The Inspiring Mutator has a 5-meter persistent green area of effect around itself that reduces the damage taken for all allies within it by 50% and heals them over time. This area buff has no restrictions on the number, nor type, of enemies that can receive it at a time, except for the Inspiring Mutator itself, who mercifully cannot benefit from its own mutative properties. Effectively, all enemies with a large enough maximum health pool who wander inside the aura are impossible to kill until the Mutator is eradicated, since the damage they take is reduced by half and the healing over time is strong enough to regenerate their health to full in a matter of seconds. This isn’t such a problem on lower tier waves when you have more substantial DPS relative to the health of your enemies and Inspiring Mutators spawn one at a time. But for the more extreme waves–perhaps Wave 27 onward?–this effect becomes so onerous that a Mutator could survive for a long time before it is defeated or be impossible to target in a crowd of allies it’s sustaining indefinitely.
Vampires and Spirits especially prove overbearing with the Inspiring mutation. Both enemies types heal themselves and frequently halt movement to cast spells, making any attempts to try separating the fast mobs from the slow ones through kiting ineffective. How is a lone player expected to target an Inspiring Mutator in a crowd of more than six enemies, much more a crowd of dozens, with no way to discriminate? Most abilities have a limit of six enemies than can be targeted at any moment, and there’s an upper limit on the amount of damage one is capable of dealing in a short span of time, based on gear and build, to mitigate the dangerous situations that can arise when an Inspiring Mutator is allowed to live for too long.
It’s not just an ordeal for lone wolves. Duo scenarios eventually start spawning two Inspiring mobs at a time with ludicrous (albeit, despairingly hilarious) results starting around Wave 31. For an example of what I mean, I encourage you to watch a video of Steppaz and me (from 1:26:01 through 1:35:36) encountering as many as seven Inspiring Mutators in Wave 33:
Perhaps there is more we could have done if I my damage output matched that of my partner (I made up 42% of our damage), but when you consider that Inspiring becomes more difficult to overcome compared to other mutations at this stage in Occult Defence, and you combine that with the Rising Strength enrage condition recently introduced that increases the damage enemies deal once they’ve lived for more than five minutes and applies five status effects to every player periodically, there’s little room to argue that Inspiring is unfairly punishing in its current state.
Allow me to make a few suggestions to improve the imbalance in difficulty:
- Limit the enemies who can be inspired to those allies who enter the field with the Mutator, as it works for the Avenger and Charged mutations.
- Limit the number of Inspiring Mutators that can spawn in a wave. How can Wave 35 be surpassed when it’s possible to face as many as seven of them at a time, given that Rising Strength is now a reality?
- Reduce the heal over time effect. Vampires, Spirits, and Deathless can, by virtue of their powerful heals and barriers, extend the length of a scenario wave significantly. Combined with Inspiring, the starting point from when you can potentially damage these mobs comes later, changing Rising Strength from a possibility into a near inevitability that can cascade into a hopeless ordeal, more so when the Mutators are capable of healing themselves.