Porcupine Goliath spike damage is ridiculously over tuned...

Back then they were ok. Now, not so much.

So I noticed a while back that these monsters begun to deal a hell of a lot more damage than back in the good old days.
The mechanic is OK, it's the damage that needs to be toned down.

I'm aware that there are a ton of "protection" against them and I do try to avoid them. It's just they tend to pursue you in pack very fervently and sometimes they can come from every direction.

Most of my caster and ranged chars are doing ok. With them I usually just place a totem which usually takes care most of them or shot them from afar then take cover.
It's the melee and half-ranged (sunder/earthquake etc.) characters, that have no more gem slots for totems and such are those who are not doing OK and are endangered from these rabid beasts.

I thought armour would help, but no sir, it does not do shit.

I just run into a pack of them a while ago. They were blue and they lived up to their name and left me feeling blue after they "pegged" me to death. It was like the U.S.A and Russia. Mutually Assured Destruction. I genked them (accidentally) and they genked me.
Most of them were offscreen, "hiding". I launched a sunder attack to fend them off and was flamedashing away instantly to a cover. But I was too late. The blue pack caught fire and were immediately destroyed and they launched a deadly chain reaction of "spike-inferno" toward my lad which caught him in medias res the flamedash and instagibbed (instantly killed) him. Not even a granite flash could've saved him. Nor any CWDT+Immortal call. It was a total, unforgiving oneshot, leaving no time to even react. It was a quarter of a second flash and he was dead. (He is dead Jim.)

They are wily, cunning, sly and insanely subtle. They anticipate. Sometimes I notice that when I place a totem with one of my (lucky) casters, that they do not die and launch their spikes until I moved out of cover. They even do this when they should be long dead, yet only explode and launch the spikes when I move out of cover. Half of the time this happens off screen or at the edge of the screen. This is unfair, but not so dangerous when you're with a caster/ranged. If you're melee, you're already dead.

Back there was an issue with devourers, especially in maps, where they would pop up in large groups instantly beneath you, leaving you either dead or stunlocked. They were unshakeable and followed you ruthlessly to the end of the map. Now they're "fixed". They appear in smaller packs, their damage was toned down and they only follow you until they have line of sight.

So I ask the dear devs to at least consider toning down the damage and pack size and spike speed of these creatures. Do the same like you did with the devourers.

Thanks.

The big difference is you can't see devourers. You can see the porcupine enemies. It's actually one of the few enemies that do something in the current state of the game. Most enemies just walk around, die, then drop stuff. At least these enemies can still accomplish something.

I actually think we need more enemies like this or at the very least, enemies that engage you. When I see porcupine enemies, I'm usually more careful and ready up some defensive flask. It makes me think about what I'm doing rather then go through the motion of -movement skill- -one shot screen- -movement skill- -one shot screen-

Meh, those porcupines are a thing to remember especially on Vulnerability + Crit Chance/Multiplier + No Regen/Leech or Elemental Weakness + Minus Max Res + Added Damage as Fire/Cold/Lightning, but in the first case you can at least mitigate some of the damage via Armour + Endurance Charges with either CWDT + IC or manually cast IC, in the last case it's either large pool of ES + VP + meta skill or your toast most of the time...

I'm all in for more dangerous enemies, but they should be more balanced as to not one shot you no matter what your defences are (of course jumping in a middle of porcupines, giant skeletons or ancient devourers is a suicide run most of the time) but more monsters should try to out flank you, search for you in cover but not instagib...

Just take your time with those packs, don't kill them all at once.

I am not entirely sure how to describe their spike-on-death damage, but it has some kind of stacking property, the more spikes hit you within a certain time-window, the higher the overall damage (if you're familiar with Dota 2, it behaves like Bristlebacks Quill Spray).

So if you just go in, kill the whole pack at once and then die, you're at fault.

That's how it is supposed to work, one of the few enemies that require you to actually adapt to their mechanics, unless you're strong enough to just outright soak up all the damage of course.

You could literally just run next to such packs and assess the situation calmly, as long as you don't kill them, they're actually fairly harmless.

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Peterking72 wrote:

Nor any CWDT+Immortal call.

Care to explain why cwdt + IC would not have helped? It does not work vs "elemental damage added" but it should take care of the phys damage after the trigger?

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sofocle10000 wrote:

I'm all in for more dangerous enemies, but they should be more balanced as to not one shot you no matter what your defences are

Doesnt block, armour (phys part), evasion, max resist (ele part if any) help?

Based on my own experiences they are deadly to "not tanky" builds but mostly harmless vs multi layered tanky builds.

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Jankalor wrote:

I am not entirely sure how to describe their spike-on-death damage, but it has some kind of stacking property, the more spikes hit you within a certain time-window, the higher the overall damage

Source? Never heard of such a "stacking property". Unless you mean "linear (cumulative) damage increase based on number of spikes" - which is what I would expect.

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Zrevnur wrote:

Source? Never heard of such a "stacking property". Unless you mean "linear (cumulative) damage increase based on number of spikes" - which is what I would expect.

I cannot provide you with any source, since this is based on my own personal experience with this kind of enemy.

But the damage does not feel cumulative to me at all, but I might be wrong.

I am usually playing as Cyclone with capped physical mitigation (90%), meaning that killing a single Porcupine literally does nothing to me, even killing 2-4 keeps the damage at a bare minimum (perhaps 2-3% overall health damage).

If I were to straight up kill a whole pack (lets say 12+) Porcupines at once though, I'd suddenly drop to 50% HP.

This is all very theoretical of course and obviously depends on a lot of factors, like map-mods, pack-mods and what not, but the overall sentiment of my "scenario" is consistent with every Porcupine pack I've ever encountered.

Kill them all at once = huge amounts of damage
Kill them slowly / one by one = damage is minimal / managable

I definately am curious, if my perception of this mechanic is accurate, perhaps we could get an official response on this matter :-).

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Jankalor wrote:

I am usually playing as Cyclone with capped physical mitigation (90%),

Armour bug? Did you experience significant damage from them (discounting elemental damage map mods) after the fix as well?

I can deal with their damage with armor flask, as i can see its coming. But they fire screen away with this, now THAT is not fine.

No, I didn't see that there were more because about the 2/3 of the blue pack was off screen.
2-3 blue was on the edge of the screen.

A few white was lurking just before me (2-3 mobs). I attack them, manage to evade their spikes. I thought that there were only 3 blues, because sometimes there are just 3 of them. (It's not Diablo 3 after all, because back in 2012 when I was playing with Diablo 3 there were always 3 in the yellow pack and 6 or more in the blue. But in PoE it's sometimes different.
Anyway the rest of the pack was off screen. Actually I meant to avoid them altogether, but the spikes from the white pack leaved me no choice but to move towards them. So I attacked them and was flame dashing to safety. Only that my char was one shot halfway, because they died from the first hit, which is unusual for a blue pack even if you using decent gear.

So I thought I was only hitting those 3 mobs then avoiding their spikes with flame dash. Unfortunately for me Sunder managed to magically one shot all of them at once. All 8 of them, and I only saw 3.

Trust me that if I knew that there were that many I wouldn't have attacked them. Sometimes if I see more than 3 white I run the other way and hunt them down 1 by 1.

Boy I wish that there was room for a totem. However seems like I have to make room if I want to avoid more incidents like this.
It just irks me that I have to sacrifice other important skills for just one enemy, but the real thing that bums me is that if armor worked as it should, this shouldn't have happened.
The amount of armor I am using with this character used to help back then before these porcupines started to deal outrageous damage. Back then I could literally kill a 12 pack if I had enough armor to mitigate the damage. Even then I had to evade some spikes,but it was manageable. Now you have to consider attacking a pack of four whites? What the hell. Is this a game about fear?

I do think and plan before killing enemies. I don't want to just face roll everything because that would quickly became boring and I would've already left PoE.
This enemy is not challenging in the right way. It doesn't force me to think. It forces me to fear.

By the way I'd love if there was more puzzles and things in this game that made you think.
More enemies that made you think how to approach and kill them.
Unfortunately this enemy fails to do that. It only succeeds at making you fear it. Fear to kill it.

Killing it should be the challenge, not the thing that happens after.

Anyway I feel this should change...

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Zrevnur wrote:

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Jankalor wrote:

I am usually playing as Cyclone with capped physical mitigation (90%),

Armour bug? Did you experience significant damage from them (discounting elemental damage map mods) after the fix as well?

Mhm, good point.

I haven't played since the fix came out - I guess I should see if it feels any different now.