I've got over 9k armor and 1/2 of that applied to DoTs, yet it doesn't make an appreciable difference in my defense vs the T4 SFB boss. Does that stat actually do anything? Or do his dot floor effects just not count as dots for some reason? I'm beginning to think it might be shorter to create a list of things that aren't bugged...
External link →I could be wrong about this and I'm on mobile so I can't check right now but I think the confusion comes from the ability draining percent current HP over time instead of dealing damage.
Is there a way that could be countteracted? Seems like a really weird mechanic to just be "here's hp loss you can't interact with or mitigate in any way." Making the barrier swap an instant cast would also help a ton. Taking 2 or 3 ticks of massive unmitigatable damage because you're finishing a skill animation and the boss placed fire underneath you feels insanely bad.
I could still be wrong about why this seems to be going through defenses but if I'm right, no, you can't mitigate it. I know we have this somewhere, I just can't remember where it is.
The key thing though is that because it's % of current HP, it can't kill you.
Even if the degen can't kill you, Cremorus absolutely can. "It's % of current HP" is very small comfort to a melee character who just had 60% or more of their HP removed in a blink and is still tanking the same amount of substantial punishment from a very powerful boss. At least a ranged character can continue to dodge and evade the projectiles coming their way. For them, "it can't kill you" matters. If you're point blank getting frame 1 hit by projectiles, "it can't kill you" becomes much more effectively "get dead, idiot. Shouldn't have played melee."
It's expected that melee characters will endure much more punishment than ranged, and it's not that hard to build accordingly. But when damage just says "no" to all the health and defensive layers you've invested in and, in doing, becomes even MORE punishing the tankier you've built, there's a problem. If you're familiar with some of the evergreen challenges with the League of Legends character Vayne, I think you might see some of the same problems rearing their heads here.
Even worse, if this is in fact % current HP removal, guess which character archetype is utterly unaffected by it? Low life wardstack characters. IE, the most powerful defensive archetype by a MASSIVE degree.
This started as a problem with how armor/dots are scaled but I think we might be stumbling onto an even worse problem with Soulfire Bastion in particular.
Once again, just to be clear, I'm not entirely sure that's what this is. I'm going to keep saying it because it feels like it's being ignored.
I strongly disagree that it's a problem that different build archetypes have different danger levels in different situations.
The damage that dots do is designed around people's armor not applying at all. If you do have extra mitigation from that, it's gravy.
I'm also starting to think that the % current HP drain is actually on the Emperor of Corpses.
I'm not ignoring you at all. I think we're describing different experiences, and I'm failing to emphasize the pain point.
Interestingly, if it is EoC (and maybe abom after you destroy the soul vessels?) that has the extremely punishing dot zones, those serve a hugely different function in the fight. The outer ring degen zones in both those fights segment the arena and create big, telegraphed no-go zones. Presumably, to force you into closer proximity with the brusier bosses and prevent you from BVR sniping them into trivialized oblivion.
Cremorus' degen zones make the player engage with the main SFB mechanical gimmick of swapping barriers. The difference here is you MUST engage with the fire/necro fields in SFB. They're placed under you, swapped under you, and the boss is pummeling you with his spells the entire time. I'm unsure if there's no time between the fields switching or if the slow-fade vfx of the fight kinda disguise that "no degen" time. There's a telegraph that "a swap is coming soon", but the actual moment of the swap where you need to react and press the D key is either non exist or obscured to the point it may well be (to my aging gamer eyes anyhow).
Point being, if the player is forced to engage with a mechanic, it feels terrible to then take away their defensive agency in mitigating the results of said mechanic, even in part (the first couple ticks of damage after a field swap). It's much more appropriate IMO to use %hp removal in an "out of bounds" scenario.
Long asides not withstanding, I am 100% on board with different archetypes being threatened by different things. The point I'm attempting to make is this:
If Cremorus' fire/necrotic degen fields are in fact % current HP removal, I think that's an inappropriate use of that damage type and defensive mechanics should be applied to them.
If his fields are not the %hp degen, they hit like a train, and the character build mechanics that presently exist feel insufficient to deal with them. If this is specifically a SFB problem, giving players a clearer indicator that "It's time to swap barriers NOW" or allowing that swap to be performed mid-action like an instant cast spell would make it less frustrating.
ok, so I was just wrong on a few things, it's just a normal dot that's strong.
So here are the stats on that damage. The base ability does 100 damage per tick on a 0.3s interval.
I also went and did the fight real quick to see if the switch had any sort of indicator and while I couldn't notice a visual one, it does play a very distinct "shing" sound about half a second before it switches. As far as I can tell it only plays that sound when it's about to switch so it should be reliable to just hit the switch when you hear the sound. That should give you just enough of a jump on the effect to take way less damage.
devtrackers.gg