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Foundry Trick: Trigger Timer

zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
edited June 2013 in The Foundry
I have a room where the player has to perform an action quickly or 6 bosses spawn on him. So I needed to make a timer. The only thing I could think of is to create a sand hourglass. But using mobs and guards.

In a secret, inaccessible room, I place guards on one side of a wall, and mobs on the other. The player triggers the removal of the wall, when the mob encounter is defeated, the boss spawns are triggered.

You can adjust the time base on the number of mob vs guards. Just thought I would share.
Post edited by zovya on
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Comments

  • nymbleshanksnymbleshanks Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 12 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    That is a brilliant solution. Any chance that the guards can fail? Is the mob annihilation rate pretty consistent?

    - Nymbleshanks
  • mhaermhaer Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    Nice idea!

    Could you do something similar with some sort of ground AoE damage? So you "cook" the mob and its heal is the timer?
  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    The guards can fail, if you don't put enough of them. Just experiment with ratios to get the time you want. Test at different levels too, because they scale to player level.
  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    You can also stage the triggers, have one encounter defeated by the guards, remove another wall with more mobs, and etc. But be sure you have enough guards. If the guards fail, the timer fails.
  • myrkolithmyrkolith Member Posts: 212 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    If you setup the behavior on the Guards, there is one that doesn't let them be killed I forget what it is called offhand but one of them lists that the npc cannot die. I don't know if it's part of the cowers when entering combat or not though.
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  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    I'll check that. I thought only the non-combating NPCs couldn't die. But all guards are mortal.
  • drakedge2drakedge2 Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    Hmm, I couldn't find where to make NPC's fight last time I was looking. This would be useful for later chapters in my story. What asset are you using to make NPCs fight mobs and can you make it so that say one of the characters in your story follows the player and acts like a companion? IE fighting alongside, or healing the player?
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  • tilt42tilt42 Member Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    You can't make NPCs fight, but there is a group of friendly encounters under the Guard header. They'll fight along your side.
  • nymbleshanksnymbleshanks Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 12 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    Note that anything attacked by a Guard is zeroed for xp gain, from what I last saw. For the stated mechanism that is fine as its a subset of mobs that your players never see; however that could really irk players unless they are just out for a good story regarding a companion.
  • drakedge2drakedge2 Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited April 2013
    Oh okay cool, that is a nifty trick then, I will need to play with that some.
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  • sshatesshate Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 33
    edited April 2013
    That is brilliant. lol
  • yospeckyospeck Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 174 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    AMAZING idea. So much so that I started playing around with it and I think I've found the most optimal way to use this.
    Above I've set up an alleyway with invisible walls off the main area of the map. The guards I'm using are ranged (Easy) and when the trigger is set a one way patrol (melee) appears and wanders into the "Kill Zone" where the guards can attack him over the lowered invisible wall, but he can't get to them or attack them, so just stand there and gets killed. When he dies the next mob appears and patrols into the kill zone.

    The beauty with this is that:
    1. Your guards wont die as the mobs cant reach them
    2. There's a pretty consistent kill speed, which can be increased/decreased by the number of guards you you add (and you can just stack them on top of each other so they wont run out of room)
    3. It's resource light, instead of having lots and lots of walls, after your initial setup each "tick" just costs one mob.

    To get advanced you're better of not having a patrol (I was using one just so I could watch them, as this adds unnecessary time to your ticker, instead the mobs can just appear in the kill zone when triggered).

    Also, you could have different speed of ticks, when a mob appears have extra guards appear for that tick, then they disappear when that mob is (set of mobs) is killed.


    9mGb0IW.jpg?1

    I've put in the height on the y axis for the walls so people dont need to mess around. Just try and get your guards as far away from the kill zone as possible as the melee guys have a ranged melee (que?!).


    Massive respect Zovya :)
  • rathenau15rathenau15 Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 37
    edited May 2013
    Thanks for sharing that mate, quite ingenious!
  • eldartheldarth Member Posts: 4,494 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    Instead of guards, has anyone tried spellplague decals? [I will once I get a chance]
    Create MOB, patrol into spellplague, when MOB dies, spawn next MOB, rinse, repeat.
  • yospeckyospeck Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 174 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    Would be great if they damaged NPCs as that would free up space with using up your encounter slots with the guards.
  • coanunncoanunn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 368 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    eldarth wrote: »
    Instead of guards, has anyone tried spellplague decals? [I will once I get a chance]
    Create MOB, patrol into spellplague, when MOB dies, spawn next MOB, rinse, repeat.

    This is a guess, I haven't tested it and with the server down I won't get to till after maintenance but.. won't they just stand at the edge like they do with traps? I mean that was the original exploit that lead to people being banned and the change to the TOS for the Foundry. You can't "modify" the mob AI which would be set to avoid environmental damage. Now if it does work to avoid this you could create the "death zone" and just spawn them in it. They slowly die from the effect and it would be more consistent than a scaling encounter where you still have to worry about the Combat RNG HAMSTER things up.

    It's an ingenious work around but it sure would be nice if they just gave us monologue controls, timers, and a bit of scripting so that we didn't need to go through all of this.
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  • lunchtimenowlunchtimenow Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 51
    edited May 2013
    Has anyone tried placing an NPC with the MOBs? Ie, the MOBs attack the NPC instead of the Guards shooting at the MOBs? Or will the Guards pull aggro like players?
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  • coanunncoanunn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 368 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    Has anyone tried placing an NPC with the MOBs? Ie, the MOBs attack the NPC instead of the Guards shooting at the MOBs? Or will the Guards pull aggro like players?

    1) Guards would indeed pull aggro.
    2) Yospeck's setup above precludes the need as the guards are inaccessible to the mob and both are inaccessible to the player.
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  • lunchtimenowlunchtimenow Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users Posts: 51
    edited May 2013
    coanunn wrote: »
    1) Guards would indeed pull aggro.
    2) Yospeck's setup above precludes the need as the guards are inaccessible to the mob and both are inaccessible to the player.

    Sounds good. :D
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  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    yospeck wrote: »
    AMAZING idea. So much so that I started playing around with it and I think I've found the most optimal way to use this.
    Above I've set up an alleyway with invisible walls off the main area of the map. The guards I'm using are ranged (Easy) and when the trigger is set a one way patrol (melee) appears and wanders into the "Kill Zone" where the guards can attack him over the lowered invisible wall, but he can't get to them or attack them, so just stand there and gets killed. When he dies the next mob appears and patrols into the kill zone.

    The beauty with this is that:
    1. Your guards wont die as the mobs cant reach them
    2. There's a pretty consistent kill speed, which can be increased/decreased by the number of guards you you add (and you can just stack them on top of each other so they wont run out of room)
    3. It's resource light, instead of having lots and lots of walls, after your initial setup each "tick" just costs one mob.

    To get advanced you're better of not having a patrol (I was using one just so I could watch them, as this adds unnecessary time to your ticker, instead the mobs can just appear in the kill zone when triggered).

    Also, you could have different speed of ticks, when a mob appears have extra guards appear for that tick, then they disappear when that mob is (set of mobs) is killed.


    9mGb0IW.jpg?1

    I've put in the height on the y axis for the walls so people dont need to mess around. Just try and get your guards as far away from the kill zone as possible as the melee guys have a ranged melee (que?!).


    Massive respect Zovya :)

    That would work up until, if and/or when they implement mob evade.
  • kamaliiciouskamaliicious Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    coanunn wrote: »
    1) Guards would indeed pull aggro.
    2) Yospeck's setup above precludes the need as the guards are inaccessible to the mob and both are inaccessible to the player.
    It takes a LOT of aggro to pull a creature attacking an npc, like damaging them for 80-90% of their health, before they will turn on their attacker. It's why some Foundry featured quests are dressed up exploit quests, there's quests that use this behavior all over the place.

    As for spawning a mob into a deathzone (spellplague cracks surrounded by walls for instance), that's exactly one of the exploits Cryptic forbids.
  • yospeckyospeck Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 174 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    zovya wrote: »
    That would work up until, if and/or when they implement mob evade.

    There will always be ways around it, like raised platforms, shooting over a large gap where there's no way they can reach you as these are fundamental mechanics to the game
  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    yospeck wrote: »
    There will always be ways around it, like raised platforms, shooting over a large gap where there's no way they can reach you as these are fundamental mechanics to the game

    Evade is when a mob cannot attack back, it goes into evade mode making them untargetable, therefore undefeatable.

    Though I've had no problem with hard guards defeating waves of easy minions.
  • mosby1mosby1 Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 288 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    I've been trying to get a version of this to work faster. I've experimented with a few other options:
    - I tried spawning mobs on traps. That's still fairly slow.
    - I tried dropping them from a height. That kind of works. The highest I could get to work was 300. I used the weakest mobs I could find. They took about 80% damage, which is pretty good. I dropped them onto a trap to finish them off.

    Neither of these is really fast enough for what I want though.
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  • eldartheldarth Member Posts: 4,494 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    As for spawning a mob into a deathzone (spellplague cracks surrounded by walls for instance), that's exactly one of the exploits Cryptic forbids.

    I know it's forbidden as "an exploit" where the PC would gain XP, but if they've "fixed" that exploit by zeroing XP from mobs killed by the environment (as they have mobs killed by guards), then that might simplify things by being able to spawn them directly over a spellplague filled room. Might allow for a bit finer grained, or more consistent timings.
  • coanunncoanunn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 368 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    It takes a LOT of aggro to pull a creature attacking an npc, like damaging them for 80-90% of their health, before they will turn on their attacker. It's why some Foundry featured quests are dressed up exploit quests, there's quests that use this behavior all over the place.

    As for spawning a mob into a deathzone (spellplague cracks surrounded by walls for instance), that's exactly one of the exploits Cryptic forbids.

    Hence the fact it MUST be inaccessible to the player and unable to reward XP. It would be nice to hear from Cryptic on the issue as it is really due to their inability to provide us timers and scripting that we have to resort to such things.
    zovya wrote: »
    Evade is when a mob cannot attack back, it goes into evade mode making them untargetable, therefore undefeatable.

    Though I've had no problem with hard guards defeating waves of easy minions.

    I think we all know Evade is coming at some point and will totally destroy about half the foundry missions currently published or more. But you are certainly right that this only works up to the point that evade is added at which point the better solution might be to spawn HARD guards, Easy Mobs, despawn both at completion of the mob encounter and spawn fresh for each additional "tick".
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  • ahkronnemesisahkronnemesis Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    I imagine you can also use a very small hidden room with space only for a trap and a mob (or 4 traps and a mob) an make the trap(s) spawn under the mob when going through a trigger.

    Not sure how traps vs mobs scale tho.
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  • coanunncoanunn Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 368 Bounty Hunter
    edited May 2013
    I imagine you can also use a very small hidden room with space only for a trap and a mob (or 4 traps and a mob) an make the trap(s) spawn under the mob when going through a trigger.

    Not sure how traps vs mobs scale tho.

    In the Foundry traps vs players don't even scale right. The same trap in 'Live' will do 9 or 10 times the damage it does in the foundry at the higher levels. No I think in the end yospeck and zovya have come up with the most effective methods UNTIL we are given scripting tools to make timers.
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  • zovyazovya Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 0 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    My hardest guard encounter which is 2 brutes and 3 minions if I remember correctly. They can take down an easy melee of 3 skeletons in 5 to 7 seconds. That's quick enough for anything I need... for now anyway. And that only uses 2 encounter slots.
  • abaddonliveabaddonlive Member Posts: 14 Arc User
    edited May 2013
    This is brilliant! Cant wait to try it out! Do you have your quest published yet?
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