Feedback and Suggestions - On Death Effects and One Shot Mechanics - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

Hi, I'm a long-time PoE player. I first started playing PoE almost 8 years ago, in 2015, during the Warbands/Tempest leagues. I have probably close to 10,000 hours played - 6,000 of which verifiable on Steam. The bulk of my playtime has been on the Hard-Core mode, but gradually i moved to Soft-Core.

Over the last several years i have been playing PoE less and less. But it's not because the game is boring, it's not because I've completed all the content, or because i don't feel challenged. It's primarily for two reasons.

The first - I simply don't enjoy Soft-Core as much as Hard-Core.

And the Second - PoE Hardcore in 2023 feels too frustrating and unsatisfying to play.

Hard-Core PoE is simply no longer fun to play, and Soft-Core isn't fun for me either. Now, why do i feel this way? I think my complaints and criticisms can be found echoed often by other players on the internet.

On Soft-Core, it feels like there's no weight or importance to my actions. Death is meaningless and so it doesn't matter if i build sufficient defenses or not. I get bored quickly on SC. For some reason it makes me feel especially like I'm on a treadmill. I personally don't feel challenged enough to play on Soft-Core, and i don't feel satisfied with my accomplishments on that game mode either.

Which is why in the past i spent most of my time on Hard-Core. But for me, Hard-Core feels too bad to play today mostly for two reasons. Those reasons can be simply summarized by "One-Shot Mechanics" and "On-Death Effects" (OSMs and ODEs). A simple Google search shows that I'm not the only PoE player who is frustrated by these types of game-design decisions. These two reasons are mostly why I've barely played PoE for the last several years.

But OSMs and ODEs aren't necessarily a problem by themselves. The real problem, and my particular point of contention, is when they aren't well-telegraphed and/or visually obvious. This leaves the HC player with no room to out-play the game's design. Instead you're left with a "surprise you died" effect, which is neither a fun nor satisfying way to lose a character.

Let me elaborate with an example from the HC Crucible league. I was playing a level 54 Necromancer progressing through the Southern Forest in Act 6. I'm using Summon Raging Spirits, Zombies (6), and a Stone Golem as my main abilities. While running through the forest i noticed my mobs are all hung-up on what looks like a Rare Ape Chieftain type monster. This one is particularly tanky and my minions are taking noticeably longer to kill it. Still, i don't have enough time to hover over the nameplate and read the monster Affixes (this is, i would argue, the norm in PoE - ie you clear so quickly you can't read monster affixes). The Ape drops some items which i click on to pick up. While my character is moving towards the items i notice what looks like some vaguely circular black smokey-looking projectile spiraling out of the location the Ape died. It's difficult to see against the dark-color of the Southern-Forest's shaded background but this strange black projectile isn't close to my character so no threat, or so i thought. Then suddenly my character's Health goes from 100-0 in less than a second. "You Died", the screen reads.

So, what killed me? I have absolutely no idea, and no way to know or verify. This is the crux of the matter. My character is level 54 in a Monster level 49 zone. I have 2,177 HP. My fire, cold and lightning resistances are all well above 75. I have at minimum 41% physical damage reduction, up to 60% while standing still. Some would say i am both over-leveled and over-geared for the zone I'm in. And yet i died in 1 hit, in less than a second, to what i presume must have been some kind of ODE. But i don't know precisely what it was. Was the Ape ghosted? I didn't see a ghosted-effect. Was this a corpse explosion? What was that black projectile? Did that kill me? Were there more of those? Did i accidentally run into one that i didn't see because the background zone setting is a dark shaded forest which makes it nearly impossible to distinguish the visuals of this particular ODE? Or was it something else? I. Don't. Know. And i have no way of knowing.

If i look at my character, lying there lifeless, on the ground; my Stone Golem and 3/6 of my Zombies are still alive. They're attacking a rare Shield-Crab. Where did this guy come from? Was this a parasite that came out of the Ape? After doing a little research, that means i might have been fighting a Host Ape. Was this thing responsible for my death? Again. I. Don't. Know. And i have no way to know. There's no official database/bestiary i can consult with a list of every monster's abilities. There are no death logs. No re-plays. Nothing. There's nothing i can do to learn from this death and prevent it from happening again because i don't even know what caused it. Not only that, but whatever it was - it was not telegraphed in a visually obvious enough way for me to avoid it in the first place.

And this is essentially the problem i have with PoE, and in particular Hard-Core mode, in 2023. My first time playing PoE in 2015 was on Hard-Core. I started on HC because i was familiar with ARPGs. I didn't use a guide, i learned the game organically at first. Needless to say, I died. I died a lot. And I lost my character many many times. I had to re-start many many times. But the reason this was acceptable back then was for two reasons.

First, i was new to the game so it was reasonable and expected that i would die to unknown things. Things like drop bears, volatile dead, elemental/physical reflect affixes on monsters, random bosses - all of these things killed me at least once (often the first time i encountered them). But i could actually learn from these deaths which is the second reason dieing was acceptable. Back then, i could easily identify and understand what killed me, why i died, and fix that problem to avoid dieing to it next time. So i felt like i was actually learning from my mistakes which provided some small form of positive feedback despite losing my character. But that is not something i can say about PoE today, in 2023. Despite GGG having removed or changed some of the more egregious OSMs and ODEs of the past, it somehow feels worse than ever. When you can't identify what killed you, you can't improve your game-play. And that makes HC feel especially bad.

And this happens all too often. It's not the first time this has happened to me, and i know it wont be the last time in the current iteration of the game. And it feels particularly bad when it happens so early in the game, such as in Act 6 of the campaign at level 54 when you're both over-leveled and over-geared. This is something that i personally feel like should not happen, whether on SC or HC. Not this early in the game at least. Because when it does happen, like it did to me just now, it just feels so completely bad and de-motivating that I, personally, will not be playing PoE Crucible league anymore at all. That's it. I'm sick of it. If this happened to me at level 95 i wouldn't feel so bad about it, at least by then i feel like I've played my character enough that i don't mind losing it. But when something like this happens so early in the game, it reminds me of how bad some of these design decisions are that i just don't want to continue playing.

So as someone whose played over 10,000 hours of this game, and as someone who really respects and holds the GGG development team with the highest esteem, I hope GGG really listens. You need to fix these issues in PoE 2. You need to. You need to make Hard-Core a game mode that players can actually play again. Get rid of all of these cheap, poorly telegraphed, or badly designed one-shot mechanics and on-death effects. If not, you need to change them so they are at the very least visually obvious. And you need to give players enough time to react to them so that they can actually be avoided. Telling players that they have to stand 10 meters away from all rare mobs and wait and watch after each kill for ODEs is not acceptable.

Give players a death log. If you're going to keep OSMs and ODEs in the game in their present form, you need to give HC players the necessary tools to improve their game-play and try to prevent the same things from happening again in the future. Telling HC players to download OBS and record themselves playing is also not acceptable - not when you have the tools to allow players to do this in-game with more accuracy and certainty.

If you don't do these things, (personally for me) the repeatability of PoE 2 will be much lower than it could otherwise be. In this current form i would probably play through PoE 2 once on SC for the novelty, and might never touch it again after that. this also obviously makes me much less likely to support the game with in-game mtx purchases and supporter packs. And if I'm not alone in thinking this, it makes me wonder just what GGG are thinking when they leave these kinds of things in the game? Why do they think these things are good for the game?

I'm very sympathetic. What you say is true and frustrating for many, at least I've heard similar complaints here time and time again. Also voiced many times for folks playing softcore.

The only suggestion I have is maybe trying Ruthless mode? It is challenging in its own way. I enjoyed playing through the storyline last league in Ruthless.

reading map mods same as rare monster mods could also be very beneficial.

Cause dying DURING the campaign just means that you don't play cautious enough so softcore might be the better mode for ya. The watered down rare mods aren't even that dangerous anymore since the last big nerf, they only get somewhat dangerous during juicy 80-100% deli maps or 8 mod t16. Something you are far away from during the campaign

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Pashid wrote:

dying DURING the campaign just means that you don't play cautious enough so softcore might be the better mode for ya.

I cannot agree with this. As much as i would like to be able to read all of the affixes on every rare mob, PoE is not designed to allow players the ability to do this.

This is for several reasons.

First, most monsters die too quickly for you to read their mods in the first place.

Second, if a monster is on your screen and you're not attacking it, it's probably attacking you. To read the mods you have to hover and hold your mouse over the monster while you divert your eyes to the top of the screen to read the mods. This is a usually bad decision, especially on HC, because if you're looking at the mods you're not looking at the monsters on your screen which are trying to kill you. And if you're reading the mods, you're probably not attacking it (because if you are it should be dead), which is another obvious mistake. If you're attacking the mob you can't read the mods because as i said in point 1, the mobs die too quickly.

Third, you usually can't take your eyes off the screen to read the mods on a rare mob because the screen is full of other monsters that you need to be aware of and because you typically need to position your character to avoid monster attacks which means keeping your eyes on the screen (and not reading mods).

So, i don't think this is about not being cautious enough. As i explained in my post, i'm over-leveled, over-geared, resist capped, with lots of phys mitigation. That was me being extra cautious, some might say overly-cautious. The specific example i gave above is not one which is easily resolved by being reasonably cautious. And that's another problem. You shouldn't have to be so cautious that you literally need to stay away from every rare mob for a couple seconds after you've killed it, that's just bad game design.

You should be able to clearly see threats on your screen and have enough time to react to them. I don't even know what i died to, and as a result i can't prevent it from happening again unless i adopt an overly defensive play-style. The only solution i have to avoid a repeat is to play the game in a way that makes me feel like i'm wasting 99.999% of my time because i have to play around the 0.001% chance that the mob might kill me with a one-shot on-death effect. And this is objectively bad game design.

It really doesn't take much. I was hunting beasts for Einhar in a low-tier map, and got hammered from out of nowhere with no warning. Rather than logging back in immediately, I scoped out the rare that got me, a yellow Einhar critter. "Voodoo Doll... Always crits."

He was so bad I actually skipped him. He was much deadlier than the red beast which I did kill. Easily.

It might be useful to have some way of seeing the creature mods without having to stand still and mouse over, all the while taking it on the chin. It's not enough to take a post-mortem peek. ='[.]'=

As much as on death effects have become much "better" to deal with, feeling less unfair than a few years ago, I agree that the remaining BS that is possible is still ... BS.

Corpse exploding ArchNemesis modifiers is probably the one I hate the most, (I think I lost one character in a9 to it last year maybe, and it was also quite tanky), the DD totems still do have a really stupid range (it's baffling to me how this is still a thing) but at least they are not instant anymore.

Stydian Revenant is also one big "FU" to the players, I haven't played melee in a little while so I always keep my distance and blast them from afar, making sure to be far from their explosion.

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Pashid wrote:

reading map mods same as rare monster mods could also be very beneficial.

Cause dying DURING the campaign just means that you don't play cautious enough so softcore might be the better mode for ya. The watered down rare mods aren't even that dangerous anymore since the last big nerf, they only get somewhat dangerous during juicy 80-100% deli maps or 8 mod t16. Something you are far away from during the campaign

Reading every affix on every monsters ? In PoE in 2023 ?

That's LOT of bad faith to start with ...

The rest of your post seems to indicate that you simply haven't read the OP.

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Madmallard wrote:

No you definitely should just move away from mobs when you kill them and it's just a requirement of the game on hardcore. It is what it is.

Let's not give players incentives to pick up loot, shall we ?

What a terrible design it would be, if players were to want to collect items that monsters dropped on the floor.

/s