While playing the other night, I thought of a few things that annoyed me about GD. Two things in particular just weren’t working for me from a gameplay standpoint: environmental damage and traps.
When I say “environmental damage,” I’m referring to areas like the fields of aether that sap life from your character as you run through them. I’m also talking about unattackable aether clouds in Port Valbury that appear at random and follow you, attacking and draining life.
As for “traps,” I’m referring to things like the red crystals that pop up in certain skeleton key areas and shoot at you.
Environmental damage seems overused within the game, particularly aether. Yes, I understand it from a story standpoint, but I don’t think it contributes to the gameplay. The aether clouds in Port Valbury in particular seem like a cheat to me…environmental damage that chases you and can’t be destroyed.
As utilized, traps seem like a poor gameplay decision. I don’t know about everybody else, but I tend to trigger them and retreat to wait until they expire until moving on…it doesn’t make any logical sense to fight mobs while I’m taking additional damage from a trap that I can’t destroy when I don’t have to. So, for me at least, they only succeed in breaking the rhythm of the game and slowing down the gameplay (neither being good in an ARPG).
I’m fine with the ground damage, but yeah those cloud things are super frustrating. I’d be fine if they lasted for maybe 10-15 seconds though. It’s just that they last so long.
The traps are pretty annoying as well, but I’ve always thought they were fine gameplay-wise. For me, I would just try to position where I won’t take damage from them, and power through the monsters so that I could get away from the traps quickly. I kinda view them as if they’re a way to add abilities to the monsters, making them harder than other monsters without just having more stats.
I’ll second the complaint about environmental damage. Traps are almost fine as they can be resisted. But environmental damage is reduced by %absorption only. That is what I’d call an extremely bad game design style. There is only one thing which could be worse - just killing the character (no matter what, just a “gods will”) at random time interval. So much fun, eh?
So… environmental damage would be fine to me if it would follow the general resistances rules. Currently it is a poor mechanic which makes gameplay worse, not better and moves the genre towards Arcade from ARPG. On my opinion, of course. I did not say anything as people seem to be fine with it and I can live with this as well. But can’t refuse to add to the existing complaint
Environmental damage is probably the worst part and most wrong thing in GD at present time I guess. Hope it can be fixed somehow - it will make the game only better.
How is deliberately walking into elemental damage and failing to get out until you die even remotely comparable to random deaths or not completely the player’s fault?
Those things never kill me until i actually am running some weird tests
They’re easy to avoid and not being aware of your surroundings is the player’s fault
Plus those twisters would be extremely frustrating had they spawned in the Van Aldritch fight, but they don’t. They’re there for the challenge, it’s a challenge dungeon so i don’t mind
I don’t find ground effects challenging, at all. They’re straight forward. Walk around, or run through. No challenge there. If they followed res rules, they’d be less annoying. As it stands, I don’t think they add anything to the game. TBH if I ever made a mod, turning ALL ground effects off would be my first move. Taking damage from an enemy? Okay. Taking damage for STANDING? Not okay.
Woohoo! Mine too. Will have a look at that mod definitely cause I find chugging potions while running through those areas the only way to deal with them as I usually have little or no %absorpion stuff.
The ground damage doesn’t bother me that much, since it does offer a sensible strategic challenge and you have options to either avoid or minimize its impact. But the impervious aether clouds are frustrating and a source of anxiety to players like myself.
However I got the feeling, while running around Port Valbury, that these clouds are sourced (or at least some of them) on the casters. More than once I killed a caster mob only to see a cloud immediately dissipate. I still find them frustrating and nerve-wracking and frankly I don’t like this mechanic for the anxiety it provokes (especially for their duration and because of how tremendously damaging they are). But if indeed they are sourced on mobs, there is at least something we can do about it while still allowing us to move around the map at the pace we feel comfortable with.
I just went throught Hardgraves laboratory recently and this area is a pain. The Rogue dungeon is one thing (it’s a rogue dungeon) and honestly the fact that most of the place that has Aether ground damage they are kind of “hallway” you move through them or avoid them from the side and then get into a larger space with much less (or even none at all) ground damage.
In Hardgrave it is just all over the damn place. This is by far the area I hate the most in the whole game (close 2nd being the Immolation) and all that for a Already Learned stupid Blueprint (this is my other main complain about the game there is 2 quest that reward Blueprint and I have done those only 5 times (3 on one char and 2 on the other) and got 4 Already Learned Blueprint…not like I’m near having them all either)
Got a link to this? Ground effects don’t kill me (I like to load up on shields) but they are a tremendous waste of my time. They aren’t interesting, they aren’t a “challenge”, and since you can’t wear appropriate resist gear against them, there’s no tactics. It’s just “avoid this or die trying”. It’s boring, lazy game design.
If the aether patches actually did aether damage, not only would it be more intuitive but it would also be something you could plan against and thus be a viable game mechanic. As it is, it’s just another “we did this to make things more difficult without actually designing anything. Fuck you.” moment of the game.
Despite my initial argument, I partially agree. Like I said, it doesn’t bother me much. Run, quaff and there is a strategic element (the part I disagree with your post) because you are asked to use the ground in your favor. But on the other hand unavoidable damage is unavoidable damage. Definitely one of the cheapest ways a game designer can come up with to “challenge” players.
I came from playing a lot of path of exile before GD. Unlike in GD, in path of exile key parts of character development (Ascendancy) are the “cheese” put at the end of a trap-laden Labyrinth. Thus, in path of exile you basically do what mice do in laboratories to develop your character, with the added pleasure of running through trap gauntlets while you do it.
As a further bonus, path of exile is an online-only game and a disconnect before you finish up and take your Ascendancy passives means you get to run the Labyrinth all over again.
Much joy.
Compared to what I experienced before leaving POE, GD’s environmental effects and traps are not much to be concerned about.
They’re still the least enjoyable part of the game, though, primarily because they raise the risk level, but not in ways that players can fight back against. If the environmental damage in GD was replaced by underground mobs that could attack from below, then at least players could respond by attacking back.
I suppose that horse left the barn a long time ago, though, and at this point it’s just one part of what is overall a very fun game.
My problems are that it’s not ‘damage’ but %Health loss per second. When it’s +33%/sec in some areas depending on when you step into it in the end of a second, the double proc that occurs within 1.2 or so seconds of time becomes tiresome to manage. Of course this only matters for characters that don’t have the ability to heal their hp bar back every 3 seconds.
Amusingly I just realized that this would be the one challenge that doesn’t become more difficult in Elite/Ultimate. Perhaps it should just kill you in those difficulties.
I couldn’t agree more, and I could also add “also seem like a poor lore setup”: when you see mines, and I mean what clearly look like mechanical devises, in areas that appear to be managed by really nothing else but skeletons like the steps of torments, I just really cannot help but thinking that those features really are out of place here.
I can understand it as a matter of setting up a given level of difficulty, but FFS at least feature something else than a f####g WW2 mine. That just looks plain lame.
My main problem with the environmental damages is that the resistances do not apply to them, and there is no source/origin of them that you can destroy: even when you destroy the crystals in the eather areas, the eather damage remains sometimes, and the crystals in that rift area that fire various waves of vitality damages cannot be destroyed and can basically rape your characters if you end up being stuck in some place with masses of mobs around and those stupid crystals spawning out of nowhere and releasing waves after waves of attacks without any possibility to stop them. That is no challenge, that is no fun.
But some parts of the game have to be poor gameplay decision according to some self-proclaimed authority figures here for some reason, so just deal with it I guess.
Just as well as deliberately playing the game and failing to exit to main menu until you die by a random occurance. It would be completely your fault as well, eh?
To be serious - this mechanic is just another step in favor of ranged characters over melee. Melee ones can easily get trapped in those environmental areas without any way to reduce incoming damage. There are plenty of combat situations which require your melee character to walk into unavoidable damage (which can kill you in 4-5 ticks) areas and fight there. Yes, we all can manage it - running back and forward and chugging potions. So much interesting game mechanic which adds so much fun to the game! Awe!
Well, to be honest, there are ways to survive in these areas for indefinite time. Or I should say there is a way. Stack health regen and healing triggers, get enough %absorption, enjoy. Anyway, this mechanic is not fatal to the gameplay and we can live with it. As well as we could live without it and it actually would contribute to the gameplay, not reduce the interest.
So “avoid it or die” is a pretty lame excusion for the poor mechanic which could easily be fixed by applying resistances to that type of damage. Players simply would be more happy having a potentially controllable threat instead of pretty much uncontrollable one.
I think the question I’m asking is not whether the mechanics in question are acceptable or can be mitigated/avoided (obviously they’re “acceptable” and can be mitigated or avoided to some degree, since we all play the game), but rather if changing or eliminating them would improve game play.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and scream that they’re game-breaking issues and that I’m never going to play again if they’re not changed (they aren’t game-breaking and I’ll continue to play just like before). I simply personally think they all have a negative impact on the flow of the game play and the game would be improved if they were removed or altered.
Environmental damage based on % of life is annoying, although I agree that it’s not game-breaking.
Altering environmental damage / trap damage to take resists into account would be fine by me. Reducing the size of aether fields would help the game flow better. Both of these changes together would be highly welcome, at least by me.
Part of what’s puzzling to me, though, is that it probably is a game-breaking feature to quite a few players who are not here to voice their opinion. It’s also not critical to have this kind of stuff in this or any other game. And yet, game developers seem to fairly frequently choose anti-fun mechanics like this.
