Archnemenememem

If you will, set aside all your balance and gameplay considerations for a moment.

Thematically it's really silly for players to encounter "Arch" "Nemesis" monsters in groups, often, and with multiple accumulating "defining" properties.

Thank you. Okay back to balance and gameplay considerations.

What do people think about Archnemesis contributing one modifier per Rare, with Rare monsters occurring significantly less frequently overall (rewards adjusted to meet altered difficulty and scarcity) and not spawning or very rarely spawning from league mechanics, and Magic monsters moving towards (not into the same position as) current Rares raw attribute-wise and reward-wise (not including reward conversion)?

I feel this would give GGG three independent dials to adjust regarding drops and gameplay in general: Normal, Magic, and Rare monsters as properly distinct islands of player exposure, complexity, difficulty, and rewards. It has the added benefit of seriously reducing cognitive load and reading times during combat too - much easier to work out what to do in response to one terrifying and memorable modifier than read 4-7 randomized methods of execution and realize you just can't fight the thing or don't want to because it'll drop nothing but flasks. To be clear, working out what to do is different from that being easily accomplished.

It also allows GGG to slow down the game on a slope rather than with a wall (Archnemesis Rares).

- Rare monsters could drop high/very high rewards but wait to appear until Act 5 and would shake up play in a less haphazard manner. They'd be hard encounters and demand attention without demanding the majority of the play space, and with one modifier Archnemesis modifiers can be designed in a more deliberate and flexible fashion.

- Packs of Magic monsters would be exciting to fight without the guarantee of an overbearing Rare monster and reliably rewarding in low/moderate amounts depending on monster difficulty and level. League mechanics that spawn Rares would spawn Magic monsters now, maybe very rarely Rare monsters in endgame.

- Normal monsters can drop very low/low rewards and be a bit more hale while providing a baseline for item progression and experience gain above their current state as literal shredded paper. Plus players can get the chance to learn to fight specific monsterpatterns if there isn't always a jacked up Rare charging at you.

- The Unique monster dial is one they have already, and tbh I'd like them to tweak unique mobs up life-wise if this is the tankiness they want for rares (imo adjustments from stacking mechanics on rare monsters should only provide flat life determined by monster level, it would be much more consistent than multipliers). Unique monsters should occupy the very high/extremely rewarding category depending on difficulty and level (with further adjustments based on scarcity like with pinnacle content) and should on average be harder than Rare monsters of equivalent level which is just absolutely not the case right now.

Scarcity, rewards, and difficulty can then be adjusted with each "monster tier" dial independently without a knock-on effect on other "monster tiers". With the game as it is atm Normal and Magic monsters effectively don't exist (other than xp from magic mobs), and as has been said several times Archnemesis monsters dominate any content they appear in.

My unironic suggestion to this Problem:Solution is to make them appear much less often, with more elaborate and engaging solitary modifiers that allow that domination to happen but occasionally and with much higher payoff. Make Magic monsters more intimidating and a bit rarer and push their rewards upward to match and Normal monsters can piddle along however they do.

I understand that development time went into the reward conversion system but it can likely be altered to suit this concept, the stacking part is mostly what's extraneous as solitary Archnemesis modifiers could still convert rewards which actually sounds pretty dope to me with this idea. Part of this would be tiering the modifiers (if that's not already a codified thing) so you encounter less rewarding but less intense modifiers earlier in the game and more demanding but increasingly rewarding ones later in the game.

tl;dr: Make Rare monsters spawn much less often, with ONE fully fleshed out and terrifying Archnemesis modifier and high rewards, and move Magic packs a few steps towards the space occupied by Rare monsters so they're tough and somewhat rewarding but not wildly powerful or super complex. Give Normal monsters a slight bump life-wise because they may as well not exist and make Uniques more... uniquely challenging..

Thanks for reading!

the sad state of archnemesis makes me more afraid of steel infused monsters than Kitava or Innocence touched. I literally feel like "thank god it is just going to shoot dodgable orbs at me" instead of "this phys immune monster is going to one shot me through my armor." Hyperbole sure, but the higher tier arch mods are so much safer than the low and mid tier.

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roundishcap wrote:

the sad state of archnemesis makes me more afraid of steel infused monsters than Kitava or Innocence touched. I literally feel like "thank god it is just going to shoot dodgable orbs at me" instead of "this phys immune monster is going to one shot me through my armor." Hyperbole sure, but the higher tier arch mods are so much safer than the low and mid tier.

Right, given this would involve redesigning the modifiers with not combo-ing (on one monster) in mind I expect some tiers would move around. It would open up Steel Infused to be more engaging, with less generic defensive traits and more active things like guard skill usage and banners that you can play around.

personally, i play sub par builds. like a elemental fdamage tornado shot ranger in archnemesis league and a cold dot occultist this league.

in both leagues i didn't really suffer from more difficult archnemesis mobs and those builds were cheap 3 ex builds for casual playstyle and some fun.

ok, i never beat maven or sirus with those chars cause damage output is abysmally bad but playing until read maps was fine.

where is the point where you have problems and which builds fail on archnemesis mods?

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vio wrote:

personally, i play sub par builds. like a elemental fdamage tornado shot ranger in archnemesis league and a cold dot occultist this league.

in both leagues i didn't really suffer from more difficult archnemesis mobs and those builds were cheap 3 ex builds for casual playstyle and some fun.

ok, i never beat maven or sirus with those chars cause damage output is abysmally bad but playing until read maps was fine.

where is the point where you have problems and which builds fail on archnemesis mods?

some rares are harder to kill than some end game bosses, do you not understand that

Building on the OP

Let's do an experiment to demonstrate variance, roll 4d100 and compare the total against the difficulty of 1d100. 1d100 represents the difficulty of a single archnemesis modifier on a monster. For this experiment we'll pretend Empowering Minions doesn't exist.

We'll also simulate the further variance from build interaction with simple .5/x2 bounds.

This is an oversimplification but should get the idea across.

Our d100 got a 66, not too bad. That's a 33 when a character has an advantage (think CI against primarily chaos dealing monsters) and 132 when at disadvantage (using the chaos monster example, a low lifer without a solution for chaos bypassing ES). Either an easy fight or a pretty tough but doable fight, which seems about right. 200 is as hard as a fight gets against a single mod monster, and that's a bad matchup against the highest intensity modifier.

However, I got 166 on 4d100 - this represents an easier 4 mod fight than average... but still 2.5 times harder than our harder than average single modifier fight. In a good matchup that's an 83, a moderate encounter. In a bad matchup that's 332, a potentially lethal fight. With a single modifier having a range of 100 and the end of that range being "tough" before build interaction, this is a bit overbearing.

I rolled again and got 309 - a harder 4 mod fight than average, and nearly five times harder than our baseline Rare monster. At 154 for a favorable matchup it's already pretty hard but nothing crazy... however an unfavorable matchup is a 618, this is an extremely lethal fight and probably a short one.

At 400, the theoretical maximum difficulty for a 4 modifier archnemesis rare, the range is 200-800 depending on build matchup. The lower threshold is as hard as a bad matchup against a single modifier rare, and the upper threshold is comically one sided. The range of lethal encounters is from 300-800 (rarely lethal to immediately lethal), or 83% of the encounters with a maximally difficult 4 modifier archnemesis rare.

If Rare monsters were limited to a single modifier, with a difficulty range ending at 200 instead of 100, we can observe tough fights in a good matchup (100) and pretty lethal fights in a bad matchup (400) - this sounds to me like a more engaging spectrum of encounters than 1 to 800 depending on the number of modifiers, their difficulty, and build relevance, wherein 350 is a fair but lethal encounter.

Truth be told the variance is probably much higher, with builds sometimes making a fight 10x easier or harder and the modifiers aren't randomly difficult - they were designed - so the difficulty is not evenly distributed. Variance is of course a huge factor in replay value and generally keeping the game from being monotonous, but it must be bounded to prevent encounters from being disproportionately non-interactive.

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Rextec wrote:

some rares are harder to kill than some end game bosses, do you not understand that

haven't met one. but i'm only at t3 maps.

but even if that's the case, if they're more rewarding cause they drop synthesis items or something, it would be ok for me.

some combinations shouldnt be allowed. and AN needs to be removed from or nerfed hard (even harder) in combination with other league-mechanics.
heres what happened to me: ran a lvl62 (!!!) alva-temple, the one you build through the campaign. it had the T3 regen-room which just broke it. at that point my char was about lvl70, 2 4l-dmg-skills, merciless lab (i know, guardian, so doesnt mean much in terms of dmg, but still). have been cruising through the campaign, all the campaign-bosses and itzaro died really fast. this is is one of the better league-starters i had, meassured against the campaign and its content.
the AN-mobs in the temple were simply untouchable. overcharged, gargantuan, sentinel, all the defensive mods made them not just unkillable, but untouchable in combination with the %-regen. now the supposedly actual bosses of the temple, the architects, died in less than 3 seconds. not is this only thematically irritating, that random yellow mobs become the defacto bosses of other leagues, it show how insanely overpowered AN is (or can become, in combination with all the stuff thats out there).
whats sad is that is one of the first times i feel like something hasnt been tested at all. every campaign i run into some boss thats unkillable for my char, but then the blame is on my side for having 20 unspend skill-points or running arc-onslaught-arcanesurge in my lifesprig. thats okay, thats the game telling me to take it seriously and thats why i like it.
but to be overleveled and, in terms of the campaign, fairly well-build, and then not to be able to even damage monsters 8 (or 6) levels below, that cant be right...