Hi, as a HC player I always dreaded lag and memory crashes but this season, game was very stable for me. But… now, my worse enemy is no more lag but those elite affix that spawn a bunch of falling swords on my head. I play with Raheir so he could tank a shot for me but, often I run NMD with narrow corridors and having 5-6 swords chasing me made me change my pants so many times already (and got 1 RIP because I got walled and stun by other environment hazards). I didn’t die for 3 or 4 seasons, even when fighting Lilith, but those swords are just a pain in the butt. How you guys manage to dodge them in small areas, and with hordes of other mobs chasing you? Without running out of evade charges?
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They follow you for a few seconds and when they fall they do a little bounce before they drop. Once they start dropping they don’t follow you anymore so all you have to do is keep moving until they are gone.
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The swords deal a lot of damage, but they don’t chase you for too long, but maybe sometime you’ll need to made them fall by stopping for a really brief moment and then run away or dodge when they fall.
Unfortunately, not having free movement when being chased is a serious problem, as is the fact that Raheir’s Valiance ability seems to always activate too late.
Personally, I find the most annoying of all the ones that summon that reddish lightning bolt in the form of a Fallen Lunatic that follows you until it reaches you and then stops and explodes, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the elite affix (Crackling Soul maybe??).
Anyway, it’s usually not a real threat, but sometimes in the Pit certain elites seem to continuously to spawn them from off screen like machine guns, and I spend a lot of time dodging them around, maybe wasting time running backwards.
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Interesting I was watching them yesterday and they do not do any real damage to me more of a nuisance.
I don’t know what to tell you, of all the new Elite affixes, swords are the ones that deal the most damage to me and the only ones that damage me visibly, even outside the Pit.
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I thought Swords would be less of a problem in HC cause people already play cautiously, i.e. fight one group, retreat, fight other, retreat, e.t.c.
Basically ?, just retreat when fighting a group with swords, do the battle in a motion of retreat/kiting
And yes, this is much more of a problem for melee
Ideally what Blizz should do (IMO) is instead of pure damage Swords should apply mortal-strike+maim or mortal-strike+bleed type of a debuff that will make you either take more damage from other sources or cause bleed, and then make it so that you recover harder, but won’t be a big-damage hit
Either that, or, the second potential idea is turn those swords horizontally and have them launch in a direction instead of following (something like a mag-mine from SC2 if remember these..)
just time the rhythm, and don’t push any skill button to avoid momentarily stop running.
What’s even worse is the exploding lava balls that practically camouflage themselves into the terrain at times making them tougher to spot, and THEN the swords on top of that.
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Yeah, those swords are indeed annoying…but I noticed that I can stay underneath them UNTIL I see that red circle right below me…THAT’S when I know to move coz when that red circle appears, the sword is stuck wherever it is above me. A lot of times though, it’s hard to see that red circle coz of all the ground effects. 
I’ve often found doing a quick circular motion on my mouse, while moving, causes my character to do a quick spin and baits the sword to drop. Doesn’t always seem to make them drop but is a semi-reliable method.
it’s cute that you think that, but we just face tank everything.
You don’t need to worry about any of this, because:
- You don’t stand around fighting in small corners and tight spaces.
- If you do get boxed in, you use your mobility skills to reposition.
- Mobs don’t chase you. You chase them, CC them, and delete them.
- You don’t run out of evade charges because you use boots with “Attacks Reduce Evade’s Cooldown”.
- If you get walled you can just run out the open end, or if you’re really stuck, teleport/shadowstep/leap/soar/blood mist/falling star/whatever to go over it or through it.
- It’s not possible to get stunned or otherwise CC’d because we avoid all ground based effects which are all clearly telegraphed and have long delays, giving us plenty of time to get out of the way using your high movement speed and mobility skills.
- If the CC hits you anyway it doesn’t matter because you should be permanently Unstoppable or, at the very least, have sources of Unstoppable in your build with short cooldowns (ideally more than 1) which you can trigger as needed.
But of course, most of that doesn’t really matter anyway. We dance around for the lols, but if we build defensively, we should be able to tank the damage in all but the most extreme scenarios.
To make sure I wasn’t misleading you, I tested the theory by taking a few different characters into T4 pits. Taking a few swords to the head didn’t usually even break the barrier. If I let the barrier drop, I lost a few pixels of fortified life. It can barely scratch you.
I wasn’t able to see the health bar move perceptibly until I let the whole screen of enemies wail on me, with explosions, falling swords, Belial shadow attack, whatever, landing at once, at most I lost maybe 10% of max life. Which immediately regenerated.
I don’t care for the swords but unless I’m pushing it in the pit 1 will rarely kill me and it’s pretty rare I get caught anyway. The ones I hate are the large triple/quad explosions that pretty much leave no where to go, especially in confined areas.
This season the game introduced/buffed these into cheap, 1-shot mechanics:
- Falling sword(s)
- “Explosive” elite affix that covers screens at a time and has very thin red veins on the ground that blends so well it’s almost invisible. They were not one-shot in previous seasons and they were totally fine mechanic.
Others talk about “building defensively”, but first they should define how defensive that should be… Over 75% resistances, +max life and GA armor affixes where ever you can fit was considered “defensive” only a few weeks ago. Hell, it’s even enough to withstand all other attacks in S11 T4, but these 2 one-shots are so over-tuned they are really out of proportion like 50x the damage of everything else. That’s why it’s cheap. Plus it happens too often and without any cooldown (e.g. at most like 1 sword or 1 cluster of explosive blobs per 10 seconds).
So, my solution is just as cheap: Endurant Faith gloves + lots of life on hit.
Just accept this season is the season of Sanctified Endurant Faiths.
its not a seasonal thing its the direction of the game. Granted the waves of affixes feels sloppy and i hope they do something about that, but monsters being more of a threat is here to say (or at least i hope it is)
This is good for the game. instead of everyone easily maxing defenses and piling x%dmg you will have to make choices about survivability vs dps. In some ways it is a gift to players who use situational awareness and skill to avoid death vs needing capped dr and resists. This gives players who can understand and avoid threats more build space for dmg output, thus rewarding skillful play. Just in time for leader bords 0.o
What they are doing feels like a direct response to 2 years of “D4 too Easy/Boring”, and i am glad they are doing it. Im sure there will be stumbles along the way, but this is great for the long term health of the game.
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Yes a pain and almost certain death get caught with swords dropping as well as getting swarmed at the same time with the little exploding lighting guys.
This guy has a bad build with low toughness. It’s his own fault. And he also specifically chose to play hardcore. Also his own dumb mistake, lol.
Nah, this is the wrong direction to make monsters dangerous. It’s too heavily dependent on these 2 mechanics. Everything else don’t scratch you and all of a sudden these things, which belongs to no enemies so you cannot do anything to stop it, 1-shots you.
The “correct danger” should involve A LOT of life globe fluctuations but just slow enough for some reaction. And that involves:
- reducing the number of ways and the rate of health recovery
- giving each monster respectable damage so surrounded by 10 actually feels dangerous because you can see the tug-of-war happening in your life globe.
S11 is going the opposite direction. We now have so much life on hit and life on kill, and potions dropping non-stop, and monsters hardly scratches you except those few non-monster-attack effects.
i see you ignored that i said the affixes are sloppy and that the general idea of making monsters more dangerous is a good direction.
Go you… way to reply to what you want to reply to instead of what was said !
The swords are garbage, they can follow you through teleports and kill you they can kill you when youre not even by them and they git the ground on the other side of the screen, theyre by far the worst mechanic in Diablo 4, quite possibly the worst game mechanic ever created, total trash they need to be removed so people do ’t quit the game because of one very horribly thought out , totally garbage
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Except the monsters aren’t more of a threat. If they were they wouldn’t need all the AOE.