They don’t understand that damage mitigation is the cornerstone of an ARPG. If you get one-shot in an ARPG, it’s supposed to signal that you don’t have the gear to engage with that enemy unless you can avoid this attack. The caveat is that the potential to mitigate any attack in the game must exist. If you have attacks that just do some arbitrarily huge amount of damage that can’t conceivably be mitigated with the tools available in the game, then you are shifting from ARPG into an arcade bullet hell game.
The gear, the passives, it all becomes meaningless due to these types of mechanics, they undermine the spirit of the genre. GGG with Path of Exile doesn’t really get it either. It’s fine, I mean, if there’s enough people that like this style of game, that’s great, but they aren’t really in the same core vein as the original concept rng loot gathering action rpg. In my opinion, it’s evolved into something lesser.
Now these games just splatter the floor and screen with nonsense. Back in Diablo 1, there wasn’t a ton of effects. You could clearly see the acid puddles on the ground, you could clearly see the hundred projectiles coming toward you, and nothing tracked your location. I’m not saying no attack should track, but something like Path of Exile 2 has tons of dumb crap that tracks you while you weave through bullpoop on the floor. ARPGs are way more fun when there’s actual strategy and tactics involved rather than purely mitigation—meaning you should have to dodge or maneuver around as part of your mitigation and actively avoid some damage using cover or terrain. If something one-shots you, that tells you it’s either a rare strong enemy or you’re pushing beyond your weight class. But whatever, we’ll get brain rot because that’s what we deserve. It turns out pong was onto something, if only they had made it flashier with more balls and more paddles they’d have had the modern ARPG.