Why are we punished for defeating Izaro too quickly? The "One emerged, all 3 go through!" issue.

All the statues need to rise up from the floor instantly, or start risen.

When the run takes 5 minutes to zerg it's completely retarded to sit at each boss phase for 1+ minute waiting for the slow as hell statues to rise. It's like a 40% increase in total farm time if you want to wait for statues.

If he dies before rising his statues he sucks too much and doesn't deserve any of their buffs. :p


It wouldn't matter as much if you weren't grinding for 1/350 helm enchantments per build per character (i.e. 30+ hours of inane zero XP progression grind per helm, on average - and the tail of the probability distribution around this expected mean is so long that some players could very well spend 300+ hours grinding a single helm). Honestly this level of grind seems like a desperation move by GGG to retain players. But I think it will have the opposite effect and turn people off the game. I'm already nearing the 'do not bother' threshold and considering other games. The grind should be less (ie. more targeted farming, either by gem color or stat requirement or something) or the monster level needs to be 77+ so at least there's some XP progression.

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Vhlad wrote:

If he dies before rising his statues he sucks too much and doesn't deserve any of their buffs. :p

I like the way you think.

I agree with OP and have MORE points to add as to why Izaro should not receive effectively-unremovable buffs simply because he died to high single-target DPS before they even revealed.

Firstly, one of the major complaints about lab is the fact that disco'ing makes you start over from scratch. The longer the run takes, the more chance you have of disco'ing and not being able to finish. Running it faster is a counter to this, but the current broken mechanic of buffing him for buffs that never gave the player a chance to disable them in a timely manner directly opposes that. For the sake of better handling the fact GGG servers are not rock-solid and Lab kind of demands that they be, killing Izaro quickly should NOT be punished in any way, to better enable glass cannons to play the way a glass cannon SHOULD play any boss fight. And in general, glass cannons/high single-target DPS in general should not be explicitly further punished - they already have tradeoffs by their very nature that are widely punished by non-cannon-specific burst DPS and large packs elsewhere.

Secondly, especially in Hardcore, glass cannons are punished by far enough already with the much higher risk of losing the entire character. Normally this is within acceptable bounds because they can just try to kill things minimizing the chances they take of getting hit, but Izaro forcing them to wait until his defenses reveal to be disabled is, again, counter to that, where it should not be. And since Hardcore is dramatically more affected by this point, the fight should be balanced more for Hardcore than for Softcore - allow glass cannons to function as they're meant to, instead of unfairly punishing them over the life+regen builds that already has a huge advantage in HC that goes beyond anything even possible in SC. Playing a cannon is risky, and it's plenty risky enough already. It does not need ANY further punishment in any way, shape or form. If anything punishing high life regen/flask-spamming builds should be looked into instead, since they trivialize the traps to an utterly unfair degree compared to any other build due to the way traps currently function. And generally reducing the degree to which ES/evasion/armor/lifepool builds are punished by the trap mechanics over constant regen/flask builds in general, because it's currently broken: if you're regen/flask focused, you can literally leroy jenkins the traps and live, while every other build dies in mere seconds, even if it was lag that caused the trap contact and resulting death, and even in HC, where deaths should not be handed out quite so frivolously.

It simply makes far more sense to let the people who actually want more treasure keys idle through the buffs activating (which, presumably, because they're OP enough to in the first place, they actually don't take the risk a cannon would in so doing) than to severely punish certain normally-feasible builds that just want to complete the lab before they die or disco along with them.

I'm playing a summoner first this league. My zombies take him out before one or two of the buffs show up...which then makes him able to 1 shot me in later fights since I'm a summoner. It hardly seems fair to make me kill off half my zombies to kill him slower because his mechanics are slow.

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Why exactly are we punished for defeating Izaro too quickly?

Because you have prove that your defence is good no only ofence. Bud this is Crap for summoners.

I didn't know about this until I read this topic. I don't think this empowering mechanic is a good one. Not only is it obtuse enough to be difficult to learn, but once you do learn it the counterplay is poor.

I get the concept where a player that is somewhat overpowered can invisibly empower Izaro in exchange for a greater reward, and it's a good enough starting point for a concept. However, an invisible change shouldn't be one that you prefer not to have. Izaro 3 is arguably the hardest part of the labyrinth, so empowering him should never be an unintentional act. And the act of intention to NOT empower him certainly shouldn't be tedious or complex itself.

Well the fastest runs get a reward. So if it would be the other way around if you want to do fast runs and have multiple keys you would have to wait, which would be actually a terrible design.

That way you get an advantage over other people if you manage to kill him with the buffs, since this saves you time, however this should be the case for all mechanics, not just a few.

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Emphasy wrote:

Well the fastest runs get a reward.

Every run gets a reward. The fastest get more runs in the same amount of time, thus more rewards. Especially considering GGG will give unique items to the fastest runs each day once they finish the code for it, there don't need to be any additional mechanics to reward the same thing a 3rd time over. Especially not a hidden mechanic that people who don't want to empower Izaro will trigger without realizing it.

Alright, I feel I need to clarify my stance on this. My previous posts are kind of a mess and I might or might have not made some contradictory statements.


This is a consolidated version of my resoning.

I don't like the current implementation of the system because:

1. It is counter-intuitive. "Only two bonuses were active during the first phase, so how the heck did all 3 find their way into the next fight? I must've done something wrong here". That's what I thought the first time it happened and I assume not only me;

2. It's inconsistent. Some buffs follow the "one emerged, all 3 go to the next fight" rule, while others work the way they should, in my opinion, work, i.e "As many buffs go to the next fight as were active in the previous ones";

3. It is unfair to some characters. Those include mainly:
3.1 Summoners (thanks to Timewar9 for this contribution - I don't play summoner builds, so I would've never come up with this) because they need to unsummon their minions, otherwise they risk defeating Izaro too quickly;
3.2 High single-target DPS characters with average/average+ defences (my character Aerandair that I run the lab with serves as a perfect example: 5,4k life, 14k armour+chaos golem+4 end charges+fortify+50%block and 95k Concentrated effect Cleave DPS) that
- mow Izaro down in several seconds,
- easily tank Izaro's regular (unbuffed) hits,
- can manage Izaro buffed by 3-4 things
- get destroyed by fully-buffed Izaro
This means that all the people that planned those kinds of characters (me included <sadface>) are pretty much screwed if it comes to speedruns, because they have to wait for all the bonuses to emerge, then disable them, and only then process to kill Izaro, effectively wasting their single-target capabilities. And it's not glass cannons I'm talking about.



What I hope for is either a GGG member coming in here and saying: "This is an unintended mechanic, this will be fixed in the next patch" or them acknowledging that this is a problem and perhaps changing it to "All bonuses active in the first Izaro fight are active in the 2nd fight, and all bonuses active in the 2nd encounter are active in the 3rd"

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1. It is counter-intuitive. "Only two bonuses were active during the first phase, so how the heck did all 3 find their way into the next fight? I must've done something wrong here". That's what I thought the first time it happened and I assume not only me;

Technically a mechanic that was never emerged, was also never disabled. It might be odd for the first time, but technically it makes sense. You do destroy the golems as one example, so if they never emerged and got destroyed, they are avaible for Izaro to buff him between the fights.

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2. It's inconsistent. Some buffs follow the "one emerged, all 3 go to the next fight" rule, while others work the way they should, in my opinion, work, i.e "As many buffs go to the next fight as were active in the previous ones";

Well that is an issue, inconsistency is always bad. However if we can explain it with case 1, then it might be worthwhile, but I'm not actually sure which ones are that, so no idea, if it is reasonable why they do not apply if not emerged.

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3.1 Summoners (thanks to Timewar9 for this contribution - I don't play summoner builds, so I would've never come up with this) because they need to unsummon their minions, otherwise they risk defeating Izaro too quickly;

This might be an issue if you overlevel Izaro greatly, but then you shouldn't care about it. Unless you pop Flesh Offering and Vaal Haste and notice afterwards that you should eventually not kill him that early it is no issue. Your minions don't do much at all as long as you just run around and they hardly accidently kill Izaro with a few hits, they are only able to do that if you greatly outlevel him, which makes it a non-issue.

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This means that all the people that planned those kinds of characters (me included <sadface>) are pretty much screwed if it comes to speedruns, because they have to wait for all the bonuses to emerge, then disable them, and only then process to kill Izaro, effectively wasting their single-target capabilities. And it's not glass cannons I'm talking about.

Well that is the entire point of this behavior. To be the fastest in the lab and get the reward for being the fastest you have to be able to not only kill Izaro fairly quickly, but doing it fully buffed. And the fight is not always the same. Some fights are able for those characters to do well (the charges as one example). So I actually feel its better that way. To get the fastest runs and the reward for being among the fastest you have to be able to deal with a buffed up Izaro to be at the top of the labyrinth ladder and get a price.

If you would make it the other way around people would have to make different runs for the fastest time and max keys, and that doesn't really make sense.