Immortality is killing PoE

I believe in old PoE Atziri was immune to either fire completely or for sure could not be ignited. That went away because it was direct disable to specific build.
There were more content with immunities to various mechanics but as far as I know, everything was removed and there is not a boss today who is for example stun immune.

From this, adding element immunity is attempt to do reversal. From my point of view it is not good.

You can make all sorts of excuses about PoE being successor to D2, but I liked PoE much more than I like D2 where content was not limited to build you played, only to your ability and gear while gear being accessible :)

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Marxone wrote:

You can make all sorts of excuses about PoE being successor to D2, but I liked PoE much more than I like D2 where content was not limited to build you played, only to your ability and gear while gear being accessible :)

Players will just run past things that are immune like they did in Diablo 2.

Players aren't going to half their DPS or spend 3x longer fighting something. They're going to dip, finish clearing and open another map. This is why I always liked Diablo 1 more anyways.

In Hell/Hell 3rd floor Succubi were Immune to all elements. If you wanted to kill Diablo for loot you had to deal with them but you also had a global magic system which gave you tools to do that.

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Xzorn wrote:

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Marxone wrote:

You can make all sorts of excuses about PoE being successor to D2, but I liked PoE much more than I like D2 where content was not limited to build you played, only to your ability and gear while gear being accessible :)

Players will just run past things that are immune like they did in Diablo 2.

Players aren't going to half their DPS or spend 3x longer fighting something. They're going to dip, finish clearing and open another map. This is why I always liked Diablo 1 more anyways.

In Hell/Hell 3rd floor Succubi were Immune to all elements. If you wanted to kill Diablo for loot you had to deal with them but you also had a global magic system which gave you tools to do that.

Now take into consideration how the game is structured around getting "content" to drop from monsters. Imagine unlucky streak where you don't get any map drops just because you have to ignore 1/3 of the monsters. GGG continuously "balance" map drops and if you check early feedback, it was not uncommon for some to dro from low reds back to T5s because they hit unlucky streak. Unfortunately it is another design choice by GGG because they "want us to trade maps".
Sure, it is not endgame problem, they might even adjust drops because of it, but I would not count on it.

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Xzorn wrote:

As for D2 comparisons. People just run past Immune packs. It's equally stupid.

The overwhelming majority of Diablo 2 players build past immunities. Maybe in late nightmare mode you MIGHT avoid a pack because they don't yet have the skill points - or you misspent due to lack of experience playing.

By hell mode, you have the points - from just quests alone - to have a backup skill. And the equipment too.

If you're poor and inexperienced in Diablo 2, you have two skills. A main and a backup for dealing with immunes.

If you're experienced and poor, you have a wand on weaponswap with lower resistance, decrepify or amplify damage charges.

If you're rich, you break the immunity with Infinity, The Reaper's Toll or any of a number of merc equipable weapons that drop curses.

It's a game designer's job to create problems for you to overcome. They're selling a power fantasy, but that escape only has meaning if you must work for it.

As such, adding a new angle - immunities - to the game is, in my mind, enjoyable, exciting, and adds another layer of complexity. They've added a new hill we need to climb - and with that challenge, the reward for conquering it.

I for one hope we see a lot more elemental immunes - and that it becomes integral to PoE II. It certainly didn't hurt Diablo II's numbers and nobody complained about them in the New Game +++ in Torchlight II.

I was wondering how monsters seemed to take ages to die when they were at 1 hp. Wow, this immortality mechanic is stupid I agree. I'm not playing any glass cannon build this league but I see it being nearly impossible to if mobs will become immortal even for a few seconds, they will just kill you effortlessly.

I disagree. Imminities feel frustrating specially when tied to a specific reward like more logbook drops. Diablo 2 is a game where you can invest in more than 1 skill because gear is not that skill dependant, many items improve all your skills or a tree that has different elemental skills. Skills advance mostly with level as you mentioned and not with gear like in PoE, you need to slot gems somewhere and having a weapon swap for a skill is not an option in most cases due to how 6 links are necessary to clear as you go further into maps.
People don't complain about immunities on Diablo 2 or other games because those were always there, but not in PoE they are new, unexpected, something no one would ever ask for and definitely not a challenging thing that improves the game, just another obnoxious mechanic to deal with.

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Xzorn wrote:

Immunity to a damage type is just bad RPG design.

The only time it's acceptable is when the player can remove it by some means, usually mechanics.

You can have 90% Resistance to something and long as the player has access to tools for reducing this value, it's also fine. Flat Immunity is just not fine. You remove the tools a player could use to overcome anti-build designs and you remove character interaction entirely at times.

Even games based around using 4+ characters at a time like DOS2 or XCOM have no business using Immunity. You render your Pyro or whatever entirely useless and it's not a fun experience.

PoE has been designed over time to use single damage types. The separation of Aliments and Crit, The way Aliments work, Poison, Impale, Bleed, ect. The only reasonable exception is Lightning/Cold mix. Items like Voidforge or Capricious Spiritblade further solidify this design.

The implementation of the Immunity is also insulting IMO. I've never accidentally hit Immune Physical and never will. As for D2 comparisons. People just run past Immune packs. It's equally stupid.

I cannot agree more with everything you said. In DDO (different type of game but similar in many ways) most of the monsters either have some sort of immunity or dmg reduction to the point they become immune to phys damage if you can't bypass it, and sometimes some type of damage will heal them instead of damage, like Undead and Iron Golems. But you do have many ways of dealing with this.
Having a weapon with metalline or adamantine, feats (passive skills), enhancements (refundable passives), some ability enhancements remove immunities and resistances, as a caster you can bring another type of spell and you only need some universal spell power to deal some damage.

Here in PoE1 (we are very far from poe2 yet) your skills are limited to your gear because they are slotted there, so even if you have generic damage boosts you still need to socket the skill and the support gems for it which is not possible in many scenarios like if you are unarmed and encounter phys immunes what weapon swap would benefit your damage? if you can't convert damage as unarmed with a weapon swap except maybe if you were already using one specific weapon node and some trash unique has conversion on it and you also happen to be using that jewel on your tree.

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SingThisCorrosion wrote:

I disagree. Imminities feel frustrating specially when tied to a specific reward like more logbook drops. Diablo 2 is a game where you can invest in more than 1 skill because gear is not that skill dependant, many items improve all your skills or a tree that has different elemental skills. Skills advance mostly with level as you mentioned and not with gear like in PoE, you need to slot gems somewhere and having a weapon swap for a skill is not an option in most cases due to how 6 links are necessary to clear as you go further into maps.
People don't complain about immunities on Diablo 2 or other games because those were always there, but not in PoE they are new, unexpected, something no one would ever ask for and definitely not a challenging thing that improves the game, just another obnoxious mechanic to deal with.

Well, a few thoughts here.

- There were actually not always immunities in Diablo 2. Blizzard experimented around over the years between launch and 1.06. They tried giving the monsters massive hit point boosts, then utterly epic regeneration. Later they rolled those back and tried so much innate resistance to most attack types that having some manner of curse was basically mandatory if you had more than four players in the game.

It was an evolution. Eventually, they settled on modestly upping the monster hit points, and then making certain types of monsters - where thematically appropriate - immune to certain elements. It was not flawless, and they noodled with it over time - only blessed hammer really got off unscathed - and that was because it's innate damage to undead allowed it to bypass the magic immunes populating act 2, the sewars in act 3 and the packs in the Wordlstone Keep.

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- A six-link that's not supported by your gear and only minorly supported by your tree is perfectly viable in PoE. I have a Storm Call Elementalist with 18k tool-tip, a bladefall trapper with 8k tool-tip and a champion with 36k lacerate tooltip. They can kill any mosnter quickly in a corrupted T-16 map except the boss or league uniques like Syndicate members. You don't need 500 million dps to clear out the packs.

In fact, my Elementalist uses a 4-link supported arc to trigger arcane surge and innervate - and just that opening 23k attack kills like half the monster packs I hit.

The super DPS only comes in to play for dealing with league-unique content, quickly killing map bosses, and bypassing end-game boss mechanics. Having a secondary attack for immune monsters does not require much investment at all.

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So no, I don't see a problem with immune packs of monsters. Nor even map bosses or the occasional league unique creature.

Now, if GGG were to add immune end-game bosses, that would be a problem, since they pretty much require maximum investment. But throwing in packs of immune monsters is already easy to deal with. It will be easier once PoE II comes out.

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Sabranic_SilverDeth wrote:

If you're rich, you break the immunity with Infinity, The Reaper's Toll or any of a number of merc equipable weapons that drop curses.

It's a game designer's job to create problems for you to overcome. They're selling a power fantasy, but that escape only has meaning if you must work for it.

It's not worth it to the player is the problem. Mercs were slow. Before they added the synergy mechanics it was perfectly fine to use two main skills. You just had plenty of extra points.

Once they added that system pretty much all dual skill use died and it wasn't like the game got harder afterwards when people killed fine using dual skills. It was just more screen obliteration and speed.

This is why I mentioned Diablo 1 and liking many things from that version over Diablo 2. I love both games but we lost some things. The universal Magic system was one of them. It's very kin to PoE. The major difference being that you could have every spell at lvl 23 or 25 if you went shrine hunting. Players had strong options to work around immunity.

...Even the slow but feared Teleporting Warrior.

D2 post synergy this wasn't worth it. You had your inventory filled with charms, your points set and maxed out for doing what you built for. PoE is even worse in this regard.

So much of our performance comes from gear rolls. So much that if you were to swap to a different damage type 6-link skill it would be pretty pointless and probably get you killed.

PoE not only has you spec for a certain build and damage type but it has you gearing for it. Not some "Oh cool Rune Word this is good for many things" or some generically good set gear. It's down to Crit Multi or DoT Multi, Impale or Bleed, Fire Elemental Overload or Ignite.

Immunity is an even worse idea for PoE than it's predecessors and even those weren't good ideas.
Like I said, players will just run by Immunity. It wasn't worth it in D2 and certainly not in PoE.
You can like the idea but I'm just going to Leap Slam past it. That's just a fact.

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Xzorn wrote:

It's not worth it to the player is the problem. Mercs were slow. Before they added the synergy mechanics it was perfectly fine to use two main skills. You just had plenty of extra points.

Mercs keep up just fine. I do not have a single merc that can't keep up with my characters. If you kill stuff in melee, they're at your side always, if you teleport, they at your side instantly. About the only situation where you can even get out of their aura range is if you're leaping to the chaos sanctuary on a barbarian or shield charging long distances on a Pally - and they do eventually teleport to your location after about 5 seconds.

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Xzorn wrote:

Once they added that system pretty much all dual skill use died and it wasn't like the game got harder afterwards when people killed fine using dual skills. It was just more screen obliteration and speed.

Absolutely untrue. Barbarians Beserk, Amazon Strafe or Multi-shot, Sorceress Frozen Orb, Amp + Corpse explosion, Sorceress Static Field, Druid Rabies, Necromancer Revives, Assassin Death Sentries, Druid Fissure, Paladin Zeal, all require no more than 20 points to be 8-player hell viable as a secondary attack for immune packs.

They scale very very well with almost no synergy, or very little - some require ONLY synergy and no actual skill investment. Many of them only require one single point and their pre-recs.

The only class that is even CLOSE to point starved enough for this to be a problem is a bone necro. Lucky for them, they get two of the "one point wonders" to pick from.

That line's not going to fly, I've been playing Diablo 2 for 20 years+ now.

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Xzorn wrote:

This is why I mentioned Diablo 1 and liking many things from that version over Diablo 2. I love both games but we lost some things. The universal Magic system was one of them. It's very kin to PoE. The major difference being that you could have every spell at lvl 23 or 25 if you went shrine hunting. Players had strong options to work around immunity.

Well if you really want to get nit-picky, a warrior could never reach spell levels that high without cheated equipment due to intelligence. But that's a side issue I just felt like pointing out. Dropping Dreamflange cheated uniques on a warrior to up his INT is not what was intended.

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Xzorn wrote:

D2 post synergy this wasn't worth it. You had your inventory filled with charms, your points set and maxed out for doing what you built for. PoE is even worse in this regard.

Again, this is untrue. Absolutely untrue. Even the people who can swing an infinity on their lightning sorceress or javazon have the points left for a secondary skill. A good bow + 20 strafe or multishot will handle the immunes you can't break in the Chaos Sanctuary and other iLevel 90 areas. Frozen orb only requires 20 points, the pre-recs and 1 point in cold mastery.

The game continued to evolve, and I suspect you stopped playing around 1.10 or 1.11. You information is old, out of date, and incorrect.

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Xzorn wrote:

So much of our performance comes from gear rolls. So much that if you were to swap to a different damage type 6-link skill it would be pretty pointless and probably get you killed.

Not a bit. A secondary skill, well chosen, even in a 4-link can wipe out packs in a T-16 vaal'ed map. It won't be as effective on Unique and the map boss, but you could still do it if you had to. I know because I have these skills. I use them for things like elemetal equilibrium, triggering arcane surge, debuffing resists, delivering curses... and a VERY good percentage of the time, these "tigger" skills destroy the T-16, Vaal'ed map packs so badly I only need to mop-up with the primary skill.

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Xzorn wrote:

PoE not only has you spec for a certain build and damage type but it has you gearing for it. Not some "Oh cool Rune Word this is good for many things" or some generically good set gear. It's down to Crit Multi or DoT Multi, Impale or Bleed, Fire Elemental Overload or Ignite.

You are wrong again. On T-16 elemental reflect maps, I swap my stone golems into my 6-link on my fire golem Scion... and I clear the whole map with them. It takes about twice as long. But it works just fine. I also have a jewel-swap on my necro, and turn my skeletons until nukers for physical reflect maps. I flip vulnerability with a elemental weakness gem and I'm good to go.

I won't even go into how easy it is to swap from physical to elemental on my trapper or swap elements on my ice-shot pathfinder.

The truth is, you can work out a secondary attack, using an alternate element, (thanks to the HUGE selection of PoE skill gems), that performs well with your tree and gear.

You don't need Maven-slaying DPS to DESTROY packs and clear maps. You'll slow down on uniques and maps bosses - that's true. But I don't see that as a problem.

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Xzorn wrote:

Immunity is an even worse idea for PoE than it's predecessors and even those weren't good ideas.

That's you're opinion. I found it fun and exciting.

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Xzorn wrote:

Like I said, players will just run by Immunity. It wasn't worth it in D2 and certainly not in PoE.

The number of people who skip content in D2 after nightmare mode - where SOME people panned poorly - is trivial. And in PoE, (especially), Once we have access to a host of 6-links, the number would be trivial as well.

Why?

Because the absolute truth of the matter is, we have more than enough
leeway and gem diversity that almost any build can find a secondary skill that makes good use of their tree and gear. You won't need "Maximum firepower" to clear a map.

I will say again, if they add immune Unique End-game bosses, THAT will be a legitimate issue. Since you DO need to fine-tune and synergize every aspect of your character and gear to kill them. It would entirely gate certain builds from those bosses - but I sincerely doubt GGG would do that intentionally.

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Xzorn wrote:

You can like the idea but I'm just going to Leap Slam past it. That's just a fact.

Your loss.

I suspect the devs are leaning towards immunities based on the "test" they're conducting in the current beta-league. And I can tell you with a high degree of confidence, they're not giving us between 9 and 14 6-links so we can use them all to support 1 primary attack skill.

They're going to want us to branch out and use a variety of skills - Wilson even said as much in the PoE II interview. Now we can see one of the mechanics GGG is exploring to enable that.

I mean... how do you think they will force you to use multiple skills? They don't have many options. Maybe they've got something planned out of left field - they are a clever lot. But from where I am sitting, short of adding immunities to areas, GGG lacks options to incentivize players use a variety of gems.