Exploding Crystals feels like pre 3.0 volatile affixes...

Disclaimer: I'm going to beat this horse dead to try and drive the point home.

Been a hardcore player since well before vids like "SparklyD Hardcore Death" showcased why the mechanic "volatile" was not in a great place.

Back in the day, part of survival was mousing over every elite (to verify if you were going to 1 shot yourself on kill). For melee, that sometimes meant kiting the mob around to create the opportunity to mouse over the mob to verify volatility.

I understand that mechanics are moving away from walls-of-text scrubbing, and towards a more intuitive state: you know the mob fires mortars because you can see the mortars. Big pyro ball charging? No need to read.

Enter the SURPRISE, hidden under your feet, hidden under the monster model/your own character model, minions etc. melee deathtrap that is Exploding Crystals.

Melee-Meatgrinder "Exploding Crystals" has the exact same user-experience as oldschool Volatile-Death: didn't mouse-over the mob to check before kill? Back to the beach with you exile!
Can you please either make the Crystals HUGE or make it visible on the monster model? Just replace the monster model with a giant crystal. I'd rather you hide the unimportant graphic like "what the base monster is" than the thing that's going to sneak kill me for not interrupting the game-flow to read the affix-text.


To reiterate. The crystal graphic is often hidden under the enemy model or my own attack animations and it's gotten to the point where you have to pretend that it's 6 years ago and affix-reading is a core part of survival - all because of this one affix.

*Edit: You can't even see the crystals or hear any sound in the following clip:

https://vimeo.com/784573945

I'm going to request you switch the ear-bleeding sound effects of the already visually overstimulating Lightning Storm with CrystalsExplode.
Record someone breaking a window and play that on a loop. w.e. Anything to make this feel less bs.

I'm fine with Lightning mirages because you can see them.
Same with Lightning Spires.
Lightning Storm could have it's volume lowered by 200% (I basically have to mute the game sound when I encounter one of these mobs).
Molten/Toxic balls? balanced.
Ice Prison? Balanced, even in ruthless.
But this silent killer is extremely unsatisfying, and it's visual inconsistency with the rest of the mechanics feels more like a disingenuous gotcha than an engaging or chaotic (read: fun) additional to combat.
I don't want to hear "the dmg is low enough that it shouldn't matter". Yes I've survived hits from this garbage. But you also put it on thickboy, go to sleep while you kill it elites, but unlike "creates toxic orbs on death" etc. Crystals Explode is an auto death because of how invisible they can be.

./rant done.
Melee players: Tell me if I'm crazy of if this has killed you too.

"

DarthVero wrote:

all because of this one affix.

Hahaha if only. Soul Eater getting generated is a lot of fun in Delve let me tell you.

But more seriously, it's killed me when finishing rares off with Scorching Ray. Vortex makes any ground effects almost completely invisible, as well as making you listen to a constant repetitive sloshing noise as you leftclick around.

RIP to Crystals in current league with selfcast build - with Vortex...

Soul Eater in Delve is worse though. Logout users shouldnt be rewarded like that.

bump

melee spammer here

after all the fixes to the Archnemesis mechanics getting tuned down , this seems to be the only thing that relatively stayed.

its really annoying frustrating having to frostblink or leap slam away from every yellow i dont hover over in the heat of battle .


its manageable but its not a very good quality of life.

what i do feel is BS is the Metamorph version of the purple crystals if that they cast them and i almost got vaporized after 0.5 seconds only to frostblink out. that in my opinion is very dumb because i cant see the cystals when im hitting things , literally .

they buff melee by like 10% and they NUKE melee by making sanctum almost impossible for strike melee , and still have mechanics that punish melee still a bit too much

100% agree. Either the crystals need to be much more visible, the enemy needs to have a persistent visual effect or a longer time to explode with a more visible effect before explosion (something like the exploding bugs in delve).

i read the chrystals description, didn't think it affected me cause of the distance to the monster, bang ... dead.

doing cold dot i didn't see anything coming. guess, at this point the game should sell mtx to remove extra effects ... not add them

bump

bump

they are not that bad with 75% chaos res