An idea to make lab traps less frustrating without making them less difficult

You know those parts where there's trap after trap stretching offscreen and you have no idea where you need to go and how to stay alive on the way? Here's an idea.

At either end of such trap series, there is a special interactable object. Let's call it the Ethereal Stone. When you touch the Ethereal Stone, 3 things happen:

1. You turn completely ethereal, and can walk through traps and enemies without them affecting you in any way. Traps do no damage, the Temp Chains sentinels don't slow you down, Draught sentinels don't drain your flask charges, etc.
2. You become unable to use any skills or interact with any world object other than the Ethereal Stone you touched.
3. Impassable magical barriers manifest all around the gauntlet, preventing you from leaving the vicinity.

So, you're free to walk around and safely scout out the immediate area. But besides that, the only thing you can actually do is go back to the Ethereal Stone you touched and touch it again. Doing so returns you to normal. You can use the Ethereal Stone as many times as you want with no penalty.

It seems like a good suggestion that would resolve the visibility complaint that is frequently voiced regarding the labyrinth.

yes, a visual into what's ahead will be really good, coz often you will have to run and just pray nothing crazy is beyond the screen... which is just too dangerous for HC

I absolutely agree with the idea of this for the current state of endgame trials at least.

My big problems with those traps are the fact that there are too many basically asynchronous things that stretch offscreen that you cannot analyze. It's so fucking stupid. You just find yourself spamming movement skills forward blindly and hitting a flask when you do take damage.

At least in my mind (ie a non action rpg design), the thing with a proper labyrinth design is that you should be able to complete it without ever taking damage at base movement speed but instead I see a floor spike in endgame trial where you cannot move across (at 100% movement speed) without getting hit because it's length spans so god damn far and it's period is same as every other single floor trap. And at the end of it is an a synchronous set of floor traps leading to a different asynchronous floor spike pattern (see: top left part of trial of piercing thruth. Also fucking light radius man. Theres already a map that reduces light radius (Whakawairua Tuahu) why not just let labyrinths give us max light radius or some shit.

Having >1 life and all these bullshit action rpg tools is just an extra advantage for us, but trap placement design should not be designed around that fact. Too bad this is in an ARPG eh?

There is definatly an aspect of yolo into this room to the lab. It was probably designed to test reflexes and quick decision making while under pressure. I would not even attempt to argue for or against it. Some People do not like it at all, this is pretty plain to see.

the only problem I see here is with Chris' statement that the team was perfectly fine with some people not liking all the content.

It would be nice to be able to scout out the lab traps in advance.

Like all of PoE, though, once you get used to it you learn what sort of trap layouts there are and so it's no longer an issue.

I guess the difference with lab traps and the rest of PoE though is for other things that you need to learn about (eg: Atziri, Izaro fight, etc) you can just look up what to do, or watch videos etc.... With the lab you have to try it first in game to find out.

Unless they start naming all of the trap gauntlets so you can google search for them or something.

I have simply suggested to adjust the trap density: there are some areas where there are too many traps in a meter, but aside for that zones the lab for 99% of the time is without traps (or better, there is one only once, which is totally harmless especially because you fight monsters in those times so you leech and gain flask charges).

They should balance this thing. The uberlab, compared to the trials, is a piece of cake.

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Serge91 wrote:

I have simply suggested to adjust the trap density: there are some areas where there are too many traps in a meter, but aside for that zones the lab for 99% of the time is without traps (or better, there is one only once, which is totally harmless especially because you fight monsters in those times so you leech and gain flask charges).

They should balance this thing. The uberlab, compared to the trials, is a piece of cake.

Yes this.

I would also make more traps destroyable so you can choose whether you just run through traps or destroy it (consume time).
Damage dealt by traps should be scaled with other content in the game (no % of your life) cos It doesn´t make sense in ARPG.
Ah and more visibility (light radius) and ZOOM OUT overall so we can think what to do nxt.

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