As I have mentioned several times starting years ago, Dune Dervish and Sand Dweller type monsters need to be adjusted. I will begin with a little backstory:
When Diablo 3 was released in 2012, player damage was no where near the levels we have today. Back in the vanilla (pre-RoS) days from 2012 to 2014, player damage and toughness were roughly on par with each other. This was also the timeframe when PVP was somewhat viable in the Scorched Chapel since there weren’t many 1-shots if both players geared appropriately.
Since greater rifts were introduced, they were designed with an asymmetric scaling formula: monster health and damage scale differently. Currently, the formula is each GR level multiplies a monster’s health by 1.17 and its damage by 1.02334 which stacks multiplicatively. Thus with this exponential GR scaling, the developers were able to provide a very wide difficulty slider from GR1 to GR150 (with a relative difference of 10 digits of health)!
As patches were released to keep the players entertained, a power creep was inevitable. Because of this, the developers had to scale player damage faster than player toughness to balance out the GR monster scaling asymmetry.
Fast forwarding to recent years, player damage is several orders of magnitude higher than toughness. It is common to see attacks deal 10T or more damage yet player toughness values typically range from a few 100M to 1-2B. Because of this, the legacy mechanic of the elite affix reflect damage had to be adjusted and was heavily nerfed years ago to the weak fireball that we see now.
However, the developers did not address the uncommon monster types: Dune Dervishes and Sand Dwellers and their reflect projectile properties!
Because of this oversight (deliberate or not), these types of enemies are capable of 1-shotting any player even with a massive toughness build. Not even a molten explosion in GR150 compares to the damage of a reflected Impale or Hungering Arrow. This problem will be even more pronounced next season since everyone will get trigger-happy shadow clones upon clicking pylons.
So now that I have provided some backstory, here are my solutions (any one of which will address the problem):
- Remove the reflect projectile property from the aforementioned monsters. An alternative implementation of this solution is to remove the reflectable flag from all attacks in the game (e.g. Evasive Fire is not reflectable but Hungering Arrow is).
- Rescale reflected projectiles to the monster’s damage, not the player’s. This solution can work as long as the monster’s damage scaling isn’t too extreme (e.g. Mallet Lord melee attack).
- Remove the aforementioned monster types (excluding named unique monsters (e.g. act 2 key warden)) from the game until another solution is available. This is a drastic solution but is the quickest to code into the game.
I also posted about this concern on the PTR feedback forum in my [2.6.10 PTR] Consolidated Season Theme Feedback Thread! so be sure to like my post there for added visibility!