Oneshots slowly take the joy out of the endgame

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
21

I think there is a solution to the one-shot problem that would elegantly address both the “instant jumps to full health so only one-shots matter” and the “regen can’t compete with leech” problems, but I’m guessing engine might prevent it from happening. And ironically, as much as I also enjoy GD way more than PoE, PoE has that solution: make lifeleech happen over time, not instantly.

In an environment where leech is instant, there isn’t really a way to make attrition-based combat where enemies take some health away and you need time to recover it. Leech or our damage would have get nerfed hard and enemy damage would need to get nerfed hard. Our health pool relative to enemy damage would need to be fairly massive so that we can have chunks taken out of it, not be able to recover all of it instantly, and still be able to survive the next series of hits. And our damage would need to be low enough that everything doesn’t get blown up after it gets to do 1 attack, cause then the attrition doesn’t really happen. That’s the PoE problem, the whole screen gets blown up in one click so for enemies to be dangerous, they need to hit insanely hard cause only like 1 out of a 100 gets to actually attack. An attrition-based combat would probably require a full redesign of encounters and the overall flow of the game and it’s questionable whether it would be worth it, cause there’s a good chance in the end it would feel worse than what we have and all that work would have been wasted. And also, we’ve seen what happened when leech got nerfed in raw numbers or sunder got introduced. People just got more leech, builds just got tankier, and ignored both.

With leech over time, though, enemies could move away from the one-shot threat territory and more into wearing you down over time because even if they don’t one shot us, they can pose a challenge to our ability to leech back quickly enough to survive the next barrage. Kill speed would still equal defense since you thin out the enemy horde faster and mitigate more damage, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean more survivability in terms of the ability to take damage, not if, like in PoE, there were a cap to how quickly health can recover from leech (as in, you can’t be leeching more than X% of your max health per second). Because then, you can’t solve the issue by getting more leech, it won’t change anything. At most you’d be able to get more health so the % of health recovered is a higher number.

With that, leech would be much more comparable to regen or health per second heal mechanics because it can never just get us back to full instantly. But I assume that’s dream territory cause GD probably doesn’t have the capability to incorporate over time leech and leech caps like PoE does.

22

We really are trying to recreate the game from scratch, aren’t we?

As long as speedrunning and timer challenges exist, the pressure is there to simply jump into a large pile of enemies and output as much DPS as possible and move onto the next pile. The act of “isolate the most dangerous threat and neutralize it before the cumulative effects of debuffs get you” becomes anathema because “it’s too slow. Timer bad, Build goes in trash.” The very act of zerging into enemy packs inherently carries the risk of getting one-shot by all of those attacks.

We can either work together to pin down the sources of particular damage spikes (which tend to be multi-projectile close range attacks that shotgun you - looking at you, specifically, Vinn the Giant) or accept that if you want safer gameplay where the risks of getting one-shot are lessened, you have to give up your timer fantasy and create new standards to establish an equilibrium between damage output and survivability.

Zantai himself said that he doesn’t have some sort of magic timer threshold that builds should strive for in order for them to feel good to play, but even if he did, somebody is going to throw those standards out anyway, set some arbitrary number as the “any build that doesn’t get this standard is trash,” and then complain that “only 5 builds are viable now” and ruin the experience for everyone else in a game that thrives on build diversity.

This obsession on “build tiers” has done far more damage to the joy than anything that Zantai has placed in his game.

6 Likes
23

We should only focus on Build diversity, dps output should be the same.

24

I… would say you kinda cannot really fix the “oneshots” part. Like ppl already mentioned - player recovery (and no, not leech only) is through the roof. Like lifesteel is in the face, but amount of regen, health recovery, and flask heal per second is also huge in total. So when you can recover from any hit in a few seconds (usually a second)… game already lost war of attrition unless it just deliver insane damage in those few seconds… so effectively the current situation.

25

I’ll use Crucible as an example:

On Wave 199, I deliberately try to keep the Nemeses who spawn at that wave alive so I can beat down both phases of Korvaak and - ideally - both phases of Beronath too. Korvaak in particular is nasty if you keep him alive at Wave 200, as it becomes intangible about 5 seconds or so into Phase 2 with that finger-blast attack, which adds more projectiles to the bullet-hell you’re already facing.

The “optimal DPS” way is, of course, to beat everything as fast as possible and accept that you have to eat both Korvaak’s and Beronath’s second phases on top of Wave 200, since their transformations eat precious seconds. This is a trade-off players should face, and decide whether or not to risk getting killed to save those precious seconds.

26

This might not be a matter of whether it can be fixed. These days, most builds are judged by how many seconds it takes to kill a Celestial, how many minutes it takes to clear Crucible, or how quickly it can clear SR. As thepowerofmediocrity put it, any build that’s even slightly slower gets labeled as trash. If people were genuinely willing to sacrifice some damage for better survivability, they wouldn’t keep getting one-shot all the time.

2 Likes
27

Are you telling me you’re getting constantly one shotted in Crucible 170? In SR30/31? In baseline Ascendant?

Or is it that you’re now jumping into the challenge difficulty CR200, a 5x juiced altar and SR36 while brandishing potions that make you take more damage, all while trying to maximize your clear speed?

You moved the goal posts, in some cases significantly, and now it seems the expectation is that everything below that becomes trivialized.

15 Likes
28

You’re refusing to do the one thing that actually helps monster design feel more fair.

Do list which particular cases one-shot you. I don’t believe you will find many that aren’t correctly telegraphed.

Unless of course you’re doing SR40+ runs in which case :man_shrugging: you brought that type of challenge onto yourself I suppose.

But in the main campaign, if you have 20k health and let’s say 15% Damage absorption and 10% enemy damage reduction (all average numbers btw), I really cannot tell which attack can one-shot you without a clear telegraph.

Outside of bugs of course, which brings me to the original point: please do list the cases!

2 Likes
29

I think this touches on something that came up in the “vision” thread recently, which is what level of difficulty you intend to balance around. If it’s SR30/31, CR 170, no-altar Ascendant then we know what the expectation should be.

30

None of the finished builds I’ve tried, or really ever had, get one shot in SR30/31. In 0 altar Ascendant my average tankiness characters don’t get one shot by anything after the nerf to enemy OA and damage in that mode. Stuff like Underking’s boulder can one shot me, but I don’t let myself get hit by it (and just when experimenting I found some of my tanks can somehow survive being hit directly by it on 0 altar Ascendant.) As for shotguns, they aren’t really one shots… But I haven’t encountered a shotgun that feels unfair. Since the last balance patch really I haven’t come across anything in FoA that makes me feel like WTF when I die.

The new rocs can hit kind of hard when multiple projectiles hit, relative to other non-hero monsters, but when I’m built properly I can often get away with straight up eating a lot of their attacks. If anything I wish more monsters in other acts had their level of threat in ascendant mode.

The leap stunning enemies can also get me killed if they hit me one after another, but I just laugh when it happens because it’s always a result of me running straight into their groups, not any unfairness. After that kind of death I just approach them with a little more care and blow them up no problem. This also never happens to me in HC because I play HC like a scared angry cat armed with a bazooka. I don’t jump into any fight I’m not 1000% certain I can facetank.

In base ascendant mode, a lot of my finished builds can often get away with eating a Valdaran shotgun on 0 altar Ascendant, though that’s probably because I’m not so washed up as to get hit by all his projectiles even when I’m playing recklessly, just a few of them. I kinda wish he hit a bit harder with his projectile nova.

Anasteria is the only boss in SR that comes to mind, in that her meteors come down fast and at hard-to-predict angles. I find her the most difficult to play “skillfully” around, because her attacks are easy to run into by mistake even when consciously aware of them and trying to avoid them. But I like that she stands out as a threat. If I could tell where her meteors would land I’d have 0 complaint. I contrast this to Aleksander, whose animation and meteor fall speed are just slow enough that I never feel like it wasn’t my fault for getting hit.

1 Like
31

If you build your characters to have the bare minimum acceptable defense in pursuit of the most damage possible to produce the lowest time clears possible, you are literally toeing the line to try and get the best times - seems natural then that you would get one shot in various scenarios that your reckless character setup couldn’t stand up to while pushing through content progressively harder than baseline ascendant. I dont think having exactly uncrittable DA (31XX for dread?) In ascendant 5-6 altar gameplay and 18-20k hp is really the right margin here.

Crucible 200 probably shouldn’t be judged the same as the rest of the game either in terms of difficulty.

1 Like
32

I don’t know, i see clips of elite players trying to facetank half of a sr map or trying to facetank the four bosses in a SR boss room, and then be surprised that all the stacking debuffs eventually lead to an one shot.

Maybe stop trying to take everything at once.

7 Likes
33

Just make life leech a flat value ezpz

34

I’m also struggling a bit with the 1 hits that are often not too visible. ‘Git gut’ is certainly a valid argument, but imo when fighting eg most FOA bosses (dread, bero, chieftain,…) Im often dead without really realizing what happened. So I jump around and that works mostly… but not sure of it should work that way. Can be mistaken and my apologies to @banana_peel for that. If I want to build defensive to avoid this, the rewards are just not there.

What I don’t really get is the timer discussion, for me this isnt the point at all here, and that’s why there is no reference to that or that x amount of examples are given, to avoid we end up on this road.

Edit: my general conclusion: one hits are not very visible and sacrificing dmg should be rewarded to avoid 1hits. Not the other way as is the path I feel we currently are walking, stack dps instead.

35

When I’m referring to timers, I’m referring to this:

Where players are intentionally jumping into spots to get the maximum DPS, but then get surprised when a combination of stun into freeze into getting hit in the face by Underking rock leads to one-shots.

Timers here mean “complete SR32-33 in only 3 minutes” so that builds get placed into Top / High / Mid / Low tier based on said damage output and clear speed.

1 Like
36

those are some of the most well telegraphed bosses tho :thinking:

37

That leaves git gut as argument then which I totally accept :smiley: but they shouldnt 1hko if you go the defensive way instead of being punished for it

38

I didn’t think banana was really refering to these cases, but obviously you are right that these kinds of trends shouldnt be basemark when we’re speaking about balancing. Apologies if my post came off otherwhise

39

Why are you always expecting ill will from the player? I don’t get it. Every single time I utter any critisism, your first reaction is to ridicule the sentiment. Is that our culture code now? I don’t enjoy it, for the record.

You recently complained about the wave of toxicity on the forums. Why is your own first reaction so often passively aggressive, even for a calm structured post that doesn’t throw any personal jabs?

Yes, I just sat down, spent 2 hours formulating my thoughts - all because I shifted the goal posts and want to trivialize the game. How many years have I been here? Have I ever asked to make the game easier?

Danger and difficulty can be designed in different ways. In the past decade the danger of oneshots became a big trend in action combat, following the Souls series footsteps: dodge at the right moment or get killed. I personally don’t like this design. I think, it’s a very “cop-out” way to have difficulty in the game.

As for gamemodes. I rarely play SR36+ and never give feedback about the difficulty on it. Oneshots start at about SR32-33. I do play full altar Ascendant (without tdm pots mainly), and as it is a part of the campaign I expect to be able to build a character that wouldn’t be randomly oneshot by a small telegraph effectively unavoidable attack at melee range with no chance of survival. I play CR200 and never complain about the gangbang kills that happen there, only about individual abilities and unavoidable situations.

About the builds. Idk about other people but the way I make builds didn’t change: I pick the best synergetic items for the idea and then try to buff it up as much as possible given the restrictions. I didn’t wake up at FoA and started thinking I now need twice dps I had before or the game will be dull.

This is one example of a build (and showcasing the HP problem). You take the jewelry set for Avalanche and a weapon to convert it, along with gloves for chance to use. Everything else is: generic cold chest with HP, generic double rare helmet with big HP, pants with HP, boots with HP, shoudlers with big HP, belt with HP, both weapon augments with HP, 3 HP components, 3 devotions with HP, 5x4% HP armor augments, 3 HP ascends, 76 points into physique.

Took HP at almost every turn and only got to 22k HP total. No TDM pot, 3800 DA, 23% DR on hit. This is what my regular build looks like. Does it look like chasing clear speed? Did I dump everything into OA and crit? Did I slap on two TDM pots? Sacrificed DR on hit, components for dmg, ascends in favor of OA?

With this build I got: oneshot by Fabius SS at SR34, I think; killed by random attacks or very hard to dodge jump of Gruldir 3 times (full altart); killed at CR200 by some strange burst explosion that happened after unavoidable Anasteria Sunder on death; killed several times by solo Underking grenado exploding off the wall; died in CR200 walking over some purple stain I didn’t see with other effects on the screen; died in CR200 jumping over Underking green mines with some 16k HP.

I understand that eradicating a lot of these hard to avoid oneshots will dramatically decrease the danger of the endgame. You dont want endgame to stop being dangerous. But when most danger comes from popping the character like a cherry, you feel like all your efforts in building up the defences were wasted. We always report builds with insane solo dmg output that allows you to bypass boss mechanics. This is the same issue but against the player.

4 Likes
40

The crux is “What can actually be a danger when everyone and their cat just leeches their entire health bar every 0.1 seconds?”

If they don’t debuff you to the point of being one shot, they’re just tanked through with leech.

Irrelevant when you’re just leeching constantly.

Again, irrelevant when leech is a thing.

Has 0 impact on you just standing your ground and leeching.

With all the added WD% casters have gained over the years to be able to leech it’s less likely than ever that casters need to actually move (Yes, even with the malus of not having full leech from 100%+ WD)

At this point in the game, there’s nothing that can really be done about it.

You’d need to rebuild the game from the ground up in a way where leech isn’t absolutely bonkers.

To which, GD2 is the best place to find such a thing. With its new engine and ability to start fresh with mechanics (I.e. Making leech not stupid, making resistance cap not the baseline so that resistances are an actual build decision, making regen not hot trash without heavy investment, designing the game with more in-combat mobility in mind, not using the stupid TQ armour mechanics etc)

GD1 is and always has been based heavily around the stupid insta-leech (Which is why there are a bunch of complaints about FoA now that just sitting there facetanking everything with leech isn’t viable in all circumstances). Where the only way to threaten such a thing is by “One-shots”. Thus leading to the binary state of defensives, where it’s just get “Good enough” to not be one shot then it’s all irrelevant beyond that because so long as you don’t get one shot you just leech. So everything after that is pure offensive stacking.

Even if leech was able to be adjusted in the engine to work over time, it’s still going to need an overhaul to the entire game, as it will have to be balanced around how much leech you can get, how fast it heals over time, how you build around the mechanic and of course, all the damage sources in the game reworked accordingly etc…