The Ideal AE Buster Team, and the Ideal AE Buster Team Team Buster
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2011-03-08 03:40 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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There's currently an MA SG on Triumph that runs on the weekend. While it's generally meant for stories, asking if a week could be set aside for running challenges couldn't hurt. They ran through my challenge arc The End of Saturday Morning and gave feedback though it's nowhere near some of the craziness that seems to be proposed here.
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Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I'd like it if something like this got started. It not something you can do in any other MMO.
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Players can do it, it's more a trick of making sure as few people stand near the AV for RttC buffing as possible. It's important to kill off pets, especially weak ones like imps, who are hurting more than helping. If you can make sure everyone is as far back as possible, you can overcome it easier.|
Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
i actually did some testing with this, when you get a custom AV in AE, they are given automatic 80% resist to all debuff types, with the fast healing in the willpower set that gives another 20% regen debuff resist, which essentially makes a wp AV completely immune to all -regen powers so the only way to kill them is to out dmg their regen and tons of -resist debuffs
i once took a AV with no attack powers and the full secondary of willpower and just see what it would take to kill him from baddy perspectives, a x8 spawn of vanguard took about 15 minutes to kill the WP AV and they mostly were able to do it because they were flooring its resist to about -200%, i was monitoring the regen on the AV as well and with a fully saturated RTTC + fast healing it was around 1000 hp/sec regen with full immunity to -regen i have no idea if any actual team could kill that unless it was a bunch of cold doms with tons and tons of -resist, maybe ill/colds due to the untouchable pets which wouldnt be buffing its regen further |
It can still be really hard, especially with SoW, since even at base that's a lot of HP and regen. Normal AVs regen enough as it is, so add in an extra 20% HP and Fast Healing and even one target in range for RttC and it hurts.
On the topic of absurd stuff, at one point there was a bug with Ninjitsu where it was damage capping whoever had it. It was applying a +100% damage buff (still does) so that it could simulate the hide crit. But it would stack with itself, and just add up to damage capped stuff instantly. I combined that with EM and AVs and have a screenshot somewhere of an AV hitting me for over 8000 damage.
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Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU
Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My goal would not be to make a mission that tried to outlast the players. That would be boring, and there are trivial ways to do that. My goal would be to make a mission that killed the players, in tricky ways. That would be more entertaining and more in the spirit of the challenge.
By the way, the Scrapper Challenge mission actually has some design rules in it, which I set for myself to test a theory. I theorized it was possible to make an extremely difficult mission without resorting to the conventional way the devs do it: by scaling numbers, especially health, aka the big bag of health syndrome. So the rules were: 1. No AVs. The mission actually contains no Archvillains. 2. No indestructible critters. None of the critters in the mission is designed to be ludicrously difficult to kill. They are all individually defeatable, but extremely dangerous. This time around, I would use AVs. Even very tough EBs would probably not be strong enough to take on the strongest possible teams out there, with purpled builds and alpha shift. But the goal would be to make a mission that was dangerous in an interesting way. The Scrapper Challenge is dangerous in I think an interesting way. If you want to see what I consider an interestingly dangerous mission, that's the place to start. |
Just tried it on my Ice/Fire/Fire Dominator, Solar Icecap. Great mission. I don't have any characters hardcore enough to solo something like this, so I did it on +0x8 with bosses turned off. I don't get to claim the fame of saying I beat it at the intended difficulty, but it was a lot of fun regardless. It wasn't as hardcore as what we've been talking about, but met a different challenge niche (that is, doable with practice by many people). I included a few screenshots of the action.
Here is the character meeting the contact, wearing perhaps one of the least intimidating superhero costumes currently registered in Paragon City.
Walking into the opening and spotting the Sonic Resonance bubbles, I knew immediately I was going to be breaking some rules of typical Scrapper challenges. Kiting was absolutely going to have to happen. Luckily I had an inspiration load of about 10 greens, 2 break frees, and whatever other random inspirations I happened to pack.
Opening with a pull onto Ice Slick seemed the way to go since I had no idea what attack these guys were packing.
This evolved into a firefight when the mini robots started showing up. Around this time, Domination kicked in and I was able to immobilize them despite the giant bubbles.
The first couple of groups of just robot guys went ok, but then the ambushes started. I was handling that with modest success, running back and forth between sides of the mission to kite the enemies across Ice Slick. But eventually there were so many I had to face them head on.
Eventually it got to where there were at least 3 or 4 different kinds of enemies shooting at me. One of them was some kind of Energy Blaster that had a nasty melee attack and moved REALLY fast. Luckily they didn't seem able to hit me too often, but at this point I was running low on green inspirations.
Things got more desperate as more and more enemies of different kinds kept showing up, forcing me to abandon my hiding spots.
Suddenly, the word "Confused" appeared on my screen. Oh crap, Illusionists. At this point I was reduced to running and hidding and hoping I could catch them in Rain of Fire when I was unconfused. No luck.
Rather than use Rise of the Phoenix, I decided I needed to depart to the hospital. I didn't bother buying new inspirations despite being out of greens. On my return, my only option was to try to single target the Illusionists before they could spot me.
After this part, I thought I still had to defeat the entire boat. But to my surprise after ranging the two enemies downstairs, the glowie showed up. I snuck past the enemies and grabbed it, claiming my 54 tickets!
Great mission. A lot more fair than anything we've talked about in this discussion. Some lessons learned for me:
- Having an AoE sleep power is surprising valuable against enemies with shields. You can throw out an AoE hold first, then follow with the sleep, and hope the detoggle from the sleep in turn forces the hold to hit.
- However, Ice Control's ranged sleep power still mostly sucks.
- Naming your enemies "Illusion Challenge" greatly assists the players in figuring out who keeps Confusing them.
Had you named them "Sword Challenge" you probably could have wrung 2 or 3 extra deaths out of me. A dirty trick, but this is a dirty thread.- Mezzes completely wreck solo squishies. Not that that's suprising given what we know.
- Had you hit me with -Speed and -Recharge (especially from an autohit set) I would have faceplanted a lot more. However the encounter may also have teetered far into the "extremely frustrating" category.
- Masking which entity summons the ambushes makes the whole affair a LOT deadlier.
- Having a couple of groups of easy enemies between big fire fights keeps players guessing. Even though I could handle hordes of robots fairly easily, the chance that one of them might summon another ambush kept me from getting too aggressive.
Great mission. I may do it again sometime when I want a reminder of how much less my characters can solo than a melee when the game actually ramps up the challenge meter.
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Even with bosses off, beating it is still not easy. Its certainly a far harder challenge than the RWZ challenge.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Great mission. A lot more fair than anything we've talked about in this discussion.
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As to ways to make it harder, its actually been tweaked downward many times. I removed excessive confuses from it, and I took out smoke when too many players noted that without +perception, it turns the thing into an impossible mission. At one time there were a lot of fire guys in there with fire damage auras, but those were bugged to do double damage, so they got removed also.
I'm using this mission as the foundation to make the Ultra Killer Mission for this thread. I've been rebuilding the minions. They are already plenty scary, before I've added the upgraded LTs. And believe me, I'm using all my knowledge of making nasty critters from the ground up: the minions aren't throw aways.
Yeah, the names are not very tricky. That's going to change in this mission. They won't deliberately lie, but neither will they say what the thing is so blatantly.
If I'm lucky, I might have an early alpha of this thing up this weekend some time. Depending on how many ITFs I end up on, of course - still got those two badges to work on.
PS: Glad you enjoyed the mission. Its not intended to blatantly assassinate players. It is intended to be beatable by a strong enough player or set of players. But its intended to make people think it took effort to do it, even for strong players.
PPS: I gotta fix the contact. Its not supposed to be a boulder, but the devs keep patching things in ways that alter my missions in weird ways.
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I just tried it with my blaster (on +0/x1 with bosses, but with an alpha level shift), just to see how badly that would go.. And the answer is, with only deviation from the rules being inspiration use... After a few tries, I can consistently get MOST of the way through the second wave before I drop.
Of course, I'm also not using inspirations very well. I suspect I can get to the third wave with more varied inspirations than just 'some purples, some break frees, and maybe a couple blues'. But I start getting confused if I try to juggle too much.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Even with bosses off, beating it is still not easy. Its certainly a far harder challenge than the RWZ challenge.
As to ways to make it harder, its actually been tweaked downward many times. I removed excessive confuses from it, and I took out smoke when too many players noted that without +perception, it turns the thing into an impossible mission. At one time there were a lot of fire guys in there with fire damage auras, but those were bugged to do double damage, so they got removed also. I'm using this mission as the foundation to make the Ultra Killer Mission for this thread. I've been rebuilding the minions. They are already plenty scary, before I've added the upgraded LTs. And believe me, I'm using all my knowledge of making nasty critters from the ground up: the minions aren't throw aways. Yeah, the names are not very tricky. That's going to change in this mission. They won't deliberately lie, but neither will they say what the thing is so blatantly. If I'm lucky, I might have an early alpha of this thing up this weekend some time. Depending on how many ITFs I end up on, of course - still got those two badges to work on. PS: Glad you enjoyed the mission. Its not intended to blatantly assassinate players. It is intended to be beatable by a strong enough player or set of players. But its intended to make people think it took effort to do it, even for strong players. PPS: I gotta fix the contact. Its not supposed to be a boulder, but the devs keep patching things in ways that alter my missions in weird ways. |
I went back and tried it with bosses. Knowing what I know now about the structure, I was smart enough to clear out the area before attacking the main boss, and kited him around while I took out everything else in the area. His vulnerability to Ice Slick is exploitable to an extent. I was very very glad to be an Ice Dom and not a Fire. Plant or Mind might have had a somewhat easier time due to their ability to confuse bosses, which Arctic Air can't. On the other hand, the ability to slow them seemed to help me out a lot, and let me at least race behind boxes. The Masterminds summoning their minions right into my AA was pretty LOL too, when they'd all show up and blow the MM away.
It was all smooth sailing until the second ambush wave. Holy carp. Instant death the moment they spawned on top of me. I came back, managed to pull 2 or 3 bosses at a time. They still killed me. More an issue of not having the sustained DPS of a "true" damage archetype and the serious handicap of mezzes failing. A Mind Dominator might have had an easier time, although I can see many full teams wiping on that second wave. Still I think it's a cool mission. It scares me to think of how much harder this could be.
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The main bosses job is really to stay alive for a while and trigger the ambushes: the ambushes themselves are the real threat. I like the idea of "constellations" of critters creating the threat rather than one big target. The right set of bosses can be nastier than any standard AV, but in a more interesting way - I think - than just one big target.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
I went back and tried it with bosses. Knowing what I know now about the structure, I was smart enough to clear out the area before attacking the main boss, and kited him around while I took out everything else in the area. His vulnerability to Ice Slick is exploitable to an extent. I was very very glad to be an Ice Dom and not a Fire. Plant or Mind might have had a somewhat easier time due to their ability to confuse bosses, which Arctic Air can't. On the other hand, the ability to slow them seemed to help me out a lot, and let me at least race behind boxes. The Masterminds summoning their minions right into my AA was pretty LOL too, when they'd all show up and blow the MM away.
It was all smooth sailing until the second ambush wave. Holy carp. Instant death the moment they spawned on top of me. I came back, managed to pull 2 or 3 bosses at a time. They still killed me. More an issue of not having the sustained DPS of a "true" damage archetype and the serious handicap of mezzes failing. A Mind Dominator might have had an easier time, although I can see many full teams wiping on that second wave. Still I think it's a cool mission. It scares me to think of how much harder this could be. |
I've tweaked up the main minion group for the killer mission, and I'm starting to work on the main LTs. I'm going to split up some of the threatening powers between them because minions run out of endurance too quickly. One thing about designing nasty critters: if you give minions too many powers ironically they can become less threatening because they tend to burn up all their endurance fast, and not have enough to ever use some of their stronger powers.
Also, you have to be careful balancing things like summons. Make too many critters spawn off gang war or mastermind pets and you can blow the aggro caps, making most of your threat stand around doing nothing but be targets. I'm trying to dial that in.
That's just for the minions and Lts that will be spawning in the background. I'm still thinking about the main threat. I'm cranking up the difficulty on those by an order of magnitude, and using some of the stuff I normally don't use because its usually too nasty for the normals, only the crazies would want to face them.
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One thing that you might already be doing, that I'd like to suggest, is a "punishment" for herding. For example, if you herd Group X together the minions will quickly pile up 10 stacks of Siphon Power for all their buddies, and the bosses will be keeping the minions alive a few seconds longer (and themselves quite a bit longer than that) with Twilight Grasp.
Well, I went to try out your scrapper challenge, Arcana, set it to +4 X8, and went in.
Beat up a group of the resist buffing, summoning guys. Did not please me hitting them for 10 damage heh. Zzz.
So then I went through the map looking for the boss, who doesn't speak. But of course you already know he's in the front of the mission. He was hiding inside the open box. Anyway, the ambushes occasionally killed me even though I'm ridiculously tough but I whittled them away.
I thought the group with illusion challenges would be impossible and I'd have to use a breakfree to stay unconfused long enough to kill one, but eventually I managed it, then another. Eventually got rid of them all, then slowly punched out the others.
I did herd things together where they would all be in my darkest night, but beat it +4 X8 no insps no temps.
I think my challenge mission, Aeon's Army Extra Hard, is harder, as I don't think I can beat it with any builds that I have now on X8 no insps no temps, and it doesnt use any custom enemies save the end boss, who himself isn't as hard as many regular enemies. I only have 2 characters I've tricked out though. If anyone can beat Aeon's Army Extra Hard, I'd like to hear it. A scrapper managed it chugging lucks, which I thought would be impossible, but I don't know how any other tricked out ATs might fare.
Give it a try and see what you think.
P.S., I approve of naming the enemies descriptively of their powers. Naming them deceptively would not be helpful. You really want people to have to brute force things instead of reasoning out a good plan from what they can see?
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Herding will not be a good idea in the updated mission.
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Originally Posted by The Demacian
One thing that you might already be doing, that I'd like to suggest, is a "punishment" for herding. For example, if you herd Group X together the minions will quickly pile up 10 stacks of Siphon Power for all their buddies, and the bosses will be keeping the minions alive a few seconds longer (and themselves quite a bit longer than that) with Twilight Grasp.
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The question of "How unfair is unfair" comes to my mind. When designing something like this, for a team, DO you even draw a line where you say "Okay that's enough of THAT"? Considering the very real possibility of an all-support "superteam" tackling your mission, something tells me "No, no you don't"
Over-attacking EVERY "weak point" seems like a tall order to cram into even an x8 spawn.
Defusing Defense: Debuffs for those who lack DDR, Tohit Buffs for those who have it. Are longbow officers and Nemesis Leutennants the order of the day? Does every enemy need AIM and powerboost? Fortitude and Forge don't seem up to the task, but perhaps I'm mistaken?
Defusing Resistance: The only unresistable resist debuffs I know of are Vanguard Sword and Longbow Nullifiers, and I might even be wrong about those. ARE there other options? Are these mobs scary enough on their own to include into a custom group? Will the other mobs in the group dillute them to the point of ineffectiveness?
Defusing Endurance and Recovery: SOME sets resist this, but enough don't that it seems a viable avenue. Tesla Cage's -100% recovery springs immediately to mind, but I'm behind the times, I'm sure there are other options. Do we deploy sappers? Super stunners?
Defusing being able to do things: How much of a place does Mez have? Just enough mez to keep people having to tank/prebuff against it, or should mez attempt to overstack players' protections?
Slows and Recharge debuffs fall under this category, and again, due to the existence of personal and grantable resistance to them, raise the question of "How much and how avoidable".
Knock Down and Back work toward this goal, but again, do we spam the entire map with earthquakes? Or put just enough knock in to disrupt the unprotected?
Finally, To-hit Debuffs and Defense, and related but not as direct, Resistance buffs are similar in their affects. Do we pile them on? The to-hit related ones seem to raise a bar that says "You must negate this much evasiveness to even play the mission", is this a statement we want to make? Resistance is "fairer" in that at least you can still HIT, but, it's also impossible (for players) to mechanically counter, though for some resistive powers specific counters do exist. (Knocking enemies out of a dispersion field or steamy mist, etc)
Defusing Healing and Regeneration: Well, there's -Regen and -Special out there. Is it worth having your minions spend time on this sort of thing?
Defusing being alive: As has been already discussed, exotic damage typing is probably your best bet. Energy and Cold and Negative and Psionic seem to me to be the least resisted/defended against, but then again, there are strong stackable sources of protection from each, so perhaps avoiding overspecialization is more important than wailing on a specific "percieved weakpoint".
It would be fun to toss one's hat into the ring on this, to see what players actually find challenging, and see what is just unfair, if any such thing exists.
Mission Arc: Metatronic Mayhem (Id 1750): A tale of robots gone wrong, rogue robots gone right, and madmen gone every which way but loose.
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In terms of powers and abilities, no. The one thing I do consider out of bounds, and only in the sense of being trivial rather than being unfair, is to just fill a mission with nothing but unkillable AVs.|
Originally Posted by Teeto_K
The question of "How unfair is unfair" comes to my mind. When designing something like this, for a team, DO you even draw a line where you say "Okay that's enough of THAT"? Considering the very real possibility of an all-support "superteam" tackling your mission, something tells me "No, no you don't"
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Actually, there is one effect I've struck from my mission as being unpalatable even for a mission of this difficulty: foe intangible. I don't intend to cage the entire team indefinitely, which is theoretically possible. That would make the mission difficult in a trivially annoying way.
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| Over-attacking EVERY "weak point" seems like a tall order to cram into even an x8 spawn. |
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I believe it probably is against the vast majority of strong solo builds. Things like Level 54 Master Illusionists are things I stayed away from for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the primary target for the Scrapper Challenge was scrappers, and the combination of melee ranged debuffing and ultrahigh psionic damage would be problematic for most scrappers. Also, I specifically avoided things like filling the entire mission with mostly bosses.|
Originally Posted by Elfis_Presley
I think my challenge mission, Aeon's Army Extra Hard, is harder
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Also, the scrapper challenge was specifically intended to help me practice building custom critters, so its full of those. I know there are some really nasty standard ones. But it seemed a bit unfair to stick things like Hamidon in there (until they took Hamidon away from me: a lot of things not in the AE are not in there because of me, no kidding).
I think a couple of things could take it on, none of which I currently have. A Dark Armor tanker with a soft-capped defense build could probably do it (there are such builds floating around). A really powerful Willpower build could probably do it (my DB/Will isn't 50 yet). And I'm guessing a perma-dom Mind control dominator could do it. The ingredients for a strong build to take that mission on seem to be: strong to smash/lethal/psi, very high defense in general, mez protection, and either ultra high control or enough health to take the occasional very large hit.
Interestingly though, I'm not sure if yours is harder than mine verses teams. If you scale the Scrapper Challenge to +4, the difference between the two might equalize verses an eight player team. Still, anyone who manages to cruise through the Scrapper Challenge should definitely take that on: its definitely a step up in difficulty.
I think the one I'm working on now is substantially harder than Aeon's Army Extra Hard, although its hard to say this early. Its *intended* to be. My rough target is for the one I'm working on now to be significantly harder than AAEH at *even con*, and scale up to team-crushing difficulty at +4.
Edit: I should clarify what I mean by saying I'm not sure if AAEH is harder than the Scrapper Challenge vs a strong team. Against a solo player, the goal is to present enough different offensive challenges that the player cannot counter them all: one leaks through and they die. But against a team, you have a very different problem. A team is going to turn the tables on you and present your mission with a wide range of offensive challenges that can simply neutralize them, making them unable to deploy any of those neat offensive tricks you've placed into the mission.
Against a player, you're thinking of giving your critters high offense, exotic offense, strong debuffs. In a team setting, you have to do that *and* simultaneously protect your critters against chain knockdown, superstacked mez, extreme tohit debuffs, mega sleeps, nukes, etc. Right now, my soft-capped SR scrapper testing the mission with invulnerability turned on is showing melee defense between 38% and 34% - down from 47% and with 95% DDR**. Even FF bubbles are going to have problems here. But if a team of eight Earth controllers just earthquakes everything in the mission, most of those debuffs go away, along with most of the offense, and it becomes a cakewalk.
I could just literally give everything status protection, but that's boring. I would basically be doing the powers equivalent of making everything AVs. So while I will have to include some status protection or the mission becomes controller snack food, I'm trying to do so in a measured way - even in a "killer" mission. That's the challenging part. I want it to kill super strong teams, but in an interesting way.
I really hope to have an alpha version of the mission set to lower than max difficulty ready for people to play around with Sunday or Monday. I just have to figure out where to publish it: I don't want to depublish any of my missions just yet and all three slots are full. I'll probably have to publish on a secondary account, which means making sure an alt on that account has everything I need to publish the mission. The alpha version is going to probably be weaker than the final version while I think through all the ways a strong team can neutralize it.
I *am* coming to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a threatening minion or LT to a team. To a solo player, yes. To a team, everything will likely be bosses, EBs, or AVs most of the time. An LT is too easy for a team to vaporize.
** PS: standing there letting them pound on me, the critters managed to take my defense down to a record low of 26.5% defense, down from 47%. Punching through DDR, that's 210% defense debuff. But its unlikely any team will see that, because I doubt everything will be able to stay alive long enough to see it. Either the critters go down, or the team goes down, before the debuffs stack that high.
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Yeah, I wish I could get a team together and watch them in my mission, but high difficulty low reward isn't very popular for some reason heh. You don't happen to play on Virtue do you? Most of the stuff you have to kill in my mission are lieutenants, though there are a lot of bosses and a few EB's. Most of the bosses are meant to be avoided in one way or another for a soloist, while a team is meant to fight it all; that's how I intended to challenge both solo and team. And the master illusionists aren't the cream of the cheeze. The cheezy cheezy cheeze are the rularuu overseers and the ambushes.
If you manage to make a mission that hard at even con, I'd be flabbergasted . Of course, I guess you can just make sure every group has capped resists, and healing, then it can never be soloed... but my mission is more geared to punch you in the eye instead of sitting there invincible.
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I remember that... having roughly 2/3 my WP Tanker's health evaporate in one attack by a +2 Lieutenant was a nasty surprise.|
Originally Posted by Dispari
On the topic of absurd stuff, at one point there was a bug with Ninjitsu where it was damage capping whoever had it. It was applying a +100% damage buff (still does) so that it could simulate the hide crit. But it would stack with itself, and just add up to damage capped stuff instantly. I combined that with EM and AVs and have a screenshot somewhere of an AV hitting me for over 8000 damage.
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Originally Posted by Teeto_K
Defusing Resistance: The only unresistable resist debuffs I know of are Vanguard Sword and Longbow Nullifiers, and I might even be wrong about those. ARE there other options? Are these mobs scary enough on their own to include into a custom group? Will the other mobs in the group dillute them to the point of ineffectiveness?
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To my understanding, AE critters use different damage and buff scalars than standard NPCs. I think it's something like Blaster damage + Defender buff/debuff + Scrapper HP.
Ah, I forgot to mention, the reason I have no minions in my challenge mission, and the reason there's so many bosses, is my scrapper sometimes kills +4 lieutenants with just shield charge, fireball, fire sword circle, solo with no buffs. Even if they popped me instantly after the knockdown, I'd mow down any challenge that didn't include bosses with just that, one hospital trip at a time.
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Custom critters use a special temp damage scale. Its supposed to be roughly comparable to what the critters would do if they could slot damage enhancements. In fact, minions use exactly the same temp damage scale for melee damage that players use.|
Originally Posted by Zamuel
To my understanding, AE critters use different damage and buff scalars than standard NPCs. I think it's something like Blaster damage + Defender buff/debuff + Scrapper HP.
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In absolute terms, at level 50 a scale 1.0 melee attack will do the following amount of damage for a minion, Lt, Boss, EB, and AV custom critter in the AE:
Minion: 107.09
Lt: 160.63
Boss: 267.72
EB: 374.81
AV: 481.9
Note this is what standard critters deal with a scale 1.0 melee attack:
Minion: 120.48
Lt: 180.71
Boss: 385.52
EB: 481.9
AV: 874.56
Interestingly, standard critters have higher effective damage modifiers. In fact, from Boss and higher the modifier is a lot higher. So why are custom critters more dangerous offensively? Because they have *our* powers, and our powers are actually a lot more dangerous.
For one thing, there is a design rule that says that except for special circumstances, no critter deals more than scale 2.0 damage in one attack. No one: not Statesman in the LRSF, not giant monsters on monster island, not even Hamidon has an attack that deals more than scale 2.0 damage. Whereas we players have lots of those attacks. Total Focus deals 3.56. LRSF Statesman's total focus-looking attack deals 2.0. Energy Transfer deals 4.56. Be thankful custom critters don't get literal assassin's strikes, which deal 7.0.
So while the strongest AV attack for conventional critters is going to deal about 1749 damage, for a custom critter wielding energy transfer that will be 2197. And the devs usually aren't giving AVs powers that buff damage by a lot. Rage provides a 40% damage buff. Heck it used to provide 80%, but the devs eventually divided all damage buffs by two to approximately equalize them with player buffs**. Still, rage boosted Energy Transfer for a custom AV deals 3076 damage. That is Lord Recluse while buffed by the towers kind of damage, and he's usually +4 higher than the players when he hits for that much. This is an even con AV hitting for that without being externally buffed. If you faced this AV at +4, that attack would hit for 4430.
The ultimate, though, is Ninjitsu. To simulate being able to crit from hide, Ninjitsu Hide grants a 100% damage buff to the critter. So an SS/Nin custom AV that lands KO Blow (3.56) while Rage is up (+40% damage) and while Hide is unsuppressed (+100% damage) will land 4117 points of damage in one attack. This is like four yellow mitos hitting you simultaneously. You only make SS/Nins when you just plain want to kill the players, period, unless you're not using Hide and Rage from those sets. This of course ignores the old stacking bug Dispari mentions.
** I argued that since mission maker powers are supposed to simulate player powers, and critter damage scales are supposed to simulate critters enhancing powers like we do, damage buffs should be diluted to about half strength like ours are. When we buff damage by +80%, that is usually on top of our ~ +100% damage slotting. So we go from 200% to 280, an increase of 40%: 280/200 = 1.4. So the critters, who don't really have that enhancement, should get half the benefit from damage buffs. Before they made that change, an SS/Nin custom AV could have landed a 4800 point attack on a player. That comes close to one-shotting a scrapper at the resistance cap.
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I'd love to take the team I was on for a MoSTF a couple? years back thru something like this. To say we destroyed it is an understatement. Part of the reason I think this team is (was) so tough was the versatility of its possible responses to "x" on top of massive buff and strong debuff ability commonly found on all def/con teams:
Stacked Leadership, Tactics and Assault in particular.
Capped recovery
Very high To Hit buffs (often exceeding +100%)
Strong Resists to pretty much All damage types. (Sonic shields plus APP shields)
Capped defenses to All (including Psi) (FF and Cold shields plus Fortitude)
Very High Regeneration (the Emp defenders were capped, everyone else had 2+ Regen
Auras stacked)
At or near the damage cap for the ATs
And then for 'versatility':
Sleep powers
Confuse powers
Intangibility (Caging powers, both the Sonic and FF/Arch could cage LR or the towers)
From (as near as I can recall):
2 Emp/Rad/Dark (think both were /Dark, I know mine was)
1 Emp/Sonic/?
1 FF/Arch/*
1 Cold/Arch/*
1 Sonic/Sonic/*
1 Mind/Emp/*
1 Fire/Kin/*
The one thing where this team isn't as strong as some def/con (or dom/corr etc.) teams is debuffing. Our strength was more to the buff side of the equation though obviously the Cold has some serious debuffs, and overall a fair amount of -resist on the team. (And I believe the Sonic/Sonic had Liquefy)
I think to really put the nail in the coffin for a team of 8 people, you have to look for the seriously hindering abilities that very few sets protect from. To make it more extreme, then try to push this through in a way so that sets that bring relatively less to the table more or less become required, to squeeze the team away from other major advantages they would have.
Like most of the rest of the posters, I tend to feel the buff/debuff sets are the ones to beat, so I'll look mostly at those here.
-Recharge: Cold Domination offers 60% resistance to this. This more or less makes 2 Cold Dominators "required" on the player team, at least IMO. -Recharge absolutely wrecks players otherwise, and a lot of it is available in an autohit format.
-Defense: No sets offer explicit protection (except Shield), but lots of them let you stack defenses so high it may not matter.
Confusion: Several sets offer protection. Stacked Tactics may be the most effective counter for players. Enemies almost certainly need some Storm Summoning users to prevent massive exploitation of this ability.
Fear: Only protection I can think of is in Dark Miasma or castables. Assuming you are able to hit the players, this one is extremely exploitable.
Sleep: Protected by castables or after the fact by healing. But more importantly, is available to critters via Mind Control, which bypasses some portion of defense, and via Electric Control's sleep patch, which is massively annoying. Note that the fact that for critters this requires a castable, players may be able to sneak up and sleep groups, especially due to Mind Control's aggroless sleep power.
Stun, Hold: Covered by any big bubble. IMO Sonic Resonance may be the set to go with for critters for one simple reason: when first encountered, they have no cooldown on Liquefy. And Sonic's normally very redundant clear-mind type power isn't so much wasted here. Note that groups of Controllers or Dominators may be able to bust through a Hold.
Knockback/Down: For players, IOs eliminate a portion of this. Critters without armor will at a minimum fall victim to it unless one of them can cast ID. I'm not sure if having an enemy spending time casting that instead of some of the nastier abilities in Kinetics is worth it. The fact that many critters won't be protected from knockdown/back and that it is available in autohit form (Ice Slick, Earthquake, Bonfire) may be a significant leverage point for players to exploit.
Repel: In the maingame I'm not a fan. In this kind of play though, I'm completely unsure. Almost nothing without actual armor has immunity to repel, including players. ID from the Kinetics set protects against it. However, enemies with Force Bubble will not run the power continuously. They will turn it on only for a few seconds at a time. It is is still massively annoying. Note that one way I experimented with killing players is giving them an "ally" that ONLY has Force Bubble, which results in it following the player around aggroing everything within a 100ft radius, and simultaneously forcing groups apart.
Endurance Drain: Throwing a ton of this at players forces the issue for them greatly. However the question is what source to use. IMO Freakshow Super Stunners may be a partially good one. Or maybe not. In any case, by throwing enough of it at players, you almost force them into having a Force Fielder for the ~85% resistance.
Intangible: Kind of sucks in the main game. In this situation though, maybe not so much. NOTHING grants protection to it to my knowledge. Black Hole would be almost a must-have power for Dark players. For critters, I agree with Arcana that including it would just make the whole thing irritating.
-Run Speed: For players, likely nullified by Cold and Kinetics. For the critter group, two enemies with Arctic Fog give them 100% resistance, at least unless players can detoggle them.
-Regen: Not protected against anywhere. IMO the enemy team shouldn't even be considering it.
-Healing: Cold Domination again. But it's single target.
Afraid: As far as I'm aware, nothing protects against this. However, it doesn't affect players, so the enemy group has no special use for it. Players can use it to exploit enemy behavior, and it is available in some autohit powers (e.g. Arctic Air).
Based on all of this, knowing nothing about what specifically will be in the mission, and assuming I could just roll them up like NPCs:
BUFF/DEBUFF SETS
x2: Cold Domination
x1: Empathy
x1: Force Field - preferably with Force Bubble, job is to bubble and create lockout zones around corners when ambushed
x1: Dark Miasma - preferably with Black Hole
x1: Kinetics
x2: Radiation Emission (mainly for the autohit toggles)
PRIMARY/SECONDARY
x1 Illusion Control (minimum)
x1 Mind Control (minimum) - preferably with Telekinesis
The other sets are up for debate but Fire and Gravity Control and any Defender set without debuffs would be some of my last preferences; Archery may still be ok though. I'd be working the assumption that enemies have lots of Confusion protection, so Plant Control is valued here more for Creepers than anything else.
Of course, once you know something about the actual mission to be run, this lineup could change. Part of the challenge of this thread, if we do identify a real great lineup, would be to theorycraft the mission that busts them.
[Side note: IMO, stacked Vengeance needs to be ruled out as a valid tactic for either enemies or players. I'm not saying that shouldn't be used ever, but I think that in reporting victory the team would have to fess up to how many Vengeances were used, with "higher scores" going to teams that use it less often.]
Personally, I think Intangible is perfectly valid for NPCs if kept at a minimum since it does act as disruption. Limiting it would be based on enemy choice and perhaps powerset since the argument fluctuates between AoE and ST sources.
Concerning KB, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss players being affected by it due to some things like Force Bolt having high mag.
Also, you missed an effect, Teleport. Only a few armors offer protection against it and only Gravity's Wormhole is a valid source of it. While not directly a debuff in itself, it adds to the disruption factor by splitting the team.
Quote:
Its very hard to control. Easier than it was, but still very hard to prevent spamming in some corner cases.|
Originally Posted by Zamuel
Personally, I think Intangible is perfectly valid for NPCs if kept at a minimum since it does act as disruption. Limiting it would be based on enemy choice and perhaps powerset since the argument fluctuates between AoE and ST sources.
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Quote:
| Concerning KB, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss players being affected by it due to some things like Force Bolt having high mag. |
Quote:
| Also, you missed an effect, Teleport. Only a few armors offer protection against it and only Gravity's Wormhole is a valid source of it. While not directly a debuff in itself, it adds to the disruption factor by splitting the team. |
I've concluded the fight needs to be nothing but bosses, EBs, and AVs. And the final fight is likely to be all AVs. The problem is that even in a thing like this, I need to make sure the AVs aren't trivially unbeatable without just single pulling the entire mission. I still intend to obey critter tiering: using AVs *everywhere* including as the minions of the mission would be excessive. Unless strong teams prove able to annihilate everything too quickly even cranked up to +4, in which case maybe.
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Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zamuel
Personally, I think Intangible is perfectly valid for NPCs if kept at a minimum since it does act as disruption. Limiting it would be based on enemy choice and perhaps powerset since the argument fluctuates between AoE and ST sources.
Concerning KB, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss players being affected by it due to some things like Force Bolt having high mag. Also, you missed an effect, Teleport. Only a few armors offer protection against it and only Gravity's Wormhole is a valid source of it. While not directly a debuff in itself, it adds to the disruption factor by splitting the team. |
Looking at the version of Wormhole available to enemies, it looks like it doesn't actually do Teleport. It appears to be just an AoE stun with knockback. But in the right circumstances Wormhole could be hugely useful to players, because if you were to pick enemies up and throw them out of the radius of radial mezz protection, you might cause them toggle drop.
On enemies, Force Bolt is Mag 9. That would be enough to cause some issues. IMO the best player strategy is defense buffing so that most of the bolts miss. But ID helps too. Luckily it appears that Force Bolt is pretty much the only KB available to custom enemies that rises above Mag 8 (two -kb IOs). Most other KB powers appear to be around Mag 3 or less, with a few exceptions (Wormhole, Power Push) at around Mag 7 or 8. I should note that Bonfire appears to be able to throw you even if you have protection. At least, it seems like my characters with Mag 4 protection get thrown sometimes despite Bonfire supposedly being Mag 3, maybe due to stacking KB, or maybe because enemies actually use the same pet players do so the values shown in the AE detailed view are wrong?
The other effects I left out were Taunt and Placate. Getting a Tanker in this mix really wouldn't be a bad idea IMO. Mainly for the autohit Taunt and it's associated -Range, which in some circumstances you may be able to abuse to heck and back with the right map and clever use of Force Bubble. If I had to drop one support set, it would be the extra Radiation character in favor of a (probably) Dark Armor Tanker. We'd just have to pray s/he was able to actually hit enemies with the heal. But if nothing else, that autohit Mag 30 stun in the self rezz would be nice to have around.
Quote:
On the subject of maps: I would rather challenge the players with the critters, and not exotic map locations. I want to balance giving the players options without letting them dictate the fight completely. That's why I like those ship maps for challenge missions. Each compartment isolates the different parts of the map from each other, which means the players cannot always see what's coming or what's next until it approaches. Conversely, high ceilings mean things like flight and hovering are not nullified like they are in caves. If teams can literally destroy anything I can put in a map like that, I would consider using map geometry to further reduce the options players have. But for now, I think the ship maps are a relatively even playing field.|
Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
The other effects I left out were Taunt and Placate. Getting a Tanker in this mix really wouldn't be a bad idea IMO. Mainly for the autohit Taunt and it's associated -Range, which in some circumstances you may be able to abuse to heck and back with the right map and clever use of Force Bubble. If I had to drop one support set, it would be the extra Radiation character in favor of a (probably) Dark Armor Tanker. We'd just have to pray s/he was able to actually hit enemies with the heal. But if nothing else, that autohit Mag 30 stun in the self rezz would be nice to have around.
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This isn't so much a question of fairness, as it is the point is to give a strong team a challenge for their abilities, not constrain their abilities. A fight in a phonebooth can be advantageous for the players if they choose it, but it can also eliminate options and give the critters a huge advantage by taking away one of the areas players excel over them: smart movement.
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My only concern is about AVs. They are pretty easy to make so irritating that the mission stops being challenging and just becomes boring. IMO a common sense rule needs to apply to them. I think it's ok for them to be hard, but IMO the only challenge should not be "lets see you out DPS THIS."
By the way, the Scrapper Challenge mission actually has some design rules in it, which I set for myself to test a theory. I theorized it was possible to make an extremely difficult mission without resorting to the conventional way the devs do it: by scaling numbers, especially health, aka the big bag of health syndrome.
So the rules were:
1. No AVs. The mission actually contains no Archvillains.
2. No indestructible critters. None of the critters in the mission is designed to be ludicrously difficult to kill. They are all individually defeatable, but extremely dangerous.
This time around, I would use AVs. Even very tough EBs would probably not be strong enough to take on the strongest possible teams out there, with purpled builds and alpha shift. But the goal would be to make a mission that was dangerous in an interesting way. The Scrapper Challenge is dangerous in I think an interesting way. If you want to see what I consider an interestingly dangerous mission, that's the place to start.
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