Subject: Map Mods Can Create "Unplayable" Combos for Certain Builds

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Lord_of_Death#1926 wrote:

The Feeling of Wasted Time

Hey GGG,

First, thanks for an amazing game. I love PoE’s depth and build diversity. That said, I wanted to share a recent experience that felt particularly bad and see if there’s any room for adjustment, not just on difficulty, but on respecting player investment.


map modifiers with:

Monsters have 79% chance to block attack damage

63% reduced cooldown recovery rate

53% less character defenses

-15% maximum elemental resistances

Reduced aura effect

For a CoC build, "79% block chance" and "63% reduced cooldown recovery" are a death sentence. Blocking prevents the hit—and thus the critical strike—from occurring at all, stopping my triggers before they start. The cooldown recovery penalty then ensures that even if I do trigger, it happens at a glacial pace.

These two mods together don't lower my DPS; they surgically remove the core gameplay loop my entire build is designed around. I cease to be a CoC character and become someone spinning in circles, hoping for a lucky, ineffective hit.

The Insulting Defense Strip: So, I'm doing no damage. The monsters, however, are hitting just fine. The "53% less defenses," "-15% max res," and "reduced aura effect" then systematically dismantle every defensive layer I've invested in. My carefully crafted survivability—the gear, the passive points, the aura setup—is rendered paper-thin. The game is telling me: "Not only will you not kill anything, but you also can't survive."

The "Waste of Time" Feeling
This is the core of the frustration. It's not about losing; it's about the complete lack of agency and the disrespect for the time and passion I've invested.

My Preparation is Wasted: The hours spent crafting gear, balancing stats, and fine-tuning cooldown breakpoints are made meaningless by two lines of map mod text.



A Suggestion for Relief
I'm not asking for the game to be easy. I love hard content. I'm asking for the difficulty to come from monster behavior, dangerous synergies, and execution—not from mods that fundamentally delete a build's way of playing the game.

Could we consider:

Preventing certain extreme mod combinations from rolling together (e.g., high block chance + heavy cooldown recovery reduction)?

Reworking "binary" mods to be punishing but not absolute? For example, "Monsters have a high chance to block, and blocked hits drastically reduce trigger effectiveness" would still be brutally hard for CoC but not an automatic "skip."

Adding an optional UI warning when a map rolls multiple mods known to completely disable common archetypes?

What do you all think? Have you run into similar combos that didn't just challenge your build, but made it—and the time you put into it—feel completely invalidated?

Cheers,
A slightly salty but still dedicated Exile