Abyss + Temporal Chains is really awful

Prefaces: Not every build has to be able to handle everything well. Builds are even free to not be able to handle things at all (especially if you're really niche or memeing). But generally, you want unhandlable things to be opt-in (not from a build standpoint, but from choosing which content you do or not; see PoE1 Atziri which I could never handle with Trinity builds). Allowing the flexibility of weapon set switching also allows a lot of strange interactions to be fixable if you have a permanent weakness. I also love the game, but this is just one of the things that are getting old incredibly fast.

So, Temporal Chains. I play Lich with permanent curses. It is a core ascendancy passive with no weird stuff going on. It is an obviously core build direction, since there are no less than six curse clusters on the passive skill tree, Whispers of Doom, plus two additional clusters that improve slow magnitude. And outside this particular interaction, it's really powerful. I believe I am doing intended gameplay. I also believe an ascendancy shouldn't kill you on a generic encounter including a white monster type.

My character is using Temporal Chains on Blasphemy, so I can technically move away, however the radius is too large for this to be a tenable solution.

The two culprits are Lightless Moray and the abyssal modifier that makes monsters invulnerable. They are both invulnerable for an extremely long time because their invulnerability state are both connected to their action speed and movement. I believe that for Lightless Moray, the invulnerable state is part of its attack animation, for the abyssal modifier, the invulnerability is a ground effect, so the solution is to aggro it out of the ground effect. But because it's slowed, I basically can't pull it out of the darkness. I die to these two effects the most often, I believe. Especially if it's a rare and it has something like donut or lightning explosions. The solution to periodic effects like those is never to dodge forever, because it opens up more opportunities to get hit (where you probably die), but to kill them before the effects get an opportunity to kill you (the latter is by the way good design; you almost always want the default solution to be aggressive and take risks).

Technically you could weapon switch out of it, but this is an awful solution, since it removes a defensive layer and kills me anyways. And it doesn't remove the issue of selfcast curse liches (the more intended build than mine) that can never turn off their curses after it hits a mob.

So, on opt-in, and such. Abyss as a league mechanic is present in every map. So this is a generic encounter I have to face if I want to play the endgame at all. So the game has an obviously intended ascendancy build that gets destroyed by something you face in every map.

Because of the map completion system, if the monster is rare, there's not even really an option to skip it. I guess you can redo the map, but this is, again, awful.

I haven't played chill builds, but I'd expect builds that use chill as defensive utility face a similar issue.

The point is that if I want slow in the game (and you should, because PoE2 shines the most when defense/mobility utility skills are relevant), I wouldn't design unavoidable encounters where invulnerable states are bound to action speed or position (eg ground effects). It messes with so much with that makes PoE2 special. Periodic invulnerability aura, for example, is actually completely fine, since its effect as far as I know is independent from the monster action speed. Maybe it just gets less dangerous buffs from the aura than the abyssal ground invulnerability. If so, make that the mechanic. Because I am doing something the game told me to, and then Temporal Chains reverses in utility and kills me.

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EDIT: The culprit may be specifically Amanamu's Void plus Undying Will. I'm not sure. Staying inside the Void did not make me able to damage the monster in most cases. In either case, it's is far more egregious than Periodic Invulnerability Aura. Maybe it boosts monster damage at the same time, or lasts far longer. Regardless, it results in either of two states; that I have to state at the screen as the monster finishes its animations, or I die. Neither is particularly compelling when I can't opt out of it doing something the game wanted me to.

As a sidenote here, doing Archnemesis style modifiers, where the base function of the modifier is really hard to figure out what it even does, is bad, as I noted in another feedback entry. I'm level 92 and I am still learning what a bunch of Abyss modifiers even do, because the game doesn't tell me, and I don't have time to learn when the monster is killing me. I wouldn't bundle monster effects into inscrutable modifiers, and I thought GGG learned the same lesson from Archnemesis.

Keywording complex mechanics as a bundle can work, obviously inspired in a good way from Magic the Gathering. The difference is that there, we have reminder text to read, and the game isn't real time, so we can take the time understanding the mechanic before continuing the game. Adding a bestiary that describes modifiers would solve this.
Last edited by Skadrel#3812 on Sep 11, 2025, 7:43:36 AM
Last bumped on Sep 11, 2025, 7:24:50 AM

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