My carry died from the damage spike on HC Ruthless.

As thread title says, we're playing HC Ruthless as a team and my carry died in damage spike on the Tier 5 map. The map had these mods:

1. Monsters cannot be Taunted
2. Monsters deal 15% extra Physical Damage as Fire (Shaping the Mountains Atlas modifier)

Carry had about 9.5k of Armour rating and was killed by magic Sand Leaper mob with the Overwhelm mechanic. Also the mob was buffed by the Wisps. He lost about 2.6k of Life in a single hit without any chance to do anything, even react. We were doing tougher maps and even T6s with extra damage but in this case he can't react on the danger because there is no any telegraphing mechanism or notification like "THIS MOBS HAS HUGE DAMAGE". He appeared from the offscreen area, leaped and wiped the charcter.

I don't understand why the hell single magic mob on the map without any damage modifiers deals 2.6k of damage from the single hit to the target which has non-zero armour rating. Maybe am I missing something (?) but from my point of view it looks like an average PoE well known one-shot case.

Twitch.tv clip

If you missed it - here is a whole "Overwhelm complain thread": https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3463638

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cursorTarget wrote:

2. Monsters deal 15% extra Physical Damage as Fire (Shaping the Mountains Atlas modifier)

Aegis should take care of that. So map basically had no mods.

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cursorTarget wrote:

Carry had about 9.5k of Armour rating and was killed by magic Sand Leaper mob with the Overwhelm mechanic. Also the mob was buffed by the Wisps. He lost about 2.6k of Life in a single hit without any chance to do anything, even react.

Its IME a competitor for second most dangerous mob type, IIRC their leaps can be preempted with stagger moving. (Not trying to say the mob type or Overwhelm are balanced.) And stagger moving is not good for EA IME also, a weakness of EA build.

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cursorTarget wrote:

I don't understand why the hell single magic mob on the map without any damage modifiers deals 2.6k of damage from the single hit to the target which has non-zero armour rating. Maybe am I missing something (?) but from my point of view it looks like an average PoE well known one-shot case.

Dont know what you mean with "well known one-shot case". Lets assume poedb numbers are correct (they arent always):
This is also assuming it was that single blue mob. I dont quite trust the gfx esp if its not lockstep?

923 max dam
*1.3 assuming its a crit, there was ignite debuff afterwards so it prob was one
*x magic mobs prob get a generic damage mult, not sure though, uniques get *1.7
*1.5 leap says
*1.15 leap says not sure if this also applies
*y 0-3 wisp empowerment, no idea what this does, would need testing

=> 2070 *x *y

Randomly assuming x = 1.2 y = 1.2*1.2*1.2

=> 4292 damage for armour calc: => *5 = 21460
=> 9.5k armour takes off ~0.7% of the damage (Overwhelm)
=> mob could have done up to ~4262 damage with one leap (assuming my random guesses for x & y)

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Zrevnur wrote:

923 max dam
*1.3 assuming its a crit, there was ignite debuff afterwards so it prob was one
*x magic mobs prob get a generic damage mult, not sure though, uniques get *1.7
*1.5 leap says
*1.15 leap says not sure if this also applies
*y 0-3 wisp empowerment, no idea what this does, would need testing

=> 2070 *x *y

Randomly assuming x = 1.2 y = 1.2*1.2*1.2

=> 4292 damage for armour calc: => *5 = 21460
=> 9.5k armour takes off ~0.7% of the damage (Overwhelm)
=> mob could have done up to ~4262 damage with one leap (assuming my random guesses for x & y)

Checked and tested =>
Magic mobs (at least in lvl 68 lab) only seem to do a bit more damage than normal ones. Consistent with the 30% more & 20% less implied by monster rarity stats.
So x is likely *1.3*0.8 = *1.04
y: according to wiki only one of the colors (Primal) increases damage per increasing crit mult, unfortunately no idea by how much
Anyway this gets:
923 * (1.3 + y) * 1.5 * 1.15 *1.04 - PDR = 2578
1656 * (1.3 + y) = 2578 + PDR
y = 0.4 is not enough to get 2578 + PDR.
y = 0.5 however gives max dam of 2711 after PDR.
So if other assumptions are correct then Primal Wisp Empowerment gives more than 40% crit mult.
(And if the "guilty" mob didnt have Primal Empowerment then at least one of my assumptions is wrong.)

This is more or less why I dont play hardcore anymore. Ill go ahead and say around 95% of my deaths are some mechanic you can barely see doing most if not all of your HP in damage and boom you're dead.

The way that sustain and flasks work in this game, its kinda the only way for characters to ever die given the mechanics, but its also, as you have seen, unbelievably frustrating when playing HC.

Zrevnur
Appreciate you for this detailed analysis and efforts.

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Dont know what you mean with "well known one-shot case".

I meant this is an example of how typical death happened in the PoE, by just bursting down with the heavy incoming damage in 1-5 frames without ability to react. And the worst part of this is when you roam on the map, and the other mobs have acceptable and predictable DPS output, some monster appears and wipes the character in 1-2 hits.

This is visit card of the PoE - Path of One Shots. Even if you build defences and they are working for the choosen difficulty level it doesn't matter for these rare cases.

At this moment my carry decided not to play PoE because the reason of the death wasn't mistake in the build or player actions. We spent several hours in conversation thinking what can be done better and we came to conclusion:

1. Do not touch league mechanics because it is balanced around baby mode (SC trade)
2. We need support which can be started out-of-the-box in the acts.

But not touching league mechanics makes no sense playing the league. So he decided to quit.

Unfortunatelly, this topic won't be read by the devs, responsible for the game balance. Eventually it will become archived and forgotten. Nothing will be changed / explained / fixed.

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This is more or less why I dont play hardcore anymore

At least on regular HC you have access to the decent gear. But even with this access it's a question of time to be killed by some tricky mechanics.

PS Thanks for the link. Armour is trash. It was trash, it is trash and it will be trash, even if you have 1M of the rating.