Current bump on Sundered makes the game much more black and white: low danger outside of it and very high inside.
Which is a design choice, of course. But if you choose to force people play specifically around this debuff, it needs some more work. Mostly in animations. The game has too many effects for the player to be able to discern the incoming Sundered attacks. Options here can be:
More distinct visual tells. Like very distinct and very sparky flash as opposed to the current one that barely stands out of other effects
DIstinct audio queue and or unique and memorable voice lines leading to Sundered attack
Slower animations
Right now there is only a handful of bosses that perform their Sundered attack in a way that can be easily reacted to, among them Celestials, Ben, Grava, Iron Maiden, Alex. Most blue bosses have either indistinct animations or they are too fast.
A little on the tangent: Reaper lost a lot of power in the previous patch. Imo it deserves to have a Ravager mimic attack that applies Sunder in his arsenal.
sister crimson volcano, suddenly there’s a volcano under you but you’re already sundered unless darting around and happen to avoid it as it’s cast
some other normal/purple bosses i’m not even aware of has sunder until it’s there, i think Inara? was one of the recent ones i didn’t even realize
It’s already incredibly obnoxious on hardcore and pushing it even higher into a dodge or die mechanic is the completely wrong approach. Some of the sunders are incredibly hard to dodge, like Mog’s elemental cloud on a melee build.
Seeing the incoming damage spike even higher is just outright absurd.
If the issue is that some Sunders don’t matter, then that’s a different matter entirely. Being able to facetank Logghorean because his damage output isn’t particularly relevant, is, frankly, something should happen considering where he’s at in the game. But if that is your problem, simply revamp it into a stacking debuff. Putting it on a 100% increase (like this would be for Ravager) is just plain ridiculous.
I’ve been pretty firmly in the camp that a 70% sunder is too punitive given how significant even small damage multipliers can be. So yeah, increasing it further seems to be a step in the wrong direction, especially for anyone who is out there playing hardcore. Celestials and high SR have already increased in general spiciness due to sunder being there in the first place. I (mostly) liked the sunder change and thought it paired well with evade. The higher the value is, however, the more you risk punishing the most minor of misplays. Maybe that’s the overall design decision, and if it is, so be it. But if the goal of sunder is just to get people to pay attention and not blindly facetank, it already does this sufficiently and then some. For bosses where you don’t worry about sunder too much, e.g. Log, that’s mostly because those aren’t the hardest bosses in the game and a good character probably should be able to tank a weak boss through sunder. There are plenty of bosses where getting sundered puts you at risk of being 1-shot already.
The idea of a stacking debuff makes sense. That has the effect of punishing cumulative misplay as opposed to obliterating a character because of one very small mistake. I’m aware you can dodge some sunders pretty effectively, but that doesn’t really mean the damage multiplier value needs to be higher.
The 70%+ I’m thinking of is from celestials. 50% is sort of in the range of lethal at the wrong time but not as crazy. I thought I had seen some 70%+ figures in SR, though I don’t always hover over to see the sunder value. If it’s only a few attacks that you should never get hit by in SR that go up to 70%, that’s indeed more reasonable (though with the 30% increase, we’re kind of back close to that 70%).
grim dawn has indeed effect overload, where particles stack up to “255,255,255”
which i think is not possible to fix unless you turn it in to a 2D game? guild wars 2 has the same effect overload problem, that could only be fixed if you turn it into guild wars 1 which has very sparse effects but is very readable…
i hope GD or GD2 will never have “MMO red circle damage indicators” on the ground.
but i think an ARGP should have something like it, but instead of a red circle for an incoming ice spike from the ground attack, the ground should freeze over or something… maybe not only as texture but with 3D ice crystals so you also can use it in snow levels…
the meteors are done well, the shadow as the indicator would be a red circle in some MMO.
all them ramblings may only be relevant for a possible GD2.
Anasteria also hit for 90% in SR. Same with Zantarin. Totally fine if they’re meant to be celestial-level too, but if not, just pointing out they are in that category.
Yeah, fair enough. Anasteria is a bit more of a wildcard since you don’t necessarily have to fight her that much, but “Don’t get hit by Aleks meteor and don’t eat Zantarin’s shotgun” are kind of drilled into any HC player pretty quickly.
Yup. Old Anasteria came close to RIPing one of my characters. This one looks scary, but you have this giant flashing indicator that says “Maybe think about using mirror or an aether cluster if this gets dicey.”