Suggestion Dungeon Revamp

[xexorian]

Currently the Dungeons project feels unfinished for me. I know we have had a lot of positive feedback on it so far. However, I would personally like to take the newest mythicmobs update into account and take the time to completely revamp and improve upon the original project... if we have enough support/desire to have it done within the community.

One of the biggest issues with our code base right now is the fact that all of our tiers and factions are combined internally. For example we have T1_UNF_WARRIOR as an internal mob name, whereas I feel we should simplify this for various reasons related to having a centralized codebase for all of our custom mob projects.

I propose redoing of all the spawners and internal mob names in preparation of upcoming sweeping changes to the script repository for MM we have. One of these changes would be to simplify all the mob names down to

Faction_Class, example: Bandit_Warrior, Unforgiven_Mage, etc.

We can then further refine this system down for having custom mobs. We should toss out the idea of having;
minion, elite, boss, and summons.

And instead implement them as harder and more difficult versions to add variation to the mob spawns. Also, taking into account spawn density and locations I feel we should lower the overall health of all the mobs by about 20% starting in Tier 1 and upto 50% in Tier 6. Tier 7 mobs should however be about where Tier 6 mobs currently are in health, however, be far more dangerous in terms of attacking power.

For the sheer grindy content, I would like to ease down the HP of T1-T6 mobs for leveling purposes, and for purposes of pushing content with better drops and rewards I would like to leaving 'auto-hit' skills out of the Tier 7 mobs. And make those more of a 'this can be dodged'. (To an extent. I plan to leave at least one or two skills across these T7 mobs that will trigger normally as part of the mechanics, for diversity this can't be avoided.) However, the harder hitting, two, three, or maybe even one shot mechanics will definitely become dodgeable through sheer skill.

As for the Elite and Boss and Uber Bosses, I feel we should just simplify this down to
Bandit_Elite_Guard, Bandit_Mercenary, Bandit_Wizard, etc. and we should stray away from the Faction_Class and just use the name of the elite mob as the filler. In 99% of cases this will be the actual full name of the mob instead of abbreviated tiered factioned off names.

This will make reading everything more clear for anyone who plans to work on the repo in the future, or who may want to re-use this content elsewhere in our network. As well as helping simplify the legibility of the mob spawners and what they're actually spawning.

Another change coming with MythicMobs 2.3 are new mechanics and new internal things as well as new config layouts. Several of these changes is something called BaseDamage{} which has several options, HealPercent{} and new targeters and location mechanics as well as scoreboard tracking among other cool things and bugfixes.

This will allow me to finally create a meta-skill to fire off level-based skills with a single line of code.

For example, I could create the meta skill, which we would add in 1 line to the mob;

OgreSmash:
  Skills:
  - skill{s=OgreSmash1}
  - skill{s=OgreSmash2}

And then have;

OgreSmash1:
  Cooldown: 8
  Conditions:
  - Level 1-10
  Skills:
  - BaseDamage{m=1.20;ignorearmor=true} @target >0 1
  - HealPercent{m=0.025} @self >0 1
OgreSmash2:
  Cooldown: 8
  Conditions:
  - Level 11-20
  Skills:
  - BaseDamage{m=1.25;ignorearmor=true} @target >0 1
  - HealPercent{m=0.03} @self >0 1

For the sake of simplicity I didn't put any particle effects on this, but it would mechanically scale by level, and only fire the appropiate skill on a cooldown of 8 seconds, while also scaling the multipliers for damage and self heals (since it's a raging ogre skill you know?)

This will mean we would have a larger skill config ultimately but simplify the mob database significantly. We could use just 1 mob, and 1 skill line on that mob and have it scale no matter how we configure the spawner and for whatever level it is. We can also make mobs gain levels (and heal) if they kill players! So, some very interesting stuff can happen!

Along with taking the time to add these meta skills in for each faction of mobs, I would also take the time to change and add in particle effects for EACH faction, and have the feedback be different.

For example; WitherFire and HungeringMaw are the same mage skills across all factions, in the future we can change them to maybe do a different effect like slow, blind, stun, suffocate, as well as use correspondingly different particles, and rename the feedback of the skill so it FEELS different as the player levels up. Mechanically, they would vary slightly, however the damage values, and hp values of mobs would remain loosely similar if the mobs were the same level.

Obviously for the caster mobs what I mean by this is something like so;

Unforgiven_Mage:
  Health: 450
  Damage: 25
  Armor: 5
# And then we'd have
Ogre_Mage:
  Health: 500
  Damage: 20
  Armor: 5

So they'd both be similar, but they would also use the same scaling values, and if you multiply those by 70, you would get similar-ish stats across the mobs.

For example if we used HP increases of 25 per level, the mobs would have around 70x25+baseHP at level 70, which means it would only vary by any sort of percieved racial mob differences, and mechanically this wouldn't matter much, but for the players it would represent lore and statistically vary enough to be interesting.

So, in other words; all of our modifiers would vary based on the mob type, and so would the base faction stats of that type, but the scaling of the mobs between similar 'class' types would be identical. That said, keep in mind the skills would be getting revamped and become meta skills that scale by level, so tiny differences here would equate to larger differences in fighting prowess later.

For example a mob that heals itself 10% everytime it lands a special attack would heal 185 health if it had 1850 hp, and if there was a faction with higher proportions of HP and lower base damage, it would heal more if it had a similar skill but the damage would not scale as much. I believe this would also add an edge on skill diversity by taking fully into account racial differences of the mobs.

Internally, we use a class system similar to how heroes already functions. We typically have Warrior, Archer, Mage, Scout, Rogue, Healer, Berserker, then Elite Warrior, Elite Archer, Elite Mage, and then unique bosses. The only other mobs we have in this limited system would be summoned minions if we're even using those.

So this is a major reason why I would like to diversify and expand the system in anticipation of the upcoming Adventure server, as well as in preparation for any unknowns, like if we release a minigames server, or have custom mobs on factions, etc.

Which brings me to another good point with the new MM 2.3.0. We also have the ability now to spawn mobs around a radius of the players. However, it is currently not within my scope of knowledge on how to scale mobs by the # of players in a radius.

MM does have a signaling system but it doesn't work in reverse, and seems like it would bug out. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to have mobs realize more players are nearby (especially elites or bosses) and have them scale HP to the # of the players nearby. Preferably, they would scale based on the # of players in combat with the mob, and leave combat if any extra players run outside of their combat range and scale back down, even if that means losing extra health and dying or being stuck at 1HP. Unfortunately MM isn't quite this tailored yet to allow for super custom mechanics.

If anyone else is excited or would like to see some of these changes in the near future, I am looking for constructive feedback on how to improve the system, as well as suggestions for various faction-based skills or input on numbers and how we should balance them.

Things to keep in mind for this are, any minecraft effect, or particle can be used, and we can do a lot of things with lines, squares, rings, spheres, etc. Spheres can be warped to look like ovals, and squares can become rectangles, lines can extend to infinity or be very short, I can also do projectiles, and homing missiles, and effects that target invisible mobs and then disappear to deal damage in an area.

Thanks!
-Xexorian

 

[Rihawk_]

This is coming from one who has spent a ton of time in the dungeons recently (currently /quests top 1) and I soend my time in all the dungeons from t4 and up.

I dont know how it can be changed, but I definitely think something should be done about the mob's spawning in some of the dungeons. Either that or the dungeon maps could be tweeked a little.

From my experience, both t4 dungeons are fine, sky castles is alright because you can shut doors everywhere to limit the swarms, and dark palace is really nice because its so big and expansive, theres so much room between every spawner.

Ivory however is harder to level in because once you walk into the square past the archway things, you just get swarmed so hard and its a lot more difficult to fight anything, especially when all 5+ mobs are using throw on you or teleporting and hitting you from different directions. Its not as bad in redhand, but its similar, you can easily get swarmed and overwhelmed.

I know that for ivory, if some more doors were put in the empty doorways, that could potentially do a lot, but if spawns could be affect by how many players are nearby that could be really cool.

Also this doesnt have to do anything about the creation of new mob skills, but the archers seem extremely annoying and over powered. I know that probably 90% of my deaths are from archer minions/elites killing me. I dont know if this is how it works for sure, but to me it seems that their arrows do more damage the further away you are, so it doesnt help how they knock you back constantly (even just their basic attack has a lot of kb) or the fact that they seem to have aimbot.

Also, this is just a minor point, but one of the types of minions in each dungeon has an attack where they "visciously maw at you" or something of the sort and in elven palace that can hit you more than half way across the courtyard at the base of the temple (the shorter length). That seems a little excessive to me, especially when you can even take fall damage from it then. There are also the melee minions that knock you back like 5 blocks whenever you hit them once, so it just takes forever and its kinda annoying to kill them as a melee class yourself.

I think I would be onboard for most of what you said, particularly the slight diversity in skills (like hungering maw, etc) and the dynamics around how many players are nearby, or even how they level up if they kill players that sounds rad (sounds like the shadow of mordor kinda vibe, me likey).

Lol sorry for the rant of a reply xD

TL;DR

This all comes form my experience in the last few weeks in all the dungeons T4 and up Ive constantly been in there, top quester as proof .

T4 dungeons, sky castles and dark palace are great for leveling, however in Ivory and red hand you can easily get swarmed and overwhelmed to the point where you can barely escape because of excessive throw abilities or teleports / knockback from basic hits from all directions.

Archer mobs seem too powerful due to knockback / aimbot, could use some tweeks. Also knockback in general for mob abilities could maybe be toned down a little.

Slight skill diversity (slow, burn, etc) would be really cool and make it more enjoyable. Also dynamic spawning based on nearby players and the leveling of mobs as they kill players sounds really cool.

 

[Kainzo]

Currently the Dungeons project feels unfinished for me. I know we have had a lot of positive feedback on it so far. However, I would personally like to take the newest mythicmobs update into account and take the time to completely revamp and improve upon the original project... if we have enough support/desire to have it done within the community.

One of the biggest issues with our code base right now is the fact that all of our tiers and factions are combined internally. For example we have T1_UNF_WARRIOR as an internal mob name, whereas I feel we should simplify this for various reasons related to having a centralized codebase for all of our custom mob projects.

I propose redoing of all the spawners and internal mob names in preparation of upcoming sweeping changes to the script repository for MM we have. One of these changes would be to simplify all the mob names down to

Faction_Class, example: Bandit_Warrior, Unforgiven_Mage, etc.

We can then further refine this system down for having custom mobs. We should toss out the idea of having;
minion, elite, boss, and summons.

And instead implement them as harder and more difficult versions to add variation to the mob spawns. Also, taking into account spawn density and locations I feel we should lower the overall health of all the mobs by about 20% starting in Tier 1 and upto 50% in Tier 6. Tier 7 mobs should however be about where Tier 6 mobs currently are in health, however, be far more dangerous in terms of attacking power.

For the sheer grindy content, I would like to ease down the HP of T1-T6 mobs for leveling purposes, and for purposes of pushing content with better drops and rewards I would like to leaving 'auto-hit' skills out of the Tier 7 mobs. And make those more of a 'this can be dodged'. (To an extent. I plan to leave at least one or two skills across these T7 mobs that will trigger normally as part of the mechanics, for diversity this can't be avoided.) However, the harder hitting, two, three, or maybe even one shot mechanics will definitely become dodgeable through sheer skill.

As for the Elite and Boss and Uber Bosses, I feel we should just simplify this down to
Bandit_Elite_Guard, Bandit_Mercenary, Bandit_Wizard, etc. and we should stray away from the Faction_Class and just use the name of the elite mob as the filler. In 99% of cases this will be the actual full name of the mob instead of abbreviated tiered factioned off names.

This will make reading everything more clear for anyone who plans to work on the repo in the future, or who may want to re-use this content elsewhere in our network. As well as helping simplify the legibility of the mob spawners and what they're actually spawning.

Another change coming with MythicMobs 2.3 are new mechanics and new internal things as well as new config layouts. Several of these changes is something called BaseDamage{} which has several options, HealPercent{} and new targeters and location mechanics as well as scoreboard tracking among other cool things and bugfixes.

This will allow me to finally create a meta-skill to fire off level-based skills with a single line of code.

For example, I could create the meta skill, which we would add in 1 line to the mob;

OgreSmash:
  Skills:
  - skill{s=OgreSmash1}
  - skill{s=OgreSmash2}

And then have;

OgreSmash1:
  Cooldown: 8
  Conditions:
  - Level 1-10
  Skills:
  - BaseDamage{m=1.20;ignorearmor=true} @target >0 1
  - HealPercent{m=0.025} @self >0 1
OgreSmash2:
  Cooldown: 8
  Conditions:
  - Level 11-20
  Skills:
  - BaseDamage{m=1.25;ignorearmor=true} @target >0 1
  - HealPercent{m=0.03} @self >0 1

For the sake of simplicity I didn't put any particle effects on this, but it would mechanically scale by level, and only fire the appropiate skill on a cooldown of 8 seconds, while also scaling the multipliers for damage and self heals (since it's a raging ogre skill you know?)

This will mean we would have a larger skill config ultimately but simplify the mob database significantly. We could use just 1 mob, and 1 skill line on that mob and have it scale no matter how we configure the spawner and for whatever level it is. We can also make mobs gain levels (and heal) if they kill players! So, some very interesting stuff can happen!

Along with taking the time to add these meta skills in for each faction of mobs, I would also take the time to change and add in particle effects for EACH faction, and have the feedback be different.

For example; WitherFire and HungeringMaw are the same mage skills across all factions, in the future we can change them to maybe do a different effect like slow, blind, stun, suffocate, as well as use correspondingly different particles, and rename the feedback of the skill so it FEELS different as the player levels up. Mechanically, they would vary slightly, however the damage values, and hp values of mobs would remain loosely similar if the mobs were the same level.

Obviously for the caster mobs what I mean by this is something like so;

Unforgiven_Mage:
  Health: 450
  Damage: 25
  Armor: 5
# And then we'd have
Ogre_Mage:
  Health: 500
  Damage: 20
  Armor: 5

So they'd both be similar, but they would also use the same scaling values, and if you multiply those by 70, you would get similar-ish stats across the mobs.

For example if we used HP increases of 25 per level, the mobs would have around 70x25+baseHP at level 70, which means it would only vary by any sort of percieved racial mob differences, and mechanically this wouldn't matter much, but for the players it would represent lore and statistically vary enough to be interesting.

So, in other words; all of our modifiers would vary based on the mob type, and so would the base faction stats of that type, but the scaling of the mobs between similar 'class' types would be identical. That said, keep in mind the skills would be getting revamped and become meta skills that scale by level, so tiny differences here would equate to larger differences in fighting prowess later.

For example a mob that heals itself 10% everytime it lands a special attack would heal 185 health if it had 1850 hp, and if there was a faction with higher proportions of HP and lower base damage, it would heal more if it had a similar skill but the damage would not scale as much. I believe this would also add an edge on skill diversity by taking fully into account racial differences of the mobs.

Internally, we use a class system similar to how heroes already functions. We typically have Warrior, Archer, Mage, Scout, Rogue, Healer, Berserker, then Elite Warrior, Elite Archer, Elite Mage, and then unique bosses. The only other mobs we have in this limited system would be summoned minions if we're even using those.

So this is a major reason why I would like to diversify and expand the system in anticipation of the upcoming Adventure server, as well as in preparation for any unknowns, like if we release a minigames server, or have custom mobs on factions, etc.

Which brings me to another good point with the new MM 2.3.0. We also have the ability now to spawn mobs around a radius of the players. However, it is currently not within my scope of knowledge on how to scale mobs by the # of players in a radius.

MM does have a signaling system but it doesn't work in reverse, and seems like it would bug out. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to have mobs realize more players are nearby (especially elites or bosses) and have them scale HP to the # of the players nearby. Preferably, they would scale based on the # of players in combat with the mob, and leave combat if any extra players run outside of their combat range and scale back down, even if that means losing extra health and dying or being stuck at 1HP. Unfortunately MM isn't quite this tailored yet to allow for super custom mechanics.

If anyone else is excited or would like to see some of these changes in the near future, I am looking for constructive feedback on how to improve the system, as well as suggestions for various faction-based skills or input on numbers and how we should balance them.

Things to keep in mind for this are, any minecraft effect, or particle can be used, and we can do a lot of things with lines, squares, rings, spheres, etc. Spheres can be warped to look like ovals, and squares can become rectangles, lines can extend to infinity or be very short, I can also do projectiles, and homing missiles, and effects that target invisible mobs and then disappear to deal damage in an area.

Thanks!
-Xexorian

Push a new branch, so we can have a legacy setup and then we'll make the changes and lastly change the spawners (in a fell swoop?) LETS DO IT
Make this happen.

 

[iAlchemist]

I don't know if this is possible via mythic mobs but would it be possible to have mob v. Mob combat in certain areas? It might add an interesting battle-field sort of feel to dungeons, and it could possibly tie into events at lower tier dungeons. I.E.:

At a tier 3 dungeon, every few hours a mob invasion begins, the invading faction (any of the other dungeon's factions) will begin to summon their forces in the dungeon, and attack the current mobs in the dungeon. As these mobs die, a percentage tracking how many of them have died will count up until a certain amount has died and the forces will retreat. Players who fought the invasion will gain some bonus XP and a few rewards. I think that'd be an interesting and unique dungeon event.

Another one, taken straight from "Destiny" would be to summon an object of interest. Players can investigate the object to begin an event where waves of mobs will try to attack the object and players have to defend it. Each wave gets stronger until they survive ten waves or last 10 minutes against the onslaught. Once again, XP rewards and gear. Can only activate if the dungeon has a population of 2 or more.

Finally, a common idea, a lead invading boss. One powerful mob invades the dungeon slaying both mobs of other factions and player. Players can team up to defeat said mob for XP, killing team gets the gear. Can only activate if the dungeon has 4 or more people present in the dungeon.

These are just some ideas to break up the monotony of grinding in the dungeons, which quite honestly gets old when you're not doing anything different. Adding these sorts of random events, which should take place fairly often, might help excite that risk vs reward aspect that people seem to like.

 

[xexorian]

I don't know if this is possible via mythic mobs but would it be possible to have mob v. Mob combat in certain areas? It might add an interesting battle-field sort of feel to dungeons, and it could possibly tie into events at lower tier dungeons. I.E.:

At a tier 3 dungeon, every few hours a mob invasion begins, the invading faction (any of the other dungeon's factions) will begin to summon their forces in the dungeon, and attack the current mobs in the dungeon. As these mobs die, a percentage tracking how many of them have died will count up until a certain amount has died and the forces will retreat. Players who fought the invasion will gain some bonus XP and a few rewards. I think that'd be an interesting and unique dungeon event.

Another one, taken straight from "Destiny" would be to summon an object of interest. Players can investigate the object to begin an event where waves of mobs will try to attack the object and players have to defend it. Each wave gets stronger until they survive ten waves or last 10 minutes against the onslaught. Once again, XP rewards and gear. Can only activate if the dungeon has a population of 2 or more.

Finally, a common idea, a lead invading boss. One powerful mob invades the dungeon slaying both mobs of other factions and player. Players can team up to defeat said mob for XP, killing team gets the gear. Can only activate if the dungeon has 4 or more people present in the dungeon.

These are just some ideas to break up the monotony of grinding in the dungeons, which quite honestly gets old when you're not doing anything different. Adding these sorts of random events, which should take place fairly often, might help excite that risk vs reward aspect that people seem to like.

Parts of this suggestion seem feasible but I don't know how soon I can get around into delving into the events based things. One of the major changes in MM 2.3 was the use of the scoreboard to track custom variables or something, I'm still not 100% on it. If it does use a variable we can track it may be possible to have invasions and use these variables to track MM data to control it. Actually seems to be easy but I would have to understand more about how the scoreboard mechanics work internally first.

 

[xexorian]

This is coming from one who has spent a ton of time in the dungeons recently (currently /quests top 1) and I soend my time in all the dungeons from t4 and up.

I dont know how it can be changed, but I definitely think something should be done about the mob's spawning in some of the dungeons. Either that or the dungeon maps could be tweeked a little.

From my experience, both t4 dungeons are fine, sky castles is alright because you can shut doors everywhere to limit the swarms, and dark palace is really nice because its so big and expansive, theres so much room between every spawner.

Ivory however is harder to level in because once you walk into the square past the archway things, you just get swarmed so hard and its a lot more difficult to fight anything, especially when all 5+ mobs are using throw on you or teleporting and hitting you from different directions. Its not as bad in redhand, but its similar, you can easily get swarmed and overwhelmed.

I know that for ivory, if some more doors were put in the empty doorways, that could potentially do a lot, but if spawns could be affect by how many players are nearby that could be really cool.

Also this doesnt have to do anything about the creation of new mob skills, but the archers seem extremely annoying and over powered. I know that probably 90% of my deaths are from archer minions/elites killing me. I dont know if this is how it works for sure, but to me it seems that their arrows do more damage the further away you are, so it doesnt help how they knock you back constantly (even just their basic attack has a lot of kb) or the fact that they seem to have aimbot.

Also, this is just a minor point, but one of the types of minions in each dungeon has an attack where they "visciously maw at you" or something of the sort and in elven palace that can hit you more than half way across the courtyard at the base of the temple (the shorter length). That seems a little excessive to me, especially when you can even take fall damage from it then. There are also the melee minions that knock you back like 5 blocks whenever you hit them once, so it just takes forever and its kinda annoying to kill them as a melee class yourself.

I think I would be onboard for most of what you said, particularly the slight diversity in skills (like hungering maw, etc) and the dynamics around how many players are nearby, or even how they level up if they kill players that sounds rad (sounds like the shadow of mordor kinda vibe, me likey).

Lol sorry for the rant of a reply xD

TL;DR

This all comes form my experience in the last few weeks in all the dungeons T4 and up Ive constantly been in there, top quester as proof .

T4 dungeons, sky castles and dark palace are great for leveling, however in Ivory and red hand you can easily get swarmed and overwhelmed to the point where you can barely escape because of excessive throw abilities or teleports / knockback from basic hits from all directions.

Archer mobs seem too powerful due to knockback / aimbot, could use some tweeks. Also knockback in general for mob abilities could maybe be toned down a little.

Slight skill diversity (slow, burn, etc) would be really cool and make it more enjoyable. Also dynamic spawning based on nearby players and the leveling of mobs as they kill players sounds really cool.

To be honest, archer based mobs are a huge pain in the ass. I may just make them all become melee mobs with an ability that makes them stop to aim and fire a projectile that can be controlled damage-wise and distance-wise. It would be far easier to dodge however in a 1 on 1, but it seems a feasible change if we're talking about loads of mobs swarming you, kiting and stuff would be mandatory to avoid most of their damage.

 

[xexorian]

I'm thinking of having some mobs upgrade to an elite version of themselves if they manage to kill a player. For example, have a leather-armored warrior with a iron sword replace itself with an elite version if it kills a player and upgrade its armor or something. (however it would have to despawn to prevent infinite things happening) but I don't see it being a feasible addition to dungeons because it would just make it harder to get back to your location, and, most likely other people might kill it, and while being 'cool' I just don't see a good reason to create elite versions of every single mob to do it.

The biggest change in 2.3 however is that we can control Armor which is a new mechanic that reduces all damage by 1 per 1 Armor. With mob scaling we can control damage reduction mobs have by an integer basis now instead of just %'s. (We can do both, actually.)

 

[Irishman81]

From a balance standpoint: these are some things I've come up with after having done a large amount of leveling.

• Mobs/Bosses with lock on skills are extremely infuriating to fight against. Skills like hungering maw or the wither thing give no opportunity for counter play, and do very high amounts of damage.
• The skill "teleport" is fine, as long as it has a fairly high cool down. The point of adding teleportation skills was to prevent people from illegally/afk leveling if I remember correctly, even if the mob teleports once before dying, that's enough to ensure legality of leveling.
• Toss needs to be removed. I honestly don't see the point of toss with leap/teleport being a thing. The only possibly way I could see it working would be to have a global cool down on a player once they get tossed once by a mob: in order to prevent 3-5 mobs from all tossing the same guy at once, resulting in death by fall damage.
• Armor piercing skills should not be as common as they are now. When I looked at some of the configs, armor piercing=true was popping up way more than it should be. It destroys a lot of the use of having a tank in your party, as the skills don't take armor into account. I saw you mentioned % health damage skills for mobs, but I don't think that's a good idea either. If we are trying to promote strong groups forming for leveling, % hp also hurts a lot of the tanks/high hp classes.
• No knock back or lack of real knock back on mobs is also very frustrating to fight against. For left click classes, this takes away a lot of the counterplay while leveling, and guarantees you taking a ton of damage from the mobs. This also diminishes the role of a peeling class. If I'm playing paladin/dragoon for example, I'm going to try to keep the mobs away from my healer/caster to the best of my ability. If I can't make a difference in knocking them away, my squishies are going to get demolished.

If you need any help with this stuff @xexorian let me know.

 

[xexorian]

From a balance standpoint: these are some things I've come up with after having done a large amount of leveling.

• Mobs/Bosses with lock on skills are extremely infuriating to fight against. Skills like hungering maw or the wither thing give no opportunity for counter play, and do very high amounts of damage.
• The skill "teleport" is fine, as long as it has a fairly high cool down. The point of adding teleportation skills was to prevent people from illegally/afk leveling if I remember correctly, even if the mob teleports once before dying, that's enough to ensure legality of leveling.
• Toss needs to be removed. I honestly don't see the point of toss with leap/teleport being a thing. The only possibly way I could see it working would be to have a global cool down on a player once they get tossed once by a mob: in order to prevent 3-5 mobs from all tossing the same guy at once, resulting in death by fall damage.
• Armor piercing skills should not be as common as they are now. When I looked at some of the configs, armor piercing=true was popping up way more than it should be. It destroys a lot of the use of having a tank in your party, as the skills don't take armor into account. I saw you mentioned % health damage skills for mobs, but I don't think that's a good idea either. If we are trying to promote strong groups forming for leveling, % hp also hurts a lot of the tanks/high hp classes.
• No knock back or lack of real knock back on mobs is also very frustrating to fight against. For left click classes, this takes away a lot of the counterplay while leveling, and guarantees you taking a ton of damage from the mobs. This also diminishes the role of a peeling class. If I'm playing paladin/dragoon for example, I'm going to try to keep the mobs away from my healer/caster to the best of my ability. If I can't make a difference in knocking them away, my squishies are going to get demolished.

If you need any help with this stuff @xexorian let me know.

1) Lock on skills, homing missiles or? What are you talking about. Hungering Maw is a dot as is witherfire that both just inflict ignite or wither effects and some damage.

2) Spells always bypass armor, this is not intended to be tanked, also it would affect durability a lot more, which might mean improving the damage but making armor more neccessary. Interesting thought. Could be done. Tanks would be more OP though. While wizards or weaker armored classes at a disadvantage. The reason I originally went with armor piercing was to avoid armor immunities -- base mob melee attacks do not pierce currently and are affected by armor, and the design intent was to prevent huge pools of mobs being kited infinitely, if their one or two skills each are landing, you will not be able to kite 10 mobs and kill them. I chose numbers I felt would safely let you kite 5 or so, without instantly gibbing the tanks, if group heals were taken into account. So, currently this was by design.

3) Toss is a fun skill, Leap is even more fun. I was watching how some mobs would leap over gaps either to their doom, or actually make it across pitfalls and keep chasing players. I thought it was really cool, and scary. Toss needs to have a tighter range before being activated, and Teleports ... I feel should be only really for elites. Especially elite casters. If people are cheesing the mobs too much in areas I can try to adjust these areas to have less hiding spots or advantages. Barrier blocks are wonderful.

4) no KB was intended, most mobs in T5+ have 1.0 KBR which means you need atleast a KB2 sword/item to be able to knock them back roughly half the time. In 1.9 left click spamming won't be a thing anyway, and the combat changes mean single target swings may be taking a huge increase in effective damage values since you will only get off a swing every 1-3 seconds. (think Fireball 250 dmg 5s cd (50dps) Mace 150 dmg, Axe 100 dmg, Sword 75, Dagger 50) and what we would do is have to change multipliers for dmg values in heroes. This may be a huge undertaking, but "Damage Per Second" will be a factor in 1.9 and should be roughly equal on all weapon types for a given item quality / level requirement. Things that modify haste or attack speed will be direct % dmg increases -- but melee classes will require skill now to deal good damage. Since the closer you can time your 'perfect swings' will play into account of how well you can maintain damage, and this will be the direct opposition of spell casters who skill will be determined by lag and aim in most cases. This will begin to diversify our classes in heroes finally, and add a layer of depth we have sorely needed.

I do agree though. I say we reduce KBR down by half, and lower mob HP by about 20-50% across the board. I played myself upto about level 30-40 as a wizard and I was having huge sustain issues and having to kite things for crazy long just to kill them, even with the PVE modifier it is stupidly unefficient, and single-target damage should kill the mobs fast, and relying on AOE should not be as overpowered as it is.

In other RPG games, if you were high single target dps, your XP/HOUR was not affected much because AOE was expensive in either mana or stamina for these classes. Single target was sustainable and quick enough you had less downtime and while AOE *was* typically better, it was only ever 'slightly' better. Currently, AOEing mobs is a HUGE increase in XP/HOUR over players trying to single target shit and kite one or two things just to survive mechanics as they are.

I feel it should be easier. That said, my original intent was to make things hard, however I feel it's a bit too hard right now, and we can reserve how difficult encounters are for future content after I patch the leveling content up. I also would like to move drop tables around a bit and make it where only elites or bosses drop armor most of the time, and leave it off the regular mobs. We still have huge supplies of gear from mobs, and while that is nice to have, I think it could be tuned down a bit.

However, making things a bit easier to kill means a lot more money will be going into the economy, as well as combat relics, so we may lower the droprates on common items a tad, and increase the amounts you get on rarer mobs. I really want elites and bosses to be valuable as kills vs normal mob grinding for exp, and having it flood your inventory with trash gear.

The route I would like to see is

Normal Minions = XP Farming
Elite Minions = Item Farming
Bosses = Best-In-Slot-Items/XP Farming

while having all 3 drop relative currency based on difficulty.

I could see elites being rather difficult - if not harder than they are now, if we change spawner locations up, and make it more practical to know as you get 'deeper' there will be more and more waves of elites before you get to the bosses.

What I mean to say is, improving elite HP a tad, drastically lowering minion HP, adjusting drops across the table, removing the higher droprates on common mobs, improving the currency and EXP of elite and boss kills by about half, and smoothing the system out so it's more fluid ultimately.

TL;DR

-Increase Toss/Teleport CD
-Remove Tosses from some mobs or change how they work (it may be possible to use new mechanics to detect, though, not sure.)
-More unique skills per faction, more skills in general, more particles, and new mechanics
-Proper Mob Scaling by level as set by Spawners/Locations
-Unified Faction configs and Meta-Skills
-Specific *probably elite* Mobs able to level up if they kill players (until killed/natural despawn)
-Change loot up a bit, lower Minion HP, Increase elite HP/XP/Item drops, Increase boss XP/Item tables
in the future;
-Unique boss encounters, phases of each encounter, etc. NEW T7 mobs (not re-writes.)

 

[xexorian]

The largest issue I have right now is the limited number of practical 'effects' within minecraft I can use. We have 12 factions+ localized into 6 tiers to level from 1-60 in, and the issue I have is I cannot create enough unique effects to have each faction be themed well enough.

I do need some creative input on how these skills should or might work per faction. Seeing as how I can only make damage ignore armor or not, and use delays to create damage-over-time effects, the only other combination is healing, scaling damage/heals, and potion/temple effects.

Furthermore, some of these 'effects' are not targeted at PVE play, they are things like respiration, fall damage reduction, mining speed, etc.

Things I can use are like;
Ignite, Wither, Blind, Nausea, Suffocation, Slow, %physical dmg reduction, %physical dmg increase

And then I can take it a step further and say,
Cold/Ice = slowness/damage over time
Fire/Lava = Ignite/%dmg increase/damage over time
Witchmagic/Shadow/Unholy/Dark = Wither/Blind/damage over time
Wind/Cloud = Blind/Nausea
Might/Earth = Suffocation/slowness/%dmg reduce
Nature/Poison = Damage over time, Slows, Nausea

And with it being so hybridized down to the same half dozen mechanics, it kind of blends.

This is the issue. So, what I have to do is change the player feedback, change the exacting mechanic of how damage is dealt, how the skills feel, and most importantly, what the particles are, and how it themes in the end.

With 1.9.X we have some new minecraft mechanics finally coming into play, however they are very powerful. I'm still on the fence on how I will use 'Floating' effects, or gliding, or anything else. The biggest thing they did was make arrows have statuses potions have, which is basically what I'm already doing to custom mob skills now.

Such as the throw rum skill I made for the pirates, inflicted damage over time, and nausea. As well as literally throwing a splash potion I at the player. (the potion didn't do anything, the mechanics were fired by the skill )