High level PVM content

Just gonna leave this here and maybe it can serve to spark some discussion of similar ideas. It would be a huge development undertaking but maybe it can be some inspiration, idk 🙂

TL/DR: “Hard” pvm content would be nice. Perhaps something like champion spawns on OSI.

Something I think would be a good addition, especially at this later stage of the shard, is a way for people who have built their characters powerful enough to be able to influence the difficulty to time commitment ratio of pvm. I mean we pretty much hunt the same stuff from the day we first started pulling Balron Generals to a boat in the wild and wear it down with a swift power bow as we do today when we could probably take on a whole dozen of them at the same time solo if we found them like that. Granted we are a tad bit more efficient at this stage but we are hardly challenged anymore.

Of course this is natural progression of a game like this, and pvm cannot scale almost indefinitely like it does in Diablo III with Torment levels (as you chose difficulty when you create each game session you can make everything harder and harder as you gear up and the loot level will be increased accordingly). But some sort of “hard” content where you are rewarded more for your power than the vast amount of time you put in would be really good. If we could make it encourage team-play as well I think it could breathe some new life into the server.

I think this is the main reason people tend to fall off as time passes on shards like this as well. Sure you lose interest eventually since the first nostalgia rush wears of and your usual shores in game turn into routine. But it is also increasingly harder to motivate killing the same mobs over and over as you’re likely to find an item upgrade from every 10,000th kill instead of every 100th.

I’m thinking of something along the lines of champion spawns in OSI (or at least my uneducated idea of what champ spawns are like 😀 ). Maybe looting or carving rare material from world bosses until you have a complete set, kind of like pentagram pieces, but instead of an item reward you get to spawn an extra powerful boss or encounter that gives much higher rewards than normal mobs.

Since some bosses already deal quite high damage, I think damage mitigation, high health and health regen are the parameters to experiment with to create an extra hard encounter. Also the nemesis/arch angel AI might work, but I think those are better suited for low health mobs tbh.

Tiamat is one example of a boss that has health regen (actually leech but meh) high enough to act somewhat like a gear-check. Deal too low damage and you won’t kill it. Dragon King is a mob with high damage, leave it in a room without levels/ledges where you can keep it at range and it will be pretty hard for most players. Blue Slaads are pretty tough as well, and just making them less slow and sluggish or stupid would make them much harder. Combining aspects from all of these could probably create some stupidly powerful beasts.

As for rewards if you could influence your own chances somehow. Like if you go use your spawn item at a certain location you will get a lot of clothing items in the loot, giving you a greater chance of decent stat mods or skill items. If you go to another spot to spawn the boss you will get more weapons and therefor an increased chance of decent EF or blackrock. Another could be magic items like books and scrolls, where the rest of the loot is randomly distributed as it usually is.

Also to come back to Torment levels in diablo 3, maybe it could be possible to chose the difficulty level of these encounters. Giving the enemies even more health or mitigation or whatever.