Eladrin, it's time to address rampant immunities!

[Hobgoblin]

I wish SR actually worked, then there would be no more firewalling everything in 80% of quests, no more dps is the best caster option in raids. Then we could have nothing work offensively and something would have to give on the immunities.

read the description on spell resistance. it says all nondamaging spells, xyfiel. so how is it not working properly?

hob

[Angelus_dead]

You can. Its called WOW.

In DDO, we dont have regenerating mana, so we cant have encounters that last 30 minutes.

I'm pretty sure that most WOW bosses have a strict limit making it impossible to kill them with a 30 minute fight...

[dumbbunny]

Might I suggest that bosses lose ALL their blanket immunities to debuffs of all sorts and instead have spell/item immunities to these sorts of things instead? Also eliminate most of their insane inherent resistances for item generated resistances or spell generated resistances.

Essentially code boss monsters to come into a fight pre-buffed with no brainer spells like FoM, Deathward, resistances, and GH. Also have raid mobs have lots of psuedo-item effects which grant immunity to various things and greater resistances and such.

Some boss mobs would then be able to rebuff themselves for certain spells (some when they are gone they can't get back...they used a clickie just like the PCs do ) depending upon what type of mobs they are. 'Item' buffs would come back based upon the timer for MD since that is the only thing that can strip them for a time anyways.

Item buffs could be coded as combined effects such as Standard Raid Boss Immunities - This raid boss has various immunities granted from magical items they are wearing. This could create simple blanket buff categories to reduce on coding and increase re-usability.

These changes would provide much more use for debuffers in end game content as well as CC. It would also provide for some great opportunities for the developers to create other 'item buff' categories for mobs such as...

"Strong Ability Score Enhancement Items" - Magical items this monster is wearing grants it +6 to every abilty score. This would be a nice one all sorts of mobs while giving players a way to strip it away for a short time with MD.

"Stong AC Item Enhancement" - Magical items this monster is wearing grant it +20 AC. For when BAM or TS goes epic to put on blackguards

"Devastating Spell Damage Enhancement" - Magical items this monster is wearing grants it superior pot 9 and superior arcane lore. For epic caster boss mobs.

"Epic Guards" - Magical items this monster is wearing grants it lightning strike guard, disintegration guard, and freezing ice guard. For those low AC epic boss mobs.

And of course various weapon effects like paralyze, weakening, vorpal (particularly on epic mobs that are adds with a boss who casts MD!), and such...

Ok i like a lot of these suggestions but i would suggest for bosses and such give them the buffs but make them suppressable with probably 2-6 seconds of suppression per point the dispell beat the caster lvl by for every buff. The items make sense and also please have chests drop good loot in epics.... there are few enough places that good handwraps can drop as it is so make epic end rewards maybe and epic chests actualy drop lvl 20 loot. 20 to AC will probably make it impossible to hit the blackgaurds unless disjunction works on it. but i think that disjunction should be useful in quests.

[Aerendil]

You can. Its called WOW.

In DDO, we dont have regenerating mana, so we cant have encounters that last 30 minutes.

We don't? :/

Guess all those SP potions; recalling to taverns for regen; and the upcoming Spellsinger II SP regen ability were just a dream.


(should I mention scrolls too?)

[AyumiAmakusa]

The way I see it, bosses will keep pilling on immunities until we are forced to fight this:

[SINIBYTE]

The way I see it, bosses will keep pilling on immunities until we are forced to fight this:

I heard HOrcs will be getting their own Prestige line to knock down brick walls.

[terrenceknight1]

read the description on spell resistance. it says all nondamaging spells, xyfiel. so how is it not working properly?

hob

I imagine Xy was referring to P&P 3.5 where Spell resistance applied to -most- spells including damaging ones not the watered down SR we have in DDO

[Kindoki]

An simple solution would be to simply "grey out" a hotbar skill if it can't land on the target.

I'm not to fond of this personally. There are very few things that I would run around hollering about "losing the feel of D&D", but it just seems to play better in my head that a group of adventurers that are facing a monster for the 'first' time (suspension of disbelief) would immediately know that X doesn't work, but Y does. You're supposed to have to work for it. It's the rest of us who have sorted out a shortcut (foreknowledge).

edit: almost forgot to say that I do think the 'boss ward' info on the mob is a decent compromise. Honestly, I don't think I realized you could highlight a mob, and see information about it, until sometime in 2007.

[spade413]

I've always liked the idea of bosses having random immunities, each time it's spawned, with each boss having a different chance for a particular immunity to be invoked. So, Boss A has a 80% chance of being immune to insta-death, a 70% chance of being immune to stun, a 60% chance of being immune to slow, etc, whereas Boss B only has a 30% chance of being immune to Insta-Death, because he's the end guy in Garrison's Missing Pack, and why should that guy be immune to a Wail of the Banshee from a 20th level wizard? You can up the % of an immunity being active per difficulty setting for the quest, and even set some to "Outright Immune" based on Dumb Obviousness (I can respect our inability to trip Velah, for instance).

There are some downsides, in that inevitably some quests will be so much easier with certain immunities dropped, that some people will simply reset zones until they get a boss who can be overcame quickly; for this, the system would need to be tweaked, and quests with bosses who can be quickly accessed by level appropriate people will have to have their immunities stepped up significantly, at least in the Insta-Kill department. I suspect that this will be the exception, rather than the rule, however.

I really do think that a large chunk of the community calls for randomized content, and finds having their most potent abilities emasculated at every turn frustrating. I know that I want to attempt to keep the game we all love from growing stale, and to challenge myself with each character I make (or reroll, or True Rez...).

[Deathseeker]

I think you have to somewhat seperate "mini-bosses" and Epic mobs from main bosses. The main bosses (DQ, Suulo, Harry, etc) simply need to have the immunities for the most part. Not having them would likely trivialize the fight. Even if there saves were incredible, it only takes a single instadeath to end a raid. Charming them wouldn't make sense. Etc.

HOWEVER, I do agree with the complaint regarding mini-bosses and Epic mobs. While they need to be challenging, just using immunities to eliminate a lot of the features that make the game fun is bad. This doesnt just go for spells, it also applies to things like AC (which loses benefit in Epic), vorpal, assasinate, etc.

The idea isnt to make it easier, but rather add more variation in strategy.

For end game mini-bosses and Epic mobs, I'd suggest something like the following (mostly referring to Epic)...

• Decrease mob HP in general.
• Increase mob AC in general. Make to-hit values more a build focus than just pure damage values.
• Increase some mob fortification. Make the new abilities to lessen fortification a bit more valuable.
• Remove the immunity to death spells. Instead, give the mobs a secondary save on them. Make it tough to insta-kill them, but not impossible. Reward extremely high dc’s. For example, if a player has a 38 dc, let the mob have 2 saves. Assuming their saves are somewhere around 28, this would give a 25% chance of an Instakill. Chance goes up if the player dc is increased, or if the mob is debuffed. Tweak the values accordingly (mini bosses have better saves than epic warded mobs), but make death spells have some chance of succeeding, yet don’t make Wail any more of a great spell than mass hold…just give some different approaches.
• Make vorpal strikes vs epic ward proc an Energy Drain type level drain. Instakill on vorpal would be too powerful, but level draining would at least give some benefit. This would help Assassins who’s primary benefit of their 3rd tier PrE is wiped out by Epic ward.
• Give certain mobs the ability to cast FOM (or something similar) as a short duration buff to their fellow mobs. Make us focus on who to kill first, or make us debuff occassionally, before simply mass holding everything. Same with some type of short duration, removable resistance to being pursuaded/suggested. Again, these should be mob cast not part of an immunity, so we can take out the mob casting it or debuff it.
• Reduce (not eliminate) the epic mobs resistance to stat damage. They should still be resistant, but make it at least somewhat of a strategy to debuff a stat on them.
• Reduce the to-hit values of the mobs. Make AC much more viable in Epic. The latest changes did not do enough to help.

I think something along the lines of the above would keep the challenge level the same, add some varying strategies, and in general make things more interesting.

[Scraap]

I imagine Xy was referring to P&P 3.5 where Spell resistance applied to -most- spells including damaging ones not the watered down SR we have in DDO

Don't have any 2.5 manuals laying around at present to be absolutely sure, but in earlier revisions at least, wasn't SR self-balanced out by shielding vs damage but also vs helpful effects, or was that just one of our house-rules I'm misremembering?

[*]Reduce the to-hit values of the mobs. Make AC much more viable in Epic. The latest changes did not do enough to help.

Fighters at least get up to +5 to-hit on a flanking attack, so there's code in place to use the notion, but: how badly do you think folks heads would explode if epic mobs had a chance to ignore, say 25-75% dodge AC when flanking in conjunction with lowering the to-hits? That'd bring the utility of actual armor up, as well as shrinking the differences between having some bonuses, vs grinding your life away to have all of them before perceivable utility kicks in...

[terrenceknight1]

I know creatures can willingly lower their SR to allow beneficial spells pass through but If memory serves me correct they have to spend a round to drop their defenses which automatically come back up once they stop concentrating.

If someone has a book handy and could confirm/deny that would be great.

[sephiroth1084]

One suggestion/thought I've made before, that I'll repeat here since this thread is getting some dev attention, is that bosses can get some sort of ability that triggers when they are subjected to certain effects.

The one example of this that I really like would be for bosses to become susceptible to being tripped, but the impact from their hitting the ground causes a shockwave that deals damage and can itself knock down anyone around the boss. This would give some characters more options as well as giving us all more decisions for these encounters. Do we knock the boss down, avoiding its damaging attacks for a little while, but risking losing a lot of our own DPS as well, possibly even ending up with the boss back up, but most of the melees down.

Stunning a boss could bring some of his minions into play, who rush to the aid of their master. Sure, he'd be auto-crit for a short time, but the group would suddenly have to deal with other significant threats.

[BurningDownTheHouse]

A lot of good suggestions

Great ideas bro.

Except maybe this:

• Increase mob AC in general. Make to-hit values more a build focus than just pure damage values.

I've seen your rogue in action man. You don't want ac to be any higher (a nice wide barn with soft walls should be about right).

[Deathseeker]

I've seen your rogue in action man. You don't want ac to be any higher (a nice wide barn with soft walls should be about right).

You're just jealous because you made those now unstylish Red Scale armors, while my combination of bunny hat and epic vulkoorim fighting leathers is the new hot trendy look that all the fashion world is in awe of

And even on my rogue, I'd rather feel forced to have to destruct, dex damage, hope for caster debuffs, etc than not have to worry about it. The net result of lower mob HP but higher mob AC should make things actually die faster IF we apply better tactics/knowledge. But if not, then yeah, it might be harder.

Faster kills is a good reward for better tactics/knowledge.

[MrkGrismer]

I know creatures can willingly lower their SR to allow beneficial spells pass through but If memory serves me correct they have to spend a round to drop their defenses which automatically come back up once they stop concentrating.

If someone has a book handy and could confirm/deny that would be great.

In 3.5 it is a standard action to lower spell resistance.

[Jarlaxis]

Perhaps as an interim fix until MadFloyd and Eladrin can do their sweep.

Make Mordenkainens Disjunction useful.

i.e. works on bosses and epic mobs by doing what the description says. Suppression of wards/buffs based on spell DC as to how strong of a suppressive effect it has.

[Chai]

We don't? :/

Guess all those SP potions; recalling to taverns for regen; and the upcoming Spellsinger II SP regen ability were just a dream.


(should I mention scrolls too?)

Yeah ok, add the words free and reliable to my statement. We dont have FREE or RELIABLE mana regen. I dont think we can compare guzzling 100k gp mana pots 6 or 7 at a time to standing there doing nothing and regenerating mana in a different MMO.

Recalling to taverns in raids? LOL.

Spellsinger mana regen will be great, but it will still be limited. In games that have long raid encounters, mana regens, and the regen rate can be buffed. DDO is just starting to get into reliable mana regen after almost 5 years.

[Jarlaxis]

Rampant immunities bad!

Recalling to taverns in raids? LOL.

Ever run VON 5/6 on elite before your SP bar got a freebie refill from zoning into part 6? Or before SP pots were just a click away and they were actually rare drops?
This is only a single example.

[NuclearCoffee]

Totaly signed