Lets talk about adds

You know, you might just dislike the tank/dps/support trinity. Might I suggest you try Guild Wars 2? That game has much better mechanics since it uses the carry/support model where everybody need to dodge/dps instead of tank/spank divide.

:

- Shield each other unless debuffed Yup. Gotta love tactical moves. Plus, if the damn Shield Armor is going to pop shields like it´s free, I want to be able to stop it.
- Heal each other unless debuffed Yup. Some bosses do that already and we Controllers can do something abput it. Having it extended to some adds? It´s interesting
- Are completely immune to control effects Yup, ONLY if they don´t have CC abilities themselves. Wing Armor in the Cave raids became my most hated add for that reason.
- Deal more damage as their health decreases Yup. I like the idea of a Berserk effect.
- Turn invisible unless stunned Nope. Any AoE attack can already bring them out of stealth, and any DPS can do that. Hell, anyone with Pistols can use Full Auto and de-stealth anything. The idea is good, but not needed due to the mechanics of stealth itself.
- Are not controllable by Tanks Uh... not sure about this. Controlling is a Tank´s main role in a raid, asides from being the ultimate punching bag. Taking this away from them seems a bit unfair.
- Are not Controllable by controllers No, please, no!
- Revive downed enemies Yup. Hell yes, actually. This would make people pay a lot mre of attention to their surroundings. This happens in HIVE T1 duo, it needs to happen more.
- Drain power from the group Yup. Hush does it and it brings a whol new cycle to the fight. I´d like to see more adds do it.
- Pull, push or encase us (and tanks being able to break us out of said encasement or pull) Nope. Not because I don´t like it per se, but because with control mechanics being introduced in PVE, I dont see a need for it. Besides, a good number of adds can already do this.
- Attack certain roles in the group and ignore tank aggro Yup, again, it will encourage paying attention. So yes, IF AND ONLY IF that attack is not a 1-shot.
- explode when they die Yup. With or without tell it will be interesting. As long as they are not 1-shots.... I mean, even those could be avoided, but it would be a huge bother.


All of this aside, good job on proposing new stuff, I will always support constructive proposals!

I fully support this thread and hope that the developers take it into consideration for future content. Hopefully not to the point of putting 3 Shield Drones all in one group shielding each other and the rest of the adds around them, including Eye Drones that are sucking our power out so that we can't stop the Shield Drones even when we DO get their shields down... But something more interesting than the tank+spank than what we have no would be fantastic.

Great ideas as usual.

Greenman for president!

Great idea they definitely need to bring back some sort of variation to the game.

Yes sir! I whole heartedly agree

You got my +1
Tbh harpies and dogs are slightly different from the rest but they can't really be compared to batcave ones though.

There was a thread from last year that myself and other players added ideas into. I sent it through PM to some of the Devs. One did respond and one of the request was actually put in the game. It was that a NPC could buff a boss to deadly mode if it wasn't controlled (A&B last boss).

Out of all the raid instances the ones that had the most unique NPCs was the Batcave Trilogy. The herds had the perfect balance and set up.

There were NPC's that could be controlled for 15+ seconds and these took the majority of the herd. This was great for Controllers because they got the visual sensation of controlling. These NPCs did the least damage which was good for meleeing or just having a Controller go in their face to control. These were Security Drones/Sentries Drone Walkers, Perimeter Guard, OMACs, Neuromites, and Elite Servitors.

There were NPCs that breakout and become immune to control effects for a short time. Like the Omega Sentry, Wing Armor in Inner, OMAC Prime, Neuro Omac, Elite Subjugator, Elite Adherent, Elite Guardian, Kan's Eagle Soldiers, etc. If all the NPCs are controllable for 15+ that leaves no use for a tank but these NPCs were great to keep the tanks busy since these did more damage and broke out of control effects. Tanks took damage and gave healers a reason to heal.

There are even NPCs that are not controllable at all like Neuro Omac Elites, Wing Armor in Outer, Prime Harvester, Brainiac Herald, etc.

Then there were NPCs that disrupted the group. WIng Armors in Outer were great even though they were annoying. A good tank used his/her breakout to free the team from control effects and flee. Elite Subjugator's shoot a green beam that puts players in a green orb for 6 seconds. This guy was fun because no matter what you did you could not break out unless the team killed him or controlled him if he wasn't immune. Eye Drones were already mentioned. Those are the power suckers.

Same with Arrester Drones. You could not breakout and you needed your team to kill or control the NPC so you could be free. These types of NPCs all required the team to call things out and made use of controlling or just focus firing.

The Shield Armors and Elite Guardians were fun too. Elite Guardians shielded each other for 9 seconds and would continue to shield each other unless they were pulled apart. The timing needed to be right because they were controllable for 2 seconds before they developed immunity for 7. Shield Armors shielded nearby NPCs for 20 seconds unless they were pulled away from the NPC herd.

fos 3 even had unique controllable NPCs. When the gold & red sentries became immune to CC from powers you could use your weapon CC. When they were immune to weapon CC you could use power CC.

What the Devs really need to do is recycle some of these mechanics and NPCs. Or just improve them a bit in new content. Just give them new skins to fit the raid theme. The right amount of specific NPCs is important in each herd. There needs to be the perfect amount of controllable, non controllable, and temp controllable enemies. Otherwise Tanks, healers or Controllers aren't needed. Even if there are NPCs that are controllable for 15+ seconds in groups, having them deal some kind of Damage Over Time like the Brainiac Progenitors will keep the healers busy.

The real problem is and always will be becoming over geared for content so you can just burn things. There is a way to make things "overgeared burn proof." One could be by making those shielded NPCs take 1s damage when the shield is up or just have NPCs take more damage when controlled.

Corridor battles can definitely be just as challenging and fun as boss fights. They only that I know will inhibit this is possibly the player base's failure to understand the mechanics on what to do. Most likely they'll complain and get things nerfed. But now that I think about it. The devs did promise content with normal difficulty and hard difficulty raids, not versions but raids. So this could definitely go into hard raids and the tank and spank stays in the normal for the casuals.

I still enjoy the OMAC duo for these reasons. The adds and mini bosses required different varieties of CCing to progress.

Thats the type of variety I refer to when I say that there are different types of adds with different variations of health, but in the end nearly EVERY add post T3 can be boiled down to nothing more than an NPC that solely does damage to us and nothing more than that

While counter mechanics keep these enemies from being incredibly boring, there is still nothing that makes me go "okay we need to focus fire enemy x before y" and thats something that I think would spruce up some of these raids a good bit...Give these enemies "roles" and you have more interesting combat

Lets make hallways more then just a place to build your supercharge and bring some variety to it

If you pay close attention, the last REAL RAID was FOS2.

I agree completely.

Interesting and a variety of NPCs (albeit I wish there was more variety), challenging hallways, some mini-bosses and hallway objectives, fun and difficult boss fights *salivates*

We said in a poll on the old forums that FOS 2 was our favorite raid (I said Inner, but whatever point still stands), yet we havent gotten anything relatively close to that in the DLCs since...Lets start taking elements that made the initial raids great

Green your making me all sentimental as I think about the beginning of it all.....

Pretty much my sentiment on this.

Calling it 'laziness' is harsher than it really deserves to be, especially when the majority prioritize speed over most things when it comes to tackling content. Don't get me wrong, the ideas are great and I'm pretty sure the Devs have probably thrown ideas like this in brainstorming sessions, but it seems if there's anything in content that causes any impedance to the end goal and it can't be burned through, some would cry foul.

There are some creative people working on this game, just sometimes, things just don't pan out as we would've liked.

Had to log in to give this a +1 and a much needed bump.

Absolutely great ideas. I'd like to see some adds again that need a different approach rather than kill it as fast as humanly possible lol

make it so

Controller will cry. They're a dying breed anyways no need to stress them out anymore

this just made me think they should have a mission where you fight a ncp controlled 2222 raid group they could create dps and support role character for each power and have a random makeup of them as a boss fight but make it so there is only one of each power per role say one rage one ice tank they could give them names and make each one unique they could even have some who use iconic and movement powers

the side bosses could be alert groups of the powers not in the raid group

Its crazy to me that the whole games role system is based on RPS but there is no place other than PVP where this is used. Why aren't support roles given more tasks to shut down their counterpart NPC's in content??? With the introduction to WM and the further deviation from standardized raid & alert group setups, this could essentially bring back the necessity of 1-2-2-3.