Oneshots slowly take the joy out of the endgame

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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Big topic, and I don’t know where to start, and worse, what to suggest - what would, with reasonable development investment, make it better at this point of the game. But I feel I need to at least express these thoughts in one place. So prepare for some rambling.

Way, way too many encounters in the endgame have all danger packed into effectively oneshoting the character, which is killing the character maybe not in one single blow but within 0.3 seconds.

Making a mistake, you expect to be punished for 50-70% of your pool and be prompted to take action to correct it. Can’t correct a oneshot. You can scrape and scrape for defences until maybe someday you survive it and then engage with the enemy. Or you can stack more dps to prevent it before it happens. And since FoA launch I find the latter more and more effective for safety rather than trying to break all your synegies, sacrifice all offensive stats and then still die to some random shotgun or a dodge not going off at the right moment.

A lot of things make GD stand out in aRPG landscape, and one of the biggest is this visceral feel for the character, like it’s present in the world and everything that happens to you is impactful. Which is why the march of oneshots is especially deteriorating to the experience: when a poorly telegraphed barely visible swing of an enemy kills you, it breaks the immersion and chips into your motivation to keep playing.

So how did that happen? New enemies with overtuned skills is not the sole cause. A lot of balancing done for the game in recent years was positive and very much appreciated. But one balancing tendency certainly contributed to the issue: HP nerfs across the board pre FoA. The characters needed more ways to build up their HP pools to prepare for FoA dangers, in turn they got less. There are a lot of ways to raise defences, and some previous ways were buffed. Still a lot of the defence stuff is conditional. Only HP is absolute - the very thing that you need to stop oneshots. And, IMO, it was mistakenly nerfed in the context of FoA dangers.

The issue doesn’t only dregrade the immersion, it largely affects the effective ways to build your characters. When you know the most danger comes from oneshot abilities most of which have significant cooldown and initial use timeout, you are encouraged to sacrifice all conditional defences your build can have in favor of burst dmg: kill it before it does anything at all. Coupled with new “flask presses” FoA has brought, this creates some very vivid PoE flashbacks. And I don’t play much of PoE for a reason.

Many players I speak to point out how bad regen has gotten. For a while it was in a good place, but now you almost don’t feel your regen stack on any non-kiting characters: you either leech to full every split second, or get 1-2 KO. What does carefully gathered 3k regen per second do against hits that remove 20k HP? Not much.

I could list some particular cases of enemy abilities I have the most frustration dying from, but the problem seems too broad to me to disect it case by case.

I really wish the danger in the game would shift from oneshots to other things: heavy debuffs, dmg over time, continuous barrage of dmg instead of shotguns, area denial and smarter enemy movement, where casters keep distance and disengage more (which would also help with the stupid enemy pathing around the character). Most of all, I really want for the strongest enemy abilities to have prominent and/or slow animations with obvious visual clues that can be picked up even in crowded environment.

All in all, I just want to engage with the enemies. React and outplay them, not build samey dps machines that kill the Big Bad sooner than they cast their Reap Ass ability with initial delay of 7 seconds and 50000 phys dmg right up where the sun doesn’t shine. As it stands, the best defence in GD currently is attack. We have other games for that.

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question
how is reacting to the 50.000 phys hit after 7 seconds any different? contra engage/react/outplay?

The way it sounds to me, oversimplified, is not wanting to react to the dangerous attack, and would rather outdps it to prevent it coming at all.
And this then gets exacerbated in scenarios where there’s less control; gangbangs.
But, what’s the alternative, return to 4boss facetank? - because i’ve never understood what the engagement is there (and i’ve outright meme dunked on how the game turned into a face simulator because of it :sweat_smile:)

I honestly wonder what the middle ground is, where it doesn’t either turn to pre foa 0 threats rush, or a slowed down “but i don’t want to have to waste time dodge swipe” risk react.
We either end up casually outstatting too much, or outhealing too much, reducing threat/risk or need to react :thinking:

If i can reliably “never” die/only be brought to 30/20/10% hp, and have measure to heal that up before the next combo that’ll only be able to bring me to the same threshold; where’s the risk or the engagement going to come at me from?

Right now i’m forced to engage and react to certain things, or die because i’m simply not running 50k hp that easy…(not that 50k hp is unattainable, just not my kind of tradeoff)

i’ve mentioned it before a couple times, i’d outright argue stuff like Aleks meteor should be brought to 1shot status, instead of facetanked/“ignored” except for its sunder threat…

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As players, we do occasionally want to interact with enemies and dodge some skills. But we also don’t want to be interacting all the time — getting one-shot too frequently creates frustration. Solution to too many one-shots : lower monster damage a bit.

However, before that, we need to clarify the basis of our discussion — are we talking about 5-altar Ascendant, SR 36-37, or CR 200 EX? The difficulty differs across these three scenarios, so which specific scenarios do we have one-shots problem most? (Me vote for 5-altar Ascendant)

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I believe the one-shot kill problem is also due to the huge OADA debuff.

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Completely agree with the core sentiment here. What always made GD superior to games like PoE is that combat felt visceral and deliberate—you could actually react and outplay encounters rather than playing a screen-clearing DPS simulator.

The real issue isn’t difficulty; it’s visual clarity and telegraphing. Nobody wants a return to the mindless 4-boss facetank era, but dying in 0.2s to an obscure animation buried under particle effects completely undermines the new Evade mechanic. If a mechanic is meant to kill you outright, it needs a distinct wind-up so dodging feels rewarding rather than pure guesswork.

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Personally, I think lifesteal has become so powerful that it’s putting the game in a difficult position when it comes to balancing survivability and boss damage.

As player DPS continues to increase with each patch, percentage-based lifesteal naturally becomes stronger as well. At this point, slow, sustained damage is practically meaningless against lifesteal builds. A boss might hit you for 80% of your HP, but so what? You can potentially heal back to full in half a second, ready to facetank the next hit as if nothing happened. Meanwhile, builds that rely on passive HP regeneration might need 3–4 seconds to recover the same amount of health. That’s an enormous difference.

As a result, to make bosses feel challenging and threatening, the developers have been pushing their damage per hit higher and higher, leading to more and more oneshot mechanics.

This creates a situation where maximum HP becomes a binary survivability check rather than a meaningful defensive stat. If you have enough HP to survive a boss’s biggest hit, you can pretty much facetank everything without worrying about dying, since lifesteal brings you back to full almost instantly. But if your maximum HP falls just below that damage threshold, you simply get oneshot. There’s very little middle ground.

And the increasing prevalence of oneshots creates other problems as well.

First, builds without strong lifesteal, especially those relying on passive HP regeneration, are disproportionately punished. They can’t recover nearly as quickly between heavy hits and often have to rely on potions to compensate.

Second, defensive mechanics designed to act as a safety net at low HP become increasingly unreliable. For example, effects that trigger when your HP drops below 30% or 50% are supposed to help you survive dangerous situations. But if a boss simply oneshots you from above those thresholds, those mechanics never even get a chance to activate.

Ultimately, I think the underlying issue isn’t necessarily that bosses deal too much damage. It’s that lifesteal has made anything short of lethal damage largely irrelevant, forcing the developers to rely on oneshots to create any real sense of danger. And unfortunately, that approach ends up hurting build diversity and making survivability feel increasingly all-or-nothing.

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side note to that is, “last time devs reduced lifesteal y’all complained a lot”, (despite still being in the former static tank/threat-no threat meta scenario) and leech res nerf got reverted anyway :woozy_face:
It’s easy for us to label part of the issue leech, but the solution “clearly” isnt’ reducing leech either, because then we arrive in the "#deadbuilds/archetype"land again

And i don’t see how zoning/barrages or debuffs is a fix either :thinking:, because Sunder kinda proved that “just add a nasty debuff” is not a deterrent either to prevent facetanking when that tankiness or sustain is achieved, and zoning also just get ignored, in some cases even when they have dmg+debuff (benji clusters).

Sans new foa attacks, and certain scaling/detonation bug(ptr fixed?), what pre-foa attacks actually got respected in meta? Calla shotgun sands slam? anything else that wasn’t just blatantly facetanked, or even multi gangbanged? pre and post leech nerf ?

As long as scalable healing or defences exists, we can or will arrive at a point where we outstat or outheal the enemy (even regen could do it before FoA dmg scaling), so how do you make something to respect, unless you know you can’t just semi guaranteed ignore it and not heal up (regardless if proc/regen or leech), aka takes off moar than can be guarded against.

I don’t know what attacks are 1shot, sans bugs, that aren’t fairly telegraphed atm? Which might allude to outliers still existing to be looked at. :thinking:

But with the old sunder “disrespect” in mind, what attacks/debuffs do you guys think you would actually end up engaging with/moving from, if they didn’t have the potential to outright kill you?
What would it take for benji stab/clusters to not just be considered a casual facetank shrug and something “fun”/worthwhile engaging with - if Underking style nuke is off the table

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The reason people disrespect Sunder and ground hazards isn’t because they don’t fear damage; it’s because as long as weapon damage connects, life leech instantly erases the punishment.

A hit that chunks you for 75% HP while applying a 2-second debuff that cuts healing/leech received by 70% would force an immediate Evade/disengage every single time. It creates an active, high-stakes ‘oh crap’ moment where you must retreat and recover, rather than an instant 100-to-0 death in 0.2s that gives zero room for player agency.

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just switch meta to stack more heal, no?
That’s what happened with sunder, stacked more hp and leech to ignore the dmg increase.
if your healing is reduced, what’s there to stop you from stacking that now to ignore the debuff?
We already went from low leech meta to higher now, isn’t that just a slow/roundabout “forced” extension of the same previous optional. “everyone slots 2x haunted steel” etc then :thinking:

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Nobody (or just not me) is going to sacrifice weapon components for 2x Haunted Steel just to facetank a few seconds debuff when Evade exists. Evading costs 0 stat budget and lasts just long enough to let the debuff expire. That’s the entire definition of player counterplay.

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ye but… they already did that with sunder/pre foa :sweat_smile: haunted steel has been present on a lot of builds, pretty sure i’ve even seen it on a pierce build at some point, despite being both a comp and 10% dmg loss from the conversion :thinking:
The meta shifts to what ends up having the most overall value for whatever the desired goal is, if that’s cleartime and 8sec staying power ads more value there than constant evading, why wouldn’t it be slotted?
again, 4boss gangbang was a thing because constant evade wasn’t necessary despite sunder, because hp and leech just got dialed up/stat swap prioritized, and evade a backup

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I don’t think evade/disengage post-sunder is always an easy solution (and it shouldn’t be). Getting sundered should put you in a quandary: should you keep attacking to maintain your healing, knowing that you could get insta-killed with the debuff on you (but you might get lucky) or should you disengage, knowing that other damage, ground effects, dots etc could kill you, now that your healing is gone? If you die you will wonder if you made the wrong choice. The actually right choice, of course, was not to have got sundered in the first place, but mistakes happen (and some sunders are very hard to avoid).

tldr, I’m not sure that sunder should debuff healing. I think it should put you in a position where you know the next attack could one-shot you, so you may give up your healing voluntarily, but that’s not the only possible play.

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That’s actually a great perspective, and I fully agree that combat is at its best when players face that exact quandary: ‘Do I risk staying in to sustain, or disengage and risk dying to residual ground degen?’ lol

The problem with current endgame one-shots, however, is that this dilemma often never happens. When the incoming burst kills you within 0.2s without clear visual warning, there is no decision window. You don’t get to weigh the risk of staying vs evading—you’re just dead.

If an attack chunks you for 75-80% HP and threatens a lethal follow-up, that quandary comes alive and forces a meaningful reaction. But when it goes straight from 100 to 0 instantly, player agency is removed entirely.

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isn’t that just simply about addressing outliers then?
Which non telegraphed attacks does this/“lets make a list”
/Either make them telegraphed or dial down specific non telegraph attack dmg down to start with etc if they aren’t meant to be UK boulders/dread swipe style attacks :thinking:
*i’m pro 1shot (obv), but i also believe Crate and Zantai has largely always been fair in which attacks either could or were meant to hurt us. So if certain attacks’ animation/speed isn’t fair it might be worthy by itself to address.
Also again assuming we’re not having bugs like current detonation issue with projectiles or “cloud” attacks/aoes. (or it’s not “silly” expectation like 5x altar etc :sweat_smile:)

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Fair enough on addressing specific outliers, @Gnomish_Inquisition, and fixing unfair telegraphs is definitely part of the solution. But the core issue in endgame (especially deep SR or high-density Ascendant maps) usually isn’t one solitary boss winding up—it’s overlapping damage instances.

When 3 or 4 elite heroes or high-tier trash simultaneously fire untyped projectile barrages or floor clutter under heavy visual spell effects, you don’t die to a single ‘Underking boulder’; you die to 5 smaller hits landing in the exact same 0.1s frame.

Turning down invisible shotgun overlaps and ensuring heavy hits have distinct animations solves both problems without stripping away high-stakes danger.

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How do you threaten a character that heals their entire health pool in under a second though?

With the life steal and regen we can stack we’re immune to everything that isn’t a one-shot, or psuedo one-shot.

I do like the idea of Sunder also applying a 70% healing received (and regen) penalty though. That might force a disengage.

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I agree with most of this. In particular:

One of the great strengths of the game.

It seems to me that it’s mandatory to get as many 400HP ascensions as possible. If you don’t need +WPS% then 400HP is just the best armour ascension by a mile.

I agree with this provided it doesn’t go too far - ie the telegraphs don’t become plonkingly obvious (as in Last Epoch, say). But if you are watching, paying attention, then your reward should be that you can see what’s about to happen.

Absolutely, but that’s one of the most brazenly telegraphed attacks in the game.

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I wholeheartedly concur with signalling the problem. I don’t necessarily agree with the solution being ‘more HP’.

20k feels like more than enough to balance around and work with as designer and player on both sides.

But you know it’s gotten bad when even in Hardcore, I might as well forego Turtle, Diamond or Ghoul for more offensive stats as they won’t proc at a relevant time anyway and when they do, they’re very limited in how impactful they are.

I disagree with one shots in general. Even exceptionally well telegraphed ones like Beronath’s floor gashes. They have no place in a game like Grim Dawn. However, with the rise of damage and drastically increased sustain, it’s one of the few tools devs have left to create a threat right now.

Sunder similarly needs absurd numbers just to feel impactful and then it still gets ignored by many builds as the leech is too strong.

A whole new sustain mechanic is introduced, avoiding many of the pitfalls of regeneration, and it is at best an afterthought as the numbers aren’t particularly meaningful versus one shots and by only ticking every second you might well be dead before it comes into play.

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Reduce Onslaught stack bonus to 5% per stack and cap them at 10 - Done.

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I’d say I’m kinda ok with oneshot (high-damage) skills as long as they are well-telegraphed. Say, Uber Bobr’s ground slam is a oneshot but you can react to it, and dodge. On the other hand, Mog 2.0’s stun jack spam can be a oneshot too, and guess what? You have no idea will it or will it not be a oneshot! And the latter things are much more persistent in the game.

A bit off-topic, but regen as a sustain metric fell off hard. Even with base 5k regen (9+k with giant) it’s not guaranteed you survive as well as with having high ll or w/e.