Better Combat for Large Creature Encounters

Hejo~!

I've got a decent idea for how to make encounters with Large Creatures more interesting and engaging for players while also potentially mitigating the effectiveness of large, uncoordinated player groups (Zergs).

- In this text Large Creature can also be understood as an Elite Type or Boss Type Enemy, whenever applicable.

Instead of Players just attacking the Large Creature and playing around its mechanics until it falls over and dies, how about a Hit-Zone Mechanic?

During the fight with a Large Creature, there are different zones on its body that, when attacked and dealt sufficient damage, become disabled or break.

For instance, you could target the head for increased damage, focus on the tail to disable it with sufficient damage during the fight to stop the Large Creature from using its tailswipe attack, or aim at the wings to hinder the creature's flight capability.

- This could be used to award players with more specific loot, which could be used in for example crafting, and reward players for participating in fights against the same or similar Large Creatures.

Why would it be beneficial to have this Hit-Zone Mechanic in the game?

I believe elements like these add depth to combat, requiring players to actively strategize their approach to Large Creature Encounters and coordinate with each other.

It should promote that fights rarely ever feel identical because players may experiment and try a different approach, or change how they approach the Large Creature based on what's best for their current group composition.

This may allow developers to make Large Creature Encounters more complex and varied, If they wish to.

This could help mitigate the effectiveness of large, uncoordinated player groups (Zergs) against certain large creatures by requiring coordinated efforts to disable specific creature parts that enable potent attacks. For example, a creature part might enable rapid Chain Lightning casting, necessitating players to split into smaller groups for a coordinated takedown.

If you fully read this post, make sure to include Hejo in your reply.

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Comments

George_Black

There is no zerg problem. This only occurs in PvE mmos, in which players can't claim a target. It's free for everyone to rush and hit. Look at FF14 fates, look at eso overland, look at wow. Nobody can turn around and punish the thiefs.
Now look at L2. Nobody can go near an open world raidboss without getting punched in the face by the group that started the raid. They will be marked for life if they try to steal without an invitation.
Secondly in AoC dying is no laughing matter. In all the above mmos that I mentioned, you got smacked, you respawn and that's that. You lost nothing.
Third. No fast travels, no global channels. You can't bring zergs quickly to a specific location.

Now let's move on...

"Focus on the tail to negate the tailswipe attack." Meaning you negate the unexpected aoe attack. Isn't that helping the unorganized?
In my experience from soulslike games, fighting bosses as a due or more is even more dangerous than solo. The big AoE attacks of the bosses are punishing for your friends that dont pay attention, or aren't as focused as the one that is under attack.
I say keep the tailswipe, don't remove it.
What's stopping uncoordinated players from attacking the head?

Now I like the concept, but here are some changes:
Multiple targets: wings tail, legs etc They help making the encounter less of a dps race, since you can't stack DoTs on a single entity, and if you chose to recast DoTs in every different part of the body, then you just waste time and dmg.
I think different parts of the body should have a relation to melee and ranged players, as well as physical and magical attacks.

Disabling some parts of the body may give a chance for melee to get up close and deal dmg. Hurt the legs, lower the head, hit from melee (Dragon Age Inquisition).
Some weapons or barriers that the creature may use might need magic dmg to help with the raid. Not all groups will have magic archetypes with them, but it is an option to make it more engaging, and different from time to time.

All in all I want to see stuff like that and I agree, but I don't consider zergs to be an issue in AoC PvE.
I keeps popping up and the people that mention it haven't checked out AoC seriously. The game isn't build like that.

Enigmatic Sage

"Hejo~!"

It's honestly not a bad idea especially if you have target locking more specific to range allowances for tracking accuracy. That way the tab-target wont be broken / meta as placement would be important while giving healers more to potentially do as players would need to be more mindful and not just turn healers into a HPS spam beast that breaks the game. Not a fan of healers and tanks being broken like that as they need to fit the balance for PvE and PvP with creating issues.

I definitely like the idea of being more dimensional in the boss encounters for different strategic encounters where it may or may not apply.

On the fence about the loot thing but perhaps maybe gives a higher chance for more specific items to drop based on encounter accomplishments?

The risk vs reward element for triggering certain boss mechanics such as enrage and improved tiers of npc attacks sounds like it could be a lot of fun for co-ordinated group play.

The double edged side of this is it could also enable trolling to occur as well in certain scenarios. So maybe have something like this limited to more special encounters?

Depraved

how do you call a large, coordinated group of players?

anyways dont you think a zerg could attack the boss' head, tail, etc as well? do you call a zerg just random players who got together and started attacking the boss, maybe using the ingame voice chat? or a guild with large numbers on discord telling people "attack the head", "attack the tail" etc

Enigmatic Sage

@Depraved There is more context you're potentially over looking such as dungeons variables ranging from open world with variables to instanced.

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons

Could also add a unique experience for node sieges as dragons and whatnot could be involved as well.

Azherae

Well Hejo there.

I figure the thing you want here is exactly as your topic says. For the battle itself to be better, and the anti-zerg thing moreso being against 'zerging with just optimized DPS'.

It's not terrible, but because it's a tradeoff, and in any large battle can't be 'allowed' to be easy to begin with, it might be overwhelming to players.

Who would then zerg it even harder to power through the mechanics without having to do it, if possible, and just complain if it wasn't possible. Also, in Ashes, this would need to be fine-tuned so that you needed the full possible contingent of people just to achieve it (pushing it toward hard, not just interesting). Otherwise, you'd get 'a few people whose job it is to do this part of the fight, and a lot of people waiting around to start doing damage when the enemy was disabled.

Noting for transparency that my only serious experience with this system type in an MMO is the Proc system in FFXI which comes quite close, but isn't a parallel. My Monster Hunter experience doesn't count because Monster Hunter is definitely more restrained. Is it more interesting to target body parts? A little bit, but with either enough damage or a core strategy that avoids the attacks that the body part enables, one can ignore it.

I'm not suggesting that Intrepid disregard this suggestion, just noting that the game we've seen so far (judging by the few abilities they've shown us that might be the basics of combat for some Archetypes), doesn't support it well.

Enigmatic Sage

@Azherae
I believe projectile collision is still relatively planned and if it's something they want to expand further on down the road these special encounters could even have more dimensional elements to them such as increased armoured areas and depending on the design of the mob/encounter, perhaps even block some things at certain angles to reduce certain archetype stacking.

Player collision is still planned so it's not like you'll have 10 melee stacking together on the boss either especially with acrobatic ability animations involved to some degree. Players will probably need to consider positioning regardless.

Dungeons could have multiple groups competing or working together before we even know about max player counts per dungeon as an example.

Either way, depending on how complex they want to go with it, it is something to potentially consider and theory craft about with difficulty scaling involved too.

Azherae

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

@Azherae
I believe projectile collision is still relatively planned and if it's something they want to expand further on down the road these special encounters could even have more dimensional elements to them such as increased armoured areas and depending on the design of the mob/encounter, perhaps even block some things at certain angles to reduce certain archetype stacking.

Player collision is still planned so it's not like you'll have 10 melee stacking together on the boss either especially with acrobatic ability animations involved to some degree. Players will probably need to consider positioning regardless.

Dungeons could have multiple groups competing or working together before we even know about max player counts per dungeon as an example.

Either way, depending on how complex they want to go with it, it is something to potentially consider and theory craft about with difficulty scaling involved too.

Yes, but these things are all part of older MMOs already in specific ways, since you can simulate collision using the basics of angles.

Basically, I'm talking about what happened in games that already implemented this. I am sure that Ashes can find a way to go beyond the maximum strictness of positional strikes in games like the ones I've played, but unless their base design works with it, players seem to work around this easily enough that it doesn't matter.

But, I'm definitely biased by my huge ego overall. When someone says 'more interesting' I'm comparing to stuff I enjoy which is already really complicated. I think Dark Ixion's horn has separate potential odds of breaking based on what weapon the person attacking from directly in front of it is using, but it's entirely possible that even to this day, no one is entirely sure how it works (or at least if they know, they didn't bother to share back when this boss was relevant enough).

That link doesn't really explain how complex actually fighting that mob is, relative to the sort of stuff mentioned in this thread (it does only have one body part that can be broken though), but that's just the 'expectation' for FFXI bosses. There's no point in trying to give a very detailed explanation to anyone other than your guild, because different groups don't fight the boss the same way. So things like wiki just 'list off what it does and leave it to the group to figure out how they plan to approach it the first time'.

I mention this because if we want to discuss 'angular damage', 'boss responses', and 'break chances', I'd be basing it on this one (it's the simplest one, so I figure that's best) but others would still need a lot of background to know why I say the things I said.

Depraved

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

@Depraved There is more context you're potentially over looking such as dungeons variables ranging from open world with variables to instanced.

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons

Could also add a unique experience for node sieges as dragons and whatnot could be involved as well.

dungeons in aoc will be open world dungeons. you can still zerg a dungeon T_T

Enigmatic Sage

Azherae wrote: »

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

@Azherae
I believe projectile collision is still relatively planned and if it's something they want to expand further on down the road these special encounters could even have more dimensional elements to them such as increased armoured areas and depending on the design of the mob/encounter, perhaps even block some things at certain angles to reduce certain archetype stacking.

Player collision is still planned so it's not like you'll have 10 melee stacking together on the boss either especially with acrobatic ability animations involved to some degree. Players will probably need to consider positioning regardless.

Dungeons could have multiple groups competing or working together before we even know about max player counts per dungeon as an example.

Either way, depending on how complex they want to go with it, it is something to potentially consider and theory craft about with difficulty scaling involved too.

Yes, but these things are all part of older MMOs already in specific ways, since you can simulate collision using the basics of angles.

Basically, I'm talking about what happened in games that already implemented this. I am sure that Ashes can find a way to go beyond the maximum strictness of positional strikes in games like the ones I've played, but unless their base design works with it, players seem to work around this easily enough that it doesn't matter.

But, I'm definitely biased by my huge ego overall. When someone says 'more interesting' I'm comparing to stuff I enjoy which is already really complicated. I think Dark Ixion's horn has separate potential odds of breaking based on what weapon the person attacking from directly in front of it is using, but it's entirely possible that even to this day, no one is entirely sure how it works (or at least if they know, they didn't bother to share back when this boss was relevant enough).

That link doesn't really explain how complex actually fighting that mob is, relative to the sort of stuff mentioned in this thread (it does only have one body part that can be broken though), but that's just the 'expectation' for FFXI bosses. There's no point in trying to give a very detailed explanation to anyone other than your guild, because different groups don't fight the boss the same way. So things like wiki just 'list off what it does and leave it to the group to figure out how they plan to approach it the first time'.

I mention this because if we want to discuss 'angular damage', 'boss responses', and 'break chances', I'd be basing it on this one (it's the simplest one, so I figure that's best) but others would still need a lot of background to know why I say the things I said.

That's definitely fair and a good understanding of reference for perspective.

In my head I was more under the assumption spells and projectiles wont be passing through friendly players, the environment, special object made by the boss or enemy players ranging from arrows to projectile style spells such and bolts and what not. There is no friendly fire but body blocking plays a factor in the encounter unless I am mistaken or they plan on changing that. For example if there was 20 people in a single raid group but you could have up to 3 raid groups, that's 60 potential people involved in a single special encounter and if involved in sieges, you're looking potentially at 100 people depending on siege objectives and size.

The way my imagination is already going is to be thinking about mechanic manipulation, boss abilities, phases, affixes, environmental lay out, collision limitations and raid formation etc lol I'm already planning the boss kill in my head

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