Gloams, the new one hit wonders?

[IlleglWpns]

So there I was, hacking my way through the swampy pit in Act 3 hell in hopes of finding a better weapon. I encounter a gloam boss pack and alarm bells start go off in my head. I turn on resist lightning and cautiously advance to try and lure one out around the corner. Having done so I decide to turn off resist lightning and engage one on one.

Baaad idea. One lightning bolt later I'm staring at my character's dead body (a paladin). 900 health GONE in the blink of an eye. Now granted I had minimal lightning resist, but even with a critical hit that SHOULD not have happened. And in fact it didn't happen with normal gloams. Later I found out that the boss was fire enchanted and that in fact, elemental damage transfers to minion's spell attacks...

Now arguably this death was my fault...I should have kept resist lightning on...but it was ONE gloam, and not even a boss at that. IMO minions should not get elemental damage added to their spell attacks.

Give gloams a VERY damaging ranged attack? Fine, it makes the game harder, you have to dodge and pay attention to your resistances.

Make it hard to dodge and extremely long range? A little less fine, but I suppose skilled players can deal with that too

Allow it to kill characters with ONE shot, when said characters do not have negative resistances and have decent HP? NOT FINE. This makes every encounter a game of russian roulette. Heck even with the megademon infernos you could see your health drop and run away. With gloams you can get hit from offscreen, be stunned, and die without any warning whatsoever.

[Pren]

Upgrade to the current version of the beta (1.10s), and the minions receive the boss' abilities bug has been fixed.

However, frame based monster attacks (lightning, inferno) are way, way, way too strong. With 75 FR and -13 MDE, you still take noticable damage from venom lord infernos in normal.

[IlleglWpns]

This was 1.10s, and the minion ability bonuses is a "feature" not a bug. The inferno can be countered fairly easily with high fire resists and or a wand of lifetap. Worst case for me I stand back, provide resist fire for my merc, and let him tank the minions. The gloam lightning attack is a whole other story...

[gekko]

1 shot kill types -- blizzard's official (some would say only) way of making the game difficult and adding flavour and variety to their games.

gekko

[IlleglWpns]

This is a reply to Whybish's post in the other (duplicate) thread:

You mean the tomb vipers? Yeah I met those. I think something is wrong in that it's applying physical damage each frame as well as doing a lot of poison damage. It's like a bizarre version of Diablo's LBOD.

[Thecla]

1 shot kill types -- blizzard's official (some would say only) way of making the game difficult and adding flavour and variety to their games.

You have to wonder if this is really intended though. In 1.10, they have toned down just about every one-hit kill threat in 1.09 --- doll explosions in large games, mslebs (presumably a bug fix since the ms was never intended to apply to the lightning bolts), bad auras like fanaticism in hell, oblivion knights, Duriel's charge, Diablo's fire attack, Korlic's leap attack...

Perhaps it's just for variety that they threw in a new one-shot kill attack with the gloams (and, to a lesser extent the infector's inferno attack and some multishot archer bosses); but it makes very little logical sense to remove all the old one-hit kills only to put some new ones in.

[DSTheHermit]

but it makes very Blizzard-logical sense to remove all the old one-hit kills only to put some new ones in.

Edited for accuracy.

[Guest]

all damage adders(and probably monsters' melee damage) is added to spells.

that bug might of happened when they changed how spells/missiles worked or something late in the patch progress, getting poisoned and chilled by charged bolts from a LEB in any way feels pretty wrong.

[whyBish]

You mean the tomb vipers?  Yeah I met those.  I think something is wrong in that it's applying physical damage each frame as well as doing a lot of poison damage.  It's like a bizarre version of Diablo's LBOD.

So I'm not insane... Yay :)

I wonder if any MPQers could give a hand?

[Guest]

it doesn't say in the mpq's really. the first couple of columns in skills.txt are srvstfunc, pclthitfunc & srvdofunc(where it's just a number), they are hardcoded complicated things about how a skill should work. for both the ama and viper they're the same.

compared to the zon skill it has # subloops 3 vs 0 for its first srvcalc/cltparam, i have no idea what that means.

the viper exploison has 1 in the collide column, also srcdamage(controls if the skill uses the attackers weap damage) for the javelin is 100%, and srcmissdamage(if the weapon damage is carried over to the missile) is 100% as well.

it doesn't make sense though that it makes the sound of bonespear when you pass through it..

[IlleglWpns]

Does anyone know what skill the gloams actually use for their lightning? It can't be regular lightning because it does around way more damage.

[Ruvanal]

I might be off some in reading this but here goes.

Act 3 Swampy Pit area has willowisp1 in it. Aren't you lucky, these are the "wimpy" ones of the bunch. <_<
hcidx=118
name=Gloam
mlvl(h)=80
aip3=50 chance to cast spell
aip3(N)=50 chance to attack (missile in this case)
aip3(H)=50 chance to move closer
Works out to be 1/3 chance for each.

MissC=willowisplightningbolt
(this missile ends up referring back the monstats.txt file for its damage parameters. The range is 40, the same as an arrow.)

Skill1=Chain Lightning
Sk1lvl=1 (+7 for hell)=8
see the sorceress damage for this one

damage base for A1 attack physical 40 to 104

El1Mode=a1
El1Type=mana (mana drain effect)
El1Pct(H)=40 (percent chance on attack)
El1MinD(H)=100
El1MaxD(H)=200
I think that these are percentages, but they may be straight amounts. Either way, bye-bye mana pool.

El2Mode=sc
El2Type=ltng
El2Pct(H)=100
El2MinD(H)=5
El2MaxD(H)=190

The standard lightning hit from a normal monster looks like it would be doing 40 to 104 physical and 5 to 190 lightning damage with a 100% to 200% mana drain based on the total of these two types of damage (45 to 388 mana drain). Don't you spell casters hate that monsters can manafe steal with their elemental effects? :o

For a boss monster the damage bonus is +66% min elemental damage and +100% max elemental damage. This would increase the lightning damage to 8 to 380 damage. The higher mlvl=83 would increase the physical damage to 42 to 108.

A critical hit would have *2 all of the types of damage from the monster including their elemental damage. A max damage critical from one of these bosses would be (108+380)*2=976 without taking into account the fire enhancement carrying over also.

As a side note: while checking on the one of the new game 'features' of dynamically replacing some of the TC to be used with higher quality TCs, I ran into a case that may be showing that the uniques(bosses), champions and their minions may have some serious bugs in how they are being spawned. I was checking the chest drops in nightmare act 1 (Cold Plains) when I had two minions drop a Seraph Rod (qlvl=76) and a Conquerer Crown (qlvl=80). This is well beyond what their TCs should be getting upgraded to based on the findings so far. Normally these two items would not be getting dropped up act 3 hell and act 5 hell. From that and a couple of other observations it appears that the uniques at least are being assigned extra attributes that they should not be getting and are not being reflected in their descriptions. One of these is an attribute that would be increasing their level (needed to account for the TC up grade for dropping these items). If so then the damage that they are doing could be even higher than what I estimated here. Along with possibly other hidden attributes that could be also further enhancing the damage that they do.

[Guest]

damage base for A1 attack physical 40 to 104

i've checked damages and re-checked, they do way more than that.

what it comes down to is in 1.10 all missiles get 100% of the monsters weapon/melee damage added to them. that is, after the melee damage has gotten all the champ/aura/enchantments to it.

otherwise i'd like to hear how you explain taking 500 damage from devourer of souls minion in hell with no conviction aura in sight. if you check the amount of frames for their inferno attack it's only 20, so that's 2500 damage per second with resistance counted.


also, haven't you noticed that you can chilled/poisoned by charged bolts from LEB's now? same with inferno, a hell venom lord's inferno can hit with poison.

[IlleglWpns]

So lets see, base lightning bolt damage from a Gloam is 45 - 195, part lighning and part physical. The one I encountered was part of a fire enchanted boss's pack, so add another 33% min and 50% max. Max damage is now 292.5. With a critical the max it could have done is 685. That wasn't enough to kill my character in one hit, so yeah, something fishy is going on.

Also hell burning souls do up to 200 damage per shot even with maxed resists, so these damages aren't right in game.

So maybe blizzard screwed up and gloam damage is a bug rather than intentional?

[Ruvanal]

i've checked damages and re-checked, they do way more than that.

If you look more closely, I stated that was The base physical portion of the attack. You can also note that I listed that the missile itself has no damage parameters and just references the monstats.txt file to get the parameters. In the paragraphs following your quote, I spelled out some of the factors in calculating that damage for the missile, like that physical and elemental portions are all a part of it. And following that was some of the effects of other enhancements would have on the final damage which was listed as a 'whole lot' more that just the base physical. Please pay attention to the whole content.

what it comes down to is in 1.10 all missiles get 100% of the monsters weapon/melee damage added to them. that is, after the melee damage has gotten all the champ/aura/enchantments to it.

This would apply IF in missiles.txt the SrcDamage=128 in which case it will reference the file calling the missile and get the physical damage data from there. Only if the SrcDamage=-1 will it ignore the physical and elemental damage data parameters of the calling function. From that you can get things like inadvertently having physical damage being persistant in a cloud effect for every frame that you are in it if the field was not set to -1.

otherwise i'd like to hear how you explain taking 500 damage from devourer of souls minion in hell with no conviction aura in sight. if you check the amount of frames for their inferno attack it's only 20, so that's 2500 damage per second with resistance counted.

A link from the front page.
http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.p...=20130&linear=0
While the numbers were from the first betapatch, the basics of it are still in the same area. You need to note that there are also some other factors besides like what is listed there to take into account such as the +% to elemental damage that minions, champions and uniques get and other damage enhancements such as if the unique is Strong that damage boost will effect the elemental damage and is also passed onto the uniques minions (no visible aura to alert one to the effect). These factor could easily put one of the Devourers minions into the damage rang that you are talking about.

[whyBish]

This would apply IF in missiles.txt the SrcDamage=128 in which case it will reference the file calling the missile and get the physical damage data from there. Only if the SrcDamage=-1 will it ignore the physical and elemental damage data parameters of the calling function. From that you can get things like inadvertently having physical damage being persistant in a cloud effect for every frame that you are in it if the field was not set to -1.
[/quote]
Ah, so that is probably the problem for those vipers...

[Guest]

thanks, i hadn't seen a post on that balrog damage yet.


i still don't get what you mean with the viper poison javelin. i removed the 128's from both the jav and the exploison, and now i only get poisoned if i get hit directly. so if i put (which?) to -1 the damage will correctly be poison? since that's what the error is... :huh:

also, do you have an explanation for the charged bolts from LEB's getting all the monsters effects? and the fact(this might not be so known) that most of the extra damage effects to the charged bolts are only triggered with a physical attack(from you, obviously).


oh and as for balrogs again, i'm not 100% sure what it means, but their inferno have hitshift=8 while the sorc's has hitshift=1. for each number lower/higher than 8 you halve/double the damage, so the sorc's does 1/12800 damage? could it be that they just forgot to set the hitshift a little lower?

[Pren]

OK, finally I reply again to this thread.

"- Regular monsters can no longer recieve the same bonuses as unique monsters."

This is taken from the 1.10s patch. Prior to this thread, I never noticed minions carrying over unique abilities in 1.10s, but obviously since then I have.

What does this mean? I'd think they'd have said minions if it was this bug, but maybe it is what they meant. Or maybe it's an entirely different bug?