Reaper suggestions to add challenge and encourage grouping at all levels of reaper

[KoobTheProud]

I was thinking about why reaper seems to be a straight grind difficulty at this point instead of the challenge meta it was theoretically designed to be.

The obvious points are that the difficulty is offset by the trees, by the free mana pots and by the explosion of power creep in gear since reaper was released. Not only has gear power exploded upwards but there are even bonuses associated with reaper directly on gear to accentuate the fact that reaper is designed to become an easy grind meta once you have played it enough.

The problem with reaper as a straight grind difficulty is that it does not fulfill the purpose it was originally created for, which was to satisfy the communities demand for more challenging content. Once somebody is grinding reaper w/o much chance of failure, well that's a recipe for declining interest and burnout over time.

The other problem is that players are already reaching the reaper caps as they finish filling out the trees and acquire all the content associated with reaper in the process.

Ultimately reaper will not be challenging nor a grind for these players and as that community grows we'll start hearing calls from more "challenge" and of course the rewards that go along with "challenge".

I think it might make more sense at that point to put some of the challenge back in reaper instead of extending the system or creating another add-on difficulty that speeds up leveling and extends power without really adding challenge in the process.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Monster resistances.

DDO originally had a series of resistances that had to be beat in order to damage some types of monsters. You needed some combination of silver and good to really damage vampires as an example. Silver for lycanthropes. Cold steel for demons. Adamantine for some constructs, etc.

These resistances have been largely trivialized by power creep, both as the base numbers on damage have gone up and as the weapons with multiple resistance breakers have multiplied. Player stats have gone through the roof also, adding large numbers to hit and damage at the baseline and trivializing monster defenses in the process.

Changing reaper difficulty to make the original monster resistances stronger and less breakable would go a long way towards encouraging grouping, even at low reaper levels. If some mobs were largely melee immune and others very hard to cast on it would encourage people to group so as to present the maximum possible array of damage types against the threats in the dungeon.

2. Reaper possession.

Currently reapers exist as an easily identifiable and usually easily manageable boss mob type. They have a distinctive form that is easy to spot at a distance. They have predictable movement patterns. They have clearly identifiable strengths and weaknesses based on the type of reaper they are.

All of these factors make most reapers just another tough mob to deal with and as your reaper experience grows many of the reaper types, particularly in low reaper levels, become trivial to manage. The only factor that still has blowout potential for most experienced reaper players is whether or not multiple reapers will spawn during the course of a fight and effectively take the party by surprise.

To fix this reapers should no longer spawn as an instantly recognizable mob type. Instead when they spawn reapers should possess champion mobs in an encounter, making the champs much more formidable in the process. Any mobs that spawns in during an encounter or dies during an encounter should have a small chance to possess an additional champ mob in that encounter.

At low difficulty levels melee champs would be possessed by carnage reapers or plague reapers. They'd do all of the stuff the champ in question did, plus have the carnage reapers high melee damage or the plague reapers healing debuff. Caster champs would be possessed by famine or fear reapers with the same juxtaposition of normal champ abilities plus the qualities of the reaper in question.

Identifying potential reapers in a pull would become much more difficult. It would be harder to kill them quickly and first, even if champs were targeted early as they usually are. Things would become more unpredictable and challenging and likely more fun for the challenge-inspired group of players.

3. The mana pots that mobs drop predictably in reaper mode.

Vanish. What exactly about these pots increases the challenge for the group that runs reaper? Answer: nothing. They are a crutch pure and simple designed to allow mana dependent characters easier access to reaper difficulty. When soloing they often mean that a character skips shrines that would otherwise be mandatory. They never should have existed and they should be removed now before SSG devotes any resources to creating new "challenge" difficulties to the game.

If you made these changes soloing reaper difficulty would become more difficult, which would also reduce the grindy nature of the difficulty at this point. Blowing through a dungeon at high speed would become much more difficult in any configuration since some pulls would become very difficult and require coordination to complete.

The idea would be to create formidable obstacles to completion in the form of monsters that were not just paper cutouts waiting to be knocked down in a few seconds before you moved on.

The challenge would be significantly greater and players would have to plan dungeon runs the way they play high reaper raids at this point. This should be a win-win for the community that wanted more challenge and more grouping. It would put elite back on the menu for fast-paced leveling and favor. It would require vastly less dev time to put "challenge" back in the game for those who wanted to be challenged. It would create a new power-grouping meta that absolutely does not exist today except for raids at an endgame which apparently is about to pull a vanishing act on us again.