Monster Champion Feedback

[Scrabbler]

I'm not sure where that reference is coming from - that we feel everything in Terminal Delirium or Monster Champions are 100% working as intended.

The Terminal Delerium dungeon was designed before Monster Champions came out. The challenges inside that dungeon were apparently designed under the understanding that monsters would have the statistics they were assigned by the dungeon designer.

The most dangerous encounter of that quest, the mirror room, was balanced and tested without Monster Champions spawning. But now that Monster Champions can spawn there, you have a scripted amplified damage effect that stacks multiplicatively with a random damage-increase effect from lucky monsters. It no longer plays-out like it was built.

[EllisDee37]

No, it was a poor example, but laugh if you want, then, when you're done laughing, name me a good system that is currently forced on people that if it wasn't forced people would use anyway.

You're arguing for my side with this question. What you should be asking for is an example of a good system that is forced on people that if it wasn't forced on people, people would NOT use it anyway. My answer to your literal question is "none." Which is exactly how an optional monster champion system would pan out. (Nobody would use it.) And right there in your very own wording is the phrase "good system" to describe a system being skipped if it's made optional.

Your original argument was that if people would skip it as an optional, that makes it a bad system by definition. So why are you asking about good systems that people would skip? Are you doing a 180 and now saying that if a checkbox was provided and people skipped it, that means it's a good system?

To recap:

I'm saying if there's a checkbox, nobody would choose champions.
You're saying that in and of itself is evidence that the monster champion system is bad.
I'm saying no, people will skip any obstacle, regardless if the obstacle system is good or bad.

[EllisDee37]

I asked because you have stated that you like these champions, and seem resistant to any idea of making them optional. What you describe here as the reason that you dislike epic elite is even more true of these new champions, in my opinion. At least as regards heroic elite.

I have not played heroic elite since U24 went live, so I can't comment on that. (Though I'm skeptical they would present much of an issue for my heroic leveling.) I do play EH, and have been since it went live, and my experience so far is that monster champions are balanced quite well for EH. If anything, they could be tuned upwards, to be more difficult.

The reasons I dislike epic elite aren't similar to the issues with monster champions. My experience on EH is that monster champions are slightly more difficult than regular EH mobs. The last thing I would say about epic elite mobs in relation to epic hard mobs is that they're "slightly more difficult."

[Uska]

Checking in to say that we're still reading along. We have certainly expected some changes to be coming. Thanks for all the great feedback!

It's possible some elements are not working exactly as intended, and of course the design can probably be improved after seeing live play.

My live play this weekend seems to indicate the number of champions is working roughly as intended, but I haven't personally checked every server on a variety of difficulty and levels, which could theoretically result in different experiences for different players . It may also have been a design mistake for orange named minibosses to have dramatically higher chance of being Champion Monsters, since that skews the overall count a great deal. Some players explicitly noted that the 10% mark seemed to be hit closer on quests with more monsters, which fits the model of statistical randomness in general, and probably the overall impact of orange name minibosses, as they're may be less minibosses as a percentage of overall monsters in those quests. (Minibosses need to be separated out from the statistics, in order to get proper data on non-Champion spawn rates for both minibosses and otherwise).



This is currently by design, but the exact list of possible Champion buffs can change in the future.


It's definitely an interesting idea, at least for some of the buffs (perhaps Deathward in particular).


As noted elsewhere, Champion buffs are generally level agnostic, or scale with the quest level, or scale with the monster's base statistics. If a level 20 Champion Buff is giving something like 20d4 damage than the level 5 version would be giving 5d4 damage. These are still up for review and changes, of course.




This is the current general mode that is in use. The miniboss list is separated for Hard and Elite, as well. There are some buffs that don't appear on Hard, or only appear on minibosses or *can't* appear on minibosses. Every buff on Hard does have a chance to show up on Elite as well, for the same type of monster: miniboss or not.



It is currently working as intended that Monster Champions do not show up in Challenges, though that could be looked at in the future.




What I'll say: Damage numbers form Terminal Delirium are not representative of damage numbers in most of DDO, whether or not the enemies are Champions.
I'm not sure where that reference is coming from - that we feel everything in Terminal Delirium or Monster Champions are 100% working as intended.


We love posts from players haven't posted before (and who we can confirm are linked to a unique account or not), though it's unfortunate if the motivation is only because they are upset. Posts from players who have never posted before are certainly something we pay attention to; if someone never felt the need to speak before now and is suddenly motivated, this is clearly one of the most important things they've felt has happened in DDO.

If I am in a heroic elite party full or near full I am seeing 40% or so champs that is way to frequent.

[redoubt]

Also i do agree from some standpoint that if epic elite stays as it was pre this update, that it made no sense whatsoever to have epic casual epic normal epic hard and epic elite, since epic elite didnt provide the factor a elite should give, they could had just changed all epic content simply to epic and thats it.
If there is no improvment to a setting there is no reason to call it epic this or that or whatever since the highest one is not fit to be called elite anyways.

I'm not sure how to get this across to you. There were and are many people for whom EE was a challenge even before the champions.

All your comments seem to be based on and come from a perspective that EE was simply easy (and it appears you believe it was easy for the majority of players.)

[dunklezhan]

Checking in to say that we're still reading along. We have certainly expected some changes to be coming. Thanks for all the great feedback!

It's possible some elements are not working exactly as intended, and of course the design can probably be improved after seeing live play.

My live play this weekend seems to indicate the number of champions is working roughly as intended, but I haven't personally checked every server on a variety of difficulty and levels, which could theoretically result in different experiences for different players . It may also have been a design mistake for orange named minibosses to have dramatically higher chance of being Champion Monsters, since that skews the overall count a great deal. Some players explicitly noted that the 10% mark seemed to be hit closer on quests with more monsters, which fits the model of statistical randomness in general, and probably the overall impact of orange name minibosses, as they're may be less minibosses as a percentage of overall monsters in those quests. (Minibosses need to be separated out from the statistics, in order to get proper data on non-Champion spawn rates for both minibosses and otherwise).

Thanks Varg.

I've played a few elites now, and I still don't see any of the problems others have cited about the massive overdamage, so I think there are a combination of factors that can cause insane damage numbers, I'm not sure that's really the intent. I think it would be helpful if you were able to confirm some of those extremes - Extreme Challenge quests aside - are sometimes possible by design, or whether what we see as the 'average' champion is closer to what they should be.

All that being said, a comment about the numbers: if ratio of mobs:champions we see are roughly what the designers expected at 10% then I think those expectations were set too high! Simply put: if what I see in game on hard and elite is what 10% looks like, then I think 10% is too high. You have made such a visibly high percentage tougher that you may as well have just made all the mobs a tad tougher and let it average out that way. I think that 5% or even 1% champion spawns would work better to my mind in terms of keeping champions novel and a bit individually scarier. I also think if you lower the %s then on hard at least you could make each champion tougher. My issue is not that champions are too tough, it is that they are too numerous. And I'm not saying it's a problem because it makes encounters too tough, I'm saying it because someone somewhere needs to watch The Incredibles more closely - if every mob is special... then no mob is special. If reducing the number of champions reduces the balancing-effect you were after... then make them tougher individually.

I am struck however by this thought:

Orange named mobs effectively were supposed to be 'champions'. So why not you just say 'all orange and even redname quest bosses will now get additional buffs chosen from a range dependent on the difficulty'. Why did we need ordinary mobs to suddenly become noticeably tougher in some cases than the orange and red names they are supposedly the minions for!

All that being said: I'm still enjoying the extra challenge champions bring. But I definitely think tweaks are needed in terms of the sheer number of mobs that become champions, it's kinda comical to see all these clusters of crowns. Maybe it just needs a diminishing chance of who can spawn as a crown based on how many other crowns spawn in an area or something. Wher eyou have one already, it should be twice as hard for another appear, and twice as hard again for another etc etc. That way seeing 3 together would be rare rather than just a factor of whether the pack of mobs is large enough.

[Adamelin]

As someone just pointed out, many players go VIP because they want access to Hard and Elite.

Since many players dont want Champions when soloing, especially new players, they wont need a VIP account and therefore will not pay for it.

Less money for DDO - bet they didnt think of that before making this change

[redoubt]

No, it was a poor example, but laugh if you want, then, when you're done laughing, name me a good system that is currently forced on people that if it wasn't forced people would use anyway. Or for that matter, name me a good system, that was once forced on people but no longer is that people currently use.

Edit: If you want to go down the route of nobody would run with Traps given the option, personally I quite like having 30% more XP from having them disabled. How much xp does Monster Champions give again?

I would check the traps box. I like traps and the trap mechanics (I think spell wards a little wonky though.)

30% xp in enough incentive that my 3 static groups all have trappers in them.

[der_kluge]

I didn't read the 36 pages of this thread.

But here's my thoughts.

I like it. I like the challenge. If the intention was to make people party more, I think it's worked. In the last few days, I've actually had full parties on a couple of occasions. That wouldn't have happened before for me, at least not on Cannith. I was in a party of 3 wizard TRs, and we failed Tear on elite (mostly because of wolves). That wouldn't have happened before this update.

I play Heroic only. So I can't speak to Epics.

Some things I would change:

Tone down the wolves. The champ wolves in Tear of Dhakaan trip and then hit for about 50-70 per bite. Not cool.
Tone them down slightly in general. The amount of hit points is a bit excessive - especially for champion archers, which tend to have a lot of hit points already anyway. In Tear, the archers had 188 hit points, and champs have 538. I don't care about the rest of the attributes, the hit points tend to be excessive.

It *feels* like this is an attempt to get people to drink a lot of mana potions. So, it's almost like a money grab by Turbine. I'm drinking a lot more mana potions as a result of these guys. I've heard similar comments from others. Maybe consider increasing some options for getting mana back into the game, or increase the drop rates of mana potions, or something.

Add a little bonus XP for killing them.

I did read a post about adding the ability to dispel their buffs. I could see a lot of PMs actually memorizing dispel magic and then using it followed by PK to great effect. That would actually give a purpose to dispel magic.


Otherwise, thumbs up by me. It's made the game fun and challenging again.

[jalont]

As someone just pointed out, many players go VIP because they want access to Hard and Elite.

Since many players dont want Champions when soloing, especially new players, they wont need a VIP account and therefore will not pay for it.

Less money for DDO - bet they didnt think of that before making this change

But we've been bleeding people for use as the quests have gotten easier. We may lose some VIPs, but it's very possible that it will be less than we would have lost due to lack of challenge.

In fact, I know a couple former power gamers that are giving the game a try again now that champions have been activated.

[Nestroy]

More testing, more running, on all difficulties and level ranges.

Korthos - heroic hard - Barb lv. 2 on solo. I got oneshotted by a lowly cultist on his magic missiles. The cultist is supposed to be doing some minor acid, fire or force damage with his spells. I dod not expect to get hit by 7 (!) missiles doing about 40 points of damage each. We are talking about heroic hard, not elite! This has been the 1st encounter inside, I abandoned the project to ivestigate further on that toon. At least not w/o some good low level equipment and a higher level. Since this was 1/2 for the champ, this is not a substantial sample to say anything about how many champs are spawning in that quest.

Redwillows Ruins. run on a lv. 9 Cleric (5 past lives, 3 Fav, 2 pally) solo, heroic elite. No problem to do some severe damage, especially on Slay Living. Good equipment for that level. 1st miniboss champ has been the scorpion, together with 3 out of 7 scorpion mobs being champions. Needless to say that I got beaten up. Since I had not been long into the quest I recalled, reseted and went in again only to be smoked again by the same miniboss and this time 4 champs. One of them hit with poison (?) damage at about 200 points every few sevonds (no save or save DCs much too high). Which is much for a lv. 8 elite quest. I met 12 champs on 35 and 9 champs on 27 killed respectively, but it seemed to me that when a miniboss spawns as champion, that there are many more champs around, so perhaps the numbers are missleading for a whole quest.

Impossible Demands, EE on a lv. 23 pally (completionist, 5 epls) - since the bug with the priestress still persists this had been a walk in the park. Trying to do the optional Blademaster resulted in one miniboss spawn and two out of 5 drow being champs. I survived but preferred to abandon doing optionals in there. The blademaster had only his regular chest, not any additional. Same as with Redwillows - idk if there is some mechanic in place that spawns more mob champs when the miniboss champs are around.

Outbreak, same toon as Impossible Demands, EH. I am still looking for an EH or EE version of Corruption rune arm, so I decided to try this quest. I prepped for the whisps to be deadly as champs and had no problems to reach the last fight. Uthe was a red named champ boss, which was astonishing since I remembered reading that endbosses do not spawn as champions. The well geared and veteran Pally could beat down Uthe and the constant red musk zombie champs spawning. Thank god only one of the whisps had been champ, so this was no blood bath. Only one dead, which at the current state of the game I would name a success. Of course no extra chests - I do not know if any of them spawn at all - 2 minibosses (the sample providers) and Uthe, so three chances at chests, but none received - perhaps just bad luck, who knows. I forgot to count kills but there had been 17 champs total, so this is above 10% for sure.

Don´t drink the Water EH - I love that quest. Plenty of melee or ranged champs (from the Yuan-Ti) but with the exception of Fles-Ona being a champ no problems at all. Fless-Ona is a caster, had plenty of resistances, an additional ton of HP and hit with her spells at about 800 damage - on EH, mind you! The pally is built and geared for survival, so taking 800 damage every few seconds has not been a big problem. None the less this was a substantial drain on my resources. The dragon was much easier to kill afterwards. I counted 68 kills and 12 champs, including ALL three minibosses, so this is above 10 % too.

My conclusions and suggestions for the DEVs from these runs and the whole weekend testing:

1) While Champions in themselves are OK, their spawn rate is much to high. I might have been on the worse end of the Gauss Curve in that, but if devs tell us 10%,, I would expect quests with 5% and quests with 15%. Not each and every quest at 25% +/- 10%.

2) While most champs do not add to the danger level of the quests, several champ combinations, especially on bigger mobs, casters and special monsters (Beholders, Mind Flayer) are lethal. This is no question of tactics and if this happened far in between it would be OK, but given the high number of spawns these occur far to often and leave a bad feeling on the gamers side. Please rethink the buff tables and make them better balanced to actual quest levels.

3) While most buffs on champions are perfectly OK for EE content and perhaps EH, damage amplifications of 200, 400 and even 800 % on heroic (hard, elite) quests is way out of bounds. Especially when the monsters already are frightful, like kobold shamans on lv. 2 quests or beholders on lv. 12 quests. I got oneshotted by disintegrates (I was not even given a save!) from beholders doing 1600 points of damage on lv. 15 Delirium in lv. 17 elite. See point 2 for suggestions. I woudl even suggest to exempt heroic hard and perhaps heroic elite from the champ system all together.

4) While on EE champions are quite some nasty fun (and we expect this to be insane), EH with EE buffed mob champs is just way unbalanced. Adrenaline Overload on basically EE mobs in EH is way overpowered. Eh shouldbe the quest level of choice for the casual and eTRing off destiny Vet. Now EH is just another unexpected slaughterhouse. Especially on caster and special mobs (did I already mention Beholders). If I play EE, I know what to expect. EH - well, I need the recommandations and the Xpto keep my eTR train going (and spending money in the process) - I will have to stop this if champs remain in EH at their current state, especially with the minibosses being champs by default.

I would suggest the following:

EE - keep the champs as they are. Great work, cool feature, let the true masters of the DDO-verse handle them.
EH - tone down on quantites. Stop making minibosses champs in EH.
HE - tone down on quantities big time. Give the champs heroic buff tables instead of epic ones. Buff up melee and archery as you like, but stop making spellcaster that are already uber more uber in these quests. I am running elite Durks (base lv. 2) on lv. 4-6 toons, not on lv. 9 toons!
HH - make champs really rare, use heroic buff tables. No miniboss champs in HH.

This immediately would make a shody implementation of a good idea into a winner.

Alternatively I would second putting champs in a "nightmare" difficulty setting any time too.

[jalont]

I would suggest the following:

EE - keep the champs as they are. Great work, cool feature, let the true masters of the DDO-verse handle them.
EH - tone down on quantites. Stop making minibosses champs in EH.
HE - tone down on quantities big time. Give the champs heroic buff tables instead of epic ones. Buff up melee and archery as you like, but stop making spellcaster that are already uber more uber in these quests. I am running elite Durks (base lv. 2) on lv. 4-6 toons, not on lv. 9 toons!
HH - make champs really rare, use heroic buff tables. No miniboss champs in HH.

This immediately would make a shody implementation of a good idea into a winner.

Alternatively I would second putting champs in a "nightmare" difficulty setting any time too.

I'd support most of this. I wouldn't support another difficulty setting though. We've been through this. New, harder difficulty setting gets implemented, players get more power, new setting becomes easy, players that shouldn't be playing on said difficulty get mad because they can't play on it anymore if the challenge gets increased to match the power creep.

We can skip all of that and get right to the "players that shouldn't be playing on said difficulty get mad because they can't play on it anymore if the challenge gets increased to match the power creep" by putting EE back to where it was for years.

[EllisDee37]

Outbreak, same toon as Impossible Demands, EH. I am still looking for an EH or EE version of Corruption rune arm, so I decided to try this quest. I prepped for the whisps to be deadly as champs and had no problems to reach the last fight. Uthe was a red named champ boss, which was astonishing since I remembered reading that endbosses do not spawn as champions. The well geared and veteran Pally could beat down Uthe and the constant red musk zombie champs spawning. Thank god only one of the whisps had been champ, so this was no blood bath. Only one dead, which at the current state of the game I would name a success. Of course no extra chests - I do not know if any of them spawn at all - 2 minibosses (the sample providers) and Uthe, so three chances at chests, but none received - perhaps just bad luck, who knows. I forgot to count kills but there had been 17 champs total, so this is above 10% for sure.

Don´t drink the Water EH - I love that quest. Plenty of melee or ranged champs (from the Yuan-Ti) but with the exception of Fles-Ona being a champ no problems at all. Fless-Ona is a caster, had plenty of resistances, an additional ton of HP and hit with her spells at about 800 damage - on EH, mind you! The pally is built and geared for survival, so taking 800 damage every few seconds has not been a big problem. None the less this was a substantial drain on my resources. The dragon was much easier to kill afterwards. I counted 68 kills and 12 champs, including ALL three minibosses, so this is above 10 % too.

I've also run these two quests on EH since U24 went live, on a level 21 fighter/cleric who has awful reflex saves. So I've been killed in there before on EH from all the lightning. (Wisps and dryads/druids in particular in druid's deep.)

I hadn't run him through it since the melee power update in U23, which means I also hadn't run it since Armor Up in U24 with the introduction of MRR. My experience in both of those quests on EH with my fighter/cleric is that adding in melee power, MRR and monster champions together made both quests noticeably easier than they were for this character pre-U23.

It's worth noting that I soloed both of them, and am comparing it to my experience soloing both of them pre-U23.

[maddong]

Do we need a champion reward feedback thread specifically?

Trash loot quests are not a significant reward. We need xp since that is useful for everyone except the triple completionist/triple epic completionist level 28 character....

[jalont]

Do we need a champion reward feedback thread specifically?

Trash loot quests are not a significant reward. We need xp since that is useful for everyone except the triple completionist/triple epic completionist level 28 character....

Maybe. But XP is still really really easy to get.

Maybe renown?

I think I like renown better than xp.

[EllisDee37]

Maybe. But XP is still really really easy to get.

Maybe renown?

I think I like renown better than xp.

I think I'd rather have renown in heroics and xp in epics.

Right now, for heroic leveling I just one-and-done all heroic quests on elite (hundreds of them) and never repeat anything, getting all the way to 20. Then in epics I'm constantly rerunning the same ~30 quests to get the millions and millions of xp needed for fate points and karma.

[Rys]

What I'll say: Damage numbers form Terminal Delirium are not representative of damage numbers in most of DDO, whether or not the enemies are Champions.
I'm not sure where that reference is coming from - that we feel everything in Terminal Delirium or Monster Champions are 100% working as intended.

So being repeatedly hit for 1-6k of damage in the mirror room with no way to avoid it (except for bringing uber ccer with you) is WAI? I will say it again: oneshotting is no fun but I guess it will raise the sale of cakes for sure.

[jalont]

So being repeatedly hit by 1-6k of damage in the mirror room with no way to avoid it (except for bringing uber ccer with you) is WAI? I will say it again: oneshotting is no fun but I guess it will raise the sale of cakes for sure.

I support the implementation of mechanics that make it more necessary to group. Needing a CCer is a GOOD change. But, of course, you don't actually need a CCer.

[Rys]

I support the implementation of mechanics that make it more necessary to group. Needing a CCer is a GOOD change. But, of course, you don't actually need a CCer.

When I log, I log for playing the game, not for waiting half an hour for certain class.

[hit_fido]

It may also have been a design mistake for orange named minibosses to have dramatically higher chance of being Champion Monsters, since that skews the overall count a great deal.

Skewing the count may be one issue but another problem with extremely high occurrence of orange champions are some certain quests where orange named mobs themselves are very frequent or appear in clusters. In the former case it increases the frequency that players will encounter an orange champion next to 2 or even 3 "normal" champions - e.g. Tear of Dhakaan. In the latter case you have quests like Shadow Crypt where the second to last fight you can now expect to fight 2-4 orange named champion aoe-spell casting wraiths each ONE of which is tougher than end boss; or the quori stalker 'ambush' in The Prisoner.

I suspect this clustering effect is going to frustrate the most players - too little time to assess which is the most threatening, certainly not enough time to reduce the threat before taking too much incoming amplified damage from 2-3-4 champion foes, one or more of which may have already been tougher by virtue of their orange status.