I'm tired of being one-shot

[whitelion]

Grushnak just did 3307 against my Archmage on Nightmare with Greater Weapon Focus (1778) + Assault (1529). I also saw a log in Discord where one of the combat trainers did 4236 with a similar combo.

On Nightmare!? That's crazy. Even if you don't have much armor (you're an AM,) that seems excessive.

[Dervic]

The numbers on that Assault seem quite fair... but I agree GWF should be looked at to prevent those damage spikes, maybe change it to 100% chance and reduced weapon damage (TL), it would still be good for applying on-hit effects.

[Delmuir]

To be fair, an Archmage can dish out numbers in the 2k range fairly easily (and considerably more with effort) but usually not until end game. I'm just a little shocked by the amount of damage as early as it was, i.e., in the Sandworm Lair. I think I was like level 16 or so.

This is why I don't play Insane, i.e., because you run into this kind of thing constantly, but Nightmare usually isn't so bad. For the most part, it still isn't, but GWF seems to be the culprit quite often. The six knives-GWF combo is fairly punishing but GWF alone seems to be an awfully common kill-skill.

[Arcvasti]

The numbers on that Assault seem quite fair... but I agree GWF should be looked at to prevent those damage spikes, maybe change it to 100% chance and reduced weapon damage (TL), it would still be good for applying on-hit effects.

The thing with Greater Weapon Focus is that "another, similar, strike" means that it does another attack at the exact same weapon multiplier as the triggering strike. Just making it only do a bump-level hit when it triggers would go a long way towards making it less spikey.

[Tryble]

GWF examples are just a subset of the case where colossal melee damage enemies get multiple actions on the player at once. Enemies which manage to double the player for whatever reason and throw two hard hitting talents are going to toast you. Plenty of boss rares get access to high levels of Blinding Speed, and it doesn't help that there are tons of enemy species with minor but meaningful global speed boosts. Getting crippled and/or slowed is pretty frequent as well.

Personally, most of my experiences with getting oneshot in 1.6+ is getting doubled or worse by an enemy with way more weapon damage than I had armor, although GWF was relevant a couple times too. Like this one I got just a moment ago - not entirely sure I ever saw this guy.
It's a shame that you can't just duck away and wait out GWF, since it's uptime is good and CD low.

Some enemies have such crazy DMG/APR/Crit Mult that they don't even need to double you to take you out with the throw of a single talent - see that one guy from earlier, who could probably kill almost any Insane Lv50 character in one Prismatic Slash or whatever.

[tabs]

Got hit on normal for 1k damage by a Orc Grandmaster Assassin (rare, archer class) in the last floor of Reknor. He had 250% critmult...

So oneshots aren't just an insane thing

[Delmuir]

Those assassins are rough but Reknor does seem a little early for that kind of damage.

I wonder how much the xp penalty affects this. I've actually found it more difficult at times to be at a higher level... I think of the assassin who has the shopkeeper as a good example. He's easy at level 10 but murderous at 15. If I don't get him early then I usually wait until 20 or so.

Of course I could be wrong but... maybe?

[Bananadine]

Ah hey I finally had this happen for the first time (playing on insane incidentally). It was exactly this:

GWF examples are just a subset of the case where colossal melee damage enemies get multiple actions on the player at once. Enemies which manage to double the player for whatever reason and throw two hard hitting talents are going to toast you. Plenty of boss rares get access to high levels of Blinding Speed, and it doesn't help that there are tons of enemy species with minor but meaningful global speed boosts.

Yeah some unique enemy in the Old Forest hit me with a Rush + Greater Weapon Focus + Prismatic Slash combo all at once. It was able to do this because it was a snake.

[whitelion]

Overall, I am enjoying 1.6.6 more than previous 1.6.x builds. Getting one-shot is still very possible, but with the changed AI I haven't been experiencing it out of auto-explore or resting like happened before. Enemies with high stealth and the accompanying crit boosts can still get you out of nowhere though. But most of the time I at least get a chance to see the enemy and make some choice about what action to take.

GWF examples are just a subset of the case where colossal melee damage enemies get multiple actions on the player at once. Enemies which manage to double the player for whatever reason and throw two hard hitting talents are going to toast you. Plenty of boss rares get access to high levels of Blinding Speed, and it doesn't help that there are tons of enemy species with minor but meaningful global speed boosts. Getting crippled and/or slowed is pretty frequent as well.

Personally, most of my experiences with getting oneshot in 1.6+ is getting doubled or worse by an enemy with way more weapon damage than I had armor, although GWF was relevant a couple times too.
It's a shame that you can't just duck away and wait out GWF, since it's uptime is good and CD low.

Another one that I find quite annoying and pretty much always run from if I can't dispel it is Displacement Shield. Against caster randbosses, you often can't eat a nuke spell and also hit yourself on the same turn without dying, which is fairly likely if you attack into the shield, so it's safer to just run and wait them out if you have the space. The shield also has extremely high duration (15-25 turns is common) and the quick summary of enemies doesn't show how much power it has left. Maybe this is available via inspect, but I didn't think to try.

[Tryble]

Another one that I find quite annoying and pretty much always run from if I can't dispel it is Displacement Shield. Against caster randbosses, you often can't eat a nuke spell and also hit yourself on the same turn without dying, which is fairly likely if you attack into the shield, so it's safer to just run and wait them out if you have the space. The shield also has extremely high duration (15-25 turns is common) and the quick summary of enemies doesn't show how much power it has left. Maybe this is available via inspect, but I didn't think to try.

Inspect does reveal the shield power. I used to try to wait out displacement shield, but it's so long that can sometimes be more dangerous. Breaking it while they're stunned or silenced is...usually safe enough.



Anyway, after a couple of wins now and a dozen random other characters besides, my experiences with extreme damage spikes (about twelve or so I would guess) have all been the result of being doubled by enemies with unusually high offensive power. Maybe it's just the characters I've been playing, but so long as you survive an attack you're typically fine given how powerful healing generally is. Lots of my characters have been so soaked in healing that I just don't care about any damage that doesn't outright kill me. I'm starting to wonder if the life boost + healing reduction idea might be a good change for the game overall...

[whitelion]

I was playing an adventurer on insane and got hit for 2k damage through 200 armor, 77% resist all, and T5 ablative armor....which seems excessive. Enemy type was mindslayer randboss using TK smash, but I'm guessing that high levels of armor pen and respen on enemies are still a problem. This enemy did have unusually high base weapon damage compared to others (> 300) and I probably would have run away if my adventurer didn't otherwise feel OP and crush through high peak stair bosses like nothing, but still.

[Bananadine]

Seems like 1.6.7 is very different? I got bored breezing through early-game dungeons because they were so easy! It felt like a huge change. For me personally it made the game feel much more fair but much less interesting; overall I preferred it the old way. I'm actually shifting from Insane to Madness for now. (That probably won't work out in the long run, but who knows.)

I've only tested with one run though, up to level 30 or so (at which point I went into an overly advanced dungeon to make the game interesting again and eventually got myself killed). So maybe my impression is inaccurate.

[whitelion]

Yeah, it's been getting less common as the 1.6.x releases have rolled on. However, it also depends on what classes you play. Classes with lots of active defenses and low max hp, like Archmage, can still get one-shot out of autoexplore. The east is also a lot more dangerous. I think that getting one-shot in the T2s (which did happen in the early 1.6.x releases) has mostly been addressed with the changes to the AI and the tweaks to certain dangerous nukes like Freeze. You can certainly still get one-shot by high peak stair bosses, but I think on insane the general strategy is just not to fight anyone in high peak if you don't have to.

[Hunter]

It seems AI doesn't come after you even if his friends does see you and that mob see his friends.
You can clearly see it in Trollmire with Bill - he almost never come after you, while all his frinds in his LoS come to you.
So it's actually bugged?

Yeah, I've noticed that LOS response is a lot wonkier -- or at least less prevalent -- than it used to be. Whereas enemies would usually be woken up by active aggressive enemies racing toward you (a massively dangerous side-effect of teleporting out of danger, resulting in a frustrated enemy bee-lining toward you and waking up every other creature it passed), now a significant percentage of them don't even wake up if you kill something two squares away, just so long as you don't cross their LOS. No question it's easier by an order of magnitude, but a happy medium might need to be found. I don't miss the omniscience that seems to come with late-stage play, especially since you, by definition, are the strongest being in the main plot thread, seeing as winning requires you to beat everything, and usually multiple enemies at once, and you have no such omniscience (and, in a related not, I have always thought that stealth and invisibility were essentially broken at higher difficulties -- the very occasional benefit in the endgame is nowhere near worth the amount of points you put into them or the slots you invest in the runes, or however you achieve stealth/invisibility -- and that opinion hasn't had reason to change recently. But that's a different, if similar, conversation)

[visage]

I have always thought that stealth and invisibility were essentially broken at higher difficulties -- the very occasional benefit in the endgame is nowhere near worth the amount of points you put into them or the slots you invest in the runes, or however you achieve stealth/invisibility -- and that opinion hasn't had reason to change recently.

While that's generally true, a rogue throwing knife build in my opinion gets enough value out of it. ...and an adventurer stacking multiple sources of stealth can pretty much breeze through Insane right now. (If Predator gave access to Hate as a resource, there's a pretty good chance that a stealth adventurer would be Madness-viable.)