Shaper 68 million hp

is it bad?

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BloodPuddles420 wrote:

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FramFramson wrote:

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BloodPuddles420 wrote:

The people complaining about this are missing a massive part. This was about balancing it, not making it more difficult. People can get so powerful there was someone who had enough damage to one shot almost three Shapers at once.

There's nothing they could do to make it more challenging when literally any build can get millions of DPS. Other than add a massive amount of invulnerability and phases, which would be way worse.

Uh... there are literally thousands and thousands of different game mechanics to make bosses difficult in video games.

Surely a handful of them are adaptable to ARPGs to make boss fights more meaningful than this boring, phoned-in "balance" change.

Tell me just one that would prevent someone with 5 million DPS from making a joke of the fight.

Edit: Typo.

Super Armor from Binding of Isaac's optional 'super' bosses. It basically puts a cap on the amount a single instance of damage can deal to the boss. So no matter how crazy high damage you have, there's still a 'mandatory' amount of hits you need to deal to the boss to kill him. This still varies between builds in how fast they kill him - dependent on how quickly and how many instances of damage they apply (like having multiple different damage sources), and if each of those instances of damage reach the cap given by the boss' super armor.

If players then do builds especially against that, by doing many instances of damage very rapidly, they could implement a temporary invulnerability shield that procs when the boss takes too many hits too quickly. Kinda like a safety belt in a car, you pull on it too quickly - it blocks and you can't pull it any further, pull it slowly and it works. It could force players to be smart about how they play instead of just blindly spaming the most damage they can put out, pacing it and attacking more slowly than they could so that they don't trigger the safety shield - or even adjusting their build a bit so it isn't 'too strong' for the boss.

Or if the boss reaches half-hp within a second, he goes invulnerable and transforms into a stronger version of itself - with stats calculated to be of appropriate difficulty for the enemy it is facing (it has a dps sample after all). Maybe has slightly better loot to reward the player for being so strong - but only if he defeats it at this (then hopefully more challenging) difficulty.

That's just three ideas, there's many other things, little gimmicks and mechanics that could be implemented to 'equalize' the playing field between super op builds and more average-player builds. Mechanics that put the player's skill to the test rather than their build - an avoidable debuff that insta-kills you if you get hit twice by it, but goes away on its own if you keep avoiding - or that can be cleansed with some interactable in the arena. There's endless possibilities.


(not saying the above ideas would be perfect or 'the solution' that is right for POE, just saying the possibilities exist)

Major problem is it seems they are balancing the game for builds that achieve milions of dps (they even said this at exilecon) but upping the hp this high will make more people join the meta club cause the alternative builds even with HIGH investment do not achieve this lvl of dps...

I rly dont understand why they prefer to buff hp instead of balancing the scale of the damage with diminish returns and stuff like that. Soon we will have diablo 3 numbers if they keep doing this.

And more builds = more sales cause everyone have a skill they like to play so they will purchase mtx for that skill.

They want us to grind bosses slowly so balance it for everyone and not for some builds on x or y league... Rn u can invest like 40 ex on a fully optimized build and do far less dps than other 1ex build of the "meta" and thats is broken.

68 is too much for most players.

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schattenwulf wrote:

Mechanics that put the player's skill to the test rather than their build - an avoidable debuff that insta-kills you if you get hit twice by it, but goes away on its own if you keep avoiding - or that can be cleansed with some interactable in the arena. There's endless possibilities.


(not saying the above ideas would be perfect or 'the solution' that is right for POE, just saying the possibilities exist)

Mind that when you say "player's skills" you don't conflate skill (i.e. executive functioning competence, reaction speed, "micro" skill, aps) with knowledge (studying the fight online, or learning by trial and error).

In league, you want as little foreknowledge as possible so as to present a truly novel experience to seasoned players. You don't want to have to do an hour of "homework" before attempting a map or instance.

That said, players overrate their innate skill levels and will always bitch and whine about insta deaths from technically-demanding fusillades of death lasers, especially when they are invisible/black or overlap with other boss cheats.

The current system is mostly knowledge-based or experience-based, with some random death events due to two or more technically-demanding boss cheat moves overlapping to deny any area of safety inside the arena.

If you use a GUI overlay that defaults all allied spell targeting zones/areas to GREEN and all enemy targeting zones/range rings to RED, you can see easily where shaper skills overlap and where they don't, ie. timing your next flame dash to the zone of least overlap. About 10% of plain shaper fights, the entire arena has potentially lethal (this GUI overlay tracks only targeting, not actual DPS delivery) floor coverage, not counting bullet-hell phase.

To improve, for instance, the shaper fight, three things need to happen:

--Total lethal coverage should be minimized. Skills should never overlap in such a way as to present total area denial to players. There should always be pattern-recognized safe areas where targeting is suspended or de-emphasized while empty. (It becomes fair game once a player has actually moved to that area.) Behind boss, behind obstructing or impassable terrain, etc.

--Six portals need to be enough for totally new, unexposed players to learn the fights - keep it simple.

--Because graphics and visibility are part of the game players have varying control over, making all the skills fairly readily identifiable with a low particle load and reasonable differentiation from other skills, is a pro move. "Black on black, gives me a heart attack" - Corrosion of Conformity, "Clean My Wounds", 1994. This is true today, in the conqueror fights and in Elder fights. Don't use black or gray or brown or whatnot for skills, unless it's out on a glaring white gypsum flats or Glacier.

--Props. Arenas are typically barren of props except for gotchas where moving players can get stuck and become sitting ducks for annihilation. Instead, use props creatively to create tactical opportunities for both players and enemies. Statues with spears and shields: these could just be adds waiting to be activated, OR they can provide ranged players with cover, OR a boss taking heavy damage from a meta meme build can "borrow" a shield from the nearest statue and gain a huge pile of block % or even a bit of Reckoning. Those armour stands in Arena or Racecourse? You "disarm" a boss but then he can choose a new wep set midfight after taking 25% or 50% damage.

--Threshold effects like Culling Strike are only one way of applying this principle. Now that no-phasing say, Chimera is out of reach of most builds because his HP is bloated, instead apply a threshold condition that activates based on the total DPS and type (ranged, melee, DOT) of incoming. He becomes less evasive and abandons cloud combat altogether if you maim/bleed him enough, just as he will maim/bleed you into a corner. But it has to be A LOT. No simple level 1 maim will do here, you have to invest a bit into it. (And it makes him MAD and he still moves fast and one hit can gravely maim you.)

--At the end of the day, changes that reinforce and reward observation, situational awareness, thinking outside of the arena/or atleast around the edges, adapting and (a little) preparation and research are far better than just making numbers go up. I'm not actually convinced they take that much extra work, but getting the endgame fights to be exhilarating and risky without making them a joke or a euthanasia chamber for colourblind players, might entail a new way of thinking about PoE.