Bullet Hell, Desync, No Tells. No fun.

I've been playing PoE on and off since I got my CB invite back when you only got them via random invitation. I'm just saying this so you know: I am invested in PoE as a game and very fond of it.

But I gotta get some criticism off my chest concerning SotV and how it changes PoE.

See, I want to play an ARPG and not a Bullet Hell game. And this is exactly what a lot of the Invasion and Corrupted-Area bosses turn the game into: They spam the entire area with huge amounts of AoE, sometimes rapidly.
As a player, all I can do in many instances is run around like a scared chicken and hope that the AoE effects have tells.
Which a lot of them don't.
I have lost count how often I ran away from a boss at 30% life only to have them erupt a huge fire mine under my ass from two rooms across (yeah, some boss TaoE -like those mines or the Arrow Volley Orra Greengate uses- does not seem to require a LoS).
Not that it takes a lot of hits from a boss to kill me. Granted, I have focused my current character (Evasion-based PhysBow ranger) not that much on life nodes, but I have taken some along the way and even included some defensive keystone passives. I still get regularly one-shot (or killed in under one second by rapidly following attacks) by bosses, even if my resistances are maxed out.

But I could live with that if I, as a player, could effectively avoid that damage. Thing is, I often cannot. Not only are many brutally strong attacks not telegraphed, but the boss fights also suffer from desync. So even if I avoid that volley of fifty Chaos damage orbs on my screen (each of which takes roughly 30% of my life), I often am still hit by it server-side. The one second I could spend typing /oos is also the one second I am standing still, which will kill me because of the Bullet Hell nature of those bosses. This, by the by, also makes standing still to attack risky. By the by. The by.

Disclaimer: I am not a min-maxer, I play self-found and I am not very competitive. As such, I think I do not represent the average forum user. I also have NO problem beating any other content in the game. In fact, I breeze through it (Cruel Act III atm) until I come upon such boss, and then it feels like I hit a brick wall. There is a brutal difference in difficulty between those bosses and the entire rest of the game. Most of them feel like a purposely overcharged version of Imperatrix Caliga before the nerf: I run around killing monsters, and suddenly, I die.

I have decided to not actively pursue running in the Invasion leagues (after two tries cut short by above-mentioned bosses) since apparently, the road to success is "avoid the bosses if you want to live". Those new bosses to me are the thing that make the league interesting in the first place.
Well, okay: They would make it interesting if they didn't suffer from those issues.


tl;dr: You have Bullet Hell bosses in a game fraught with Desync issues. Since careful timing and movement are crucial to beating Bullet Hell games, and Desync sabotages both those requirements, a lot of bosses turn into Russian Roulette for me.

I am a gamer, not a gambler.

Well yes, it's essentially like that, you can't play this while desyncing



That's the reason people build extremely tanky here, you can't reliably avoid stuff, especially not on EU server. That's also the reason glass cannons don't really work unless summoner and bosses like domino changed that too.

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raics wrote:

Well yes, it's essentially like that, you can't play this while desyncing

[...]

That's the reason people build extremely tanky here, you can't reliably avoid stuff, especially not on EU server. That's also the reason glass cannons don't really work unless summoner and bosses like domino changed that too.

My character is no glass cannon, though. More of a "bit of this and bit of that". Everything the regular game throws at me: No problem. I play solo, and I punched through everything from Merveil to Dominus like butter. I can usually compensate my lack of total tank-ness by kiting and tactical play. The game is not so unforgiving as that every single mistake would kill my character.
Except for those bullet hell bosses. And I seriously doubt a tanky Marauder (who would have around the same resists and about double my HP, I think) would fare much better with them.

Take that Vaal construct that shoots fans of 5-6 Chaos projectiles: One takes me down about 1/3 of my HP. But because I am ranged, and the missiles have spread out enough so I only catch one, I am still 2/3rds alive. That marauder? He's gotta go into melee range to even do damage. He'll get shotgunned by most if not all of those projectiles and is more likely to hug the ground than my ranger.
And even if he does survive: The construct spams this attack every two seconds, so he'd better be damn fast or he'll kiss the floor.


Long story short: If the only build viable for the new feature of a mini-expac is a ranged HP-heavy tank, you gotta tweak your feature.

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Avireyn wrote:

My character is no glass cannon, though.

Just the thing I was saying, we aren't glass cannons at all, there aren't such here.

In most ARPGs regular investment into defense is around 30%, 50% is a full tank. In PoE you don't feel especially tanky without at least 70-80% percent plus defense-skewed skills and gear, autocasting buffs and weakening curses. And they had to do it that way so those with 95% investment wouldn't feel to powerful.

The main problem this game has is stacking, we are just able to stack too much of everything and a lot of things play extremely nice with one another, same goes for enemies.

Exactly the same problem on my character : playing with frenzy/split arrow, 1500 life, capped res; currently in cruel act 3.

And yet EVERY new boss i encounter completely rape me in a second. To the point where i don't even bother doing the corrupted area anymore, because i KNOW that i will be dead as soon as the boss will appear. For no reward, because they drop nothing, and the vaal gems are meh.



This whole extension is a disappointment, very few players will see the added content.

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sucrecandie wrote:

Exactly the same problem on my character : playing with frenzy/split arrow, 1500 life, capped res; currently in cruel act 3.

1K HP and Level 52, resists capped when I have to, and just finished Piety on Cruel without even having to use a potion. Just before mopping the floor with Piety, I ran into that Executioner dude in the Arcane Chambers. Sounded easy on paper what with him being a melee character (uses Cleave and a very fast Cyclone) and me using Barrage/Puncture as main attacks.
And yeah, worked out. Until he came too close to me (about half a screen away) and clove (cleaved?) once. I was down to maybe 15% health. This was one of two hits he got in, the second one a cyclone a few seconds later when I had potioned up to 100% and lined up a last puncture to down him. I did not even have time to move out of the way and was cut down in a matter of microseconds. Fortunately, my Puncture had hit and finished him off.

Still, that fight felt not too bad. Next time I know that his reach is roughly half the screen for the cleave and can plan accordingly, even though his damage seems a bit excessive. And his Cyclone is faster than my 24% Increased Movement Speed (as well as having about double the radius of a player's Cyclone), making it hard to avoid.

But apart from maybe toning down his unexpected range a tad (or making my 45% Evasion + 30% dodge actually work against those attacks), that was one of the more rewarding Corrupted bosses I fought.

I think I'll forgo venturing into the Corrupted areas for now, too. Too little incentive, bosses too punishing over-all.


Oh, and just to give an example for a bullet hell boss: That Incinerator in the Disused Furnace: Throws firebombs (and mines, I think) like candy and has a firestorm that follows you around the room (like the one you can get from the shrines, but burns you down in seconds should you be dumb enough to stay still for longer than it takes to get an arrow away).

Another would be Peri...something the Lucky, who can be found on the Corrupted island tileset: Lines up a LOT of Storm Calls under your feet (can be as many as 20, maybe even 30 'tagged' areas) that trigger irregularly. Good luck having the spatial awareness to dodge that. particularly if you're running around in water, where the marks are much harder to see.

Meet the firestorm guy at low level, i had to launch my arrows one at a time and use a potion right after because his firestorm melted me... ridiculous battle.



Also have fun trying to kill the totem guy...

He can throw 3 totems at you at once, locking you in place (can't move while you are surrounded by the totems).

The totems do : LMP fireball, LMP incinerate, storm call...
Even with capped res, one storm call on the face took 80% of my life...



If these bosses were doing physical damage, i could understand the difficulty for my character (i'm evasion at the moment); but they use elemental spells and still rape us while we are at 75% res. No balance at all.

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sucrecandie wrote:

If these bosses were doing physical damage, i could understand the difficulty for my character (i'm evasion at the moment); but they use elemental spells and still rape us while we are at 75% res. No balance at all.

It's the problem of additive resists, each percentage is more effective than the last so increases in maximum resists are extremely powerful.

Content seems balanced around the assumption that you've got at least some increases, be it from passives, auras or uniques.

Not quite sure why they went with a system like that, considering they explicitly mix Increased, Decreased, More and Less modifiers as needed I'd have figured a multiplicative resist system would've been the obvious choice as it would have completely avoided balance situations like this. Not quite sure why they didn't. Probably much the same reason they thought a 40% less modifier on mortal conviction was a good idea...

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Gobla wrote:

Not quite sure why they went with a system like that, considering they explicitly mix Increased, Decreased, More and Less modifiers as needed I'd have figured a multiplicative resist system would've been the obvious choice as it would have completely avoided balance situations like this. Not quite sure why they didn't. Probably much the same reason they thought a 40% less modifier on mortal conviction was a good idea...

If you ask me, max resistance barriers shouldn't be passable under any conditions, if it's possible, power creep will ensure that players will have to do it some day.

Additive resistances are bad, mmkay.