Elite Bosses and Arch-Villains in Dark Astoria

Tina, Maria, and Unai are specifically the legacy contacts with missions with a high concentration of AVs in them (which get downscaled to EBs) back when the devs felt that level of difficulty was appropriate for the high level game. They are in fact the primary reason AV->EB downscaling was invented in the first place: they were, in effect, unsoloable (by the difficulty standards of this game) story arcs within the core content of the game.

Absolutely. Now consider the transition playing someone through those arcs as they level up and then going into DA. Yes, the supporting cast of minions, LTs and bosses often are more challenging, but the "named boss" foes are not. Now, if you played Tina, Unai and Maria solo, you probably got the Praetorian leaders as EBs, and the difference in that and the EBs in DA probably isn't too extreme. The "classic" EBs would have all had PToDs, where the DA ones do not, which isn't an inconsiderable difference, but it's not as big as the difference in an AV and an EB. But if you did those classic arcs with a team, you probably saw all the Praetorian leaders as AVs, and that won't happen in DA, in general.

I get that they explicitly decided to make it that way. They "weighed" the content towards teams of people small enough that they wouldn't have triggered the AV upgrade in the classic Praetorian arcs. I'm looking for something more than that and less than iTrials.

Well I'm working on a new challenge arc, if that helps.

By the way, is the architect options button only broken for me, or has it been broken for a while now? Kinda tricky to test things without it.

I acknowledge that there are reasons for why people might want to feel that they are playing at the maximum possible difficulty (that no one else can play at a higher difficulty). I also agree that there is a value in accommodating these people (it could be debated how large that value is, and how it compares to the value of other alternatives, but that is a subjective call).


However, it seems to me that two separate issues are being conflated in this thread.

We agree that there are people who do not wish others to be able to play at a higher difficulty, but that is not what most people in this thread appear to actually be talking about. Most people, including Dr. Aeon, talk about the content being targeted at "solo and small team" players. I would argue that those two groups are not the same, and that the "no higher than me" group is no more representative of the "solo and small team" group than the "I solo AVs for breakfast" group is. Yes, there are people belonging to the "solo and small team" group that are also part of the "no higher than me" group, but there are also those that are members of the "I solo AVs for breakfast" group, and it is my belief that *neither* of those two groups are representative of the "solo and small team" group as a whole.


It is my belief that most people who play solo and on small teams do not have an easy time handling AVs.
It is also my belief that most of the people who play solo and on small teams do not care at all if *others* have the ability to fight AVs even if they themselves prefer not to.
I believe that most of the people who prefer to play solo and on small teams simply want content that they can play at their own pace, without running into opposition that they are not able to handle on their own.



My impression of the posts in these thread are also that most of the people who express concerns about making it possible to get AVs in these missions do so out of a worry that it will impact their ability to handle the missions on their own, not out of a worry that *others* will be able to fight harder foes than they themselves prefer to fight.

In my opinion, such a worry is unfounded.


I consider it to be axiomatic that it is possible to give the *option* of fighting AVs, without making the foes *any harder whatsoever* for the solo and small team players who do not elect to fight those bosses as AVs.

Since such a change would thus not present a problem specific to the "solo and small team" group as a whole (or a representative part of it), I do not consider it appropriate to say that the reason to not implement such a change is because of that very group.


Sure, the "no higher than me" group would prefer the status quo, but if *they* are the reason for not implementing the change (a valid reason), then *that* should be the stated reason, not some vague "we're doing it for the solo and small team players" statement.

Going by Paragon Wiki's list of 45-50 story arcs:

The Final Darkness: 2 AVs
Future Threat: no AVs/EBs
A Hero's Hero: 15 AVs
The Horror of War: 5 AVs
Project: World Wide Red: 1 AV (and one optional Giant Monster outside the mission)
The Red and the Black: 1 AV, 1 EB (PW says 2 AVs, but unless it's been fixed "recently", Sefu is just mislabeled)
To Save a Thousand Worlds: 1 AV
Upon the Psychic Plane: 2 AVs
Alone in the Darque: 1 EB
Ancient History: 1 AV
Brainpower: 1 AV
The Code Merlin: 1 AV
The Conference of Evil: 9 AVs
Crimson Hunt: 1 AV
The Destiny Raids: No AVs/EBs
Escaped!: No AVs/EBs
The Great Grun Gathering: No AVs/EBs
Indigo Hunt: 1 AV, 1 EB
Iron Fist: No AVs/EBs
Light and Darkness: 1 AV
Politics, Cimeroran Style: 2 EBs
Snake Fest: 1 AV
The Spirit City of Hequat: 1 AV
Time After Time: 1 AV, 1 EB
The TV Invasion: No AVs/EBs
The TV Report: No AVs/EBs
Video Killed the Radio: 1 AV
Vigilante Justice: 2 AVs
Vindication: 4 AVs
Von Grun's Lament: 1 AV
Von Grun's Redemption: 1 AV
Von Grun's Science: 1 AV


Out of 32 arcs, 23 have AVs (25 have EBs or AVs (78%)). There's an average of 1.9 EBs/AVs per arc (though that's obviously inflated by a few arcs with an exceptional number of AVs).

I'd say that EBs/AVs are fairly common in the high-level *story arcs* at least.


If you look at stand-alone missions, the ratio will go down a bit. Maria's one-off missions are shock-full of AVs, and most of the high level Villain contacts don't even *have* any stand-alone missions (Pither has 5, Grillo has 5, and TV has 4. Out of those 14 missions, only 1 has an EB in it), but most of the high-level Hero contacts have a fairly low AV ratio in their one-off missions.

I would suggest that since Aeon elaborated upon what he meant by that phrase implicitly by stating what was done to target them, that deconstructing that term is unlikely to be particularly fruitful. Unlike players, who can be goaded into semantic arguments, the developers are actually (at least as I understand it) explicitly warned not to engage in them.

I tend to note EBs per mission, not EBs per arc, because the unit of content in City of Heroes is the mission, not the story arc.

I don't see the first part (the goal being to provide challenging content for solo players and small teams) precluding the option for AVs, and he doesn't elaborate on what the potential issues might be, so I'd be reluctant to conclude what he feels they might be.


Regardless, other posters have expressly mentioned a concern that making the bosses AVs that scale down might make it harder for them to handle the missions solo/on small teams, and I see no reason for why this should be true. Feel free to disregard the "including Dr. Aeon" part above, and the point of my previous post still stands.

That would depend on the mechanics of the scale down. There are lots of potential ways to do that which generate different results. I can say, however, that statistically speaking EBs tend on average, to be scaled up Bosses but Archvillains are not scaled up Bosses. Normalized for modifiers AVs have on average a significantly higher level of offensive output. Had the developers been told *originally* to make the NPCs AVs that would then scale down to EBs, the net difficulty would almost certainly be higher than it is now.

Yes, but they were not originally designed that way, and there's no point in looking at the alternatives that won't give the desired behavior (no change for solo/small team players).

We do however have the option of *now* turning them into AVs *without changing their powers at all*. This would give players the option of facing foes with higher HP/damage, while still leaving them unchanged for "small" teams that do not wish to see them improved.


This would give easier-than-normal AVs, which would make it somewhat easier to get the AV rewards, but given that we're talking about missions where players can be +3 and AoE huge spawns left and right, is that really a significant issue?

I don't see it as a significant issue now. If the devs want to use this opportunity to investigate a method of scaling mission content without scaling individual critters, that's likely to be far more palatable to everyone and I think that's the better option to take. The problem with quick fixes is that they preempt the requirement to create better fixes.

In particular, its taken as an axiom that a mission actually *must* "scale" to be equally appropriate for weaker and stronger teams, but that's actually not logically mandatory. I posted a method for mission difficulty design in Aeon's thread that presents essentially the same mission to the everyone, and the stronger the team is the more difficult it becomes without actually changing *anything* in the actual mission content. It can't be used in isolation to span the complete range of difficulty desired, but the notion that its obviously impossible a solo player and a team could both attack the same mission and both claim to have completed the same mission successfully at equally challenging difficulty is just one of those assumptions that get glossed over when discussing subjects like this.

I'm getting the impression that any solutions that might pop up in that other thread would be more likely to show up in future content rather in the current DA content (if nothing else, a "complex" fix would be more likely to have an unintended adverse effect on the intended target for DA).

In any case, while making a "quick fix" now would remove the requirement (or at least "reduce the incentive". I wouldn't say that a "requirement" exists) for a "better" fix, it also wouldn't *preclude* such a better fix. The devs could easily implement the easy fix now, and still opt to go for a better fix at some later point if they so choose. I'm pretty sure that the discussion won't die down just because they add the option to get AVs (if nothing else, the people who are still discussing after a couple of weeks probably won't be deterred). The devs certainly won't stop thinking about it.


Basically, there's a chance that a quick fix is the only kind of fix DA is going to get, and even if a better fix shows up at some point in the future, such a fix could replace the quick fix.

I would certainly be willing to wait a couple of weeks/months to see if a better fix could be implemented in DA, but at what point does it become better to just go for the quick(/easy/safe) fix instead of waiting for a potential better fix that might never arrive?

Yes and no. "The devs" can choose to do anything they want in theory, but in practice "the devs" are a collection of individuals each with a different set of priorities and perspectives. Every significant design decision that happens is the result of a dynamic consensus of a number of different people. Almost *nothing* happens with unanimous consent: in particular no decision I'm personally aware of did not have a number of dissenting voices against it.

The equation for doing anything is often tenuous, and removing a promoting factor can shift the equation from likely to unlikely in a very permanent way, by altering the dynamics of how different developers evaluate the priority of an item. It has happened before several times to my knowledge.


Well, from a timeframe expectation perspective, even if the devs decided to implement AV scaling today, it would likely be weeks to months before we saw it implemented. A non-critical change like that which made changes to many different things in many different places would almost certainly require internal QA and balancing passes, and mandatory beta server testing.

Dark Astoria's mobs have a base tohit of 64% rather than 50%, similar to the mobs seen in incarnate trials. So your softcap isn't softcapped in DA, most likely, unless you're running around with >59% S/L def.

Something else here Arcanaville didn't point out as best I can see: making these foes AVs that scale down would give them the PToD, which would make these arcs substantially more difficult for a soloist of any AT that relies on mez. Being "native" EBs means that they don't get the purple triangles.

That's why I said "depends on how they scale down." A literal rank scaler would retain the purple triangles, but there are game mechanical ways to scale AVs down to EBs in a way that removes the purple triangles if the devs wished to pursue that.

I think the fact that AVs generally retain purple triangles when scaled down in normal content is intentional for a variety of reasons. Moreover the purple triangles are not a special AV power, that protection is generally baked into the defensive powers of the critter, and stripping the purple triangle power literally would also remove other defenses the critter is actually supposed to have.

Even *that* is addressable by altering the way the defensive powers are created to allow just the AV-specific protection to disappear under scale down in theory, but now you're talking about hand editing the defensive powers of all the critters being discussed in DA.

Stargazer knows all of this, so it didn't occur to me to articulate that for context.

I considered that possibility, but it didn't seem to match with your previous response to UberGuy in which you said that Tina and Unai have a high concentration of EBs/AVs. Tina isn't really all that remarkable in this sense, and Unai has a remarkably *low* AV-concentration if you count all his missions (few AVs, a ton of missions).

In general, the initial Hero-side 45-50 contacts (Maria being an exception) have a low AV concentration. They have a large number of non-arc missions, and the arcs tend to be long, with one or a few AVs in them. In contrast, newer 45-50 contacts tend to have a higher concentration. Villain-side high-level contacts tend to have several short arcs (around 3 missions per arc is common), and a low number of non-arc missions.

So, it really depends on what content you're looking at. For EB/AV concentration per mission, Hero-side content tends to lie lower than Villain-side content.

It also depends on what you're comparing to. "standard 45-50 content" doesn't have EBs+ all that often compared to what?

And this is for a change that is limited in scope, has known balance implications (we've fought AVs before. Sometimes these AVs), does not require any particular UI changes (if things are to be *unchanged* for those solo/small-team players that wish, then many other potential solutions will require some way to opt-in/out), uses existing tech, and doesn't really do anything "new".


An as-of-yet undecided potential alternate solution that would involve doing something previously untested, might require some sort of UI changes (or might impact solo/small-team players) and might require new tech would presumably take significantly longer.

At such a time, it would seem quite likely that it would instead be incorporated into some *new* content instead, especially if you could write a story around this new mechanic.

In such a case, the situation in DA would still not have been addressed.

This is actually exactly what I was talking about.

There is a concern that "promoting" mobs to AVs would somehow impact solo/small-team players (e.g. give the newly promoted AVs PToD), even though that would not be the case unless you expressly want them to get it.

PToD is not something that is automagically granted to mobs simply by virtue of being AVs; it's part of powers that have to be given to them. Most AVs get such a power, but it is not mandatory, and there are AVs that do not have them.

In this situation, it would be a design imperative to *not* change the difficulty for solo/small-team players (assuming they do no have the "prefer to fight AVs" flag set), so the "promoted" AVs would *not* get such a power (or any new powers whatsoever). We *want* them to stay the same (as EBs).

(all of this has been mentioned a number of times in this thread)


When you face them as AVs, they would have the benefits that are actually inherent to AVs; basically (and somewhat simplified) higher HP and increased "AT modifiers" (pretty much higher damage on their attacks). When you face them as EBs they would not be changed from now. At all.

And this is for critters that are designed as AVs and then scaled down to EBs. In this case we're talking about critters that have already been designed as EBs (and thus never been given power(s) responsible for PToD or any special "AV resistances"), and then retroactively given the *rank* of AV.

We *could* solve this by making these special powers treat different ranks differently, but in this case it's much simpler to just not give them the powers in question in the first place, because the design goal would be to not let them have them.