Spectral Enemies and physical damage resistance

Damokles

Hello Everyone, Damokles here again!
As you read above: What do you think about spectral/undead enemies and do you think that incorporeal enemies should be resistant against physical damage?

With that I mean that adds like:
Ghosts, Spectres and other incorporeal enemies would be 100% resistant against physical attacks, requiring us to coat our weapons in special liquids (that could give the alchemists another good use and throughout best seller item xD)
Zombies and other undead would have 50% resistance against physical attacks (except for critical hits) and would take extra damage from spells.

What do you think of this? IS could scale it so that spectral enemies would only appear in higher dungeons and zones, they could guard ancient ruins from before the cataclysm (like the ascalonian ghosts in GW2 from a story perspective).

Karthos

I like Final Fantasy logic where healing spells/skills damage dead/undead enemies.

Azryil

I like the idea of having some monsters being resistant or vulnerable to certain elements even going so far as an element healing the mob if the element was of the same type as the mob(fire damage vs fire elemental).

karthos wrote: »

I like Final Fantasy logic where healing spells/skills damage dead/undead enemies.

This has been a fairly common element in games, but it never made much sense to me beyond Holy element vs undead. I definitely think that holy attacks should do increased damage to undead mobs, but healing specifically shouldn't be use as an attack.

neuroguy

It would need to be balanced with a symmetrical or asymmetrical disadvantage for magic users.

Symmetrical: some monsters that are 100% resistant to magic and require some mechanic to hurt.
Asymmetrical: some other form of disadvantage that doesn't just mirror the melee counterpart.

I like the elemental examples given but flat out 100% physical resistance seems harsh.

Damokles

@neuroguy
I thought a bit about the same idea for mages, they could make it so that instead of flat out resistance, specific enemies had some kind of protective magical layer around them that casters would hve to whittle down. While the layer is up, they would be immune against magical cc and only take 50% of the damage.

This could even be ontop of the physical damage reduction for spectres (making them the strongest type of enemies in dungeons)

And it is supposed to be harsh! Thats why I also said that this should only be in high level dungeons and raids. I want it to force groups to always think and try to support each other.
These dungeons could have some of the best loot, or drops from spectral adds could be extremely valuable (crystalized bones, spectral dust, spectres cowls, etc) for jewelers, alchemists and smiths.

ferretstalker

I mean, yeah. I'd love to see enemies with various strengths and weaknesses that players have to adjust their equipment for, and having elements like that would go a long way towards the horizontal progression system they seem keen to implement.

Take it further and apply the same thought to elemental monsters, like a water elemental having a weakness to lightning based attacks or requiring players to gear up in fire resistant gear to clear a volcano dungeon. I like the idea of Alchemists creating weapon enhancements like a "spiritbane oil" or something similar that affects spectral enemies. If the goal is to make the endgame more fluid, then this is one way to do that.

neuroguy

This kinda sounds like it's falling in the category of conceptually cool but perhaps practically tedious. Intrepid was also playing around with using "darkness" in cool ways in the world and dungeons. Last I heard they wanted to make sure the mechanic would be fun and not just conceptually cool before confirming its implementation.

If they find a fun way to implement this where it is not too tedious and feels rewarding, I'm all for it.

Wandering Mist

I am fine with that as long as you give us the tools to overcome these weaknesses. The last thing I'd want to see is certain classes completely unable to kill certain types of enemies purely because of some immunity that they can't overcome.

There was an infamous boss in Vanilla WoW's AQ40 raid called Viscidus that took things like this to the extreme. This boss has 3 phases. In the first phase he can only be harmed by frost damage, and the idea is you have to freeze him with a barrage of frost-based attacks within a certain amount of time. Once he's frozen he becomes weak to physical attacks (shatter the frozen ice), until he breaks down into a load of small adds that all need to be dps'ed down.

It sounds like a very neat idea, but terrible in practice as it meant certain classes were useless for this fight, and at least part of the time every player in the raid has literally nothing to do.

Damokles

@wanderingmist
Thats why i want physical dps to use an easy to produce buff item (some kind of oil that can be produced by alchemists, this would always be in demand), that has an effect for one hour and then needs to be reapplied. This weapons buff would give the dps only a 10% damage decrease instead of the 100% for example.

My goal with this is to give the game some kind to easily to navigate rpg element in higher dungeons.
(I also know of viscidus and hated him with all of my black shriveled rogue heart xD)