Fortress pulse-explosion

The whole escape is annoying and should have an indicator of the correct path like sirus maze etc.

That being said if my 90/90/90/76 cloak of flame cws chieftan can notice the damage sometimes, sometimes the pulse does WAY too much damage.

I have never had an issue with the pulses. Are yall running any form of recovery?

I'm 84/84/84/100, 11k ES but with basically no armor or evasion. Prior to this build I was 75/75/75/75, 3k life/4k ES, with a bit of evasion. At no point have I had any issue with the damage from the pulse. All burst are relatively small hits (less than 20% of total life/ES pool) and are easily leeched back to full before the next burst. Just keep moving and attacking as you run out, in my experience.

As far as it being annoying, sure maybe a bit. But the blocked areas show up before it is time to escape, so you can scope out your exit while still killing mobs. And once you find the initial exit, it is almost always a very intuitive straight shot out.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

I mean... clearly that's not true, though. It's quite evidently not true in this particular case, it's very rarely true in Path of Exile as a whole, and it's not actually true in most military applications. Co-operation is almost always the best defense, because zero sum games don't actually exist in the real world. If offense were actually the best defense, why do you think the Cold War ended without nukes being fired? Just food for thought.

Of course it's not true in this case because you are unable to attack the pulse. It's invulnerable. Otherwise I wouldn't be here complaining, I would just destroy the pulse and then run out while waving my tail happily ever after.

Also, wars ended because nukes exists. The offense is so strong that they don't even have to use it. Why do you think Russia haven't nuked Ukraine? Because if they use nukes, they'll be nuked themselves.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

Alright simple2012, lets see you pull that off in hc.

If the BEST defense was offense. Then there would be no reason to invest into defense in hc. You're just repeating some phrase and trying to prove something to me.

I don't play HC for a reason. I don't want to end up dying to on-ground effects on-death effects or pulse-effects like this.

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Piousqd#0073 wrote:

I have never had an issue with the pulses. Are yall running any form of recovery?

I'm 84/84/84/100, 11k ES but with basically no armor or evasion. Prior to this build I was 75/75/75/75, 3k life/4k ES, with a bit of evasion. At no point have I had any issue with the damage from the pulse. All burst are relatively small hits (less than 20% of total life/ES pool) and are easily leeched back to full before the next burst. Just keep moving and attacking as you run out, in my experience.

99 out of 100 times I survived. But I still got 1-shot those 1 out of 100 times and that was enough to be frustrating. It wasn't a matter of recovery.

I reckon you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is.

Your opinion on defense is irrelevant if you're just going to make claims you're not willing to prove.

If you died to this mechanic even 1 time your build has a flaw. I haven't died to it at all, but I'm not playing trash builds. Seems like there is some wisdom for you there.

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

I reckon you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is.

Your opinion on defense is irrelevant if you're just going to make claims you're not willing to prove.

If you died to this mechanic even 1 time your build has a flaw. I haven't died to it at all, but I'm not playing trash builds. Seems like there is some wisdom for you there.

That pulse seems like its affected by certain map mods. Which should not be happening, its not a "monster". Its just some global damage coming from who knows where. And it can probably crit too. On most maps it dealt half my hp, and in one rippy corrupted 8-mod t16 it oneshot me even with arcane cloak absorb up. That's an insane variance of damage. You can't just say "your build sucks" when people die to RNG bs mechanics like this lol, especially when its completely unavoidable damage. It also killed me 1 out of 100 times, and its just complete nonsense.

If you could hide behind walls or something to avoid the pulse, then it would actually be skill-based. Right now this mechanic is just "durr play tanky build or get oneshot". That's so boring. Playing a build that can do all map mods and facetank 99% of the stuff in the game does not take any skill. Only time investment of farming up the currency.

It just sucks. You should never ever force your players to play certain types of builds. That just kills the game completely for some people.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

On most maps it dealt half my hp, and in one rippy corrupted 8-mod t16 it oneshot me even with arcane cloak absorb up. That's an insane variance of damage. You can't just say "your build sucks" when people die to RNG bs mechanics like this lol, especially when its completely unavoidable damage.

Well, calling it “insane variance of damage” is a pretty bold claim when your example isn’t exactly the beacon of reliability. What it really shows isn’t some unhinged mechanic, but how completely unprepared your own defenses are for even the most routine hit.

Saying it “chunked half your HP” or “oneshot you with arcane cloak up” doesn’t hold much weight when that arcane cloak is basically a shiny participation ribbon instead of a defensive layer. A barely well-utilized skill isn’t going to magically compensate for a build that folds the moment something looks at it with even mild enthusiasm.

If anything, your post highlights again why building actual defenses matters if you don’t want your character getting clapped by a simple mechanic or an enemy giving you a mildly irritated glance. It’s just part of the game, and the game expects you to build defense if you want to survive. If that’s not to your liking, then there is really no reason to complain about deaths when the main issue sits squarely on your end.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

I reckon you're not willing to put your money where your mouth is.

Your opinion on defense is irrelevant if you're just going to make claims you're not willing to prove.

If you died to this mechanic even 1 time your build has a flaw. I haven't died to it at all, but I'm not playing trash builds. Seems like there is some wisdom for you there.

That pulse seems like its affected by certain map mods. Which should not be happening, its not a "monster". Its just some global damage coming from who knows where. And it can probably crit too. On most maps it dealt half my hp, and in one rippy corrupted 8-mod t16 it oneshot me even with arcane cloak absorb up. That's an insane variance of damage. You can't just say "your build sucks" when people die to RNG bs mechanics like this lol, especially when its completely unavoidable damage. It also killed me 1 out of 100 times, and its just complete nonsense.

If you could hide behind walls or something to avoid the pulse, then it would actually be skill-based. Right now this mechanic is just "durr play tanky build or get oneshot". That's so boring. Playing a build that can do all map mods and facetank 99% of the stuff in the game does not take any skill. Only time investment of farming up the currency.

It just sucks. You should never ever force your players to play certain types of builds. That just kills the game completely for some people.

Of course it's affected by (some) map modifiers, because those map modifiers affect the players' damage mitigation and recovery abilities. It deals all elements of damage, so if the map has -max resists the pulses will hit harder. It deals some amount of physical damage, so the player being affected by vulnerability means the pulses will do extra damage. And it's worth repeating, because this is something that I do not know how people are not understanding in 2025, the pulses do chaos damage so you have to actually have chaos resistance. Chaos resistance has not been optional in the last 5 years, but a lot of 6-portal players still treat it like a luxury good to be filled in at level 99. It's not, get some chaos resistances on your damn items FFS and you'll stop constantly dying.

As far as I know the pulses are not impacted by monster-specific map modifiers, but I've thought of a pretty easy way to test that so I'll reply in this thread next time I find one. But they should be able to crit, at the normal base 5% chance, 30% multi. So there is some potential variance there, but it's not nearly as extreme as you're suggesting.

And no, you don't have to play a tanky character to survive these, you just can't play a bad zero defenses character. I tank these quite easily in hardcore red maps, on a build which is NOT optimized for defense in the slightest (the build is not even close to being able to run T17s). But I DO have some armor, a couple +max resists, and chaos resistance because the character has to survive general mapping content. Mechanics like expedition, Ritual, and even red einhar beasts all hit orders of magnitude harder than these fortress pulses.

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Zrevnur#2026 wrote:

Supposedly likely mostly phys spell damage. It doesnt even break (my <300) ES on one of my current builds with ~20k armour, >20% hard, 46% suppressed.

On this build it seems to be doing ~150 (non-chaos, dont know if any chaos also) damage per Blast on T16 without relevant mods. (If no Guard/Heart of Flame are up.)
Also noticed that at least the entrance area doesnt seem to get blasted, I had to move upward a bit to get hit for the testing.

Most everything in poe isn't "skill based" The skill is in making a build with the proper defenses + damage.

I would say around 90% (totally made up number) of things in this game happen too fast to out skill outside of bossing. You're surviving because of your character defenses not skill.

Watching Ben do feared/ubers in gauntlet, that's skill. General mapping without dying, that's your build.