GGG's Recent Direction - Desentivizing Glass Cannons - Sorta

For a long time GGG has been ruled by speed focused glass cannons. Do massive damage to a large area and not interact with the content. Charge through content as quickly as possible.

This is very obvious when reading the wiki on the "Apex of Sacrifice" accessed through sacrifice fragments. The optimum method is clearly do enough damage to cause the bosses to not be able to do anything.

However recently the Labyrinth has been added as well as many bosses (Innocence, Kitava, Elder and his guardians, etc.) that make it so the option of killing quickly and not interacting with the content not work.

In the case of the bosses they have a large enough HP, immortal phases, and very powerful, but telegraphed, attacks. Fast glass cannons to not crack have to interact with said bosses as they are intended. The battles are still much quicker for glass cannons then everyone else though.

In the case of the Labyrinth there are traps that force fast glass cannons to go slow and interact with the content. This is one area of the game where a glass cannon will never be number one (except they can trivialize the Izario battles; trade-offs).

This leads to people saying I have this awesome build that is great everywhere but the Labyrinth/Kitava. Therefore the Labyrinth/Kitava needs to be nerfed, removed, etc. Well, guess what your glass cannon is optimum with almost all other content in the game. You clear it easier and faster. You deserve at least one area that does not bend over backwards to be easy for you. (Sorry for the rant).

All the top end players have to figure out the exact, minimum, amount of skill points, etc. they need spend of defense then spend the rest on speed and attack. Because defense is something that can be very heavily influenced by player skill and offense is not as influenced by player skill, the best, highly skilled players, still use glass cannons. Hence if you are watching a twitch feed of "one of the best" players in the game, they are most likely using a glass cannon.

Overall the divide between the best players, and everyone else, has increased. There is a reason why in threads complaining about the Labyrinth and Kitava people are saying this is impossible (with my build) and people respond "Get Good!" or change your build.

For everyone else who knows they will never have the ability to be a top player (myself 100% definitely included) the existence of first the Labyrinth, then Kitava, forced me to switch over to taking care of my defense. I now only play a Juggernaut (I have since tried to find ways to increase my kill speed. I over corrected).

Before I started focusing on defense I'd manage to get to maps, but always die even in the low level maps (generally to Bloodline or Nemesis mods). I found Dominus on Merciless impossible.

Now I can enjoy pretty much all content that I come across (just fought a few of the Elder guardians for the first time. FUN!). Yes my clear speed is slow as sin, but I can experience and enjoy the game.

I completely approve of GGGs recent additions to the game. However they have made me 100% aware that I will never, ever, be I top player, so I should just go at my own speed, with a build optimized to me (instead of someone else's glass cannon) and enjoy the game as a slow relaxing grind.

If you think Kitava is a well designed boss your entire opinion is invalid. Regardless of if youre playing a meta loloneshot build or just playing for fun, that fight is horribly designed. Many attacks and their hitboxes dont align with the animations, invuln phases where you can still take damage are fucking retarded, and nobody want to watch this giant x faced demon orgasming in pain for 20 seconds between each of the 20 unnecessary phases.

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cpurdy777 wrote:

If you don't agree with me, the way I play, and how I have fun with the game, your entire your entire opinion is invalid

I fixed it

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Blakwhysper wrote:

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cpurdy777 wrote:

If you don't agree with me, the way I play, and how I have fun with the game, your entire your entire opinion is invalid

I fixed it

That's honestly really rude of you! I completely agree with Cpurdy to be honest.

I once tried my Wisdom Scroll build on Kitava and it didn't lose a single health bar no matter how many of them I threw.

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CidAvadose wrote:

...I completely approve of GGGs recent additions to the game. However they have made me 100% aware that I will never, ever, be I top player, so I should just go at my own speed, with a build optimized to me (instead of someone else's glass cannon) and enjoy the game as a slow relaxing grind.

So, you've found a build that you like to play, right?

Every build is not going to have the same play-performance across the entire spectrum of play-experiences that the game provides.

Most builds have "Not a good idea to run maps with ___ mod" or "Can't farm Uber Lab well" or "Dies repeatedly if you do ___ instead of ___."

And, the builds that "do everything well" only do "everything well up until ___, where they will struggle to survive."

The sort of "glass cannon" issue you're talking about is very much the same among similar games - Glass cannons are not forgiving classes/builds/characters to play. They usually have a weakness that takes a skilled player handling them well to overcome. That's why you'll see youtube vids of glasscannon builds doing things you couldn't imagine - Those youtubers are skilled players and make their living, pay their bills, buy food with the money they earn playing games.

If you're not a player who makes their living playing games and who is a highly skilled POE player playing a customized build geared up with help from your other youtube POE farming buddies farming gear all day then don't expect to be blitzing through the entire game without a care while playing a top-geared glass-cannon build.

It ain't gonna happen.

Well, at least not easily. The players that can do that are generally very skilled at playing those sorts of builds and they know what content they shouldn't be attempting with that build. And... they'll laugh when they die. If you can't laugh off a death in game, you won't like being a glass-cannon.

PS - Enjoy your gameplay experience. Make the most of it. Have fun. That's what the game is really about. It's not how far you go or what feats you achieve, it's only about how much fun you're having playing the game no matter what it is that you're doing. If you want to push harder and do more difficult content, you'll have to push yourself a bit harder, too. If that isn't "fun" for you then that's OK, you'll just have to judge when you've reached the point where you're not having fun doing that.

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CidAvadose wrote:

However recently the Labyrinth has been added as well as many bosses (Innocence, Kitava, Elder and his guardians, etc.) that make it so the option of killing quickly and not interacting with the content not work.

Nope, it just ramped up threshold. It is still "kill them faster than they would be able to wind up." It's not even their HP, but their insane damage that is impossible to mitigate for many builds. Even if attack is telegraphed, it not always helps.

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cpurdy777 wrote:

If you think Kitava is a well designed boss your entire opinion is invalid. Regardless of if youre playing a meta loloneshot build or just playing for fun, that fight is horribly designed. Many attacks and their hitboxes dont align with the animations, invuln phases where you can still take damage are fucking retarded, and nobody want to watch this giant x faced demon orgasming in pain for 20 seconds between each of the 20 unnecessary phases.

People win, with glass cannons, on hardcore. So you argument is inaccurate.

The best players do not play bosses like Kitava blind. They know the spots that you need to stand to take no damage. They know the hitboxes. Those who don't want to put in that research have builds with higher defenses and accept that they'll be hit some.

Time between phases are a breath of fresh air. They give life time to regenerate. Shields time to recharge. Time to resummon dead minons. Time to give your hands a break for a few seconds. The battle would be hell if there was no break between phases.

Times of invulnerability. If you look at that Apex of Sacrifice wiki I mentioned you'll see a boss that has no invulnerability phases. People just one-shot each stage and ignore the battle entirely. That requires no skill. Surviving for a time does. As I originally mentioned GGG recent development has caused player skill to be more pronounced. Which is why I admit I have none and plan my character accordingly.

I think you have to be considerate of the fact that one shots leave little room for error.

The faster a fight, the less time for you to make a mistake or get caught by said one shot.

Damage has always been a form of mitigation (by reducing enemy uptime) but its more pronounced here than say D2.

D2 boss fights basically revolved around damage output and mitigating damage mostly through gearing and build.

In PoE some boss fights are drastically more mechanically intensive, and as mentioned above the hitboxes aren't necessarily precise. Other fights are practically tank and spank in comparison.

If there's anything I've learned so far with my time in PoE, its that mitigation options are lacking short of highly specialized builds.

It's a lot easier to reduce boss damage output by pushing the phases faster than it is to facetank and mitigate.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the higher end content can get more expensive making "practice" impractical. The last rush I got was from my first Chayula solo kill - but given the value of the breachstone I'd need to be pretty damn confident in what I was running to risk eating the loss if I failed.

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cpurdy777 wrote:

and nobody want to watch this giant x faced demon orgasming in pain for 20 seconds between each of the 20 unnecessary phases.

^
The reason I don't like Belfry maps and such. Boss animations take about as long as clearing the entire map on a zoomzoom build.

Same with Elder farming. All those boring long animations... God...


Yeah high content is so expensive that you want to be 100% sure that you can handle it. Therefor always have a boss-farmer who is online whom you can call in case you have only 1 port left. But there should be a way to practice it with your current build without having to resort to Standard and trying to replicate your build there.

I don't entirely understand where Kitava's safe zones are supposed to be (except for the X shaped AoEs). This league I had 6k ES, with uninterrupted recharge and regeneration per kill, as well as defensive flasks with immunity to bleed (if that occurs in the fight, don't think that was ever a problem though).

And yet I literally died within seconds. The map versions shouldn't be a problem (they weren't on my last char) because by then I should have enough damage to skip those phases, which is still very much possible.

I think the safe zones should be clearer and more than 5% of the boss room. The Innocence fight also requires you to move around a lot, but at least you have space for it. I haven't fought the shaper or uber elder yet, so I don't know how much I'll panic on my first try, but judging from the videos the safe spaces are larger, better telegraphed, and more controllable. Even Atziri's Flameblast is huge and fast, but you can clearly avoid it if you manage to move in time.