Cap rare damage aura stacking. Instantly dying to unlucky rare mods is beyond BS.

I've been trying to push 100 this league and it is absolutely insane trying to play any content above T13 without ever dying. You get no exp from anything besides 5-man legions, even a T16 gives me well under 1% at level 98...then suddenly you get ganked and you're behind where you started. Feel free to check my 98 character in legion, please inspect his gear, tree, and skills before you declare I'm a noob who just wants the game to be easy/doesn't know how to make a build.

There is nothing - nothing at all - that turns me off this game more than dying to an unavoidable, unforeseeable one shot from some trash rare that rolled quick, sub phys, extra phys, extra cold, and extra damage and just popped my ass from across the screen instantly. When I play perfectly and don't die in like 20+ guardian maps and never die once to a boss, but then I roll a 1 on charisma in the last map and get oneshot by a random rare through 5600 life, fortify, sand and stone, and a bunch of evasion (which happened to fail)...I get irritated. You've already nerfed exp gains like 10 times. It's already really hard to level up without this horse shit. My hat is genuinely off to HC players/100 racers who can tolerate this atrocious balancing.

My suggestion? Rares only should be affected by 3 damage mods max. If they roll 4+, one mod is replaced with another mod. If they have 3 damage mods, they are unaffected by allied damage mods. Am I salty? Yeah, kinda. But this trend of monster damage dwarfing available player defenses needs to stop.

You want to know what I bet is a big motivating factor in why GGG is against a combat log? They don't want us to see how insanely bullshit the monster damage numbers are. I guarantee if people started seeing that monsters are hitting for 6k+ damage in one hit, they will start getting mad, and GGG will be forced to actually balance the game.

TL;DR - Monster damage is out of control as a result of out of control player damage needing a counter. Capping rare mobs' aura stacking ad infinitum would help to reduce the massive variance in rare mob damage and reduce some of the bullshit dice rolling that results in unfair deaths (without trivializing rares at all - a 3mod rare in a nasty map is, and would still be, insane). The game can be punishing, but it must be punishing in predictable and fair ways, otherwise good player performance/gear/builds are meaningless.

I would be a fool to declare the game is dying just because I say so, but I can tell you this shit is making the game die for me personally, which is really sad, as I've played it for years. I doubt I'm the only one.

Regarding the suggestion, I agree that some kind of cap might be good regarding rare monsters affected by multiple auras, some kind of soft cap though, not hard cap ...
But limiting the amount of auras affecting a monster arbitrarily would be just confusing and would be a band aid imo.

And I'm really not sure of a good way to implement that.

"

MeWhenum wrote:

through 5600 life, fortify, sand and stone, and a bunch of evasion

Zbout 7~8k evasion, right ?
This is not much for a level 98 character imo.
It might be fine for softcore, but if you want to push to 100, I would go for more tankiness.

The character that I rerolled recently for example has 7200 Hp + 800 ES at level 89, 17k armour before molten shell/granite and 18% physical damage taken as fire damage + AOE buffed enfeeble.
It feels a bit weak against elemental damage yet, I need more buffer for this kind of setup, but it's still significantly more than you.

I am building it tanky ( HC ) so it is naturally tankier I guess, but still ... you need a bit more tankiness at level 98 imo.


Your flask setup is very offensive also, I would take at least one more defensive utility flask, and take instant or half instant flasks for life ( one ideally, to fit another defensive flask.

You have no armour, are right next to the Acro/Phase Acro cluster and have not taken it, that is a big, big mistake imho, spend those five points there and you should already see quite a difference.

I would also swap Temporal Chain to Enfeeble on your setup, monsters are too often immune to temporal chain unfortunately, and you are not using any damage over time effect to scale of temporal chain.

Depending on what is killing you, as an archer, I would consider arrow dancing too.

PS : why are you not using blood rage ?

This post isn't about my character explicitly, but I can go over it if you like.

I have about 18k evasion, not sure where 7-8K is coming from. I've recently swapped to a boss kill setup for some uber farming, and the extra HP nodes let me survive one shaper ball consistently if I fuck up. The dodge nodes are great for mapping but they are much less useful to me than being able to not die to a ball for uber specifically.

I use cwdt temp chains because I was too lazy to use the jeweller thing to get another blue on the eva base for enfeeble. Besides, this doesn't help against one shots until I've already taken damage.

Armor is shit given the amount I have and I have half as much on my normal setup with dodge nodes, so I ignore it.

I don't use blood rage because (1) no skill slots left (could use cwdt I guess) and (2) I find it really irritating to use, and is nearly worthless for uber.

Flasks are offensive, yes, but my leech is high enough that that plus a speed flask is pretty much always sufficient given that I rarely take hits successively. Not trying to brag but I'm quite good at avoiding damage altogether. I have enough flat life that instant flasks feel anemic in terms of overall recovery anyway.

And, more importantly than any of this, my dps is ungodly high, probably about 5+ million once all impale instances/pride/flasks are up. Nothing survives more than a fraction of a second, which makes it even more offensive that I can die in that time with this setup. And as to what's killing me? Not consistently, but sometimes maraketh dagger bros or templar shield bashers. Arrow dancing won't help and it'll be pretty hard to convince me that the issue is my build and not these mobs being way overtuned when beefed up on auras.

Regardless of if my build is flawless or not, my character is decently beefy (way beyond what an average player would build) and deals a shitload of damage, which I treat as defense in this insane speed meta. My watcher's eye alone costs more than most people's entire builds. That is not a reasonable bar to expect people to meet to consistently be able to farm high tier maps without ever dying to some random bullshit.

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MeWhenum wrote:

I have about 18k evasion, not sure where 7-8K is coming from.

I just gave a look to your pieces of gear, counted about 150% inc on the tree before dext +1k from champion, but I must have missed something somewhere, 17k is much more after all.

"

MeWhenum wrote:

Besides, this doesn't help against one shots until I've already taken damage.

I can't tell for you specifically, but many many cases that people call "one shot" around here are not actual one shot but successive hits in a very short period of time, which means that many more things can make a difference in such cases. It could be to hit almost at the same time instead of one, in which case enfeeble might just be life saving.

"

MeWhenum wrote:

And, more importantly than any of this, my dps is ungodly high, probably about 5+ million once all impale instances/pride/flasks are up. Nothing survives more than a fraction of a second, which makes it even more offensive that I can die in that time with this setup. And as to what's killing me? Not consistently, but sometimes maraketh dagger bros or templar shield bashers. Arrow dancing won't help and it'll be pretty hard to convince me that the issue is my build and not these mobs being way overtuned when beefed up on auras.

So, you have unnecessarily high dps, and you die occasionally ...
why not slightly lower the dps ( and you will still destroy pretty much everything ) and get a little bit tankier to die even less occasionally then ?
Seriously, you are right next Acro/Phase Acro on a pure evasion build

"

probably wrote:

Regardless of if my build is flawless or not, my character is decently beefy (way beyond what an average player would build)

Average players don't level up to 98, and if we only consider players in those last 5 levels for example, it is definitely not " way beyond average" regarding defences.


I am not saying that Legion monsters are properly tuned, I can't say about those, it seems awefully spiky from what I've seen, but, I am just saying that I do not find your character that tanky.
I have been playing mostly HC recently, so I naturally build tankier, there is that ... but, considering HC as a base for balancing ( character balanced around not dying ), it isn't that great at your level, it's correct for sure ... but maybe correct isn't enough to comfortably level up to 100 if that is what you are aiming for ?

Extra eva is from +1k if I've impaled recently, and I have like 70-odd % inc eva and armor hybrid nodes which will look separate from inc. eva. nodes.

When I say one shot, I mean literally that. 95%-odd HP to zero in one frame. This has and does happen with legion mobs especially. I am obviously not including stuff like boss windups which absolutely should do this much damage.

I already explained why I don't have acro/phase taken. My normal setup has ~200 less HP but has those nodes. Frankly I have pretty much every life node anywhere near the bottom right of the tree and life on almost all my gear, in addition to several secondary defenses...could it be tankier? Yeah of course, but it would be pretty damn hard to get it substantially tankier unless I waste tens of nodes escaping that area of the tree or super-gimped my damage by e.g. going noncrit (or playing an entirely different skill/build). I'm also not convinced that I'd be better at surviving the one shots that I experience unless I got a LOT more flat HP, which is kind of unrealistic. I could (generously) squeeze like 400 more total hp if I had mirror tier gear with all t1 rolls, but I think you understand why I'm not including that option.

Fair point that people >lvl 95 frequently have more tankiness...at least in HC. You admit that your reference is HC so I'll speak from my own perspective that this is quite a reasonable amount of HP for SC given how many layers of defense I have tacked on. Keep in mind that e.g. fortify alone gives me 25% more EHP, for example. This isn't my first rodeo (not saying you're accusing me of that, just that I have a pretty good feel for what is needed to survive SC...at least most of the time). The issue is that 99.99% of the time I am 100% untouchable and .01% of the time I die instantly. That huge fluctuation in monster damage is why I am making this suggestion. If I can farm uber elder deathless consistently and survive any attacks besides shaper slam, there is no reason at all I should be able to be instagibbed by a rare in a T13 map with mild mods just by chance.

And for good measure, I had this issue just as consistently on a previous character this league, I'm pasting here my description of it from another post I made earlier. If this beefy character doesn't meet your standards idk what will. I ended up dumping that character at lvl 96 because the massive tankiness simply didn't pay off given the cost of movement speed and damage and the fact that I would randomly die sometimes anyway.

"

I was running an ED occultist with 5k life, 75% chaos res, 4.4K ES, malediction, arctic armor, sand and stone, and blasphemy level 22, level 4 enhanced 80% increased curse effect enfeeble and temp chains (on top of curse, freeze, and stun immunity, and massive ES regen from the ED). My dps was good (with curses, over 1 mil dps vs trash and 320K sheet ED dot dps). 99% of the time nothing even hit me due to the huge slow or if it did I took negligible damage. Sometimes, though, when the moon's phase was just right and Chris Wilson scratched his beard in just the right way, I would absolutely evaporate to a legion rare in a red map basically instantly with few/no map mods (1-3 hits in well under 1/2 of a second).

I have made several threads about this as well. They have crit bugs IMO. I love the difficulty but despise unfair one shots with a passion.

I to am pushing to 100, and it's beyond infuriating.

"

MeWhenum wrote:

And for good measure, I had this issue just as consistently on a previous character this league, I'm pasting here my description of it from another post I made earlier. If this beefy character doesn't meet your standards idk what will. I ended up dumping that character at lvl 96 because the massive tankiness simply didn't pay off given the cost of movement speed and damage and the fact that I would randomly die sometimes anyway.

"

I was running an ED occultist with 5k life, 75% chaos res, 4.4K ES, malediction, arctic armor, sand and stone, and blasphemy level 22, level 4 enhanced 80% increased curse effect enfeeble and temp chains (on top of curse, freeze, and stun immunity, and massive ES regen from the ED). My dps was good (with curses, over 1 mil dps vs trash and 320K sheet ED dot dps). 99% of the time nothing even hit me due to the huge slow or if it did I took negligible damage. Sometimes, though, when the moon's phase was just right and Chris Wilson scratched his beard in just the right way, I would absolutely evaporate to a legion rare in a red map basically instantly with few/no map mods (1-3 hits in well under 1/2 of a second).

Nothing will ever meet his standard. He is just making excuses for bad game design. My Chieftain is basically all about mitigation, 40k def, Arctic Armor, Cwdt Enfeeble, Basalt + Granite Flask + Fortify + 8 endurance charges @7k life and 500 ES and he still evaporates into thin air if a rare gets the wrong combination of mods on high tier maps/delves.

That being said, i don't expect it to change. GGG is in a bit of a bind here. With the current level of sustain available to charakters allowing instantheal for 5k+ life the only way they have to put some sort of difficulty in this game is by making the monster damage scaling so absurdly high that nobody can ever survive it. You can either limit yourself to low tier content that can't roll high enough or your doing a gamble which your bound to lose at some point.

i was one-shotted by a legion spearman on t15 without any damage mods or unlucky dodge or something remotely dangerous yesterday. i am ok with mobs that hit hard and im ok with expirience penalty, but im not sure was that some kind of bug or not.

all defenses were active. my current dancing duo char has
- 36% evasion 40% dodge
- dread banner -21% less enemy accuracy
- blasphemy-enfeeble-curse effect -36% non-unique enemy damage 42% reduced enemy accuracy
- flesh and stone blind
- -20% damage (kintsugi) and i had hale negator with 11 charges specifically for critical cases so mobs cant burst me down fast, but it cant help with single one shots.

so i thought i was prepared. that spear went through all that defenses and hit me for my 6.1k hp. i was 99.5, halfway to 100. i still going to take 100, i dont care.

that is why im going to build the fattest zombiemancer EVER in the next league. ~15-16k ehp, cwdt-enfeeble-temportal chains-steelskin, wicked ward, fortify, cwdt-self spirit offering-vaal grace/vaal discipline, block+rumi's flask, we gonna see if someone can fuck him up!!! i really doubt.

i know that this is not the answer that you expect, but you can plain buy your 100 lvl. it will cost you around 25 ex (99-100) if you will be doing 5-way rotas. only problem that the league is dead and it can be tricky to find one, but its possible.

I agree with the OP, the possible damage variance is just too high. Even if we don't assume the odd bug which rolls Max(int) damage by accident and has been seen in the past...

The problem is that fixing this would require a complete rebalance of the game:
- instant logouts would have to go
- sustain / replenish life would have to be lowered *a lot*
- player damage would also have to go down as much as monster damage
- new mechanics implementing some kind of diminishing returns on damage would have to be introduced unless POE is stripped of many of its possible damage multipliers

For sure the game would be a helluva lot better if this were done, but I honestly don't think they are capable of it. I mean they miss even the most obvious game breaking bugs which affect many many people within the first hour of every new league! Forget about play testing, they just don't do it. And balance is not on their goals at all, change is.


With all monster buffs / player debuffs active at the same time, a monster can comfortably hit for 50x the "normal" hard hit. Think of it as a random death timer. You can slow that timer by building beefier, but you can only stop it if you play unchallenging content. And even then, it can (very rarely) kick in.
That's POE.