Monster Champion Feedback

[dunklezhan]

I would like to see more interesting champ buffs e.g.

-A broader range of standard player-available buffs (not ship buffs, but deathward, blur, true seeing, range, haste etc) - a single champ with lots of these kinds of buffs pre-cast should not be that uncommon.
-'buffs' which change the champs behaviour, e.g. 'I take double threat from ranged/spell/melee (del as applicable) attacks', 'I am chaotic, and my threat will reset every ten seconds' 'When I get to 50% health, my aggro will reset and I will take double threat from ranged attacks',
-'trigger buffs' e.g. 'when i get to 80% health I do an AOE Sonic with (fort save) stun affect', 'when i get to 50% health my armour penetration doubles', 'if I make a save then for 3 secs I gain extra att/damage or I get +X dodge', 'when I successfully trip, the target must make a fortitude save or also be stunned. The stun ends once a successful balance check is made for the target to recover their feet'.

None of the extra damage or hit point effects should make a champ super tough. Those "player buffs" should do a lot of the work.

Of course, whether any of that could be done without lag or horribly breaking AI... well. I wouldn't know.

[Nimdeadlee]

Ah, and when they fix that bug, will the folks saying the champions are wonderful still think that? I wonder.

No need to wonder. I loved the pre-nerf champions on Heroic Elite and didn't trip or stun a single one.

[PublicEnemy]

After playing quests with champions for a while now I can say that they are a great addition to the game!
They add that little plus of challenge DDO is made for, they may need a few changes maybe (like more variations to their buffs/advantages) but overall they fit in quite well! Even the "angry" reviews about them tell us it is quite a success in terms of challenge!
So please, polish the champion system but do not "destroy" nor alter it too much, its one of the greatest and original idea/addition/change made/put into the game! Keep up the good work and keep it in the right direction! Cheers!

Ps: I dont use trip or stun and I am mainly talking about the ORIGINAL and general idea of champions here.

[Ironforge_Clan]

You have got to be joking .. dungeon alerts spawning even more champions?. But just in case you are actually serious, this is totally and completely ridiculous. I will not bother to respond further.

That's because you wouldn't know what to do how or to handle such a situation. This is why you could always play on normal or hard mode.

[moomooprincess]

I finally found the thread where it is said Champions have been nerfed, this one!!! Looks like I should hang out in this Official Turbine Discussions forum more often.

I was fine with the champions the first way. It was nasty, nasty, nasty. Was it hard? You betcha. Was I worried that I could not adapt? Nope.

Today, I noticed that it was not as nasty as it was on Monday. OK, easier for me to adapt to.

I am fine with it either way.

[FestusHood]

If HEROIC HARD and EPIC HARD have to be the same setting, with no variation, then make it easy for new players. (imo)

If HEROIC ELITE and EPIC ELITE have to be the same setting, with no variation, then make it difficult for Vets. (imo)

This is why i don't like this idea.

There is already a significant jump in difficulty between hard and elite difficulties. This is more apparent in epic than heroic. If you make hard even easier, and elite even harder the gap widens.

Why this is bad. The amount of improvement, in whatever form that takes, skill development, gear acquiring, past life grinding, etc. to make that huge step going from hard level difficulty to elite, will become larger. Ergo, it will take longer, assuming that they can even do it at all.

This is bad enough as it is, but now they will be doing it all on difficulties that they have long ago surpassed in terms of challenge level. How long is someone really going to tolerate running through the same stuff that they've beaten over and over? Yes, i get that vets are currently in the same predicament.

Everybody keeps devolving this discussion into a completely binary equation. They act as though there are only two groups, utter newbs, and hardened vets. Furthermore, they act as though these groups are essentially static, with no transition between them. As if newbs remain newbs for a long time, and then suddenly become vets overnight.

There is a large 'middle class' in this game. I personally think it's larger than the other two groups combined. Any idea that basically sets the only available difficulties to either stupid easy or stupid hard totally ignores any concept of a learning curve. It just becomes a plain leading up to a cliff.

[slarden]

Level 28 wizard
- running displacement
- ghostly
- 121 AC
- 28 dodge
- 66 PRR (39.76% DR)
- 30 MRR (23.08% Reduction)
- All resists over 60
- lotsa past life stuff and good but not perfect gear
- all saves >70 with 84 reflex+epic reflexes
- >200% Fort
- Just over 1000 hp and 3000sp

I ran Carnival chain EE with a party (5-6 each quest). I never saw any damage #s over 200 including the end fight in small problem that had some champion bosses. We had 4 bards in the parties so everything not red was cc'd in the end fight - so it may not have been the best test. Probably not the best test for me. Basically I saw nothing problematic

I ran EE breaking the ranks solo.

The champs in the first 2 waves seemed reasonable and the largest damage numbers I saw from champs were 400ish which before my mitigation was 650ish. Really no problems to speak of with # of champs or damage of champs

Here is the odd thing that may be a bug. In the 3rd wave not a single hill giant was a champ - the entire wave. This was a wave I was concerned about because if I get knocked down and hit by a few champs that bypass fort and displacements - and I am probably gonna die for sure. Whether it was luck or a bug - I never saw a single champ this wave.

The final wave is always the toughest for this character since I can't cc the shadar-kai. The boss hits me for disintegrate for 600ish multiple times even with my 84 no-fail save which means DC is 85+. Shadar Kai bodyguard champs hit me for 600 a few times. This would be 1000 before mitigation which seems reasonable for level and EE since some mitigation would be expected for EE.

As for the comments about not being able to die with the changes - I am not buying it. My caster could definitely die in there with the boss hitting me for 600 with disintigreate and mobs chasing me the entire time - some which can also hit me for 600. I noticed 2 things different than pre-U24. I used more sp in the quest and I was taking more damage.

[phillymiket]

This is why i don't like this idea.

There is already a significant jump in difficulty between hard and elite difficulties. This is more apparent in epic than heroic. If you make hard even easier, and elite even harder the gap widens.

Why this is bad. The amount of improvement, in whatever form that takes, skill development, gear acquiring, past life grinding, etc. to make that huge step going from hard level difficulty to elite, will become larger. Ergo, it will take longer, assuming that they can even do it at all.

This is bad enough as it is, but now they will be doing it all on difficulties that they have long ago surpassed in terms of challenge level. How long is someone really going to tolerate running through the same stuff that they've beaten over and over? Yes, i get that vets are currently in the same predicament.

Everybody keeps devolving this discussion into a completely binary equation. They act as though there are only two groups, utter newbs, and hardened vets. Furthermore, they act as though these groups are essentially static, with no transition between them. As if newbs remain newbs for a long time, and then suddenly become vets overnight.

There is a large 'middle class' in this game. I personally think it's larger than the other two groups combined. Any idea that basically sets the only available difficulties to either stupid easy or stupid hard totally ignores any concept of a learning curve. It just becomes a plain leading up to a cliff.

But what can they do?

It seems to be a four-way link between HH HE EH and EE. They need seperate adjustment.

What needs to happen is Heroic Hard needs to be easy enough for a fairly newer person YET have Epic Hard hard enough for a typical player to enjoy.

Or to put it a different way...
- on Heroic the jump from NORMAL to HARD to too large with Champions.
- on Epic the jump from HARD to ELITE is much larger.

Heroic covers the lowest levels, including the Starter Area, and includes our newest players so therefore needs to be more forgiving.
Epic by definition only includes Vets (or Vet'ish people at least)

Heroic and Epic have different needs. Hard needs to be in one place on Heroic and another on Epic.

Why are they adjusting them together?

The only reason that I can think of is that it's just not possible. Which makes it impossible to balance.

A newish person can most certainly content themselves with "only" EPIC NORMAL therefore make EPIC HARD challenging to please Vets.
A vet can most certainly content themselves without having HEROIC HARD be a challenge therefore make HEROIC HARD easy enough to make it possible for a newer person to have fun.

Easily solved save for the fact that it's not apparently set up with a "solved" setting.

Champions are a great idea, but maybe they need to:

- take them down with a "Coming Back Real Soon" announcement
- take a second, catch their breath, find a new way to calculate how they show up and how they can be modified on a quest by quest basis.
- Use them, coupled with adjusting the over-all difficulty of the settings, in an attempt to for-true-and-for-real balance this game again.

It could be an opportunity if you think about it like that, not an unsolvable them-vs-us disaster.

[FestusHood]

I would like to see more interesting champ buffs e.g.

-A broader range of standard player-available buffs (not ship buffs, but deathward, blur, true seeing, range, haste etc) - a single champ with lots of these kinds of buffs pre-cast should not be that uncommon.
-'buffs' which change the champs behaviour, e.g. 'I take double threat from ranged/spell/melee (del as applicable) attacks', 'I am chaotic, and my threat will reset every ten seconds' 'When I get to 50% health, my aggro will reset and I will take double threat from ranged attacks',
-'trigger buffs' e.g. 'when i get to 80% health I do an AOE Sonic with (fort save) stun affect', 'when i get to 50% health my armour penetration doubles', 'if I make a save then for 3 secs I gain extra att/damage or I get +X dodge', 'when I successfully trip, the target must make a fortitude save or also be stunned. The stun ends once a successful balance check is made for the target to recover their feet'.

None of the extra damage or hit point effects should make a champ super tough. Those "player buffs" should do a lot of the work.

Of course, whether any of that could be done without lag or horribly breaking AI... well. I wouldn't know.

I personally don't care all that much about lore in this game. Even the fact that it is based on dungeons and dragons is no more than maybe 10% of the cause of my interest in it. On the other hand, there are many people who do care about the lore in the game.

The more and varied and powerful you make these random buffs, the more it breaks any concept of lore. If you go ahead and make these random buffs the most consequential aspects of these monsters, then the whole idea of them being different types of monsters becomes purely cosmetic. Just skins.

It also disrupts any concept of any kind of consistent rule system for the game. A good example of this is from my first night of playing when i was taking bonus slashing damage from aoe spells that i had evaded. That just doesn't make any kind of sense at all.

This game has always been some kind of a hybrid between a role playing game and a shooter/action kind of game. I guess it's time to abandon the whole rpg element of it and just go for pure arcade now?

There will just be a whole bunch of damage sources moving around, and nobody knows what any of it will actually do, so just keep moving and try not to get hit by any of it.

The idea of actually taking time to open up a text window and examining monsters to see exactly what the heck is going on with them is not tenable in a real time movement game like this. It's fine in a turn based game, or even one that allows the action to stop while you do this, but not in this one.

People asking for them to fine tune the buffs so that they make more sense, such as preventing trolls from being resistant to fire, or fire ellies being resistant to cold? Yeah, that's not gonna happen. You will be lucky if they can get npc's and inanimate objects from getting crowns.

[Albinosaurus]

/snip

My concern is having a tick box option to choose champions or no champions will constrain the behavior of the community in ways that I believe are to its detriment. Human's take the optimum path. I suspect the majority will choose the easier option that does not encourage tactics, or communication or grouping to maximize XP per minute. In my view, that is not the best possible community. An environment optimized for solo play without incentives for cooperative group play is not the best option for the long term health of the game.

The only way around this is to provide a strong incentive (XP, renoun, etc) to encourage selecting the Champion tick box option. Do this and you have now constrained choices again in the same way the XP bravery bonus constrained choices. If everyone is selecting the Champion option because the rewards are just too good to refuse you are compelled to do the same.

/snip
--

I don't believe in the false dichotomy that the anti-checkbox crowd is supplying, because my own experience shows that lots of groups play at different levels.

However, I have to say that if you believe not incentivizing it would cause people to want to play it, you're wrong (I still haven't logged since the end of the day U24 released, and I have no cause to). If you believe that incentivizing it will cause everyone to want to run it, then you already know the solution needed for people to want to run it. As for the efficiency concern, I don't think everyone will be able to run it--even if it is incentivized--just because the difficulty can be prohibitive, and if people decide that running regular Elite without it is more efficient for their time than including champions, you can see the obvious flaw with the champions system: it's a waste of time.

[Connman]

Who's talking about toons who are inexperienced and/or undergeared? That is a bogus argument. Most of the posters here are not newbies. We have well built, well geared toons. We know the quests. We know how to run them, how to run our toons. You may like the champion slog fest, but frankly, many of us do not. The game has been drastically changed with the introduction of champions, and for the worse. Much worse.

THe only way to answer this sounds harsh, but *** are you talking about, have you not been following along. You must not read so good. thank you for replying with uh -uh we are ubers too.

[FestusHood]

Completely disagree. Pre-U24 heroic elite was actually harder at level, than Pre-U24 epic hard. It was challenging. Then they introduced the miserable champions. This is not challenging, as in come up with better tactics, approaches, it's just a slug fest, a mana pot sink.

Champions aren't facilitating dynamic group play, it kept me and many others out of EE quests after a few tries. Could I do it? Yes. Did I want to? Heck no. It wasn't the least bit fun. Ditto for heroic elite. It's NOT fun.

Is it less painful since the hot-fix? Yes, but, do I think they're worth having in the game at all? No. Add a nightmare difficulty level. Give those who want the darn things have them, leave the rest of us alone. Champions do not improve the game, they just make it a painful slog.

Completely agree with you. Especially on the first part. Prior to these champions, the game used the cr system to determine the challenge levels of mobs. All anybody has to do is go into a quest like servants of the overlord on both heroic elite and epic hard, and examine the cr numbers on the mobs.

Speaking for myself, it distresses me when i see people who, as of yet, have no interest in running epic elite being willing to just basically throw the epic elite difficulty to the hardcores. They don't seem to realize that once they have beaten the quests on heroic elite, there won't be anyplace for them to go. Moving into epics sans epic elite will actually be a DOWNGRADE in the challenge level of the quests they are running. For many of them (and probably myself), epic elite will be permanently inaccessible.

[FestusHood]

But what can they do?

Make a new difficulty level above elite. Since champions seem to be the wave of the future, go ahead and let them be nuts in the new difficulty. It's simply the best of bad alternatives the way i see it.

The idea of just rebalancing the current difficulties is not acceptable at this late date. Not that many people feel like they need to be the absolute best at something, but many people need to feel like they are at least better than average, even if they are not. I never ran the old epics. I was however able to run heroic elite quests pre-motu, on first life characters. Not without difficulty mind you, but it was still possible. It's not my fault that they messed up the power balance in the game. The idea that myself, and a lot of other people like me are going to be demoted through no fault of our own is not going to be well received. Perception is reality. Even if the difficulty people are shuttled down to plays exactly the same as the one they were previously on, it is still going to feel like getting boned.

[Braegan]

~deleted~

[Sam1313]

Make a Legends Only button, that only people who have TR'd more than 3 times can enter and have the champions in that setting like they was the day they was released that way the vets, elitist can feel like they are getting a challenge. The xp would be the same as if they had just run elite and the loot would be the same. Just bragging rights only would be their only reward.

THIS is what they NEED to do. Add a level above Elite but it does not pay out any more XP than Elite, It does not offer any better loot than Elite, If does not pay more favor than Elite. Since the Elitist are just soooooo bored because they are just soooooo powerful with all their completionist past lifes and all they WANT IS THE CHALLENGE, then give it to them. IF all they want is the "CHALLENGE" then give them JUST that. But. I guarantee you that its not JUST the challenge that they want. Oh no They want even more Powerful gear. Watch you will see them say this: "well if it doesn't offer any better XP or LOOT then theres no point in me running it" That's because they aren't looking for a "Challenge"

[Sam1313]

Do you not ever pay attention to Dev posts? The current team has made many references to having played pnp not to mention the card event which its art work is completely aimed at pnp roots. Your slam on the Devs is completely unfounded.

I can look at pictures too.

[Braegan]

~deleted~

[Braegan]

THIS is what they NEED to do. Add a level above Elite but it does not pay out any more XP than Elite, It does not offer any better loot than Elite, If does not pay more favor than Elite. Since the Elitist are just soooooo bored because they are just soooooo powerful with all their completionist past lifes and all they WANT IS THE CHALLENGE, then give it to them. IF all they want is the "CHALLENGE" then give them JUST that. But. I guarantee you that its not JUST the challenge that they want. Oh no They want even more Powerful gear. Watch you will see them say this: "well if it doesn't offer any better XP or LOOT then theres no point in me running it" That's because they aren't looking for a "Challenge"

A new difficulty will not solve anything.

Ubers will run it.

Non Ubers will want to run and soap box it to get nerfed.

And this showcase has showed it would be nerfed to placate.

Waste of time.

[Sam1313]

A new difficulty will not solve anything.

Ubers will run it.

Non Ubers will want to run and soap box it to get nerfed.

And this showcase has showed it would be nerfed to placate.

Waste of time.

That would be sad. If they did create a level above elite then they should stick to their guns, Stand their ground and NOT change it for anyone.
Sadly it seems that this game has gone from playing what you like or what class/race you favor into playing what is the bbotm best build of the moment.
If they created a Turd and put a hat on it and if it did the most damage in the game then everyone would play the Turd....Sad.

[Ayseifn]

Do you not ever pay attention to Dev posts? The current team has made many references to having played pnp not to mention the card event which its art work is completely aimed at pnp roots. Your slam on the Devs is completely unfounded.

Yep, I haven't been able to play table top in years so everything is look back at with rose tinted glasses. Pretty sure some of the devs are still playing PnP so all the warts are still highly visible to them.

That said 3.5 did take a turn for the worse though in a lot of ways. Like fighter went from one of the best classes to one of the worst, their job was to fight, not read books, not heal the sick, not steal things just fight. In a world of magic and monsters they had the best save progression to reflect this, in 3.5 apparently they stopped fighting magic and monster just other fighters. They weren't the best at fighting other fighter types either, summons from you friendly caster were about as strong.