Game Mechanics A Way to Deal with Lootrun Cheese Spots

Lootruns! We all love how fun they are right now. Cheese spots made a lot of challenges much easier despite the stacking difficulty increase overtime and with curses. They allow players to get away with tons of pulls with minimal effort, which in turn makes mythics more common and thus reduce their market value.

Another thing about cheese spots is how they can help ranged classes by being vantage points. Ranged classes (especially the sharpshooter archetype) thrive on being far away from enemies, making these vantage points a necessity more than a convenience. This means vantage points shouldn't be removed, but rather balanced.

Barriers are intended to be a temporary fix to this, but they can be inconvenient even outside of lootruns. So while the content team implements their solution (or comes up with one), I'll be suggesting my own!


The fix I came up with is simple: Add a Mechanic Similar to The Watched Phase to Lootrun Challenges
(exluding spelunks and that one with the huge bone guy and tornadoes cuz yeah)


The Watched Phase from TNA raid keeps players on their toes. Everyone who's played TNA knows how much damage they can deal to a player if they stand still. By adding a similar mechanic to lootrun challenges, ranged classes would have to move between different vantage points in order to survive, testing their kiting skills and limits! Its frequency should be low enough to give players some breathing room, but high enough to make sure they're being challenged. Beating challenges and taking curses will affect its damage or frequency to make sure ranged players can feel the difficulty increase as they progress through the lootrun!


I'm sure you have a lot of questions, so I'll answer some you might have right here!
1. TNA watched phase deals too much damage!!!
Yep I agree, and it's aoe is pretty big too! Reducing both should be fine, as long as it still poses a threat to ranged classes staying in vantage points.

2. How about builds with low walk speed and mobility!!!
Good question! Low walk speeds are common in builds that are heavy in defense or strength, which means they likely have a lot of fire or earth defense. Making the mechanic deal fire and earth damage should make it less threatening to those builds!

3. How would it fit the theme!!!
I won't lie, I don't really know. I'm not well-versed enough about the lore to design a mob or an event that would fit the theme. If that's your forte, then I'd love to hear your thoughts about this!


I don't have a lot of knowledge and experience about combat balance and the meta, so I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions about this! Make lootruns fun again!!!!

 

Ok but what if I just leap and tp upwards or move like two blocks to the left and back

 

oh are vantage points pretty spacious? i really dk much about them. if they are then how about increasing the explosion radius?

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it can also be like the area you're at becoming dangerous every once in a while, dealing damage overtime. i think it would be fine if that mechanic has a pretty big aoe. kinda like that mechanic from fire hive boss guy

 

You... made a suggestion on specific ways to counter vantage points without knowing anything about said vantage points?

 

yyyyyyyyyyes. Yeah I see your point lol.

If you know about those vantage points, would you say a similar mechanic to this is a good start to fixing the problem, or is it far from what changes need to be made?

 

Honestly, I really like the idea. I hate invisible walls in general and I think that some classes (archer) really need the safe spots to be viable or at least to recharge and heal up for a moment. Having an actual, mechanical reason to not safespot forever would be both more elegant and more fair. I think that you could absolutely theme this to fit lootruns, especially in the silent expanse. Giving at least some mobs in the challenge the ability to do something like the Watched AoE beam would make sense; most of them are eye-centric so it fits the theming, it prevents safe-spotting forever but lets classes that need a safe area have a brief period to rest and be safe and dish out some ranged damage. I don't think doing fire/earth damage is really necessary, most lootrun builds aren't going to have negative walkspeed and if they do they can still use a movement spell to dodge.

 

I agree with Melkor, this is really cool.
It would be cool if Graveyard of the Thousand (bone monstrosity) was rebuilt to have more ledges and places to hide, and got a new special mob that uses the suggested mechanic.
I also hate barriers, and there are already so many in the Expanse. I wish they just removed all of the unnessesary barriers there.

 

All that needs to be done is expanding the area, so that ranged classes have room to not get swarmed

 

Barriers can't stay no matter what happens. It makes everything so tedious

 

One thing I heard on discord was that barriers should only appear if you are in that challenge, which is a great idea

 

all cool and while we are on the topic of barriers can we get rid of all silent expanse mountain barriers, i just want to fly over the purple spikes...

 

Exactly my thoughts. I hate those random barriers, especially flying high as an acrobat. Half the Expanse isn’t explorable because of barriers, and also when there is a clear path all the way through to someplace, but random barriers? It’s just soooo annoying sometimes. If the issue is running away during AJB or AJF, then just add a teleporter or something if you stray too far.
Even with that in mind, what’s the problem with walking on some spikes?

 

Ngl I kinda agree, but it's not applicable to all challenges. Some of them are in tight spaces surrounded by walls, and idk how willing the ct is in opening up those spaces.

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And thank you for all the feedback so far! I personally don't use these vantage points even with ranged classes, so I'm not the most familiar with them. Though I'm open to learning more about them, so I'd love to hear more thoughts about this!

 

This is unrelated, but I also wish that more of the explorable expanse was away from the path, into the mountains or something. There is just so much potential with all the space SE takes up, and yet only like 50% of it has actual content.
I'm not trying to be ungrateful. I think the SE is really cool. There's just a lot of wasted potential IMO.

I also feel like the deeper parts of the expanse, pretty much Eyeball Forest until EO, are just not as scary as the rest of the place.

Also path to darkness and olmic city and the mines are the coolest parts
Not my opinion just facts

 

I lootrun on only archer and this seems like a great idea.
I'm not that glassy so I mostly only feel the need to use a safespot for destroy challenges.

Maybe even a mob that moves very slowly and shoots beams.
Theming works better and they could be countered by focusing the ranged mob.
The beam could also be emitted by the destroyable target.

The problem with temporary blocks like the temporary doors in quests is they can be glitchy when they appear and disappear. Getting stuck in a ghost block is far worse than bonking a barrier.