Gound Degens, On death effects, etc.. and how they relate to the lack of engaging combat directly.

Nobody likes ground degends, on death effects, flying balls following them after you've killed enemies already and so on.... so then.. Why does GGG keep using these kind of things then?

It's simple really, when everything dies in seconds before they can even react or do anything to you... how could they possibly pose any kind of danger to you or demand any kind of engagement? They don't... so this is why they keep using these effects that aren't tied to monsters as they live but rather after they die, or not connected at all to their existence as an entity.

Is it a good solution though? No, of course not. Everyone hates it, clearly... but how else could they make monsters pose any kind of danger to you in this environment? There is no other way I can think of.. and apparently neither can they think of another either.

So what do they have to do instead? Attack the root causes of course... making monsters tougher so they actually can pose a danger to you while they live not after they die.

Would that be enough by itself though? Of course not... you will quickly realize that fighting too many monsters at the same time (monster density), which don't die fast enough, will quickly make it become what people define as "a slog". So then, monster density needs a serious hit too.

Is it enough now? Sadly, still no. Now that monsters are tougher and fewer you will realize that their attack patterns and skills are severely lacking... making for a very lacking experience in terms of engaging combat.

Now this one is the really hard one to fix for GGG... because they would need to redesign enemy AI, attack patterns, monster skills, mods and so on.

Let's take, for example, monster mods and see what they could do there. As it is right now, monster mods are a mess... boosting passive stats a lot of the times, stacking all sorts of annoying effects on them making enemies very annoying to fight and not fun and so on.

So how could mods be redesigned?

Simple... let's pretend we have a monster with 1 ability (let's pretend that ability is something similar to sunder and is well telegraphed)... as a rare monster... that enemy could have another ability added to it from a pool that makes sense to it's type (maybe humanoid, in this case) .. so now that monster could also use.. some sort of ability that looks like hammer of gods, for example... you probably get the picture).

In essence, the more "rare" a monster is, the more it becomes similar to a boss... a mini-boss if you will.

A very important aspect here is that these abilities they are given... they HAVE TO use them... not just have them and pop out of them. Why I am mentioning this? We have plenty of examples of blanket "abilities" given to monsters that are either passive or just "activate" out of them while they do their own thing still... Take for example the abilities from asmeri spirits they get.... these abilities just "happen" out of them making for a very lackluster experience when combined with whatever else that monster is doing at the same time. Not to mention the "blanket" aspect of said abilities which is extremely lazy and breeds a lot of issues on it's own by combining things that should never get together... and this is a recurring theme in PoE.

There actually is one monster I have found during my testing of spectres that sort of does this thing... but it's the only one I've found personally... that is the Death Knight. As a rare, it gains another ability that it can use, not just pop out of him. If they follow that formula and expand on it, as well as address all the other issues I've mentioned earlier... they would definitely go on the right path...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3iY-Z2O8L0

The issues are very clear imo... will you act on them, GGG?