Question: Are NPCs with God Mode Fun Killers?

Conceptually, I don't mind godmodes on the occasional or signature NPC.

What I *hate* about them is their implementation - ie. their duration,
their (lack of) cooldown, and their (cheating) ability to ignore the
inconvenient drawbacks of those powers (unlike our variants).

In those cases, yes - they're Fun Killers and categorically, they comprise
the bulk of (the very few) missions I skip or simply autocomplete.

By contrast: Unlike Goat, I don't mind Paragon Protectors quite so much,
although I think the duration of MoG should be lessened somewhat.
That said, you know it's coming, and can often prevent it entirely with
some timing and slight tactical changes - that adds spice and challenge
for me and I have fun playing the mini-game of "Kill the PP before he
MoGs" . It's like knowing to kill Sappers first - a tactical consideration.
Once he does manage to MoG though, it's a mild pita (or a major one if
you have a lot of them) due to the excessive duration of the power.

Master Illusionists on the other hand are always irritating, and the fact
that they can attack through Phase is an outright cheat imho. If they
adhered to anything even close to Phase rules, I'd have no issue with it
at all.

Valkyrie and Statesman are just ridiculous. They go directly to the
skip/autocomplete list. End of Story.

I don't think NPC godmodes need be fun killers by necessity, but
unfortunately, the way they're implemented currently often achieves
that exact effect. It's a pity, really.


Regards,
4

Ah. Thanks for the clarification!

Speaking as a primarily squishy player, my main beef with 100% DR is that it also means 100% resistance to damage debuff and 100% resistance to resistance debuff. Not only does it shut out dps, but it shuts out two of the four main debuff types, too.

On the other hand, I've got no beef with NPCs using godmode powers which bring them up to 90% or even 95% DR. Anything less than 100% is beatable. (I also don't mind special encounters which make an opponent invincible under certain conditions, such as the force field over the Hydra's head, or Ajax's invulnerability.)

The traditional reason why there will never be unresistable crits is the Hamidon. I haven't followed the "new hami" raid- it could be a moot point now.

For special encounters (AV's, EB's, named bosses who appear at the end of a mission, etc) I don't mind them throwing every and all types of bizzare "cheat" coding at they want to at us. I consider that interesting and challenging and generally fun. Plus typically the reward is to complete the mission or Task Force.

But I do find it rather annoying to have regular 8 man spawns who are found around every single corner of a mission take 2 minutes to kill because of 1 or 2 bosses who have a god-mode.

Yes, Mog is the ultimate fun killer. I want that moment of glory, but players have never had that.....also its almost more than 1/3 of the pps spawned have Mog....whats the matter devs, do you know the others suck? Maybe its time to revamp those powers....not tilt make obnoxious spanws happen more often.

But, fun fact about PP's which of course will be changed once the devs get wind of it....Electric Control drains thier end so they cant mog. Poor Electric, it was so much fun to watch......

Sometimes you can easily survive a challenge but have a hard time beating it down. It is then a matter of patience.

Sometimes you can easily beat something down with a big IF you can survive it.

The latter is what counts as being fun to me.

Edit: and yet I play tankers. I meant as a team.

Aside from Valkyrie's ridiculous duration (that's really the definition of tedious), my only problem is with Shock Power. It's not her Power Surge that's really the issue; it's that she also gets an auto-hit end drain with Power Sink. I almost always get completely sapped between PS and continuing to attack to keep progress on her health bar, even with a few blues handy.

The PPs from 30-40 come in 3 flavors:

Claws with Unstoppable

Spines with Elude and...

Energy Blast with MoG?

At least the first 2 kinda make sense, but I think the Energy Blast PPs would be better served with the Elite Paragon Protector style of last attacks, Nova.

Both Elites use their respective blast set's big bang (Inferno and Black Star) and I believe that giving them Nova instead of MoG would make them at least more challenging for Controllers and Dominators who recently got their pets and Masterminds who recently got their top tier pet buffs. Also, having a Nova go off in your face is never fun for anyone.

It'll probably never happen, but it'd be nice.

By the time the enemy's Unstoppable has crashed, I don't care, because I've moved on. If I can't move on, because he's required for mission complete, it really doesn't matter if he's stunned and has no end; I took off 3/4 of his health while he wasn't stunned and had end after all.

Yes, the godmodes need to change. If enemies must have them, limit them to 30 seconds to 1 minute in duration. Stop throwing them on every player character surrogate with an appropriate powerset. Stop giving them to every signature character. Limit enemy self-heals as well, especially Dull Pain-type heals that also grant +HP, ESPECIALLY if they also have a godmode (Ms Liberty, I was looking at you. For a very long time, since you wouldn't just DIE already.) Cap AV resistance at 95%.

Captain Freak: We DID have Moment of Glory like that. We couldn't heal for 3 minutes and thousands of posts died complaining about it.

Eva: "Not Fun" is very hard to quantify. But complaining that the toughest things in the game are tough is an argument that seems to require some kind of backup.

Timeshadow: There's a LOT of ways of dealing with parapros. I've run a couple Manticores lately.

Manti 1: Sheer overwhelming firepower with a little bit of knockdown. When they lose 60% of their HP between "falling down" and "Getting back up" very few of them MoG. There may also have been some psi damage on that... because the Moggers didn't live very long even after hitting it. (I don't remember, do parapros have the psi weakness like Regens did?)

Manti 2: Holdarama. Every time a Parapro showed up, it got turned into some sort of flaming, dark-covered icicle which got beaten down.

Manti 3: Stalker. It took me a few Parapros to figure out what was happening, because they'd go from like 3/4 health to dead with no stops along the way.

I think the major problem with AV fights generally is that they are very binary. Either the AV can kill you easily or it can't kill you at all. When you add a cheat godmode to the AV's arsenal the result is a draw, neither of the opposing forces can defeat the other. From other games perspective, you're basically looking at two cheaters with infinite HP fighting each other until the other one leaves due to boredom.

It's the same thing with other NPCs, I just find it extremely boring if the enemy pops a godmode and still isn't threatening enough to be able to kill me.

Worse when the energy/energy PP gets MoG off, you get REDUCED xp for them!

Actually, we didnt have that moment of glory, because it didnt have Psi def and resistance like the mobs do.

There are some many NPC abilities that deserve to be classified under the "completely stupid" category, this is just one more example of it. I don't mind abilities that require a player to adapt or react, but NPC's are stacked with abilities that are essentially of the "lolol you lose" type (or in the godmode case, simply dragging out the fight for however long the ability lasts). Abilities that either auto hit or can't realistically be avoided and have debuff numbers so absurdly high they might as well have put -1000 to everything on there.