Basically the devs demonstrated very poor judgement by not allowing us to toggle off unwanted powers on badbuys. We simply cannot make proper goons.
Coming Soon(tm) aka i15 I believe.
Damage Proc Mini-FAQ
Just noticed Damage Proc Mini-FAQ wasn't working with new forums, it's been updated.
Hmm, I need to go back and check. I thought minions only got up to Shotgun on regular difficulty. Are you making your minions on Hard?
Also, it's not wise to fight custom-made toons at difficulty levels you're accustomed to out in the real world of PC or RI.
[ QUOTE ]
Hmm, I need to go back and check. I thought minions only got up to Shotgun on regular difficulty. Are you making your minions on Hard?
[/ QUOTE ]
As of the most recent patch, Normal minions have M30 Grenade. AoE attacks were supposed to be bumped up to Hard, so I think this is an oversight.
Custom critters are bad news in general for lowbies. They already hit much harder than standard level 50 enemies. Level 10 characters are meant to fight wimpy guys with fire axes, so they pretty much get pulped by custom foes.
The only thing you can do, really, is avoid using custom critters in low level missions until we can do something about the crazy damage scaling or give standard "thug" weapons to our minions.
Arc #41077 - The Men of State
Arc #48845 - Operation: Dirty Snowball
I just finished testing a mission with custom mobs with Assault Rifle and the minions did NOT have M30 Grenade listed in the editing screen or in the mission.
That is interesting. Mine definitely do have it, and they are on standard..
They were made a while ago, perhaps I need to edit them or something...
Well, I adjusted them, they don't have the grenade anymore. They must have changed them between the time they were created and now.
However, I still have the following problem (the numbers come direct from the combat log of my character).
Burst - 6.22 damage x4 = 24.88
Slug - 37.81 damage
Buckshot - 20.98 damage
Total = 83.67 damage in one "round" (since they fire one right after another, a round is about 3 seconds). That's ONE minion.
My L8 Defender, trying to solo this mission, has 187.4 health.
Power Bolt - 2.43+9.74 = 12.17 damage
Energy Torrent - 3.65+8.03 = 11.68 damage
Total = 23.85 damage in one "round"
Since the typical spawn is three minions, in three seconds, they'll do 251.01 damage in three seconds. They have 80 health each, and since I gave them Standard Regeneration, they have no particular defenses (they heal faster rather than having defenses). In other words, to defeat ONE minion, it would take four "rounds" or roughly 20 seconds. In that time, I'm dead, many times over.
Now, I realize that this is a Defender, but he's still supposed to be a super hero, and he's getting torn to shreds and embarrassed by minions. That's not fun. It can take HOURS to clear a single mission when you have to retreat to rest after every minion, let alone every battle.
I would love to see an "easy" setting for custom mobs. They really are head and shoulders above normal enemies almost every time.
I don't care if that comes with an xp penalty when fighting them or whatever. I just want to be able to make mobs that are about as challenging as the rest of the game.
Being able to cherry pick exact power loadouts in I15 will be a big help - but that's a long way off. Still, once it happens, hopefully this problem will be solved.
You will only be able to "add" powers to CC's. Yes, this is not good or helpful in any way whatsoever since on standard they already have too many powers.
The development team and this community deserved better than this from NC Soft. Best wishes on your search.
The problem is that the critters have no notion of what "level" (or even level range) they are supposed to be operating in. Standard critters are far stronger than players at low level, and become manageable to easy at high level. Not only do players accumulate powers, they accumulate slots to enhance those powers, so they become much more effective.
It seems odd to me that the devs didn't start with the notion of having a standard scaling of low level to mid level to high level, affecting both power availability and power effectiveness, and allow authors to make tradeoffs to balance offense and defense as deviations from the default.
The way things are structured now, the devs have put themselves in the position of making worst case assumptions about mission authors. That is, the weakest an author can make a critter has to be comparable to the PvE critters designed to fight level 50 player characters, and scale up from there. That's pretty crippling if you're trying to design critters to be fought by level 5 characters.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
Put another way, one thing the devs could have done was to make "standard" custom critters force a level 25 cap on the mission, "hard" force a level 40 cap, and only "extreme" go up to level 54. Then they could balance the meanings of "standard", "hard", and "extreme" against the level ranges of characters they'd be fighting.
Or, they could have made critters scale automatically to "standard" when the mission was 25 or lower, "hard" when 26-40, and "extreme" when 41+. In a sense this is what the dev-designed PvE critters do, albeit it's via creating different critter versions rather than having auto-scaling.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
One thing to note.
At low levels, custom enemies lose powers.
However, this only applies to the high-tier powers, so w/e.
What shall claim a Sky Kings' Ransom?
PPD & Resistance Epic Archetypes
I posted this elsewhere, but I thought it appropriate here too.
I've been tinkering, and I've noticed that my generic troops are mowing down my blasters in a matter of seconds. That's MINIONS, even a low as green conning ones.
They're Minions with Assault Rifle and Regeneration (since regen offers little resistance or defense).
That means each minion has Burst, Slug, Buckshot and M30 Grenade! Each one does a significant amount of damage AND only burst has no knockback component. I'm finding this has made my minions almost impossibly destructive juggernauts to lower level characters.
I haven't looked yet, but perhaps the level limits on the abilities in the list are a little off. I mean, 4 offensive powers like that by L6? On a Minion? Access to the M30 should be later, if at all, for minions.
What I'd really wanted was minions with Burst and nothing else. Perhaps an Underling level could (should) be added?