Changes you don't like.

[beia]

[Davairus]

that's a good idea

[Ergorion]

This mob regen rate is fucking nuts. Thumbs down.

[Esivole]

I tend to agree with ergorion on the mob regen thing. Some of it makes sense, some of it is literally insane.

[Ceridwel]

I think in general these days the pbase is on such a low swing that we need to make it enticing for people to gear up without needing a Winter group. If that means looking at the regen changes again then maybe that's not a bad thing.

[Davairus]

its NOT the code, the code was ignoring the values set by the builders before and now it isnt.. its all human error. so just let me know which ones are too high and which ones feel good and I will write a script to weed out all the too high ones

[Lorne]

Too much across the board imo. Judge based on trying to kill the wights and Armageddon bosses.

[Merlandox]

Dav, I get it that the regen change is a human error. However, having it makes solo-ing mobs really shit. I have no idea how you tester do it, being able to solo down bosses, but in general across the board, it's really difficult to solo down bosses to get eq.

If I were to take some unlucky rounds, the boss will regen 2000 hp while I'm healing up to try again. That sucks, I'll just walk away and make do with other eq.

[Davairus]

give me some that are fine

[ottif]

Soloing is the wrong direction for a MUD. Especially one where soloing rewards hoarders.

[asudan]

What!! Being able to solo a mob and gain such item desired is a huge deal. To be able to kill that creature for whatever item is a fun and challenging thing to do for me on any character. But I will say, I myself do not like the change to regeneration on mobs.

[Vanisse]

I just went through the code to make sure I actually understood how it worked. Then I went through a bunch of areas, checked the mob regen stats. Then I fought a bunch of different boss mobs using average and high end eq. These are some thoughts I have on the matter after poking around.

On my preliminary screen, there were a few cases where the mobs had slightly higher regen than default (Seringale guild guardians, which no one has apparently had a problem with), one rather egregious case of over-regeneration in Winter. I also found quite a number of cases where the regen is set laughably low. Since everyone has been used to regen being completely broken for years, one might find these currently broken mobs to feel "normal" while everything else seems "too high". Also, since regen was broken for years, builders who generated mobs manually rather than using default settings may not have applied the HP stats correctly during creation, since the mob HP came out the same in the end and there was no discernible difference.

I also found that right now mobs regen *exactly* the regen number set by builder, which doesn't seem very organic, but that's another matter entirely.

A level 50+ NPC currently default regens quite a bit more hp point per point on tick than a PC who is only sleeping (no cures or slow). It is usually a much smaller fraction of the NPC's total hp (which informs the condition description). Without using cures, hp recovery for a player can be around 10% per tick; the mob default regen is around 3-5% depending on the mob hp.

While testing, I found that the default regen amount is theoretically well within the damage that a player can do in a single round.

That said, the default algorithm generates a recommended regen level based only on the level of the mob. I think this may be dangerous as it ignores the effects of sanc and AC that a builder adds to the mob, which can heavily reduce the damage that a player can inflict. There are some boss mobs where the builder addressed this specifically (heavily reducing regen when boosting AC for example), but also I would expect many that simply have been left at default values, which passes a preliminary screen (and builder feels safe leaving at default) but may not feel balanced on the player's side.

Dav, if you do want to do a revision, I would suggest 1) instead of using a basic default regen algorithm, make a new algorithm that can account for applied sanc/AC, 2) apply this new algorithm across all default-set mobs, and 3) generating a list of mobs that currently don't follow the default in case they need review.

This would actually have second impact because the current default settings generator creates a mob with average AC and no sanc; so what really needs to be updated is the "Current: <regen> Recommended: <default_regen>" fields on OLC for the builder, and possibly an echoed reminder when they make any manual adjustments to AC or sanc. I imagine something like this:

[Merlandox]

Well, guild guardian goes unnoticed because they are lower level. The regen is not going to affect a level 50 player brute forcing it down. It'll probably affect when you're trying to enter the guild at level 35 probably, which in today's case is pretty rare for 35 to rush the guardian with another player sitting inside. The regen affects higher level mobs. 5% of 5000 hp is 250hp. Add in sanc and high AC, it's tough.

Anyway, I'm not intending for all the mobs in the realms to be pussy. In today's player base, it's really hard to find a group to hunt for eq. If every single creature regens so fast and you can't solo for the eq, i'm never going to get anything and it become frustrating. There has to be a balance of both sides. In the past when regen was broken, i can solo any mob, it just takes time. Now with such godly regen, I think the most broken mob is daryth. Seriously. Have you guys tested solo-ing daryth? His stupid rage/berserk heals him almost every other round. It's almost impossible. I'm not sure any class can do it. I personally felt it was so disgusting doing it in a group the last time I tried.

[Merlandox]

Oh btw, another perspective. The other mob I wanted to highlight was the Chieftain in dankbank forest that holds the huge iron sword. The last time anyone did it, I think I was there. We had what, 5 guys? we had a healer and a monk and we needed to flee and heal from his insane damage almost dying in the process.

I am not entirely sure how much regen that chieftain has now, but if u gonna add in 250 hp regen a tick, it's going to be a mad house killing him. How often are we going to get 5 man groups these days?

[Xenyar]

Daryth is insane.. when i had Krite, decked fire zerker sleeping in a tent and using trophy to heal quicker and i still could barely get a dent in him. If i rested more than 3 or 4 ticks he'd be back in excellent.

[tayyah]

Daryth has to be broken, I found some of the higher end lone bosses to be laughable in comparison. dame valere and tiamat are super easy for example. but daryth... I ran into the same issues as said above, couldn't even get him to quite a few wounds with all his rage/relax bs. I've really been thinking about this since it was first posted and I solo'd quite a bit of npc's in the last month and to be honest Daryth is really the only one that I ran into that it wasn't able to slowly wittle down. but that's a fire giant warrior which is a npc machine. Im probably a terrible example because I have never been able to really solo shit until the fire giant lol.

[Lorne]

IMO some of those guys I think you should be using a group for. I mean the chieftain with the huge iron sword, he literally has the best physical sword in the game. You shouldn't be able to solo him. Not too toot my own horn but I solo'ed him on Lorne when regene was still "broken". It did take me...I believe 2 hours, no exaggeration. And I did have a bit of help, Ysette was grouped with me at the time, and she took the agro away from the bodyguard and did other stuff for the two hours.

Daryth is a bit debatable, he was hard to solo before as from all the things you guys mentioned. He does carry one of the best bracelets. But yea, he needs to get looked into, the whole regene with rage and berserk does make him tough, even for groups.

But I think bosses like the wights, or the guys in riverwood come especially hard for people to solo. Even as an experienced player, I can struggle quite a bit if I'm unlucky. Aarngrim kicks my ass.

[Davairus]

Vanisse has made a great post, but the rest of it really sounds like a mindless buzzing drone of boohoo everything stinks. Its coming across as mostly just whining to me. People have privately praised the extra challenge presented by mob regen as well. They have literally told me they see some outliers but dont' revert this change.

The builders ought to think of the regen when they decide to put sanc/resistances/armor on their mobs. In fact I specified that the trolls in tenebria would be higher regen and hp but have a lower AC. As someone who is able to choose a different approach AND has no time to go through 9000 mobs to look at this, my kind of solution would be to make the POISON spell severely limit a mobs regeneration, in the same way that it severely limits a players generation, AND ALSO write a script to catch outliers.

I have asked for examples of mobs that are working fine and I'm receiving more broken mobs reports. You've tried that. It hasn't worked. You guys have the opportunity to do that for months already now and guess what? It failed. Give me what I have asked for and I will make it the gold standard by which all others will be judged. We will make Serin great again

[Ergorion]

We don't have access to the numbers and have to resort to just feeling it out. I haven't played for months and just tried to start outfitting a toon but got so fed up with it that I said fuck it, it's not worth it.

I can't give you specific regen rates that I think are appropriate because I don't have that info. What I can say is I believe high level mobs that are out in the open should be able to be solo killed by a solid level 50 pve class with a reasonable amount of effort. By out in the open I mean the daryths, and master torturers, and the individual wights of dal kaddar. Mobs where you don't have to beat a bunch of henchmen to get there.

Winter and the underworld and those challenge areas should definitely have shit that requires a group and the division of booty so one pve class cannot just roll through it and get decked.

By reasonable amount of effort I would say 20 minutes to 30 minutes of real time.

[Vanisse]

Ergorion, I know you guys don't have the data behind the scenes, but you could give us stuff like your damage output vs different boss mobs. Either damage per round (from group command) or the range of damage verbs that you get. (Like, doing wounds and mauls on Xymeria vs. doing MANGLES on Aarngrim while wearing the same outfit.) That was what I was trying to do earlier today, except I can't perfectly simulate a situation that you'd be in. If we try my approach I'd need to figure an equation which decreases regen to partially offset cases of high damage reduction that the player might face, obviously without turning the mob into cheese.

Dav, I know that there is onus on the builders for this problem, but builders may not realize or know the math behind how much damage reduction is associated with all the AC or sanc or berserk or other affects they are sticking on their fancy boss mobs. Which is why I suggested that we could have that calculated behind the scenes and a nice guideline provided for them. (and me. I don't know the maths either unless I go into the code to look it up.) While having a poison effect on regen would be neat, it would only benefit those classes who have the ability to poison. Also what would your criteria be for outliers? Because to me it seems that doing a simple screen for actual vs default regen doesn't accurately address the actual trouble spots as reported by players. You could also track the number off/act/act2/aff/etc. flags but that wouldn't be simple anymore. That's why I think directly adjusting the default setting might be a better approach. It would be automatically calculated based on relevant flags already on the mob and any mobs with actual = default would be automatically adjusted which I think from my brief look earlier would be the vast majority of them.

By the way, I think the reports of "broken" mobs are useful, but as Dav said, it would also be good to report boss mobs that you feel are good right now, so that they can be assessed and compared.

I just checked Daryth and he's one of the cases where he has default regen but the sheer number of added affects causes him to feel imbalanced. There are probably more.