Giant Monster rewards tables?

Spawned from a discussion about the Seed of Hamidon.

So, part of this is a question to others, part is just a straight up suggestion.

Basically, is it time for the developers to revisit rewards for slaying Giant Monsters?

I've only been playing a couple months but in that time I've seen a few Giant Monsters and they largely go ignored, just wandering around their zones pretty much unmolested. I did actually partake in a beatdown on Deathsurge the other night, he spawned and I just wanted to see him, ended up joining a team that took him down.

It was a kind of satisfying experience, but the reward was.. not lackluster persay but it did seem a bit underwhelming considering it did take the team to take him down. A couple merits, a badge, and a chunk of exp/inf. Not all that bad, but now that I've done it, I have no reason to ever bother with Deathsurge again on that character, except maybe to join a team to help out some newbies that haven't done it before.

Compare this to say, the new Signature arcs with some pretty quality rewards, and your choice of them, or even the Praetorian zone events. Pretty much all that can be done solo and are easily repeatable. And in fact, kind of encourage you to repeat them.

If the problem is a worry of farming for XP/Inf, it seems like the simplest solution would be to attach the biggest chunk of XP/Inf for beating them to the badge for killing them, something you can only earn once. And of course offering other goodies, different merits, costume parts, temp powers, etc. Though even then, there seem to be much better ways to get XP/Inf now anyway >>

It just seems to me that Giant Monsters should be something that players want to take on for more than just the fact of saying "yeah, I did it". When one spawns in a zone, more players should be willing to want to jump the thing or even be actively hunting them or trying to make them spawn, regularly.

Anyway, that's it really. It just seems like the devs could offer even slightly better carrots for the effort involved in taking a monster down. Honestly, I'm kind of curious what the metrics look like for how often any given GM is taken down. It seems like a shame to create something as scary cool as the Seed of Hamidon and it mostly just gets to wander freely (Though, I am aware First Ward has issues with team search too, so that might be *a* part of it).

Or I'm just crazy and the reward is worth the effort. What do you all think? What would make Giant Monsters more appealing to want to tackle?

I do feel there needs to be a little more incentive to run GMs more than once. In fact, the only ones I've ever really done are those that are needed for accolades (when I remember them) and the once time I decided to test my MMs final build and solo'd Scrapyard (which took an age cos the git kept running away )

As is, they're just...'meh', really.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

It's history lesson time kids.

Once upon a time giant monsters spawned rarely, did not have their own announcement channel, and gave huge experience rewards.

This was a pretty cool thing. Somebody would broadcast that Lusca was up and it would take time to gather the two or more teams required for a beatdown. This was also before IOs and even SOs weren't easy to get so the GMs presented a real challenge.

Now part of the problem is that experience was shared equally among the team. This meant that if you had a fairly balanced team in the right level range you could gain two or three bars of experience from Lusca. GMs didn't scale back then so it also meant that if you had 2 level 50s and 6 level 1s on the team Lusca would drop fast. The level 50s would get some trivial amount of experience that they didn't need anyway and the level 1s would get half a level or better.

This made power leveling fast but sporadic because like I said, the monsters spawned rarely and people flocked to the event because it was good experience and unusual. Then came the rise of the Winterlords.

Winterlords when originally brought into existence weren't like they are today. Originally all the zones froze over. Bodies of water everywhere turned into ice. And the Winterlords would spawn in multiple locations in various zones each of them appropriate level to the zone but worth tremendous experience. Level 50s flocked to the low level zones and gathered up their flocks of lowbies. Then they would fly or sprint or teleport from place to place and put the smackdown on the Winter Lords.

This meant it was almost impossible for lowbies to enjoy the challenge of fighting a GM because almost as soon as it spawned there would be 3 or 4 level 50 toons there killing it with a few hits. Meanwhile the groups of lowbies who were teamed with those level 50's would watch their experience bar climb half a level, three quarters of a level, sometimes even an entire level with each Winterlord that spawned. And soon Atlas parks all across the servers were filled with level 50s asking where the tram was, where PI was and what did PI stand for? They came to be known as Winterlord babies.

That is when the devs instituted a major beatdown on GMs. Unfortunately they approached it from two different angles and wound up instituting those two different angles at the same exact time. The first one is that they dropped the experience per monster to about one tenth what it formerly was. Kind of harsh but it would stop any of the half a level kills. But at almost the same time they put in the scaling of the GMs so that no matter what level you fought them at they were level appropriate to you.

This glorious combination of tactics now meant that if you actually fought the GMs as they were originally intended to be fought with a full team of zone level appropriate characters it became great fun. You could spend a few minutes to half an hour fighting, possibly take a couple trips to the hospital (especially in the case of Lusca) and when all was said and done get approximately the same amount of experience you would get for a solo defeat of one lieutenant level mob. Which if you were lucky might wipe out half the debt you got fighting them.

At which point the GMs became just another thing for badge hunters to go after. Although I do sometimes stop and wave at Lusca. After all she spends all her time waving at the tourists on the docks. I bet she likes it when somebody occasionally acknowledges her with an answering wave.

Waitwaitwait....wait....wait.

Zones froze over?!

Why the hell did that get taken out of the game?! That sounds AWESOME!! D=

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Yeah that sounds pretty wicked.

It really is a shame all these really cool monsters are in the game and most aren't given the time of day. I've seen Scrapyard running around unmolested pretty often.

I mean, *I* could probably try to pull a team together but again, it's something I could do *once* and have no reason to do again except on alt characters. And that's assuming I'd get a lot of takers. Whereas I could advertise doing an SSA and snatch up a team very quick.

So yeah, if they're going to keep the monsters in and keep adding more (The Seed), especially ones that *require* a coordinated team effort (again, the Seed), the rewards ought to match the effort a lil better and be varied so there's incentive to do it more than once. We've already got several trials that seem to be intended to run more than once (Sewer, any incarnate, the new halloween trial), so it's a design plan to create events for players to repeat for multiple rewards, why are Giant Monsters being excluded from this sort of design?

In order to reward more significantly GM rewards, but be able to control them so they don't get out of control, we could add a GM-Merit currency to the game!

i think that GMs do need to have more rewad for them, right now they are barely worth the time to fight and being essentially impossible to solo aside from a few powerset combinations, the risk/reward ratio is completely out the window

time to kill 1 GM for avg team of non incarnates and minimal debuff: 15+ minutes
reward for previous: maybe 1 boss worth of xp/inf

in the same amount of time i could run through a mish solo and get 5x the reward of the GM

the ONLY GM thats even rare nowadays is caleb, but due to the lackluster rewards (and with how quirky caleb is) still remains largely ignored (i personally dont kill GMs unless im looking for merits on my ill/cold or if a friend needs help)

Actually, speaking of Villainside GMs, what's with their rarity? >> Heroside has nearly a dozen, Villains get 4.

Wow I didn't even know about the Pirate Traps. >>

Two of the redside GMs can be forced to spawn which is something blueside doesn't have.

Whatever happened to Kronos? (sp?) I haven't seen him in ages... I think the last time I say him was during the an old Hami Raid during the Hold phase....

I have never had trouble forming teams for Deathsurge or the Ghost of Scrapyard. Obviously since they're requirements for accolades it isn't a problem. For every other GM, there's not really a reason to go after them other than 2 Merits and a badge. When I have to fit my playtime for tip missions, iTrials, Task Forces, MA arcs, the occasional flashback mission, and/or leveling low level and mid level toons... There's just so much content now Giant Monsters have fallen by the wayside in importance.

scrapyard is on a timer spawn, his respawn is around 20 minutes (this is mentioned on the giant monster overview page that the website had)

i wish we could have 3 deathsurges again though

Have GMs drop:

1) Guaranteed TF/Trial recipe drop;
2) Badge;
3) Assistant badge progress if you already have the badge for that GM;
4) 10 merits (Jeez the SSAs lowest reward is 7 merits!).

Done. Watch how excited people get to kill them then.

im pretty sure both sig arcs only award 2 merits right now (unless you pick the x4 then you get 22), which is 4 total, i do agree they take about avg to longer to kill than running a sig arc