Normally I wouldn’t be against it but there are 2 massive problems with its current application.
Not all builds can get attack damage converted to health, meaning not all builds can have a reliable sustain. Now imagine you have yo fight a monster which is resistant to your type of damage and happens to have a reflect. Imagine you have to do it fast because you are, for example, in a death room or are getting cornered and need to clear the screen. The constant damage from reflect can get into pretty absurd territory. Heal constellations get drained out, the potion goes on cooldown, there is only so much you can do to combat such intense damage intake. And yes, I know they sometimes don’t activate their reflect, it only makes the whole thing slightly less frustrating, it is a band-aid, there are moments when you must attack reflect or not.
Having reflect is kind of pointless to begin with. There are so many resistances and different layers of defenses a player has to take care of, going full damage(the thing reflect combats) is going to be stupid even if reflect didn’t exist. You’ll die to spike damage, dots and debuffs all the time. Meanwhile ranged builds, the ones reflect was made for in games like Path of Exile, are relatively weak in comparison to melee ones so there is no reason to keep them in check.
All in all I am not sure reflect and how often it pops up is right for this game.
“Damage Reflected” as a gear stat is utterly pointless, I know that much.
mobs in Grim Dawn have GIGANTIC health pools compared to the dmg they do, which means reflecting their damage is like tickling them. Even if you get it up over 300% damage reflected it barely hurts them. Even bosses.
And despite the word “reflected” this is actually no damage mitigation at all for the player. Retaliation is cool, damage reflected either should be increased by a factor of 5 or 10, or just removed from the game. All it’s doing right now is taking up space.
I have noticed that reflect has been toned down since release of the original game. It used to hurt, but not so much anymore. Even my AAR mage barely feels it, where it used to kill me so fast, but my AAR build does get to nulify it most the time. I also have found some gear and devotions which can reduce the reflect damage as well.
I’ve come to terms with my Flames of Ignaffar build being able to simply cast through it. It gives a little ADCTH benefit, but at a severe discount, and it still doesn’t hurt that much and I now have retrained myself to ignore it.
I did some Barrowholm mine runs. Encountered Kubacabra there a bunch of times and killed him without problems. He hit me a bit, after all the place is supper narrow, but I managed to tank the hits. Meanwhile a reflect crab, who is very resistant to my type of damage, and a bunch of other crabs who can corner me easily are a huge pain because of the super high reflect spike.
Another example - the death room in Port Valbury. I usually beat it pretty handily however if there are a bunch of random reflect heroes I am screwed. At this point hulks do not threaten me as much as some random slow fool, like those floating eyes, who happens to have reflect.
And no, I don’t think there is any way to mitigate it other than getting max lighting resist somehow. Already have 80+60 overcapped res and 16k life, it doesn’t help that much.
I agree that monster damage reflection should be toned down a little. At the same time, maybe a general boosting to the percentages of the skills that provide damage reflection to the characters could make them at lest a bit useful…
I agree. it was quite common to suicide yourself against a reflect foe during EA, it doesn’t happen much currently. maybe because you generally have a very high resist to the dmg you deal. my physical Commando still has to be cautious against reflective toons/heroes.
What I have noticed is that reflect became more punishing now as my own damage went up with the expansion.
Why, FoI can hurt on reflect too, or maybe you just need more DOT. Its nothing compared to what melee pierce nightblade and a build with myth Guillotine felt whom I tried to play recently. Guillotine is especially cruel
reflect damage is simply horrible in this game especially if you are playing a physical build like cadence.
a player with such a build will usually have between 15-40% physical resist compared to 80-90% of any other resistance. what makes it particularly bad:
-in addition to already having low physical resistance, abilities like “break morale” will also be reflected, giving the player even lower physical resistance.
-the visual reflect effect (orange spikes) is sometimes inside large mobs, and difficult to see.
-the reflect soundFX sometimes does not trigger
-some mobs like apparitions and oligarchs can spawn with ‘of valor’ shields that have built-in 30-40% reflect. In those cases, you have no way to know before it’s too late. terrible design.
“but you can have anti reflect components, augments and constellations!”
yes, and you will end up with a gimped character.
it was so bad they had to reduce it by 75% in crucible (yes, seventy-five percent) but somehow they left the normal mode untouched.
I think the reason my FoI barely feels it is 2 fold. I have 83% resists against all damage, except physical, and I usually have a Inquisitor Seal down, which nulifies fast small ticks worth of damage.
I did notice that I do have 1 toon that gets hurt when reflect is up, and he does mostly physical damage. The rest are mitigated by my resists and other stuff.
I pretty much one-shotted my toon in a BoC run recently. Can post the video I guess. My Grenadier can crit from 120K t0 380K with Grenado. Due to the 1 second delay of impact of Grenado - If I throw 3 in quick succession there’s a small window before I realise I shouldn’t have done that…
Well, if you are running through BoC with 200 % Attack Speed and shadowstrike a reflective enemy, hit him with Acid Spray and Rend, Howl of Mogdrogen up and Mythical Gorefeast proccs…you better hit the button for Blade Barrier fast.
I am pretty sure you can read that this certain boss monster has a reflect affix and not kill yourself with single target. All I am talking about here is AoE. You know the reflect mob is right there, you have no choice but to hit it though because you need to clear the screen. And you have no attack damage converted to health cushion so the constant spike damage has no way to get mitigated.