Let me preface by saying that I think the game plays great in general. In terms of raw gameplay, Last Epoch is giving me basically the same vibes as Path of Exile did way back in alpha. There are obviously some kinks that still needs to be sorted out, but you can also clearly see that the developers know what they are doing.
Having said that, I find myself somewhat disappointed by the encounter design.
I think the game relies too much on “don’t stand in the red circle of doom” type of mob attacks. My objections to these are twofold. On the one hand, they teach the player to stare at the floor instead of at the action. This turns the otherwise very fun combat into a game of whack-a-mole where the only skill you really need is to be able to move between clearly marked safe zones and clearly marked un-safe zones. On the other hand, when there is a lot of action, some of the ability signals can also be next to impossible to actually tell. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, the hand of god appears from the sky and knocks you the fuck out. I think the red circle of doom attacks make the game feel too mundane when they work as intended, and too unfair when they don’t.
I much prefer attacks that are based entirely on physical objects and motions. My favorite example is probably the “evil eye” type of mobs. They fire a series of fairly slow-moving projectiles in a curved arc. The spell behavior ensures that the player has ample time to respond, but also that you have to exercise some brain functions in order to distinguish between “safe” and “not safe”. Another example is from the mini-boss before Lagon. There is a lightning spell that simply encloses you in a circle of lightning. Easy to see and avoid as long as you keep your cool, but potentially lethal if you don’t. These sorts of attacks teach the player to pay attention to the game world and ensure that, when you die, you die because you suck and not because the game was unfair.
I think the red circles of doom should be reserved for bosses doing potential 1-hit KO’s, if you are insistent on using them. But at least for ordinary encounters, I think you should strive to let the action guide the player.
Edit:
This is the most egregious example I could think of:
This is an endgame boss that is basically impossible to fail since the game uses color-coded ability signals to solve the entire encounter for you.
I think LE does a tremendous job of giving visual feedback to the player compared to any other similar game.
Most mob types, even the regular mob types matter, since they can have dangerous avoidable attacks.
Telegraphing is not the only way LE does tell the player about upcoming attacks, there are plenty of mobs that have abilities that are not telegraphed on the ground, but have strong animation/wind-up’s etc (like e.g. Soul Cage Breath, Watcher Homing Projectiles or Ospirix Warrior Eathquake Skill)
I do really like, that even regular mob types and not just bosses have clear and dangerous mechanics.
I personally do not want only “1-shot” mechancis to be telegraphed, i like that each and every ability that is potentially avoidable and dangerous has some sort of telegraphing or animation.
Combat pace in LE is still in a very suitable and manageable frame, which i really like. Having to constantly move and avoid stuff, even for non-boss encounters make combat and gameplay way more engaging.
I am definitely not against either hard hitting normal mobs or animation wind-ups. Hard hits should both be a reasonably common occurrence and clearly signalled to the player.
What I’m against is the over-reliance of color-coded big hits instead of using proper physical signals to inform the player of said hits, such as animation wind-ups or having clearly visibile projectiles flying your way.
In the example I posted above, I think the color-coded telegraphing trivialize the entire encounter.
I’m not sure I agree with your view on that particular boss (since you can face tank it with anything that has capped resists), but also the xbows (or whatever they are) are mostly offscreen, so you wouldn’t be able to see where they’re aiming at if they didn’t have a big telegraph. They need something that says “we’re about to fire now move if you don’t want to be hit”.
Of the telegraphed attacks that we have at the moment, I think most of them that have a big circle on the floor are reasonable.
Void-fused Earth’s ranged attack, I think most people wouldn’t be able to predict where they would land if they didn’t have circles on the floor, though the melee one is obvious.
Profane Flesh’s necrotic mortar is fairly obvious since they explode a while after they land, but the big charged attack can be anywhere on the screen in a direct line once it starts doing the animation.
I face-tanked him too (like all other bosses I’ve fought in the Monolith). But I think that’s a different debate. My point here would be more that, regardless of how hard he actually hits, the encounter would be trivial because of the comprehensive telegraphing.
If there are abilities in the game that people cannot predict or comprehend (and I agree that the crossbow attacks in the above encounter may be just such an ability), then my preferred solution would be to rework the ability using physical signals until people can predict or comprehend it. Not just give them a cheat sheet and call it a day. Though I of course recognize that giving people a cheat sheet is the more economical alternative.
Edit: I changed the title of the thread to clarify what I’m after.
While LE definitely has more telegraphed stuff than simialr other games, they also have more than enough non-telegraphed abilities, that have other kind of indicators.
In the future, when we get mroe enemy types, we could get more of those “different” indicated abilities, such as wind-up animations etc.
But i don’t see an issue here, in fact i really to find this refreshing compared to other similar games.
I kinda agree with OP but in a different way.
The element of game design that I find underexploited in LE to warn the player to avoid attacks is sound, especially for bosses.
I don’t like to make this comparison every time but for me the best example to illustrate that is Sirius “Die !” voice line during Awakener fight (in PoE). Every player pretty much reacts to this sound stimulus than the actual animation to avoid the attack.
Using this aspect of boss encounter (and to a certain extent mobs encounter) has for me several advatanges :
Diversity of the gameplay
Give more identity to the bosses
I honestly think that it is an aspect completely underused in LE maybe for valid reasons, but would, in my opinion, immensely change the impression of some encounters.
Totally agree, this can be great additions, especially for Bosses in particular.
For more usualy mob types some distinguishable sound, that does not get annoying over alonger period of time would be more appropriate.
For Bosses, as you said, that would give them alot more character and would develop their identity. Maybe somebosses could also have very interesting sounds.
Some MoF bosses already have sounds associated with their abilities, but that can be improved upon.
While PoE is probably the worst example for this as a game in general, the Sirus fight is the one and only fight that is well designed in PoE, but that fight has such a high standard, which the other content of PoE can’t compete with.
As you said they give the player clue about the game play, while giving the character alot of identiy. For Sirus this is especially the case, since the Voice Lines develop over the course of the fight and get more intense/crazy for the later stages of the fight.
I agree. In PoE for example a lack of telegraphs often just means you’re instantly dead with no chance to react. It’s more than possible for a game to be challenging with visual (or audio queues), just by making players juggle what they’re looking at (e.g. FF14, Wildstar).
For an APRG, the extra clarity is really nice because things often get visually out of hand with clumps of mobs all doing their own thing.
I’d be fine with that in addition to visual ques, but audio cues alone handicaps people with hearing problems. More flavor voice acting for bosses would be great (“my brothers will not have died in vain!” ).
As for the OP, I disagree that the clear telegraphing is a problem. Dying to an ambiguous AOE is one of the most frustrating things for me. Sure, I can understand the argument that learning to estimate AOE sizes is part of getting better at the game, but so is learning to recognize which items are good/bad, yet I never see objections to the “economical” approach of using a loot filter instead of learning base types and affixes. It’s ultimately up to the devs to decide where to draw the lines between player skill and unnecessary burden, and I, for one, don’t mind if memorizing AOE sizes isn’t a requirement.
The God Hunter Argentus fight is definitely one of the more telegraphed fights, and it’s also undertuned. Another fight, Void Rayheh, is also among the most well telegraphed fights, and we’ve had a lot of discussions in the forums about whether or not the fight is too difficult. It has even gotten nerfed yet some people still believe it’s too challenging.
World of Warcraft also relies on heavy amounts of telegraphs in its dungeons and raids, yet those don’t make the game easy. It’s one thing to have a telegraph, and another to effectively react to the telegraph. Telegraphed attacks don’t negate difficulty. They allow for it to be presented in a different way, and some types of attacks would be nearly impossible to implement without telegraphs, because they would be almost impossible for the player to successfully react to.
I can understand the concern for too many visual telegraphs, and that making the game sort of one dimensional in how players react to bosses. I agree with you that having other cues is a good way to diversify what the player needs to look out for, and therefore how the player engages with the content. I also like @Grimtok 's suggestion for more auditory cues.
Right now, I don’t get the feeling that the telegraphs are too extreme, but I can see reason to be concerned about it getting out of hand as more enemies are added to the game.
Absolutely true. My remark about sound was concerning voice acting too.
Again Sirius is the perfect example of what good voice lines and voice acting can add to a boss encounter. Music too.
On the point you are raising how people with hearing problem or disabilities deals with this aspect on such an encounter ?
Voice lines as cues have the advantage of having it both ways : their text can be displayed on screen and therefore be visual for people with hearing problems.
I don’t have firsthand experience (my hearing is good), but from what a deaf friend has said, it comes down to a mixture of constantly acting as if those attacks are coming and yomi (FGC term that’s basically a combination of mind-reading and baiting your opponent).
Your argument is half-reasonable: Boss fights are currently terrible slogs against giant bags of HP that have way, way, way too many attacks that make it impossible to fight back and force you to spend time purely dodging, doubly so if you’re a melee character.
But the other half is where you’re wrong: That’s not an issue of going overboard with telegraphs. Look at a game like Secret World, which had and has (F the reviewers) the best combat of any MMO ever made. EVERYTHING in that game is fully, cleanly telegraphed by both animations and outlines: There are no untelegraphed attacks unless they are unavoidable hitscans and the like.
Over-telegraphing isn’t the problem, encounters with no interesting attack patterns, large periods of dead time, and 4-10 times too much HP are the problem. Enemy health and survivability needs to be seriously reviewed in light of the current gamestate, and brought way way way down in many cases, most of them bosses.
Fights need more interesting attack patterns, and ones that don’t prevent you from inflicting damage. Create small safe pockets, give players tools for briefly surviving in those dangerous areas, make attacks brief and quick and snappy. Bosses right now are too slow, too pendulous, and just not fun.
I played Wildstar in the past and I think after this there is no more overtelegraphing posible :D. Bosses are sadly designed this way to be no pushovers if you outgear/outscale them. Sadly this ruins a lot for me because H&S are all about scaling for me. Why should I waste a lot of time on a level 70 boss when I’m level 90? I don’t get the design philosophy but the system behind it… making bosses meaningfull. Sadly the bosses aren’t meaningfull but time consuming to a point where I think the devs want to fool us ^^.
Hm, i don’t say Uber Elder is bad, but i think it’s not better than Sirus.
I do like Sirus way more.
I just think that most other fights like Elder, Shaper and Uber Elder are not was intuitive.
When i did Sirus the very very first time (without knowing anything about the fight). I still was able to deal with alot of the mechanics, while they were at no point to easy. After getting used to the mechanics and exactly knowing what to do it got way easier, but still not soooo easy to a point were it does not challenge me anymore.
Most other fights in PoE are not clean and readable from the get-go you actually need to do them multiple times to notice and understand all the mechanics cleanly.
Just go to my Profile and ignore me, that way you can’t see my opinion, might be the best option if you can’t handle different opinions.
If it’s a genuinely held opinion then it can’t be a lie though it can be wrong as far as you are concerned (which I know is where you stand & that’s fine as an opinion).
For me the telegraphing is a good thing.
I’m on the autistic spectrum, and as a result I tend to get overwhelmed when there are a lot of visuals on the screen. Trying to process visuals and audio cues at the same time can also be difficult. So for me, this system is a godsend.
I think a possible solution would be to have the option to toggle the over-the-top telegraphing, and also implement the more subtle audio/visual cues. That way, people wanting more challenge can have it and people like me can play the game in a way that suits us.
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