Monster Champion Feedback

[Vargouille]

To clarify a possible misconception: The reduction mentioned in Severlin's earlier post is compared to how many Champions are spawning right now. So a 40% reduction in a dungeon with 10 Champions would mean there would then be 6 Champions, for instance.

The current chance for normal monsters to be Champions is far below 40%. But orange name chance to be Champions is quite a bit higher than 40% right now, and we are likely to lower the amount of orange name champions more significantly.

The HP's of some champs. Some have WAY to many hp's. When I play tonight I will throw in some examples. More damage is fine but 10 times the hp's is just a time sink.

Please bug report any situations where you are sure a Champion has 10x as many hitpoints as similar non-Champions around him (same exact monster). That is definitely unintended. (Please include quest, /loc location, difficulty & level. Thanks!)

On a funny note, I saw a CR0 champion rat in Friends in Low Places EE.

Hey, there's always someone who wants to be King of the Rats!

[MoonlitSilver]

Just gonna say, adding a checkbox (even if there's rewards added as incentive to run with champions) will split the LFMs into champs and no champs groups, and people who will only accept one or the other. Remember the all the QQing about bravery bonus ruining LFMs forever?

Do we really need that sort of headache again? When LFMs are already scarce enough as is?

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Also, to give another data point, I too feel the orange-name spawn rate is far, far too high. I've been running mostly on hard difficulty since the update, on Khyber server. I just did a prison of the planes today on HE, and every single orange-name prisoner in the planes rooms was a champion. I did a claw of vulkoor run on HE the other day, and once again every single orange-name scorpion guardian was a champion. (Also, way too many of the smaller scorpions were as well, to the point that I was against 4-5 champions at once in most of the fights). Those are just the two specific examples that spring to mind, but I've seen this sort of thing with other quests with lots of orange-names, especially orange-names associated with quest objectives (like PoP) or large sets of the same monster type encountered many times (like the scorp guardians). Cabal seers in frame work, the entire army of orange-names in VoN3... everything seems affected.

Either I've been having the absolutely weirdest luck that I wish I could apply to my drop rates instead, or the spawn rate even on just hard must be something like 70%+ chance for a few days of playing to give me multiple examples of entire large sets of oranges all being champions. Spawn rates this large seem ridiculous if the goal is unpredictable random challenge.

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And on an unrelated note, devs, if you're serious when you mean players shouldn't be getting simply one-shotted outside of extreme challenge content, I invite you to take another look at the ballistae in Storm the Beaches and vampire penalties to light damage. And no, an enhancement that reduces the heavily-multiplied light damage in exchange for destroying our ability to heal ourselves doesn't cut it. It still counts as one-shotting if it only has to be followed up with a sneeze in the vampire's general direction to finish them off.

[Archangel666]

Bored = too easy. Surprised we all have to spell that out for you.

Not necessarily.

Bored could simply mean "Too Grindy", or it could be, simply that someone has played for too long and simply finds the same quests over and over again through multiple lives to be boring. I've seen a few comments that attribute the massive decline in the playerbase population to "The game is too easy, so they got bored and left", when one could also say that "There's been no endgame to speak of, which leaves only Reincarnating, which in turn leaves only running the same quests over and over again, so they left". Then of course there's the Epic Destiny system. I'm sure many players liked having Alts, but with the amount of XP needed for Epic Destiny's this makes getting Alts ready much much more tedious.

Realistically, it's probably a combination of the two and indeed other factors, but no way in the nine hells is it solely down to "The game is too easy so people got bored and left".

[Kaytis]

The current chance for normal monsters to be Champions is far below 40%.

You said it was 10%. What is it really?

[Sehenry03]

One other thing that I hope EVERYONE starts doing!!!!

The people that are actually recording how many mobs they are fighting and how many of those mobs are champions...THOSE are the ones helping the dev's. The people just saying "70% of every quest are champions!!!!" is making things worse. Number one...no it isn't. You sit down and actually record how many champs and it is not 70%. Maybe 1 person in 100 quest runs out of 100 people all running 100 quest runs gets anywhere near that number.

Come on guys if you want this fixed then help them. When you do a quest...count mobs. Count champions. Count how many mini bosses are champions. Count how many chests are dropping. Etc.

Record damage numbers if you think its unfair. Record what mob and what CR they are and what damage and what damage type.
Record hit points if you have it open. if you think its to high write it down.

Help the Dev's fix this instead of just jumping in and whining about everything and just saying "FIX THIS I HATE YOU!!!!!"

This is not gonna be an over night fix.

Could any Dev's maybe give us ANY kind of time line on when you think a patch might be implemented?

[Rys]

Holy ****. The Dev's say they plan on nerfing champions and people start complaining AGAIN. if you don't want to waste time...or you don't want to be 1 shot...DON'T DO EXTREME DUNGEONS.

You all just got through saying that you want the casual to be catered to...you really don't want the elitists to have anything?

No worries I am off to playing Hello Kitty already

[Sehenry03]

One other thing that I hope EVERYONE starts doing!!!!

The people that are actually recording how many mobs they are fighting and how many of those mobs are champions...THOSE are the ones helping the dev's. The people just saying "70% of every quest are champions!!!!" is making things worse. Number one...no it isn't. You sit down and actually record how many champs and it is not 70%. Maybe 1 person in 100 quest runs out of 100 people all running 100 quest runs gets anywhere near that number.

Come on guys if you want this fixed then help them. When you do a quest...count mobs. Count champions. Count how many mini bosses are champions. Count how many chests are dropping. Etc.

Record damage numbers if you think its unfair. Record what mob and what CR they are and what damage and what damage type.
Record hit points if you have it open. if you think its to high write it down.

Help the Dev's fix this instead of just jumping in and whining about everything and just saying "FIX THIS I HATE YOU!!!!!"

This is not gonna be an over night fix.

Could any Dev's maybe give us ANY kind of time line on when you think a patch might be implemented?

And PLEASE be accurate. People would have to be brain dead to think every ratio given so far is accurate. You see a mob of champs and they kill you...you get ****ed and jump in here and complain. Just stop.

Get an ACCURATE idea. Its not hard to do. Be honest so the Dev's can do this right. Give false information and they know your just lying to be an ass and they will ignore you.

[Sehenry03]

No worries I am off to playing Hello Kitty already

LOL...well if Hello Kitty is anything like your portrait...that's gonna hurt

[LeoLionxxx]

Hey, there's always someone who wants to be King of the Rats!

Hilarious as this always is, it would seem some monsters should be tagged as not being able to be champions. In particular, monsters not intended to be fought (the scrag in that Korthos quest was a champion the other night) and objects that you just want to beat down (I read someone's flight pillar in WGU was a champion).

[EllisDee37]

Idea for the devs:

Instead of having a table of 10 powers that you roll 3 times on (or whatever the numbers are), sit down and hand-craft dozens and dozens of combinations manually, then set them up in a d100 table. Then for each champion, just roll once, do the lookup and you have your custom-configured combination that should theoretically always makes sense. This way we don't end up with triple hp-boosted silliness, or DR + vulnerability vs the same kind of attack, or whatever. And it's a still a randomized D&D-esque lookup table.

Have the 96-100 options be the super-uber combos. And maybe have a second custom-crafted lookup table for miniboss champions.

The primary benefit would be no more broken combinations. A secondary benefit is that we as players could theoretically start to recognize some of the combinations, which would be better than having to open an examination window to see the powers.

[-D_Rock-]

sorry i'm here for xp only, not to waste time.

so go do quests that are better XP/min like i said before in my post. and quit wasting time with xtreme dungeons???

[Rys]

LOL...well if Hello Kitty is anything like your portrait...that's gonna hurt

[InsanityIsYourFriend]

Greetings!

We have been reading player feedback, data gathering how players did over the weekend with Monster Champions in place, and playing with the content ourselves. Although we are still data-mining, I wanted to give players our initial impressions of all of this.

~ Overall we like the system and have had fun with it. A lot of players played with the system over the weekend. That said, even our most hardcore devs agree there are probably just too many Monster Champions, especially on Hard. We plan on reducing the spawn chance by around ~20% on Elite and ~40% on Hard. This will include minions and orange name bosses.

~ We are also looking at damage. There is some content where the damage is higher than we are comfortable with. We will probably dial back the damage increase as well. We want feedback on the possiblity that damage boosts for minion and orange named bosses will drop by about 20%.

We are looking for feedback for these proposed changes as we want to make those changes this week.

~ We agree with players that it would be cool to have the Champions have a chance to give an extra reward such as Champion tokens. We like the suggestion that tokens can be turned in for some crafting materials and are looking into that.

~ Hirelings seem somewhat fragile with Monster Champions lurking about. After our changes we will be looking for feedback as to whether they need to take less damage from Monster Champions. That change is somewhat involved and wouldn't be put in until the next patch.

Sev~

I really dont feel that hirelings should take a blanket % less damage from champions, upgrade their PRR/MRR, or (my personal preference) give HIRELINGS a % to become champions

[Archangel666]

(my personal preference) give HIRELINGS a % to become champions

Wouldn't work. They would simply have to be Champions. Otherwise, they die as they are now and if it was a percent chance, people would simply recall out, reset, resummon until it was a Champion.

[Sehenry03]

That is...eye catching for sure

[N-0cturn]

To clarify a possible misconception: The reduction mentioned in Severlin's earlier post is compared to how many Champions are spawning right now. So a 40% reduction in a dungeon with 10 Champions would mean there would then be 6 Champions, for instance.

The current chance for normal monsters to be Champions is far below 40%. But orange name chance to be Champions is quite a bit higher than 40% right now, and we are likely to lower the amount of orange name champions more significantly.

I would have gone with just half the current normal champions so 40% seems ok. The orange named seem to bet at 90% or higher which is way to much. About 33% would make them common but still special.

Also some "enemies" should not be able to be champions like statues in HH, Pillars in WGU and similar objects that are flagged as enemy. It might be the easiest way to make all those objects into red-named enemies. This also prevents insta-killing by Prismatic ray which might or might not be supposed to work.

So far I have not be insta-killed by a champion. There have been some cases where I have been surprised by many champions at once but this should be better when the spawn rate gets reduced. However I mostly Did EH and EE, so I guess I will run some Heroics soon.

EDIT:
Hirelings: I think a flat damage reduction for hirelings would be the cheap and dirty way. The best thing would be to update the hires to the new enchantments and if they do not already get the improved PRR/MRR they should.

[myliftkk_v2]

Example for today is Thrill of the Hunt EE. One non-boss Shadar-kai champion wiped out everyone in range with about 2-3 chain swings. Some party members had around 200 PRR and 150 fort but it didn't seem to make a difference other than they died about a second or two later than the rest.

I've heard similar from guildies about Shadar-kai.

Still, they like the changes, and the increased danger.

[Scrabbler]

Reports of non-extreme challenge quests "one shotting" players are concerning and we are looking into them, so specifics would be great.

Any Heroic dungeon with an Ice Flenser.

That said, even our most hardcore devs agree there are probably just too many Monster Champions, especially on Hard. We plan on reducing the spawn chance by around ~20% on Elite and ~40% on Hard. This will include minions and orange name bosses.

The problem is that for most situations, the current number of Monster Champions is actually just fine. There are occasional places where the encounter was already harder than normal, and Monster Champions there just pushes it over the limit.

For example, Enter The Kobold. It was already the case that 100% of the combat challenge resided in the single final dungeon room. Now, the number of champs appearing in the last room can really decide whether you'll finish or not.

You should look at creating a way dungeon designers can specify certain areas to not have Champions, for the same reason that raids don't have Champions.

[FestusHood]

Bored = too easy. Surprised we all have to spell that out for you.

Too easy isn't the only reason people become bored with something. Back when i played on multiple servers, i had one close friend on khyber. He was certainly not finding the game too easy. Neither of us had even taken a single toon to 20 at that time. To complete most quests on elite we either had to run them over level or get help.

One day, out of the blue, he just stopped logging in. I went back every few days for a few months to see if he had logged in again. He hadn't. That's when i decided to just play on Argo and basically abandoned all my toons on other servers.

One day, almost a year later, he logged in to a low level toon he had made on Argo to look for me. I asked him what had happened to him. The answer: Just got bored.

[Hilltrot]

Yes, It was stupid then as it is stupid now. We were just starting to get to some semblance of reality when this nonsense came. And no, running around in circles is not fun.

Running around in circles is the stupidest lowest form of gameplay. You're forced to do it, because it is the only stupid mechanic this game truly provides now, once again. ********** has a more imaginative compelling combat system now.

And they refuse to remove it. Fly is a third level spell. They nipped that one in the bud. But all the persistent AoE spells made it in. And the champion dumdums will still run back and forth between the blades till they die.

What thought provoking gameplay . . . What imagination must be used to still be using the same strategy from 8 years ago! The game was starting a process where one could move away from this strategy, now we're rushing back to it. Great, will the new endgame look like the Hippodrome?

They could have redesigned the dungeons to have fewer but more powerful monsters with vicious combinations which took teamwork to defeat. They could've given the enemy melee a root for goodness sake. But they did the global and I mean GLOBAL "crown me" system. The laziest, simplest way to make it "harder" from a programming and design standpoint.

What really upsets me is that this might very well be the amount of effort I can expect from the DDO team in the future.