Do Malta get Acc or Tohit bonuses?

Did Castle explain why it was designed that way? I was actually wondering before we heard that if this was intentional, since Devouring Earth mobs aren't really in the 40+ game (at least blueside), and that this was an attempt to up their difficulty since they're in tip missions for people in the 40+game.

I was actually surprised/annoyed to see them in those tip missions, as I hate DE with a passion. I can fight other difficult mobs without any issues, but there is something weird and annoying about them that I just don't like.

I haven't noticed any increased difficulty anywhere else, either. I was wondering about Arachnos a bit when my Fire/Fire Tank was soloing a tip mission, but then I realized I had 4 Executioner bosses fighting me along with a Tarantula Queen or two eliminating my defense bonuses. All those criticals and damage really added up. But I guess that was to be expected with their higher level than me, all their damage, and their defense debuff.

Maybe the DE were considered "too easy" for the end game, and that's why they're barely used. I have no idea why the rock dudes were deemed "hard enough," unless the devs figured tedium = challenge (which judging by some of the older content may very well have been part of the design philosophy back then.)

Has anyone checked the to-hit on the DE in Maria Jenkins' new arc?

And that Malta mission is made of awesome. My DM/SD runs it whenever it comes up. My new self-imposed challenge is to keep Frostfire alive the whole time. I've managed it only once on +1/x6; on x8 he has yet to survive the third wave.

I consider this bad mojo. It's irrelevant that DE may have been too easy. In my opinion, blanket +toHit is the wrong way to buff them, or anything else.

Giving mobs 50% base toHit is fundamental to making defense and resistance of proportional value. There was a long-fought struggle, visibly waged by Aracanaville but also others, to first get the devs to understand this, and then get them to make changes that made the survival benefits of +defense actually scale versus foe rank and level the same way that resistance did.

The problem with giving any mobs uniform +toHit is that it causes them to be disproportionally harder against characters who have +defense than against those who have other methods of mitigation, such as resistance, debuffs, control, or +regen/heals. A mob with (using a round number for examples only) +12.5% toHit deals 125% as much average damage as it would with no +toHit against people with no defense. But if you pick someone who has 25% defense, that mob starts dealing 150% as much average damage than it did before. This is, IMO, a balance nightmare, where how challenging these mobs are becomes a function of how much defense each character has and how heavily it depends on that defense to survive.

All things considered, this probably is less of a problem on DE than on any other mob type, given that they blow this bonus out of the water every time they plant a Quartz. I would not want to see it added to additional mob types. If they want to up the DPS of foes, they should do it in a way that applies more uniformly to various player characters, such as +damage or +accuracy.

I started a thread about the DE increased accuracy in the bugs section a few weeks back. The strange thing is that it doesn't show up on their stats anywhere. They don't show higher than normal acc modifier or higher than average to-hit base it only shows up on the combat log in the rolls.

I don't understand how this can be WAD, since it's only the tip mish DE and not all DE. Also the tip mish DE are bugged in that the bosses won't con down to Lt. if you have it set for no bosses.

I guess if you accept soft-capped defenses as your standard, anything less will be significantly underperforming, because even 40% defense means getting hit twice as often. But then, even 30% (4x as often) is probably fine for most content, particularly with inspirations. Bump it to 32.5%, and one small purple inspiration becomes god mode.

I have no theory on the significance of 64%.