One of the main complaints I keep seeing about Greater Rifts is getting one shot by stuff like jailer, thunderstorm, or any one of the numerous “unavoidable damage” mechanisms that were implemented by the dev team for the initial game design that shipped back in 2012.
The philosophy behind these were simple. One was that the designers felt that running around and dodging monster attacks was not a fun way to play the game. So they designed these affixes where some of them are not avoidable by melee and/or ranged characters. Jailer previous was primarily a crowd control mechanism as it did no damage. The same for vortex. They later added in elemental (arcane) damage to make these particular affixes more challenging.
This inability to dodge was one of a number of contentious design philosophies that was met with disagreement by the player base. Being able to move out of the way of attacks is a core fundamental part of hack-and-slash games because it is one aspect that puts a players actual reflexes to work. Dark Souls is a perfect example how of your reaction and ability to dodge attacks (especially in boss fights), matters. I’ve watched some known Diablo 3 players try to play through Dark Souls, and I’ve never seen any one of them play it for long periods of time. D3 is one of the least difficult to play hack-and-slash games since besides initial theorycrafting and finding breakpoints that push the limits of the game, the rest is as mindless as it gets once content is outgeared.
As it stands, some of these mechanisms in D3 are “cheaply” designed because you cannot really counter them with actual character movement. And while you can try to anticipate when something will be cast, they are for the most unavoidable because the underlying mechanics will cast it directly on your character regardless. So you cannot even put your reaction skills to any kind of test. If undergeared, poof. Once geared inline, it becomes a matter of kill before being killed. Once overgeared, you can stand still in that stuff and feel like a god. How boring is that?
There are some items designed to counteract the elemental damage (like immunity amulets) and/or reduce/eliminate the actual crowd control effect usually at the expense of reducing your damage output as an intended design. So yes, someone could gear in Blackthorne’s, Ice Climbers, and an element specific immunity amulet, but they would lose out on the ability to utilize a number of offense/damage oriented sets. Basically, your character would take forever to kill stuff and there is a point (with diminishing returns), where that defense won’t be able to take too many hits anyway in an infinite scaling design.
Additionally, while in theory, a monster cannot spam their affixes, there is nothing in the design to prevent them from chaining them one after the other (thus replicating a spam situation). So what happens often with Frozen for example? Once you see the start of one bomb happening, you can expect a chain of them to occur from the minions. And as a character, you end up running away from them. But that is usually just one of the affixes. An avoidable one like this, is often times accompanied by one of the others that is unavoidable. So you may get a spam of something like jailer or vortex that temporarily removes the ability to control your character. That right there is a terrible design (when you lose character control where nothing you do matters).
In an environment where there is a known upper limit in terms of difficulty, the unavoidable damage and loss of character control from these affixes can be countered with better gear. The problem is that since vanilla’s release, the game has changed; the biggest one being an end game challenge mode called Greater Rifts that was designed to “infinitely” scale. Unavoidable damage and character control loss has absolutely no place in that kind of design. There is a point in this kind of infinite scaling design at the limits of ones gear, where the margin for error with ones own play makes more of a difference than cheap mechanics that cannot be avoided. And there is a point where game play that turns into a frustrating, masochistic ordeal, is just a sign of very poor design (which is par for the course with “Team 3”).
What players also need to realize is that at some point, not even high leveled gems will be able to prevent these kind of one shot deaths. The only way for further progression is better items. And like everything else in this design, it’s about bigger numbers. Right now, 4 player groups are able to divide the numbers. But there will be a point where any makeup of 4 players, will hit a solid brick wall without a further progression in better gear (more so once perma-cc is removed).
And once that group progression hits that wall, “solo” progression (which for many, is a derivative of the progress they made in group play) will also hit a wall. The fact that some gems currently have ranks that end at 50, is rather telling that while the developers made Greater Rifts “infinite scaling”, the entire mathematical formula with how various gems work to allow continual (but also masochistic and frustrating) progress through Greater Rifts, was likely not well fleshed out to deal with how players in group, are short circuiting the ability to level these gems.
Part of their “solution” has been to introduce a couple of new gems (more defense oriented ones) while also raising the ranks (talking about the primary effect) of some gems that previously had a cap. Again, I feel the entire Greater Rift design is one meant as a stop gap to keep the most hardcore D3 addicted players satiated until the next expansion where they will use the same formula for to obsolete level 70 gear (and that by extension includes the effects from legendary gems).
The D3 designers do not seem to grok that players want new content not in the form of just new items. Players want other things to do in the game. Funneling end game into just Greater Rifts is an incredibly lazy design because it just reuses content (nephalem rifts with a timer and its own internal difficulty system). But it’s this continual lack of understanding all the root cause design issues, that unavoidable damage will continue to remain in Greater Rifts.
