I am a technical writer. I'm pretty good at what I do. What I do is take large amounts of seemingly disparate information, and I magically coagulate it into one piece of writing that explains everything in a clear and coherent manner. That is my goal for this piece.
Let's take a look at the mish-mash amalgamation of data that is a player fighting an elite.
And I ran, I ran so far away
Haha. Oh, 1980's. You never stop being retroactively useful.
Consider, for a moment, Nephalem Valor (NV). The player receives a bonus to items and amount of gold drops with this buff, granted by killing elite packs, but the player loses this buff when they change skills. So the player is locked into a set of skills, a dedicated build, which is a good thing. But it has an effect on combat. An obvious effect.
There are, in a general sense, three types of elite encounters in the game. They all start the same, but then branch off into one of the three types of encounters.
1. The "corner-boxing" single-ability spam, where the player thins down the ranks of a pack until the last, boxing that last monster into a corner and spamming their left mouse button ability on them until they die, which usually takes a really long time. These packs are often obnoxious due to some CC or other. These packs pose no threat whatsoever.
The video link below shows corner boxing with a character basically being stunlocked through chained-fearing. For a barbarian, it is encounters like this that mostly force you to take Wrath of the Berserker.
Corner Boxing (Video)
2. The DPS race. The player attempts to kill an entire pack of monsters before they themselves are killed. These are highly offensive packs which do an insane amount of damage that no mitigation is going to save. The best defense is a balls-out suicidal offense, right? That's how NV-enabled farming characters are built in inferno. These packs pose an insanely high degree of threat.
There were two deaths before the barbarian in the video below went for a full-out DPS race. A barbarian that overgears the content.
DPS Racing (Video)
Alternate (Video).
A dps race.
3. The "Flock of Seagulls" encounter which combines one and two through various permutations, such as the "this isn't worth it" pack, the "this is going to take twenty minutes" pack, or the "I don't even want to bother" pack. So you run. You run so far away. Just to get away. These packs represent unbearable monotony, so the player wholly ignores them whenever possible. It's like reading a book, finding a sour sentence, having that sour experience being the breaking point, and putting the book down. The very worst thing a writer can set up.
You even get this in co-op games. You'll have a full party (but not for long) with, say a Fields of Misery spawn with charging beasts with some ridiculous combo. People either leave or they say "fuck it let's kite it, die, and move on." Because it isn't worth it. Because it's expensive and there's no reward. Because it isn't fun at all. Packs like these just murder co-op games. Players can and do drop out very often over this kind of thing.
One of many Flock of Seagulls encounters. (Video)
I honestly see no imperative reason to play co-op, other than breaking up a farming run by simply being with other human beings in a game. That's the only incentive I have. It's due, in part, to packs like this.
This is how it feels for some packs, whether they are just mind-numbingly monotonous (rolling all four defensive/CC mods) or you just don't want to do them (any kind of succubus encounter):
Why is this happening? Because choice is being stolen from the player in combat.
Gear choice, spec choice, play style choice. You are forced into one of two types of characters, no matter the class: Out-the-ass defense, or suicidal offense. There is no in-between. There are very few viable builds with medium-quality gear in inferno. For progression? Ha. Forget about it.
It's not so much that the monster mods aren't being categorized correctly (they aren't in my opinion), or that the mods are homogeneous (they are). It's because elite combat, the toughest combat in the game, suffers from polarized spikes of difficulty.
Combat in Diablo III is not about what you're doing, but how long you're doing it for.
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