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

The way scaling in the game currently works is more with numbers than it is altering enemy stats. This would work great if everyone were scrappers, but with the prevalence of AoEs just adding more enemies sparsely increase difficulty.


Though I have proposed a solution to that: HP of enemies (except AVs) scales depending on how many teammates you have, and debuff resistance also scales. HP scales by adding 33.3% of their original HP for each teammate. This would solve the 8 judgements problem, since having a team of 8 would increase an EBs HP from 5,416 to 18,053 at level 54. This is... not the final number in any sense, but nonetheless the idea is there. It seems kind of scary at first, but the fact is that your team of 8 is going to take down an EB faster than by yourself. With up to 8 times the damage against 3.33 times the HP it is hardly a fair fight.

As for debuff resistance scaling, I think that it would be 7% for each additional teammate. A team of 8 would give all of the enemies a debuff resistance of 49%, and while not rendering debuffs useless it does make them slightly harder to use. Again, AVs are not affected by scaling, since they surpass that amount even with a team of 8.


The important thing is that this HP scaling and debuff resistance scaling suggestion aren't mutually exclusive with any other. If we have an idea but can't implement it because they'll die too easily or just be held, we can just apply HP and debuff resistance scaling.

Director 11 already does something like that

The reason you have 5 seconds of warning for most big killer attacks or abilities is because you need to take into account the Root Time for longer animating powers otherwise it punishes some powersets a great deal more than others.

Removing rooting would solve that problem

Well, given those parameters the three main options I can think of are the same three options I came up with in I14 beta for the AE:

1. Support "constellations" of minions around the Boss explicitly designed to support the boss. Most minions are not support critters and die to fast to support anything anyway. I came up with the strategy of making support critters that were like tank/defenders: they could buff the boss, they were hard to kill, but they were not offensively dangerous themselves. That way they could add difficulty to the fight without adding too much offensive threat.

2. Ambushes. These aren't just dumping more critters into the fight: if you design them right you can make them upset the apple cart so that players cannot lock into a static strategy. The problem with the AE was how difficult it was to control the composition of ambushes, which is a limitation the devs wouldn't have (I tried to get pohsyb to add composition dials to ambush spawns but there didn't seem to be the time).

3. Better designed Bosses. Even with the limitations of the AE custom critter editor, there are still lots of tricks the game engine has that the dev designed critters don't use much of. Particularly with regard to balancing the degree to which strong targets straight up kill the players and the degree to which they act more "defensively" by applying debuffs and soft controls.

There's a number of ways to do this, but the bottom line on bosses was that I felt the best way to make a good boss was to give it actually low damage and higher survivability, but then give it something that periodically hit hard. So the boss became more of a bursty threat than a continuous one.

In fact, in general the best possible way to make encounters more interesting is to make them less predictable.


I also like the idea of using "scaling powers" - I asked for that exact tech during AE beta many many times, but I don't think that is leveraged to the best extent possible either when its used (for example in the iTrials).


The one other major idea I had with regard to boss scaling which would have required tech to add (the AE doesn't support this) was to add a pacing parameter to the mission. In the same way that AE missions track and throttle tickets, a separate meter could measure player performance throughout the mission. Based on a number of parameters including how fast the player (or team) burned through the mission and how much damage and deaths were incurred, the boss could be scaled upward with a scaling power that factored those things in. So basically the quicker you burn through the mission, the harder the boss at the end to scale up to your ability.

I also thought of a cheap way to do this without as much tech and complex metering. Spawn reinforcements around the boss, and have those reinforcements attack the players at regular intervals. The quicker you get to the boss, the more of those reinforcements would be left. The longer you take to get to the end, the more you'd have sapped that reinforcement strength during the mission and the weaker the final boss would be, roughly in keeping with scaling the final encounter to the relative ease with which the player dispatches threat during the mission. In other words, the faster you go, the steeper the mission gets.

So lets say the final boss is a strong Elite Boss. But on his own, he's not that big of a threat. But he has five "lieutenants" that guard him, each of which synergistically makes him stronger and in literal rank could be bosses or elite bosses himself. At regular intervals one of those Lts is dispatched like an ambush to seek out the player or team in the mission, and he takes an entourage with him. This denudes the final boss of one of his protectors and some minions. If the team is less powerful and slow, it will take them time to burn through the minions in the mission and this "LT" which is actually a boss or EB would also slow the player or team down.

If the team is very slow, eventually a second, and even a third "LT" would leave the boss to go attack the player(s). When the player(s) finally arrived at the boss, the boss could be alone except for his normal minions. But if the player or team is strong and/or fast, he could find himself facing a significant constellation of support for that final boss.

This works in conjunction with the normal difficulty sliders. Turning bosses off would mean these "Lt" ambushes would be led by Lts, and thus capable of being dealt with by even weaker players. At the extreme case, they could be led by EBs or even AVs in theory at high enough difficulty.

So instead of reinforcing the boss, we could do the opposite. Start the boss with an army, and slowly strip that army away. Or rather, spread the army out so instead of facing it all at once it gets faced a piece at a time throughout the mission. And the regulating variable would be how fast the players themselves progressed through the mission, as a proxy for how powerful they are.


Really, though, I think crafty critter design is where you get the biggest bang for effort. Based on my own experience designing critters for AE missions, I don't think we've scratched the surface of what we can do there. Take my Challenge arc. Contrary to what some people think, I did not build that to be the hardest possible mission you could construct. Actually, I tried to built it to have the widest degree of difficulty possible. I believe that that single mission has a wider range of difficulty from -1x1 with no bosses to +4x8 with bosses and AVs than I think any other content in the game has. It goes from actually not hard at all to extremely hard, and has a lot of shades of grey in between. And it doesn't even have every trick in the book because half that mission was damaged over time by AE changes.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Yeah, so? You'd have to play a bit differently, yes. That's the point.

So the point is to deny some sets their attacks because they take too long? That sounds like an absolutely bad idea.

Can you give us a heads up on what it is that the power and art teams do when it comes to designing missions and encounters?

I.E: Does the power team make critters? Would making intermediate Con ranks be off limits? Stuff like that would help a lot.

Aside from that, as was suggested, the best way to improve challenge without "Hitting the AV button" is to have support focused enemies helping out in fights.

Using the Incarnate level stuff as an example, imagine a boss fight with a Malta director that hacked a PPD and Arachnos drone (described as being of the Insta-kill variety not the every day versions), but because you're an Incarnate they actually can't insta-kill you, and instead debuff your speed/recharge and (to a lesser extent) and have a chance for a Mag100 hold that has you do a quick Kneel animation as if you're resisting the effect. (similar to the forced puke of poison gas trap).

An EB level Malta directer wouldn't be a big deal to an incarnate character, but with two EBs with big recharge debuffs that have a chance for a short mag100 hold would be more difficult.

A good example in my opinion, that's already in game, would be Sky Raider Engineers. The FFGs that they summon can make a fight much more difficult, especially if they stack, without toggling the AV button as you say.

No, it would encourage waiting until the villain has to recharge the power until rooting yourself.

That's actually exactly how Incarnate trial bosses scale to the number of players on the team, except that instead of resistance, they increase the max HP and get damage buffs depending on how many players are in range. Though for Trials it's a bit more complicated since "range" is the entire instance, and it counts dead players as well.

The only problem with that is it requires powers work to do, so it's not something that the mission designers can just add on the fly. They need to implement some sort of Generic Villain ... Scaling thing, then it would only have to be done once and could be re-used.

I believe Aeon is asking people to think of ideas which focus on what the mission designer can do given the existing assets and technology, because that is his area of responsibility. Suggestions like improving the design of critters, or changing the game technology, while interesting, go beyond what he or any other mission designer can do.

Which is why I suggested both. The powers people design critters, so its really up to Black Scorpion and his minions to design more interesting bosses. The programmers at the direction of the design leads can add or alter game mechanics, but that is often time consuming and expensive, and rarely done ad hoc. The mission designers can ask for certain kinds of assets like a new critter group, but they don't explicitly make them. Basically, the only things Aeon can do to try to make missions more interesting in terms of difficulty scaling is essentially what we could do in the Architect, but with better control. He could also ask for certain new things in terms of critter design or game mechanics, but of course those requests would then be completely outside his ability to control or even get scheduled to happen. So the less he has to ask for changes tot he powers or the game code, and the more he can do things through mission design itself, the more likely he can put a suggestion into practice.

Large team feedback (8 people)

The problem my group has been having in content lately is that, even on +4 difficulty, enemies die too quickly for everyone to feel like they've contributed to a fight. The people with fast reaction times and fast characters drop all of their area attacks on to a group of enemies and then there are just a few bosses left in the couple seconds it takes for slower people to make it in to the fight. This causes half the team to rightfully feel like they aren't even playing the game because they don't have area attacks and they spend most of the fights trying to target a boss that's not dead yet and get an attack in on it.

I've had this opinion for a few years now, but the more I play the more I believe that minion rank enemies are the cause of this game's area damage favoritism in big teams. This is especially true on incarnate trials (this thread doesn't focus on those, but I'm mentioning it as an aside). Minions serve absolutely no purpose in a mission with 8 players except to make area damage more important and make people using area damage feel more important, barring specific enemy groups like the cimerorans that have strong support minions.

I think that my experience would be much improved if I had the option to make minions STOP spawning in teams with many high level players, with them replaced by the player equivalent in lieutenants, bosses, and possibly an EB if the enemy group has a generic one. This would go a long way towards helping my fights to take longer so everyone in my groups can contribute.

Yeah, allowing +3 level shifts in an environment where the enemies don't also have +3 level shifts is causing things to be ridiculously easy. My "ubertoon" brute has a challenge running the content solo at +4x8, but can still do it. When you're in a situation where the solo character can already beat it at the maximum difficulty, then any amount of teaming will make things ridiculously easy (and I like to do 8 man teams with my SG).

Indeed, flip the switch for Incarnates and have the enemies have to blitz us like we're the AV. Make them be warned to bring a team for back-up before facing us.