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I say it a lot, but there's a lot of people asking for new content just expecting it to appear. Here's some turbo nerding to show you the sort of things that go into creation for this content. While this may turn into a lot of words and look impressive, most of the time I put into this project is going to go into making this presentable. Just throwing random numbers together is pretty easy.
A few people have expressed interest in Bio4 for Classic in the past and I've spoken with numerous people about getting it implemented. So here's my take on it. Some of these ideas/skills may not work and it needs extensive testing and balancing before it could even be remotely playable.
I'm going to break it down one monster at a time, listing stats, skills and a description, talking about the goals or idea behind each one. Also including some other ideas I had or limitations that hold specific things back. If there's enough interest I'll put some effort into making things a little more readable, but for now it's laid out the way the game expects so I can easily turn it into usable content incase this actually gets used for anything.
I'd also like to note that I havent sat down and figured out how hard these will be to kill or how hard they're going to hit, this is really just a very very quick starting point. Same goes for cast percentages, delay times etc.
Monsters
Paladin 
This is essentially a tanky support. It has high vit/defense/health. Heals its friends and theoretically helps them by removing some negative statuses with Provoke. It's Demihuman Holy 3.
Defending Aura/Reflect Shield to prevent rude attack stuff. Generic Holy attack as well as some iconic Paladin abilities and some AoE if it gets in amongst a group. Heals friendly targets on Idle. Provoke is in there as a test, if it doesnt work you could use something like Status Recovery as an alternative to just prevent statusing everything. At some point discussing it (with Xellie and Undying) we were talking about finding out if they can cast Sacrifice on each other, this would also be amusing.
Biochemist 
This is a weak (low attack) low vit fragile character. It has some support with an Aid Potion but is mostly there to throw Acid Bomb, it could probably use some more variation however. It's Demihuman Fire 3 (following picture has it listed as demon, but it's not).
This is almost entirely about Acid Bomb. Lots of bomb on rude attacks probably too much, not sure what the damage is going to look like. Also throws out some Bombs and potion pitcher on idle. There's a two handed quicken and small aoe for group.
Scholar 
This is a tanky caster, lots of spells and some AoE. There's room for more abilities and I was considering trying out Double Bolt with it, if it doesnt work you can probably combo them easily enough. It's Demihuman Ghost 3.
The scholar has Magnetic Earth and Blinding Mist as potential abilities for rude attack. It will also Dispel on engaging, this I'm not entirely sure about, it does make getting extra ones potentially scary but could just be a really unfun mechanic to introduce (to anyone without GTB). Other than that it just has a lot of bolts and a Fiber/Firebolt combo as well as Soul Siphon.
Champion 
This is a hard hitting mobile damage dealer. Making use of Snap the Champion can get into a group quickly and has a fairly telegraphed Guillotine Fist for players to avoid. It also has a few things to try like Root or checking to see if Monk combo moves are usable. It's Demon Water 4.
Plenty of snapping and a long cast gfist for players to avoid, I was considering making one that was less avoidable below a certain health value. I was hoping we could make Root work also, but I dont think it's going to work. You could also add a "Fury" powerup at lower health too.
Stalker 
This is a mobile semi-caster. It's fairly light on skills right now. There's some huge potential where you can have it respond with specific abilities used on it and imitate Intimidation. I'm not entirely sure what to do with it honestly. It's Demon Poison 4.
Flying Kick for movement and rude attack as well as cloak. Right now it's just a simple Poison attacks, Full Strip, Storm Gust and Counter Instinct.
Minstrel 
This is a fairly squishy thing. I'm not sure if performer skills can be used by monsters, but you can substitute in some alternatives to get the same effects. It's fairly light on overall abilities and may benefit from something else. Right now it has a low level Tarot at a low chance, this may not be a good idea but it's hard to say theorycrafting. It's Demihuman Wind 3.
There's a panic Frost Joke on rude attack. It also casts an Arrow Shower + Curse combo and some other Minstrel like abilities. Tarot is the biggest I dont know here, because it goes through FCP it may not be a good idea, but low chance etc.
Gypsy 
Pretty much the same deal as the Minstrel, indentical stats to save time/effort. Just some substitutions for skills to make it more Gypsy themed. If they're able to cast songs you can probably throw in a Slow Grace too which could be interesting, possibly give it a cast time or trigger below a certain percentage to remove annoying need to spam agi up on everyone. It's Demihuman Wind 3.
Dazzler spam and Arrow Shower + Sleep combo in for the Minstrel abilities.
Design
In one of my posts in the Challenge Dungeon thread I talked a little bit about making a distinction between a mobby map with weak monsters and an emptier map with scarier monsters. I didnt really make a decision here because it's very hard to tell how all this theory will translate into actual gameplay. But it depends what people want to see, something similar to Bio3 where you're keeping your interactions to as few monsters at once as possible. Or similar to how Bio4 plays out on Renewal where you're just running around creating huge groups of things to kill.
These are also all melee right now, I had a bunch of ideas where you just have a character with a range and give it a 100% chance to cast a spell and high enough attackspeed that it would always be casting something. But it'd have to be tested. The caster in the current Challenge Dungeon wasnt bad, you could probably get away with making the performers ranged, but adding more stuff to chase at higher changes could keep them at suitable ranges for long enough and still encourage them to close with the group/tank.
There's also some cool things to consider like the disabling of items or skills on the map. You could disable Phen Cards, Gods or MVPs. Teleport has been disabled so far on all the Challenge Dungeons (and I'd like to see that remain). You can also look at potentially disabling Assumptio or Resurrection to keep things interesting. Obviously making changes like this would require a rebalancing of incoming damage and monster skill use. But there's a lot of things that can be done to mix up gameplay, even if it's just a little bit.
These should all be changed to monstertype 19 (Sword Guardian, Raydric, AL3 dragons etc). This is sort of something that I feel could get overlooked, but there's a whole bunch of pre-programmed AI behaviours, things like cast sensor, passive or looter. I think these are editable and hold some of the most interesting things to play with. You can mix and match, make stuff hyper aggressive, cast sensors whatever.
Drops
I'm not going to go into specifics for drops. But if you look at the drop table for the current challenge dungeon:
You'll see that it's almost entirely made up of items that "should be available already" and a lot of it is fairly situationally interesting and a lot of it is absolute garbage. The only really desirable item there is the Subject Aura and it drops at such a low rate that I'm not sure one exists here yet. Now there's a few reasons why the drop table looks like that, we wanted to get New World items available to people and Campitor was trying to adhere to the theme he was building for the dungeon. However that means along with some things people actually want there's far more items they dont want.
I would suggest thinning out the equipment drops here and consider looking at "new" items. I'm hesistant about adding anything new without making all of the proper pre-renewal items readily available to everyone, however I feel there's room for us to add things like Undyings Wind/Earth Twin Blades or items to buff underpowered/whelming classes.
I would also suggest leaning away from supply based rewards, we've got enough places to get GSBs right now. You may want to add something that fills the gaps in the current supply chains, but it doesnt seem that necessary.
Misc
We have monsterIDs available for this details here and should be able to get them implemented with their own sprites, drops and experience.
Further reading
Read the Challenge Dungeon thread here. I posted way too many words about design decisions and other interesting things.
End
If you read through this or tl;dr'd to the end here. Post your thoughts, mention what you liked and what you didnt. Question some design choices. Ask why not <thing>. Propose your own ideas or changes. Content for the Classic server heavily relies on the input of its current players, we're the ones who know the most about how the game works and we're the ones who will be playing it. Unfortunately it takes a seed like this plus community effort to get any project started and it still doesnt guarantee that the project will get investigated or implemented.
This is merely a starting point for getting something implemented, it needs a lot of testing and refining to turn it into something that would be fun or interesting. The current Challenge Dungeon is almost there, but it didnt get enough fine tuning and lacked a couple of things to make it "great". Partly because of how long it was taking to develop, changes and testing for new custom content needs to be done more than once every week or two otherwise things drag on for too long.
Edited by Themes, 07 March 2016 - 08:18 PM.
