Can we discuss about this SOUL CAGE mobs

last night when I played I had Monolith runs with over 30 of these in 1 map

maps with over 17 Profane Flesh, 21 Giant Crabs. Sometimes 5 Profane Flesh/3 Giant Crabs at once

I just run to the boss and drag my pets but there is a huge amount of some of these mobs

in one monolith last night I had about 15 of those axe throwers all clumped together throwing projectiles at once, almost died multiple times to that pack alone

https://imgur.com/a/0KzWnvV

What I meant in that context was:
“without you ever even being offered an opportunity to react to it( while taking damage).”

The other half of my post is a clarification on it, that sometimes you simply don’t notice them due to excess amount of effects on the screen or similarly coloured background.

That is the thing. You can react to it before taking damage, because they move so pitifully slow, their animations are so pitifully slow and they’re bright ass necro-lime green!

To contrast the “1v1 in a vacuum” i posted just before, here’s some more in a lvl 100 zone with 5 affixes and “lots of stuff going on”. Same principles can be applied.

https://imgur.com/a/lzlK2Vq
https://imgur.com/a/IQTk4S7
https://imgur.com/a/KldIoBx

Sure, no doubt about it! Nobody has denied or is denying that you can kite them.

Here’s a clip of the death in the image.
Constantly spiders exploding, a bunch of new giant spider walked in the screen - focus is on a new threat, soul cages re-emerge from the bottom of the screen, I die instantly.

https://i.imgur.com/ZqBKdIa.mp4

Does this scenario happen all the time? No.
Could it potentially be avoided? Yes.
Does any other monster produce such instakill scenarios? No.

I’m not sure I’d agree with that analysis. You moved south into an existing blob of fire. Is it easy to see after the fact when you’re not getting stressed about all the **** flying about the screen? Yes. But that could easily have been a Putrid Flesh’s (or Decaying Flesh, can’t remember which, the one that fires out the necrotic mine/aoe things) ranged necrotic slam. Or a skellie champ’s ranged spear attack (which has much higher range than the Soul Cage).

Wait… there was no threat on you, nor to your north or west, and you chose to walk down INTO the soul cage breath that was already visible and channeling.

Am I on Candid Camera?

The necrotic mines haven’t killed me yet and the exploding faceman also has been tankable for me so far but I don’t think the faceman is a particularly good mechanic either.

I think that any sort of one-shot mechanic is acceptable only for a boss but that’s just my opinion.

No, you’re experiencing hindsight bias.

Bro you’ve got to be trolling me, you alahahkbar’d that shit with your face, when you had no reason to move, even, and then wonder why you’re not in heaven with 9 virgins?

Is viewing my own clips where I dealt with, arguably, more on my screen(three of them mind you), and coming to the conclusion that yes, indeed, these attacks are very slow and avoidable ALSO hindsight bias? Because, let me tell you, if theres such a thing as foresight bias I likely had that too; knew the mechanics were easy and demonstrated as such.

Whats happening here?

I just want to say I really like these enemies and while I think damage on some DoTs that are particularly threatening to melee characters should be lower, soul cages are fine. Even on maps with tons of them it’s an interesting challenge to find a way to safely work your way through them. Maybe their HP could be a little lower, though.

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The issue isn’t the fact he walked into the DoT…its the fact he walked into a ‘damage over TIME’ and died instantly without anyway to correct their mistake.

Sure if it did 90% HP and another mob finished him off…thats fine, or if it did 90% HP and he quickly backtracked/teleported/corrected their error again its fine - you seem to be missing the point as others do here

Why should a non boss mob be able to do a lingering insta-kill DoT that stays around for 4-5 seconds? and there can be 15+ in 1 area?

don’t stand in its aoe explosion, and near its cone breath. Treat every mob like you dont want to get hit by them. avoid all attacks.

Correcting the mistake would be clicking away at any point during the 5 second journey into the bowels of dante’s inferno. The mob is literally balanced around not being in the fire. He’s got every disadvantage in the world(speed, animation windup, range, brightly colored model), other than damage. If the dot did very slow ticking damage he would have to to have the mobility of the sharks and even more health. You seem to be missing this point. Homogenizing this mob into a differently modeled version of all the other things you face is not the answer, we need variety.

Also, can I point out that he had FOUR damaging modifiers in that map, one of them being Deadly If Not Damaged Recently, which is +100% Damage by itself. He also only has 600hp, and no ward. With the level of enthusiasm for bbqing his own hide on display, I would not be surprised if he had no significant necrotic protections as well. Hell if I was a skeptic I think I might say it’s almost like he did everything wrong in this clip to try to display how “OP” soul cage is!

Because it is the hardest ability to be hit by, in the game. We’ve been over this.

I’ve literally never seen more than 2 in one 40yard radius. I posted 4 clips above where I have 2 max, with 5-10 other mobs(not soul cages). The only way I’d be able to get 15 soul cages in one spot would be to either pull the whole instance(and have it not leash) or skillfully trim away all the non-soul cages and slowly kite all those that I found until they were finally piled up. There was barely 10 in that map I took clips from. You’ll have to post screen shots, at the very least, if you want to convince anyone.

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I’m not sure what your fight here is but you’re either blinded by it or you’re not aware how these damage modifiers work. If you truly have some worries about the mob being made monochrome with the rest of them then practicing factually correct arguments is the way to go (:

  1. Crit until approached, the mob was approached
  2. Deadly unless damaged, the mob was damaged
  3. Physical damage, the mob doesn’t do physical damage
  4. 19% increased damage, yeap

Yeah, 620 HP with 50% res, not the best for DoT but not low either.

That was me walking towards that direction for 1 second, not 5; and getting distracted by new group of dangerous mobs entering the screen.
No other ARPG or rare mob in this game is able to produce similar outcome at least by design.

Sure, but there’s no need for the mob to instantly kill you.
We could design a rock that doesn’t move but if you step on it - you die and I could make the argument that:
The mob is literally balanced around not stepping on it. It’s got every disadvantage in the world(speed, animation windup, range, brightly colored model) and it’s even unable to move other than damage.
This wouldn’t make it a good mob, even if I could excuse it.

With Soul Cages you are bound to click in the death zone sooner or later during your journey, it’s just a matter of when - be it accident or not.
There is just so much going on all the time on your screen if you grind efficiently.
I personally don’t see it enhancing my experience.


My final verdict is that I believe these mobs could have a bigger cone with more distinct colouring / maybe some radiant shading but at least 2x less damage.

Strawman. I never said all 4 of your damaging modifiers applied to you in that exact death. I drew attention to the fact that you chose 4 offensive modifiers to highlight that you throw caution to the wind, exemplified by how you tried to face tank the soul cage :smiley:

  1. Crit until approached: he was already channeling when you approached his breath of fire, but moot point as dot’s can’t crit.

  2. Deadly unless damaged: I can see that the last skele you just summoned fixated on them, swinging at them just before you touched the fire. But had they been hit prior to casting? Did they dodge? You did take dodge as one of the only defensive modifiers. We don’t know because you don’t use enemy health bars.

  3. Physical Damage: yeap

  4. 19% increased damage; well, this is quite disingenuous, considering you dove into TWO breaths wouldn’t this be a little something more like +138% damage? Or +338% damage if they were in fact not damaged before casting? We should probably stick to factually correct arguments.

See this is what I don’t get, clearly I was exaggerating about the 5 seconds because I joked about dante’s inferno, but you go the complete polar opposite of the spectrum and try to make it sound like it was instantaneous. 1 second? Well I paused the video, seeing you move at 3sec and dead at 5secs so it’s at least 1.5-2 seconds, lol. But the point of me making that comment is that it was a long deliberate walk. The first soul cage was at the bottom of your screen. You walked all the way down, passed it, off your original screen, to meet the second soul cage.

Secondly, and I truly am sorry if this is too rude(not denying it IS rude), but I need to call you on your crap. You’re trying to justify a lot of shit here instead of just saying you played like shit and its your fault that you walked into fire. The excuse that “new dangerous enemies appeared and distracted you!”, I don’t buy it. The only thing encroaching your position on the screen is the second giant blue spider to the right, the other spider to the left was there from the beginning. And speaking of that, one might assume they were a pair and came at the same time; not being new at all! But none the less, even if the one to the right was new, it hadn’t yet appeared on your screen until after you started moving. And IF it was so alarming and dangerous, one would think that you would pull away from it(top, left, the only safe space on the screen), not continue to casually stroll passed it to your death. This excuse isn’t convincing, especially when you visually didn’t respond anything like you describe.

I can think of plenty of mobs, here or otherwise, that will evaporate you when stacked as a pair with damage modifiers.

Yes, when you’re first learning… or if you’re playing on a mobile phone.

It’s bright green/white, and so is their hitbox. And if it was 2x as big but half the damage it would “.5 shot you” with 2 of them stacked, and damage modifiers, but would be so big you couldn’t walk out of it in time and would still complain.

Btw you know what would also make it do half the damage? Walking into only one of them.

It’s also a dot so can’t crit.

I’m not sure I agree with that, I think that any mob that produces a dot pool on the floor could have had the same thing happen (if you were distracted by other mobs), though the others need to get into melee range to do it.

There seems to be a bit of an issue with mobs that deal dots, we get used to the damage output of hit-based mobs being halved by glancing blow, and are then surprised by dots doing relatively massive damage because they’re not affected by glancing blow.

If a hit-based mob & a DoT-based mob were balanced to do the same damage over a period of time (say, 1,000 damage over a 10 second period), because we always have capped glancing blow, that hit-based mob is only doing 500 damage over a 10 second period, but the DoT-based mob is laughing it’s arse off because it’s still doing 1,000 damage over 10 seconds.

I also think that the bright green colour of it’s attack is sufficiently distinct.

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Oh, I forgot to reply to this one.

Lets build on your hypothetical. All things being equal that rock wouldn’t be super small, it would be very large and very bright white/green. It would also be attached to a similarly large, hmm, tree? Also colored very bright white/green.

Now, yes, if you stepped on that rock you most definitely deserve to die. See it from my perspective yet?

Well that’s weird because I see it completely white, is this game some find your colorblindness test :smiley: ?

That’s a VERY good explanation! If I opted to ignore glancing blow and chose other defences to compensate for the lack of it, I potentially would have been able to react to it.

Doesn’t sound like a game that I’d want to play and I’m a pretty active advocate for difficulty in games.

I could even be Batman or Joker - my characteristics are irrelevant to the facts that I have 620HP with 50% res and died in less than a second to a rare mob.
I did not try to face tank the mob, I’ve been expressing the contrary in every post by now.

Then you’re axiomatically disagreeing with me.
You know better how I was personally & perceptually experiencing the scenario - I have no argument against it.

Again, this is hindsight bias.

Sorry, I have no further interest in discussing this topic - I’ve expressed my voice pretty clearly by now.

A long list of ineffectual denials and dismissals, the true sign of a defeated individual. Good day!