I’ve played a ton of DH and never had a problem with these mobs. It never seemed like a big deal.
They’d wreck me when I played Shadow impale DH… Zipping through at blazing speeds while throwing out impale, it’d usually happen by surprise while backtracking.
I’ve also had it happen a few times with the GoD set, but always when I’m within close proximity to them.
You need all your resists to be 900 or above, ideally above 1200, you need 18-22K Armor, you need 800K to 1.2M Life, and while playing and buffed up, you need about 800K Toughness. These are minimums for a hardcore character of any variety.
1 Like
The opponent is fine, what isn’t is the character doing billions of damage per hit while having 1000 times less the HP lol
Try with a Shadow/Impale DH where each knife thrown could hit for 50 trillions of damage, and you’re throwing three at a time. Good luck having enough health pool / armour / elemental resistances to counter 150 trillion incoming damage versus a HP pool under a million. Dervishes are an auto-skip mob type for Impale.
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!
5 Likes
This is so much worse than I thought. I think removing those monsters will be a great idea. Nobody is gonna miss them.
Well it is mostly very bad for builds that use projectiles. While every class has some projectile skills, I think demon hunters have the most. Luckily, there are some DH builds that can bypass the problem since Multishot, Fan of Knives, Evasive Fire, Cluster Arrow, Rain of Vengeance, grenade-based attacks and rocket-based attacks are not considered projectiles.
However, other builds such as those including Sentries, Hungering Arrow, Bolas, Strafe, Impale, and a few others are affected by the problem. In those cases, DHs usually just opt to skip these monsters entirely when spotted unless doing speed rifts or GRs (where all monsters are killed faster than they can reflect the projectiles). In pushing scenarios, these monsters are a no-no unless there is a conduit or shield pylon nearby!
As a side note: I played barbarian in season 20 and the Wrath of the Wastes: Whirlwind build is safe vs these enemies (provided you’re not in a group with an Impale or GoD DH or something). However, be careful next season with your clones!
2 Likes
But those Dervishes can be stunned to stop them from spinning. So, for example, using rattling roll can prevent them from spinning long enough for you to impale them. You just have to pay attention and position yourself so that if you are using ricochet, the impales don’t hit another dervish that might be spinning.
Play on normal, and torment 1.
Not just your clones. On the PTR we had bugs where people were getting DH clones even though they were on non-DH heroes. Also, all three of the possible Necromancer clones use Bone Spear which, I believe, is categorised as a projectile. This means even if you’re not playing a build with projectiles, you might get a clone that does, or one of your team-mate’s clones does. So, on HC, even avoiding playing as or with a DH or Necro might not save you, unless they’ve fixed this between the end of PTR and S22 starting.
It really isn’t that bad. Even on HC with a Barb.
Avoidance skills are important to learn early on.
Experiment in SC then go back to HC.
Last night I ran into a whole bunch of them again. But this time I decided to Try to kill them. This is how my thought process went:
“Since I still don’t know the reason how they killed met last time, I should probably disengage. It took me a while to get my set and a lot of time to level up the gems Ahhhhhh screw this here it goes!”
As soon as they stopped spinning, I charged in with whirlwind.
“Two can play this game!” I said.
They all died. I killed those Dune Dervishs in about 2 seconds.
I think it was a good night.
1 Like
As an old (unfortunately) arcade gamer from way back, like the old arcade games, the dervishes and the Keywarden have a spinning pattern. Shoot them when they stop spinning because they do stop in a pattern. Off-screen deaths fortunately are not too regular but if you cannot see or hear it, you cannot kill it.
That does not help. I have 90% physical resist and 89% all elements (further reduced by 60% from esoteric gem) on my necro. My toughness in combat is 3.8B (solo, way higher with barb & monk supports). I will proc my cheat death from 1 single Bone spear reflected (not on CoE, no triple krisbin, just base dmg, not even a crit).
The thing is the damage you deal, is way higher, non crit, than what your toughness is. If you get that reflected back at you, outside of immunity (pylon or support) it will proc your cheat death or outright 1 shot you. Melee don’t have to deal with this problem as dmg reflect mobs are patethic in dmg returned compared to full dmg from reflect projectile.
I can facetank - as dps - Grom (w/e fatty name is) in 4-5 pools and never be in danger in GR120, or stay in 4 arcane beams, or eat Stonesinger (w/e name) boos charge / coldsnap charge / Lich King Charge attack and not drop under 25% hp (which I heal back up instantly thanks to my curse giving me 2% hp per enemy hit x 3 [2 sims) = 6% hp per attack).
Not even Raziel with his bugged holly projectile nova can proc me, but 1 single dervish or sand dweller that puts reflect up in middle of density (so impossible to see) will 1 shot me.
The only time when you can reliable dodge your own reflected projectiles is if there’s a champion with the slow time bubble (as gl playing speed GR’s or push GR with a mage with slow time bubble lol).
It’s that simple, dmg you (your pets or in S22 shadow clone) deal is way higher than your toughness, unless you play a z-dps class, in which case you don’t really care as you’re there not to dps mobs but to control them and provide buffs.
1 Like
“There’s currently a bug where every class can spawn DH shadow clones and those clones WILL use ranged attacks against anything and everything”
Thanks for your post as I was wondering why my seasonal POJ tr monk was getting those dreaded Justice was slain!
Since tempest rush is not a projectile and in non seasons I never got a reflect projectile death. So ic now it is a seasonal thing. One of the buffs in season must be a projectile.
Is it possible that the Cyclone rune for Sweeping Wind acts as a projectile?
One of the Demon Hunter Shadow Clones uses Impale.
All three of the Necromancer Shadow Clones use Bone Spear.
The fact that non-DH heroes can spawn a DH Shadow Clone means that if this happens whilst you’re near a Dervish pack, the clone will likely kill you. This is especially relevant on hardcore. This was brought up, in a number of threads, in both the PTR Bug Report and PTR Feedback forums. No acknowledgement of this was given, and the mid-PTR patch didn’t address it. We can only hope they fixed it for live. Even so, playing in groups with a DH or a Necro on hardcore is going to be a massive gamble.
But also required, since they will be the meta S22 classes, be it supports or DPS. Rat Runs on HC should still be pretty safe as everything will be frozen as well.
And you can just opt to not run nemesis in groups on HC to not spawn those reflect mobs, and if you do get a normal one can just skip for safety reasons - IMHO.
Folks, I used Nemesis on some Pylons and , boy oh boy, those Dervish spawned. My Barb whirlwinded hard like a washing machine and took all of them down in less than a second. But it gave me quite a scare.
But I love Nemesis on Pylons. They sped things up so much. So this is what I have been doing. I whirlwind toward the pylon, and with the whirlwind is still going on, I clicked on the Pylons, and those bosses spawn right into my death spiral. Sometimes the only reason I knew I killed Dervish was the metal clunking sound they made upon death.
So far so good. But I still intend on aborting when I see them in the wild.