Dragon Hate

[AnjyBelle]

I stick to it:

 

Immunities are - at least for living beings - cheap nonsense.

 

High resistances - yes, but that's it.

 

I've seen too many so called boss- / end-fights with a screen filling list of "immunities", degrading the entire group at least to auto-attackers

if not make them entirely useless.

 

Of course I can load a previous game, respec, equip different gear etc.

But that's meta-gaming, not only in my opinion close to cheating.

 

A well designed encounter should be either winnable without meta-gaming OR the group dies, because the player failed to develop them

good enough for harder enemies - in other words: He gimped them (example: I saw a paladin / rogue / wizard in a D&D-MMO...)

Well, start over and do better.

 

(Please spare me the flames... I am aware that I am rather alone with that opinion).

[gkathellar]

 

 

Debatable? Are they? Really? Because I'm seriously interested in hearing an argument from someone - anyone - that justifies locking out any damage dealer who relies on crush weapons from meaningful participation in the fight.

I'm not necessarily in favor of the Alpine Dragon's immunity to crush damage, but I can think of a couple of arguments off the top of my head. First thing's first, it is the player that is supposed to react to the game world and adapt to enemies, not the other way around—unless, of course, you just wanted a game you could mindlessly cut through like butter without ever changing anything that you do. If you build your character around doing crush damage only all the time, you willingly pigeonhole them into a niche; can't complain if not all creatures in the game world adapt to your character's strength by becoming weak to it. It is on you to adapt your tactics/strategies to a fight; not on the game to adapt to your character build.

That's great for certain fights - say, the Chromatic Demon or Magic Golems in Watcher's Keep. But those encounters were about the gimmick. For a major bonus boss who is supposed to demand you bring the best you have to offer? It's a different story.

 

 

What if a fireball has such intensity and such raw, chaotic power that the fire blight simply can't hold together in it, and its spiritual matter gets swept away as part of the blaze? Honestly, if you're capable of dealing so much damage that you push through a blight's elemental DR, that seems legit to me.

Honestly, that doesn't make much sense at all. A fire blight is made of fire; how can it possibly burn to death if burning is its very existence? When was the last time you could put a fire off by adding more fire to it?

You'll notice that I didn't say "burn." I guess a good word would be dilution - hitting the blight with such intensity that it loses itself in the purer, grander flames that you command. It's not about burning so much as it is about making the blight lose cohesion. Sort of like how in a mass of plasma, electrons drift freely from atomic nuclei, losing their immediate ties to one another due to the immense energies involved.

 

(Also dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel to extinguish coal fires.)

Edited September 26, 2015 by gkathellar

[Caerdon]

Honestly, that doesn't make much sense at all. A fire blight is made of fire; how can it possibly burn to death if burning is its very existence? When was the last time you could put a fire off by adding more fire to it?

 

You're inventing your own lore here. Fire blights aren't made of fire, they're (fragments of) souls bonded with fire. But just because they can channel, control and use fire, that doesn't mean they can necessarily withstand arbitrary amounts of energy and heat. And we know they do have limits, because they can't just create/absorb more fire and grow bigger.

 

Don't get me wrong, I like that blights are immune to their own elements - it does make sense and it's good for gameplay - but it's not something the lore as we know it demands.

 

That said, flat-out immunity to a specific type of physical damage very rarely makes sense. Why, exactly, are earth blights immune to slashing? An axe would still carry lots of momentum and act as a crushing weapon, even if the blade couldn't cut into the rock for some reason. And if the blade hit an edge on the surface of the rock, it would still concentrate all that momentum over a tiny spot, effectively dealing at least some piercing damage. High resistances - even very high - do make sense, immunities don't. Making some of the toughest monsters in the game arbitrarily immune to a specific physical damage type is an example of what I call artificial difficulty.

[Oralaina]

This might be an unpopular view, but I've always wondered why dragons (in PoE and other similar games) have to always be enemies. Why can't we have dragons as allies? Or at least dragons that are friendly and with whom you can converse, engage in witty banter, exchange information, may be even get quests? Just my $0.02.

 

Well, there was a game, WAY back when.... You could befriend the dragon (and she had a mouth-filling nominative for sure - wish I could remember what it was!)  Now, befriending her wasn't (IIRC, and it's been a LONG time) all it was cracked up to be....  You know, I want to say it was in BG 2, but jeez, that was a LONG time ago, so I'm not positive.

 

Okay, off to do some research....

Edited September 27, 2015 by Oralaina

[KDubya]

 

Debatable? Are they? Really? Because I'm seriously interested in hearing an argument from someone - anyone - that justifies locking out any damage dealer who relies on crush weapons from meaningful participation in the fight.

 

I'm not necessarily in favor of the Alpine Dragon's immunity to crush damage, but I can think of a couple of arguments off the top of my head. First thing's first, it is the player that is supposed to react to the game world and adapt to enemies, not the other way around—unless, of course, you just wanted a game you could mindlessly cut through like butter without ever changing anything that you do. If you build your character around doing crush damage only all the time, you willingly pigeonhole them into a niche; can't complain if not all creatures in the game world adapt to your character's strength by becoming weak to it. It is on you to adapt your tactics/strategies to a fight; not on the game to adapt to your character build.

 

The game offers weapons that do multiple damage types. Some of them do crush damage + something else. You could win most fight with crush damage, then run into the one fight where your usual thing isn't viable and you need to adapt. Swapping to a weapon that does two different damage types is one way of doing that. Besides, most if not all weapon focus talents include all damage types, so you can switch to a weapon that does that particular damage type that you need without losing your +6 Accuracy bonus.

 

I don't mind having the immunities to physical damage types being in the game. Having my two monks run into crush immune Ice Blights was a surprise but nothing that could not be countered. After that experience I carried a spear in one slot just for them.

 

When I saw the Ice Blights around the Alpine Dragon I thought that it'd just mean that I either need to be way less than optimal versus the minions or just go after the Dragon. Having the boss and the minions immune to the same damage type is the complaint.

 

I always metagame that Dragons have such huge deflection scores because it is hard to hit the very few vulnerable areas on a dragon. The 130 deflection is from trying to shoot the dragon in the eye, not from it going Matrix on you. Beyond the huge deflection you have equally large DR. Again it makes sense that even if you hit a soft spot it still is heavily armored, the difference being that you can hurt the dragon by overcoming both deflection and DR, while hitting the rest of the Dragon does no effect and is shown in game as a miss.

 

A fist monk can swap in dual spears and not lose out on the accuracy, again not the big issue. The bigger issue is Torment's Reach, FoA, and Flagellant's Path all do only crush damage, changing from fists to spears changes nothing. Crush immune reduces you to only auto attacks, no other class gets hit this hard with an immunity besides a Monk.

 

From a logic standpoint it is better and more immersive to have really large DR rather than immunity to a physical damage type unless you are going to make something immune to all physical damage, like a ghost or something like that. It makes no sense that I can hit the Alpine Dragon with a two handed Morningstar to no effect but I can kill him with a shotgun or a dagger. You can even kill him with cold spells.

 

I'm not on Trial of Iron so no harm done with a reload. I'll just come back with a few stacks of paralyze scrolls and kill him like every other dragon, other than Sky whom I can kill cold in a straight up fight.

[AndreaColombo]

^ fairly sure Alpine Dragon is also immune to cold? Though it sure isn't immune to Shadowflame's paralysis effect.

 

That said, my fully buffed main had such a stellar Accuracy in my last play through that I could aggro the dragon without debuffing it - sufficed to suppress his debuffs affecting my main and hit hard