Messages posted by: Wail

Locrian wrote:

Apparently, engineers are getting xp bonuses at the end of a game per sentinel built. One base specialist said he received 400 xp at the end, so it may also be counting turrets. Also, monster masters last build were getting the same for pets (an extra 80 for each), and since nothing was changed in that regard for this build, I'm betting it's still going on.

Pretty sure this would need to be addressed by subclassing MutUT2004RPG (although it's an easy change). I've attempted to fix this issue by destroying summoned monsters at the end of the game, or destroying their controller, but I think by the time the pawns themselves are notified of the end of the game, it's already awarded the experience.

Dragon7350 wrote:

This is unrelated to the previous, more important topic (maybe a countershove problem?), but this seems like a bug regardless.

At the end of a map, I would goof off and use speed boost. I noticed that, whenever I ran out of adrenaline, the message of day showed up and my adrenaline was refilled back to 100. I could do this infinitely.

Another day, I was on a map that was massive, so I tried speed boost. The same thing happened, and I found it possible to use the boost, the healing blast, and healing sphere in succession in order to heal more often and constantly (I tried this once to see if it would work).

I have adren drip, and I think that is what is doing this in part.

I don't know if this was meant to be or if it is a glitch, but I'm assuming the latter.

Yeah, the Speed combo is poorly written which results in RPG abilities being applied again after it runs out. You can use this to gain double the effect of any ability unless that ability is specifically designed not to double-up on itself (e.g. checks to make sure it removes the effect before applying it).

Trying to add in the weapon effects to artifacts sounds like a lot of work and would probably be a balancing nightmare.

While I'm making suggestions, this one doesn't have anything to do with balancing the ExMon subclass in anyway, but could be nice: Display summoned monster name and health on the summoning player's HUD.
Definitely could be a nice tweak for keeping tabs on your monsters.

Regarding Extreme Monsters... And feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt since I rarely play on DC (and rarely have time to play anything at all these days due to other obligations).

Making the Extreme Monster subclass even more passive from the player standpoint seems like a great way to make a really boring class. I know when I play a Medic, the pet monsters I summon are kind of just there. It's nice to occasionally get a double kill or something out of them, but they don't feel connected to my game experience really, mostly because the only level of control I have over them is where I summon them.

I've looked at the controller class and it doesn't seem to be feasible to add "giving orders" to pets easily, since the FriendlyMonsterController is not a bot controller but rather a MonsterController. That's one avenue that would be nice to have but doesn't seem very viable.

I'm going to toss out a couple of other ideas that might work towards making Extreme Monsters more of an active class.

-All Monsters gain negative health regeneration (-5HP/s)
-Link Gun: All ExMon come with a special PetMedic Link Gun that links to monsters. While Linked, they heal very fast (healing increase on Pets to offset the degeneration) and do additional damage.

The idea behind this is to keep the ExMon focused on keeping his pets going. Since they suffer constant health degeneration, they need to be babysat or they will die. The Link Gun/Leash allows the ExMon to heal his pets from the degeneration effectively, and also to prioritize some amount of damage boost between pets (e.g. you can link the pet who's actually fighting vs. the one standing there posing)

Another idea:

-Reduce pet base damage a bit
-Add a "Pet Double Damage" artifact that you could run ala Triple to give your pets enhanced damage output (maybe restrict it by pets in a certain range?).

Again, the focus here is on rewarding players who try and take an active role in corralling their pet monsters instead of summoning them somewhere and then running into a dark corner. A TripleDamage-like artifact/power would give you more control over how effective your monsters in certain scenarios and reward skillful timing and resource management. (Whereas always-on damage bonus is just ... Boring and promotes passivity).

I would be interested in an achievement system even aside from UT2004RPG/DruidsRPG.

UT3 with Steam has some interesting achievements. Granted, I never really got many of them because UT3 was kind of a letdown for me in many ways, but achievements can make the gameplay fun by giving you something to do that's different instead of "optimal."

There's a mutator for UT2004 based on one of the achievements for UT3 - The achievement for UT3 involves picking up all the items in every stock level (e.g. Get alll the health, ammo, shields, weapons, etc.) The UT2004 mutator tracks this on a per-map basis, although I believe it works for any map and may have some kind of preset maplist challenges.

The one thing that I'd really like to see with the achievements though is some kind of persistence/tracking. That's kind of tricky, and would seem to require a system much like UT2004RPG's character/profile tracking.

That and making a bunch of cool icons to pop up for each achievement, while seemingly kind of trivial, adds to the coolness factor a lot for me.

Some ideas:

Kill Specific type of Monster X
Kill Any # Monsters Using X Weapon/Artifact.
Defeat Unique Monster Spawned in via acceptance of Quest (Team Quest, or maybe make it Solo by making the Unique Monster invulnerable to everyone except the Quest owner)

Pick up X items dropped by [any/specific] monsters
Pick up X items randomly spawned in the level
[Return items to "Quest Giver" NPC/Location]

Heal X amount of health on allied players
Heal X amount of shield on allied players/vehicles
Protect Unique Monster Ally for X Seconds until it can summon an escape portal for itself.
Energize Unique Monster Ally by using (Healing Sphere | Damage Sphere | Invulnerability Sphere | Lightning Rod | etc.) on it for X seconds or Y times total, so that it can summon an escape portal for itself.

Sounds like a good idea to me, would like to do something like this eventually.

Trooper wrote:

as a player with a adrenaline master with only 14 health bonus, that heal over time helps ALOT. I play very gungho in your face which means as a junkie, I get in trouble fast. wayno has used that heal over time and its kept me able to stay in the mess a bit longer which I appreciate

There's no doubt that 10 health regen a second is nice on the receiving end. The question - Would is it a better investment for you to use 20 adren on potentially healing one person for 300 health over the next 30 seconds, or is it a better investment to wait for 5 more adren and heal everyone nearby for more (400) health? It's not always and forever a no-brainer, but it's mostly a no-brainer.

As a bit of an aside, it seems to be a bit of of a mismatch to give a "fire and forget" sort of healing ability to the "Extreme Medic." After all, a player who is purposefully playing a class & subclass dedicated to healing is going to be actively trying to heal players at any opportunity.

20 Adrenaline for 300 health of healing on a single target doesn't seem particularly worthwhile compared to 25 Adrenaline for 400 health of healing on as many targets as are nearby.

Also, one heals instantly while the other heals over time. And while healing over time in this case is "the point" the fact remains that Blast is simply far better as a spike heal (aka, when people actually need healing right now).
A heal-over-time like this is going to have more waste (since it's primarily going to be used on a player who is already at or near full health as a way of keeping them topped off). The efficiency of a heal like this needs to be much higher to be worthwhile.

In my experience, 1 point of Shield ~= 2 HP. Or something along those lines. Even though in theory they're supposed to absorb the same amount of damage, shield just seems a lot more effective than HP.

I've been thinking about how to resolve this for awhile.

The surefire way to fix the issue is to create a mutator that extends MutUT2004RPG and adjust the awarding experience function so that it only checks actual Players.

I've also been considering simply adusting the FriendlyMonsterController so that as soon as the game ends, it destroys itself. This would theoretically resolve the issue although I am not sure whether this kind of adjustment would execute before the awarding of end-game experience.

As Elite said monster health and defense shouldn't change with increased difficulty level unless they're specifically set up to do so (which I don't think any DC monsters are. Most of them are Skaarpack/Satore monsters and those are not.)

On higher difficulty levels monsters will attack faster (less of a random delay between attacks), dodge faster (less delay between dodges) and dodge better. I believe on lower difficulty levels that bots/monsters also move slower and do reduced damage, so moving the difficulty level of the gametype up might also be affecting their overall speed and attack damage.

If you guys have any particular ideas on what you'd like to see in new monsters I can see what I can do.
There are Warlords and Sliths I've created would fit in fine on DC, I think. Classic Unreal monsters with improved skins and some unique abilities.

Been looking at the idea of having a voteable/selectable difficulty setting myself. In particular using this idea in conjunction with having more than one wave configuration setup (although it's eminently possible to have the monsters themselves simply become more difficult if Game.Difficulty is Hard or something).