Why mobs should be adjusted to work as groups "trinity" style.

sigmaseven0

The What:
Most of the mobs in CO are basically DPS with an occasional "shtick" thrown in for flavor.
CC, heal, Buff and debuff powers are currently reserved for master villains and higher. Villains and even minions should also have access to various utility powers in AOE form. Some Master Villains and Enforcers even deserve an active defense and there aren't enough support mobs that AOE heal/buff the spawn.

Each Villain faction should specialize in something (range/melee/buff/debuff/cc/healing/mix).

The Why:
1. Mobs don't really have any attributes that demand target prioritization. (ex if a mob has a powerful buff/debuff/cc (especially a force multiplier) they need to be CCed or killed 1st). Target prioritization is something that makes sub-classes like CC and Assassin useful and makes playing with a team more generally meaningful.

2. Since all villain groups are primarily based on varying degrees range/melee of DPS, each villain group feels like a re-skin of the next. This causes the whole CO combat experience to bleed together leading the overall experience to become dull quicker (which is bad for player retention).
A simple trip to the power house can highlight how interchangeable each villain faction feels in combat.

4. This design philosophy is one of the things (like customization) that COX did rite and CO should build upon.

4. This will add depth and help CO combat not feel overly dated/shallow in the modern MMO market.

5. CO has undergone several massive revisions since 2009 and the current mobs are out dated for the current meta-game.

@crypticarkayne @ladygadfly

raighn

I could certainly see potential in this... and hopefully the dynamic will cause people to actually cooperate... As it stands we only really have 2 groups of enemies with any Target Prioritization...

Destroids: Leader Bots with their CC's & Annihilator Bots with their Knocks.
Viper: Brickbusters (top priority) with their overpowered Debuff, Powered Armor with their broken Knocks, Demolition Experts with their Knocks, Draesha Enforcers with their Knocks & self Buffs...

Beyond that all other mobs can just be taken out in whatever order you wish to hit them...​​

zamuelpwe

I say honorable mention goes to Escaped Prisoners due to the knock, stun, and fire patches. In fact, something I noticed that there are several enemy groups that are almost interesting but just need a small nudge in one direction or another. There's also the fact that difficulty is skewed by play and build style.

theravenforce

Elder Worms:

Have access to Ally Support: Empathic Healing & Ally Buff: Psionic Reflective Shielding.

New Shadows:

Immortals have access to a bleed based regenerative bite, life link to share damage & a knock

PSI:

Hypnotists: Placate that can be useful against heroes with less INT.
PSI Agent: AoE Stun & Single target knock combo. Ranged Knocks via Rock Throwing.

I've noticed in this other game I'm playing, mobs even single target non bosses seem to have heaps of HP and low down times between their attacks, so much like players they are always attacking.

It could be an idea for Level 40 Team instances to have enemies with a significant boost to HP as well as even less time between attacks on Elite. Basically increasing some of the effects Elite grants.

I would agree that mobs should have some sort of support mechanic added to them but when you look at the enemy factions in CO...the ones which are more widespread or appear in later instances tend to have better mechanics.

Example: VIPER are pretty much everywhere except Vibora Bay, they have some of the best mechanics in the game and this shows in Level 40 content like UNITY and in Serpent Lantern.

PSI's mechanics are very weak (in my opinion) and they don't seem to sport the fancy abilities such as calling for assistance from other groups nearby without having to move (telepathy). PSI do not exist in any shape or form outside of Millennium City except for the Psidewinder mission in Canada, and even then it's only Mind Slayer.

spinnytop

I am in favor of forcing mobs to play trinity style. It can help them learn some team work.

spinnytop

gradii said:

spinnytop said:

I am in favor of forcing mobs to play trinity style. It can help them learn some team work.

With the current AI mobs can't learn teamwork, they're too stupid for it.

Smart AI is actually a myth. All "teamwork" and "intelligence" is faked with clever programming. You'd be surprised what they could pull off in this game; what they're working with here isn't so different from what other tab-style MMOs are working with. It can be as simple as making one npc repeatedly do something that happens to benifit what another npc is doing repeatedly.

roughbearmattach

spinnytop said:

Smart AI is actually a myth. All "teamwork" and "intelligence" is faked with clever programming. You'd be surprised what they could pull off in this game; what they're working with here isn't so different from what other tab-style MMOs are working with. It can be as simple as making one npc repeatedly do something that happens to benifit what another npc is doing repeatedly.

Very true. I used to DM on a NWN2 game world, and I occasionally did Dev work, setting up encounters and scripting enemies. Even with really, really limited AI, it was easy enough to tell mob X to use a pre-chosen group buff as its third action, heal when at 50% health, or move away and use ranged attacks in a given condition.

ansemthedark

Liking the idea to make groups more interessting , but i whould like to add what do people think of instead of boosting Super villains with mass health or damage, makes sense for villains like Ripper atleast, but others that are more leader oriented like them calling backups and more commanding them even to like target one player that seems dangerous for the villain or buff his team like the Squad Leader from VIPER does.

raighn

ansemthedark said:

Liking the idea to make groups more interessting , but i whould like to add what do people think of instead of boosting Super villains with mass health or damage, makes sense for villains like Ripper atleast, but others that are more leader oriented like them calling backups and more commanding them even to like target one player that seems dangerous for the villain or buff his team like the Squad Leader from VIPER does.

It's been tried before in other games... unless they give the bosses large sums of HP fights with them are trivialized... We also already have a few super villians that call in backup, Mr Gemini for example... Now imagine how that fight would go if he didn't also have a substantial amount of health as well? It wouln't last long at all... Bosses need to be capable of surviving the massive amounts of damage players can deal.

spinnytop

raighn said:

the massive amounts of damage players can deal.

^ seems to come up in a lot of discussions, doesn't it?

raighn

spinnytop said:

raighn said:

the massive amounts of damage players can deal.

^ seems to come up in a lot of discussions, doesn't it?

Sadly... we really shouldn't be able to deal enough damage to 1-shot other players... power creep in CO has honestly gone into absurd levels in the past few years... giving the AI atleast the the smbolance of intelegence & teamwork would help atleast a little bit to curb the power creep... having enemies that actually require more strategy to take down than just "hit them till they die"... make us work as a team, make us use block, make us use holds, make us need tanks & healers, make us prioritize targets.

Most importantly, don't listen to the "It's to hard, I can't solo it with my uber-tank/DPS" complaints... if you get those complaints then you know your doing something right... you've succeeded in making people realize they need to work with others... it's when you get complaints about organized teams not being able to complete content that you should be concerned with... also, a change like this would require you to actually fix CCs to actually work again...

raighn

gradii said:

raighn said:

Sadly... we really shouldn't be able to deal enough damage to 1-shot other players...

When the base HP of some players is a measly 5k yes, yes we should... Player HP is what has a massive disparity.

Considering that there are builds floating around that deal 20-30k spikes... it's more than just player HP that needs adjusting... though yes, player HP needs a major boost to keep up with damage... base HP should be atleast ~20k at lv40 to an upwards of 150k with high CON & gear/specs...

theravenforce

raighn said:

Considering that there are builds floating around that deal 20-30k spikes... it's more than just player HP that needs adjusting... though yes, player HP needs a major boost to keep up with damage... base HP should be atleast ~20k at lv40 to an upwards of 150k with high CON & gear/specs...

Wow...really?

In my experience...I have no problem PvPing and PvEing with 4.4-5k HP at level 40. Sure it's easy to get one shotted but well...I guess it's how you use the build moreso than the HP it has.

Now I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having 20k HP, but it seems like overkill. Hell, think about the mobs!

They'd need Canada PH (5 Man Hard level ) VIPER Soldier HP. At a basic level.

A holo VIPER Soldier at 5 Man Hard in Canada PH has around...25.1k HP for some strange reason.

raighn

theravenforce wrote: »

Considering that there are builds floating around that deal 20-30k spikes... it's more than just player HP that needs adjusting... though yes, player HP needs a major boost to keep up with damage... base HP should be atleast ~20k at lv40 to an upwards of 150k with high CON & gear/specs...

Wow...really?

In my experience...I have no problem PvPing and PvEing with 4.4-5k HP at level 40. Sure it's easy to get one shotted but well...I guess it's how you use the build moreso than the HP it has.

Now I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having 20k HP, but it seems like overkill. Hell, think about the mobs!

They'd need Canada PH (5 Man Hard level ) VIPER Soldier HP. At a basic level.

A holo VIPER Soldier at 5 Man Hard in Canada PH has around...25.1k HP for some strange reason.

My issues with the Damage:HP ratio in CO stims from years and years of playing games with both worse & better ratios... I've played a game before where the max HP was 99 and the max hit was 66 (and with a certain weapon was guaranteed)... I've played games where the max hit equated to ~1/100 max HP... and I've played games where the max hit equated to ~30x max HP... however even in the games where max hit was an upwards of ~30x max HP the average hit was generally <1/10 max HP... in CO however the average hit tends to be ~3k which is 3/5 base HP and ~1/5~1/7 max HP... take into account that many builds can hit 3k/0.5s thats 1s to kill someone at base HP and ~3s to kill someone at max HP... sure we have defenses to help mitigate this as well but we have to push those defenses to extremes to keep up... not to mention the fact that many mobs have 3~10x our HP and yet deal <1/2 our damage... that does show that at some point the devs did realize that the Damage:HP ratio for players is off balance but instead of adjusting it all together they put a more balanced ratio on mobs only... now i'm not saying the ratio on mobs is what should be on players, just that it's a more balanced ratio... damage should not be => HP... it's OK to have certain long CD/high energy spikes deal damage => HP, and to a lesser degree crits... with crits it should only be a rare occurance for huge crits like that or only possible during brief periods while a buff is up.

Thats just my view on it though...​​

zamuelpwe

Yeah, the biggest problem with doing anything with the enemies in the game is the sheer disparity in player power. Reigning that in properly will do a lot to help the game. However, in the vein of the thread, I do have an idea. Something that happened in the middle to late life cycle of CoX was that when new powersets and outfits were added to the game, one or two brand new enemies were added to existing enemy groups. I wonder how well it would work here to add new enemies as opposed to wholesale revamps. ARGENT is a group that I think would actually do well with a single new enemy since they do have enemy variance and exist at higher levels.

agentnx5

raighn said:

spinnytop said:

raighn said:

the massive amounts of damage players can deal.

^ seems to come up in a lot of discussions, doesn't it?

Sadly... we really shouldn't be able to deal enough damage to 1-shot other players... power creep in CO has honestly gone into absurd levels in the past few years... giving the AI atleast the the smbolance of intelegence & teamwork would help atleast a little bit to curb the power creep... having enemies that actually require more strategy to take down than just "hit them till they die"... make us work as a team, make us use block, make us use holds, make us need tanks & healers, make us prioritize targets.

Most importantly, don't listen to the "It's to hard, I can't solo it with my uber-tank/DPS" complaints... if you get those complaints then you know your doing something right... you've succeeded in making people realize they need to work with others... it's when you get complaints about organized teams not being able to complete content that you should be concerned with... also, a change like this would require you to actually fix CCs to actually work again...

Frankly my squish DPS characters are no match for my tanky slightly-DPS characters. The issue is more complex than just "too much damage", it's also "not easily killed" for tanks.

There's a balance there, and it's not just in nerfing damage for the highly damage focused characters. And it's not in buffing up HP of the enemies.

Want to make harder enemies, allow them to do healing like players do and remove the archetypes entirely so it's 100% freeform and thus there's an even playing field to plan the balancing against... It's radical I know, but that's more of the root cause of the problem. And yes, power creep is a factor too, I agree (but more so on defensive capabilities than offense, unless you count backup devices)

Please stop this "it's just too much damage" argument. It's not just that, it's a layering of issues.

raighn

agentnx5 wrote: »

Please stop this "it's just too much damage" argument. It's not just that, it's a layering of issues.

I'm pretty sure we established that a few posts ago... I've never said that it's just the damage... I've acknowledged that HP is an issue too as well as many other factors... Damage just happens to be a big and immediately noticeable factor... whether it's the main factor or not I honestly couldn't say and won't attempt to say either.

As for why I dismissed defense in my prior post it was in relation to player damage... it takes a hefty investment to raise defense enough to efficiently mitigate player damage, far more than is necessary to survive from most NPC encounters. When dealing with NPCs you can raise your defense to the point that all but the toughest of enemies barely scratch you without having to go to great lengths on your defenses. Due to how little damage most enemies deal you can easily use self heals to mitigate a large portion of enemy damage, whereas against other players self heals are more of a final defense rather than a potential first line of defense.

There's a disparity between player potential and NPC potential. As long as players remain leagues beyond NPCs in power (offensive, defensive, utility, etc...) then there will be a problem, and everything will be far to easy...​​

spinnytop

agentnx5 said:

Please stop this "it's just too much damage" argument. It's not just that, it's a layering of issues.

This is blatantly dishonest. The argument was never "it's JUST too much damage". The argument was "player DPS is too high". You inserted the word "just" in there so that you could argue against a claim that nobody was actually making... I think there's a name for that.

chaelk

Criminals- get the hit men first with their taser attack and sniper rifles.​​