Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath New Boss Fights Preview
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One of the ideas behind the upcoming The Fall of Oriath expansion for Path of Exile is making the boss fights more dynamic. Illustrating their progress on this front, Grinding Gear Games released a couple of preview videos.
Here's a fight with Abberath, God of the Goatmen:
And here's a giant enemy crab, The Brine King:
Additionally, since I don't want to dedicate a separate post to it, the developers have answered some more questions regarding the upcoming damage over time changes. An excerpt:
Why are you making this change, instead of leaving poison/bleed/ignite based on hit damage and just making them only able to scale on damage over time and poison/bleed/burning modifiers and nothing else (not even generic damage) while ignoring resistances?
The first reason is that (apart from ignoring resistances) this suggestion is how Ignite in PoE's very early days used to work, and it resulted in large amounts of negative player feedback, and proved very tricky for new players to understand. The fact that Ignite dealt "Fire Damage" (over time), but was not affected by "increased Fire Damage" confused a lot of players, and caused a fair bit of anger from players who discovered it after playing for a long time under the assumption that modifiers to "Fire Damage" would affect all "Fire Damage". Adding on to that, a property of Damage over Time ignoring resistances would cause a lot more unintuitive situations on top of that. If a player is on fire, and uses their Ruby Flask to boost their Fire Resistance, they'll expect that to work, and rightly so.
The second reason is that doing what you describe isn't as simple to apply, or to understand, as people assume. An Ignite might come from a hit that deals fire damage, and thus has already been affected by modifiers to fire damage. It might come from a hit that deals no fire damage, and thus has had no fire damage modifiers applied (for example, if using The Three Dragons). It might come from a hit that dealt no fire damage, but did have fire damage applied to it because that non-fire damage was converted from fire damage. It could be that all three for different parts of the damage, and the final hit values (which are all the old system had to apply an ignite with) cannot be used to reverse-engineer that information, because it doesn't know what damage types things used to be. It simply isn't possible from those final damage values to work out which modifiers have applied to them.
The third reason is that this change brings things more in line with how a lot of mechanics in Path of Exile already work, which keeps things simple, rather than introducing new special cases. Molten Strike, for example, uses the same base damage for the melee hit and the projectile explosions, but different modifiers apply to each. Some modifiers apply to both (Fire Damage, Attack Damage), some apply only to the Melee Hit (Melee Damage), some apply only to the projectiles (Projectile Damage, Area Damage).
Under this new system, the hit and Ignite (or Bleeding/Poison) of a skill are both calculated from the same base with different sets of modifiers in exactly the same way that the melee and projectile hits of Molten Strike already are. Many players are already used to understanding these calculations for skills such as Molten Strike, Wild Strike, Shock Nova, Earthquake, and many others. Making Bleeding, Ignite, and Poison work more like existing skill mechanics is preferable to making them work even more differently.
Is there going to be any interaction between the inbuilt damage multiplier of skills and the DoT for poison/bleed/ignite? As an example, if I ran a skill with a reduced base damage (like spectral throw), would I do less damage than a skill with higher base damage (like heavy strike)?
In the Fall of Oriath Beta, we're changing the stat that is described on skills as "Deals x% of Base Attack Damage" to specifically apply to the base damage; Previously, it was a multiplicative damage modifier similar to what you'd find on a support gem, just presented differently. This meant it actually scaled all damage, not just base damage.
In future it will correctly modify the base damage. In addition, most attack skills will also have a Damage Effectiveness multiplier as many spells do, so that added damage such as from the Added Chaos Damage Support will be modified separately, since this Base Damage modifier will no longer be applying to it. Because Damaging Ailments are based on the base and added damage of the skill, this means that the Base Damage modifier and the Damage Effectiveness will correctly affect the ailment damage. As a result Spectral Throw would apply a smaller bleeding or poison than a Heavy Strike.
