Debuff-immune enemies [Resolved]

[Khadgar]

Post-patch edit: Hooray! Problem solved! Bosses, spawners, and ghosts can now be effected by certain debuffs and DoTs!

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Why are some enemies, namely ghosts and bosses, completely immune to all debuffs?

I understand why bosses should be immune to hard CC, such as stun, freeze, and disable, but why poison, burn, armor reduction, and similar?

And why are ghosts immune to all debuffs? This makes killing them as the wizard way harder than it should be. It's fine if they have a huge resistance to skill damage or something, but the fact is that the wizard, at least, has no real effective answer to swarms of ghosts.

- Primary attack requires nearly a direct hit.
- Fire breath is too short range to deal with a massive swarm of archer ghosts and thief ghosts safely.
- Blast wave is very low damage with a large cooldown.
- Meteor is basically a suicide button, because you stand still and die immediately to projectiles.
- Combustion (burn damage over time) does nothing.
- Flame shield passive does nothing.
- Scorched earth (spells leave danger area) passive does nothing.

I have been having an immense amount of trouble fighting ghosts on the armory as a solo wizard. I can deal with the first 2 areas peachy keen. I can handle the rest of the entire armory easily. But, the statues that spawn ghosts just overwhelm me, since I have no good way to kill them. If I take my time and kill each ghost as it spawns, I am almost certainly going to run into the time limit, and have a "Great Threat" spawn, and then I will die to the ghost swarm.

Just seems weird having 1 enemy type complete negate 5/7 of your abilities.

[varna]

I also think it's dumb for structures, bosses, ghosts, etc being totally immune to all CC. They should still be able to take DoTs and similar non-disabling statuses. The fact they can't makes me think the devs lazily slapped a "status immune" flag on them all and didn't stop to consider it from a balance standpoint and sort those out...

[Suvi]

Originally posted by Khadgar:

- Fire breath is too short range to deal with a massive swarm of archer ghosts and thief ghosts safely.
- Blast wave is very low damage with a large cooldown.
- Meteor is basically a suicide button, because you stand still and die immediately to projectiles.

Max Fire Breath, max blast wave, upgrade skill power at the wizard shop.
Fire breath the statue and it melts. Blast wave the ghosts and they all die.
This is how I've dealt with the ghosts and they pose absolutely no threat to me.

Combustion sucks on wizard and is almost completely useless due to meteor 1-shotting swarms.
Scorched earth also sucks, but at least it works on bosses. The damage is too pitiful to consider maxing it at 25 skill points.

Meteor is only really good when you're in a combo. Otherwise, it's best not to use it.

On another note, I agree that ghosts shouldn't be immune to debuffs. They're trash mobs, so they shouldn't have that kind of immunity.

[Khadgar]

@varna
Would be nice if different enemies had different resistances to various debuff effects, instead of all or nothing. I mean, if the devs were going for a "what makes sense" approach, then how do they justify poisoning a skeleton? Why can't you burn a bug nest? So obviously, they weren't going for a "what makes sense" approach.

The only issue with doing stuff on a case by case basis for debuffs is for the player to be able to know when an enemy is going to be immune to a debuff. The current system, if nothing else, easily lets me know what enemies are immune to debuffs. All ghosts, all spawners & towers, and all bosses. Everything else is vulnerable. It just is disappointing for debuff based classes (which I suppose is just warlock poison & wizard burn) to run into an entire class of enemies which resist this core mechanic.

@suvi
Interesting. Blast wave is a mostly overlooked skill for me, since it mainly gets a longer duration of debilitating effects, which is never something I found myself wanting. The damage is pitiful, even upgraded, but I guess if you max it, it's slightly less bad against ghosts? I mean, obviously what I'm doing isn't working so... Guess I gotta wait until I get 20 more skill points or whatever to upgrade that, since there is no respec! RIP

I really like combustion and scorched earth, though, they synergize quite well. Scorched earth is useful not for the damage, but for it's application of combustion. For example, if you kill a spawner with a primary attack, and it emits 4 enemies upon death, because of the scorched earth ability, these new enemies will start out already burning, because the scorched earth area appears on the ground, which immediately applies combustion.

(Obviously) I am still only on the 3rd area, so I could see this becoming much less effective in later floors, maybe. But for the first 3 areas, it works really well, ghosts excluded.

[Suvi]

Originally posted by Khadgar:

@suvi
Interesting. Blast wave is a mostly overlooked skill for me, since it mainly gets a longer duration of debilitating effects, which is never something I found myself wanting. The damage is pitiful, even upgraded, but I guess if you max it, it's slightly less bad against ghosts? I mean, obviously what I'm doing isn't working so... Guess I gotta wait until I get 20 more skill points or whatever to upgrade that, since there is no respec! RIP

As a Wizard, I mainly use Blast Wave on the edge of a swarm to kick start a combo that can allow me to start meteor spamming. Higher level blast wave and maximum skill power upgrade means Blast Wave will be chunking down even the tankier units of the swarm.

Highly useful. The debuff is a bonus imo. Not the main point of the skill.