A new Labyrinth (My Vision, Long post)

I see a ton of Lab threads complaining about it. But most of the time nobody offers suggestions on how to fix it. I've posted small tidbits of this in other threads on the lab, but I figured I'd put my thoughts down here.

I like the idea of a lab with traps and all, but the execution of it was poor imo. It's not that I die in it, I actually find the lab really easy. It's just boring to go through. The number 1 reason for me is that the lab doesn't mesh with the core mechanics of the game. This design doesn't suit an ARPG.

So this is my concept on how the Labyrinth should have be done.

1. Traps need to support monsters, not be separate from them.
2. Traps need to do next to or no damage at all.

Traps need to be in areas where monsters are around to attack you. Not gauntlets of traps. Killing monsters is a core part of the game, dodging traps isn't. So combine them. I understand that the current lab has areas with traps, then areas with trash mobs to refill flasks. The monsters aren't actually designed to kill you. When it should be reversed.

Traps should instead be setting you up to be killed by monsters. Being stunned, slowed, bleed, etc. Aside from maybe the fire pits, the traps shouldn't be the ones killing you. They should be helping monsters do that.

Imagine a room with skeletal archers. They have the ability to knock you back at times. On the outside of the room are the spike traps that come out from the ground when you walk over them. Baam you get hit, they knock you back into some spikes. Now you get stunned, and they proceed to wail on you some more.

Or imagine a brutus like enemy in a room with those poison slowing darts. Imagine being slowed to a crawl and brutus is able to close the distance constantly. Where normally you can kite him all day, you may find that harder here.

The point is, the trap didn't kill you. It assisted a monster in doing so.

This also allow all builds to do the lab on a equal footing. Doesn't matter if your life, es, hybrid, mom, whatever. You can walk in without fear that a rotating spike will 2 shot you. You don't need to be a juggernaut with 100% life regen. You can play the build that you intended to play from the start.


3. Get rid of the large rooms, in favor of small controlled rooms.

These kind of encounters only work in smaller controlled environments. You couldn't see traps with monsters because the areas are way too big for that. So instead create several small rooms. Inside small rooms set up an encounter that has traps and monsters together. These encounters don't have to be something on a big scale. You can take enemies from the different acts and place them inside, but now have them supported with traps. Maybe craft up some unique enemies specific to the lab itself. Either way, craft up like 100 of these. Each lab will generate 20-30 of these rooms.

The small rooms can still create a maze like experience for the lab. You run into a room, and the area locks down. You have to complete the encounter for the doors to open up. Rooms may have multiple doors leading to side rooms. Once a room is completed, the trap stops and that room is cleared for the remainder of the run.

4. Side rooms give more generous rewards.

Seems like the majority of people rush through the lab as quick as possible. Allow Izaro to gain whatever power in his fight. Gain bonus keys from that and use it at the end. But they skip the entire lab for the most part. Side rooms can give better rewards to players. Large currency chests, chests with only rares plus high chance for unique, extra enchant attempt, shrines that give you permanent power in the lab, etc.

This gives the incentive to explore the whole labyrinth. Run into a room with silver key or door... ehh run back. I've opened several silver chests only to find nothing different from a chest I find anywhere else or a strongbox. Darkshrines also barely affect the lab in any meaningful way. To the point where if I run into one or see it on the map. I just skip it. When you design areas and rooms, they should serve a purpose for the player. Most of the lab really doesn't do this as people are skipping everything just to finish it asap. Stopping and exploring might net them extra currency or item drops.

The permanent power shrines can give players extra power. These can be the shrines that are in the game or entirely new shrines made for the lab. The point of these is they can be sought after by players struggling with the lab. If they can make past a few encounters, they might be able to unlock something that helps them get past the rest of the lab.

5. Death Penalty.

I for one don't mind that dieing sets you back. But I've seen a lot of people talk about this so.. lets help everyone out here. I suggest that if you get past a trial in the lab, you start off from the last trial you completed. Basically a checkpoint system. Start of Lab, First Izaro Trial, Second Izaro Trial. You still go back a bit, but you don't have to redo everything.

I'm still not sure how the actual areas would react. If they would stay the same or change when you come back in. I'm leaning towards stay the same. If your struggling with the lab encounters, you will have at least experienced it enough that when you go back, you may be able to prepare better for that encounter. Veteran players won't mind, they're more interested in fun engaging fights/ rewards from running the lab. Win/win situation.

6. Izaro reward is reversed.

You should be rewarded with a bonus key if you manage to stop or deactivate whatever is helping him in the fight. Not ignore it. I believe this is reversed. This is a minor point though and is more up for debate.

7. Racing Change

I have watched several videos of people racing to get that jewel on the leaderboards. One thing that comes to mind is that these people skip over everything possible, and take abilities that nearly or actually 1 shot izaro. Movement speed, movement abilties, OP skills in current patch. These are sought after for people trying to get the fastest times. With my designed Lab, this would change.

You would have to be able to deal with actual encounters. Your speed would now be how fast you can deal with them and move on. Rather then how fast you can simple skip everything. This lends itself to the core mechanics more and allows more freedom with builds to actually attempt to try and go for this jewel. People shouldn't have to change their entire build just to attempt to run for this. People spend a lot of time crafting a build for the league, they should be able to compete for a spot if they want to.

8. Change to helmet rewards

After running the lab maybe 30-40 times for my characters since It came out. I haven't recieve 1 single helmet enchant that was related to ANY gem in my build. Obviously I was hoping for my main skill but not even any other gem I had as part of the build. There are way too many skills and more to come in the future. It will only get worse and worse for this. I know this is something you try and get but most people don't want to run this 100s of times to get solid enchants for there build.

My suggestion is the helmet enchant works like this. Click on the enchant and then click on a gem. Then that gem creates an orb that you can use on your helmet. The orb breaks but gives you an enchant based on the skill you enchanted. Orb can be corrupted if need be. I do understand this makes it extremely easy to pick the 1 skill you want to enchant and be done with it. Rebalance all the enchants to make various skills worthwhile to get and have unique properties to make them more attractive. Make the values of these properties have a huge difference from the lowest to highest.
So you may have to run it several times to A. Get the right enchant type and B. Get the maximum value on it.

This also makes it all part of the build theory craft. If you know that your able to enchant a skill, you can make that part of design of it.
Maybe I can get a Aura Enchant so that I can fit another aura in my build. Maybe I wanna buff up my chaos golem so I can get some nice phys reduction in my build. Maybe I get some extra AoE on my main skill so I can skip out going to the templar or witch area AoE, allowing me to go somewhere else on the board. I don't ever think of any enchant when I'm currently making a build because they don't work for me. This would help this feel like its part of the game.


In conclusion, this makes Labyrinth more accessible to everyone and every build. The traps won't be shredding you up but instead will be supporting monsters by giving you debuffs. Life, hybrid, CI, MoM, will be able to function just fine. Rooms will be smaller but full of interesting encounters to go through. More reward to gain. Less death penalty and powerful shrine bonuses for struggling players. More people will enter the Lab trying to get their perfect helm enchant. And more people might try and attempt to race it, with more builds being able to do the lab equally. Overall an experience that revolves around the core game play of theory crafting builds, killing monsters, getting loot.

I have better suggestion.

Give 2 Ascendancy points after killing normal Malachai, another 2 for cruel and another 2 for merciless, and another 2 after any tier 15 boss.

Like this no one will ever enter labyrinth and they wont need to fix anything :)

I actually didn't mention Ascendancy at all. This was more to create a piece of content that everyone can enjoy and get rewards from.

On a side note, Malachai doesn't fit the theme of ascending at all. What happens when Act 5 comes out. He won't be the final boss anymore, does he lose this reward. It made more sense if you gained these points as you leveled. Some people suggested a certain intervals you gain 2 points or even every 10 levels you gain 1 point.

Regardless if the lab was fun and engaging, people would love to run in. Thats the point of the thread.

Malachai was just example, giving ascendancy point every 10-11 levels would be fine too. Point was remove ascendancy points from lab and no one will play it anymore, so there wont be anything to fix

That just removes the entire purpose of gating ascendancy behind content that isn't part of the main storyline. They want you to go out of your way to get those points, which is perfectly fine. Putting it behind malachai or levels is just giving the points out for free.

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Etherfire wrote:

That just removes the entire purpose of gating ascendancy behind content that isn't part of the main storyline. They want you to go out of your way to get those points, which is perfectly fine. Putting it behind malachai or levels is just giving the points out for free.

i know :(

god damn traps

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I for one don't mind that dieing sets you back. But I've seen a lot of people talk about this so.. lets help everyone out here. I suggest that if you get past a trial in the lab, you start off from the last trial you completed. Basically a checkpoint system. Start of Lab, First Izaro Trial, Second Izaro Trial. You still go back a bit, but you don't have to redo everything.

I'm still not sure how the actual areas would react. If they would stay the same or change when you come back in. I'm leaning towards stay the same. If your struggling with the lab encounters, you will have at least experienced it enough that when you go back, you may be able to prepare better for that encounter. Veteran players won't mind, they're more interested in fun engaging fights/ rewards from running the lab. Win/win situation.

Very original feedback and i enjoyed, particularly this checkpoint system would be good. You might even say that once you make it so, why would you run through 2-3 areas of just running to get back, you might as well spawn in the last area you entered. I think this touches on the most annoying aspect of lab that many can't stand. Full reset, need deathless flawless act which ends up feeling hopeless for many. There are many that do builds which shine later and they just push through bosses like malachai and dominus simply by dying over and over. Hell sometimes i do it on certain builds.

And honestly the ones this change helps are the "baddies", so to speak, i find it so weak when those who have no issues insist on making the less skilled players suffer to the max. So bad mindset, it gives them nothing and comes from fear and insecurity, there is plenty of oppertunity in poe to shine by understanding the game, they don't need to make other people suffer full stops that ruin the game. Like many systems in PoE it only works when you are good enough to avoid the negative consequences - and if you are not then you will first of all never be able to compete in the rest of the game, but you will be punished to the point the game becomes worthless for you - for no gain for anyone except someone that loves to watch them suffer as they fail so they can tell them git gut and have even more oppertunity to feel they are good.

I would also say you would be reset back to the last trial in your already cleared area both to respect your time(Progression), but also to avoid abusing some of the rewards. I guess you could reload the area but what would that really do outside making you feel you retain some original purpose for the purpose of retaining it over what is actually best?

Another thought is why not make deathless run reward an extra keys rather than if you ignore the content as it currently is. If i was a lab runner i would never do lab without maxing keys anyway, so naturally you always do it on builds that can ignore content so i don't really see the big purpose but yea that's not something i am so opinionated about, just a thought.



...


So this line of thought:

Die and go back to trial

-->

Why even have to walk 2-3 dead rooms

-->

Might as well ress in current area

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Means that we have made a judgement that this gauntlet experience which is essential to character progression is simply is more destructive to player experiences than it is good and does not fit nor was a success.

I said this before, just the insane amount of feedback on lab indicates that there is a gigantic issue. I never seen so much feedback on one thing before, and it never stops comming - and for what? it just is not worth it.

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Furthermore about traps i'd drop an alternative thought which i wont go in detail with. In their scaling constant value + percentage based they should be shifted more towards constant value. This also means that for your merciless character you can faceroll normal-cruel easier which is how it should be in my mind.

I think 4,2,2,0 progression of ascendancy points is also better. It will give people their core class function to have fun leveling with earlier(which when game is balanced doesn't mean everything is automatically cheesecake), but also means you won't need endgame to complete your class so you won't need all trials etc, and because of that endgame lab would be about farming enchants for those who like running lab and so the difficulty can be scaled to feel more challenging rather than have to be reduced to the level of the masses pain limit. It will also reduce the max power lab you need endure if you cannot stand it - further taking away from the level of destruction lab causes.^

Also there arent much powerups or whatever, things that will lessen the impact of being a high regen build etc, and will help builds go through without big problems. Also some of the trap gauntlets are badly done and you have to just gamble and keep running and running and can't see ahead to make a call on when to move, or things are not clearly enough showing a pattern for you to predict and some of them execute too fast. So many things can still be balanced. The traps have to be forgiving in how hard it is to move right when it comes to them, we play an ARPG not an arcade game so don't expect people to love that gameplay.

I believe that if the OP had been the general design handed off to the labyrinth developers then we wouldn't be having all these threads about how labyrinth is not fun and doesn't fit in with the rest of PoE. Some strong evidence supporting that is that the final Izaro fight is great fun IMHO. Also people that think Labyrinth is boring, irritating, and tedious content have reported that they find traps in Grim Dawn fun and they are implemented more as described in the OP, at least that's my understanding.

Regulator has been collecting together suggestions in the OP of the thread https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1609216. There are some suggestions similar there but maybe e1337donkey might want to take a look and perhaps suggest some improvements or a new proposal be added?

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Turtledove wrote:

I believe that if the OP had been the general design handed off to the labyrinth developers then we wouldn't be having all these threads about how labyrinth is not fun and doesn't fit in with the rest of PoE. Some strong evidence supporting that is that the final Izaro fight is great fun IMHO. Also people that think Labyrinth is boring, irritating, and tedious content have reported that they find traps in Grim Dawn fun and they are implemented more as described in the OP, at least that's my understanding.

Regulator has been collecting together suggestions in the OP of the thread https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1609216. There are some suggestions similar there but maybe e1337donkey might want to take a look and perhaps suggest some improvements or a new proposal be added?

I almost was going to post in that thread but was afraid that it being 200+ pages.. my concept would get lost in it.

Exactly though, the final Izaro fight is a great example. That's what the whole lab should be with him being the toughest challenge.

About 1 and 2: fairly original. I wouldn't remove damage, but changing the emphasis to status ailments would be interesting. Not sure if it's a good idea, though.

3: requires more monster AI to work. It works at Izaro's third phase because he is not dumb, but normal monsters get killed with traps. Also, normal monsters tend to be not challenging with the current design, so they are not enough challenge to justify that.

4, 5 and 6: great ideas. Maybe 4 is somewhat over the top, but surely the game doesn't incentivize to learn Izaro's mechanics as it is (unless you fight it at the proper level, then it's way more fun). A checkpoint system would imply some way to re do some fuckups when you fight Izaro, though, so it would be way gamechanging.

7: similar to 3, GGG should work on making encounters harder rather than one shot fests.