Discussion: EB's, AV's, and Challenge in Missions

It seems to me the simplest solution is to give the EBs an invincibility/against all odds style defence, except more significant.

Give them an aura power with a large range that boosts their resistance by 10% for every player in range. Soloing, the EB only has 10% resistance, nothing too troubling, against a full team of 8, they have 80% resistance. A lot tougher, but nothing a full team can't handle.
An important point would be to give it a much larger radius than invincibility and the like, otherwise a team of blasters could just keep out of range.

Another advantage of this would be that if you lose a member of the team, the boss actually gets easier. Nothing worse than losing half the team and then wiping completely because the battle just got impossible.

1. Like the staged fights idea - just dont have the main target regen too much b/w stages
2. I always liked what you did with Vanguard Sword in RWZ, Resistance Blue side in the new Tina Mac miss (?) Tweeking the secondary effects of typical enemies is a nice surprize
3. More effective use of Lieutenant classes also maybe give them more powers and options. Give them effective offensive powers like you did Malta Sappers, or Vahlz with bombs, stealth and assassin strikes, radiation or other "high powered" debuffs. Soft-cap one or two in a mob of enemies due to "elite training." Some with one or two pets.
4. Give incarnate powers to lieuts on up in appropriate settings

Let's see,... environmental hazards would add other challenges and fun. Examples include substations with electrical equipment everywhere (zap!), natural gas plant (cold to close leaks, fire to set em off), burning building (fire damage and collapsing floors), outdoor missions with lightning storm and high winds, aquatic missions with natural predators around, space missions no oxygen (new uses for the bubbler), jungle with poison plants or other debuffs, operational manufacturing facilities with dangerous equipment - all these will also lead to more fun for players in using the environment to their benefit for example knockback into a gas leak and ignite! It would also allow for more uses of some of the lesser used positional powers.

Use the Environment! Some of the mission I enjoy the most are the lava ones where I can find creative ways to use the lava while trying not to get into it myself.

Have you considered adding "time limit" as a way to make it more interesting?

Some examples:

1. An elite boss appears and you only have 30s-60s to kill him off. If you can't, the mission fails. This kind of scenario probably favors burst damage, which gives people more reason to pick Blaster/Stalker.

2. If an elite boss survives more than 30s, another elite boss appears.

3. You cannot hurt the elite boss until all the surrounding minions/bosses are killed off. If all the minions are not killed off before 30s, another group of minions show up. The ambush will only stacks up to 3 times and you have to clear all groups of minions until Elite can be killed.


I do feel the difference between an Elite and a real AV is pretty big. Is there any way to make Elite a bit strong but not as strong as AV for soloing or very small team play?

Here's something everyone would hate:

An enemy that can turn off half your powers =) All at random, and it would switch which powers are "off" every minute or so. Would not apply to Temp powers.

Enemies that deal direct, unavoidable damage when killed.

Enemies that "Respawn" with high resistance against the attack type that killed it last.

An enemy that can rearrange your UI >=)

Another thing I would like is the ability to set these up in AE if at all possible. Like... a pack of mix-and-match generic "gimmicks" or powers for AVs or Giant Monsters or let's call them End Bosses to make custom endboss enemies.

My post from the previous thread:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dr. Aeon The goal of Dark Astoria was to provide challenging content for solo players and small teams; upgrading these EB’s to be AV’s that scale down, at this point in development, has the risk of causing a number issues that could hamper this experience, which is something we want to avoid.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Irrespective of whether it happens in other instances, scaling EBs up has issues. Scaling *upward* always has issues, because things designed to be a particular rank tend to be more intrinsically powerful, separate from the rank scaling... That's not a good idea on its face. Is it worth creating that one problem to solve the alternate problem of the content in DA not scaling to larger or more powerful teams? Not in my opinion...

It sounds a bit to me like they need some sort of EB+ that is designed to be scaled up.

Say, add extra HP, some small resists, and a small damage buff for each extra person on the team. The EB+ is tougher than a regular EB, but doesn't give AV level rewards. But don't go further than that.

Don't increase debuffs or secondary effects, and don't push the total resistance to anything over 85% or so. You want to increase difficulty, not completely shut a team down.

You *might* increase the mez protection a bit, but probably not more than say +2 total for a full team. Just enough to require a bit of mez stacking.

The difficulty settings could affect this. Higher level difficulty results in a higher level EB+. Extra spawn (x2 to x8) results in an EB+ with the HP and resists and damage for that number of people. "Allow AVs" gives +2 to level, up to a maximum of 4 counting other level increases. But still no AV rewards.



So basically design a way to make EBs slightly tougher, without going all the way to AV, and without hard coding AV rewards either. I think you can get by with just a bit of scaling on the powers and such, without scaling everything.

I'm avoiding other ideas here, like adding gimicks to a fight, mostly because I don't think every single fight should have to have a gimick. And because trying to come up with a lot of gimicks might be difficult, and therefore result in poor quality.

I'm also avoiding "summons" or extra EBs, because I don't think that's going to add enough challenge to a fight, and it could be hard on the designers (folks showing up for no good story reason).

I hate increased challenge, whether by creep over time or deliberate mechanisms, even if player power creep happens. Therefore, I am against any and all complexity / power / difficulty / ally increase / objective increase changes ("tedium"). However, I am ok with them as long as it is something that I can leave disabled while still receiving the awards to which I have become accustomed. Also, the devs would need to be fair about what is considered baseline unavoidable difficulty, without moving the goalposts.

I play to enjoy the game, not to master tedious complexity or difficulty changes. I respectfully request that any implemented changes are optional while allowing me to continue enjoying the game as I have been doing.

Thanks,

Lewis

I just wanted to post one thing. Challenge in missions does NOT equal annoying. I repeat challeng in missions does NOT equal annoying. There are way too many factions I simply avoid, not due to challenge but just the annoyance factor. Attacking mobs and they have close to 50% lethal resistance is not fun, drawning in a sea of caltrops is not fun nor challenging just annoying since no one dies from caltrop damage. So devs when looking at making all future content do not do it where its annoying because that just makes some players just skip it entirely.

I say this, as long you come up with unique ways to battle boss and not always having boss that hit hit hit all the time, then it be better.

Like if the Boss has a special Attack that you need to dodge or use a temp power to shield yourself.

Even a Device on Mission map might be a key to stopping a really strong foe.

You can do something like they do in Kingdom Hearts and tap a button to counter attack the foe with a combo of hits.

You guys can do is type a command down into the chat box to fight the bad guy back.

Well the only thing else I can think of is trying to talk to the foe and answer couple of Questions to him or her and depending what you say will make the foe weaker or stronger.

Speed is the key. A solo player needs more time or to go at a slower pace so they can still win. They might have low dps, health, powers, etc. and just need an extra couple of hits in before they win.

Remove their regen for solo players
Most E-B fights tend to be about overpowering their regen as much as taking out their health bars. One of the most annoying things is whittling down EB health to almost defeat, dying and then coming back from the hospital only to find they've regenerated to 100% and you have to start all over again. In teams your allies can keep up the damage till you get back but solo it's frustrating especially in zones where the mission door is far enough away from the hospital to allow for the full regen.

If it's possibly for the defender inherent to know how many are on the team maybe we could try a regen supression. And if some wanted more challenge they could have one that increases it.

Allow for faster rate of occurances
Not sure how switchable it would be but there was one tip that was immense fun and challenging on the right ATs; the Malta ambush tip in the 40-50 range. Before it was 'fixed' it had ambush on top of ambush, almost all of them at once. Someone who is experienced enough with their ATs like how my widow could handle them all, widdling them down slowly.

A switch to change the speed of occurances or even two versions of the mission OR like above; the mechanics used in the Army of Me badge mission.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

One thing that concerns me with the suggestion of multiple EBs in a fight to scale to the number of players is judgement powers. One reason for the significant drop in difficulty for large teams in DA isn't anything about the design of the zone, it's that when you can drop a judgement or two on every pack of enemies before engaging them, even the +4 levelled (and I should note, +4 doesn't count for much facing a team with +3 shifted characters) end up melting like they were facing a team of fire blasters. I absolutely love the idea of multi-EB fights (one of my personal favorite fights in the game is the climax of the first mission of the Apex task force where you fight incresingly large numbers of EB War Walkers with waves of clockwork between them) but in an incarnate content setting, I worry about what would happen if a team could just drop their eight judgements on them at once.

They'd probably melt.

I'm not sure how much this idea would constitute to an impact on the powers team because I honestly don't have a clue how easy this would be to code in, but my idea is, in pretty much any of these 'multi EB' scenarios, to give incarnate level EBs a 'judgement shield' which would make them invulnerable (or at least highly resistant) to the damage component of judgement powers.

This seems like a non-annoying way (to me) to solve that particular problem. I don't want to see content becoming too difficult for the 'casual' player to enjoy, because that's not really the sort of game CoH is, but at the same time there's something wrong when I feel like I have to hold off using my powers to make the epic fight as epic as it should be!

In absolutely complete seriousness, I really think that someone who cannot overcome the regen of a standard, even-level EB, even if it has some resistances, should not be soloing. I have absolutely no concern about a team of any size having that issue.