Make Rare Monsters MECHANICALLY Interesting, Not Mod Hogs

I'm noticing far too many PoE1 problems rear their ugly heads in PoE2, and one of them is what I will call the "Fuck You" types of rare mob mods. I shouldn't feel compelled to skip a rare just because it's anti-build. Others are just so tedious to deal with that I hardly want to, and with PoE2's drop rates there is even less incentive to bother. Rares should be interesting, not just another thing on screen to gib or skip.

First, get rid of the "Fuck You" mods, or at least adjust them significantly. These are the ones that result in tedium or needless frustration and add literally nothing to difficulty or challenge. Siphon/drainers are big "Fuck You" mods, like mana and flask drain, and should be removed or tweaked significantly (like how Volatile Blood was changed in PoE1 to not be an RNG "You Died"). Others that are primarily tedious and do not create a challenge, like Life Regen and Evasive, should either be greatly reduced or removed entirely. Some I've experienced, like the plants and such, are good on paper, and really need to be closely monitored to make sure they are sensible, and ideally should only be in the mod pool for certain mobs or thematically appropriate mobs with a design eye out to make sure the encounters become more mechanically interesting rather than frustrating. Those plants are only a handful of frames from spawn to attack and have piss poor tells as far as I've been able to figure out for as few times as I've encountered them, especially for the damage they do at my 0% chaos resist (if they do chaos) and 65% armor.

Second, get creative. Last Epoch has some interesting if limited ideas on their rare mods, like duplicating at low life or resurrecting. What creative mods should help lead to is a more attentive player, more mechanically interesting leveling/mapping, and more rewards. Give thematically appropriate skills to rare mobs, like a mace user gaining Sunder (if they don't already have some such equivalent). Give them gear mods that guarantee a rare drop of that item (with chance of unique of same type) that adds contextually to their stats, appearance, or combat, such as "Wielding a two-handed mace" or "Wearing a lightning imbued amulet." In fact, such mods could be an AMAZING replacement for simple "Extra Fire Damage" kind of shit. Make them INTERESTING and demonstrate their worth at a glance to kill or skip. Heck give them boss attacks thematic to their zone's, faction's, or act's final boss, like a Vaal summoning a laser crystal from the Act 3 final boss. "Miniature" versions of bosses could also make for some interesting rares when thematic to the zone/map, that have a limited repertoire of the full version's skills.

Magic mobs should be just enhanced normals to spice things up, while rares should be more mechanically interesting. The direction of a more mechanically driven combat experience at the heart of PoE2's design needs to be the lens through which GGG implements ALL content, and that should include modifiers of rare monsters, such that raw stats mods (like increased armor or increase damage) are stripped out to a bare minimum.

100% agree. Give rares mechanics we have to dodge roll out of, not auras that mean all you can do is endlessly kite.

The Rare Monsters they hand crafted and sprinkled throughout the campaign are far more balanced and interesting than the randomly generated rares. I agree with getting rid of the build stomping mods like mana drain and temp. invulnerability, perhaps they could focus on creating more rare monsters and having the random rares pick from a list of pre-made rares. Heck, get the community in on the fun and have them submit rare monster ideas with modifiers. Do this and you would turn this frustrating system into a fun way to encourage community engagement and hopefully lessen developer workload.

Fully agree.

The game is great but 5 modded rares would be the worst part of the game. DOn't make these rares just a build/stat check and don't make them artificially hard while decreasing engaging combat.

Engaging combat is what makes this game the best ARPG so far. 5 modded rares are not engaging.

i would even go so far to give them a visual indicator like the lootbeam when they first encounter a players field of vision. i cant count the amount of mapbosses i missed because they were smol and im basically blind

I think most of the problems in PoE 2 looks like this, they made a game that is mechanically extremely different than PoE 1, such that people should think about it very differently, and then just design encounters like it's PoE 1 where it's all a gear check.

They're using way too much random for the type of gameplay they want, where every encounter should be individually crafted with care.

Glad to hear some support of the idea. Anyone with other interesting concepts to make rares more interesting?