Game Exploit removal

[RikOz]

I recall, back when I was playing Diablo 2, that I noticed enemy mobs, aside from end-of-level bosses, had the same abilities that were available to the player. The challenge came via the simple fact that there were always so damned many enemies.

 

My complaints about general enemy power design are few:

 

#1: Overreliance on Knockback/Knockdown, particularly at low levels. Examples: Hellions and Skulls who appear to have only one attack: the AR attack with KB (Slug?) All the mobs in a spawn will run up to you, and then just stand there waiting for that power to recharge so they can knock you down again. This is mainly a "fun" issue - spending most of a fight flat on your back is not "fun". It's cheese, particularly loading up enemies with KB at low levels when a player does not yet have access to counters.

 

#2: Stacking ToHit debuffs. Three words: Circle of Thorns. Again, cheese. Low-level characters (pre-25) can't easily counter it. You can only carry so many inspirations, and even if you load all 10 slots with yellows, those aren't going to last you through a full CoT map. To make things even worse (though this may have simply been my really bad luck with RNG, across every single one of my characters), for the first several months of Homecoming, CoT maps seemed to be grossly overpopulated with those ghosts (I'd see map after map which were almost entire populated with ghosts, with hardly a humanoid mob in sight), which meant being under near-constant ToHit debuffs. That appears to have either been fixed, or the RNG has finally balanced out for me.

 

#3: A higher-level thing: Mobs with "you can't touch me" abilities, like MoG and similar abilities from other PSs. They simply last way too long. They turn what is supposed to be a fight into "twiddle your thumbs for three minutes until the power wears off". That's not "challenging", it's "boring". Of course, I understand that bosses with those abilities (like Marauder) were originally intended to be approached with a group, where you'd likely have at least one AT/Powerset that could mitigate/counter the ability. It would be nice if the game could differentiate between a group and a solo player, and change tactics accordingly, but I don't expect the HC devs to do that.

[SwitchFade]

From the multiple voices decrying the abilities and tactics the AI uses, it's clear the game is not too easy, as so many mention in other threads.

 

Nice, game it's balanced well, I'll definitely have to vote for keeping things the way they are.