Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Dropping the respawn time to 25% in a handful of zones and 50% in some other zones would be extremely positive and not that much work (Presumably...). I still like my "Monster Tide" idea though that's more ambitious and experimental. What's your favorite idea to handle Resource Contention you'd like to see tried in a TLP? | Page 3 | EverQuest Forums
So, my favorite idea is dynamic respawn rates. I'd actually love to see the paradigm of players spreading out invert and instead motivate players to funnel together, lag be damed. Here's some thoughts I had in Patch Notes format.
TLP 2024: Monster Tide
- Each NPC spawn now has an "NPC heat" level. This heat level is increased when players kill that NPC spawn quickly, and decreases when it is not killed. It provides more difficult encounters and greater rewards
- Heat level changes as follows:
- It is a moving average based on the lifetime of of the last hour of spawns, allowing players to "warm up" camps if they are able to kill the NPCs quickly for multiple spawns
- In order to apply maximum heat for an NPC spawn, it must be killed within 30 seconds of spawning
- NPCs with a respawn greater than one hour are not affected
- Heat level makes the spawn more dangerous in the following ways. At max-heat level:
- NPCs will respawn 4x faster
- NPCs will have 50% higher damage and HP. This buff is not retained if the NPC is charmed
- NPCs will be 2x more resistant to crowd control spells like mez, stun, charm, fear, snare, root, blind
- NPCs will have a 2x higher aggro and social radius
- NPCs with rare spawns will be 2x more likely to spawn as a rare
- Heat level makes the spawn more rewarding in the following ways. At max-heat level:
- NPCs will reward 2x more experience
- NPCs will reward 2x more loot
- Maximum heat levels are intended to only be achievable in raids or over-leveled groups. It's intended that a normal group fighting mobs near their level will achieve a heat level that provides half the above difficulty and rewards
- The values above will be examined each expansion release and tweaked as necessary to ensure the proper amount of loot is entering the system.
- Heat level changes as follows:
- Calculations for loot / experience claiming have been adjusted
- The bug allowing some abilities (Especially DoTs) to overestimate their damage contribution has been fixed. Now only damage actually done to the mob will count
- Damage shields will now correctly attribute damage, such that a mob injured by a damage shield will count that damage to the owner of the damage shield
- The experience penalty for being in a raid has been removed
- Experience bonuses will now be extended to 12 person raids. The bonus for a 6 person group or raid is still 2.56, this scales linearly to 4x for 12 person raids. Raids with higher than 12 people will retain the 4x bonus
The configuration, as stated, might turn everything into a raid swarm loot pinata session and trivializes the entire thing, maybe the 50% hp/dmg/resists makes it too hard, maybe the raid bonuses will work out poorly, I don't know. Making NPCs have a base heat level that actually reduced the spawn rate, difficulty and rewards is interesting and would open up harder areas to less capable groups. Something like this system could be fun but would need tweaking once players tried it out.
And of course, it doesn't solve all the problems that FTE is intended to solve. It'd actually increase trains where a raid would wipe and one dodgy bard drags a super-hot raid of 2x social radius through to the zone-lines. The changes to damage attribution would improve small-scale DPS races and incidentally change power-leveling.
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