Volatile Bloom (?) monster affix

IIRC, the affix is named Volatile Blooms and rares with it spawn little flowers that explode for chaos damage. For the life of me, I cannot ever register their existence until they're already exploding on me while I quickly loot.

I'd advocate for anything that would signal their presence prior to exploding. I often kill rares before I can reliably read their affixes unfortunately.

Anyone else experiencing cheap deaths to those little flowers?

yep died twice to this affix today if it's the same one. I instantly died in both situations. I didn't have enough time to react and barely registered what happened both times

A bonus for this thingy happened to me:
Monsters drop exploding flowers in the `Blooming Field` map, really easy to spot, in a million of other flowers

I don't think I've died to Volatile Bloom [Boom? as I go "pop"] but it sure keeps my damage uptime to a minimum.

What gets me are the volatile crystals (??) that form when you hit a creature and explode after creature death.

The only saving grace is that my character is bad so I mostly have time to read a rare's mods before I kill it.

Yup! These on-death effects should NOT be in the game, given how the difficulty from early POE1 is back.

REMOVE THEM, GGG!

I lost the last 2 T4 maps I had after these bloom things killed me instantly. I quickly uninstalled the game and came on here to complain. I'm done.

Wasn't Volatile bloom removed?
GGG listens <3

In my opinion, the chaos crystals weren't a problem.

If you paid attention to the affixes of a rare, and saw they had chaos crystals, you could easily telegraph when and where they would detonate. The crystals dropped at the feet of the rare and would detonate after death. Anyone having an issue with them was either going too fast to pay attention to what they were fighting, or genuinely didn't know what they did.

Volatile plants are the bane of my existence as a melee main.
I'm not at the point where I'm sprinting through packs and rares with no cares at all, so your experience will differ. However, just as OP said. The volatile plants become the fight in my experience. With the rate at which new ones spawn, the tracking, the detonate delay, and the bad proximity registration to detonate, this is the modifier that should have been axed until fixed.

How to fix this to be manageable at all levels?

1. As OP said, increase delay between new sprouts. As it stands, as soon as you clear one wave of volatiles, a new one has already begun sprouting, so if you needed a moment to attack the rare making them, that's too bad, keep running.

2. Remove player tracking. Make the plants static hazards like other elemental hazards, but act on a proximity timer like a landmine. The tracking makes telegraphing impossible, and the projectiles can easily be lost in the screen clutter of a fight.

3. DRASTICALLY reduce damage. No, I'm saying NUKE the damage to the FLOOR. I cannot stress enough how frustrating it is to be on T1 maps with 33%CR, just trying to get on my feet, and one projectile from these encounters instantly kills me through 2k life. If nothing else to to be changed. At the current rate of spawn, player tracking, and detonation. These need to do negligible damage. Not just a little less, a SUBSTANTIAL amount less damage.

Two of three of my deaths in early maps [less than T11] maps were indirectly due to to flowers.

One was in a Ritual where I got blocked by terrain ... Oh well that was mostly my fault anyway.

Another was fighting a rare and I think (?) I got popped as the flowers formed behind me and I didn't notice ... oh well at least I knew what it was when I died.

Oddly my third death was also Ritual and to Chaos [but not flowers]. There was fog on the ground, a small-ish arena, and one or more "Chaos Archers" were laying down more Chaos than I could conveniently dodge.


Even with the above though I think the fault is mostly with me and my build. You really need 75% resistances when you get to T10+ mapping ; you doubly need it for Ritual ; and you need to be self-aware of character limitations combined with arena.