Make rare monsters rare

I think that the AN implementation is missing its intended purpose by some way. From what I have gathered watching the CW baeclast pre launch the goal for AN was as follows, this is at leats how I interpreted it :

1. Rare monsters need to be meaningful encounters.
2. A single AN mod should not stonewall a build but it should be possible for a combination of mods to create challenging encounters.
3. Players should be able to more quickly interpret what a rare mob does as to adjust their gameplay to counteract the threat it poses.

I think the implementation has failed on all fronts in achieving the goals set for a couple of reasons :

1. Risk/reward and time/reward balance : In its current state it is best to ignore a mob that is dangerous or takes a long time to kill. Spending a long time attacking a mob that happens to resist the damage you do is not worth it. The rewards for killing these is not substantial enough so those difficult encounters that were designed to be meaningful are simply being skipped. If you do not reward the extra effort required that is implied by making the encounters meaningful then players will not do them or become frustrated at them. Seeing a rare that doesn't die quickly or dying to a rare with a specific mod is currently a very negative experience. You dislike when it happens. Ideally seeing a rare mob should be a positive experience because of the potential loot they represent. That is not the case.

2. Visual clutter : In it's current state with all the effects that come with the AN mods the game is extremely visually cluttered. This severely impacts how meaningful a single mob is. They are not discernable in any way because there is simply too much going on. On death effects, ground effects, aura's..In maps with a high monster density you are not fighting a meaningful rare but a group of things you need to kill. Most of the time you don't even see very well what you are fighting. It is hard to see what is what so you cannot quickly interpret which monster is doing what and what is going on. No single rare is impactful in a screen full save for those that are left standing because they again resist what you are doing.

3. Mod imbalance : Because of how the AN mods are designed many of the mods are quite simply meaningless and others are very challenging depending on what you are playing. I play a smite build and electric themed An mods are very annoying while others are hardly noticeable. Because of the nerfs to the AN mods most mods have become unnoticeable in individual encounters while some are simply frustrating and add no real value other than taking long to kill or negating your defensive layers. Many single mods have exceedingly fargoing impacts on certain builds to the point where a mob with just that one mod can be more annoying than a different one with three different mods. Personally I think all rare mobs should get an inherent buff to life and damage so that each one is meaningful but that is not possible in the current state of the game due to the following point.

4. Overload : I think this is a core issue. Single rare mobs are hardly an issue but it is the combination of several of these mobs that make the game frustrating and is the reason why so many league mechanics are currently very punishing. When too many rares spawn together the difficulty is scaled exponentially. 1+1 in this case does not equal 2. Because of this the individual rare mobs have been nerfed. The result is that a single rare is no longer very meaningful but a group of them is still harder and more frustrating than it should be. A single on death or ground effect is very manageable but several on top of eachother is not. You don't really see what you are doing most of the time, you just know you shouldn't stand still for too long. A lot of the frustration from players comes from overload where too many rare monsters spawn together and become exponentially difficult and annoying.

Lets be fair. How meaningful can something be when you encounter hundreds of them in a single hour of gameplay. In a single juiced map it is not uncommon to fight dozens of rare mobs. A single delve, ritual or blight encounter will have a dozen of these rare mobs in them. You cannot have something that common be meaningful every single time. It is not logically possible. I think that AN would have been fine its very first implementation pre nerfs if rare monsters were actually rare.

I think that a lot of the issues with AN could be solved if the spawn rate of rare mobs was a lot lower.

1. Because they become less common it is possible to significantly buff their drop rates without overflowing the economy. Say that hypethetically an exalt drops once every 1000 rares currently and you encounter 1000 per hour you get on average an exalt per hour. Now say an exalt drops every 100 rares but you only encounter 100 per hour. The average drop rate per hour is unchanged but the incentive for players to interact with rare mobs is much higher. Seeing a very strong and dangerous rare should be a positive experience. "oh wow a rare with 4 AN mods. This guy might give me an amazing drop". The map mod "maps contain xx% more rares" becomes desireable and is a good risk vs reward proposition. Skipping rares becomes worse than taking the time to kill them. Taking the atlas nodes to add AN mods and more rare monsters add value other than completing challenges.

2. Because they become less common you can make them harder and meaningful without running the risk of overloading players with too many in combination. You can rebuff the AN mods and rare mobs because you have less instances where a group of rare mobs make an encounter exponentially harder. Each rare could be an actual challenge without being an issue because you encounter them less often. You cannot have 20-30 meaningful encounters per map but 3 or 4 is fine. All mods could pose unique challenges rather than just having certain mods per builds posing a threat.

3. You reduce the visual clutter cuased by such large amounts of AN modifiers. The game becomes more visually clear and rare monsters will stand out. Seeing what one rare mob does on your screen is perfectly possible. Seeing what each of the 4 or 5 on your screen do is not. You also reduce the insane amounts of ground effects. Player gameplay and movement becomes more than simply " don't stand still for too long ". As a side note this is actually a buff to self casting skills and skills that require a player to stop moving. Current gameplay heavily favors skills that can be used efficiently on the move.


To recap. Make AN mods more rewarding and hard to fight but make rare monsters rare. A single rare monster now is never meaningful because of how dangerous they become in a group. How common they are ruins the ability to make the encounters meaningful. I would prefer to see only a small handful of rares in a map and be excited at the prospect of killing them even if it takes some effort rather than seeing a couple of dozen each map that don't mean anything unless they have one of the "annoying" mods for my build. Like I said. If you want something to be meaningful it needs to be rare.

Along with this, I think a rebalance on league mechanics is warranted. League mechanics have always been much more challenging than normal content. Swapping in AN mods there is a double whammy.

Personal experience yesterday: I was at Wave 26 of a Simulacrum with only 1 portal out at that point. Kosis spawns. A rare spawns. Kosis goes down super easy. That rare wiped out all of my remaining portals. Why? Because with 3 AN mods he was much tankier than Kosis and because the wave rolled Fleet and he also had Frenzy as one of his mods, he was lightning fast. I don't share this to be upset but impactful is one thing, this is overdone and ridiculous.

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TemjinGold wrote:

Along with this, I think a rebalance on league mechanics is warranted. League mechanics have always been much more challenging than normal content. Swapping in AN mods there is a double whammy.

Personal experience yesterday: I was at Wave 26 of a Simulacrum with only 1 portal out at that point. Kosis spawns. A rare spawns. Kosis goes down super easy. That rare wiped out all of my remaining portals. Why? Because with 3 AN mods he was much tankier than Kosis and because the wave rolled Fleet and he also had Frenzy as one of his mods, he was lightning fast. I don't share this to be upset but impactful is one thing, this is overdone and ridiculous.

Yeah league mechanics are tuned to have a lot of rares in them to bump the difficulty. It speaks for itself that if rares are less common in general that they should be less common in the league content too.

My personal best story was a delve. I got to one of those rooms that starts dropping apes from the roof. Loads of rares but I got through it ok. The last monster however had Soul Conduit. The second it died the game had to revive and render all the dead monsters in the room and the drops at the same time. I didn't even get to see it. The game froze and when it unfroze I was dead with a room fizzing with revived monsters. Literally no counterplay to that. The mechanic just froze my game.

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Impiousbe wrote:

Loads of rares but I got through it ok. The last monster however had Soul Conduit. The second it died the game had to revive and render all the dead monsters in the room and the drops at the same time. I didn't even get to see it. The game froze and when it unfroze I was dead with a room fizzing with revived monsters. Literally no counterplay to that. The mechanic just froze my game.

We've been complaining about this one since delve league itself, they are extremely slow to make adjustments for content like this. Honestly I think we are lucky they disabled tricksters in the mines -_-

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Impiousbe wrote:

Yeah league mechanics are tuned to have a lot of rares in them to bump the difficulty. It speaks for itself that if rares are less common in general that they should be less common in the league content too.

My personal best story was a delve. I got to one of those rooms that starts dropping apes from the roof. Loads of rares but I got through it ok. The last monster however had Soul Conduit. The second it died the game had to revive and render all the dead monsters in the room and the drops at the same time. I didn't even get to see it. The game froze and when it unfroze I was dead with a room fizzing with revived monsters. Literally no counterplay to that. The mechanic just froze my game.

Having a lot of rares in let's say heist is not bumping difficulty when mobs are overtuned at first. Before AN came in, level 69 heist have mobs with level 80+ power level. When you bring in AN mods, the whole shit explode in a stinky mess.

I'm not against AN mods IF the frequency of rares mobs are tuned down big time like 1:5 ratio AND they get they base power level back in side content. Level 69 heist side content should be here to help you farm your gear, not being overly punishing for not having an allready endgame build thus making its farm useless.

And it goes for ALL side content of PoE since Syndicate came out.

GGG has to rebalance everything if they want players to engage with AN rare mobs...

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Azarhiel wrote:

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Impiousbe wrote:

Yeah league mechanics are tuned to have a lot of rares in them to bump the difficulty. It speaks for itself that if rares are less common in general that they should be less common in the league content too.

My personal best story was a delve. I got to one of those rooms that starts dropping apes from the roof. Loads of rares but I got through it ok. The last monster however had Soul Conduit. The second it died the game had to revive and render all the dead monsters in the room and the drops at the same time. I didn't even get to see it. The game froze and when it unfroze I was dead with a room fizzing with revived monsters. Literally no counterplay to that. The mechanic just froze my game.

Having a lot of rares in let's say heist is not bumping difficulty when mobs are overtuned at first. Before AN came in, level 69 heist have mobs with level 80+ power level. When you bring in AN mods, the whole shit explode in a stinky mess.

I'm not against AN mods IF the frequency of rares mobs are tuned down big time like 1:5 ratio AND they get they base power level back in side content. Level 69 heist side content should be here to help you farm your gear, not being overly punishing for not having an allready endgame build thus making its farm useless.

And it goes for ALL side content of PoE since Syndicate came out.

GGG has to rebalance everything if they want players to engage with AN rare mobs...

I agree in principal. The amount of rares in side content is very high in general so the problem of AN mods overload is much larger in this content. In some content the actual base mobs are also a step above others.

I don't mind side content being challenging. I think heist is actually a tad too rewarding for how safe it was to do. The entire concept was risk vs reward. Obviously the current difficulty is overtuned due to AN and I agree that the side content should not require absolute endgame builds to be doable.

Again I do believe that the solution here is to reduce the numbers of rares. Even from a thematic perspective in for example Heist it would be more interesting because the mechanic should be "dangerous" and as such give you those emotions. Now it is a blur. It would be a lot better if you would notice the few rares because of the threat they pose rather than everything being a threat.