Yes, death in this game is unavoidable and most of the times random, even if a few of you manage to play the game in HC SSF till... well... your character dies.
And the reasons are exactly the ones I wrote about above. The game is designed around the fast recovery of characters. Which compels the developers to overwhelm the player in order for the mobs to pose a real threat to the character.
And that's why you have:
- Freezes and stuns in a game with Dodge Rolling
- Rare's auras meant to limit movement (Temporal Bubble, Hinder, Mana and Life Leeching, ...)
- On death or Post death effects
- overlapping of white and blue mobs AoEs, some of them barely visible in the heat of frantic gameplay
- confusing terrain design that makes it hard to tell which part of the map are navigable and which are not (Decay and Blooming Field being two shiny examples)
The game is designed to play "gotcha!" with the player because that's the only way a character has a reasonable chance to be killed.
There are for sure ways to mitigate these issues, and those that want to play that way can indeed play hardcore, a game mode that I find intrinsically boring because it requires safe, constrained, ideally overleveled play and discourages pushing the envelope.
But my point is not that death in this game is unavoidable. My point is how death happens most of the times, even when the player decides not to take risks.
Are you sure your HC SSF character would survive a close encounter with two quick rares, one with Temporal Bubble and the other with Hinder auras, overlapping and slowing your character to about 30% of its normal unconstrained speed?
Because that's exactly what happened to me a few days ago and there was no reasonable way to protect my character against such an unpredictable occurrence.
I didn't rush in blindly. I just activated them and THEY rushed me coming from the edge of my screen.
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