OMG, you mean they can show up randomly in non-act 2 maps? What is “nemesis on pylon?” Can you explain, please?
Nemesis bracers will spawn a pack of elite on pylons / shrines. For some weird reason, 90% of those packs will be 1 big dude (the taller goblin with a 2h weapon that does the jump smash attack) accompanied by 4-5 Dervishes.
They are very common in nephalem runs / speed GR’s because they fasten the amount spent to spawn RG by spawning extra elite packs that drop globes (on top of the buff the pylons / shrines provide).
If you are playing hardcore, then you better build for survivability, and then damage.
If you have a properly built character, you can ignore the “Dervish” type enemy damage reflection, and only worry when they get close to you when they are spinning. No matter how tough you are, at any level of difficulty that matters, that Physical damage will kill you dead.
Interesting note. Those enemy types don’t reflect grenades.
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Just remember, especially in hardcore; the spawned Elite does not spawn at the Shrine, it spawns at your character, and usually attacks immediately.
In hardcore, Nemesis Bracers will get you killed. I don’t use them.
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I just encountered another group of blade spinners, this time they are called something something magewraith. And as soon as I see them, I started to run. After running away from them, my life-saving passive triggered, and I immediately drank the potion and kept running. Once the coast was clear, I teleported back to town.
So there other varieties of Dune Dervish out there in the Rift, and they can spawn in non-act 2 maps. In fact I believe enemies types are random and not restricted to any map when you are in the Rift or GR.
I have created two more HC characters on standby so they can pick up the game as soon as my current build is one-shorted by one of the Dervish varieties.
The reflect Projectile used to inst kill my monk when I used wave of light or lashing tail kick. in 2017-1. I finally started using the azkaranth ammy which saved me from my fire damage projectile. Can see my build for that year … cleared a 95.
Not sure if that solution works for other builds. But in those days it could be tested against the Act 2 boss that gave one the machine drops. So whatever your elemental damage is wear the ammy that gives you immunity from that element. Worth a test.
The reason that dervishes and sand dwellers are so deadly is because damage of players have out raced the toughness that they get. Back when toughness and damage were about 1 to 1 you’d hurt yourself badly on these mobs. But now they really need to nerf their projectile reflection ability to use the monster’s damage multiplier on the projectile rather than the player’s.
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In which stat should I invest if I want to survive a direct confrontation against a Dervish type monster?
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.
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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!
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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!
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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.