One thing that is somewhat minor but definitely confuses people without mods is the actual aura and awakening stage of Daemonhosts. The current visuals are very minimal and unless you are staring at it and are very aware of its animations you cant really tell if you are waking it or not. The radius is very ambiguous and there is no clear visual of you are about to wake it. This leads to people on certain maps trying to squeeze past a daemonhost and ending up waking it, or people not knowing you can squeeze past a daemonhost and then standing around for a few minutes trying to decide on if they should approach it or not.
My suggestion would be to have green flames start to flow out of the daemonhost as it awakens, starting small and slowly growing in brightness and speed as it gets closer to waking up. The flames should coil up and roll back at a set distance making a clear radius, giving the impression of the daemons magic trying to break free and pushing back on invisible wards that keep it contained. Could have a less intense version of this aura follow the daemon around to make its corruption radius more clear as well. Also it would just make the daemonhost feel more powerful and intimidating in general.
Concept animation I threw together in like 10 minutes (try not to judge it too hard its just for the concept):
The point of a Daemonhost is to punish unaware players that failed to to observe their surroundings properly, or made a bad judgement call when picking a direction to kite/fight in.
Knowing how to properly pass a DH without triggering it is part of that. You learn by making the mistake a few times.
This would entirely invalidate that. The game, and by extension life, is much less fun if you add training wheels and warning signs to everything.
I wouldn’t mind a bit of warp fire coming off the daemonhost when its hovering in the air. The arua radius is probably too much but it could help keep teammates from having it trigger through walls.
I mostly agree with Ethics that its something you learn after a few tries but it can be a little confusing / frustrating when it triggers and doesn’t make obvious that “You” triggered it.
I also don’t think a radius would invalidate the experience, people will always be dumb and curious the first time they see somthing.
Ah yes. Thats why they have a giant glowing light and are called out by voice lines multiple times whenever you are remotely near them, and of course why they make a loud and glaringly obvious sound effects whenever you are near them.
NO they are obvious, no one ever stumbles into them, they are there to force you to path a different way and be careful around them, not being able to throw grenades or shoot in their direction and etc.
The only people who stumble into them are complete noobs, the bigger issue is how ambiguous their detection radius and awakening states are. Unless you are staring at them there is no way to tell if they are about to wake up or not, and not having any indication of their radius means its rather ambiguous if you can walk around them or not.
Yeah I have over 1000 hours in the game, I have seen every daemon spawn location at this point and know the route to go around them, but some of them are really ambiguous and confusing. Particularly this one on archivum sycorax
The Radius actually fills the entier room and if you dont all run through at the same time or linger a little too long at the doorway you will wake it up. And unless you KNOW what the awakening animation looks like you cant tell when its safe to go or not. So this room requires niche knowledge of daemonhost mechanics that 99% of people don’t know, that are only really possible to figure out with hundreds of hours or spawning them with mods to observe them, leading to this daemonhost being woken up like every other time I see it.
Daemonhosts are not meant to hide or be difficult to spot, nor should it be hard to tell how close they are to waking up. They are just ambiguous currently and that is not a good thing.
To be clear the radius would only trigger when the daemonhost is about to wake up, so if you are close to it and already angering it that energy aura would grow around it making it clear when you are too close and when it is about to wake up.
The other thing I didn’t ever know until getting the mod which cleared things up for me isn’t the radius actually gets larger when awakened, AND it has a “tolerance”. You can go inside the circle and the mod will show you it go from orange to red telling you when the Daemon host has had enough.
When I played without the mod I followed other players skirting around the side thinking it’s safe and far enough away following the same path but it aggro’d to me. All because I didn’t understand if you stay too long within the circle it will trigger vs just putting a pink toe in it automatically has it aggro.
