Monster Champion Feedback

[Connman]

And I really like them with little hats on them! This is EE, never missed on a dominate monster, built for it but not really geared.

[phillymiket]

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

Cool...

Except Charlie Casual keeps the lights on.

Tell me you are getting a shared bank or buying new packs anymore like New Guy might?

"New Guy" has more income potential then "Mr. Vet."

Deride the new player all you want.

If they stop playing we all go down.

you need to repeat a quest on normal 4-5 times to make up for a first time elite run. .

This is how it used to be.

Run Norm 4-5 times for each quest.

That was fine then.

But making people go back to that after running E for so long? It makes it feel much worse.

People who are getting their first PLs just had their work load doubled (perhaps).

Granted BB XP bonus should not have been inflated so high to start with. Half as much would still have been great.

But people don't like to go back.

If you want to make the game harder, make it more challenging then just remove the stupidly overpowered weapons and armor.

^^^Ding Ding! We have a winner!.^^^

"Hmmmm... Let's add 60 DR plus 50%++ damage reduction with PRR."

"Hey! Why is everyone having such an easy time in Elite anymore?"

Gee, I wonder...

[Albinosaurus]

Since this seems to be the "official" thread to discuss this, I'm just going to copy from another one I responded to:

Ran Disciples of Shar chain and Lords of Dust chain earlier tonight and had many instances of 3-4 champions spawning out of groups of 6-10, and let me tell you: I F***ING HATE THIS FEATURE!

The champions are an arbitrary increase in difficulty that contribute no benefit to the player. They are an unwarranted and unrewarding tax on player resources and time. Worse, they don't add anything interesting to the fights, exception frustration and irritation. Just remove this feature. It's an out-of-genre idea (from ARPGs) that has no place here. If you don't believe me on that point, just think about what purposes these serve in ARPGs:

-Break up monotony of killing non-boss enemies.
We already have lots of named monsters in quests that do that.
We have traps, puzzles, and platforming obstacles that also do that.

-Provide extra sources of better loot/income/exp to the player.
I would be okay with justifying them in DDO this way, but only certain ones do it, yet ANY monster can be a champion. That's just wrong. It either IS, or IS NOT the reason they are here. If not, just remove them.
Lots of quests already have plenty of loot in them, and this game has been about completion of quests--not slaying of monsters--since its inception. If you want to change that, fine, but be open and upfront about it, and implement it properly. Its current state is terrible.

-Provide a challenge to the player. This, in turn, is supposed to provide fun to the player.
I would agree that they do that for this game, except that they do so in the most artificial way possible: inflated stats. There's nothing fun/interesting about that, it's downright lazy, and that's not the kind of challenge players enjoy. The rest of the game has players gear around different kinds of DR, size differences, creature types, or potentially dangerous spells or abilities. So far, all the champions I have seen have just had more hp and do more damage. B-O-R-I-N-G.

Other people have suggested things to justify their presence in the game, and maybe some of those are good ideas, but as it stands champions are a huge mistake, and greatly diminishes the pre-existing design philosophy behind quests.

With my opinions and criticisms out of the way, I'll offer a few suggestions that might make them tolerable, and allow them to serve some of those previously listed purposes:

-Every champion that can't drop a chest always grants some exp (I'm thinking about 2% quest base) and guild renown. Some plat would be nice too.
-LittleLexi has a collector NPC idea I think could help.
-Reduce their spawn rate by at least 1/5 of what it currently is and/or put a hard cap on how many can spawn in a quest. Internal timers to keep several from spawning at the same time could also be a good solution.
-Tone down their actual stat increases and instead give them interesting abilities (but nothing too ridiculous like Finger of Death, Flesh to Stone, or any other gimmicky one-shotters). For example, a champion rat around CL 15/16 could potentially use Stinking Cloud or something related to its creature type. Be creative.
-Make champions that don't normally drop chests have a small chance to anyway (5% seems legit; rolling a 20).

Anyway, I hope someone at Turbine is reading this, because this change has evoked incredibly negative feelings toward this game, and it needs to be made right.

The rate is MUCH higher than 10%, btw. They are far too common.

[LordKalkin]

They already do this, there are TWO difficulties WITH champions and TWO difficulties WITHOUT champions. You already can choose not to play with them, just change the box you are checking.

For Epic? Agreed.
For Heroic, as long as BB streaks drive leveling and PUGs? Never.
If a full party of decent+ played 1st lifers cant complete HE this is a disaster.
The game has to accommodate others besides you, me and our 27 past lives.

These need to be totally removed, optional or toned down on Heroic.
Leave them as is on Epic.

Revisit your champion loot mechanic.
No chests at champion. One chest guaranteed at end. Loot scaled on champ kills and difficulty.
Guaranteed guild favor award and exp stone for each party member.
Then you don't have to interfere with established quest loot mechanics.

[LongshotBro]

Nothing is wrong with epic normal (I will onehit kill everything and the mob cannot hit me - ehard fits more to my playstyle)


but there is something wrong with heroics now


i.e.

preU24:
i am lvl 18 - so i play lvl16-quest on elite for BB - i.e. "Rainbow in the Dark"
Base XP 9000 +
80% 1st time bonus + 50 % BB Bonus + 30 % Traps + 25 % Conquest + 15 % Ransack + 8 % Vigilant + 10% Persistence + 10% Flawless + 50% GreaterTome 1st

43.725 XP (miscalculation possible )

but i cant play heroic epic anymore - im not so uber, im not so masochistic
there are no groups at my play time; if there are groups, they r selective or play hard diff
and i dont want to lose my streak (maybe i would find a group later and the bonus is so high and the number is so nice: Elite streak - 4132 or so)


what can i do, i play hard without breaking my streak - lvl18-3 is 15 - "Missing" hard

Base XP 5700 +

40% 1st time bonus + 0 % BB Bonus + 10 % Traps + 10 % Aggression + 15 % Ransack + 10% Persistence + 10% Flawless + 50% GreaterTome

16.672 XP

but because i need to repeat those quests its more likely a (no firstime bonus - Tome only 20%)

10.600 XP

I need to do lower quests to not break my streak now and i need to run them 3 or 4 times (repeats on the next day for daily bonus and the next day and the next day) - all of them ... PreU24 i was just doing elite quests once per life - now i need to do the same stuff 3 times - boring - i know, we did this all the years ago - but i was glad, that i didnt needed this anymore - OR i buy Superior XP Pots and Stones of Experience in the DDO Store




Plz no champs in heroics - only in epic elite quests - thx

i understand your frustration, but that is not my experience so i can only base my response on that. on my main character, this life i am a pure artificer, primarily SWF melee. Each time around through TR's i started off thinking "i'm gonna keep that elite streak the whole time!" but inevitably break it at some point, a little further each life. This time, i made it to level 11 quests before i had to break it. Mind you, this was after having caught up to and surpassed quests at level, without repeating anything.

Now i am level 23, so breaking the streak was long ago. Despite that, i still haven't repeated things much. Actually the only things i've done more than once were LoD but that's due to seal/shard hunting.

When it comes to streaks and BB, certainly they are nice but to be honest i've never really noticed it impacting my play all that much. Cool when i get it but if not, oh well it doesn't bother me. It was always more a point of personal accomplishment to me anyway, as i mentioned, like "i made it further than before without breaking streak."

Despite all the many, many changes DDO has undergone since launch, i still find it to be fun, rewarding and satisfying overall, adapting to new things and finding a happy medium. i hope others find the same experience.

[Qezuzu]

And I really like them with little hats on them! This is EE, never missed on a dominate monster, built for it but not really geared.

Shadow Manipulation is equally hilarious.

Too bad everything else in Shadowdancer is so awful.

[BD_]

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Random mobs should not be harder than the hardest (raid) bosses in the game. They're boss mobs for a reason...

A few other points:

In my experience (running the GH saga on EE) - 2 champions at once was extremely common, 3 at once was fairly common. This is too much: 10% is too much unless you put a restriction on how many can spawn in one area because with a 10% chance per mob the odds of getting a whole pack of champions is too high...

Supposedly the buffs are random, but of approximately 15 that I actually examined, all but 1 had both true seeing and "I hit harder" : Bad luck? doubtful if they're really even close to random, WAI? if so - IMO this is dumb... Based on damage, the ones that I didn't examine appeared to all have it too - unless the ones that were only hitting for 300-400 didn't have it...

"I hit harder" is too much... champion hits on me (with slightly over 100 (50% PRR) ranged from 297-902, with the norm being 450-650 and 700+ hits being fairly common. I was never one hit by them, but close, others in my party were - multiple times. Compare this to most red named bosses on EE (against the same PRR) hitting for 200-300, EE Karleth 300-600, EE Truthful one about 300-600...

Respawning mobs and other special scripted spots (boss fights, special ambush sites.) should either not be able to have champions or have their numbers limited. The odds of getting a ton of champions or having a champion literally spawn on top of you are too high - any area with respawning mobs becomes a game of look for the crown over mobs heads and kill that one while more or less ignoring everything else (possibly while kiting).

Personally, I disagree with orange champion mobs, orange mobs should already be special, that's why they're orange mobs... note the word should... if orange mobs are too weak, then they should be buffed across the board (or close to it) - not having random champions that may or may not result in an uber mob...

There is no tactics or strategy on how to fight a champion that's immune to CC and instakills (yes I realize most champions can be cc'ed and/or instakilled) (orange named or racial immunities or special buffs), hits for 800 per hit, has True Seeing, and has inflated HP - you kite it and/or burst dps as fast as you can... Skilled kiters and to some extent those with uber burst dps can handle them with relative ease (even if they find it annoying or not fun) others can't.

I'm all for adding difficulty and putting in mechanisms to encourage teamwork and tactics but tossing in random uber damage mobs is the wrong way to do it. Playing dodge the champion mob over and over again isn't fun... It's not particularly "hard" it's just tedious...

Kiting isn't fun (for most people).

You want to add tactics and make things more difficult? - Give more mobs flanking bonuses and sneak attack bonuses (making fighting large packs of mobs more dangerous) and then change how mob agro works so that there are more ways to control how many mobs at a time you fight.

Add in more things like the minotaur runts in Frame Work that run away and call for help (summon more mobs) if you agro them but don't kill them quickly.

Fix dispel so that mobs don't auto succeed dispel checks against players and players don't auto fail dispel checks against mobs and then have mobs buff each other and have more mobs that cast dispel (just not spam it). Note that dispel works fine in heroic normal (at least up to about level 15 or so) - on other difficulties mob caster level is too inflated and they ignore max caster level.

More creative (or better) trap placement. There are very few traps in the game where you're fighting mobs and getting hit by traps at the same time...

Note that my experience is running the EE GH saga. I have no idea how hard or frequent champions are on HH, HE, or EH. From what I've seen on the forums, it seems that most find champion mobs on EH to be fairly easy and quite frequent.

I personally do not find champions on EE to be too hard for me - so don't go telling me to play an easier difficulty if i - I also don't find them to be fun. Doing a quest where the only thing that matters is not getting hit by random champion mobs isn't really that much harder, or fun - sure it adds a bit of time and there might be that rare time when you aren't paying attention or have bad luck or lag etc. etc. and get killed by a champion, but for the most part, if you could steamroll EE before, you still can, just now you have to play kite, cc, or instakill the champion over and over again...

[Bogenbroom]

I haven't had a chance to check them out yet, so I won't speak to the difficulty, but the numbers I am hearing around spawn rate do concern me a bit. Even at the ~10% rate we are hearing they are supposed to spawn at, that seems high. Most encounters run, what, 4-8 baddies, so you are talking ~ 2 champions for every 3 encounters?

Also, the idea of non-sentient champions is wrong. I think it is a great idea for sentient creatures, specifically humanoid and at least average intelligence creatures, but not others... at least not at the same rate.

Just some uneducated feedback.

[Blackheartox]

I have 1 more last thing to add directed towards turbine devs.

You guys should research how popular companies like blizzard and riot balance their games, and games from korean mmos.

They take feedback only from the top best of the best players when it comes to balancing end game highest difficulty content.
And those games are for a reason top leaders of any mmo rankings.
In lol for example that is a sample of only 0.2% of total gamers that the devs listen to.

Compare that to what you have now.

Only problem you have is that you made elite as difficulty the "normal to play" with bravery.
This is a good time to change bravery bonus for the sake of your and our game.

[Scrabbler]

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.

There's a big problem with that expectation: the time and effort it takes to target the champion, open an inspection window, and read through the 3-7 buff icons to figure out what improvements this particular monster has.

That's a task requiring 3+ seconds, which is not at all managable in a locked-room situation where Champions are spawning on top of you. Honestly it's barely managable when you're coming up on 2-4 Champions per room when navigating down hallways either... the time investment to figure out if a particular Champ is immune to death attacks or not means you're better off going with damage or stun/hold from the start (some Champs are immune to Hold, but that's a lot rarer)

This is quite a problem: you give monsters special specific powers with the intention that players would react to those specific powers, but don't use any predictable / learnable pattern for what those powers are, nor provide a rapid way to see them onscreen.

[Thar]

Spawn rate is way too high. Every 4th mob being a champion is too much. should be 1 in 100. The stated rate of 10% would be 40 in a quest of 400. i'm counting much higher more like 25%. It should be the same spawn rate as rare loot....

Heroics are way out of wack. Mobs shouldn't have 1000+ hp in a quest where the trash has 100hp. Any instakill is not something that should spawn on trash. Boss yes. and even then pc's should be able to block that with fort, deathward, or some preparation. not luck.

Adrenaline is too much. if your going to one shot people what does this accomplish? it's not challenging it's a waste of time and I can have fun doing other games that require skill. The added damage should be based on CR 1 or 2 x the cr rating of the champion.

True seeing and deathward are too frequent. Casters can't go through EE and insta kill much anyway without 1000s of hours of character tweaking and then its only semi likely to get get the DC highenough to make it an option. most champions i've been able to examine have one or both on ee

Risk vs reward - there is an increased amount of risk. no additional reward in xp, named items or augs, etc. I've killed 100s of champions in the last day. 1 chest.

This should have been set up as a toggle or only for minibosses.

This seems to be another knee jerk reaction to the forum 1% that whines that the game is too easy now with mrr/prr changes. WELL if the feedback was listened too when those changes went in then this wouldn't have occured. There is no reason my full plate/shield cleric should be able to stand on the dwarven artifact in the fire peaks raid when it blows up and only take 500 damage with no buffs. Melee needed some help and the armor changes did that but instead of tinkering it was hit with the sledgehammer. So things became easier for melee, so people broke out their melee from hibernation and there was happiness so then this is the counter to give us instakill damage of 1800 on ee so prr doesn't matter? what????? This impacts those least impacted by the prr changes the worst. casters can't instakill, light armor takes more of a beating.

This was a good idea, but should have been refined on lam before hitting live. not tweaked to the 1% but for a reasonable challenge for all with incremental buffs that make sense. True seeing on almost all champions negates blur/displacement. (again impacting casters and lighter armor users (bards) more) Spawn rates should have been tweaked so this is a whoo champoin lets hit that. not omg not another @#$@ champion. and some reward. 100xp per cr level per champion or token drop to cash in for better heal pot or like. Remember the 99% pay money to play the game too.

[Kaytis]

I think an immediate first step is to remove champions entirely from heroic. Hearing about new players deleting toons and accounts should not be raising red flags, it should be doing the full Star Trek panic sirens lighting up the Pacman tape where there used to be desks, with bright flashing red lights.

We can debate epics endlessly. Players that got to that level are going to be far less likely to throw in the towel. But heroic is where your new epic players come from. If they don't play through to epic, this debate will be meaningless.

By the way, I have never heard of a "Reserve Guild". That blows my mind. What server has enough players that a guild can have a "Reserve Guild"?

[Qezuzu]

I have 1 more last thing to add directed towards turbine devs.

You guys should research how popular companies like blizzard and riot balance their games, and games from korean mmos.

They take feedback only from the top best of the best players when it comes to balancing end game highest difficulty content.
And those games are for a reason top leaders of any mmo rankings.
In lol for example that is a sample of only 0.2% of total gamers that the devs listen to.

Compare that to what you have now.

Only problem you have is that you made elite as difficulty the "normal to play" with bravery.
This is a good time to change bravery bonus for the sake of your and our game.

Those games have a focus on PvP. The top players are the ones they listen to because they're the tourney players who can identify exactly what is under/overpowered or if a certain ability/character/item/etc. would become overpowered.

In DDO and other PvE-focused games, you'll get top players wanting more challenge because, with Necro4+MoD gear and fully upgraded TF weapons, multiple epic past lives and fully trained destinies+twists, and years of experience, the game is too easy.

[madmaxhunter]

Cool...

Except Charlie Casual keeps the lights on.

Tell me you are getting a shared bank or buying new packs anymore like New Guy might?

"New Guy" has more income potential then "Mr. Vet."

Deride the new player all you want.

If they stop playing we all go down.



This is how it used to be.

Run Norm 4-5 times for each quest.

That was fine then.

But making people go back to that after running E for so long? It makes it feel much worse.

People who are getting their first PLs just had their work load doubled (perhaps).

Granted BB XP bonus should not have been inflated so high do start with. Half as much would still have been great.

But people don't like to go back.

QFT, best reply so far. Remove champions. Fix the bugs. Fix the lag. Then bring them back. Running EH VoN 1 last night. Two guildies, one has been playing consistantly for 5 years, the other is a founder. They both lagged at the beginning of the arena fight. I got floated on top of the mob. Half were champions. We wiped. I play this game as a hobby, a diversion. Wasted time leads to other hobbies.

[Ghlitch]

Ran an EH Extended Haunted Halls of Eveningstar last night with a friend and a hireling healer.

Around half the mobs we ran across were champions. None of them were particularly tough one at a time, but in huge fights, the hireling went down fast. There was only one real death, and that was due to an insane mob of champions all hitting at once. When you're getting mobbed, it's also really hard to tell which mobs have those little crowns over their heads. The 5-pixel width crowns on those tiny spiders are nearly impossible to see.

We were tossing loot out left and right due to the sheer number of bonus chests we were getting. At the end of the quest, I ended up with around 125,000 plat worth of junk loot.

With these two things in mind, I'd like to see a couple of changes:

1. Give champion mobs a name like Champion Priest of Kurtulmak, give them a unique colored name, and possibly give them a glowing aura or something to help with targeting.
2. Instead of random junk chests, let them give out champion tokens. Something stackable you can trade in at an NPC for useful items. (10 tokens for a potion of deathward, 100 tokens for a major mnemonic, 1000 tokens for a +2 tome, 10000 for a +5 tome, etc)



Also, you may want to take a look at removing champions from the dragon boss fight room. The dragon spent much of the fight trying to kill the champion mobs that spawned from all the frozen pillars and mounds. He was down a good 10% before we decided to step in and speed things up. It's entirely probable that the champions would've killed him without any help.

[Thar]

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Random mobs should not be harder than the hardest (raid) bosses in the game. They're boss mobs for a reason...

I personally do not find champions on EE to be too hard for me - so don't go telling me to play an easier difficulty if i - I also don't find them to be fun. Doing a quest where the only thing that matters is not getting hit by random champion mobs isn't really that much harder, or fun - sure it adds a bit of time and there might be that rare time when you aren't paying attention or have bad luck or lag etc. etc. and get killed by a champion, but for the most part, if you could steamroll EE before, you still can, just now you have to play kite, cc, or instakill the champion over and over again...

I'll agree here on all he said but particularly these two points.

[jalont]

From what I'm taking away most from here is that eh needs some added difficulty as well. Lots of people saying now EE is too hard but EH is too easy. This is something that the devs should look at. Clearly EH needs a difficulty boost.

And EE could definitely STILL use more difficulty as well. 24 hours of this being live and not a single almost failed EE quest. In fact, only a single one shot death for me. Challenge indeed.

[nibel]

All that I ask for is some way to identify the champion buff without requiring us to select and examine.

If they have the damage buff ("I hit harder"), make them 50% bigger in size. As long as you see a huge mob you know they hit hard (or cast hard, whatever)

If they have any kind of resistance, put an overhead icon indicating his resistance (a flame for fire, a cube for cold, etc), or a flame shield-like effect, color coded by type.

If they have True Seeing, think about keeping the "casting" effect over their eyes. If they have Deathward, keep the deathward symbol permanently over their heads.

And so on and on and on.

[Wipey]

There is no tactics or strategy on how to fight a champion that's immune to CC and instakills (yes I realize most champions can be cc'ed and/or instakilled) (orange named or racial immunities or special buffs), hits for 800 per hit, has True Seeing, and has inflated HP - you kite it and/or burst dps as fast as you can... Skilled kiters and to some extent those with uber burst dps can handle them with relative ease (even if they find it annoying or not fun) others can't.

Got an example of such champion ? Adrenaline, High DC Swash and Warchanter abilities, Shield Bash, Dance, Web, Comet. Or tank it.

I think people got really lazy and complacent since U 23 ( it sure feels like heroics zerg lately, any EE, even underlevel ), with super buff to melee power and prr and mrr introduction. Plus necro 4 quests were trivial compared to for example WGU and Breaking the ranks when Shadowfell came.

There is no mob ( I don't know about new content but as far as I understand, extra damage due to quest mechanics ) that one shots high prr toon. Neither Minotaurs, Elite Vol guard, Shadarkais, Magma Brutes, Ice ellies or other hard hitting mobs.
You get hit for 400- 600 on something like 140 prr.
I think everything can be cced in some way.

It's like EE melee combat before u 23 WITHOUT any prr I would say.

[Vulkoorex]

I am a fairly new premium player that has almost all the quest packs with 7 character slots and only 2 are fully maxed out in inventory bags and bank tabs. I enjoyed finally playing elite and not having to play a quest twice to gain favors. I liked playing elite so much right off the bat that I even contemplated going VIP just for elite opener on my other future character slots.

With the changes as it is now, I don't see the point of going VIP. Nor do I see the need to play my other 5 unused character slots that I would have also maxed out inventory and bank tabs. Not to mention buying Stat tomes and other stuff. No point in getting an Otto box either since I'll have to grind a completionist anyways.