Monster Champion Feedback

[Cordovan]

UPDATE 12/16/14: We have reduced the number of Monster Champions that spawn, and also reduced the overall damage boost Champions get. The numbers are now:

• Hard normal monsters: The percentage chance for a Champion to spawn has been reduced from 12% to 6%.
• Elite normal monsters: The percentage chance for a Champion to spawn has been reduced from 12% to 9%.
• Hard Orange named monsters (mini-bosses) is now 33%.
• Elite Orange named monsters (mini-bosses) is now 66%.
• Champion Damage boost: Reduced by 25%.

Original Post: Now that Update 24 is out, and clearly there's a lot of community interest in discussing the new Monster Champion system, we thought it would be a good idea to consolidate the large number of threads on this topic into an official thread. Please run some quests, give it a bit of time, and provide us with your feedback on the Monster Champion system.

We have seen a lot of feedback that appears to be tilted toward Terminal Delerium in particular. It should be noted that Terminal Delerium is an Extreme Challenge dungeon, so particularly if you are running it on Epic Elite, it may not be the best quest to singularly evaluate Monster Champions on. That said, we do appreciate all of your feedback on this topic, regardless of what quest(s) are being used to evaluate the system.

Thanks!

[DarthCaedus]

I am going to role-play in Neverwinter over the winter break instead of working on past lifes. I don't mind a difficulty ramp up, but getting one-shotted with 1000 hp isn't something I consider a challenge. This wasn't in Terminal Delirium.

I understand you want to encourage grouping, but certain times of day grouping is non-existant so I try to solo a few quests. Getting one-shotted with great gear, past lifes, etc. just sucks time out of my schedule because I need to release, get my hp and sp back and make my way to the quest.

I don't think the difficulty increase is that big of a deal except the one-shotting. That shouldn't happen even on EE except in raids.

[ddo.rsmo.pt]

On EE Palace of Stone, me (Pally S&B) and Sorc friend only had troubles when the random encounters had 3+ Champions. Most have the Quad Damage (or whatever) perk, which deal around 750-800 damage (tested with 200 PRR = 66% damage mitigation). This means one-strike on less prepared players, but giving the EE difficulty and that they're Champions, seems fair.


I feed that, given the cluster of monsters this particular quest had (seems the norm nowadays), 2 Champions per encounter should be the maximum, also to avoid trivializing Champions. Otherwise, I'm sure we'll see a new difficulty soon called "Epic Nightmare" where all monsters are Champions.


Suggestion: Although giving a chest per Champion would just be stupid, I would see fitting that Champions could give some bonus, some examples:
- Count double towards the conquest counter
- Each 5 Champions killed would increase the End Loot +1 (capped at +2)
- Each 5 Champions killed would increase the chance for named loot


Although not perfect, this mechanic seems OK, obviously based off Diablo.


P.S: I'm getting the feeling people are reporting that on EH they get a chest for each Champion...? Is this right? 'Cause on Epic Elite, we didn't get any chests, only 3 chest from Palace of Stone (2 from Optionals (which also were Champions), and 1 from End Quest).
P.S2: If Orange names already give chest (most of the quest, anyway), there's no benefit.
P.S3: Reposting here, since the other thread was nuked.


Carry on.

[Weyborn]

Now that Update 24 is out, and clearly there's a lot of community interest in discussing the new Monster Champion system, we thought it would be a good idea to consolidate the large number of threads on this topic into an official thread. Please run some quests, give it a bit of time, and provide us with your feedback on the Monster Champion system.

We have seen a lot of feedback that appears to be tilted toward Terminal Delerium in particular. It should be noted that Terminal Delerium is an Extreme Challenge dungeon, so particularly if you are running it on Epic Elite, it may not be the best quest to singularly evaluate Monster Champions on. That said, we do appreciate all of your feedback on this topic, regardless of what quest(s) are being used to evaluate the system.

Thanks!

I think the difficulty level is perfect - EE has some challenge to it

don't change anything aside from maybe adding a token xp bump when you kill one

for those that cant handle it find a group to play with and work together

[Lonnbeimnech]

No longer sleep walking through EE, this actually introduced some challenge to the game and reminded me of what it was like when I first started the game, fun.

Love it!



edit: 1 thing, I would like it if the crown over their head was a little more prominent, or if it was easier to identify in some other way (slightly larger, maybe have their name actually include the word champion, bold text for the name, something). It can be difficult to locate which one of the mobs just hit for 800 damage when all 6 look identical.

[Panzermeyer]

Overall I don't mind the Champions. I like the idea.

However something needs to be tweaked, I was in a group in Terminal Delirium, only on EH though.

In the fight on the other side of the mirrors, absolutely mass mobbed challenging fight I have no problems with that. There was persistent earthquake and Ice Storm going on.

I have 215% Fort full health over 700hp, 93 PRR which should be over 40% damage mitigation, shield blocking with 30DR/- and I was one shot by a gargoyle (champion I assume) for 1256hp of damage. There is something nor right about that.

That makes it clear to me to play a melee at my own risk.

But even as a caster, there was no where to run in the room. This is a bit extreme with very little in the way of solutions.

One hit from a regular mob, champion or not, it's a gargoyle. 1200 points of damage?

[JOTMON]

1. Terminal Delirium is the primary problem.
(Combat): Greater Beholder hit you for a total of 6,059 points of slash damage after 5 were blocked by Good damage reduction.
(Combat): Xorian Gargoyle hit you for a total of 4,188 points of slash damage after 5 were blocked by Good damage reduction.
(Combat): Xorian Gargoyle hit you for a total of 2,192 points of slash damage after 5 were blocked by Good damage reduction
This one is just a rezfest.. we ended up just releasing and repairing and reloading mana on every death.. probably 10 re-enries eah and 20ish deaths each
The Mirror room is just bs trash 14 mindflayers spamming brain drain .. some crowned.. (I was immune to a lot of it as a PM, but the rest of the party was screwed here), lots of crowned mobs here one shotting for 2k+ each..
a tank is of no use here, one shot dead, rez, oneshot dead, rez, oneshot dead.. release...repair regen, clear death penalties, re-enter..repeat...


2.Mask of Deception.
Disappearing crowned assasins that take no aoe damage and appear behind you do a thousand+ points of damage and disappear again becoming immune to all aoe /dot damage.
fortunately my PK guard killed him as I was spam rezzing at the shrine plinking him for trival damage every time he zoned in to attack before disappearing again. . I had 13 deaths on one crown assassin.
None of the above is from crit damage.. I have 250%+ fort on my Necro caster and 1k hp and regularly solo/party all endgame EE content without this kind of issue.
Besides the annoying crown assassins and the extended range of the dragon breath spamming casters this one was the best of the 4 as new content goes... still no loot desirable loot of any worth.

3. Fashion madness
Last fight with the Red named Beholder was on super steroid haste.. spamming spell attacks
I was constantly stoned the entire fight.. the Behodler just spammed flesh to stone, and a bunch of stuff I was immune to on my PM.. death death, rez rez, death death, rez rez done.
Champions would just wander around oneshotting stoned party members.
BTW locks people out of the room if you didn't get in, door does not reopen until the beholder dies..
used my jibbers blade at the end since we were all dead at one point in the room and others (recalled to repair) were locked outside of the room with no way to get back in.. so no rez release repeat on this one.
Loot.. meh...



I am fine with the concept of Crown mobs and more difficulty, I welcome it.
I do not however have any interest in 10% of the trash mobs being able to 1shot kill a player on a single swing.
Normally a death would involve bad timing on heals, cast a rez, or running to a shrine and rezzing or the occasional cake...
after running some of the new content, it became a screw this, I am not drinking pots and eating cakes for trash mobs. release repair reload mana and reenter as many times as it takes.

If this is the mechanic we end up having to resort to I just wont run EE content anymore. except once and done for favor.
I am sure the devs didn't design new content to have it run once for favor and ignored forevermore.
or have everyone skip harder difficulties because there are too many pita crown mobs..
the reward does not=the time & resources.

[bsquishwizzy]

My limited exposure to them, here's my thoughts:

There is a spawn-rate problem. They seemed to spawn in every group of 4 or more mobs. If you're going to make something like this, you should have a drop rate of about 1 to 20 mobs.

That and the fact that people are soiling themselves that they no longer cannot solo EE with stacks and stacks of cake and pots makes me think they are just about PERFECT!!!!

Keep it up!

[ddo.rsmo.pt]

I don't think the difficulty increase is that big of a deal except the one-shotting. That shouldn't happen even on EE except in raids.

My mule level 5 dwarf has 40% damage mitigation, using Korthos equipment.

If you go into EE quests, and you're taking 1000 damage, I would say you have 0 PRR, and you probably haven't being paying attention to the evolution to the game in the past several updates (hardly ramp up).

Having said that, the Champions do pack a punch, but the only problem I found was that there are too many at time, in just one group.

Carry on.

Disclaimer: I had only time to play one quest (Palace of Stone) and it seems that I may have picked the softer one. If people are reporting "over 9000" damage, then yeah, that's a bit too much :P

[Panzermeyer]

Suggestion: Although giving a chest per Champion would just be stupid, I would see fitting that Champions could give some bonus, some examples:
- Count double towards the conquest counter
- Each 5 Champions killed would increase the End Loot +1 (capped at +2)
- Each 5 Champions killed would increase the chance for named loot


Although not perfect, this mechanic seems OK, obviously based off Diablo.


P.S: I'm getting the feeling people are reporting that on EH they get a chest for each Champion...? Is this right? 'Cause on Epic Elite, we didn't get any chests, only 3 chest from Palace of Stone (2 from Optionals (which also were Champions), and 1 from End Quest).
P.S2: If Orange names already give chest (most of the quest, anyway), there's no benefit.
P.S3: Reposting here, since the other thread was nuked.


Carry on.

Chests seem to only come with red/oranged named champions.

I have run into a lot of champions now with no chests.
Last nite ran EH Palace of Stone and the named Stone Pile was a champion and produced an extra chest (whereas it was not and did not eariler in the day)
This morning ran an EE Lords of Dust and two of the red named Rhakshasa's were champions and both spawned extra chests. No other champions have spawned chests for me yet.

[cave_diver]

Love it! Don't change a thing.

Ran all the quests yesterday on EE + EE Haunted Halls, sure a few times some members died but over all love the champions......don't cave in to the charlie casuals there are lower difficulty settings the can choose

[barecm]

Champions are a great addition to the game. I think this game has gotten way too easy lately. I do think they should only appear on Elite (Epic and Heroic) and Hard (Epic and Heroic), but not on normal or casual.

In order to make this more appealing, they should give a small amount of XP as well as a chest with a small chance of dropping named items (if the quest has them) and/or level appropriate unbound ingredients for random crafting systems. Greensteel, alchemical, thunderforged etc...

[SiliconScout]

I think that by and large Champions (in my limited experience granted) are fine more or less as is. I do have some recommendations, more like minor tweaks, though.

1. I have not seen a single Champ drop a chest yet. Not one, given the couple of dozen fought that doesn't make a lot of sense. Their Chests should have a higher drop rate.
2. The sometimes spawn on plot NPC's. Not that it matters really when they can't be killed anyway however it suggests the code is a little sloppy which brings me to ...
3. Their spawn should have some sort of cool down. Granted it's not common but it's not unusual to walk into a group that has 1 or 2 champs. My personal record is 4. At that point you start wondering if they aren't "normal" and the other mobs are actually gimps. The code could use a cool-down timer that say only allows a champ to spawn at maximum once every 6 or 10 seconds say. This would still allow for the occasional battle with 2+ champs but at least if the group (or solo player) takes it slow and steady they really shouldn't have to deal with more than one at a time.

On the whole I think it's a great change. I remember pre-MOTU when it took serious effort to build a toon that could run "EPIC", in a group, without getting planted. Especially if you weren't going to win/buy your heart but were running the EPIC's to get your tokens. It was BRUTAL and it was amazing fun. I remember my first toon that could sorta complete in a group with only a few deaths and finally earning his TR heart and it felt like an amazing accomplishment. Hell back then the number of people who could reliably solo EPICS (and not just the "easy" ones) could probably be counted on two hands for any given server.

This is NO WHERE near a return to those days, but it is a nice baby step back towards them. More difficulty will bring more enjoyable playing. I mean really who remembers that 247th run of Impossible Demands that wants smooth as clockwork? Nobody. Now who remembers that Shroud that was so close to a party wipe but managed to have one or two guys get just a little lucky and pull the run out of the fire? Everyone... every single person in that run does. ALL of the most fun times I have had from a questing perspective have been those messy, dirty, "what the hell is going on" type of runs. And in the old days many of those ended in wipes. You know what we did? We decided that we needed a "trapper" or a "Healer" or a different difficulty OR we sold, repaired, restocked and charged right back in to show that damned quest who's boss.

Today accomplishments are measured in "past lives" but it wasn't always so, they used to be measured in quest completions. That feeling you get when you finally finish off that 3rd Bard life, yeah we used to be able to get that feeling a couple times a night depending on the content we were running.

I greatly miss those moments as they are so very very rare now, with Champions we squeak a little more back to when it felt like you accomplished something by completing the quest.

[jalont]

I like the change, and if anything, I don't think it goes far enough. Most of the champions aren't any different than a regular mob for all intents and purposes. The chance of getting one shotted is so small that people will still be easily soloing EEs, and they add no chance of failure for an EE group.

[Archangel666]

Disclaimer: I had only time to play one quest (Palace of Stone) and it seems that I may have picked the softer one. If people are reporting "over 9000" damage, then yeah, that's a bit too much :P

I don't know about 9000, that's more of a meme thing, but I do know that there have been reports of 6000 damage. Nobody can survive that.

Personally I don't see a random dice roll picking a player at random and basically saying "You get to die this time" as being either fun or a challenge.

To me getting one-shotted should only ever happen in Raids and should come with a very clear tell so that people can move out of the way and even then should be rare, rather than a norm.

In a quest though, where a Champ spawns at you and may or may not have this damage boost, the only tell you get is when it swings at you and suddenly you're dead. You don't have time to examine every champ that spawns when there are a couple of them and other mobs also.

[Thlargir]

...provide us with your feedback on the Monster Champion system.

Party of 2: multi-TR fairly well equiped WF arty, and first life WF Barbarian, no hires.
Quests: Heroic elite L8 and L9 at level, Xorian Cipher, Vault of Night series, etc.

First thing we noticed was that the spawn rate was much higher than 10%, more like 30%. The chest drop rate seemed all over the place - the quori stalker ambush in the Prisoner produced 5 chests (do they count as orange named?) whereas many encounters with multiple champions produced nothing.

We also noticed that many spawns seemed to spawn with their original hit points (i.e. their HP bars were at 30% as they spawned).

The biggest thing was how hard some of them hit. Both our characters have approaching 400hp and yet we still suffered a couple deaths before we figured out the potential danger and adjusted. Lesser equipped, poorly balanced groups will find them pretty tough if they have bad luck with the spawn dice - perhaps limit them to one champion per encounter?

TL;DR version
Zerg temporarily slowed, backbacks filled faster.

[Cleanincubus]

Heroic Elite - The Mask of Deception.

I was running it on my level 26 Drow Pale Master for Favor. Before I grabbed the mask, I ran into a mob with a few Champions, but specifically a level 23 Dragonwing Sorcerer. I was hit with 1,157 cold damage (-30 from Resist Cold spell), and died instantly. Seemed a little excessive for a level 18 quest (on Elite).

[dualscissors]

As a comparison in play experiences, the old school fantasy rpgs started you out at level 1 and didn't give you extra hit points. So when you were level 1 or 2 (or lvl 3 if you were a d4 HP class), you had single digit or barely double digit HPs. Anytime you got in a fight with, say, meek archer kobolds or a lowly brigand with a longsword, it was only a matter of time before you'd get dropped due to an max dmg hit or a crit against you.

I would argue this wasn't a particularly fun feature in the evolution of fantasy games - death by inevitable bad luck, not because of poor play.

The reports I'm hearing of Champions packing 1-hit-kill punches sounds a lot like the old save-before-you-die games.

[Kaytis]

I spent years getting my toon to the level of power she is at. She has 2 TRs and 15 ERs. Epic hard was my difficulty level of choice. Overnight, I am getting ganked in EH quests. When running solo I have no possibility of recovery (I won't buy cakes). I had just started doing Epic Elites with a friend and was quite enjoying them. But that is off the table now.

This is how it should have been done: Champions should only have appeared either as an option, or as a new level of difficulty. Champions should have been worth extra xp and renown. A set and generous amount. Killing 30 champions in a quest should be 30,000 extra xp and 2000 guild reknown. XP and guild renown are the only true incentives left in this game and people would have stepped up.

Instead, you have taken away people's perceived level of ability, without any increase in reward (I stop looting chests when my inventory is full as it is). I think you have made a huge mistake. I can't emphasize that enough. You are going to lose accounts. It may be temporarily satisfying to say "ha ha, look how upset everyone is", but this is going to affect your job status down the road, and that won't be quite as satisfying.

You have different audiences to cater to. Some are very vocal on the forums. But there are many many quiet ones who are not. Sure everyone pays the bills, but when a sizeable measure of everyone gets frustrated and leaves it's going to hurt. Be very very careful how you handle this.

[Vargouille]

Oh and True Seeing and Deathward on champions... that just eliminates a lot of the tactical options (stealth play, to start with - all the way through) outright. I thought the point was to increase the tactical variety and not decrease it? And that's not getting into what it does for the characters who rely in displacement and such.

Now, if the champions did NOT universally have True Seeing and if Assassinate and such worked on them, that would be different...

Monster Champions only have a chance to have True Seeing and/or Deathward. Some Champions won't have either one. We certainly expect players to use instant kill abilities on many Champions.

The exact chances to have True Seeing and Deathward are, of course, subject to change. We didn't want these to be very low, as that also reduces the tactical variety that's used -- not every champion should be instant killed or entirely invis-zerged past.

A quest of 400 mobs will have 40 champions. It seems like the % is more like 25%.

This sounds like confirmation that the current percentage is probably working correctly. If you felt there were 40 out of 400 normal monsters (plus extra for the higher chance for orange named minibosses), that's precisely 10%, which is only slightly higher than the intended amount.

What warning for new players is given? new player steps into pug on ee... instasplat in harbor...

We don't expect brand new players to be playing Heroic Elite most of the time.

Stealth is useless everything has true seeing. Assassins are useless. other rogue tactics close behind.

Stealth is unaffected by True Seeing.

why didn't you give them defensive buffs. displacement. haste, and etc other noramal buffs that players would have at that level.

Each of the buffs listed here is already in the list of the possibilities. We agree!