wot CO needs in its endgame: Horde Mode.

spinnytop

So yay, CO got its endgame, unfortunately that endgame is dominated by "poke the giant hit point pinata until it pops" gameplay. The exciting moments are such exhilarating events like "Oh dps super hard for 10 seconds!" and "block and walk forward a bit!" or the amazing combination of the two "run over there and dps super hard for 10 seconds!". This "poke the bag" gameplay has resulted in endgame being dominated by extremely boring builds that only do one thing, and players who only care about a single number when designing their builds. Like great you made endgame but uh maybe we could stop doing the same thing over and over? Could we maybe have endgame that lets all that stuff that isn't damage/healing/resistance have a purpose? Cosmics, events and lairs all basically boil down to the same dynamic with barely any variation but hey congrats on managing to make that kind of stuff keep my interest for like two and a half years or however long it's been.

Now that I'm done whining and pooping my pants let's talk about that Horde Mode thing. High Noon was a step in the right direction since it gave us a part of the fight that wasn't that stuff I was crying like a baby about in the previous paragraph. Let's go with that, let's go with that super hard. Picture Forum Malvanum except it's lvl 40 players only, cut the cutscenes, and the opponents we face are actually dangerous stuff: more dangerous than what's in the QWZ. Why so dangerous? I want this to be content that awards GCR, but without the stale "one giant boss" design that all the other GCR content has. These should be mobs that hit hard, have a few tricks up their sleeves, and require players to interrupt the things they do rather than just tank-n-heal their way through it. Yes, these mobs should be stunnable, knockable, rootable, etc and doing those sorts of things should be required to successfully complete it - not spamming them mindlessly but actually looking for tells and reacting quickly.

Oh no the big explodey one is about to start doing a massive aoe for 5 seconds that keeps going even if it's stunned and it happens to move real fast while it's doing that - knock its **** to the other end of the arena, or stun/root it and run away. Oh no that one with the chains coming out of its butt is about to blast us with a hold that lasts like 30 seconds, quick use one of those powers that does something more than just damage! Hey that big one just become invincible, kite it all over the place. The suggestions in this paragraph are all ideas that I thought of one second before writing them so don't bother criticizing any of them because I'm not invested in any of them in the slightest - or do, knock yourself out.

Most importantly, no big un-CCable bosses. Give us endgame content that is tough and that actually requires us to use all these powers you keep making. Yes, I get it, in the past there was no reason to make a specialized DPSer, or a specialized tank, or a specialized healer. Now we have endgame content where you have a reason to make those. Can we get some endgame content where we have a reason to also make other things? This dynamic of "congrats you're level 40, now start ignoring most powers in the game and adopt a standard dps/tank/healer build" is stale.​​

pantagruel01

I feel like the problem is that bosses have been updated to the current power level of the heroes, and pre-boss stuff hasn't. Vikorin went from 430k hp to 3M hp and his damage output went up several times as well (Hyrg has been turned into a gigantic chew toy, as his hp went way up but damage didn't). I can take a CC or tough DPS into Andrith and solo clear all the way up to Vikorin, you need to be careful but it's not really hard.

Any upgrade like that should probably use a smaller number of more capable opponents, though, changing the scaling on Tough from x2 HP/damage to x8 HP/damage would make the pre-boss fights pretty rough, but also enormously tedious given how many of them there are.

Epic Stronghold (in my sig) seems like it fits what you want.

jaazaniah1

Ugh. More mob fights? That's pretty much all we do while leveling. Superheroes should fight supervillains. What I'd like for more endgame are battles against small teams of supervillains with interesting and unique powers. The resources are already in the game. I'd even be happy with 1 supervillain supported by a mob. Just no more strictly mob fights.

roughbearmattach

Save the Earth was a step in the right direction. It isn't perfect, and occasionally has some odd glitches, but that would be a good model: tough mobs, lots of em, with a supervillain.

A new event or endgame fighting involving a villain team would be great--I would actually update and log on for that.

pantagruel01

The trouble with multi-villain fights is that they're a lot harder to design and balance, at least if they're interestingly multi-villain.

First of all, if the critters are fully cc vulnerable, the obvious tactic is the same as Kigatilik dogs -- CC them all, pull one at a time. If they can't be CCed, replace the CCer with a tank. This is not terribly hard to design, but also isn't interesting. The interesting goal is presumably that every player needs to think about more than one target at once (similar to team PvP; tunnel vision on one player and you are likely to get bushwhacked by someone else), and also that people can do useful things to interfere with mob behavior.

Unfortunately, this pretty much requires critters to either use large PBAoEs or ignore aggro rules, because otherwise they get vacuumed up by a tank, and it requires perm-CC to not work, though temp CC can work. We actually have examples of secondary bosses at both Kigatilik and Teleiosaurus, and they both mostly fail: dogs can be ignored by everyone but the CCer, dinobaby doesn't have any actually interesting countermeasures, the baby tank just has to find a good way to park the baby and then the dps has to block bubbles from two sources instead of one.

spinnytop

jaazaniah1 wrote: »

Ugh. More mob fights? That's pretty much all we do while leveling. Superheroes should fight supervillains. What I'd like for more endgame are battles against small teams of supervillains with interesting and unique powers. The resources are already in the game. I'd even be happy with 1 supervillain supported by a mob. Just no more strictly mob fights.

I'm totally okay with the mobs in the mob fights being skinned to look like supervillains and being themed around their expected powers. In fact I would love that. An extended battle vs multiple supervillains is one of my dream encounters and is part of the motivation for having made this post. Because it's not "poke the one big thing".

pantagruel01 wrote: »

The trouble with multi-villain fights is that they're a lot harder to design and balance, at least if they're interestingly multi-villain.

I don't think "it's too hard" is a valid reason not to do something. Kaiserin and co have proven themselves to be capable developers who know what they're doing and who can tackle difficult tasks - difficult tasks like being a CO dev in the first place.

pantagruel01 wrote: »

First of all, if the critters are fully cc vulnerable, the obvious tactic is the same as Kigatilik dogs -- CC them all, pull one at a time. If they can't be CCed, replace the CCer with a tank. This is not terribly hard to design, but also isn't interesting. The interesting goal is presumably that every player needs to think about more than one target at once (similar to team PvP; tunnel vision on one player and you are likely to get bushwhacked by someone else), and also that people can do useful things to interfere with mob behavior.

Unfortunately, this pretty much requires critters to either use large PBAoEs or ignore aggro rules, because otherwise they get vacuumed up by a tank, and it requires perm-CC to not work, though temp CC can work. We actually have examples of secondary bosses at both Kigatilik and Teleiosaurus, and they both mostly fail: dogs can be ignored by everyone but the CCer, dinobaby doesn't have any actually interesting countermeasures, the baby tank just has to find a good way to park the baby and then the dps has to block bubbles from two sources instead of one.

There are ways to solve all the problems you're presenting, the team just has to actually get to the task of developing this kind of content. That's the only real problem here: They're not doing it.​​

nbkxs

They said there's something new coming, let's see what it is.

chaosdrgnz43

Give us lift/throw all the things at boss to win

spinnytop

chaosdrgnz43 wrote: »

Give us lift/throw all the things at boss to win

Yes, these encounters should have all sorts of throwables in them, cause that's another thing we rarely get to use.​​

sannia1

Who are you and what have you done with the real foxi?

spinnytop

nbkxs wrote: »

They said there's something new coming, let's see what it is.

Is this levelup week thing that new thing that was coming? u3u​​