Rebalancing Corrupted Area and Invasion Bosses (Locked May 16)

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Hilbert wrote:

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The item rewards from these bosses have been rebalanced to be more consistent and fair. None were decreased.

Insignificant rates.
I killed all invaders before and most after patches.
20 Minutes outranging metalsmith for white/blue junk no thx....

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The damage of the more dangerous ones has been decreased.

One shot is still oneshot.

Balancing around 90% and change the damage to balance it around 85% is still poor balancing.

ironically being as though the drops from invasion bosses are shit, I had 1 counter experience of enormous magnitude. Grath......In docks...... Shavronnes Wrappings. I was like wtf!!! Obviously delighted 25 ex :)

However, this should not take away from the fact ive killed maybe 1000 of them with nothing more than the odd rare or alch dropping from them or something :P .

I was just very lucky in this case.

Unfortunately for me the rebalancing of the invasion bosses is coming too late. Ripped level 87.5 yesterday to the avian retch. I would normally skip it but i got brave.

10k armour, MoM, level 21 arctic armour without flasks

To put this into perspective i can take on Jungle Valley weaver with no problem at all.

Got it down to like 15% and then it bursted like crazy and killed me in like 0.8 seconds maybe with 5k life.

I mean.... i was dissapointed but thats how it is. Taking a few days out before i go again but i sorta dont know just how tanky you have to be to not get bullshitted by the invasion bosses. I would really like to know actual numbers and which ones when you say "decreased damage of invasion bosses" because figuring that a boss i usually avoided i might be able to now take on due to previous rebalancing got me killed. I mean im not bitter about it really, its a game, whatever, ill go again its fun but i want to feel i shouldnt run passed loads of them. I do also think people have whined too much about their difficulty. I could take 90% of them without problem, so... just a few are still overtuned. Namely:

Judgement apparatus
The avian retch
Any of the totems...
The fire goat

Also hate ones that get life back all the time - such a pain in the arse to kill.....ie avian fucking retch! :P

But i dont like to sit and not take them on. I mean my char was tanky as hell sacrificing amazing deeps (i still had ok deeps) because thats how you have to build for this league

Im taking a different approach next time and going block with aegis... I kind of feel maybe its the only way to go!

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TobbeLOL wrote:

I agree to this so much! These unique bosses is what makes invasion leagues so much fun for me. It would be a sad thing if GGG responded too heavily on the feedback from people wanting them nerfed.

Strange because they hardly drop anything rewarding considering the effort you have to take to take them down.

I mean, you have to understand that your opinion matters but if 1 person says it's fine while 10 others say it's not then there's clearly a problem....

It's only been broken since the patch release, so why fix it now? Clearly the ideal way to upload these patches is to over power new monsters, areas, etc then nerf them (4x)+ to make them consistent with the rest of the game. The natural effect of which is a lot of people quit playing prior to the nerfs. Positive overall effect: less desync from uncluttered servers!

It's great that you want the game to be new and challenging, but new content should be low-balled in rather than heavy-handed, overpowered and unbalanced. Basically, a string of constant (1)-shot nonsense for which there is no chance to prepare (since it's all new) is less than ideal. I'd rather patches made things regularly incrementally harder in-lieu of the current weekly nerf system.

Nerf players. Nerf bosses. Nerf gear. Nerf skills. This is not balancing, but rather a reflection of poor initial testing and a lack of foresight/planning. It does sound like the design team might be figuring this out though, so yay for that.

Keep working on it; I do think this is a step in the right direction.

About corrupted areas (ambush):

- Monsters in corrupted areas should have chance to drop corrutped items.
- they should have chance to spawn in maps
- fragments for atziri should have equal drop rate and have HIGHER drop rate than vaal skills
- the vaal skill drop from urn at the and is awful after collecting all of them (one wek max)... urn should drop items and currency in addition.

You may 'overhaul' as nauseum.. withuout some REAL GAMEPLAY changes they still will be boring and skipped by most players. Because CORE DESIGN is boring.

They will be still much harder than normal areas with boss that will drop exacly the same shit like normal boos (only he is harder) and with 'great reward' = one vaal skill and i have alrady 7 in my stash. After doing some for fun whats the point after week or two? Especially for non endgame player?

You should change your core design philosophy... its just liek Diablo 3 RoS... covering piece of guano with new painting will not change that its still a guano.

I read this monifesto post and (sadly) i dont see any real change that will make corrupted areas more fun or desirable to run for me. Im sure that this weird ppl that farm City Of Sarn for 12 hours will be content.

/meh

GGG dont nerf more the boss Invasion, only balance being consistent with average hp, damage and stage level or map level of players. If they are too weak will have no more challenges this league.

Good to hear on all counts, especially map mod balance. Just yesterday ran into a corrupted area with a single mod: players have no life or mana regeneration. I mean really? The excitement of hearing the beating heart and running toward the sound quickly turned to disgust. The random side area might as well not even spawned in the first place.

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Startkabels wrote:

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TobbeLOL wrote:

I agree to this so much! These unique bosses is what makes invasion leagues so much fun for me. It would be a sad thing if GGG responded too heavily on the feedback from people wanting them nerfed.

Strange because they hardly drop anything rewarding considering the effort you have to take to take them down.

I mean, you have to understand that your opinion matters but if 1 person says it's fine while 10 others say it's not then there's clearly a problem....

[Removed by Support]

Welcome changes, but overall, I have mixed feelings.
Nerfing overall damage is an ok step -

but what would be actually meaningful is this:

-Many of the invasion bosses are terrifying, and overpowered
-Because they do attacks that can't be evaded or blocked
-It's ok that they do that sort of thing occasionally, and hurt you a good deal, keeps it exciting
-But for the love of God,
-Make them do those attacks *intermittently*
-Not spamming them out like they do! :D

-If their attacks were just changed so they did *survivable* attacks most often, punctuated by very dangerous non-blockable ones, that would be a better change

-Just nerf how often they crit, and the multiplier
-Choose wisely what skills you give to these bosses
-Example : Bear trap is ok - it's un-avoidable - but Bear trap + EK, two un-evadable skills? Add Viper Strike? Jesus!
-Apoclayptica - two totems with rapid-cast? Others with rapid-fire vaal abilities?
-Bosses that nearly kill my lvl 58 in lvl 35 zones? (*Cough electric devourers.*)

-It wouldn't be so bad if there was something you could do about these attacks
-Such as - why not add a potion that will cure viper strike?
-Why not add some passive that lets you see enemy traps on the ground?
-Can we have some new uniques that will help block spells, or reduce crit damage of spells? Can they be common enough for everybody to have, without paying 4 exalt?
(Survival of the Richest is getting old!)
-Why not make thorns from the sky blockable? Is there some reason why my character couldn't put his shield over his head? :P

-If we have *some* way to reactively save our lives, the fight is still exciting, but at least we can walk into it prepared

-As it is now - there's nothing you can do, no way to prepare.
-If you dont meet the "insano-hard" bosses, you live
-If you do, and dont exit out, you eventually die to them
-Living is a dice roll, and not a testament to player skill

All of this stuff needed to have been thought-out and tested before this league debuted.
I've tried to give good, useful feedback about the league as it's been on-going, but at this point, I think the league is going to be filed under the History of PoE as some sort of joke.

I've lost too much of my stuff to deaths that were senseless (as in, I never even saw the boss.) I'm tired of re-running my friends through the Acts again and again, just to see them rip again and again.

The changes are too little, too late. :/
The reason I leave feedback now is I hope the devs learn from this, and never debut something this untested ever again.

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TobbeLOL wrote:

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NgjnMaster wrote:

I've been playing a lot of invasion lately.

In my opinion, the invasion bosses are AWESOME and even some of them still need to be buffed a bit.

I have build myself tanky, I'm level 84 with a lot of block and spell block!

Still, I think it's so great to actually have challenging fights.

I really, really hope that you won't make the invasion bosses as poor fights as the rest of the unique signature bosses. The challenging bosses (and perhaps along with some better loot) is what really makes this game KING!

Edit: I can highly recommend people to return to Invasion league. It's a BIG challenge, but they're killable and so are exiles! COME COME

I agree to this so much! These unique bosses is what makes invasion leagues so much fun for me. It would be a sad thing if GGG responded too heavily on the feedback from people wanting them nerfed.

It's not about Invasion bosses being hard in general, it's about some of them being rotten apples that are totally unfair against most of the builds. If you get one of those in a high level map with a wrong damage mod, it really isn't too pleasant. On top of that they drop absolutely nothing atm. Risk-reward = potato. Also, when you have to build your character around Invasion bosses, you trivialize 99% of other content. That's no fun.

I myself, like most of the people playing hc, am all up for challenge but getting killed in a matter of seconds with insane defences in a high level map is just not challenging, it's plain stupid. I really liked the concept behind Invasion bosses but sadly GGG implemented them pretty poorly.

More ontopic: this manifesto sounds very promising. I might actually return to Invasion when they deploy 1.1.3. Glad to hear GGG listens. Still, even though I've been complaining about Invasion bosses being too hard, I hope they don't nerf them too much. Finding a proper balance for them being challenging and not unfair would be awesome.

I really like the flameblast change. And what you describe as players wanting to have time asses if they want to engage a invasion boss feels spot on.

Although I really dont feel invasion needs to be nerfed upon nerf. This may not be the case right now. I just feel that as a hardcore player, this invasion season has me really hooked. I played nemesis for about 3 weeks and then got really bored cause there wasnt much of a difference except some new content. The gameplay and feel was really the same from anarchy/hardcore.
In invasion I've been really trying hard to find builds and playstyles that allow me to stay alive and engage bosses. So i just wanted to say im really enjoying this season and please dont tone invasion down too much.

EDIT: I agree with the part that they may not be enough incentive to engage some bosses in high level maps. Though the difficutly level is fine.
(Im not in a position where i can kill everyboss, i prolly engage 50% of them or less. Still im looking forward to when my char can kill em all :D)