I was on the fence about this, but having experienced enough of season 4 now I am pretty confident in saying that removing the death elixir outright was a bad idea and should be reverted.
In short it needs to be brought back but made much harder to craft and with a possibly longer cooldown. The idea being that you CAN grind it out and use it when you really want the safety net but it isn’t anywhere close to being spammable.
I’m totally fine playing without a safety net - I’m not scared of dying to my own mistakes. So this isn’t the problem. The problem is that the lack of the elixir really limits what we can (or are at least willing to do) in terms of progression. This is especially relevant in the current state of the game where so many things are based around vague, nearly unavoidable 1shots. And there are and always will be all sorts of new hidden bugs too which can unexpectedly screw you up.
Using my character for example, it’s strong, easily capable of pushing past pit 60 but I’m just not willing to risk it to suddenly die to something stupid. Part of it is because the design and telegraphing is bad with enormous damage spikes out of nowhere (while everything else is very easy). But part of it is also because I just don’t know what to expect and can’t even ‘practice’ to get better and learn from my mistakes without instantly losing everything. If I had the elixir, however hard it is to craft, I would be willing to really push my character to its limits and get a much better feel for what I can do with it, what I HAVE to avoid etc. As it is I just have no idea.
The same exact thing applies to tormented bosses and any future difficult content. You don’t know what to expect and can’t even experience and learn it without either taking on absurd levels of risk or making a softcore character just for this purpose (which is extremely boring and shouldn’t be necessary imo). In D3 I was always pushing the highest GRs I could barely complete - having 2-3 cheat deaths was probably overkill but having 1 was good and made for much more engaging, tense gameplay.
I don’t think the death elixirs were that much of a problem to begin with. Though yeah, there were too easy to craft and the cooldown too short and spammable. So as a rough starter, have them require like ten times more mats and give them an hour or more of a cooldown but bring them back.
I think this would make the HC game better for everyone.
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The Elixer should only be brought back as a temporary solution until the real problems are fixed. I agree for the time being, but Blizzard needs to do a better job fixing the root causes behind why we need the elixer in the first place.
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That would be the ideal outcome but practically, I don’t think that state of the game will be ever possible to achieve as long as they keep releasing new patches. There will always be new problems with new content/patches whether it’s because of bad design, bad balancing, or outright bugs in either new content or them breaking something in previous content.
So for the foreseable future we will basically always need the elixir to mitigate against all this nonsense.
Using D3 as an example, for all its faults I had a lot more fun progressing and pushing my character in the greater rifts to my absolute limit where I could no longer stay alive or could no longer kill fast enough. And that’s largely thanks to being able to gradually build up to that level and know that I still had a decent amount of control over my fate. 2-3 cheat deaths was definitely overkill but I still lost characters even with that (trying to finish nasty elite fights or not wanting to abandon an otherwise good run. The leaderboards helped with that too).
So having 1 very limited elixir seems like a good compromise.
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I didn’t mind one cheat death in D3 in which you had to choose between safety and more damage when selecting a passive skill. Cheat death potions are a bit lazy with no tradeoff in mind. My concern is if they bring back cheat death potions, they may ignore all of the real problems that kill characters (when players die on stream it tends to bring attention to the problem). If they bring it back and make it clear it is a temporary solution admitting they have issues to deal with, I’m okay with that. Eventually the game will stablize when all of the endgame activities are finalized that they only need tweaking and at that point, cheat death potions should no longer be needed. However, by that point, everyone will be so used to having the cheat death potion that there would be huge community backlash if they take it away. In this regard, a permanent cheat death option with a tradeoff for power would be a better permanent solution so the real hardcore players that push the leaderboards would most certainly take the risk with no cheat death to reach the top spot. This also allows hardcore players to learn their limits before putting it to the test. Otherwise, you have to make a softcore character to test your limits and switch between softcore and hardcore which is less efficient.
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I agree. At the very least they shouldn’t be stack-able with other elixirs so you have some trade-off. I always said that. Maybe some bigger trade-off (in addition to more mats and more cooldown if they keep it in elixir format instead of an ultimate skill/passive or something).
“However, by that point, everyone will be so used to having the cheat death potion that there would be huge community backlash if they take it away.”
I don’t think it would be any different to now. We all “got used to it” for a year of d4 and all of D3. I think it sucks they removed them - and that seems to be the overwhelmingly popular opinion on these forums&reddit (no idea where Blizzard got their feedback from) but the world didn’t end because of it. It just made the game unnecessarily worse I think.
“My concern is if they bring back cheat death potions, they may ignore all of the real problems that kill characters”
I’d love to be wrong but I don’t think Blizzard thinks of hardcore very much if at all when designing content. I’m guessing a tiny minority of us play it especially after they removed death pots and started 1shotting everyone left and right… that was some seriously bizarre timing to do it - hopefully season 5 changes that. So the game will always be somewhat balanced around softcore and the HC people can either take it or leave it.
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I just love that they took out elixir and flame shield enchant, but they just gave flame shield 100% uptime with enough investment.
Also cool how barbs can use a pot and heal for more then every other classes total health pool per second.
And here I am expecting everyone to realize removing it was a good decision after playing without it for a few weeks. There’s less players on HC and that’s really the one and only downside to it, other than that it feels nice not to fall asleep mid gameplay.
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It’s good in theory IF the game was properly balanced and reliable. But not in practice because it seems to never be properly balanced or reliable.
Anyway that’s my take on it. I’ve been playing hc exclusively since mid D2. Never even touched SC in 3 or 4.
So I’m guessing this is not a popular take, but I think the game is properly balanced and reliable enough at least. I’ve gotten “1 shot” at lvl 100, but if I blamed the game it would feel dishonest because I know I made a mistake.
I guess it’s good that you ‘earned’ that death I suppose.
But getting 1shot due to a moment of lag (when you get barely enough time to react to begin with), or because the opaque telegraphic graphic glitched out or blended in with the environment, or the graphic was literally covered up by the dozens of other effects all going on at the same time on top of it, doesn’t feel very earned. Feels more like being cheated due to design flaws. There is also a crazy jump in ‘difficulty’ from melting content to suddenly dying to everything just a tier or so higher.
In addition to the progression blocking issues I tried to explain. I don’t know but I don’t like it - and yeah I can live with it but it still sucks.
I think elixir should stop progression and drops and be mainly see if you can handle content.
Since this will stop of spamming it since it prevent from getting gear and xp.
So u make spammable but people won’t do it if it stops all progress but only use it in area that they not be able to do it.
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That sounds complicated to implement but it’s an interesting idea. I like it. Something like that could work, yeah.
I am no program but how xp boost is they add .05 to lvl white mobs or elite but if make a 0 you get no return.
This also stop other things working like most exp boost since it be multiply with zero.
I don’t think people complain rest of exlixer that would work like defensive buffs or attack speed but mainly exp.
Then to get all lvl 0 to 100 and gear would have be done by no death potion.
This would be way test your build to see you can handle since you would eventually have to do it with out it.
Only if you dont face in Progression no situations where you will get 1 shot without being able to avoid being 1 shotted…
THIS is the main issue which makes the removal of the potion so bad.
Death Evasion needs to be in as long as we can get one shot by random floor damage, tbh.
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My bro and I had our barbs maxed out and both died to 1 shot broken mechanics yesterday. Blizzard seriously needs to implement a fix. I don’t have the answer to the problem, but the death elixir being reintroduced would be a step in the right direction. For those against the elixir being back in the game—-you can choose not to use it.
If you follow a build guide you have to adjust it yourself in Hardcore for more survivability, they are designed with SC in mind….
Hardcore is hardcore, half-hardcore is not hardcore, death elixirs made the whole game mode trivial and I have not missed them one single bit.
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Yeah… as if “just adjust the build guide” would prevent you from being 1shotted withoud a chance to avoid it…
It’s one shot mechanics is main problem, bring back to yeah
I’m done with HC until they can explain to me how an unknown killer can instantly wipe out 210,000+ hit points (70K life, 70K fortify, 70K barrier) on my lvl 100 necro without my bubble proc’ing, no environmental hazards, no monster explosions, literally nothing around me except 2 basic skeles and a shrine I’m running toward. And BAM, just dead, no explanation, nothing around me, literally nothing. Bring back the elixir until you can provide legitimate logging of what is actually killing me. I take responsibility for my mistakes, but I will not play a game that kills my character for what appears to be no reason or a bug. I’m out until there is a fix.
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