Most monster mods are not fun or engaging

Path of Exile 2 promises to be a game much more around reading the situation and playing based on what you are encountering, but in PoE1 this is very much not the case in 99.9% of situations. Monster mods in 1 are almost exclusively just a multiplier on how long the monster takes to kill, or a multiplier on its damage causing you to randomly disappear because you didn't stop to read some text on every single yellow mob.

Enemies having extra damage reduction is not interesting, nor is it fun in any way, it is purely just annoying. Extra damage auras, extra speed auras, extra crit, always crit, GOD FORBID soul eater (which should be deleted asap from the game), adaptive resistance, extra resistance, cannot leech, life regen, what have you. None of these are actually interesting or fun at all, and the only reason they have to exist in the game is to A) push you to grab checkboxes in the passive tree to deal with the random passive problem, like reduced life regen nearby, or B) for head hunter or behead.

The few mods that actually do force you to at least walk around a little bit and play around something, such as lightning mirage are also almost all exclusively annoying because they are so ridiculously spammy you can barely do anything but move every one and a half second which you do anyway in this game.

Please reconsider how you are applying monster mods on rares and magic mobs in the future because it's not actually good, and it feels more like a forced concept that's just dragging along from Diablo. In reality you could do something similar, but the core has to be that "rares" are actually just bigger and more challenging monsters that actually affect how you play. I realize this is a difficult challenge to implement in PoE1, but in PoE2 you have an opportunity to lean more on increasingly advanced monster types, rather than really annoying mods on basic monsters.

Another issue is that monster mods, compounded with map mods, is one of the main reasons why the game does not have a stable difficulty feeling at all. You can be running around obliterating a map and all of a sudden there is a literally unkillable mob because it happened to be a certain type with a certain mod, like a naturally tanky mob becoming rare with life reg. Sometimes it's just something random that doesn't even have a life or defense mod and it just has literally a hundred times more HP than any other rare on the map for no apparent reason. It is simply not a good approach.

Even in Diablo 3 just having a monster with laser beams spinning on the ground, as boring and monotonous it gets after you've seen it 20 times, actually has more of an impact on the gameplay and how you approach a fight than any mod or monster in PoE1. (at least, seeing past how the D3 meta has turned out and looking at it from a leveling perspective).

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Kashou wrote:

You can be running around obliterating a map

This is why. Without those mods there would be zero challenge.

Not too long ago we had engaging mods on rares, Archnemesis going core. But that was too much engagement for the casuals and thus we ended up with the current, braindead iteration.

Luckily T17 maps spice it up a bit.

Archnemesis was indeed shoehorned into the game when nobody wanted this mechanic. The nerfs to it weren't even enough, it's still annoying and you can get random mod combinations that obliterate you in 0.001 seconds, or make a mob tankier than uber maven.

So +1


Current monster mods are just "more numbers, more damage, arbitrary damage reduction go brrr haha cycling damage reduction is fun" etc. etc.

That's not challenging, nor is it fun game design. It's simply annoying. Archnemesis was a mistake. The league was fine because it had reward icons for each mod, but the way it went core was horrible.