46 replies to this topic

[Plutonsvea]

AKGeo, on 09 February 2013 - 10:10 PM, said:

By inventing true artificial intelligence.

High HP is a gimmick. one-shot attacks are gimmicks. AoE knockback into lava is a gimmick. AoE pull and spin-to-win (Kholer) is a gimmick. The trick is knowing the enemy and realizing that you DO have the skills necessary to counter it. But apparently it's too much effort to step away from the comfort zone of those specific 10 skills you always run in order to bring the support skills and run the weapons with the proper skills needed to survive and win.

I understand it. It took me a long time to muster up the courage to pick up the daggers and face some legendary bosses at close-melee range because that's how it just needed to be done, due to "gimmicks". But that's something that needs to be done. Adaptation is key to survival in all situations, even a video game.

Well there's your problem right there.

HP resembles... well, their HP. What do you expect? A giant rock monster to have the same resistance to swords as a human? Nope.

AOE knock-backs?  What do you think would happen, that you would happily absorb a giant explosion in front of you and keep walking forward? Keep dreaming.

I get where you are coming from, but let's face the facts. ArenaNet is a multi million dollar industry, they're not going to corrupt their combat system. As far as I am concerned, I am perfectly happy with it & they made it correctly.

But invulnerability? Sure. If a monster that is basically born in a magical realm and able to use their powers to protect themselves, Fine with me. Magic doesn't last forever, you'll be able to kill it eventually.

[drkn]

Back on topic:
Just keep the boss in the very centre all the time, making his invulnerability time minimum and barely noticeable; dodge through the spikes towards him and have everyone keep him leashed there.

It's actually pretty neat design - if you're not 'good enough' for the 'challenge' of 'keeping the boss at one spot', you will waste some more time, but still can do it without penalties. If you can pass that 'challenge', you're rewarded with getting through the fight faster.
And yes, it actually is pretty challenging.

Edited by drkn, 15 February 2013 - 11:01 AM.

[IsThisNameTaken]

Heh. Let them fix the camera angles before getting out of the sandbox and playing around with AI.

[Reikou]

One way to create challenging PvE without anything majorly complicated in terms of monsters, AI etc.

Make players compete against each other.

Make absolutely all dungeon runs timed, from start to finish.  Say each path of a specific dungeon run.
Have a moving median of dungeon run times calculated for say... the previous 2 weeks.
Any party that fails to complete the dungeon path under the median time does not receive any reward.

No need for gimmicks anything ridiculous, but it will definitely keep all dungeon runs challenging.

Edited by Reikou, 17 February 2013 - 06:37 PM.

[Lordkrall]

Yeah, it is a great idea to go completely against the whole spirit of the game and lock out non-hardcore players from even getting rewards from dungeons. I am sure that would qualify as a "challenge".

[Reikou]

Lordkrall, on 17 February 2013 - 06:37 PM, said:

Yeah, it is a great idea to go completely against the whole spirit of the game and lock out non-hardcore players from even getting rewards from dungeons. I am sure that would qualify as a "challenge".

Hardcore refers to time investment.

Player skill and ability at the game is sort of irrelevant to time spent at the game.  One can argue that skill can be improved with practice, and thus time invested in the game, but this is not a linear correlation, so your argument that this type of challenge locks out "non-hardcore players" falls flat on its face.

You don't need to be hardcore to get rewards.  You just need to be good at the game.

Edited by Reikou, 17 February 2013 - 06:43 PM.

[Lordkrall]

Reikou, on 17 February 2013 - 06:39 PM, said:

Hardcore refers to time spent at the game.

Player skill and ability at the game is sort of irrelevant to time spent at the game.

You don't need to be hardcore to get rewards.  You just need to be good.

Being hardcore have rather little to do with time spent though. It does more refer to the fact that the player in question is very good at a specific thing, not that he spends this or that many hours on it.

There is a reason the Hardcore mode in different games means perma-death and such, and it is not because it requires more time.

With your system, a rather large majority of the player based would not be able to get rewards from doing the dungeons, and that would go against what ArenaNet wants with the game. They don't want a group of elite players that can finish everything while the majority of the player can't.

[Reikou]

Lordkrall, on 17 February 2013 - 06:44 PM, said:

Being hardcore have rather little to do with time spent though. It does more refer to the fact that the player in question is very good at a specific thing, not that he spends this or that many hours on it.

There is a reason the Hardcore mode in different games means perma-death and such, and it is not because it requires more time.

With your system, a rather large majority of the player based would not be able to get rewards from doing the dungeons, and that would go against what ArenaNet wants with the game. They don't want a group of elite players that can finish everything while the majority of the player can't.

Semantics.  Your definition of "hardcore" is just the same as my "good at the game," so we will leave it at that.

With my system, 100% of the player base will eventually be able to receive rewards if they learn from their mistakes and improve their ability at the game.  With top-end PvE gear so widely and easily available, "gear" should never be an issue, and thus it really does all come down to skill and ability at the game.  All players will need to do is learn from their mistakes and improve.

And besides, every player will be able to finish all available content in the game.  Its just a of if player wants rewards or not, which is again, irrelevant to playing through and finishing content.

Edited by Reikou, 17 February 2013 - 06:51 PM.

[MisterB]

Reikou, on 17 February 2013 - 06:35 PM, said:

One way to create challenging PvE without anything majorly complicated in terms of monsters, AI etc.

Make players compete against each other.

Make absolutely all dungeon runs timed, from start to finish.  Say each path of a specific dungeon run.
Have a moving median of dungeon run times calculated for say... the previous 2 weeks.
Any party that fails to complete the dungeon path under the median time does not receive any reward.

No need for gimmicks anything ridiculous, but it will definitely keep all dungeon runs challenging.

I believe that's too simple, or it will have undesirable (from ANet's point of view) results. Instead, a scoring system would probably be better, where time from start to finish is counted as points, along with number of defeats(subtract points for each, bonus point score for zero), monster kills, optional bosses, etc.

Edited by MisterB, 17 February 2013 - 06:56 PM.

[Reikou]

MisterB, on 17 February 2013 - 06:54 PM, said:

I believe that's too simple, or it will have undesirable (from ANet's point of view) results. Instead, a scoring system would probably be better, where time from start to finish is counted as points, along with party defeats, monster kills, optional bosses, etc.

Something like this could be interesting as well, and would need alot of balance tweaking, especially the party defeats, monster and boss kill scoring.  However this is on the right track.  

Basically, it just needs to be a system that heavily encourages each player to play at their highest capacity throughout the entire dungeon run, and not just the current tab-target AFK PvE that currently goes on due to how the current system handles rewards.

I also believe that the game will benefit alot more from harsher punishment of bad play.

For example, right now, it is literally impossible to fail anything in this game in terms of PvE.  Quests can bug out, or players can give up, but the game will never fail players.  I believe that adding fail-states to dungeons would definitely improve the difficultly of the game.  For example, adding a limit to the use of in-dungeon waypoints, after which the party has considered to have "failed" the dungeon run, and again does not receive rewards at the end.  I personally feel that a limit of 15 waypoint uses per dungeon run (so basically 15 per party, or 3 per person.) should be sufficient to get through all the content in this game.  A system like this would also further promote good play and planning, and dissuade bad play such as waypoint zerging, etc.  Adding a timer to this system would again add to the challenge.

Edited by Reikou, 17 February 2013 - 07:15 PM.

[Westwater]

That time attack system is a terrible idea.  The simple fact is that if that were implimented Rangers, Eles, and Necros would NEVER get groups for dungeons.  Ever.  Most people wouldn't run with any classes besides warriors and mesmers honestly.  This type of system would kill the game faster than if they added 4 more gear tiers and raids in the next patch.

[omar316]

Westwater, on 18 February 2013 - 12:39 AM, said:

That time attack system is a terrible idea.  The simple fact is that if that were implimented Rangers, Eles, and Necros would NEVER get groups for dungeons.  Ever.  Most people wouldn't run with any classes besides warriors and mesmers honestly.  This type of system would kill the game faster than if they added 4 more gear tiers and raids in the next patch.

I loled.

[ShezuTsukai]

There is no reason a ranking system much like GW1 top daily and monthly lists for challenge missions wouldn't work for dungeon ex runs. Why not initiate a bonus number of tokens for the top team. This would reward top teams without the negativity of punishing teams not quite so well tuned because they would still get the standard reward for success.

[Reikou]

ShezuTsukai, on 18 February 2013 - 02:56 AM, said:

There is no reason a ranking system much like GW1 top daily and monthly lists for challenge missions wouldn't work for dungeon ex runs. Why not initiate a bonus number of tokens for the top team. This would reward top teams without the negativity of punishing teams not quite so well tuned because they would still get the standard reward for success.

Perhaps.  But the generic average pug going through a dungeon wouldn't care about it, and thus won't create any sort of challenge for them.

again the whole concept is to provide an incentive for players to play at their highest capacity and not slack off.

[Craywulf]

Best way for PvE to become more challenging, giving the mobs specific weakness to a particular type of attack while minimizing  other vulnerabilities but not completely so that an inexperienced player can not succeed. Basically a mob would have an internal HP bar that is exclusive to it's weakness. It's our job as players to figure out what that weakness is or we can just attack it like we normally would, but it would take much longer. For this to work every mob and boss would need to triple their current HP. So if a Skritt is level 5 with 100 HP, then it would have 300HP or hidden 100HP. Let say Skritt are vulnerable to confusion, so you only need to do 100 points of confusion-related damage to kill the Skritt faster than you would otherwise using normal method of hacking down a mob at 300HP.

The second thing ArenaNet can do is increase the importance of cross-profession-combos (CPCs). They can do this by providing greater benefits for doing them and also incorporate specific CPC vulnerabilities to champions. This would mean giving the Champions a secret health bar for one specific "field" (dark, ethereal, fire, ice, etc) they are vulnerable to. Again this would encourage planned attacks to set off CPCs and give players roles.

Edited by Craywulf, 18 February 2013 - 08:02 AM.

[raspberry jam]

Craywulf, on 18 February 2013 - 07:58 AM, said:

Best way for PvE to become more challenging, giving the mobs specific weakness to a particular type of attack while minimizing  other vulnerabilities but not completely so that an inexperienced player can not succeed. Basically a mob would have an internal HP bar that is exclusive to it's weakness. It's our job as players to figure out what that weakness is or we can just attack it like we normally would, but it would take much longer. For this to work every mob and boss would need to triple their current HP. So if a Skritt is level 5 with 100 HP, then it would have 300HP or hidden 100HP. Let say Skritt are vulnerable to confusion, so you only need to do 100 points of confusion-related damage to kill the Skritt faster than you would otherwise using normal method of hacking down a mob at 300HP.

The second thing ArenaNet can do is increase the importance of cross-profession-combos (CPCs). They can do this by providing greater benefits for doing them and also incorporate specific CPC vulnerabilities to champions. This would mean giving the Champions a secret health bar for one specific "field" (dark, ethereal, fire, ice, etc) they are vulnerable to. Again this would encourage planned attacks to set off CPCs and give players roles.

Not to be rude but those are horrid suggestions... I mean at first look they seem just fine but really they just deepen the problem.

Lots of CPCs and specific weaknesses just means that gimmicks are encouraged. Improved AI on the other hand could mean actual tactical gameplay. Give mobs a morale value, let mobs have individual behaviors (not based on their type but instead on their morale). Above all let mobs attempt to beat the player/s instead of just charging ahead and dying.

[ShezuTsukai]

In my opinion one of the best AI examples are the Veteran Waypoint Guards in WvW. They utilize CC, interrupts, heals and decent damage output. This should be the template for all opponents not just veterans. And then give veterans and champions even more intelligent skill usage with elites or racial specific monster skills. Karka monster skills make those fights interesting but why not allow elites on all veterans and up?

Some of the most interesting bosses in GW1 were made so by their name and the elite skill or skills they had. And yes some had more than one elite. Now either the elites are lackluster enough to not be noticed when used by a vet or they rarely have them.

Take for instance the first elite cappable in Factions, Double Dragon. Lian, Dragon's Pedal and all of the ele's around her had the skill but hers struck for double damage and at a level above any player could reach without gimmicks. She nuked many a noob who let her get within range of their party. And she knew when to use it to burn down the largest number of opponents. This was a real eye opener after leaving the training island. And made for a memorable boss encounter.