I looked through the patch notes and I don’t see any reference to this issue being fixed. What do you suppose the chances are it got fixed? If it didn’t get fixed, HC players will be dropping like flies.
(to those not aware: the 300 kill streak bonus was doing massive damage to teammates on PTR)
In that screenshot, it hit for 1.26T damage! That’s an absurd amount of damage when player toughness is typically in the hundreds of millions to a few billion. It’s somewhere in the order of 10^3 times more damage than a player would typically be able to mitigate.
Was thinking of starting S19 in HC. Really don’t want to get killed repeatedly by the 300 kill streak. Classes with immunity cheat deaths might pull through, but classes without full immunity on their cheat death (e.g. barbs and wizards) will be in trouble. The 95% DR from Nerves of Steel or the shield from Unstable Anomaly will very quickly be overwhelmed by the massive damage from the 300 kill streak.
Perhaps it’s intended? The buff is labelled “Pandemonium”, and it’s like the Diablo fire…
Some quotes (my emphasis) from the Season blog:
“reaching certain killstreak goals will trigger a special effect and cause even more mayhem on the battlefield”
“300 Kills: A ring of fire engulfs everything” (noting that some others specifically refer to enemies)
If that’s the case, then scale the damage appropriately.
It’s dealing damage to players as if it’s hitting regular enemies. The scaling between our outgoing damage vs. toughness is wildly different. It’s doing several orders of magnitude times more damage than a player could reasonably be expected to mitigate.
If you want it to damage players, okay, I can live with that. But scale it so that when it hits a player it hits for something like 1/2 or 2/3 of your health (or perhaps more accurately, your effective toughness). Not 1000 times more than your health/effective toughness.
And, you know, maybe warn players. If S19 goes live doing damage to players, a whole bunch of casual HC players who don’t read deep into the forums/reddit/wherever and are just grouping up for some fun HC runs are going to die. And probably not understand why.
I’m all for interesting new game mechanics, but do it in a way that’s able to be understood by players. A hidden mechanic that will one-shot everyone regardless of how much toughness you have just doesn’t seem like a good thing.
I guess it’s the same as player projectile reflection. Does anyone honestly think that’s a good mechanic?
Stuff like this would be much less of an issue if player toughness was scaled to our outgoing damage. But players just deal orders of magnitude more damage than we can receive. You can’t really have mechanics like projectile reflect and the 300 kill streak ring of fire in that situation.
I’m fine with those things doing damage. But the damage should be scaled in a way that it’s possible to mitigate. The likelihood of them tweaking the ring of fire damage in a way that it will still kill enemies but doesn’t do outrageous damage to players seems remote. Would be simpler to just prevent it from dealing damage to players.
