(Oct 5 NZT) Two-hour Turbo Hardcore Test League

Brutus just took down my summoning witch. Didn't take much, 2 hits and that was it for me.

Very fun event! I look forward to more of them.

Not too bad.

Bosses were nice and tough (as intended hopefully) and took down a number of people, you couldn't approach under leveled too drastically and under geared (resists).

The typical mobs though weren't much harder in most cases, infact it was easier/faster in a number of zones because you were able to group them up and AOE them at a faster rate.

The speed cap on some mobs is too low in my opinion, the monkeys, bandits and the humanoids on terraces/coves are EXACTLY the same speed (or at least it feels like it). (Then again if it wasn't capped the levels of de-sync would be fairly substantial I can imagine)

I can see later act2 bosses and the bandits being VERY difficult though (especially if you want to kill Oak), guess we'll find that out during the 3-hour.

Died with less than 2min to go - I was rushing and trying to get to level 14 in the Coves. Ran into an elite and group of blue scavengers which I normally would have backed away from but went charging in for the EXP. Dead within seconds. Had a blast and hope GGG does more of these.

Rolled my usual shadow race build, hit terraces and my internet decided to flip out for the next 30-40 mins or so. No chance of winning at this point but i continued on nonetheless. Brutus was brutal and the goats in gate were fairly hard, but otherwise i didnt find it nearly as difficult as i expected. I suppose 60% speed is the same as 3x frenzy charges and thats generally not overpowering either.

Reached merveil without enough time to kill her so i just went back and farmed for the last 5 mins or so. 2nd place shadow in the end.

Overall this mode seems fun for short term races but i dont see the appeal lasting for a long term event.

Thanks for the fun race, looking forward to the 3hour!

Wasn't planning on playing a witch, but decided to anyways.
What_is_turbo finished 8th as a solo witch.



Got the nice wand in the caverns just before Merveil, and the boots dropped from her.

RACE STATS

Top 10

Congratulations to all winners!

Everyone else, better skill next time.


-Temple of Exiles

Fun event, played solo gs marauder, died my first about 15min in. Rolled a new one and played a bit more cautiously, ended up at lvl 20 in western forest, #6 in the ladder.

Brutus was hard, almost died. Merveil was surprisingly easy, killed her at lvl 13 with ~50% cold res and 3 medium life flasks, didnt even have to use any tp's. Leveled a bit in fellshrine and continued to western forest.

I appreciate the effort to make a more challenging version of the game. However the current turbo version is not quite what I expected it to be. The speed cap is applied to many of the mobs I expected to be most dangerous. It's movement speed that's very deadly, even more so than attack/cast speed in some cases. I tend to find that in ARPGs it's the rare mobs with 'moves faster' attribute that are potentially the most deadly, simply because if and when things go bad, you can't always escape.

I played solo in the turbo race.

I certainly felt the added difficulty from the normal monsters in most areas. I took things slower than usual and came out of act1 at around 70 minutes compared to the more usual 47. I did Merveil at 14 for the benefit of having large flasks instead of level 12 which is the usual. It could have probably been done sooner but it would've been dangerous. Which leads me to the biggest issue I had with the race format:

The boss fights were hard, but it was the bad kind of hard. You're left at the mercy of RNG and whether or not they decide to chain attacks at you. Brutus for instance, if he decides to slam twice in a row there's not much you can do about it. To a lesser extent the same is true for Merveil as well.

In WOW they have the bosses and they want them to be very hard. So the bosses hit the tank hard. The problem is tanks are semi evasion based with a chance for bosses to miss, and a chance for tanks to block part of the damage. The problem is what happens when the tank fails to dodge or block twice in a row. You can't have a scenario where the raid dies because of such RNG. Not to talk about bosses getting a critical hit. For warrior tanks, the bosses can't crit them, simply because there is no way to balance a fight where a boss may hit a tank for 150% (or is it 200%? can't remember) of the damage, especially not when X Y and Z boss mechanics also deal damage to the tank alongside it (Druid tanks did have a small chance to be critted, but they were heavily EHP based with massive hp and armor and were somewhat of a special case). Some bosses do hit the tank extra hard but it was used sparingly, and usually in a timely fashion such as an enrage or on a timer so that the tanks could use cooldowns and the healers knew it was coming to make up for it. Usually though if the tank died, it was due to taking incidental damage from other boss mechanic or being under geared or healers mistake, and not just the boss rolling the dice and hitting the tank in the face super hard.

In PoE, same applies. If Brutus deals some 140 damage in normal and players are not supposed to survive 2 slams, or even a normal hit + slam, then the possibility of taking 2 such hits shouldn't be RNG, it should be up to the player to avoid it (speaking of which, boss' special OMGWTFBBQ moves such as Brutus or Vaal slams shouldn't be allowed to crit players, I was shocked to learn that they can). The more you bump the damage, the more you'll pigeonhole players into certain ways to deal with the boss, or worse, certain classes / builds.

So how do you make a challenging boss encounter? By adding mechanics to it. It's mostly all been done and tested before in the various games. Vaal is a much better designed fight in this regard (speaking of which, 60% faster attack would make Vaal's slam unavoidable. Another case of bad boss fight for a 'hard' mode). To make a boss fight harder you can add fire for players to not stand in, add adds that players need to kill first, add boss enrages for players to run away during, add safe spots on ground, make Brutus slam have much greater range but slower attack time, anything that isn't 'oops Brutus decided to groundslam 2-3 times in a row. Guess you die'.

(I may sound bitter but I assure you I'm not. I didn't die to Brutus or anything. It's just text doesn't convey tone very well =p)



So what can I suggest you do? I do like the idea of an extra difficulty setting very much. And if you guys made a mode where everything deals x10 times the amount of damage I would play that and probably enjoy it more than I'd like to admit, but I'm a masochist like that. Here are some suggestions (some of these can be combined with the faster movement / attack / cast idea, or between themselves:

- The most obvious one is to further tweak the hp / speed / attack speed / damage of mobs. It does require a lot of tweaking if you want to keep things fairly balanced between the classes and builds.

- A league where there's a constant chaos damage over time would be hard to tweak right. How about a league where flasks drain of their charges over time?

- Ironman league, no shops, no flask refill in towns.

- A league with substantially reduced rarity find. The idea is that magical items would be as rare as rare items, and rare would be as rare as unique. Orb drop rates would be adjusted downwards accordingly. Alternatively, a league with no rare items at all, and players are forced to use magical items.

- A league with a completely randomized passive skill tree. Take the passive tree and randomize the position of the nodes (possibly shuffle keystone nodes between themselves). Release the passive tree 24 hours / X hours before league start to give players some time to pick a build. Rewards will have to based on class rank as certain classes may end up with better trees than others.

- Survival type league where players have to progress through increasingly difficult levels or waves, and the winners are those who progress the furthest before dying (tune the difficulty so that everyone will die, ultimately). Make it a party event and let players form parties before the event starts. It would be an hour - few hours at the longest. It can come in two formats; either players hold a position and wave after wave spawns and attacks the party, or alternatively it will be similar to maps with a portal at the end of each area leading to the next level area. It can be same area, similar to crematorium, or it can be different areas of the game.

- Have each area of the game spawn with a rare map mods on it. So that the terraces may have 40% pack size, monsters deal 27% more damage, 40% increased area, area is inhabited by Rhoas. Make it so that areas have 5-10 minutes delay before they can be refreshed.

I agree with Panda on all of that.

Also I'd like to specifically agree on that the bosses weren't actually HARDER in the sense they required more skill, and this is something I'd like to see (they were difficult, but for the wrong reasons, as Panda has mentioned).