The Invincibility shield for Tolaria was a terrible idea

envico

I played through this mission on master with a friend (we both have around 1200 gearscore).

At the part where you rescue 3 students normally this takes 30 seconds to clear. Instead it took 5+ minutes to kill about 30 enemies.

At any given moment 2/3 of the enemies on the screen had a shield. And the shield was often down only down for moments. One yellow boss in the mix was having his shield go down then up again before a second passed.

heeissenberg

Whoever decided to add this modifier have 0 idea about game mechanics. Random invulnerability it's just a waste of time in a game based on kill mobs. This one, reflect and the no regen mana only with class habilities have to go.

darkpck

Agreed. The balancing for these objectives is mostly timer-based kills. But if the mobs are invulnerable X% of the time, then there should not be the expectation to be able to get those same kills in the same time frame. That expectation should be the current timer multiplied by the inverse of the percentage time that the mobs have invulnerability. For example, if they mobs needed to complete a skirmish are invulnerable half the time, then the timer should be doubled. As is, it's basically impossible to perform the same tasks and just makes the zone unplayable in the over world.

agentfog

It just goes to show how little this game was playtested.

envico

"Random invulnerability it's just a waste of time in a game based on kill mobs. This one, reflect and the no regen mana only with class habilities have to go."

Benalia's mana income reduction is fine if you play carefully. Or you can change your setup for one item and you can ignore the mana limits. The devs know that the Benalia damage reflect (vengeful) was dealing 100% damage instead of 10% damage.

Yesterday I saw 4 people take almost the entire 4 minutes to clear a Tolaria tower with the shield in master. These players were having no problem soloing missions quickly. I saw several people try playing in the area and then later nobody was in the zone. Why? Because it was faster to farm the mana elsewhere at half speed (which ends up being about three times as fast as clearing in this zone).

nexusblack

The "Rotating Shield" regional enchantment applied to the homarid walls in Dreadnaught Defense which means I spent 5 minutes waiting for the NPC dreadnaught to beat through each one. I barely got to the last zone before the timer on the ordeal ran out.

tundra

agreed, this was a bad idea. It should be either timed down or re-worked to a damage reduction vs strait up immunity

darkpck

Bump. Thanks for the change, but it's just a band-aid. All this mechanic does is artificially decrease your damage, which is the same as increasing mob health. It doesn't address the underlying issue at all. Here's the expected value (weighted average) to show the net effect of a mechanic like this.

Base case:

Let's say your average damage over time is X. Then you do X damage a second. Easy enough.

With the shield:

Let's say your average damage over time is X, and the percentage time that a mob has a shield is Y. Then your expected damage is:

X * (percentage time that a mob has no shield) + 0 * (percentage time that a mob has a shield)

=> X * (1 - Y/100) + (Y/100) * 0

=> X * (1 - Y/100)

Now take the quotient of the "with shield" and the "base case" to find the relationship between those numbers:

X * (1 - Y/100) / X

=> (1 - Y/100)

As expected, it's just a straight reduction of damage. This is the mathematical equivalent of just increasing mob health. At least to me, increasing mob health is not meaningful gameplay, and I suspect others agree.

Please continue looking into the mechanic and its added value to gameplay. Thank you for your time and consideration.

envico

The shield has since been toned down and is now far better balanced.

Thank you devs!