Problem: Range Enemies Attacking from Offscreen

TLDR: Wiping out monsters a screen away is, agreeably, not very fun. Monsters wiping us out a screen away is even less so. Please be conscientious about monster range, or at least give counterplay for such ranged monsters.

In the recent Baeclast episode, Chris Wilson talked a lot about the speed of POE and touched repeatedly on the point that wiping out monsters a screen away is not fun because you’re not interacting with them.

I agree with this philosophy, and I implore GGG to hold that standard to monsters as well. There are many mods that attack from off screen in ways that allow little counterplay, new black scythe mercenaries are just one example. GGG should also be conscientious that the player can see less on the bottom side of the screen because of the camera angle.

The solution isn’t as simple as reducing range to the screen size for all mobs (though this will work for some). Here are some cases where it shouldn’t work:
- Bosses: part of the difficulty is tracking the boss around the arena to be able to anticipate their attacks
- Enemies designed around range: having a longbow archer mob attacking from practically melee range isn’t fair

What can be done?

Enemies don’t begin attacking you until they appear on screen: this is already a thing to a certain degree, as monsters don’t attack you from across the map. But I think the range at which most monsters activate should be lowered as many of them are still attacking from offscreen.
Tied into this point is the fact that once ‘activated’, the monsters should only stay activated as long as they’re on the player screen (or perhaps, up to 3 seconds after leaving the screen). If the player dies, for example, then runs back through the zone, and monsters start attacking from faraway, it’ll make the zone even harder than it was before.

Terrain: terrain can get in between you and the monster and naturally makes it so that for a monster to attack, they need to be in the same room/zone as the player. So, we could limit high range mobs to certain maps.

Monster counterplay: having indicators or otherwise that allow the player to know an attack is coming and be able to dodge it. Currently, the projectiles just fly, sometimes faster than can be reacted to, especially if there are volleys from multiple directions. Having an indicator (a line showing where a beam will shoot or marks on the ground showing where explosions will take place) allows for the player to interact with monsters off of screen.

I’m sure that these points have been brought up before, but I hope that bringing them up again highlights their importance. There are few things as infuriating in POE as being killed from monsters off screen.