Air Elementals

[Gram]

Air elementals are once again stupid and unfun. Try Fleshmaker's end room with just a few melee types. Even after dropping the swarm of air elementals' constitutions to zero to negate 95% of the knockdowns, the constant no resist check/no ability check/no skill check toss they perform makes activating the runes incredibly difficult.

My crazy suggestion would be to change them to something more along the lines of this:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/e...m#airElemental

[somenewnoob]

http://ddowiki.com/page/Renard%27s_Elegant_Hat

Picked one of those up last night, mighty good timing for it!

[Musouka]

http://ddowiki.com/page/Renard%27s_Elegant_Hat

Picked one of those up last night, mighty good timing for it!

Yes... a level 18 item that will be great for all that stuff on the way up to 18. </sarcasm>

[Xenostrata]

Air elementals are once again stupid and unfun. Try Fleshmaker's end room with just a few melee types. Even after dropping the swarm of air elementals' constitutions to zero to negate 95% of the knockdowns, the constant no resist check/no ability check/no skill check toss they perform makes activating the runes incredibly difficult.

My crazy suggestion would be to change them to something more along the lines of this:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/e...m#airElemental

This is what Djinnis do on occasion, so we know it's feasible code-wise.

/signed.

[Cyr]

Nod, always did hate the old school air elementals. Dumb design for a mob that basically created an incredibly annoying mob with no real purpose.

I was thrilled when they nerfed them into the ground. Basically made them pointless, but it was a thousand times better then the just annoying BS they were before and are again.

[Sarisa]

Update 11's raid boss changes made Reaver's Fate run far less, but people who still needed stuff out of there could still occasionally find groups to run.

Update 11.1's change to Air Elementals basically made the raid too annoying to ever want to run again.

I've seen a grand total of ONE group for Reaver's Fate since the patch, and one of my friends that ran it said it was totally not worth running anymore. Nobody, not even the raged out 60+ STR Barbarian tank could remain standing for very long. Healers and Casters were both pretty much out of commission the whole raid. Due to the Air Eles aggro being too uncontrollable, they could not even be kited away by ranged characters and dealt with that way.

They're way worse now than before because they now have the Gust of Wind spell. That spell alone makes them incredibly hard to CC, and anyone attempting to melee them attacks slower on the few hits they can get before being tossed again.

Challenge is good. Challenge with added reward is better. "Challenge" based on annoyance is not good, and that's what the change to Air Elementals has turned Reaver's Fate into.

[Jaid314]

with some cc, it becomes a lot easier. throw a dance on them if you can, it tends to last quite a while, or a bard fascinate is good for keeping them from attacking (though not so useful for killing them). bring along an arcane for charm or instakill, that can help too.

some mobs are harder for certain character types than others. that's just how it is. i assure you, my casters all wish arcane oozes were easier to deal with for me, and hates stuff with high SR/saves/both that my melee characters can basically just destroy with ease.

[Sarisa]

with some cc, it becomes a lot easier. throw a dance on them if you can, it tends to last quite a while, or a bard fascinate is good for keeping them from attacking (though not so useful for killing them). bring along an arcane for charm or instakill, that can help too.

Reaver's Fate Air Elementals are oranged named, and thus immune to all bard song.

Gust of Wind makes it so that you won't be able to keep a Dancing Ball around for very long, along with slowing any melee trying to hit them between knockdowns.

[Battery]

if the devs don't want the to be too easy and the alternative is to make them incredibly unfun just remove them and replace with something else or make the save a balance check. It's ridiculous my monk with over 60 balance is on his back more often than against them

[Musouka]

I was on my level 9 stalwart fighter in the Desert wilderness today. I went to the area with a few Air Elementals on the undead side and couldn't stand up long enough to matter. Even had a level 10 monk there helping me. We both have GOOD STR scores too. Both of us were just getting tossed around like a leaf in the wind.

[sephiroth1084]

The air elementals should be changed to not cause knockback automatically, to allow a REFLEX save vs. knockdown with a reasonable DC for their level and the knockdown should be a knockDOWN, not a knock20feetoverthere.

Adding Gust of Wind already made them more formidable and rather annoying. Now we've got a monster that blows out all persistent AoE effects, whether DoTs or CC (how does a wind blow out an enchantment, anyway?), and the old pinball-spamming guys that no one liked before.


I was running around in the desert earlier on my rogue and encountered one of the air eles there. Nearly died because I could not stay in one spot long enough to kill anything--the 2 gnoll archers and single caster that came over to investigate all the noise from me being tossed around by the ele just sat back shooting me, while I was unable to either kill them or the elemental. Tried using a paralyzing weapon, but I couldn't get more than a swing or two off on anything before I got knocked back several feet, even when making my Str/Dex check. That isn't fun.

[Diyon]

I'm going to disagree here. I'm GLAD the air elementals got unnerfed. For one thing, their throw you around ability isn't as bad as it used to be before the nerf. After the nerf, they became boring and a joke.

Reaver's Fate isn't an utter pikefest anymore, that's a good thing. It's actually fun.

I like having some monsters, that when they appear, your response is "Oh ****! It's an *insert monster here*!"

Also, someone said there are no checks/saves/etc versus it, but I clearly saw my checks and saves being rolled in Reaver's. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have them make sure it's working properly.

That being said, I put on my Renard's hat in elite reaver's fate, and all though I clearly saw myself being effected by the air ele's (being thrown, saves, failed saves/checks, etc), the whirlwind absorption never worked, it stayed at 25 charges the entire time. So, at the very least, THAT needs to be fixed, possibly with the lower level items that have the ability too.

So thank you devs, for making air elementals scary again rather than the joke they had become. But please also make sure everything working right, and fix what isn't here.

[Vellrad]

I think this change is to make soloing reaver not possible at all.
Completly stupid.

[Musouka]

I'm going to disagree here. I'm GLAD the air elementals got unnerfed. For one thing, their throw you around ability isn't as bad as it used to be before the nerf. After the nerf, they became boring and a joke.

Reaver's Fate isn't an utter pikefest anymore, that's a good thing. It's actually fun.

I like having some monsters, that when they appear, your response is "Oh ****! It's an *insert monster here*!"

Also, someone said there are no checks/saves/etc versus it, but I clearly saw my checks and saves being rolled in Reaver's. Still, it wouldn't hurt to have them make sure it's working properly.

That being said, I put on my Renard's hat in elite reaver's fate, and all though I clearly saw myself being effected by the air ele's (being thrown, saves, failed saves/checks, etc), the whirlwind absorption never worked, it stayed at 25 charges the entire time. So, at the very least, THAT needs to be fixed, possibly with the lower level items that have the ability too.

So thank you devs, for making air elementals scary again rather than the joke they had become. But please also make sure everything working right, and fix what isn't here.

Those saves you saw were knockdown saves... you still get tossed regardless.

And nice, another post about a level 14 (16 elite) raid using a level 18 item? Even if it did work, that's not adding any balance to the issue at hand.

[Xenostrata]

I think this change is to make soloing reaver not possible at all.
Completly stupid.

Considering the only way to solo would be to DoT and kite, I think it's only effect was to make soloing reaver on a non-CASTER impossible, which is even more completely stupid.

Make Knockdown take a balance check as a save.
Make the knockdown effect only proc open encountering the air elemental, not continue to proc while occupying the same space OR have the air elemental enter a "Whirlwind" state that grants complete knockdown ability for ~20 seconds, but can only go off every ~2 minutes.

[Vellrad]

Considering the only way to solo would be to DoT and kite, I think it's only effect was to make soloing reaver on a non-CASTER impossible, which is even more completely stupid.

Make Knockdown take a balance check as a save.
Make the knockdown effect only proc open encountering the air elemental, not continue to proc while occupying the same space OR have the air elemental enter a "Whirlwind" state that grants complete knockdown ability for ~20 seconds, but can only go off every ~2 minutes.

I mean eles at puzzles.
As you can't kite them alone with dots, because there is million of them, they respawn, blow up all things like disco balls and ice storms etc.

[Diyon]

Those saves you saw were knockdown saves... you still get tossed regardless.

And nice, another post about a level 14 (16 elite) raid using a level 18 item? Even if it did work, that's not adding any balance to the issue at hand.

The tossing should probably have a save or some sort of check (but I still think it should be hard), it could be that they are supposed to have one but its bugged out.

As to using the hat in reaver's, come on, please. I didn't remotely suggest wear that hat to counter the ele's in reaver's. I was just pointing that the hat wasn't working, and it should. I just happened to be running Reaver's Fate at the time I tried it and saw that it didn't work. I mentioned it was there because it could be possible the hat works fine elsewhere, since I haven't checked, I didn't want to generalize that. In any case something is wrong with the hat and/or the air elementals in regards to that ability.

[Shade]

meh.

Yet another suggestion of

I CANT BEAT X QUEST THUS THERE MUST BE A PROBLEM

What you need to ask yourself is:
Are you really that good?


I ran this quest at lvl14 on elite the othey day, 4 melee, 2 casters. Casters didnt kill the elems or do anything to them. Sure we got knocked off a few times - thats the intended design. But otherwise after a bit of positioning strategy we had no issues.

So really... Really.

If your gona post a suggestion in the suggestions forum:
Include an actual suggestion. Linking a pen and paper reference page that the devs have obviously already read is not one.

Just "X is too hard" is not a useful post. It's a video game, its meant to be a challenge.

[Diyon]

I'm going to disagree here. I'm GLAD the air elementals got unnerfed. For one thing...[snip]

Yay negative for my opinion that air elementals should be hard and I like that they aren't what they were!

Either that or for saying the hat needs to be fixed? Idk. Oh well

[Cyr]

Just "X is too hard" is not a useful post. It's a video game, its meant to be a challenge.

The same could be said about posts that amount to "X is too easy" or "You must be too gimpy".

Any game of any complexity should have a different levels of challenges within it. There are very good arguments to be made about having easier low level content then higher level content after all. There are also excellent arguments to be made about the value of having some end game content that is incredible difficult.

It is silly to think that one extreme should be applied to the entire game or sub-section of the game though.