No XP

• • 
    

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=191169

The powers you pick for your custom critters affect the xp as well as having minions, lt's, and bosses in your custom groups.

Basically, anything you could think about doing to make your custom critters easily defeatable and worth more xp has been nerfed - for good reason.

Important parts in Chaos Creator's post

I think it was set so that if you have an enemy with normal primary/normal secondary you would receive 75% of the xp that you would for the same enemy that was part of the "normal" game.
A hard primary/normal secondary or normal primary/hard secondary would yield a higher percentage of XP than the normal/normal.

So the calculation is like 37.5% for the normal primary +37.5% for the normal secondary to yield the 75%.

The extreme is maybe worth 50%, so
an extreme/extreme enemy would be worth 100% xp
an extreme/common would be worth 87.5%.

if you completely customize the powers, then they are related to what is in each set and the percentages are built based on what the custom power selections are versus the normal, hard, and extreme...

If the enemy has no attacks, it is worth 0 xp.

I'm not sure I have all that completely strait, but that's the jist of it.



So if you have just bosses = 25% rewards of the percentages above.

So an all normal/normal boss mission would basically be 18.75% of the percentage it had before.

Also, anything you could think about doing to make your custom critters anything less than extremely deadly at any level, or to restrict minion/LT/boss ranks from spawning for story purposes, has been nerfed - for questionable reasons.

Fixed.

Edit: Reference

I've been able to make my missions for story purposes without experiencing and drawbacks due to i16.
In fact, my arcs have remained the same except for minor tweaking - objects or critter restrictions due to level options. (and writing a new for i16).

Perhaps, your story missions aren't as much "story" as mine or you are creating custom critters that have extreme power sets.
I have no problem getting minion/lt/boss ambushes to spawn. Tweak the ambush difficulty setting.

I'm glad to see that farming and power-leveling are no longer thriving in the AE.

Hurrah for i16!

Hey Alt.

Farming in AE is still exceeding farming in RC by a margin of up to 70%.

Please.

<3
Epsilon

QFT. What's even more obnoxious was that non-customs still give full XP despite being utterly wimpy compared to Standard/Standard customs.

Got to love it when the Devs implement a solution for a problem that didn't really exist. People haven't been farming customs since they took away the "Kill X Custom Enemies" badges back in issue 15 and the new SSK and Difficulty settings did much more to kill AE farming than any of these changes did. All this did really was deal major collateral damage to non-farm AE arcs.

There is another variable that can be causing this.

I had a Custom group that included Hellions, Skulls, Outcasts, Trolls, and Player created critters. Each Dev faction had random Minion, Lt, Boss. I also had multiple Minions, a Lt, and two Bosses, Player created in the Custom group (All custom critters set to Hard/Stand at least.). I had the Lt and Bosses set to not spawn automatically). When I16 hit I was only getting 1/3 xp from any MOB in the mission. It did not matter whether it was a Dev’s or mine, and it did not matter whether it was a minion or a Lt. I removed my custom spawned critters from the Custom group, and got 0xp from the MOBs. Those Hellion, Skull, Outcast, & Troll, Minions and Lts that were wondering around in my mission were worth 0 xp.

I was finally able to get my Custom group up and running. For some reason the Custom group rules was totally ignoring the fact that I had Dev critters in the Custom group, in each sub-group. I had to set my custom Lt and one of my custom bosses to spawn to get full xp even from the Dev critters. (I /buged this.)

This meant that when my custom Lt spawned in a “easy” Rescue, it spawned two of these. Those two Hard/Stand Thorn Assualt/ Rad Lts, totally reamed my lvl 15 Thug/Dark MM, along with his Lt, and two Minions in under 30 seconds (It’s amazing what two AMs, and a full attack chain can do.). Note that these Player created Lts were only worth 85% xp of an equivalent Hellion, Skull, Outcast, & Troll Lt.

My primary point is that you can also get low or 0 xp depending on the makeup of your Custom group, not just the makeup of your Custom critters. My secondary point is left up to interpretation.

I personally didn't see any problems with the old system. I was able to make many custom bosses with little to no offensive powers and still get full XP for each defeat. This was obviously the way it should have stayed, because it was already balanced. I mean, it's not like I was trying to earn retconned badges or anything, just do a little risk-free XP grinding and ticket earning. Smart farmers would have been distracted by the new SSK system anyhow

Perhaps you haven't played my arc.

Oh, let's be honest. You clearly haven't played my arc.

Tell you what. You don't judge my arc that you haven't played, and I won't tell the forum where you have your head stuffed up. Deal?

Fair enough. It'll be nice when that happens, but I'm not holding my breath for "Soon™".

I've redone my arcs to eliminate custom power selections. That means for most of mobs I have either hard/hard (if the primary doesn't have something truly obnoxious like Build Up at Hard) for 100% xp, or standard/hard for 87.5% xp. I also use a fair number of standard mobs as fillers, sometimes recolored to fill in gaps in the hierarchy of a custom group and provide more variety.

The resulting mobs, while definitely tougher than most standard mobs, are easy for well-built level 50 tankers to solo at 8x/+0, and mid-level scrappers and brutes to solo at 4x/+0 or +1.

Which means most teams including a brute, tanker, or scrapper should be able to run these missions without any serious difficulties.

And of course, you don't have to use custom mobs in AE missions. If it's really all about story, any set of actors should be able to fit the bill. The changes for recoloring and renaming standard mobs are actually very cool and can really help customize your missions while maintaining all the advantages that standard mobs have. People don't give the devs enough credit for that (and a whole lot of other stuff).

The thing is, XP and influence are not the only thing that matters. Playing AE missions for tickets is still very lucrative. In many ways, tickets are far superior rewards than random drops. Characters level so quickly now that it's silly to natter on about 15% or 25% less XP. Getting to 50 in the shortest time isn't the most important thing: having fun, playing the character you want, getting the things you want for it are just as important if not more so.

With tickets the average player can get rare salvage for a small investment in time without having to worry about the vagaries of the market and random drops. For that same investment in time that same player can get 7-10 uncommon/rare recipes, many of which can be sold for tens of millions on the market, or used on your own character.

Also, Patrol XP isn't used when you run AE missions, so if you run a mix of AE and standard fare your leveling rate is still going to be fast.

Further changes in custom mob xp are coming down the pipe as well, so the situation is likely to improve in future releases.

The devs brought down the nerf hammer for enemies (ostensibly) giving 25% too much XP (see: Freakshow XP adjustment in Issue 16). It's completely fair to say enemies giving 25% too little XP is something that needs to be fixed as well.

I see where you're coming from, but your assumptions about what I want out of AE are wrong. What's fun for you != what's fun for me. I use custom costumes to tell part of the story in a visual way, so recolored non-custom NPCs don't always work for what I'm trying to do. The high difficulty of custom critters has proven a very tall obstacle to finding an audience, though I will admit having 25% XP taken off the customs doesn't seem to have made the situation any worse. Certainly didn't make it better, though.

I can get behind this sentiment, so no offense was taken.

So what. Most teams can take on any Dev created mission/arc as well. I don’t see them reducing the xp for the less than Stand/Stand Dev critters, that exist through out play. Pretty much every non Boss Dev critter is below an equal level Stand/Stand Player critter. I posted numbers, others posted numbers and it was ignored. Now if you just give your critters Armors for the secondary then it’s not that big a deal. As soon as you give them Buffs/Debuffs and to some limit Heals (In other words make your critters somewhat interesting.), things change dramatically. AM and Tar Patch fit between the Standard and Hard categories in their respective power groups, thus they can be given to a Standard difficulty Player critter. A double stacked AM or Tar Patch is not a pretty sight to a player, especially a lowb, even if their just coming from minions.

This is absolutely BS. The actors make the story. What they look like and what they can do are part of the story.

In the story I was creating one of the factions is a Wolf/Human hybrid that were “made” by The Morrigu. This faction called Morrwolves, has joined up with a few other Dev factions for a specific purpose. Their appearance and abilities reflect their connection to The Morrigu, and were a part of my story arc. This story was going to be a three arc story, and the first arc was from levels 3 to 20. Even if I wanted to use Dev critters for this faction I could not have, because none of them fit the description in my head, at the levels I wanted my story to start out at.

Sometime you can choose to overlook an actors appearance, but it still changes the character. On the Sci-fi version of the Dresden Files they chose to go with a Latino woman, instead of a blond Irish gall, for Murphy. This actress was a petite, feisty, attractive woman; hells, I liked her, but she was not Murphy. Even though I liked the show I had to constantly tell myself that she was supposed to be Murphy. I had absolutely no problems relating the Actor who was playing Harry, to the Harry in the books.

Only in Farms do the actors not make a difference to the story.

I could not care less about getting to 50. I have a 39 month badge and have never made it to 50. What I care about is the Risk=Reward that is the mantra of the Devs. The changes made to the Player created critters with I16 stomps all over this mantra. Before I16 the Player critters did not follow Risk=Reward, but with the changes from I16 they are even farther out. It’s real easy to make a player killer, Player critter, by accident. On the other hand you have to intentionally make a Player critter that is capable of doing minimal or no harm to a player. Like I said above, many of us posted numbers in the open beta forum, and these numbers were not discussed or even acknowledged by the Dev responsible for the MA changes.

It’s irrelevant, because the changes made by the Dev was done from ignorance (Anybody that had bothered reading the open beta thread could have told that.), and from my viewpoint, the arrogant belief that Dev created critters must be better than Player created critters by default.

The changes to the MA by I16 do nothing to farms. It’s easy to make a Dev critter farm, and these changes do not affect these critters. What affected farming in the MA (Thus Pling in the MA.), is the changes to side-kicking, and having more control over mission settings.

Also there is a reason why “soon” is a joke in the forums.

Well that is nice if your arc is meant to be only run by teams as some sort of task force. On the other hand you have screwed over many other ATs by making the arc so dangerous for them that there is no incentive to run it. Especially when other stories with easier Dev foes give greater rewards.

Even more so as anyone who truly cares about the story is more likely to solo AE arcs as otherwise they will miss out on a lot of details since 1) only the team leader gets to see debriefings and 2) teams tend to move too fast for players to catch all the dialog and read things like clues and mob descriptions.

It's very easy to make a killer "non-meleers need not apply" custom group. A well-balanced group who is a decently challenge to all ATs without being obnoxiously overpowered is much more difficult and requires more than just Standard/Hard/Extreme to tweak them. The Devs, in their astounding ignorance of their own game, have only penalized authors for taking such efforts.

Recolored canon mobs are still the same canon mobs, if you can be easily pleased by a different coat of paint then that's good for you. On the other hand, people should not be punished for trying to be more creative and designing new critters from the ground up.

If the story is about the group, then no other group will do. A story where any group can substitute would have to be so damn generic that there would be no point it running it over a paper mission.

Very sad to see no response from the devs...

Exactly, and that's what it feels like right now. Legitimate users of the AE being punished.

Some VERY well said remarks!

AND REMEMBER… the whole AE system was moved from Issue 13 to Issue 14 just so that the devs could get custom critters fully integrated. [See quote below] Now with the changes in i16 “standard” custom critters (which are typically harder than “standard” canon critters already) only give out 75% of the xp that canon critters do. Raising the difficulty of custom critters higher means that even minions can become rather nasty “Heroe Killers”, which also DESTROYS THE FLOW OF THE STORYLINE as it takes ALOT longer to kill Hard/Extreme custom critters! This totally undoes so much of the reason to have custom critters in the first place!!!

Sorry for the long post, but I passionately believe that the AE can be something special!
But the changes in i16 to legitimate uses of the AE really disappoint me (and many others)...
Should I hold my breath for fixes to fixes coming "Soon™"?

Arc# 306752 - "Insect Invasion: Paragon City" - What happens when you mix magic with a few lil bugs?

So you're saying that your "Chains of Blood" arc not change at all if you completed removed the Circle of Thorns from it? That "Blowback" would not be affected at all if you replaced Malta with Rularru?

After all, you claim that the group is irrelevant to the story.