GGGuys, can we please stop the vicious circle of unfair mechanics?

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RogueMage wrote:

With a level playing field, players would trounce the monsters' simplistic AI tactics. This is still just as true in PoE as it was in Diablo II. There is no way a staticly programmed monster can compete with the human ability to learn and adapt to an opponent's skills and tactics. Monsters need an unfair advantage to pose a lethal threat to players - such as sneak attacks, overwhelming mobs, damage resistance, high speed, immobilizing effects, or destructive power.

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johnKeys wrote:

why do some monsters can?

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RogueMage wrote:

With a level playing field, players would trounce the monsters' simplistic AI tactics. This is still just as true in PoE as it was in Diablo II. There is no way a staticly programmed monster can compete with the human ability to learn and adapt to an opponent's skills and tactics. Monsters need an unfair advantage to pose a lethal threat to players - such as sneak attacks, overwhelming mobs, damage resistance, high speed, immobilizing effects, or destructive power.

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Sayyid wrote:

It is more than possible to make a game both 100% "fair" and extremely difficult.

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Deankar wrote:

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Sayyid wrote:

It is more than possible to make a game both 100% "fair" and extremely difficult.

Sure is, but it's much easier to just make the enemies deal a lot of damage and call it a day.

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KenshiD wrote:

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johnKeys wrote:

look, I know you have your definition of difficulty and your own vision of "hardcore" - and I disagree with both - but there is a kind of "difficulty" that just frustrates the player, and creates a feeling that the CPU is simply cheating, rather than challenging.




some enemies are good and fair, even if more than a bit stupid in terms of AI.
heck, most are.
some are even exceptionally well-designed, like Soulless Watchers for example.
some bosses are fun to fight - even if more than a bit OP - because they still follow the ground-rules of the game mechanics. a couple of them even have the AI to creatively challenge the player.
for example Vaal, Piety (not the Temple Map version, ffs), and Dominus.
hated, but fair.

and then there are those, who just go IDKFA on your ass, and/or make use of the game's technical flaws to "ramp up the difficulty".

Since balancing and monster abilities and AI is my favorite topic I will comment on these points.

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• if you know that a certain skill will create a huge problem of desync or frame drops - why give it to an enemy now?
  enemies still move and attack - at least server side - while the player does not.
  the player doesn't even know what the heck is going on, at that time.
  improve the framework, and only then give that monster this skill.

You are probably talking about Cyclone?
While I agree that desync makes a lot of things unpredictable there will always be situations in which one could argue that you shouldn't use skill X because desync. Very little skills in PoE don't have the chance to do something stupid while desynced.

So I do agree on fixing some of the issues first but still it's not the best argument for removing something entirely.

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• if a player cannot possibly spam a heavily-supported mega-skill at a blindingly-fast rate - because he'll run out of mana or get dangerously low on life (BM), and there's no way in hell he can achieve such attack/cast speeds even with the "uberest" of uber gear - why do some monsters can?
  and no, it's not leech: they don't hit anything and yet are still able to relentlessly keep spamming like crazy.

Two things. Probably an inconsistency in PoE.
If you fight Hailrake in Normal act1 he will only fire 3-4 ice spears at first and then has to go melee (because he is out of mana).
While this happens here it is also true that there are a lot of monsters which apparently have infinite resources and can spam infinitely.

For example Merveil.
So instead of her spamming ice spears and cold snap forever, why not give her cool downs but also make the skills stronger?
Charge up skills are also nice because you can actually dodge them.
(which is why I like the atziri fight so much you can actually kill her without taking much or any damage)

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• Vaal skills. yes, those skills a player typically needs to wipe out an entire area worth of monsters just to use a couple of times. and yet some enemies can just constantly spam those?
  unreal. unfair.

Again, cooldowns and signals are important.
An enemy uses a vaal skill or any other very strong skill, show that! Then it is always the players fault for not noticing it.
Cooldowns because those powerful skills shouldn't be spammed.

There are also just some elements which are much stronger if an enemy uses it than if a player uses it.
Cast when damage taken on an enemy is always more OP than a player (because usually that enemy has way more life than us and thus can proc those skills way more often).

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• traps. oh man don't get me started. I have a cooldown on mine. and I need a very certain belt that RNG will never give me, for the privilege of having my traps auto-detonate.

While I like the idea of traps for enemies, those who spam them (the act 3 Evangelist guy and of course Rima the spammer) are unbalanced and unfair.

Trap should be used strategically not spam able.

Give trap enemies more than just a trap skill.

In general spam skills are terrible on enemies (like lightning herald) because you can't do anything against it but gear checking. That's just bad difficulty.