Just When The Game Had Roped Me Back In, I Think I’m Done Again

So heartbreaking.

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Regulator wrote:

Its just not fair. People with less hp having easier time in the lab, traps negate defensive skill choices in the tree as well as life and armour from gear, but movement speed and player's dmg remain the same, unaffected completely. Not very well thought after all. Despite what most people think, labyrinth actually promotes fast paced glass cannon builds.

It also isn't fair that the rest of the game promotes mindless HP stacking due to the ever-present oneshots, which cripples build diversity. I actually found this part of the labyrinth pretty fair, you still have to deal with the often overtuned Izaro anyway and still need to sacrifice fun and stack HP instead.

Regarding Izaro I find the design or at least implementation to be a bit conflicted with itself.

In theory the fight has a built in difficulty selector and you sacrifice some loot for an easier fight but in practice it doesn't work like that because of respawn.

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sidtherat wrote:

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Jaxxxson wrote:

Now ignoring traps for a moment, the labyrinth has some of the most perplexing balance I’ve seen in Path of Exile, which is really saying something. Izaro is always far harder than the area level, you either have to twink your gear incredibly hard or be about 10+ levels above the zone to really stand an actual fighting chance. On top of this, the fact that he gets bonuses to his fight that you have to deal with while fighting him are so back and forth between being too strong and too weak that it just feels like I’m playing a slot machine in order to get passed the boss fights. Sometimes he has a mod I can’t handle, sometimes he doesn’t. That unfortunately makes it impossible for me to complete on certain days.

i think that what you meant here is that Lab forces you to make less powerful builds by making sure you at least give a serious damn about your defences/sustain/gameplay mechanics

Izaro is perfectly doable when one has a Build, not a Dps-dealer. With sorted out flasks, balanced defence/offence ratio, understanding of what flasks are for etc etc. i did his as melee at lvl 64 without serious twink gear (wings of entropy duelist.. so not a cookie cutter)

Izaro fight is predictable and most probably THE best fight mechanics-wise in the entire game. It does not punish melee players, it removes EXTREME kiting from ranged (yet rewards good movement speed etc ranged perks), the attacks are all telegraphed and auxiliary mechanics are challenging yet possible to 'solve' without calling them extreme

You do not need to be +10 levels or whatever, you just need to have a decent build (as in offence/defence ratio, though-out sustain etc). Several characters that can speed run Gorge despite having 3.2k hp simply cannot pass Izy (and lab, as their users are pretty much used to right-click to victory) because he is a nice roadblock. It is also impossible to zerg him - most probably a sign of things to come. POE will never be a serious 'hardcore' game when you can logout-to-safety..

This fight alone should curb extreme power creep (also called as 'fun') caused by low-mid-skilled players copying builds and faceroling everything without understanding a tiny bit about this game. Lab does the same - traps are mere decoration when you know what you are doing. For new/bad players they can be impossible to pass. They can learn or leave.

I understand people do not like the lab - everyone has a right to like whatever he chooses to. But great feats bring great rewards. If one cannot 'cope' with traps for 5 combined minutes across 3 difficulties - then maybe the rewards have to wait (yes, 5 minutes MAX of traps content - almost entire lab is trap-free and is nothing else than small maps with a theme - esp when done on-level)

+1 this!

Some people are so used to facerolling the game with their trillion damage, no defense builds. The lab in my opinion should be the first step into ending these power creep builds. the game was designed to be a hard game with thought put into the character's build and skills, and its maps and enemies should reflect on that too. The lab is a skill check and that's exactly what this game needs to be, not that POE is a very easy game but imo its been getting easier as of late.

Now i wanted to add that i really enjoyed lab and i hope that they add more different stuff when the future updates roll in, not necessarily more traps but new stuff that will make players think and focus on the positioning and tactics and be patient when dealing with stuff that can't be solved with standing still and right clicking until everything explodes.

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Khisanth wrote:

Regarding Izaro I find the design or at least implementation to be a bit conflicted with itself.

In theory the fight has a built in difficulty selector and you sacrifice some loot for an easier fight but in practice it doesn't work like that because of respawn.

Respawn O.o

Some mechanics (I think conduit and the one with those statues) are hard to entirely turn of, but at least the later isn't all that strong. All the others are easy to disable unless you deal too much damage (which then should make izaro a non-issue anyway).

I find most of them really fair. Gargoyles and other adds can just be killed, here is again a melee issue, because for the essence fight you have to keep izaro away from the essences while killing them... which is hard for melees.

It is also interesting that Merciless Izaro felt a lot easier than his normal and cruel counterparts. He still hits pretty hard, but almost all of his heavy hits are well telegraphed. And since the lab resets each day it isn't that hard to aim for the mechanics that are more fitting for a certain build. I feel that is a really good design.

It also does something else, that was prevelent during Tempest and Warbands. The Labyrinth encourages players to work together. Similar to how they shared information about Tempests or Warbands in maps, they do so now with the labyrinth. This also gives opportunity to people who dislike the labyrinth to get a rather favorable layout with the right izaro mechanics to be done with it rather quickly.

So, there's really two complaints here.

I'm not going to talk about the Izaro fight at all. I don't have any major issues with it.

The traps, on the other hand, I do. The entire concept of them is not something that I find fun in any way. While people are saying 'have movement skills', and this is true, not all movement skills are made equally, as well as the limitations involved. After all, if you're trying to click on a spot and misjudge how far it is, suddenly you're running forward into traps. Also, while the fire floors, sawblades and spikes aren't horrible, as they either don't take huge chunks of damage in one shot or prevent you from moving briefly, the doombas and spinning blade totems can be viciously deadly, especially if you jump into one of them while it's moving the same location you are.

Where this really becomes an issue is that people are now avoiding content in order to complete the lab. When I did normal, I checked every area, tried to find Argus, looked for secret areas and all that -- now? I'm getting to the point where I just want the fastest path from A to B, because I'm tired of dealing with the traps. As soon as content is skipped because it's overly frustrating or hard (as opposed to simply being unrewarding), there's an issue -- and it definitely exists in the Labyrinth due to traps.

I know, the game is meant to be hardcore (and that's mainly what I play). There's a difference between being hardcore, though, and being frustratingly difficult and punishing. Yes, I know there's damage mitigation and so on that exists -- however, most of that stuff really doesn't come into play until level 62+, which doesn't help a lot of people.

I don't know what the solution is. I don't know that removing the traps would be the right thing, and I don't think it is. Maybe changing how some of the traps work to where they can be avoided by paying attention (*cough*DOOMBA*cough*) or making them less immediately deadly if you happen to hit one twice in a row, or make the area not flat out require certain types of potions (Staunching, Uniques) in order to survive mistakes.

This is especially important given the recent ongoing issues with game crashes, lag, memory leaks, stuttering and all the other things that have hit Path since Ascendency hit. I'm not blaming GGG for those issues, I know they're working on them and fixing them as quickly as they can. I understand that. The traps just make content not-fun and almost entirely skippable.

Thanks, double post!

I'm a relatively casual player, and don't level many characters, but the labyrinth is definitely something that will prevent me from making any new guys.

Would be nice to have the Ascendancy plaque at the half-way point, so that you don't need to complete the entire thing every time. ~_~

I finished it at level 74 or something on merciless, and am definitely glad it's over with.

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sidtherat wrote:

If one cannot 'cope' with traps for 5 combined minutes across 3 difficulties - then maybe the rewards have to wait (yes, 5 minutes MAX of traps content - almost entire lab is trap-free and is nothing else than small maps with a theme - esp when done on-level)

The highlighted part or sidtherat's statement is misleading. He keeps repeating this. When people called him on it in another thread he posted the supposed proof that his statement was true that labyrinth runs should only take 5 or 7 minutes. First, let me state that sidtherat LOVES labyrinth play. This is fine, of course. But, it means that he plays it over and over, again and again, which he freely admits. So, he posted a video of HIM running the labyrinth. He admits that he had just previously run the labyrinth FOUR times before his video run. This was the exact same layout, four times immediately previously. He went amazingly fast through it in the video, didn't bother picking up loot, didn't kill monsters unless he had to, all the traps were perfectly scouted out so he knew which ones he could just barrel thru and which ones to be careful with etc.. He finished in about 8 minutes. (He got lost during the run for a minute, which just demonstrates how difficult it is to find your way around in this content.) So someone that doesn't have the layout memorized and plays the labyrinth as little as possible, it would be absolutely impossible to do it in 5 minutes. I would guess that a half hour would be a much more reasonable figure for someone that does the labyrinth as little as possible.

The problem for many people is that the labyrinth is not fun to them. This should be the message to GGG here in the feedback section. Please don't let others intimidate you into not giving your feedback to GGG here in the feedback section of the forum.

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Jaxxxson wrote:

This is also highlighted if I make new characters; I have to deal with it, 3 times, every time. It’s simply not fun for me and it’s a shame it’s necessary to really unlock fun build potential.

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DarkPaladin4000 wrote:

I'm a relatively casual player, and don't level many characters, but the labyrinth is definitely something that will prevent me from making any new guys.

I finished it at level 74 or something on merciless, and am definitely glad it's over with.

I´m 100% with you guys. Until now, PoE did encourage to reroll characters, I often did and managed to refine my leveling strategies & pathing on every attempt. But the Labyrinth soooo strongly discourages me from even trying new stuff, because after getting my 3 high level characters through it, I just don´t want to set foot in it again. Not because it´s difficult, it just has nothing in it that I otherwise enjoy in PoE.

Some days I think "come on, give it one more try !!!" but then I check the Lab layout on reddit, see that map and immediately wish this weren´t part of the game.