Damage reflection is death for witches

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atrokkus написал:

Word of advice to the devs: NEVER FORGET Iron Maiden in Diablo 2.

I played a Whirlwind Barbarian back then.

I'm still fearful of Chaos Sanctuary even today.


If no one knows what I'm talking about: Your character is completely locked in an AoE attack. If you get debuffed with Iron Maiden in the middle of Whirlwind, you are dead and there is NOTHING you can do about it.

I am glad I never played Hardcore.

To everyone saying that it's a problem of overspecialization: And we are supposed to have what option, exactly? What kind of Witch build does not use elemental damage?! I don't think the zombies + spectres will ever be able to kill those bosses and their packs. The only truly effective tactic I've used is to pull the packs far enough away from the boss that they no longer have the aura, then go after the boss with Ice Spear, keeping fingers on the flask buttons.

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That was manageable. there should NEVER be a combination in an ARPG that a character can't kill over time, and I think the amount of damage reflection that is currently + Health regen makes it literally impossible to take something down if you specialize in elements, even if you have a minion skill for backup.

This. The decision to have physically "unbeatable" enemy mod is horrible. About the only way a Witch has a chance of killing one of these is to equip a bow and hope the physical damage outdoes the regeneration.

Quite frankly, that is absurd. That isn't difficulty, that is an RNG based "go reset the instance."

Why not put blanket immunities in while we are at it? Same effect.

P.S. Now that I got rage out of the system, actually I think it's feasible that maybe *Spectres* can kill it off. Still, this is a step back to build variety.

P.P.S. Well, there is also energy shield stacking.

This is probably not *unbeatable* in the end, but I suspect it heavily skirts that line.

disclaimer: i only play hardcore


i will hold judgement until i actually face one of these reflect aura using special monsters. as a HC player i say bring...it...on.

the more ways you stack up to stop me the more rewarding it will be climb the HC ladder.

Actually, here's a solution if you want people to stop spamming one thing. Break up the aura into Reflects Fire, Cold, Lightning. Maybe break up the physical aura into Reflects Sharp and Reflects Bludgeoning. Witches specialized in one of these won't like it, but at least they have something to switch to besides Town Portal.

Yes, I agree that dividing it up would work well.

Immunities worked in Diablo II because they always varied; they therefore worked to limit specialization (or punish overspecialization), which the game desperately needed. Nothing was every immune to more than two elements (the game hard-capped resistances at 90% if a monster was already immune to two) (there was one exception: the Megademons in the Furnace of Pain and summoned by Pandemonium Diablo, who were always immune to everything but Physical damage).

PoE could use some of that; in 0.9.2, there was no reason to not specialize completely, and that's bad. You could put all your eggs in one basket and be fine — in fact, better than if you hadn't.

There's a few reasons for that; for one thing, there was nothing to demanded that you switched. For another, the way the passive tree was set up, trying to generalize was really painful (clusters of elemental damage were far from each other and difficult to take some of each from).

I haven't done enough testing of 0.9.3 to comment on how much these issues still exist, but based on commentary in this thread and my brief look-through of the passive tree, it seems likely that these issues are still present. I definitely think these are important, and deserve consideration. Breaking up the damage reflection values would serve as one way of doing it, though care would have to be taken that a witch would have time to react to the presence of that aura (i.e. insta-death is bad, mmkay?).

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Nate_Prawdzik написал:

Well I definitely feel that you should be able to prepare for it, meaning that if you use a particular element for aoe, then you should be able to penalize the reflected damage from that element with resist gear.

It seems like the main thing is you have to be on your toes. Spam all day long, but stop when you see an aura, check it out, then go back to spamming.

Is a break from relatively mindless spamming really detrimental?

See, I absolutely agree about breaking things up and switching things around.

But a player should not suddenly be punished for doing what the entire rest of the game is demanding he do. That's not a good design.

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DAOWAce написал:

I played a Whirlwind Barbarian back then.

I'm still fearful of Chaos Sanctuary even today.

They removed Iron Maiden from Oblivion Knights. They're no longer dangerous.

That said, I agree that things like Whirlwind and Zeal had major problems with IM, but... OK, here's the difference between IM and elemental reflection that we're talking about: you knew where IM was going to be, and you had opportunities to deal with it.

Every Barbarian ever should have 1 point in Berserk for the Magic Damage; they need it for dealing with Physical Immunes, and for dealing with Iron Maiden. A Whirlwind Barb could easily switch to Berserk when there were OKs around; yeah, sometimes it got cast on you from off-screen while you were whirling and that sucked, but if you were careful you could scout things out and avoid it. Paladins could do very well using Zeal with Gimmershreds for huge elemental (i.e. unreflected) damage.

The other thing that I actually liked about IM: if you got to melee range of an OK, he'd cast Decrepify on you. This removed IM from you, and therefore added a neat little tactical level to things: you needed to charge the OKs first to avoid IM and insta-death.

I liked that. It would give things like Flicker Strike and Phase Run a lot more importance. Or Leap Slam; Barbarians could always Leap to an OK if they didn't want to use Berserk (Paladins don't really have a great answer here, though).

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Slicer написал:

Actually, here's a solution if you want people to stop spamming one thing. Break up the aura into Reflects Fire, Cold, Lightning. Maybe break up the physical aura into Reflects Sharp and Reflects Bludgeoning. Witches specialized in one of these won't like it, but at least they have something to switch to besides Town Portal.

I'm going to echo this sentiment. It's reasonable, viable, gives options, keeps the mod around. Pretty much a fair medium for both sides.

As it stands now options are severely limited.

To expect people to use "different tactics" when facing the ridiculously boring and overpowered bosses with damage reflection and regen/shield is asinine. The vast majority of people are not so dumb that they're just going to stand there and beat their head against a wall for ages when they could simply could go do something else instead. The opportunity cost of fighting these things is just way, way too high.

So if the goal of the current implementation is to force people to diversify instead of just using the same tactics over and over, then it is an obvious failure, because the only thing it's going to do is to make people not fight them.

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Slicer написал:

Actually, here's a solution if you want people to stop spamming one thing. Break up the aura into Reflects Fire, Cold, Lightning. Maybe break up the physical aura into Reflects Sharp and Reflects Bludgeoning. Witches specialized in one of these won't like it, but at least they have something to switch to besides Town Portal.

I second this suggestion.

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EternisRequiem написал:

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Nate_Prawdzik написал:

You should not be able to throw an AoE spell down for a monster to run in from off screen and insta-kill yourself before you'd even have time to form a strategy.

And btw, this would insta-kill a witch that was non-specialized too, I'm sure--Or even dual-specializing and just happened to cast the wrong spell.

this, all they people saying this is hc get used to it, change strategies, etc havent yet had this hapen to a high lvl toon yet. i have played hc before and enjoyed it, but not going to bother this time. ireally dont have the time to play and be frustated by hours of work going down the drain because of a mechanic in game.
what if your in a party with someone who doesnt know how it works and gets the whole party killed, that sounds fun!

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Chris написал:

Trust me when I say that certain combinations of boss mods being instant death is a lot more fun than not having those things in the game!