Reducing Planes monster HPs

[Drawde]

Most of the monsters in the Planes have absolutely insane HPs for their level
(anything from 10000 to 30000) and are nearly impossible to fight even for a level 50-60
character - I tried fighting a Scareling with a level-50 wizard and stood no chance at all,
it barely flinched at 4 consecutive Ice Comets. Obviously in real EQ you're supposed to have
huge groups of high-level characters with clerics to heal and enchanters to charm/mesmerise
when raiding the Planes, but in EQEmu it'd be very hard to get that number of players together (and
in a local/offline game you HAVE to fight the monsters alone!). Anyone think that reducing their hitpoints
to about a quarter or third would be a good idea? That would probably make the Planes feasible for a small group
of high-level characters and possible (but very risky) for a single 50+ character.

[Trumpcard]

I think it's a good idea.. I would like to even see a 'difficulty' modifier we could put into the database. That way, we could create the MOB's with a base number of hit points in the database, then multiply it by the difficulty factor to exaggerate their hitpoints. We could make it zone specific, that way you could bump up the difficulty level on the zones (planes in this case) indivudually without manually going in and having to tweak hp's. You could do the same thing to produce exp modifiers in the same fashion that verant does for certain zones. It would be easy to do, just an extra call into the database, and an extra integer in the calculate formulas..

[TheClaus]

Well I think to stay in the accuracy of Live EQ you should leave the hps the same. However it would be up to the ServerOP to change the hps for his/her individual games based on # of players. It would be simple to go into your files and change the hp data for the spawns since it is txt file. Just my 2cp.

[_OZZY_]

A difficulty modifier would give us the best of both worlds. I think it should be implemented. Shouldn't be that hard to do, but I'm no expert in C by any means (had it back in college, but can't remember a damn bit of it *grin*).

[DeletedUser]

Point of the planes is they are hard, a lvl 60 should not be able to solo his way through the planes, just like a group should not be able to kill innoruuk (unless they are elite), I think we are doing good for keeping it somewhat balanced, people can always edit their own database to what they see fit through EQEmu Admin...

To Add: I believe that EQEmu is going to end up being a lan dungeons and dragons for people... It requires too much bandwidth, (anyone got a oc92 we can have?). Ofcourse we will try our best to make it playable over the net, but I am not sure if all things are quite that possible, especially huge raids...

[Windcatcher]

There is, of course, the concept of encounter scaling, a/la Neverwinter Nights. For the planes this might not be too hard, since you have to be 46+ just to be there and there is never more than one group hunting there at a time. Maybe when a mob pops its HPs should be based on the strength of everyone in the zone? An algorithm for this can't be too hard to create, at least as a first cut. As time goes on it could be made more and more complex.

WC

[Nada]

Well we could always post like a raid on friday, then people will be able to get ready and post if they can come. Im sure there are enough peps who would want to. Me and 2 lvl 60's took out 30k hp mob so, i think we would have a chance.

[Baron Sprite]

Could add a #player x command, as in diablo 2, where it just edits mob hps in any given zone upon the # entered. IE: #player 2 would make a 10000 hp mob be like 11000 or whatnot. Could also flip it around #player -1 would make it 9000 or whatnot. Could have the # or the % of the hp drop a variable in the db... my 2 cents... will run the code by myself later and see if it works out.

[DeletedUser]

Once Wes is able to figure out a way to efficiently allow NPC's to have an AI for spells is when you should judge their HP, a lot could change (harder) once it is done.

[Yodason]

we can add a dificulty setting

[Drawde]

I'll probably try distributing 2 versions of the NPC data, one with the standard hitpoints and one reduced.
A difficulty setting is a really good idea, but I didn't really think most non-Planes monsters needed lower HPs (except for a few unique ones like dragons and named quest monsters). Although as you say, once they can cast spells they'll get a lot harder.

How does the spellcasting AI work? Do NPCs automatically cast spells if they are a spellcasting class, or do they have to be assigned AI scripts?

[Yodason]

auto assigned appropriate with others like dt scripted

[Ariak]

Old Post, but oh well.

. I have given old mobs a huge HP reduction for my SoV zones . I equipped my warrior in full NTOV gear and got a friend, also in full NTOV gear.


Drakes - 32k

Aary spawn has two drakes and Aarry.

With #heal and FULL ntov gear (Mind you - this is the easiest dragon, and we were in FULL ntov gear!) this fight was damn near impossible without the help of a massive amount of #heals.

But, the STUN-BUG kicked in, and we split targets, 2/3 mobs were perma-stunned (Used Jae's Katana and Scept of Dest)

A guess - If we didn't use stun-bug, we'd of had to have 100+ cleric CHs, and i've YET to see somebody who plays a cleric on the emulator.

(Btw, we also had Aegolism, Speed of Shissar, Ancient Bulwark buffs on)

I've set the Drakes to a lowly 10k health, made a huge difference.

I