Archnemesis: Herald-minions must be nerfed. Here is why.

Pictures shows T16 grave trough which was used to calculate the damage of the Herald-minions (experiment 1)

The reason for this post are earlier posts by frankfatsaber and Hakk3lB3erry who complained about this Archnemesis mod. I have realised that I myself have lost several hardcore characters to this mechanic or that I have died several times in softcore.

General Problem: The Archnemesis Modifier “Herald-minions” deals to much damage per second and is able to chase the player off screen. Additionally, challenging those monsters with this modifier end in a high-risk low-reward situation.

Damage: To my best knowledge the heralds discharge twice in a time span of 1.12 seconds and inflict 100% Lightning as spell(confirmed) damage to the player.
I have tested how much damage they inflict on a normal T16 map (w/o watchstones): Every hit of one herald dealt on average 590 damage. (90% lightning resistance/100% spell suppression/Fortify)
This results in an initial hit = 590/(0.5*0.1*0.8) = 14’750 damage /1.12 seconds = 13’170 damage/s.
Note: Multiple heralds can chase you and they can discharge in different intervals. In addition to modifiers on the map and atlas and watch stones can significantly increase the damage x-times.
Note 2: Spell suppression does work to prevent a huge damage taken. I made an second experiment (different set-up: 82% lightning resistance) measured how many hits I can take before Life drops below 50%.(L<50). With 100% spell supression in average L<50= 4.67 hits were needed. With 59% spell supression in average L<50=2.70 hits were needed. (Data of both samples were compared using a students T.test. T.Test<0.05)

Solution: Multiple heralds can no longer present or discharge frequency will be raised to 2 seconds.

Range: Herald-minions can chase the player off screen. In fact I measured a distance of 205 units from the mob till where I stood and the spawned totem.(I calculated the distance with the Transparent_Distance_Visualizer on poewiki.net) In combination with other mobs (i.e in a narrow map) which lower the visibility of the heralds ends almost guaranteed in a death.

Solution: Heralds will despawn if the player is not “nearby”

High risk/low reward: Most map bosses or higher bosses have spells which deal less damage than this archnemesis modifier. But they have much better rewards than rare monster with the herald-minions modifier.

Solution: Reduce the appearance of this modifier but increase the rewards they drop. (i.e opulent archnemesis modifier)

Admirable but it’s their vision. End of story.

Imo heralding minions should be just deleted.
The prime reason- its just feels out of place and heavily disrupts game flow (fighting teleporting electric pylons from star craft which does make sounds like clicking main menu buttons in red alert 2, like come on..), but asking this is beating a dead horse at this point.

I would cull quite a few of archnemesis mods as any other player would. Maybe would also rework/add other ones. There is definitely a way to make them feel better without removing too much difficulty.

It is about improving the game. Clearly those modifiers are not fully balanced yet. Thats the reason for my constructive feeback. The more people agree with me the higher is the chance it get noticed by GGG.

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M4T_RIx wrote:

It is about improving the game. Clearly those modifiers are not fully balanced yet. Thats the reason for my constructive feeback. The more people agree with me the higher is the chance it get noticed by GGG.

+1

This mechanic is horrible. It is why I stopped playing PoE this league.

If I don't see the obelisks in the mess on screen then I die. If I do see them then I'd immediately run away back to areas that I'd already cleared. The obelisks would reform next to me and I'd have to run further, repeat and repeat again. In either case it is not fun.

I've had it twice now that I kept being chased by this effect while the source of it was 7 or 8 screens away. For some reason once it has activated it has a HUGE range and it will just keep on going. Had trouble finding them, but did eventually.


So please nerf that range.

Wait, are you all seriously cry about AN? Even on T16 it's just 14k dmg, that your character without SS will mitigate to 3k, so you will survive at least 1 hit for easy, if you're not glass cannon 2, if you have defensive abilities like SS or spell block, or simply high resistance they won't be dangerous at all.
And you know... they don't hit your character if you don't sleep. Feels hard? Play on your SC, you don't get any real punishment in this sandbox mod.

You worry about dangerous AN mods? Let's talk about Ice Prison combo when we will play Ruthless, where you don't have movement skills, and you have no defence and damage.

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Alendert wrote:

Wait, are you all seriously cry about AN? Even on T16 it's just 14k dmg, that your character without SS will mitigate to 3k, so you will survive at least 1 hit for easy, if you're not glass cannon 2, if you have defensive abilities like SS or spell block, or simply high resistance they won't be dangerous at all.
And you know... they don't hit your character if you don't sleep. Feels hard? Play on your SC, you don't get any real punishment in this sandbox mod.

You worry about dangerous AN mods? Let's talk about Ice Prison combo when we will play Ruthless, where you don't have movement skills, and you have no defence and damage.

It almost sounds like you enjoy them, please tell that is not true.

On ruthless part:
phasing ?

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Andrius319 wrote:

It almost sounds like you enjoy them, please tell that is not true.

On ruthless part:
phasing ?

I actually enjoy them, fighting when you have to dodge mechanics is way more funny.

Agree, I think it will be must have.