Did You Know - Return of the Son of the Unofficial History Thread

Did You Know that in the early days of the game, a favorite past time of some high level radiation defenders was to head to Perez, lock their debuff toggles onto a critter, lead them all around the park, the debuff toggle aggroing everything those critters came anywhere near to, and then bring them in one giant glowing debuffed mass to one of the gates, sometimes in numbers of hundreds of critters, all of which were debuffed so strongly they couldn't hit anyone and couldn't damage them if they did.

You'd be in Perez minding your own business when suddenly you'd hear "Skyway gate" in broadcast, and then what looked like every critter that ever lived come bearing down on you glowing green. If you didn't know this practice existed, or for that matter what rad toggles looked like and did, this could scare the living crap out of you. Some players fled in terror, while others who knew what was going on took advantage of the free XP.

I just saw her and she was identified as Monster.

"Monster" is a class, like minion, Lt, Boss, Archvillain. "Giant Monster" is not a true class, its what the devs call a Monster class critter that is specifically flagged to ignore combat scaling rules (i.e. the purple patch). Technically, the critters that scale to you in zone events are all using "Giant Monster code" even though they are themselves minions, Lts, Bosses, and EBs.

Giant Monsters are not necessarily stronger. If the level 50 Giant Monsters on Monster Island in PI were not giant monsters, they would generally be stronger, not weaker, because players can't be higher than level 50 (outside of level shift). But as Giant Monsters they always con even to any player, if they were just Monsters they would only con even to level 50s: any player lower than level 50 would have a harder time fighting them as Monsters than Giant Monsters, because the critter would have an intrinsically higher level than them. So as Monsters they would be as strong or stronger than as they currently are as Giant Monsters (except, as noted, for level shifted level 50 players).

Also, the class shown by a critter in a player's GUI can be overridden by the devs, so that it can read "Object" or whatever. As far as I know, there is no "object" class: I believe most are usually a subtype of minion.

They were bosses though, right? I don't think we even had Elite Bosses until Issue 3.

Expanding on this, Lord Winter is the same class as the Reichsman, which can take several seconds to bring down even with 30+ people spanking it.

You'll also see many NPC allies con as "Hero" despite being closer to Pet in terms of combat attributes. Like Mender Lazarus. He's NEVER been a Hero.

I'm fairly certain Sally always worked as she does currently.

Issue 2 did bring us Frostfire and Atta, as well as those weird "not-quite-AV" Circle mages from Justin Augustine's TF, so the concept was certainly in place if not the name.

But I believe you're right...Heracles was the first EB and the two Hollows ones were updated at the same time, possibly at player suggestion even.

The game's first two Elite Bosses were FrostFire and Atta in the Hollows, both of whom appeared with the zone in Issue 2. Sally is a Monster in Croatoa, which appeared with Issue 5. Technically, she showed up after the Elite Boss class was instituted.

I know certain "objects" scale down in both hit points and reward given when boss spawns are disabled. I'm not sure if these are tagged as objects, but Behemoth Portals naturally have boss level stats and rewards, but become much easier to kill and much less rewarding when bosses are disabled. The Behemoths they spawn are not affected.

Also, Did You Know: Behemoth Portals used to have a large Stargate type stone ring around their blue vortex, which was positioned on top of a stone platform with a ramp leading up to the gate. These disappeared a couple of years ago, the actual portal effects began spawning on the floor instead of on their elevated platform and this is why now there is a displaced faint blue ring above the main portal vortex. The upper ring actually traces the inside diameter of the original stone Stargate, and once upon a time the portal vortex would have been inside that.

There is a special portal in one of Scirocco's Patron arcs which has a LOT more hit points and physically crumbles its stone structure as the portal takes damage. AS this no doubt uses a different rig altogether, this one should still be fine.

Also, an idle uninteresting fact: Spectral Demon Lords didn't always deal Psi/Dark damage. Once upon a time, they used the standard Dark Melee Smashing/Dark pairing of damage. I'm not sure why that changed.

Ah, this, yes. Though a critter says "Giant Monster" and has no level listed does not mean that said critter does not have an intrinsic level. Everything in this game that has combat stats has a level. The level of Rikti soldiers during a zone invasion, for instance, is 30, which you could see in their Info window once upon a time. This causes a couple of problems:

1. If you bring a very low level character to a level-scaled zone event like a Rikti invasion or a Banners event, your character will be very, very weak, at least speaking of damage dealers. This is because of how most combat attributes scale. At level 1, most ATs have very similar if not the same scales for almost everything and almost all enemies are scaled to be very weak. As you go up in levels, however, enemies start getting stronger as you're expected to be using enhancements and your damage decreases in relation to enemy hit points. When fighting a level 30 Rikti Chief, you will attack said chief as though you were a level 30 character. A level 30 character with one slot in each attack with nearly useless Training enhancements slotted.

2. The entire ridiculous powerlevelling craze over the Winter Lords of 2005 (was it?) happened because despite being "Giant Monsters," each Winter Lord had an intrinsic level appropriate to the zone it spawned in. What this meant what that a Winter Lord in Atlas Park would spawn around level 5 or 10 and have a scant 4000 - 5000 health while apparently the same Winter Lord spawning in Peregrine Island would have an intrinsic level of 50 and have upwards of 20 000 hit points. However, because these all conned the same to everyone, everyone got the same rewards, so level 50 characters could come to Atlas Park and kill the much easier Winter Lords there for the same amount of reward.

Of course, the reward itself didn't scale. It was always around 5000 XP, I think. To a level 49 character who needs several million experience to get to level 50, this is small change. To a level 1 character who needs 106 experience to reach level 2, that amount of experience all at once was enough to bring you up to about level 8 or so. This is when the developers first introduced the experience reward cap, stating that no single experience gain could ever give you more than half the experience you required for the next level.

Ah, those were "fun" times

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I'm the first to acknowledge my faulty memory but it feels pretty certain. I've seen LadySadako around recently. Maybe she'll see this and chime in.

BTW - I have no problem with anyone correcting my statements. The whole reason the original thread started was from discussions where five different people had five different versions of some event or had simply never heard of it at all. Getting the right info out there is the whole point.

How peculiar. I've definitely seen proper Behemoth Portals recently. The stonework elements are part of the map, so they might've gone "missing" either due to misplaced portals or that bizarre invisible map/objects bug struck again.

Except for the Archvillain-class desk in that one mission from Vince Dubrovski.

Did you know....when CoV was first released that Archvillain-class desk had to be defeated to complete the mission. This took a very long time if you were solo.

Also, the portal in the "Defeat Infernal" mission from Maria Jenkins didn't scale down when AVs first started scaling down to EBs for soloists. It was bugged to not spew demons at the time, but still took a very long time to defeat if you were solo.

Did You Know: Originally, the Behemoth Portals didn't give any reward at all when you destroyed them. However, the Behemoths that they spawned did. The Behemoths were normal bosses which gave full experience when defeated and the portal would cheerfully continue to spawn more until it was destroyed. This led to the 'demonic invasion farms' where someone would get one of the missions containing the portals, put together a team, trigger the portal and spend the next however many hours desired fighting off a never-ending stream of XP, er, behemoths.

Speaking of those "not-quite-AV" Circle mages, did you know the Arch-Mages actually have Boss-class health, but unlike the usual Boss-class enemies of the game, they have 75% resists to every type of damage, along with heavy resists to mez? In some cases, they can actually be tougher to fight than normal Elite Bosses.

Um... That should shouldn't even be able to be opened. And I'm pretty sure that anyone who fell as they were walking out of a door right onto another flight of stairs would have a pretty good lawsuit against the city.