05-31-2012, 07:32 AM
After the session I just played, I feel much like Sirian does, albeit with a ranged class. I have been playing my Demon Hunter through Act I/Hell. My build is heavily built around slowing enemies and kiting; my equipment is heavily defence oriented. Since us Aussies have awful lag issues playing the game, I need to be able to survive a few seconds of desync, and I do. As such, 99% of the Act has been a cake walk so far. Elites swing heavily, however. Sometimes they add some good challenge, but all it takes is the wrong combination of attributes on the wrong class of enemy and you have a truly tedious battle. As an example, I have had two Extra Health/Reflects Damage groups (yay!), and it seems Waller/Invulnerable Minions makes for a long and tedious battle.
My last dungeon crawl made me rage-quit the game. Scavenger's Cave, hoping to get some decent loot. Now, Scavengers are hard enough as normal enemies. Because of the weirdness of how enemies who start an attack animation always hit you, no matter how far away you are, Scavengers cannot be kited and even regular ones have proven more difficult than most Champion packs. On the first floor, I scored Teleporting/Illusionist/Fire Chain Scavengers. Yup, they teleport on top of you, the Fire Chains all hit at once, and 15 Scavengers (three originals cloned out to 15) attack all at once, with you unable to kite. Amazingly, I only died once, but it was a long and tedious battle only possible by separating them from each other. I barely take the stairs down to the second floor and I scored a Rare group: Vortex/Waller/Arcane Scavengers. I think the effect of this is pretty obvious. I was one-shotted so many times I literally lost count. I killed them, and finished the cave, but I then quit the game and threw my arms up asking myself ``what was the point?''
In this play session, I found three fundamental issues:
1) Imbalanced risk-reward. Elite groups can (but do not always) take a lot of time and effort to kill. The reward from them, however, tends to be pretty lame. One, maybe two, enchanted items; usually magic, sometimes Rare. The probability of the item being borderline decent: slim. In fact, in Act I/Hell they are not even useful for crafting, as most items as such low-level that they still only break down to Nightmare Difficulty crafting components. The Reward for taking out these guys is the cash from selling the item to the vendor, which is far less than you could generate from 30 seconds of blasting away at normal mobs. Some of the Elite groups I just faced took 10 minutes to kill, only generate pittance in cash. A lot of effort, a lot of risk, no real reward.
2) Poorly designed Elite attributes, or awful combinations. These remind me of Fire/Ice/Lightning immunes in Diablo II: they made the Sorceress cry, and were just unfair. I do not think you will find a player who disagrees that Invulnerable Minions was an awful idea. Most players also seem to despise Reflects Damage and Vampiric. Certain enemies (eg ones that naturally Teleport) tend to make ugly, ugly opponents with practically any combination of attributes. Certain attributes combine in ways that are just unfair (eg Vampiric with Plague and/or Lightning Enchanted). Sometimes, the game throws the whole hog at you. The other day, I faced a group of those casters from Act IV (the ones that Teleport and cast Meteor) with Vampiric/Lightning Enchanted. The two companions, of cause, stand in the AoE of the Meteor and stand in the line of the Charged Sparks, ensuring the members of this group were essentially immortal, assuming you can even target them with all the teleporting. I can only imagine what those guys would have been like with another attribute or two (ever had teleporting enemies with Molten? Not fun).
3) Tedious gameplay. The one word that should never come up when discussing entertainment: tedious. When you get an Elite with a non-fun attribute, or a combination that takes away the fun, then provide a snarky golf clap of a reward for actually defeating them, you can only describe it as tedious. I am certainly not saying that all Elite groups are this bad. I faced a dozen or so Elite groups in that play session, and happened to score two immediately next to each other that were non-fun. The rest were great and led to interesting strategies.
I think I just had a little taste of what everyone is complaining about in Inferno. Blizzard needs to fix this spikiness and they need to do so quickly.
My last dungeon crawl made me rage-quit the game. Scavenger's Cave, hoping to get some decent loot. Now, Scavengers are hard enough as normal enemies. Because of the weirdness of how enemies who start an attack animation always hit you, no matter how far away you are, Scavengers cannot be kited and even regular ones have proven more difficult than most Champion packs. On the first floor, I scored Teleporting/Illusionist/Fire Chain Scavengers. Yup, they teleport on top of you, the Fire Chains all hit at once, and 15 Scavengers (three originals cloned out to 15) attack all at once, with you unable to kite. Amazingly, I only died once, but it was a long and tedious battle only possible by separating them from each other. I barely take the stairs down to the second floor and I scored a Rare group: Vortex/Waller/Arcane Scavengers. I think the effect of this is pretty obvious. I was one-shotted so many times I literally lost count. I killed them, and finished the cave, but I then quit the game and threw my arms up asking myself ``what was the point?''
In this play session, I found three fundamental issues:
1) Imbalanced risk-reward. Elite groups can (but do not always) take a lot of time and effort to kill. The reward from them, however, tends to be pretty lame. One, maybe two, enchanted items; usually magic, sometimes Rare. The probability of the item being borderline decent: slim. In fact, in Act I/Hell they are not even useful for crafting, as most items as such low-level that they still only break down to Nightmare Difficulty crafting components. The Reward for taking out these guys is the cash from selling the item to the vendor, which is far less than you could generate from 30 seconds of blasting away at normal mobs. Some of the Elite groups I just faced took 10 minutes to kill, only generate pittance in cash. A lot of effort, a lot of risk, no real reward.
2) Poorly designed Elite attributes, or awful combinations. These remind me of Fire/Ice/Lightning immunes in Diablo II: they made the Sorceress cry, and were just unfair. I do not think you will find a player who disagrees that Invulnerable Minions was an awful idea. Most players also seem to despise Reflects Damage and Vampiric. Certain enemies (eg ones that naturally Teleport) tend to make ugly, ugly opponents with practically any combination of attributes. Certain attributes combine in ways that are just unfair (eg Vampiric with Plague and/or Lightning Enchanted). Sometimes, the game throws the whole hog at you. The other day, I faced a group of those casters from Act IV (the ones that Teleport and cast Meteor) with Vampiric/Lightning Enchanted. The two companions, of cause, stand in the AoE of the Meteor and stand in the line of the Charged Sparks, ensuring the members of this group were essentially immortal, assuming you can even target them with all the teleporting. I can only imagine what those guys would have been like with another attribute or two (ever had teleporting enemies with Molten? Not fun).
3) Tedious gameplay. The one word that should never come up when discussing entertainment: tedious. When you get an Elite with a non-fun attribute, or a combination that takes away the fun, then provide a snarky golf clap of a reward for actually defeating them, you can only describe it as tedious. I am certainly not saying that all Elite groups are this bad. I faced a dozen or so Elite groups in that play session, and happened to score two immediately next to each other that were non-fun. The rest were great and led to interesting strategies.
I think I just had a little taste of what everyone is complaining about in Inferno. Blizzard needs to fix this spikiness and they need to do so quickly.
May the wind pick up your heels and your sword strike true.