Scaling enemy buffs

[boggo2300]

3 minutes ago, Myrmidon said:

 The only thing I dislike about Carnies is the phasing annoyance,  however, I do love me some Malta.

the weird thing (to me anyway) about the whole "eeew Malta no way" crowd is, once you understand Malta they just aint scary, they just require thinking, as to the carnies, I usually play a snipe heavy blaster, can't phase after an arrow to the knee!  oops sorry wrong game

[Myrmidon]

2 minutes ago, boggo2300 said:

the weird thing (to me anyway) about the whole "eeew Malta no way" crowd is, once you understand Malta they just aint scary, they just require thinking, as to the carnies, I usually play a snipe heavy blaster, can't phase after an arrow to the knee!  oops sorry wrong game

 

“When you understand the nature of a thing...you know what it's capable of.” - Blade

[boggo2300]

1 minute ago, Myrmidon said:

 

“When you understand the nature of a thing...you know what it's capable of.” - Blade

yup, it's why I play a glass cannon solo at +3 I like to plan how I kill my mobs 😄  er sorry arrest the perpetrators! 

[Myrmidon]

7 minutes ago, boggo2300 said:

yup, it's why I play a glass cannon solo at +3 I like to plan how I kill my mobs 😄  er sorry arrest the perpetrators! 

Imagine my surprise when I learned that Energy Defense gave Sappers the finger. Out loud, it was “You missed. Now you, too, shall be honored to learn Ti Qwan Leep!”.

[boggo2300]

1 minute ago, Myrmidon said:

Imagine my surprise when I learned that Energy Defense gave Sappers the finger. Out loud, it was “You missed. Now you, too, shall be honored to learn Ti Qwan Leep!”.

the learning what powers have unexpected effects on the mobs is one of the great pleasures of the game to me, and one of the fuels of my altitis

[MTeague]

I would love more challenge added to the game, SO LONG AS, we keep one of the core strength of CoX.  That you don't need a holy trinity of Tank/DPS/Heals.  I should be able to slap together 8 players of ANY given archtypes, and still be able to get the job done in the vast majority of content.  Maybe incarnate trials kick it up a few notches, fine.  But All Blaster Task Forces should still be possible, even if it might require that the 8 blasters in question all took the Leadership powers.  Similarly, a 6 man team of VEAT, Stalker, Sentinel, Corruptor, Blaster, and Dominator....  or whatever other combo you want to list.... should be able to roll through any story arc mission. 

 

Maybe the teams in my examples should need to pause and rest every so often, but don't buff enemies to the point that any AT starts being "Required" or others become a "Liability".

Edited January 4, 2020 by MTeague

[MTeague]

11 hours ago, Myrmidon said:

Imagine my surprise when I learned that Energy Defense gave Sappers the finger. Out loud, it was “You missed. Now you, too, shall be honored to learn Ti Qwan Leep!”.

"Boot to the Head"   Sssshump!

[Galaxy Brain]

I feel that say, small amounts of boost per ally in the team on top of adding unique enemies should do the trick.

 

8 * 3% acc/dam/def/res = 24% to each enemy before other difficulty settings 

 

Add in special enemies to mobs that cause trouble and it gets real fun and real tactical. 

[Parabola]

47 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I feel that say, small amounts of boost per ally in the team on top of adding unique enemies should do the trick.

 

8 * 3% acc/dam/def/res = 24% to each enemy before other difficulty settings 

 

Add in special enemies to mobs that cause trouble and it gets real fun and real tactical. 

I imagine the actual numbers used would have to be the subject of significant testing and adjustment. I'd also hope that the devs would have a feel for the sorts of places to start. That's why I didn't even try to think up some numbers to suggest and instead just went for a general framework that might have some benefit.

 

Having said which it occurs to me that in many respects this whole idea is based around trying to come up with a different way of providing lv55+ enemies. It has been suggested many times that what we need is a +5 option on the slider but then people have pointed out that lv55 enemies simply don't exist in the game and adding them might not be straightforward.

 

If these buffs were tuned in such a way that when at full strength (party of 8 at lv54) they adjusted the enemies so that they were effectively fighting at 55 (or even 56) then we would have a reasonably simple balance point. If your team was struggling then you could knock a level or two off and you'd be back to where you were before.

 

1 hour ago, MTeague said:

I would love more challenge added to the game, SO LONG AS, we keep one of the core strength of CoX.  That you don't need a holy trinity of Tank/DPS/Heals.  I should be able to slap together 8 players of ANY given archtypes, and still be able to get the job done in the vast majority of content.

My take would be that you have to balance the game around a certain presumed level of player power. I think it is reasonable to assume that the vast majority of teams are going to have some mixture of AT's and that even without the trinity you are going to have people performing different roles on a team contributing to a 'greater than the sum of it's parts' level of power. Even on an all blaster team someone takes or mitigates the alpha in some way.

 

Adding extra challenge into the game would of course make it harder for everyone and if you were deliberately running a very unorthodox and underpowered team then the experience would be a bit rougher with these buffs. However the difficulty slider would still be available; you could still knock a level or two off the enemies to compensate.

[Bossk_Hogg]

I'd also like to see a mode where all bosses are upgraded to elite bosses, and all "named" bosses to AV's. Throw some leadership toggles on them, and fights would last a bit longer too.

 

If higher level content is made though, the purple patch does need to be re-examined in terms of how it interacts with debuffs. Currently buffs have more impact against high level foes. Given that debuffs take time to apply, often require accuracy checks, and draw aggro, this needs to be fixed. A 5% maneuvers shouldnt be better at making things miss over a 30% to-hit debuff. 

[golstat2003]

19 hours ago, Myrmidon said:

 The only thing I dislike about Carnies is the phasing annoyance,  however, I do love me some Malta.

If they nerfed the phasing and gave them something else I would be fine. My issue with Carnies is that the phasing makes them tedious to fight. Tedium does not equal difficulty, just annoyance and folks avoiding them. The sapping I'm fine with.

[VileTerror]

If there were maybe a Temp Power with limited charges to negate Phase on Targets, but could be purchased with refills, that could be good.  

[Galaxy Brain]

Agreed with the phasing. Sappers are tactical as you have something to gun for first on order to effect the fight. Phasing carnies you cannot influence and just drag the fight, if say control effects stopped it thatd be cool or even phasing powers by players.

[Leogunner]

I once imagined a system (particularly for Incarnates) where there is a kind of faction or knowledge spread amongst the various groups we face that seek and target powerful metas that roam the City/Isles.  They're armed with various tools, magics and sciences meant to neutralize someone's power.

 

So you might accept a mission, run it and complete it but upon completion, there'd be a chance this group of individuals would use said tools, magics and/or science to lock some of your abilities (in the case of incarnates, the incarnate abilities minus maybe the alpha slot. in the case of IOs, your set bonuses).  The next mission would have the suppression rune, paralyzing antidote, cypher code, etc that would unlock your abilities somewhere randomly on the map.

 

It could also just happen on the new map, walking into the door and triggering a trap that gets your powers locked.  You could just complete the map normally without those powers/bonuses or roam the map, fight the spawn and click the glowie that has the thing that unlocks your powers again.  For incarnate powers, you can specifically target the different powers so clicking that glowie might only unlock your Interface incarnate powers.

 

I could even see a TF where you're about to go after the big-bad and suddenly seals/steals the whole team's powers and then the rest of the TF missions are unlocking individual team members' abilities and the team has to lean on the members with unlocked powers more until the team is back to 100%, disable his power sealing/stealing method and then take the guy down.

 

But if people didn't like the Kheld hunting random spawns, this would be 10x worse.

[ivanhedgehog]

On 1/3/2020 at 7:27 PM, Haijinx said:

I think all the underperforming baddies should get fixed though.

They need to fix the underperforming power sets first. Here you want to increase the challenge for the high performing, fully kitted out brutes but the solo defender with lower performing power sets that doesnt have a 500mill inf build will be out of luck. which is why difficulty is set do SO's. So many brutes/tanks not even taking taunt and letting the support toons take it on the chin. There already is challenge if you choose to look for it. This was never a hard core game, it doesnt need to be made into one.

[Haijinx]

19 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

They need to fix the underperforming power sets first. Here you want to increase the challenge for the high performing, fully kitted out brutes but the solo defender with lower performing power sets that doesnt have a 500mill inf build will be out of luck. which is why difficulty is set do SO's. So many brutes/tanks not even taking taunt and letting the support toons take it on the chin. There already is challenge if you choose to look for it. This was never a hard core game, it doesnt need to be made into one.

Think that's why the OP wanted to scale based on team size.  

 

Its not about making it a hard core game.  Its about making it a not lol faceroll lol game.

 

Not sure the solo defender should be a huge point of balance.  It is after all a team game.  To worry overmuch how the most team-focused AT performs Solo is to sort of miss the point. 

 

In teams defenders do not under-perform.   

 

[boggo2300]

51 minutes ago, Haijinx said:

Think that's why the OP wanted to scale based on team size.  

 

Its not about making it a hard core game.  Its about making it a not lol faceroll lol game.

 

Not sure the solo defender should be a huge point of balance.  It is after all a team game.  To worry overmuch how the most team-focused AT performs Solo is to sort of miss the point. 

 

In teams defenders do not under-perform.   

 

and with a bit of clever play even a solo Defender will surprise

[Parabola]

5 hours ago, Haijinx said:

Think that's why the OP wanted to scale based on team size.  

 

Its not about making it a hard core game.  Its about making it a not lol faceroll lol game.

Yeah this is absolutely the reason behind scaling to team size. I don't see solo performance as a problem either way because it doesn't directly impact the game experience of other players. There are arguments about solo performance such as that around whether AE farming is good for the game but that's not what this is about.

 

6 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

They need to fix the underperforming power sets first.

I feel this kind of buff would actually be of direct benefit to many underperforming powersets. If we take something like forcefields, this is a powerset that is almost universally regarded as underperforming in large part because it is considered redundant in the high level team environment. People tend to not need the extra defence because of IO bonuses and incarnates. If the enemies were buffed with +to hit they would start to punch through the current soft cap and so there would be more value in extra defence buffs.

 

6 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

Here you want to increase the challenge for the high performing, fully kitted out brutes but the solo defender with lower performing power sets that doesnt have a 500mill inf build will be out of luck.

The point about solo performance has been covered but I also wanted to reiterate something I said earlier. I am not setting out to rebalance the game around the high performing brute and making everyone else's life miserable in the process. Quite the opposite.

 

The current dynamic is that on high level teams you have some players that can easily solo the same content and so they tend to engage in a race to kill as much as possible as fast as possible. Other players with less fully built characters end up basically tagging along which isn't so much fun. If the challenge level is raised then all of the characters become more necessary to complete the mission. That SO only defender that had been sitting around at the back watching the show is now finding their buffs and debuffs are needed even by the billion inf, tier 4 brute squad up front.

[nihilii]

If you set out to build tough factions in AE, making something challenging to anyone but the most minmaxed teams is trivial. Ever fought a mob group of cold, rad and FF mobs in a bank map on +4/x8? (If you're confused by FF, think: force bubble pushing you against the walls)

The game has difficulty, the rewards for seeking that difficulty just need to be higher - starting at the malta/carnie level, as mentioned. Mechanics are in place to give greater rewards on a per mob basis, Paragon Protectors give +40% XP for example.

Adding new enemies with harder powers - yes yes yes.
Giving incentive to fight more diverse stuff - yep!

I'm not so fond of blanket stat scaling, on the other hand.

1) it penalizes adding more players to a team unless you're confident they'll contribute. This is a dynamic CoH purposefully avoided from inception, with XP bonuses for teaming. It's easy to make a MMO team friendly, it's harder to make it social friendly.
2) it's never fun (IMHO) from an immersion perspective to have mobs artificially become stronger or weaker. Levels are an acceptable stretch because they're clearly indicated with color coding, but various extra buffs, meh. I much prefer the "mob as a constant unit" school of thought CoH follows, which dictates you add difficulty by adding foes or by designing harder foes. Once you start tweaking mob stats on the fly, you make reference points muddier and it starts to be a little too minmax-y as you peer behind the curtain of what's going on.

[nihilii]

2 hours ago, parabola said:

If the challenge level is raised then all of the characters become more necessary to complete the mission. That SO only defender that had been sitting around at the back watching the show is now finding their buffs and debuffs are needed even by the billion inf, tier 4 brute squad up front.

I think this is wishful thinking. The rise of challenge necessary for the maxxed brute to *need* the SO defender would likely be so drastic it would obliterate the SO defender. In practice, I feel it would just push certain people to only look for fellow maxxed characters. You already see people being picky about who they take on Master STF/RSF runs, asking for 50+1 on Apex/TinM, even demanding certain requirements for ITFs.

[golstat2003]

It might make more sense to add these new difficulty options behind a new difficulty setting, so that it’s the user who is knowingly making the choice to see these new mire difficult mechanics.

[gameboy1234]

I like the idea of a harder game.  However I think I'd like to not change the game we have now too, a lot of folks are very comfortable with how it plays.  So if anything changes, what I'd propose is a new "hard mode" server where folks can try out the harder game but aren't required to play it.  They can return to the easier servers at any time.

 

How this works with the Homecoming team and financials, I don't know.  Folks would have to figure that out, it may or may not be possible.  But  I think it would the best way to approach making the game harder.

 

[ivanhedgehog]

11 hours ago, nihilii said:

I think this is wishful thinking. The rise of challenge necessary for the maxxed brute to *need* the SO defender would likely be so drastic it would obliterate the SO defender. In practice, I feel it would just push certain people to only look for fellow maxxed characters. You already see people being picky about who they take on Master STF/RSF runs, asking for 50+1 on Apex/TinM, even demanding certain requirements for ITFs.

To be fair, the 50+1 is because of the level shift that is part of the incarnate system.

[ivanhedgehog]

13 hours ago, parabola said:

Yeah this is absolutely the reason behind scaling to team size. I don't see solo performance as a problem either way because it doesn't directly impact the game experience of other players. There are arguments about solo performance such as that around whether AE farming is good for the game but that's not what this is about.

 

I feel this kind of buff would actually be of direct benefit to many underperforming powersets. If we take something like forcefields, this is a powerset that is almost universally regarded as underperforming in large part because it is considered redundant in the high level team environment. People tend to not need the extra defence because of IO bonuses and incarnates. If the enemies were buffed with +to hit they would start to punch through the current soft cap and so there would be more value in extra defence buffs.

 

The point about solo performance has been covered but I also wanted to reiterate something I said earlier. I am not setting out to rebalance the game around the high performing brute and making everyone else's life miserable in the process. Quite the opposite.

 

The current dynamic is that on high level teams you have some players that can easily solo the same content and so they tend to engage in a race to kill as much as possible as fast as possible. Other players with less fully built characters end up basically tagging along which isn't so much fun. If the challenge level is raised then all of the characters become more necessary to complete the mission. That SO only defender that had been sitting around at the back watching the show is now finding their buffs and debuffs are needed even by the billion inf, tier 4 brute squad up front.

underperforming sets just wont get invited.  What you will find are teams of 8 kitted out brutes still running just as fast as they can, now for even higher rewards. they need to fix the broken sets before even thinking about this sort of thing. Look at energy melee for tanks/brutes. when was the last time you saw one played?

[Saiyajinzoningen]

ill take malta over knives of artemis any day