Ranged blight monsters are very dangerous

yep 100%

This league is so «brilliant and rewarding» what even streamers started to play Standard on league's 3rd week!

xD

First of all, I agree that the fireball blight mobs are a problem. If you aren't aware, they are able to nuke you.

About the melee problem: While I don't play melee I've at least got an idea. What about building a heavy tower setup for some lanes (tanky minion + empowering 3 + arc tower works kinda well), while killing other lanes with your char. I'm not sure this will work in any case, and it might not solve all problems but it could help alot, if you have to take care for 3 lanes in stead of 6.

In general, I really like the mechanics, they just need some polishing.

About the rewards, I think they are fine. But the worth of doing blight encounters on maps depends much on your clearspeed. At some speed you hit the point where you can get more loot while killing normal mobs than doing the encounter. But for me this is a problem with power creeping and the upper end of the clear speed, in stead of the blight encounter itself.

I've been mapping along nicely albeit at a slower pace than last league (no mention of nerfed drop rates) and almost making the best of this daft tower nonsense (which imho has zero place in our game).

Last 2 days I've been cleaning out the last T15's and farming enough guardian maps. These incredibly ill conceived Fire mobs are simply stupid beyond belief. I cannot honestly think that any person with half a brain cell was involved in the calculations of including them in the blight encounters. There appears to have been zero thought in their damage output, zero thought in their spawn rates, and zero thought as to how players could possibly think about playing against them.

They are literally a "notice spawn, I'm dead" scenario every single time. Before all the daft "get gud" comments arrive, I'm no expert but I've been playing this game since Harb and played every single league on numerous types of build. This league I decided to stick with Cycloner. Having thought my way around the mana issue, geared myself up enough for Uber Elder, and started the min maxing process I thought (somewhat naively) that the league mechanic itself would be the last thing shredding multiple 10%'s off my XP daily.

IMHO, this league is even more badly thought out than Synthesis (and that's saying something). Sure, these Blight encounters are jolly at low level maps, but at high level maps they're now a case of simply completely ignoring the league mechanic altogether. 30% alone today I wasted trying to persevere with this nonsense. EVERY time it was these damn fire mobs. EVERY other encounter I managed to do just fine.

I really have no idea just how the minds of some of the people at the top in GGG work these days. Last League they created a monster by over buffing melee AoE and having everyone playing the same build. So what do they do this time? Learn from it? Hell no. They do the self same thing to another class - summoners. Seriously?
Synthesis they created an ill thought out league mechanic and then messed up the implementation. Last league we had a brilliant mechanic. This league, we go back to the synthesis ideas in the form of Tower defence. At the announcement I had a premonition of the mess this was going to be. Sadly, yet again, the implementation is a mess.

Honestly, if there were ever any performance reviews, heads should roll. You cannot keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
After I take out Uber Elder, I'm back to Standard until this nightmare ends, and it goes without saying I am completely done with doing these stupid encounters and ruining my xp and map advancement.

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Judaspriester wrote:

About the melee problem: While I don't play melee I've at least got an idea. What about building a heavy tower setup for some lanes (tanky minion + empowering 3 + arc tower works kinda well), while killing other lanes with your char. I'm not sure this will work in any case, and it might not solve all problems but it could help alot, if you have to take care for 3 lanes in stead of 6.

well, at least on blight maps, u can only set up maybe one lane (2 if lucky intersection) with lvl 3+ towers with the resources provided at start. And bears and Uniques will just walk right through them like the towers are not even there. Now good luck defending 5 lanes into pump while trying to burn down the 1000000000 hit point uniques that you have to whittle down an entire path.

the problem is that to defend against the vomit of mobs with a true melee skill, you can't wander far off the pump and by the time you notice the unique, there is not enough time to kill it due to their massive hit points. at least that is my experience in failing every blight map so far.

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Judaspriester wrote:

What about building a heavy tower setup for some lanes (tanky minion + empowering 3 + arc tower works kinda well), while killing other lanes with your char.

Yes but how specifically? That is the general strategy in similar tower defense games, but in PoE:Blight we can only manage towers around where we fight since the waves (effectively) don't stop until the end of the encounter.

In case anyone is watching this thread I thought I'd mention that the bug report got the following GGG reply:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2640522/page/2#p22488129

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Hartlin_GGG wrote:

Hey guys,

During the creation of any league, we do a fair amount of inhouse playtesting. Blight was no exception to this. One of the core things that we noticed was that there was a lack of danger for Ranged players in particular, as standing out of the Blight lane meant that no Blight monsters would come to attack you. This meant that you were essentially fighting monsters that would very rarely fight back. As such, one of the things that we did was adding skills to various monsters and adding ranged Blight monsters. These ranged monsters are intended to provide an element of danger during Blight encounters, both to Melee and Ranged characters alike.

We recognise that the original preview of the Blight League mentioned that monsters would only attack foes directly in their path and realise that the current version of Blight differs from that preview. That said, we feel that the existence of ranged mechanics on Blight monsters is a better alternative to them not fighting back at all.

Apologies for not having addressed this sooner. Hopefully this clears up any uncertainty about our intentions with regards to Blight encounters.

An element of danger is understandable.
Getting barraged by fireballs from off-screen and dying in half a second, isn't.

Please balance their ridiculous damage output, ability to "lock-in" on you, and amount of things that can be fired simultaneously.

Lightning, ice or poison: no problem
Fire mobs: DEAD!
Also as melee: it's hard to navigate/move around and click/upgrade towers ESPECIALLY if fire mobs shoot from 2 screens above :(

GGG so you want "danger" for ranged players: how about mortar mechanic?

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Asthero wrote:

Honestly those range fire mobs are killing all the fun I have in blight. I've got 15k ES, tons of phys and ele reduction, IC and yet they manage to kill me in 0.3 sec off screen...

On the other hand I have 0 problems as melee in Blighted maps or encounters. Only things that bother me are performance drop when there is a lot of monsters and screen clutter.