Fixing Labyrinth - Solution Only Replies

There are way to many posts about labyrinth and few have solutions. In any argument you need to present 2 things. The problem, and a solution. I am going to do that. Feel free to agree or post your own solutions. No complaints necessary we got hundreds of posts for that.

1. Trap damage is unfair for non-armor based builds. The traps do % of max health and max energy shield as damage. Less hp may make people believe traps are less effective on them, and vice verca if you have a lot of hp. In actuality they are equivalent. 20% of a 2000 max life is just as painful as 20% of 6000 max life for the other player. In the same time they would both die at the same speed. Armor seems to reduce the % damage. This makes it much easier to progress through Lab on my Juggernaut along with CWDT Immortal Call and endurance charges. Other classes with less armor, say sub 15k are going to die much faster. A spike trap might 1 hit them for example. Energy shield based classes will die in 1 or 2 hits as they have few ways to regenerate ES. As such Lab progression is based on class not on gear. Of course you can avoid traps, but many of the layouts have over a screen full of traps, and very few builds have movement skills that are very fast. Leap slam is only fast if your weapon is fast, lightning warp requires investment in reduced duration and cast speed. Some movement skills are weapon restricted which results in some builds unable to have a movement skill that is fast at all.

Solution. Make the traps damage flat damage. This makes progression more fair for all classes in the game. Maybe somewhere between 1-2k flat damage, or higher if needed.

2. Lab Size is too large, and requires too much of a time investment than some people just can't spare every time they log on. Sometimes you just want to run a few quick maps and log off. You can't log on and do a quick lab run and log off like you can Uber Atziri for example. I love the design of lab but it is way to large.

Solution. Make Lab smaller, or make 1 large area whee you can fight Izaro 3 times. Maybe reduce the difficulty or boring aspect of going through several side areas to get keys just to progress. You can even let us keep unused keys to make subsequent runs faster.

3. Another issue is players getting Disconnected in Lab and being forced to restart. This can get frustrating and cause players to ignore the content entirely.

Solution. Add an instance timer and when you log back in you are put at the start of the zone. Five minutes is reasonable.

4. A lot of people are frustrated about ascendency points being bound to lab completion. Personally I think the points have to be bound to Lab, as it is the hardest content in the game (besides maybe shaper) and it doesn't require players be t10+ map viable which is rng based.

Solution. I believe we can have a happy medium. It is already quite boring to do the trials on characters before ascendency, and quite boring to do the labs on multiple characters. If I got 15 characters it would take me at least a week to get all ascendency poinys for each character, especially if they can't even kill Izaro. I think the best solution is to have Labs only need to be completed once, and the ascendency points are rewarded account wide for the server you are on (standard, league, or hardcore). New characters will unlock all ascendency points upon completion of any Lab once as long as they have completed Uber lab on 1 character, or else they get ascendency points equal to hardest difficulty lab they have completed.

4. Many people dislike the no portals allowed. I believe the reason this is not allowed is due to the keys which are not allowed to be deposited into your stash and as such this mechanic prevents doing that outside of lab.

Solution. Allow keys to be deposited in stash and as such allow the use of portals in Lab. This has 2 benefits. Keys become a new valuable currency that aids in faster lab progression, the thing people want right now. It also becomes something worth trading, which creates a new market for all players no matter which Lab they can complete. This makes Lab rewarding even if you fail to beat Izaro. His treasure and enchants can be the reward for full completion. Alternatively reduce the drop rates of red maps in Lab to compensate for new clear speed increase.

5. Some people have complained about Izaros difficulty. I think he is fine as is.

You're assuming it's broke...by the looks of it it is working as intended....you just don't like it

I enjoy it as is, because I am a juggernaut and can run Uber Lab with ease. Its other people who lab is not fair for. These are solutions to make it fair for every one.

Constructive feedback only please.

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Jgizle wrote:

1. Trap damage is unfair for non-armor based builds. The traps do % of max health and max energy shield as damage.

Spoiler

Less hp may make people believe traps are less effective on them, and vice verca if you have a lot of hp. In actuality they are equivalent. 20% of a 2000 max life is just as painful as 20% of 6000 max life for the other player. In the same time they would both die at the same speed. Armor seems to reduce the % damage. This makes it much easier to progress through Lab on my Juggernaut along with CWDT Immortal Call and endurance charges. Other classes with less armor, say sub 15k are going to die much faster. A spike trap might 1 hit them for example. Energy shield based classes will die in 1 or 2 hits as they have few ways to regenerate ES. As such Lab progression is based on class not on gear. Of course you can avoid traps, but many of the layouts have over a screen full of traps, and very few builds have movement skills that are very fast. Leap slam is only fast if your weapon is fast, lightning warp requires investment in reduced duration and cast speed. Some movement skills are weapon restricted which results in some builds unable to have a movement skill that is fast at all.

Solution. Make the traps damage flat damage. This makes progression more fair for all classes in the game. Maybe somewhere between 1-2k flat damage, or higher if needed.

There is variety in having some traps deal damage this way. There isn't variety in having every trap deal damage that way. I think some traps should do % damage and others should do flat damage. I think some monsters outside the Lab should do % damage.

"

Jgizle wrote:

2. Lab Size is too large, and requires too much of a time investment than somebpeople just can't spare every time they log on.

Spoiler

Sometimes you just want to run a few quick maps and log off. You can't log on and do a quick lab run and log off like you can Uber Atziri for example. I love the design of lab but it is way to large.

Solution. Make Lab smaller, or make 1 large area whee you can fight Izaro 3 times. Maybe reduce the difficulty or boring aspect of going through several side areas to get keys just to progress. You can even let us keep unused keys to make subsequent runs faster.

I think the Normal Labirynth should be 1/3 of the current size with just 1 Izaro fight, and the Cruel Lab 2/3 the size with just 2 Izaro fights. But I'd also make Uber Lab a four-parter.

I disagree with your other suggestions.

"

Jgizle wrote:

4. Many people dislike the no portals allowed. I believe the reason this is not allowed is due to the keys which are not allowed to be deposited into your stash and as such this mechanic prevents doing that outside of lab.

Solution. Allow keys to be deposited in stash and as such allow the use of portals in Lab. This has 2 benefits. Keys become a new valuable currency that aids in faster lab progression, the thing people want right now. It also becomes something worth trading, which creates a new market for all players no matter which Lab they can complete. This makes Lab rewarding even if you fail to beat Izaro. His treasure and enchants can be the reward for full completion. Alternatively reduce the drop rates of red maps in Lab to compensate for new clear speed increase.

I really like this idea. GGG loves trade so gold keys being tradable should be appealing, right?

I assume there would need to be 4 versions of each type of key :(

A few small clarifications:

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1. Trap damage is unfair for non-armor based builds.

They ignore armor entirely. The easiest class is propably a raider with Stibnite, he has insane movespeed, he has more trouble at Izaro though. Juggernaut is mainly used since everything in the lab is Physical so while it helps a bit with Traps, it increases survivability against Izaro a lot.

From the pure defenses I would say ES > Armor/EV because ES is only counted as 60% so a CI build has it a lot easier. Also CWDT doesn't proc on degeneration (which traps are, for the most part), so you should use IC manually, which again everyone can do, it lasts for long enough even without Charges to block a hit.

"

Some movement skills are weapon restricted which results in some builds unable to have a movement skill that is fast at all.

Flamedash is always unrestricted. Also Lightning Warp allows to warp from safespot to safespot in almost every gauntlet, so it doesn't actually matter how fast it is. Flamedash though is the best skill anyway because it deplaces the player so you can dodge through traps without taking damage from them, something Whirling Blades and Leap Slam can't do and it is faster than LW.

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Solution. Add an instance timer and when you log back in you are put at the start of the zone. Five minutes is reasonable.

Honestly this should happen everywhere, not just in the lab. If you DC and immidiatly log back in you should be able to choose to start where you DCed. Not recommended to choose this option if you DCed in a fight, but if you DC upon entering a zone it should be very helpful.

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I think the Normal Labirynth should be 1/3 of the current size with just 1 Izaro fight, and the Cruel Lab 2/3 the size with just 2 Izaro fights. But I'd also make Uber Lab a four-parter.

Reducing normal and cruel is sound, exspecially assuming more content in 3.0. Not sure about the Uber lab, making it longer is not the issue, but giving Izaro a 3rd mechanism might be too heavy because it gets even harder to dodge those your build can't handle very well.

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There is variety in having some traps deal damage this way. There isn't variety in having every trap deal damage that way. I think some traps should do % damage and others should do flat damage. I think some monsters outside the Lab should do % damage.

Assuming that your Charges might run out during a Gauntlet most characters have a similar amount of Physical Damage reduction, Necros and Pathfinder likely a bit more due to the Zombie-Bonus and the high Flask efficiency but overall they are similar. Flat damage though means that a 4k HP ranger would take as much damage as a 12k ES CI char. And that might be very problematic, which is why I feel that the current solution is a lot better.

Enemies dealing %based damage outside of the lab? Why not, giving an enemy a skill that halfs your HP regardless of defenses would be an option, but I'm not sure if it is actually necessary.

are you sure armor reduce traps damage? played a few builds with tons of armor and i didnt see any major diference in damage taken, the only advantage builds with rather low amount of hitponts have is that flask are more effective.

in the end the only thing that truly gives an advantage is regen and only against spike damage traps, damage over time traps will rip them equaly wast.

ES is the one that got the short edge but its far from imposible.

the only real problem i see with lab is when you cant see the end of the traps, if we cant see whats ahead then the only thing we can do is guess.


the rest are silly excuses from people that are to lazzy to put some thought and just want to rush trhow it as fast as posible like they do with the rest of the game.

I cannot understand why there are so many discussions about trap damage, when there are a lot of things way harder to do in PoE than avoiding the lab traps. I mean, seriously, you only need flame dash to take absolutely 0 dmg from traps. Mechanically, it's not even hard. Malachai is harder than the lab, by far. Stuff like Atziri, Act 4 Piety or even bearers/volatile mobs mechanics are harder to dodge, require a much faster reaction time. You can take all the time in the world to pass the traps, you can observe the patterns and just dash between them. What's so hard about that ? And even if you do get hit, you can pot through.

Chckpoints

AND

Remove experience penalty on death to any kind of retarded trap in lab or trials.

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Dawmz wrote:

I cannot understand why there are so many discussions about trap damage, when there are a lot of things way harder to do in PoE than avoiding the lab traps. I mean, seriously, you only need flame dash to take absolutely 0 dmg from traps. Mechanically, it's not even hard. Malachai is harder than the lab, by far. Stuff like Atziri, Act 4 Piety or even bearers/volatile mobs mechanics are harder to dodge, require a much faster reaction time. You can take all the time in the world to pass the traps, you can observe the patterns and just dash between them. What's so hard about that ? And even if you do get hit, you can pot through.

The problem isn't necesarily just the damage. Some classes can handle the trap damage better than others. The problem is poe is about clear speed and time efficiency. Lab lacks this aspect that is present in the rest of the game. Traps slow gameplay down.

Flame dash is good and all but it is a limited use movement skill so you wont always have it when you need it.