On Death Effects

I just killed another elite. And sadly, because the ground was covered in stuff, I still don't know what cheesy on death effect killed me, but yeah. Lost all loot.

Whether in D4, POE-1 or this game, I and many others hate on death effects. They are cheesy and add nothing in my opinion. If you die to something you could not see, because you are behind a tree or rock or whatever, that just feels unavoidable.

Why include them. It's time for on monsters death instagib effects to go, imho. Love the game and have no problem dying to a mistake, but dying to a cheesy on death effect you cannot see just sucks and takes away from the experience of skillfully downing the creature in the first place.

Sincerely,

Inethil

Adding to it growing (I didn't think I could dislike them more) dislike of on death effects is the situation in the Chimeral Wetlands. My build revolves around chaos damage. All the deadly flowers and on death clouds released by monsters are the same damn colour so it's almost impossible to avoid them without taking damage. I'm fine with environmental hazards, at least I know where they will occur, as the flowers are clearly visible, but the purple gas is a problem.

This just happened to me. I hate this so much

Here's the thing - on death effects started with Diablo 2, the spiritual ancestor of POE, so I understand why they included them, but consider if you will how D2 implemented it.

There was only one, ONE significant on death effect and that was from the death of elites with the Cold modifier. Knowing it has that, since you see it on mouseover, immediately alerted you to the danger. In fairness so does POE, but because there are so many such effects, it is hard to keep up with.

Now here's the kicker, when the Cold Elite dies, the on death effect, a frost nova with extreme damage, always centers on the dying mob. So, you know when it's going to happen, where exactly it will happen and the radius is always exactly the same. Because of that it is eminently avoidable. If you die to it, you don't curse the game, because you screwed up and that's part of the fun.

In POE-1, POE-2 and D4 (it's even worse there because of the insane splatterfest D4 is), the position of the on death effects and the radius is unpredictable, so if the ground is obscured, you end up having to massively overcompensate, and that's if you can see it at all, or is you noticed the modifier among the ocean of same.

It's this lack of predictability which makes the on death effects suck. Make it a single nova, which always center on the monster and always has a consistent, predictable radius and players will feel far less cheesed by this mechanic.

The best part is that not only do on death effects generally one shot you from full health... but they also deliberately set the game up with mob health bars turned off by default and that option buried in the settings.

SURPRISE! No loot for you.

Brilliant game design GGG... do you honesty think that RANDOMLY KILLING PLAYERS somehow makes the game 'harder'? Cause it doesn't.

Difficulty only comes from game actions that the player can PLAY THEIR WAY OUT OF. If something has no viable escape, or is specifically designed to punish the player for the audacious crime of EXISTING. That is not difficulty. That is annoyance.

I swear the more I play the more I ask if you guys have ever made a game before...

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Glyff3083#1641 wrote:

I swear the more I play the more I ask if you guys have ever made a game before...

ur funny, i like you :P

But actually, it does raise the point that very few people talk like they have a discussion point, ive already made reference to most gamers being first order thinkers before. "This" is bad therefore the whole thing is wrong. The point about on death efects not being telegraphed or being hidden by loot are the second order thinking issues that cause problems with on death effects vs on death effects being bad.

As a simple side note i generally dislike one shot kills outside of being especially low quality builds or extra low level for a fight, if we are going to criticize lazy dev options, the one shot kills are that for me, in **every** game that has it for an 'on level' fight.

"

BloodknightUK#6716 wrote:

"

Glyff3083#1641 wrote:

I swear the more I play the more I ask if you guys have ever made a game before...

ur funny, i like you :P

But actually, it does raise the point that very few people talk like they have a discussion point, ive already made reference to most gamers being first order thinkers before. "This" is bad therefore the whole thing is wrong. The point about on death efects not being telegraphed or being hidden by loot are the second order thinking issues that cause problems with on death effects vs on death effects being bad.

As a simple side note i generally dislike one shot kills outside of being especially low quality builds or extra low level for a fight, if we are going to criticize lazy dev options, the one shot kills are that for me, in **every** game that has it for an 'on level' fight.

GGG seems to be aiming for 'hard' as their design philosophy, but as with so many game companies, they cannot properly define what makes a game 'hard'.

For something to be 'difficult' or 'hard' it needs to be achievable, but require execution, effort, or both.

Luck does not play into easy/hard. Any action taken by the game that can kill the player/set them back that does not have a viable counter from the player's side, is not a difficulty factor. It simply exists to annoy. Which given that your game is going to be free, it needs to have as little annoyance as possible, because the less you pay to play something, the less you will tolerate while doing so.

The on death effects are not properly telegraphed, generally because they happen on a patch of ground that is covered in dead mobs, masking the fact that you're about to explode.

There are very few visual or auditory clues that alert the player to a mechanic that they then need to react to. This is not a 'difficulty' mechanic, it's an annoyance. And given that you have set the game to respawn all mobs when you die, and deleting all loot, well... not only are you arbitrarily slaughtering the PC, you're then punishing them for having been slaughtered arbitrarily.

No matter how you look at that, it's bad design.

+1

This really starts to bother me getting into high tier maps and lvls where exp loss is significant. (Even after playing 5 years of PoE1)

It seems that all the worst one-shot-on-death mechanics that were introduced in PoE1 to deliberately kill the absolute giga zoom zoom power creep there were copied 1:1 over into PoE2. Now I do agree with Jonathan's "friction" argument and "meaningful" grind etc. etc. but this is just unreasonably brutal considering the consequences (the value and time investment lost).

There's a MASSIVE difference between a big abomination blowing up their body and warning the player that they're about to blow up (good telegraphing) and 90% of the other on death effects. The worst ones I've seen so far:
- the rather recent chaos homing missiles from ritual (can easily shotgun)
- the chaos flower bloom from affliction league (will absolutely shotgun)
- legacy detonate dead WIHTOUT the recent changes to telegraphing (completely invalidates the changes made to DD in PoE1)

The timeout for these is also just horrendous. It is basically impossible to purposefully get out of any of these, if you do not either:
- kill the affected rare from a little distance with "+ range" on weapons and GTFO
- kill the affected rare with a ranged skill
- try to get into the habit of measuring the last pixel on the HP bar of the mob, then try to kill it WHILE running outwards

Again, I agree that there should be mechanics that can kill any player, so it's definitely not an easy task to balance this, but oh my god, it's just SO much to lose at this point. In the past it was "just" a truck load of exp. Now it's also items, maps, time, precursor (juice) value AND even MORE exp than before from what it feels like at least.

I don't know if I agree with the "too much variety, so can't adapt" argument from above, since it's basically always: tap-kill-GTFO to survive these. But I find myself often: running back into another exploding delayed effect coming from the rare right next to that one, or items covering the ground where the effect should be. And after all it's still PoE, there's SO much stuff going on, my brain will usually just fart and tilt. IMHO they're just going off WAY too fast for it to be actually avoidable without "getting into the habit". But then again if you increase this timeout most endgame players will just run past the effect to begin with. It's a tough one. But it's super upsetting.

I do not understand who and why at GGG is so obsessed with on death effects. No one likes them and they are lazy way to add "challenge" and just pure annoyance. In PoE 1 some effects was increased visibility and sound due to people hating them and just being stupid game mechanic. PoE2 - here we fkn go again - hard to see blobs of shit that kills you when the enemy after constant dodging and shooting finally dead.

Why? No one needs this bullshit. There is already a lot of stuff to do and to die from? Why this lame cheezy garbage persist on increased scale.

I want to focus on avoiding enemy skills and attacks, not some turd rolling on the ground that is same colour as ground itself.

Man, this game is ultra frustrating after 12 hours of night shift.