Monster Champion Feedback

[Nestroy]

Generally I like the idea with the champions, but... Here some notices free from my mind:

Ran several EH quests yesterday. Seems every 3rd mob now has Champion. Palace of Stone - a mob of 15 animated rocks, and 5 of them Champion?! EH hits on my melee tank were ok, just about 100-200 dmg from the champs - far away from the reported 1000 dmg oneshotting all but the best HP builds. This at about 200 PRR and about 150 AC.

I just happened to kill about total 200-250 champions w/o getting one single chest. I know, this is random, but - WAI?!

On EH wading thru legions of champions still was no big deal. Just some inflation of HP and I emptied my mana pool somewhat faster. Only thing stinking me big time has been the fact that both mobs and champions increased big time in both power and quantity on EH when adding more party members. This also holds true for the one EE quest I tested (lots of champions in The Snitch too) and the HE quests I ran yesterday after the servers went back up. Not funny to get a big time scaling on champion quantities and powers with MORE members - I always thought the champions were supposed to increase group play but currently even deter me further from picking up group members, except for selected players I know that know their trades.


My suggestions to the Devs:

1.) Finetune the ammount of champions. Running quests with about 1/3rd of mobs (!) being champions is just plain ridiculous. 1/10th or 1/8th of total mobs sounds about right. Even better would be a mechanic where different mob types have different chances to spawn champions. But this certainly would be too expensive to code, I suppose. Sometimes the champion mechanic is lacking reason. Animated Rocks spawn Champions?
2.) Tune up the chest droprates. I expect getting some reward for killing legions of champions. At least make them champions drop guild renown. I do not expect a chest for each and every champion. But about 250 of them and no chest?
3.) Tune down scaling for champions. We are supposed to fear them on soloing, but we should be able to break thru their ranks on large groups.

[hit_fido]

I happen to be running my fighter currently. He was doing fine stunning and/or tripping most champions he ran across, no kiting or range attacks needed.

This is very good news. Personally I feel encouraged to add another dimension or two re: CC to my play style like the good old days instead of just relying on dps/aoe.

My feedback is from running ~20 low level quests having just TR'd.

I liked this idea when shared on Lamma forum, I still like it, although the implementation isn't what I expected. I expected champions to work something like random encounter orange/red names - maybe seeing 3-4 in an average instance (or more/less depending on quest size) and being scaled up at minimum to orange/red strength with some other interesting twists. The reality is there's almost never been a time in quest where I can't see at least one, if not two/three champions active.

Rate of champion spawn is higher than expected, but I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. If the 'champion characteristics' are scaled better then it may be more fun than my original expectation because of greater variety and more frequent change ups. But if the characteristics remain around the "one shot" magnitude being described by some I'd rather see much fewer spawn per quest.

The "fortification ignore" is the most egregious characteristic to me. If it's ok to bypass *all* fortification, then will it be ok to bypass all deathblock? What about champion caster mobs with "bypass all will saves"? Complete bypass seems wrong. It's also the characteristic that will most encourage the mentality of "all I can do is kite" because the consequence could be getting one shotted - I'd rather see powerful defensive characteristics combined with upgraded (but not one-shot territory) offense that give players time to understand the challenge posed by the champion then adapt.

Saw a non champion ooze split up and produce 3 champion spawns. That seems wrong.

Also prefer a more interesting reward than trash chest. If the only champions dropping them are champion orange named then at least make the chest like +1-2 levels higher than normal. Champion mob should drop champion chest.

Well it will be nigh impossible to design a system that pleases everyone but for my part as a more casual player, it's a good change, could be better, hopefully some tweaks will make it more fun for more players.

[jalont]

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.

While I have your attention... perhaps there wouldn't be so much confusion here if practically every mob in the game didn't have the little deathblock item cast over their head, even when they aren't warded. It's easy to see this casting when they initially aggro and assume that they have deathblock, even though the vast majority don't. Time to fix this perhaps?

[Blackheartox]

As said in other thread, the ammount of damage sufferd from delirium is not the effect of champion monster damage but from debuffs provided by enviorment so when people bring that damage up it is unrealistical ammount and doesnt provide proper feedback.
Now that thats it out of the way, i have a marginaly larger sample on ee and elite questing and my encounter with champion monsters can be put into 2 words: "GOOD JOB".

You guys have hit the jackpot with this change, you have made quests and every encounter different from the previous one and thus gave fresh air to ddo.
Just the thing it lacked, as now elite and epic elite feel just the right way.
My only issues with champ monsters are:

1. I havent seen a single champ monster immune to cc, is that intentional?
2. Chest in air spawns, kinda annoying.


But overall this is a wonderful idea and i sincerely hope you wont cut the champ monster spawn rate, and if you do dont cut it to much since ddo is extremely fun with this change

[Seikojin]

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.

In what I have seen, the champions force targeted combat and group tactics. They are like minibosses, can come in packs, and can work together to tear a party up.

I can see where their spawn rate can be buggy at 10%. Especially knowing how randomness in ddo works. If the trigger to call the spawn of a champ gets hung, the handle will get a duplicate respoinse of yes and spawn more champs instead of timing out and locking the game up.

Personally though, I am fine with it. It is on hard and elite difficulties only, so it does not prevent anyone from completing the game. It just makes hard a bit harder and elite a bit eliter.

When I ran eh flesh solo, I did fine up to a point where there were 4 champs in a cluster. I re-entered and was able to take them down, one at a time. This was on a non-evasion heavy armor fighter dual wielding scimis. The damage I took was high, but I was expecting that and drank plenty of pots between or popped a heal scroll if it was getting too hot while fighting.

[Tilomere]

In TD groups of 8+ caster mobs with 3 champions were stacking 3-5+ burning bloods in the first second of combat. For those of you unfamiliar with arcane spells, burning blood does an initial tick of acid and fire damage, followed by five more equal ticks of damage.

There is no save, no spell resist, no interrupting, and no avoiding the spell, as it is instantly directly applied to your character.

In heroic, the ticks after MRR from normal casters were around 160 combined fire and acid or slightly under a thousand over time. The champion caster mobs after MRR were double, at 320, or slightly under 2000 damage over time. Getting hit with say 5 heroic burning bloods in the first second of combat due to being within range of several casters due to either being in a room with 20+ of them or floating up to a platform of 8 of them from a mixture of champions and regular mobs would apply 800-1600 upfront and 4,000-8,000 additional damage over time after MRR.

For a heroic level dungeon, I'll just say interesting and leave it at that.

[axel15810]

Overall this is a great change. Excellent, kudos devs. This is a huge improvement. However, there needs to be a few tweaks:

- We need more buff diversity. There seem to be only a handful.

- We need a better way to find out what buffs champions have other than individually selecting them and inspecting them with the examine button. This is not feasible to do in fast paced combat. Perhaps you could make the crowns a different color depending on the buffs they have? Or perhaps ditch the crowns and put the buff symbols on their heads?

- The spawn rate seems a bit high. Seems like most encounters have at least one or two champions.

- You need to make sure the quest rewards are kept up to scale with the increased difficulty changes. Both XP and loot. I'm afraid that like raids, running all quests on epic normal will become the new standard across all the servers. If the XP/minute is vastly better on epic normal, I can easily see epic elite and epic hard being ignored.

- Please make the champions visually more prominent. Some kind of glowing animation or color around the monsters' bodies would be best. The actual monster itself needs to be easily identified as a champion. The crowns are too small and when mobs are in close proximity to each other it can be hard to spot which are champions.

[Zzevel]

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

This, we had a group of 4 last night doing Elite Von 1-4 (lvs 11, 11, 9, 7) and it was a blast, sure we had deaths but that was the fun of it. We actually HAD DEATHS. Prior to this i think I died <5 times in the last couple months. It slows you down (a bit) but mostly we found the champions as speed bumps. Yeah there were a couple one shouts and once we had 3 hp amongst us (champion w/ chain lightning WEEEEEE!) but for the first time in months (years) we slowed down and actually had a lot of fun and worked together.

Don't change them, deaths are supposed to occur and they give GREAT flavor. (and 3 chests in a group of 6 champions is always a great bonus too)...

[ChicagoChris]

Cordovan -

Champions are so cool! Thanks for making EE hard again, and EH, while not overly difficult, can no longer be phoned in...

Couple of suggestions and comments

I do like the idea of limiting spawn rates in mobs, but I feel that this should:
1) Scale with difficulty settings (which I believe it currently does)
2) Scale with Dungeon Scaling

This would help with small groups not getting completely blind sided, but will encourage larger groups from splitting up so much.

I also think champion kills should get an automatic guild renown reward, and possibly always drop a reward like a scaled up breakable
1) Renown should be in the 50-500 range
2) drop should be something like a level appropriate random lootgen, or plat in the 1000-5000 range (I hate that I can't be bothered to pick up the plat from a barrel - like a penny on the floor)

Some sort of sound notification of champions would be cool - trumpet blast or some such.

Finally (I'm not sure how this would work) champions should inspire their comrades - some sort of Aura that boosts the mobs, encouraging the players to have to concentrate on the champions before killing the mobs.

Overall, definitely a great add to the game.

Congrats!

[bartharok]

I, at least, have had no more trouble stunning champions, than i have stunning the non-chapion critters. Which means that the champions are not a great problem, since i can just run to them and stun them. That way i dont get hit for thousands of damage (not that i have gotten hit for thousands of damage even when i failed to stun them)

[lugoman]

Ran epic hard fleshmakers and about 25% of the trash mobs were champions. They weren't very bad on epic hard and only went below 75% health when there were three or more champions beating me at once. Had three champion chest drops.

[gamblorjb]

Have only been running EH stuff since U24 but I find the champions a nice change of pace. I'd say the % is closer to 15-20% than 10% but I don't mind that.

I find the orange named bosses to be over 50%, in fact, I did unbroken chains and all the slavemasters were champions. They all also dropped chests which all had renown in it, including 2 legendarys.

I would like to see renown earned for every champions killed. Maybe have it based on their CR level. Maybe 1:1, so a CR 25 mob champion would earn you 25 base renown. If it was a 10% chance of champions, on average you would see say 100 total in a quest (I know it varies from 0 to hundreds but example) so 10 champions and an extra 250 renown.

I think you need to get something from the mob champions even if it's renown like above, some sort of currency for trade in (auto get like the token fragments), xp, etc.

Great idea as long as they aren't crazy powerful.

Thanks for rolling out new ideas and asking for feedback.

[gwonbush]

I decided to look at champions more from the perspective of a relatively new player. Rolled up a barbarian at level 4, ran the harbor at h/e. Since Blood Tribute gave me as many temp hp as I could ask for, I was able to get a feel for where the damage totals were at. Defenses were 37 PRR, 30 MRR, 5 resists.

Ordinary kobolds champions were not particularly dangerous, having around 130 hp and hitting for 10 max with a slow attack rate. Kobold champion warriors were worse, doing around 10-18 damage a hit on elite at a faster rate with around 200 hp. They were basically mini Bloodknuckles that sometimes came in packs. What was really nasty were the shamans. Scorching Ray on Hard was hitting me for 34 (45 without defenses). Elite shaman champions were hitting for 55 damage lightning bolts (22 on save, 70 without MRR on failed save) that could hit you twice.

Overall, the worst monster I fought was a shaman champion on a high platform in Hard Hazadil's Warehouse's end room, potshotting me for a total of around 180 damage while I climbed my way to him.

In the end, I decided that the damage from "I hit harder!" is a bit too high and should be scaled back from its current 3x damage (or so it feels like) to 2x damage, at least on hard.

[Krelar]

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.

I only ran 3 quests (2 EH, 1 EE) last night but in my experience every group of 5+ mobs had 1-4 champions in it.

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

Then you are not paying attention to the reality of the game.

Ever since you introduced bravery bonus anyone that wants to run in a group has to run on elite.

Maybe your hope is champions will change this, but that is going to take some time and I suspect many new people will give up and leave before that time comes.

[Garothe]

Just going to reiterate my points from the other thread, than I'm done with this, looks like break time from DDO for me. I'm a 7 heroic tr character, and have never done an epic tr, so I have almost no PRR or MRR. I run solo and groups on Elite, and am pretty well geared for under epic content.(No I don't do EE content, I found it too difficult, yes there are a lot of us out here that do) Was running various sands quests yesterday, and in 2 different dungeons, I was one shotted. I'm a sorc with 268 hps(yes I could get more, but I'm a sorc, why should I be concentrating on HPS). In Raid the vulkrum, a hatchling crown was doing roughly 138 damage a hit, the boss of the dungeon was doing about 34. I still don't see a world where that makes any kind of sense.

So basically I can no longer run elite without a group. This now means I am waiting sometimes an hour or more to try to find a group where I get at most 3 quests with them in before they disband, or I can choose to break my streak, run hard quests, which yes I find insanely easy, and redo the same quests over and over and over again in order to get enough xp in order to level. This obviously sounds like a ton of fun.

All your mid range players who are playing even a remotely squishy they are losing virtually all of there solo ability. Because of course hires work so well at well... anything, so your dead before they even attempt to try healing you. Basically all it takes is one group to run up to me, I don't see the crown in time, and I'm dead before I know what's happening, the hireling follows almost immediately after words, and I just wasted the last 20 minutes of a dungeon. Yes elite dungeons should have a fail chance, and I have died / wiped on heroic elite before. But that doesn't mean I should be dying in a single shot! This is a **** idea which is trying to make the game more difficult for the 10% top end people, who are largely unaffected by this anyway. Us more regular players, we'll get to enjoy our time standing around doing nothing, while trying to get a group.

[DANTEIL]

I am going to try not to sound like a whiny casual player here, but in the experiences that I have had so far, Champions make the game too difficult for me. I understand that the response to this will be to simply run the game on Normal -- and I already do that when I attempt a quest on-level (I mostly solo). When I am over-level, however, I like the option of being able to run a quest on Hard or Elite -- mostly for the favor and sometimes for modest XP and/or possible loot depending on the quest. I also don't like to repeat a lot of quests if I can help it, so the option of getting the favor from Elite and being done with it is appealing. And this is mostly all Heroics I am talking about.

I have seen a lot of posts here expressing excitement for champions in Epic Elite content -- and I sincerely think that's great for players who run almost exclusively in EE and haven't felt all that challenged by the game recently. But I also believe that there are range of other players such as myself for whom the existing game was already sufficiently challenging, and these new Champions have the potential to reduce my playing options considerably (or least my chances of success). I don't know how you balance this -- I was hoping for an 'optional' toggle (with a possible 5-10% boost in XP if you leave the champion toggle on) but at the very least the numbers of champions appearing should be scaled back in Hard content compared to Elite. It is still early, so I am going to keep trying this with an open mind, adjusting my expectations as I go, but so far I am not encouraged.

[Blackheartox]

As i said alrdy, best thing you guys could do now is delete bravery bonus and change it to a bonus where you gain bonus xp for every party member that is alive at end of dungeon and scales with difficulty.

That added change would kill the "all need to play elite" mentality and if you keep the bonuses to a reasonable rate it will promote grouping and would be a excelent change in addition to monster champs.

I for example am unaffected by this change, it is pure positivity to me since imo elite should be for skilled players and epic elite solo should be for the most skilled players or groups that work together and use tactics.
Champs provide both of those.
Now if you just change the mentality to initially force every player to run elite and elite and elite and to do solo solo solo for experienced players /xp penality to member death/ it would make a greater positive change then we could imagine.
Just dont give in to negative feedback and change this wonderful mechanics you added to game

[Vanhooger]

The only error was not to add a simple checkbox.

You want more challenge/loot? Tick checkbox.

You want to run as you did before U24? Do not tick the checkbox.

Done.

If you do this all the whiners about champion gone.

[bartharok]

I only ran 3 quests (2 EH, 1 EE) last night but in my experience every group of 5+ mobs had 1-4 champions in it.



Then you are not paying attention to the reality of the game.

Ever since you introduced bravery bonus anyone that wants to run in a group has to run on elite.

Maybe your hope is champions will change this, but that is going to take some time and I suspect many new people will give up and leave before that time comes.

Brand new players may do elites, but its because of player expectations, not dev expectations. Or peer pressure, to use another term.

[Wh070aa]

Okay.

These tings do more damage then the boss of dungeon, and can 1 hit kill you. Melee without absolute best gear is unplayable.

Getting 1 shot is not fun. Beating on multiple 35000+ damage meat bags is not fun.

On side note repeater adrenaline stuff is broken/working as intended and no longer applies on 2nd and 3rd bolt as it did before, so I do way less damage too.

Who cares? Its not like anyone cares about players that don't absolutely min max, and have best gear, and want to farm for more xp, and gear in best way. Pugs are dead, and ewryone from my static party/guild no longer plays, so its such fun indicative to group. I am gonna be running normals now. Thanks.