Improved Hailrake Fight in 1.1.3

I ripped my very first hardcore character to hailrake as a newbie as it permafroze my witch.
I'll miss the old Hailrake ^,^

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SlixSC wrote:

The only problem with that is of course that you have designed the game in a way that requires players to have "a priori" knowledge of the game to beat it without dying (irrespective of natural skill).

It's of course great that you have (somewhat) identified this problem now, but it seems like wasted effort because it's not a problem you will ever get rid of, because it's inherent to the game and not just limited to bosses.

There are many examples where players will simply die unless they somehow already now what awaits them ahead of time. Try going into sins 3 with 0 lightning resist in normal for example or Western Forest with 0 Fire res.

New players that don't yet understand the importance of ele resists or even what type of damage certain monsters do will always die to things like that, because it's how you have designed the game.

<SNIP>

@SlixSC - Thanks for taking the time to write that post. Said what I wanted to say but probably better and in more detail.

@GGG - This was my main beef with PoE and possibly part of the reason I put it down for a while. For me Hailrake wasn't the issue. It was Merveil. I was cruising along through the game - sure, I'd died a couple of times to silly mistakes, but I knew what they were, no fault of the game really - but then I hit Merveil and I was getting thrashed and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. It came right out of the blue, with absolutely no warning, leaving me completely unable to prepare and therefore destined to fail by the very design of the game. Why? Because I had no cold resist. In fact, I don't think the game had dropped any items with cold resist up to that point, nor had there been any offered as a reward.

Experience and subsequent reading have caused me to realise that you have introduced these 'gear-checkpoints' throughout the game. Basically if you don't have the correct elemental resistance equipped gear then you can't pass certain points (or its very, very difficult). However, this fact is completely obscured to new players. You've got to go outside the game and research its mechanics to discover this.

Rather than changing the difficulty of certain boss fights, it'd probably be better to find ways of letting the player know what to expect in terms of elemental 'danger.' There are various ways of doing this. If you make the enemies in the zone before a boss (as long as people know there is a boss ahead) have resistance to the elements that the boss uses - then have a character at the start warn the player to pay attention to these stats. This is probably the most subtle in some ways and then leaves it to the player, ie. no more handholding. Otherwise before players hit the boss have an NPC give them some hint (eg. "It'll be pretty frigid where Merveil's lurking. You might want to think about something to keep you warm"). Heck, for the Hailrake fight you could've offered players a cold resist amulet to help them out if you wanted to make it a bit easier without changing his skills, and at the same time you introduce them to elemental resists and their importance.

Personally I think having people die because they had no clue of what was ahead is poor design. Players should die based on lack of skill and planning, not on failing some hidden gear-checkpoint.

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Ken_NZ wrote:

Merveil, gear checks, etc.

Out of pointless curiosity, what damage type do Merveil's Favored, Chosen, and Daughters do?

In the Caverns leading up to Merveil, what damage types do the Unique Merveil's Daughters do?

How many elements are there?

What does Nessa sell? Are there screen tips to help with resist gear?

If only there were clues to help people....

For a new player it is enough to pay attention the first time he encounters the boss. Pops in to merv lair, ooh cold snap and ice spear. Hmmm wonder what resist should I use... And that's all really. The whole "gear check" comes down to putting on two cold resist rings and smashing her face.
The same applies to almost every other boss. I remember fighting crematorium Piety for the very first time as a total noob. Crappy resists but when I saw her using lightning damage and almost killing me I tped out put as much light resist as I could and came back to smash her. That was all gear check I had to have. Easy Peasy.
So don't you worry about new players and their deaths. Stop portraying them as grey mindless mass that cries at slight sight of defeat. Smart ones evaluate the situation and adjust quickly. Plus they will learn important lesson and use that knowledge later in higher difficulties.

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Derpey wrote:

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Ward wrote:

Ashame,hailrake suppossed to be counter-intuitive,He has already became famous as sort of.. I don't know..Wraeclasts boogeyman?He prepares newbies for dangers ahead.How will newbie get the invaluable experience to defeat cruel dominus or queen atziri without facing hailrake first?

I guess Fetid Pool will be that place now.

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Malwin wrote:

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AlvarezBlanco wrote:

Stop complaining you ppl!!!
you get a $60 Worth game for free and still make demands...
is the game perfect?
well, not really but, can anybody tell one that it is?
also, does anybody know any developer putting that much effort into a game like them?
why don't you go complain and yell at blizzard for charging that same $60 for a beta plus $40 to fix it

At least blizzard agreed some of their decisions were wrong and fixed most of them in latest expansion...

AND ONLY AFTER ALL THIS TIME, AND EXPANSION FOR 60 BUCKS, WHAT A DEAL!

Stop eating the shit Blizzard hands to you, it's time to stand up to that horrible company.

Haha so because of that POE is free to play I can say what I think about this game unless my statemant has positive overtone???

And no I'm not a blizzard fanboy in terms of diablo 3. The game still has many flaws but looking at POE threads like feedback, proposition and actual changelogs of incoming patches,
there is probably no hope something will change to improve endgame, and it's not only my opinion, just read what others ppl think.

I don't mind paying for games. POE is not entirely free too, don't get me wrong here, I gladly paid for some more stashes and other shits, I played poe for few weeks and just feel like dev work should be rewarded somehow.

Atm POE is a great game for a week or two but idea of endgame concentrated around getting better items doesnt work. Let's say it straight, there is no endgame right now.

I admire Blizzard for one game, what they did with World of Warcraft is just amazing in terms endgame playing and true online game. You could play months and not get bored. As I mention before POE is about getting better and better items but so do WoW. The difference is how do you achive it in both games. POE is just mindless and endless grinding of gated content like maps or dominus/piety which is superb boring after few days and most of the time you can do it alone...

Hope we will see someday patch improving endgame :) Im generous here 'cos my statement implicates there is something like endgame right now, but you can hardly call it that.

+1 for tweaking shit that isn't buggy while ignoring long standing bugs. Way to go!

I don't know what everybody is complaining about?

Desync is a very important part of the gaming experience in PoE. It's GGGs way to hint about dangers ahead!

You breeze along in a map, suddenly, desync. So you, as a player, now know there's an exile or an invasion boss around the corner. I tested that, it's pretty darn accurate.

And if your game crashes, it's Minara. You wouldn't have wanted to fight her anyways, so resetting your game is exactly the right thing, and PoE already does that for you! That's Windows 7 quality customer service, and Microsoft is a multinational software giant, they know how to please their customers!

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Archwizard wrote:

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Ken_NZ wrote:

Merveil, gear checks, etc.

Out of pointless curiosity, what damage type do Merveil's Favored, Chosen, and Daughters do?

In the Caverns leading up to Merveil, what damage types do the Unique Merveil's Daughters do?

How many elements are there?

What does Nessa sell? Are there screen tips to help with resist gear?

If only there were clues to help people....

To be fair, I don't think we can expect everybody nowadays to realize, "hey, I need to pay attention to what's going on here." A lot of games, I think, don't require any thought at all, no feedback from difficulty or adjusting to meet the challenge. If there's a sudden difficulty spike, it's likely the game's fault. If that is the established modern habit, as encouraged by mainstream publishers, then I do think it is fair that Path of Exile explicitly states "hey, this game is different; pay attention." It doesn't need to give any clues, just says something to force the realization upon those who aren't used to looking for such clues. It isn't about hand-holding (or whatever people like to retort) as much as it is about it not really being those gamers' faults.. there is an established norm which is completely against the grain of what PoE strives for. Those players might actually enjoy that if they realized sooner, that in Path of Exile, it is your fault if you die, and you are empowered to do something about it if you pay closer attention.

I remember my first fight with Hailrake. I died but it made me want to go back and kill him. I hope new players wont miss out on this. It's important to know that sometimes you're going to have to make up in gear where you are weak, or where the enemy is strong.

I feel like the crafting in this game, especially jewelers and fuses, drive away more potential customers than anything else.

Not sure you'll read this as its pretty far down in the thread, But i just wanted to say POE is my favorite game since D2. Thanks, truly, for making this, and all the hard work you put into it. It is GREATLY appreciated by me, and I'm sure many other people who are less vocal about it. POE hit the exact niche I like. =)

Feels like all of these companies that make great offers for new customers and existing customers get shafted.

The fact is though this game is free and has provided me more entertainment than the rest of my £800+ library of games, sure there are mtx's but if you don't like the direction the devs are taking don't buy em!

I still have great faith in the GGG team.

Also maybe the changes we are seeing just now aren't the substantial mechanic changes/large scale changes we want to see because they are fixing this patch deployment system that messed up a few weeks ago. I can't imagine that to be a 10 minute job and these backend changes are not the kind of thing that make there way into the news posts.