Random Map Affix Difficulties

Community General Discussion
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There are some combinations of Map Affixes that are guaranteed to give me trouble. And that for a variety of reasons once those particular maps have been opened. Now, the general problem isn’t my survivability. For the most part, I’ve got a build that can handle almost everything that’s thrown at it. There are exceptions of some combinations of map affixes and mob affixes applied to epic+ (and some rare) enemies where my survival is dependent upon not getting damaged ever–meaning I receive a OHKO or very close to it. Otherwise, it’s smooth-ish sailing.

The difficulty lies in my being unable to deliver sustained damage to one target to overcome the health regeneration. I’ve been in a fight with an epic mob horde (the +x% epic enemy on a map) that took somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, a couple million gold spent for restats, seven or eight different pieces of armor (and a dozen different weapons) for different build setups, where I ended up just getting a new map. While I had enough health regen to stay alive, going against that particular group I didn’t have enough damage output to counter the regen of the individual mobs.

In scenarios like that I’m generally dependent on the Storm effect triggering enough times consecutively. Going against an epic mob with extra health and the map’s health regen makes for an even more frustrating stalemate. And that because I watch the health bar not change at all.

Pistols only hit the first mob, and while there is a chance of ricochet to another enemy, there’s no telling which enemy will get hit. With an epic horde swarming all over each other, it’s impossible to hit the same target. Especially with the game changing the target as the horde whirls and writhes. The bow and arrow suffers a similar problem; while it does penetrate, it only goes to the last mob in the line, and then repeatedly hits that one. Meanwhile, the others are only getting hit once, if at all, while the rest are regenerating. The chakram are my preferred weapon of choice. But with any horde, the direction of the attack is rarely the optimal one. It’s usually the first or second one that gets the brunt of the attack, which can be anywhere along the arc that consists of the multiple center points of the different mobs. An attack will go to a guy above the horde, then on the next attack throwing the chakram at an enemy nibbling on the player’s elbow.

I don’t have much experience with daggers, partly because I’ve learned not to remain in close proximity of mobs (due to dieing rapidly) and partly because I tend to find a significantly larger quantity of legendary not-dagger rogue equipment.

I’ve got an epic map, Legend difficulty for floor 211, with this:

+2 enemy bolt
+336.2% rare enemies
+54.2% enemy HP
+1 enemy affix
+1.5% enemy heal
+1% epic enemies

With my current gear (equipped and in storage), defeating the Cartographer is likely impossible. The only condition I will be able to defeat any of the epic mobs at the floor gate is to take them on one at a time. Which, again depending on affixes, may not be possible. I know that to be the case because I’ve had half a dozen maps where I’ve crashed into the stalemate. Heck, even a rare enemy with the “Extra Health” affix on that map is going to be a long and boring fight.

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Use a socket in your armor or hat to add +2 pierce chance, and you’ll find that the mob issue goes away real quick. A little +2 Multi Attack on one of your trinkets will also help a lot.

Or you could grab some buccaneer gear and use your scattershot for burst damage.

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[quote=“Richard Jonnes”]Use a socket in your armor or hat to add +2 pierce chance, and you’ll find that the mob issue goes away real quick. A little +2 Multi Attack on one of your trinkets will also help a lot.

Or you could grab some buccaneer gear and use your scattershot for burst damage.[/quote]
I don’t have any of that gear available.

This is, by its nature, a multi-faceted problem. Yes, there are certainly things that I could do to improve my experience. See, I only know of the Buccaneer set. Without looking up mythstones, until now, I’ve never seen or heard of the +Pierce Chance or the +Multi Attack. Players who opt to not visit the Dungeon Quest wiki, or scour the internet in search of answers on this particular topic won’t know of it, either. Yes, the game does have a Dictionary. However, when it comes to mythstones, it is completely useless. See, the Dictionary has the name, but the listed effect for all the mythstones is: “insert into an item’s empty socket to gain a powerful affix”. And that leads right into another facet. There are changes to the gameplay, in this particular aspect affixes, that would really improve the gameplay.

Another example of mob affix not-quite-problem is that mobs can have multiple great resists. The most I’ve seen yet is an epic mob resistant to three damage types. On a map with X% immunity, it means that instead of a resist they could be outright immune. At minimum it’s a weapon, at near-max it’s a full set.

On a similar note, I had some combination of map effects and faced a legendary slime with teleportation, elemental, extra damage, and fast. I had to fight within the narrow threshold of being inside the not-teleport range but far enough away that I was outside the melee range while dropping a meteor on/near it. This was an incredibly frustrating fight because the slime had repeatedly one-shot killed me within a half-second of popping on top of me. I used the Smoke Bomb to back out, and it would teleport on top of me and drop an attack that instantly killed me. I’d also vaulted and had it do the very same thing. It was a battle waged on a dagger’s edge, at floor 212 on Legendary, to give an idea of circumstances, that cost a million gold in resurrection costs. (Sure, I could have given up and not bothered, but I knew there was an unreasonable chance for me to succeed. So I fought until I succeeded. And, lookin’ back, I don’t know how I didn’t die through that last run to kill it.)

There are some affix behaviours that need to get tweaked just a bit for a more balanced playing field. A large part of that has been map affixes that make particular encounters even more difficult due to the synergy between 'em.

Mob teleports are instant. Mobs can instantly attack after teleporting. Mobs can have multiple resists. Mobs with extra health on a map with +enemy regen have a faster regen rate than their counterparts due to the larger HP pool. Mobs with fast and extra damage on maps with enemy leech suck up more health a lot faster than their counterparts. A group of casters with fast and teleport on a map with +enemy projectiles will fill the screen until they’re eliminated.

1 Like
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You’re right, MS don’t have the description in the dictionary like the CS do, I never noticed that. That should probably be changed to give the description.

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We’ll be looking into fixing some of these difficult Map/Enemy combinations for Patch 1.8.1.

Making a note to add these as well.

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We’ll be looking into fixing some of these difficult Map/Enemy combinations for Patch 1.8.1.[/quote]
Lookin’ forward to it.

I’ve just encountered enemies with two “greatly resists shock” affixes. Yeah…

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I posted fairly recently regarding similar situations and found some solutions to my problem which may help you as well.

Granted, the issue I had were specifically involving enemies with health regen and life leech. I still maintain there is a problem with the life leech giving health to enemies based on the damage they deal before reduction as opposed to net damage after reduction by the way.

So I went back to levels 100-120 and farmed them for about three days in order to get money and crystals enough to amass a store of the top three crystals. I would say you need at least 24 legend affix crystals, 12 set affix and 6 crystal affix stones so it’s gonna be tons of gold to convert all that (not to mention probably a few tens of millions of gold. I farmed on ep6 (mythic 1 now) and had over 100% item quantity but the closer you can get to the 200% cap the better. I would say don’t bother farming for legend maps as they have been extremely disappointing (most recently was a legend map with 481% runestone qualiity and 194.8% item quantity which gave me 2 runestones total. That’s with my current 168% item quantity and 650% luck. Oh, both of the runestones were total hp and mp. That includes the chest at the end. That is so mathmatically improbable as to make me assume it’s intentional or a bug. Further testing is being done by me.)

Basically the goal was to get +4 to sets and one piece each from the following sets:
Cosmic power (actually a wizard set piece which I converted)
Blood Magic
Plagued
Rage
And two optional sets which I chose Terrashaper and permafrost. Other good choices for rogue would be spell sword, periphery I think (haven’t tested that one but the description makes it seem pretty useful if using chakrams) or pathfinder

Legend affixes should focus first on Ignore Resists, then any and all of the following: torrent; twister; throw sword; deadly strike; meteor. Those are gonna be your damage dealers. They have no cooldown that I’ve found so I regularly fill up the screen with torrent procs with hit for a few million each tick to everything in range.

Crystal affixes should be dodge, crit, attack speed and whatever else gets you numbers on any of the above up to capped.

Avoid any leech, hp/mp plus or set item crystal/legend affixes. They are too easily gained through easily obtained methods.

Pick a weapon with the highest damage base you can find while maintaining a high rate of fire (unless using spell sword in which case the attack speed of the base weapon is irrelevant just get something that hits like a truck).

Spec all your level up points into magic and get 20 hero points into the magic category ASAP. If using cosmic power even better. But even if you don’t have that set; the magic star is better due to the resists over armor. Remember; plagued will mean that extra armor from both level up stats and the hero category is wasted.

Rage adds armor on top of plagued and the combination of rage and plagued pretty much guarantees you to hit the cap of 350% Crit damage.

Currently I haven’t found anything that can kill me yet. Farming mythic 3 and just running into groups of enemies and letting them hit me to proc torrents then collecting loot.

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^tl; dr version. Upgrade your gear.

You WILL eventually run into the same problem though where certain affixes are just a killer combo again.