One of my fave characters to play is my Path of the Three Sentinel. I have tried many builds for him, and something I’ve noticed is that while doing high-end content like Tomb, Shattered Realm, and Crucible on Ultimate/Gladiator, is when I employ Guardians of Empyrion I sometimes take horrific damage that kills me almost instantly.
Specifically, I’ve noticed it against Bloodlord Thalonis and some of the encounters in Tomb of the Heretic (I still can’t figure out exactly which enemies/abilities are doing it in Tomb).
I’ve played this game for years and just spent an hour reading everything I could find about Player-Scaling pets, but have come to no useful answer.
My Sentinel build is otherwise extremely tanky and durable - without Guardians of Empyrion deployed my Sentinel can solo Morgoneth, do up to 100 waves in Crucible, and complete 40-50 waves of Shattered Realm on Ultimate/Gladiator.
So then, why with Guardians deployed do I sometimes take horrific, nearly-instantly lethal damage in some encounters? From what I can tell, when this happens I don’t see any reflector enemies present. Does it have to do with some kind of multiplicative aura or retaliation damage I can’t easily notice? I know that Thalonis specifically does dangerous chaos damage in little AoE’s and by Aura (perhaps chaos res reduction too idk), but that’s the only thing which comes to mind.
Ok, post is long enough. I hope that someone can explain this mystery to me or at least link me to a discussion that does so.
Thalnos has mind control, but it does not affect player scaled pets since those tend to be immune.
Probably has to do with your Chaos Res being low and not related to Guardians
You have 62% chaos resistance in the build link and Thalonis can reduce it with a debuff and he can summon Harbingers that have a debuff that also reduces chaos resistance.
I’ve noticed something similar on GoE and Blade Spirits. When I was playing a Belgothian Pierce Blademaster, where Blade Spirits were only serving as a skill proccer, I had situations where I’d go up against, say, Malkadarr in Tomb of Archon Barthollem, and my Blade Spirits would nearly kill me. He’s not supposed to have any reflect. If it’s retal, it shouldn’t affect me either. Unless you have some sort of %WD tied to your pseudo pet, you can’t leech through it. But somehow, enemy reflect/retal goes through the pseudopet back to you? That seems pretty inconsistent.
I appreciate what Maya and Norzan said about this build having rather low chaos res, but it’s higher in-game than what the build shows. It’s 78% in game, not the average of 62-63% the GD Calc shows. I doubt that being 2% below chaos res cap matters much for what I’m experiencing, especially since the same issue occurs against enemies which don’t deal chaos damage. I appreciate the feedback though, thank you.
Yes, I’ve also noticed the same issue on my Blade Spirit character. I play my Sentinel way more though, so I used him as the example of the post. But yes, seems to be the same “surprise damage” with Blade Spirits as well.
Isn’t that super weird though? As far as I can tell Malkadarr doesn’t have reflect. So if it’s retal on gear, which I assume it is cause it hasn’t been happening consistently in that fight, then how in the hell is that getting to the player’s healthbar? In order for enemies to take our retal damage, they have to be hitting us in melee. Damaging debuffs won’t retal, ranged shots won’t retal, ground effects won’t retal. So how the hell is retal getting to the player through pseudopets? That violates all retal mechanics.
Anything below 80% in Ultimate and you just get blasted for massive damage because enemies’s damage in Ultimate is balanced around the player having at least 80% resistance, with the only expection being physical.
And again, Thalonis does this right at the start of the fight:
5 Meter Radius
-10% Offensive Ability
Increases Health Regeneration by -50%
-48% Movement Speed
-25% Poison & Acid Resistance
-25% Vitality Resistance
-25% Chaos Resistance
Indeed, the lower chaos is one of this build’s weaknesses, but how does it account for my character taking massive damage from Thalonis via my Guardians even when I’m not near him? This is what I need to understand. I don’t normally seem to take horrific/lethal damage via my Guardians from nearly anything, just a few things in the game (and I’m having trouble discovering exactly what is doing it).
Regarding chaos res, I did a test this morning with this build. I easily rofl-stomped Bastion on Ultimate and never was in any risk at all, even vs Shar’Zul. Speaking of Shar’Zul, I stood back a while and let my Guardians beat on him for 10-12 seconds, and I took no noticeable damage while doing nothing at all.
In stark contrast, I went up against Thalonis and tried the same thing. I took notable chunks of damage from the Guardians’ interaction with Thalonis.
That’s why I made this post, not specifically because of the chaos damage element, but since this build has slightly low chaos res it was just more noticeable.
The main question still stands. What exactly determines how much and what kind of damage I take through my Player-Scaling pets? Is it from an aura? from only certain kinds of AoE? Non-reflect retributive damage?
I have noticed damage reflecting from certain monsters with Guardians of Empyrion before. Never took massive damage from it, but I’ve noticed my health pulsing downward slightly in time with the swings they take at reflect monsters before, so it’s definitely something that happens with Guardians.
Generally, I put 1 point in them, and use them for resist debuffs, which is a partial explanation as to why I never get hit hard by that. I also tend to be careful about resists, especially on ultimate with overcaps, and sometimes I will get devotions with reflect resistance.
On a character based around physical/trauma damage, I got to a total of 100% reflect resist, and it very, very noticeably made me completely immune to reflect. Looking at your character sheet, it looks like you’ve got 93%, which should frankly be plenty. You could try adjusting devotion points into crane or owl to see if an actual 100% makes a difference.
I noticed a couple of low resists on the character sheet. I know that sometimes doesn’t reflect reality exactly, but elemental resists were 49% and chaos 62%. Even if they’re higher than reported, that’s probably not enough of an overcap. Poison had a 13% overcap, and acid/poison is a significant fraction of the damage Guardians do.
If you’re looking to try the reflect reduction and the resistance boost at the same time, the crane constellation comes with some of both.
Oh absolutely. I understand what you mean about using Guardians primarily for resistance reduction. If I stick with this build I’ll probably put minimal points in the base skill and max out Celestial Presesnce as high as possible.
Right now I’m just trying to wrap my head around exactly what leads to the player taking damage from this type of pet (or perhaps specifically just Guardians) before putting too much effort into tweaking this build.
My usual build for this Sentinel doesn’t use Guardians at all (and thusly doesn’t have the “oops just died for no reason” problem I’ve noticed when using Guardians).
As for resistances, I’ve changed gear and components a bit since I made that build in GD Calc earlier, and the testing I’ve been using the last hour or two has all resistances at least a little over-cap except Chaos, which I was able to get to 78%.
My usual build w/o Guardians is at least a little over-capped on all resistances.
Good response, tysm for taking the time to share all that.
That’s the only source of reflect/retal that I’ve been able to find on the Bloodlord. Thalonis summons this thing, the thing applies the aura on all its allies, and now every swing from Guardians shaves a % of your health off. The more enemies they cleave through, the bigger hit you take. Not sure why it should be chunking your health to a noticable extent though, cause afaik % reductions to health are resisted through vitality res or something like that, so you shouldn’t feel much of anything with your resists.
Not sure why it should be chunking your health to a noticable extent though, cause afaik % reductions to health are resisted through vitality res or something like that, so you shouldn’t feel much of anything with your resists.
My thoughts exactly, and yes I found that this morning as well. This statement of yours is what lead me to making this post. I clearly don’t see/understand something about Player-Scaling Pets or Guardians specifically, and I was hoping someone would have answers as to why a particular type of ability or damage is doing immense damage to my otherwise tanky Sentinel.
Life reduction is governed by its own stat (not vitality resist). The stat is called “resistance to life reduction” and can be found on relatively few items, like This one.
So it checks out that guardians having a cleave attack could chunk your health, since each swing could take like 4% of your health off per enemy hit, with 2 guardians swinging, that will add up extremely quickly.
I know that stat specifically exists but I could have sworn Zantai recently mentioned somewhere a link to Vitality resistance. Not sure if it was during one of the past PTR discussions, the recent stream or some such, but I remember him talking about it cause I was very surprised that was the case. Maybe he misspoke, maybe I misunderstood, maybe it was a fever dream.
Thank you Snazzblaster and IMarcusI. I have a question about what Snazzblaster brought up:
From what he said, percentage life reduction can occur like retaliation damage, but I was unaware things did life reduction in that manner. I thought life reduction only occurred upon certain enemy death and hostile debuffs from enemy spell effects. If certain enemies in fact do life reduction as retaliation AND that life reduction is transferred via the Guardians, then that might explain at least some cases of the issue I discovered.
