Enemies with powers that benefit 'active' play.

We see a few of them in the Incarnate trials; but I would like to see alot more of this' enemies whose attacks can be avoided with manuevers, or seeking cover, or something other than simply pure defense/resistance, and who you can't just walk over with pure DPS. Wouldn't it be great to spice up existing enemy groups with this sort of thing, or even existing mobs?

Snipers? What if you made enemy Snipers like players; excessive damage, but if you break LOS with the shooter during the animation/interrupt time it doesn't go off, as well as being interruptible. Tack on some 'critical' non-resistable damage to these NPC snipes, or some debuffs, so that it gives some incentive for any player to take cover or switch to kill the sniper once seen, and make sure their AI keeps Snipers avoiding melee contact/easy AoE range.
Location-Targetted DoT AoEs? Your standard ones, like Caltrops, are just a huge radius that can't be avoided aside from simply backing off and reverting to ranged combat. It'd be nice to see enemies with some of these with a relatively small radius/recharge time; if you stay in one spot, they can rapidly build the DoT up to unsurvivable levels, but if you keep moving it can be easily avoided. (I.E: A Vahz minion shoots you with a chemical sprayer. That one spot now has a 100 dmg over 25 seconds burn patch. He keeps shooting every 5 seconds; if you stay still, you'll have silly amounts effecting you.)
'Warning' AoEs? This method, of giving a character an essentially unstoppable attack, but then giving anyone around them advance warning so they can back off/move away, preventing 'get to melee range and then pound til it dies'. Do it at range, too; the location its about to shoot starts to glow, and you'd best get out or you're a corpse.
'Intercept-capable attacks'? I.E: The boss makes a smaller, weaker creature, which will self-destruct when it hits you, or after X seconds. You either shoot this thing down en route, launch it off with knockback/etc, or otherwise simply keep it from getting close.
Enemies who its actually a bad idea to attack at certain points? Perhaps entering a brief phase where they regen when dealt damage, and have an insane resist, while not attacking. Or when they reach X health, they start to self destruct; and each hit they take after this point buffs the range/dmg/to-hit of the explosion.

Really? I've dealt with uninterruptible snipers that can shoot through walls fairly often, especially from Nemesis. Wonder if thats just my own experience.

But, by and by, I'm fully aware many of these ideas are in the game; I'd just like them expanded to cover more enemies. In the tutorial, these big glowing patches appear, warning you a meteor or airstrike is about to hit. Imagine a Damned doing that; an aura of flame envelops him, he points his arms; a big glowing cone appears on the floor where he's about to incinerate for excessive DoT. A set of caltrops does significantly more DoT; but is only a few feet wide, so if you step off to the side you get out. A Rikti Mentalist summons up a Nightmare that charges you; an illusory creature that dies to one or two hits, but if you let it touch you it self destructs causing some nasty damage and a terrorize effect. A Devouring Earth boss that summons mini-floating-seeds that if they aren't killed before contact, attach to you, giving some sort of nasty debuff, or even a major confuse effect and a buff.

I like the idea of enemies with powers you can avoid. But I'm an old school twitch gamer. Things like that are right up my alley. Not everyone who plays is a twitch gamer though.

It is NOT cool for those older players who may have never played a video game before this one (yes, they exist), because they don't have the reflexes honed from years of gaming that some of us younger players do. It would suck to have enemies with autohit, but avoidable attacks when you don't have the reflexes necessary to avoid them.

Adding a couple more enemies with avoidable powers would be cool, but don't add so many that players with slower reaction times will get frustrated with the game.

Hehe...

Still to this day, my Blaster's see a rock hurling at them and always try to side step it. It amazes me that those werewolves had the time to install heat seeking tech in every single rock around them. Phasing tech too! Things come flying around corners and thru walls and other Heroes just to smack me in the face!

So, it wouldn't be a hard transition for me to make personally. I don't think the engine is capable of that level of detection though. With tohit checks etc, once the power is activated it's either going to hit or miss. Not sure how they could code it to miss only in this event. I can't see them changing ranged powers to be straight line activations, which would be the simple way of 'Get outta the way' gameplay.

Personally, I feel that mixing a heavily stat-based game with twitch action is always a bad idea. The twitch has the tendency to override stats a lot of the time, both by making certain enemies far too easy if you know how to dodge their attacks and by making certain enemies far too hard if their attacks overrule your stats.

Personally, I'd play a City of Heroes action game if it played something like Darksiders or, hell, even Spiral Knights, but that sort of thing just isn't possible for a game like this. It would require blocking, dodging, cover, aiming and basically a whole new game, one where our existing stats wouldn't count for much, especially defence/accuracy. If City of Heroes were an action game, the character progression system would need to go a completely different way.

That said, I'm not exactly opposed to enemy attacks like what Protean and the War Walkers have, but only in limited numbers. As a gimmick when fighting an elite boss, sure. As an "every minion" occurrence, though? Hell no. This game isn't built around fast reactions with powers rooting you for upwards of three seconds not that rarely and upwards of two almost all the time, and it's DEFINITELY not a game of fast reactions when a lot of us play it with 200-300 ms of ping.

What's more, these types of powers make a mockery of the existing powers system. Why bother stocking up on defence and resistance when an enemy attack can ignore both? What's the point to playing a Tank and sacrificing my damage output if a Blaster can dodge out of the way of incoming attacks and be just as safe, anyway? Why can't I have powers that ignore enemy defence and resistance and heal me up to full with no ill effect if they miss?

At the end of the day, City of Heroes is a click-n-kill game not terribly different fro the original Diablo, not terribly different from Black Isle's aD&D games. It's not about reflexes, it's about stats. The more reflexes you put in there, the more you devalue stats while not really having a meaningful action game that City of Heroes will never be.

Quote:

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 think we'll see more of this as they continue to add new enemies to the game.

Some of the Awakened mobs in First Ward have a confuse aura that stacks against you (requiring 5 ticks to take effect) so you can't just mindlessly plink at them from close range. You've got to back off every now and then to prevent getting controlled.

I don't think I'd want them to be common effects, but I don't mind having a few here and there so wouldn't mind if some older groups (which don't have any) get new npcs with a twitch type power... so long as they don't go overboard.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too