Apologies, my fellow players, I want Balthazar to be more difficult. But in specific ways and places. I’m putting this here as an alternative to the easy solution of ‘More Veteran Subjugators’
Right now, Balth has exactly 3 fail points — points where failures commonly happen.
- The famous one that everyone knows is where the NPCs leave the rally point – that escort mission is the single failure point after reaching the Rally Point, and the only one that can truly stop Balth from being captured. Worse, it’s the wrong kind of hard. The NPCs will blithly wander into degen wells and die in job-lots, players may never notice the wells, and sit there asking after the fact: ‘what happened?’ (please teach NPCs what degen wells are and how to walk out of them?)
- The second one is at North Invasion, it takes either a large or skilled team to take the beachhead.
- The third one is on Central invasion, the final escort of reinforcements. Between what I think of as Killroy Alley and the Veteran Subjugators, it’s not too hard for fewer than about 8 players to fail it through simple bad luck or inattention, and larger groups may fail to handle the Veteran Subjugators well.
South invasion is a green light. The early events can even be managed solo, with only some risk of failing, or with 4 players for almost no risk of failure. I’d suggest making one of the Southern Invasion events more difficult. Such that it is iffy with even a large prepared zerg, yet still be iffy-possible with 2-3 players — Something to bring it towards equal with central and north.
The other is there’s two final events:
Capping the Ring.
Killing the priest.
Only in the very early post-beta period did killing the priest fail, when he’d insta-heal to full off of his acolytes, when he’d kill players in job lots by fearing them into his wells. Of late, I’ve not seen this fight take more than about 3 minutes. I’d suggest giving the acolytes better healing power, so that it becomes more a fight of out-DPSing their heals.
I’ve only ever seen the ring cap fail once. (Small zerg decided to kill stuff well outside of the ring….) Make the ring cap event more challenging.
Lastly, The event currently only scales vertically. More players = more & bigger foes. Scale the meta-event horizontally too: Pop up risen reinforcement squads – Mini-events spawn at a distance and march on the NPC escort to the rally point, and to the temple if the escort is comlpeted. These can be from ‘meh’ to ‘nasty’ if they reach the NPCs, giving players good cause to detail groups to killing them away from the main action. Target the squad scaling for 5 players to clear them out.
Outside the box ideas:
- Randomize spawn locations for each of the escort events. They get boring if you just nuke the undead with pre-placed traps and pre-targeted meteorshowers. Keep us players guessing where that next attack will be from. Bonus points if us playeres never learn all the spawn locations, or if they are removed from the equation.
- Make the NPCs more active elements in the priest fight, such that having more reinforcements has an appreciable effect there. Say, snaring the abomination or temporarily blocking the fire rain…
- Drop a rock on the Rally point, make it unsuitable to rally the NPCs at – Have the reinforcements march individually to the temple, any one can cap the ring, but it only becomes easy when two or more reinforcements hit it close together in timing. (Player coordination drops significantly once groups reach the rally point)
- Axe the clock on the priest fight (it’s artificial) – end it when the priest gets n specific reinforcements from the long-march reinforcements of risen.
//Portable Corpse