One of major problems of the game - life leech

Insta leech will always cause problems, regardless of limitation. Just remove it already, together with reflect ...

Life leech SUCKS! It's a one way street into unbalance.

Why? Because it creates a threshold. Every mob that cannot out damage your life leech, effectively heals u.
And the result is what we see in POE.
Nobody cares about to much aggro, nobody cares about any monsters except the ones that oneshot you. That's the threshold.

Now, let me draw a picture of a balanced game:
Defenses work and life leech is at a minimum. Now you care about every fucking mob that attacks u. Even the white ones will, in great numbers, be dangerous to you. But! on the other hand there are no one shots necessary to kill players. Mobs can simply damage them and still kill them if players aren't careful.

You can try that mechanic! Even in POE. Take a char and remove any life leach,gain on hit, regen etc.
Now remove a lot of your own damage. E.g. take a shitty weapon. Now move a few levels back so that you don't get one shot. E.g I moved back from merciless Act2 to Cruel Act3.
Its a bit tricky to find the right spot, but when you find it the gameplay is really amazing.

You start to care about white mobs and the number of white mobs. You still kill them fast but in the process they damage you and you have to take actions because u cant just leech it back by killing them. You retreat or evade, it is just so much more fun.

I mean, in context of poe even instant leech could've been balanced as 'too rich' if you had to invest a certain number of nodes into it. Past a certain point (say, 50-60 nodes) it becomes a heavy price to pay. Which then creates actual choice.
Nothing wrong with something powerful if you pay accordingly for it. [As is, it's just one keystone you take and for north/east side of the tree it's trivial travel distance. He'll even a Templar and Mara can travel somewhat efficiently to to it]

Well, at least this was true before ascendancy. Nowadays a lot of ascendancies can get close to 200% increased damage and big damage boosts from ascendancy tree so they can even afford a huge investment like that.

Here's the bullshit hierarchy, from least bullshit to most bullshit:
3. One-hit KOs
2. Instant leech
1. Reflected Damage

One-hit KOs are close enough to not being bullshit that you can have a few - in the form of highly telegraphed attacks like Oversoul Slam - and everything would still be copacetic. But you really don't want your design to overuse them, and you definitely don't want to rely on them heavily for your design to work.

Instant leech is higher on the bullshit hierarchy because it forces OHKOs. If you take any non-lethal damage, a split second later and bam, you're back up to full health. Therefore, in order to threaten your character AT ALL, the game must necessarily resort to OHKOs. This creates undue reliance on OHKOs as a threat mechanism.

However, the highest on our bullshit hierarchy here is reflected damage, because it forces instant leech. Well, either that or going pure physical with CWDT IC, or go totems/minions/traps, or self-gimp your offense into non-viability. But for normal characters using normal skills, yeah, instant leech.

The game should have a more attrition-based style of combat where being on less than full health during combat is a routine position with its own strategy, not some bizarre anomaly. To do that, the mechanics in the hierarchy need to be removed or at least softened, starting with the most bullshit and ending with the least.

One hit ko's are fine IF it's a telegraphed attack a normal attack is fucking stupid.

Encountered a rare mob in warehouses (that act 3 overground area where you also encounter the gemling legionaires) today:
life leech
regeneration
(something else)
soul eater

Guess how long that fight lasted.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Here's the bullshit hierarchy, from least bullshit to most bullshit:
3. One-hit KOs
2. Instant leech
1. Reflected Damage

However, the highest on our bullshit hierarchy here is reflected damage, because it forces instant leech. Well, either that or going pure physical with CWDT IC, or go totems/minions/traps, or self-gimp your offense into non-viability. But for normal characters using normal skills, yeah, instant leech.

The game should have a more attrition-based style of combat where being on less than full health during combat is a routine position with its own strategy, not some bizarre anomaly. To do that, the mechanics in the hierarchy need to be removed or at least softened, starting with the most bullshit and ending with the least.

reflect doesn't force the player to use instant leech. It's just instant leech is the most convenient, lazy, easy and efficient form of dealing with reflect which is IGNORING it and refusing to deviate from playstyle instead of actively (or even passively, choice to not kill/hit a reflect mob/pack exists) engaging with it.

It's the same argument I've had with people who dislike managing resources, ie mana and the best way to deal with mana was to bypass it instead of investing into it. So what the fuck is the point of resource management if resources aren't scarce? Might as well give infinite mana then.

The fuck is point of things that deviate gameplay if people refuse to deviate gameplay by playing something that makes you play exactly the same way they would otherwise?

Instead of dealing with problems and problem solving people for some fucking reason treat any such problem as nuisance and try to find loopholes or the laziest ways to avoid dealing with them.

"

grepman wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Here's the bullshit hierarchy, from least bullshit to most bullshit:
3. One-hit KOs
2. Instant leech
1. Reflected Damage

However, the highest on our bullshit hierarchy here is reflected damage, because it forces instant leech. Well, either that or going pure physical with CWDT IC, or go totems/minions/traps, or self-gimp your offense into non-viability. But for normal characters using normal skills, yeah, instant leech.

The game should have a more attrition-based style of combat where being on less than full health during combat is a routine position with its own strategy, not some bizarre anomaly. To do that, the mechanics in the hierarchy need to be removed or at least softened, starting with the most bullshit and ending with the least.

reflect doesn't force the player to use instant leech. It's just instant leech is the most convenient, lazy, easy and efficient form of dealing with reflect which is IGNORING it and refusing to deviate from playstyle instead of actively (or even passively, choice to not kill/hit a reflect mob/pack exists) engaging with it.

It's the same argument I've had with people who dislike managing resources, ie mana and the best way to deal with mana was to bypass it instead of investing into it. So what the fuck is the point of resource management if resources aren't scarce? Might as well give infinite mana then.

I kinda see what you're saying, but you're not making the best comparison. Life is a resource under normal conditions, or at least should be, similar in nature to Mana even without reflected damage in the mix. So reflected damage is more like some kind of anti-mana monster mechanic: to have enough mana to negate the monster, you immediately trivialize all mana issues with other content.

Actually, that sounds kind of cool. But there's another key difference: running out of mana doesn't kill you.

Point is, I think Corrupted Blood is a much better take on the reflected damage mechanic. It's completely avoidable with the right flasks, just like any hit from any monster should be avoidable with epic mouse skills. I'm completely against ANY untelegraphed damage.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

However, the highest on our bullshit hierarchy here is reflected damage, because it forces instant leech. Well, either that or going pure physical with CWDT IC, or go totems/minions/traps, or self-gimp your offense into non-viability. But for normal characters using normal skills, yeah, instant leech.

In the current state of the game, more or less, yes. However, reflected damage is not necessarily a bad mechanic: It limits the amount you can invest into offense, which is fine I think. The problem with reflect damage are three things: 1) It is, or can be, too high, so that you would have to unrealistically gimp your DPS, 2) the clear speed meta is so strong that often you hit the reflect mob before being able to realize that there actually is a reflect mob, or even hit it off screen, 3) it can be trivialized by instant leech.

The second point kind of makes the third point pretty much mandatory. I have more than once died and wondered what I actually died to, and then found out that I offscreened myself to a reflect rare (for example when my Vinktar was not up). That is not good balance. How am I supposed to react to a threat that I cannot see? the only way is to build such that reflect doesn't affect you. Which is, as you say, stupid.

You know what else can limit offense and encourage investment into defense? Telegraphed hits. You know, the type you maybe could have avoided, but didn't.

Basically, if you're even arguing "hey, we need to limit glass to prevent its dominance," and you figure reflected damage is actually a good idea, this means the game's already completely failed on clearspeed balance. You're excusing bullshit gameplay by pointing out it's usually bullshit, but with the opposite polarity.