AE Enemy damage/health?

[Ultimo]

At the risk of yet another storm of nastyness, I feel the need to post about this issue again.

 

Once again, I'm trying to make enemies for AE missions, and as usual, I'm having great difficulty making them playable.  They're either way too squishy with appropriate damage, or way too strong with appropriate durability.  There seems to be no middle ground.

 

In addition, and I've commented about this before too, allied NPCs don't seem to scale down as enemy NPCs do.  For example, if I put an enemy built as an EB in a mission, he'll usually appear as a Boss (with appropriate damage, but too squishy).  If I include an allied NPC in the mission who is built as an EB, he appears as an EB, which trivializes the enemies (since EB damage is so over the top).

 

I'm not sure what else to do about this.  Any suggestions?

[ZamuelNow]

What level are you trying to build them for?  What are you using to test?  How many enemies are you trying to build?

[Jiro Ito]

I always err on the squishy side for my custom enemies, and if I want to ramp the difficulty up, I give them a power that is innocuous on its own and only becomes difficult if the number of enemies is increased (tohit debuffs for example).  I've never gotten a complaint that enemies were too easy!

 

If I want a hard enemy, I use EBs or AVs that way the player knows what they're getting into, and I try to give them an ally to help.  It can be a pain to balance, and testing and trial and error is really the only way.  

[Defeat All Snakes]

By default, I generally gave enemy spawns High Pain Tolerance from the Willpower set. It's a good low-key boost to their survivability without turning things into a tedious grind.

The issue with EBs and AVs is something that, as far as I can tell, is only happening to you, meaning it's probably either something to do with your personal settings, or some obscure, unique issue as yet unidentified. If you want to test that, go ahead and publish a WIP version of your mission with a BUG TEST DON'T PLAY THIS description to avoid abuse, and perhaps some of us can run through it a few times and tell you what we're seeing.

 

[Ultimo]

1 hour ago, Defeat All Snakes said:

By default, I generally gave enemy spawns High Pain Tolerance from the Willpower set. It's a good low-key boost to their survivability without turning things into a tedious grind.

The issue with EBs and AVs is something that, as far as I can tell, is only happening to you, meaning it's probably either something to do with your personal settings, or some obscure, unique issue as yet unidentified. If you want to test that, go ahead and publish a WIP version of your mission with a BUG TEST DON'T PLAY THIS description to avoid abuse, and perhaps some of us can run through it a few times and tell you what we're seeing.

 

Part of the problem is that characters I create as EBs sometimes appear as allies, and in that form they completely trivialize the mission.  But if I make them Bosses, they're completely trivial themselves, when they appear as enemies.  I don't want to have to have TWO versions of every character... and that doesn't help if one of them is confused or somesuch.

 

It's also not a matter of one particular mission, this is an issue that arises in many stories I've tried to create.  It's just so hard to make an enemy that's a challenge for any class.  I mean, my Tankers can usually handle an Elite Boss, because they can withstand a bit of damage, but a Defender or Controller is going to get obliterated.  If I make the enemy a Boss, the Tanker can still tank the damage, but isn't going to immediately wipe out the enemy, Controllers are a bit hampered by the immunity to controls, but they can at least survive getting hit a few times... but anyone with even reasonable dps, like a Scrapper or Blaster, is going to wipe out the Boss with ease.  It's just so hard to find a balance point.

 

The ideal would be a rank that's part Boss, part Elite Boss... with Boss damage output, but Elite Boss defenses.  No such thing exists, of course... My usual recourse is to limit the powers I give to Elite Bosses, but that makes them rather thin and uninteresting to fight.  I mean, who wants to fight an enemy with ONE attack, maybe two?

[Clave Dark 5]

One basic rule of thumb I've heard was that it's best to just never give any custom foe any armor powers, just attacks, because when you start building for "challenging" you can end up really shutting down some players in some way - players whose armor say has a Psy hole in it, or end up sending a Psy toon against a custome who's armor doesn't have that hole, things like that.

 

But you want to make them challenging without being "too much," so it's going to take some experimentation on your part.  Defeat All Snakes' suggestion there sounds like a good start.  You're probably going to have to test, test, and retest with different toons, at different levels, etc.  A lot.  AE is janky and really eats up time doing this sort of repetition, I know, and often you just can't make it do what you want; it's about trying to make your vision fit it, not the other way around, and sometimes you'll fail anyway and have to start again from a different angle.  But if you can make this work?  You'll have really achieved something, something that few other apparently know much about!  That would be pretty cool, right?

 

I have a feeling there's not going to be one easy silver bullet answer to this though, you may have to accept "good enough" and face the chance that some squishy Defender may end up messaging you to complain "I couldn't finish it, this was too hard!" 

 

Other random thoughts:

• You can always of course include a warning in the story description, "don't walk in here with squishies."
• Being able to include two versions of characters isn't a bad work around really, just... again... time consuming.

Best of luck!

Edited December 31, 2024 by Clave Dark 5