All enemies have global chance to proc +to-hit

[aethereal]

This isn't a terribly serious suggestion.  More...  Something to think about.

 

What if all enemies had a global chance to proc the following effect: +10% to hit, self only, for 10 seconds.

 

Minions would have a 5% chance to proc it on all attacks, lieutenants 10%, bosses and above 15%.

 

The idea here is to somewhat defray the value of defense, while not making it super useless, and to give more of a role to powers that have been made somewhat useless in a world of easily attainable soft-cap.

 

Since it's based on a proc, defense would be just as good as it is now against an alpha strike.  SR character's might have some use for Elude, Parry might see situational use, etc.

 

Too big a change to do globally, but I think it's kind of interesting.

[Greycat]

They do already have a chance to hit, since defense can't be 100%. Some groups already have boosts to this, as well, due to (typically LT) characters with tactics and the like.

 

Plus, while softcap may be "easily attainable," it's not universally (or I'd say even widely) done. It's just that the people who do it talk about it more. 🙂 So this would impact the "normal" player more.

[AerialAssault]

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but a lot of these "make all enemies tougher" suggestions come from two places:

 

1) People playing at level 50 exclusively (while fully slotted and Incarnated)

2) People who only play at +0

 

This suggestion would make the intervening levels even more of a chore than they already are, and for that I can't really give it a thumbs up.

[Patti]

Can the bad guys have something like cut hero defences in half with a 10% chance so people with really high defences get hit more than people with low or regular defences?

[Apparition]

24 minutes ago, AerialAssault said:

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but a lot of these "make all enemies tougher" suggestions come from two places:

 

1) People playing at level 50 exclusively (while fully slotted and Incarnated)

2) People who only play at +0

 

This suggestion would make the intervening levels even more of a chore than they already are, and for that I can't really give it a thumbs up.

 

You forgot 3.  People who only run Council radio missions.

[Darkneblade]

There is already tons of enemy with defense debuff. I'm not sure why we need more. If glancing hit will be thing I could see it will be useful but until then nah.

[Burnt Toast]

27 minutes ago, Patti said:

Can the bad guys have something like cut hero defences in half with a 10% chance so people with really high defences get hit more than people with low or regular defences?

Why exactly do you want players who rely on defense to be...hit more? That makes absolutely no sense. 

[Patti]

Grey cat just said a flat hit Boost for bad guys would hurt regular players more than the minmaxed players.  I thought that the idea was for only those people to get more difficulty without hurting regular people so that's why.

[AerialAssault]

20 minutes ago, Patti said:

Grey cat just said a flat hit Boost for bad guys would hurt regular players more than the minmaxed players.  I thought that the idea was for only those people to get more difficulty without hurting regular people so that's why.

If someone has 45% defence and it gets halved, they still have 22.5% defence. If someone with 5% defence has theirs halved, they have 2.5% defence.

 

Now I'm not a mathematicianist, but 22.5% is still higher than 2.5%.

 

(let's not even entertain what would happen if your defence was halved again)

 

Edit: I've just realised, these enemies already exist, they're called Romans, and there's a reason they're a high level group.

Edited July 11, 2020 by AerialAssault

[aethereal]

I think I'll stand on my record: I don't particularly like the end game, I've never in fact ground out a T4 incarnate ability, I play the leveling game much more often than the 50 game, I rarely group and I play on much higher than base difficulty.  And I avoid the hell out of Council farms.

 

As said at the beginning, this isn't a terribly serious suggestion, because it would change too much, but I don't think of it so much as a difficulty increaser.  Yes, it would add a bit of difficulty for people invested in defense, but not a ton.  It's more about creating a sort of tier between "pretty good defense" and "great defense." If you soft-cap, you have full resistance against alpha strikes and full resistance against 90% of other attacks, but you notice when you've got a widow or bubbler in your team, and the SR tank or brute has a bit more defensive ability than you do.  That feels about right to me.  You get sharply diminishing returns after soft-cap without it being almost no returns the way it is now.

Edited July 11, 2020 by aethereal

[AerialAssault]

What happens to people who are not at soft-cap? Or people who are solo? Enemies who attack rapidly will quickly perforate squishies on account of being able to gain more ToHit more often.

 

For some characters, even a change from +0 to +1 can turn a comfortable encounter into a nightmare, due to the enemies hitting more often and your character missing more often. If you're going to make the enemies hit even more, then they might not be able to manage +0.

 

That's why I can't agree with any of these suggestions aiming for a change to the core gameplay. Adding more difficult content? Sure. Heck, I could even get behind updating older enemy groups to fit in with the newer designs of post-GR enemy groups. But a blanket change over everything? No thanks.

[Xanatos]

No.

[ImpousVileTerror]

Well, @AerialAssault as a . . . "mathematicianist" (ahem), I notice that the idea actually has some legs, as the amounts Debuffed in that example are:

22.5 Debuffed Defense

and

2.5 Debuffed Defense

 

22.5 is definitely the larger Debuff, and ergo the person who was originally at 45% Defense will certainly "feel that" Debuff way, WAY more than the person who lost a mere 2.5

 

The idea has legs . . . I just wonder if its strictly necessary.   

I also wonder if it could even be programmed with the spaghetti in its current form.

[Doomguide2005]

And for some sets, /SR I'm looking at you, getting defense 'halved' vs defense debuffed vs a foe to hit buffed are all very different things.  So what more precisely is the desired goal?  And then there's Elusivity which currently is a PvP thing.  

[ImpousVileTerror]

An excellent point.

So . . . what if it was somehow able to target JUST Set Bonus Defenses?  After all, the nature of this complaint (at least as I keep hearing it) is that a Blaster at the Defense Cap trivializes all of the Melee Archetypes.

(Again, I'm not here to say this is necessary or warranted.   I just like to theorize about tweaks to the game, and what sort of impact they would have.  To play "devil's advocate," if you will.  Good ideas rarely spring up fully formed on their own.  They require the nurturing of a community's efforts to spitball ideas and examine their outcomes.)

 

As for Elusivity . . . sorry.  I still haven't been able to wrap my own head around that one as-is.

Edited July 12, 2020 by ImpousVileTerror
*input -> impact

[MTeague]

Go run missions in the Night Ward.  Exemplared down to content level.  Have some fun with the Awakened.

You don't lack for tougher content if you want to face it. 

[SwitchFade]

Ahem..

 

No.

[DreadShinobi]

The issue isn't defense, clearly resists are the problem. Instead of a tohit buff, make it so all enemies have a chance to critically hit, that deals triple damage and ignores 100% of your resists. So when your defense fails you actually feel it. Layered defenses are far too broken, it's time those council marksmen learn to snipe. 

[aethereal]

6 hours ago, AerialAssault said:

What happens to people who are not at soft-cap? Or people who are solo? Enemies who attack rapidly will quickly perforate squishies on account of being able to gain more ToHit more often.

Enemies do not attack at a particularly frenetic pace, and this proposed change is much more significant for high-defense players than low-defense ones.  Very occasionally having an attack have a 60% chance to hit you instead of a 50% chance to hit is not going to radically change the difficulty of the game.

[Lines]

Even though I'm normally in the 'more difficulty' camp, I couldn't back this specific idea.

 

I was fighting vanguard on a perfectly soloable character yesterday and had to floor the difficulty. I do like that such enemies exist, but I wouldn't want it to be everyone.

 

A similar suggestion was to have an option for support bosses who'd appear now and then and provide a random buff to its allies. One of those buffs could be a -def proc, like you suggest. Players who don't focus such bosses do so at their peril. I could get behind that a little more - it's not just trying to subdue the meta; it brings a small ounce of situational awareness and coordination to the game.

[AerialAssault]

9 hours ago, ImpousVileTerror said:

Well, @AerialAssault as a . . . "mathematicianist" (ahem), I notice that the idea actually has some legs, as the amounts Debuffed in that example are:

22.5 Debuffed Defense

and

2.5 Debuffed Defense

 

22.5 is definitely the larger Debuff, and ergo the person who was originally at 45% Defense will certainly "feel that" Debuff way, WAY more than the person who lost a mere 2.5

 

The idea has legs . . . I just wonder if its strictly necessary.   

I also wonder if it could even be programmed with the spaghetti in its current form.

This is perception vs. reality though. You may perceive that you have lost more, the reality is you still have more than someone who has significantly less, at least until 1.5 seconds later when your defence is halved again. All this will do will encourage the current meta more by building as much defence and as much AoE damage as possible before enemies inevitably slash the tank's defence to 0 and kill them instantly.

If the idea has legs then they're crippled and lame legs, and a sure fire way to make people hate playing the game when they defence crash on every group of enemies.

 

3 hours ago, aethereal said:

Enemies do not attack at a particularly frenetic pace, and this proposed change is much more significant for high-defense players than low-defense ones.  Very occasionally having an attack have a 60% chance to hit you instead of a 50% chance to hit is not going to radically change the difficulty of the game.

Thanks for ignoring the rest of my post.

 

I don't know which enemies you are fighting, but there are definitely enemy groups out there which attack very fast. Praetorian Clockwork, for example, have about 4 attacks each at level 20+, and they recharge very fast.

 

Here's where these ideas fall apart; in making such a blanket change, you haven't considered what that might actually look like in practice, nor given sufficient detail. Does this ToHit stack? Can it proc off of missed attacks? How long does the buff last? What does this mean for characters with little to no defence to begin with? 

 

You may think that giving enemies a +10% to-hit won't drastically alter the game, but we already know what happens when you do. The Incarnate enemy groups, that is, Banished Pantheon, Knives of Vengeance etc. do have a higher base To-Hit than other enemy groups of about 15%. And guess what, people aren't queuing up to fight them, because they're challenging to fight at +4/x8, especially Banished Pantheon. Heck, even groups like Nemesis and Devouring Earth demonstrate what happens when enemy To-Hit increases by even a small amount.

 

Again, I'll re-iterate, I'm opposed to any such suggestion which aims for blanket changes to the game without considering the full consequences, and above all, is tailored to fit one person's idea of what is fun. I would rather see increased difficulty via creative enemy/mission design, that is optional to do so.

 

 

[ImpousVileTerror]

uh, @AerialAssault?  aethereal was fairly clear up front . . . 

"This isn't a terribly serious suggestion.  More...  Something to think about."

"Too big a change to do globally, but I think it's kind of interesting."

This was never meant to be a blanket change without considering the full consequences.  It was a thought experiment, at least from my reading of the original post and some replies.

It's definitely something which, as aethereal originally suggested, should -not- be applied to ALL enemies, though.  That would be rather ludicrous, and I should have addressed sooner (and, heh, still don't fully address until later in this post.  I'll get there, eventually!).

 

The notion of stacking the Halving mechanic was something I didn't see as implicit to the concept.  I was thinking of it in terms of a "get hit by this, and now for X period of time your Defense bonus is halved, unless another application of the Debuff is applies, extending the duration accordingly."  Although, stacking it does further highlight how it would target and impact high defenses more than lower.  Half of 0 is still 0; so if we were to stack such a Debuff, it would be an equalizer.

I followed up with refining the concept in that targeting Defense directly would overly impact those Archetypes/Power Sets which have Defense as their innate core mitigation and survival tool.  After all, it was illustrated to me that hitting the core Defenses of players rather missed the point of all this.  And, as the majority of concerns/criticisms/complaints of this nature (again, based on my reading, at least) seem to focus on the impact of Set Bonuses, I re-examined the idea in a more narrow application.

 

And, again, I do emphasize that I don't think these are inherently necessary changes.  But theorizing on new mechanics is healthy for game design.  Maybe the Devs already thoroughly examined something like this and discarded it for any number of reasons, but they didn't explicitly tell us not to consider it.  Talking about it here, exploring and examining the impact and the metaplay reactions, is part of the fundamental reason for this board.  I'd encourage everyone not to oppose ANY idea.  We could work with others to refine ideas, or disregard them and explore ideas that personally resonate with each of us.  I trust the Devs to simply ignore any idea that doesn't meet the burden of rigorous iterative design.  No one in the community needs to "vote no" on any idea.  I frankly believe that ideas need to reach critical mass before they'd ever really reach the Devs' consideration.  Ergo, the best way to demonstrate a vote of no confidence in any idea here is to simply not reply to the thread it was posted in.

 

Of course, AerialAssault raises some excellent points in regard to the To-Hit Bonus, and by extension any difficulty boosting mechanic.  Increased challenge is available and exists in the game, and there is a perception that these requests for greater difficulty are coming from a perspective that seems to wilfully ignore the existing content which is already more difficult.

So, it seems, that a mechanic like either of these two (To-Hit Procs and Defense Halving) would be applied to -just- select enemies in factions like The Council (specifically at high levels) to bring that group up closer to other challenging enemies groups.

Personally, I'd rather see rewards lowered to decentivize people from targeting the weaker enemy factions _AND ONLY IF_ this is genuinely seen as a problem worth addressing by the Devs.  I recommend keeping the Council easy for players who do not want to seek additional challenge.

At that point, where does that leave theoretical new game mechanics meant to increase difficulty?  Why, for new content, of course!  Imagine an Incarnate faction or a Trial which utilizes mechanics like these.

 

So, @aethereal!  Do you think a small edit to the original post might help refocus the conversation constructively?  Or do you still personally feel that the idea should apply to all enemies?

If you do edit, I recommend retaining the original wording for posterity, and amending the post with the new perspective.  After all, fully changing the start of the original post in a thread has had some staunch criticisms in the past . . . *remembers Steampunkette's Hasten thread from last year and cringes*

[AerialAssault]

2 minutes ago, ImpousVileTerror said:

snipped for ease of reading

I did think about the suggestion, and felt it necessary to point out why a global change should be avoided.

 

However, I do agree that changing the 'easier' enemy groups (i.e. Council) might encourage players to broaden their horizons.

 

Let's say, Council Marksmen get a stacking ToHit buff, which represents them "zero'ing in" on their targets. Now, this makes them too dangerous to be allowed to remain undefeated, as their shots are only going to become more accurate the longer they're left alive, but they're still only minions so any character should be able to deal with them before it becomes too much. This should probably only apply to the Cor Leonis super soldiers, so that lower level characters aren't overwhelmed.

 

Stuff like that is more along the lines of what I could get behind.

 

 

[Ukase]

A proc in various NPCS would not be noticed by me. They either hit you or they don't. In the chaos of battle, I hardly think when I take that 1700 pt slam from Bobcat in Tin Mage that I'm going to recognize why the hit occurred. 

Why not just raise all the npc ToHit 5%? We'd never notice, not really. Except the farmers who were on the margins of soft cap. 

[aethereal]

Since this isn't a suggestion that would ever be implemented, I didn't bother to create an exhaustive tracing of a million details, but yes, my suggestion was intended to be more-or-less global.  Maybe, if this were actually being taken seriously, it would phase in and not affect very low levels (maybe 0% proc rate under level 10, maybe half the listed proc-rate from 11-20, or something).  And obviously if someone wanted to actually do it, the numbers would all be subject to tweaking.  Is it 5% proc rate for 10s for minions or 7% proc rate for 5s or what, who knows.  Yes, procs off missed attacks, no, doesn't stack.  And might there be particular enemies that need rebalancing for this?  Sure, maybe.

 

But the vast majority of enemies would not need to be rebalanced in light of this.  Again, this is a low proc rate chance to have probably 1-2 attacks from this enemy have a mild to-hit buff.  It's not going to turn groups into holy terrors.  What it actually does is create a tier of diminished returns -- but not *no* returns -- on high defense.  Low defense characters won't notice this.  If I have 0 defense, fighting +0 enemies, and I'm fighting 10 minions, then after a particularly unlucky alpha strike, 3 of those minions will proc it (ie, this is 6x more than the expected case, a very unlucky set of rolls for me), at which point of the next wave of 10 attacks, instead of the expected case of 5 of them hitting, I'll see 5.3 of them hitting, for an expected increase in damage of 6%.

 

For a defense-capped character, on the other hand, in the same unlucky situation, I'd see a scenario where instead of 0.5 attacks hit on round 2, 0.8 attacks hit, for an expected increase in damage of 60% (again, this is in the unlucky case where the proc happens at 6x higher than the expected case).  Note that I'm still expecting less than one hit in the second round of attacks, and the alpha strike was fully mitigated.

 

This is in stark contrast to the defense-halving idea that I took to be satire, which is more in the vein of creating a huge "hole" in defense mitigation, kind of in the spirit of things like psychic or toxic "holes."  My suggestion isn't like that.  It's a mild softening of defense at high levels to create a scenario where you say, "Well, yes, I'm at 45% defense for everything, but I do like it when someone brings Maneuvers onto the team and I get a little more mitigation."