Tinkerbell wrote:I think it would be nice to have a monster that TRULY needs teamwork.
Yes please! It would be nice to have an area with a true challenge, as opposed to relying on spawn events for anything remotely difficult, as it is currently...
Tinkerbell wrote:Imagine a monster that live in southern Nivalis (on a new map). She only spawns once every 24 hours or so (randomly)
You could even use an NPC to make this a truly random spawn, as opposed to using static spawn points; something like a global timer that decrements a variable every 30 minutes, spawns when it hits zero, then calls a function when the snow scorpion is killed, resetting the variable to a random value and starting the timer again
Tinkerbell wrote:She hits 2 times harder then Jacko
Hitting hard is a must; there are so many mobs that just do 1 damage every time that all evenly matched combat is boring (as it is currently, at least)
I'm not sure if you'd be interested in using this, but I think I've managed to get a splash damage skill working, so if you want, you could allow the snow scorpion to periodically hit multiple targets at once. Something that might keep people on their toes, in addition to a possible higher critical hit rate?
Tinkerbell wrote:but has 6 to 8 times the HP.
Quite a bit there; even the snake lord is currently set to only have 4 times JackO health, though there are other supporting scripts there (as there would be with the snow scorpion as well, I guess?)
Still, would need to see how it goes during testing. The ability to quickly regenerate coupled with a sizeable health buffer might prove insurmountable, or it might prove a worthwhile challenge
Tinkerbell wrote:She is the opposite of aggressive (she tries to run away)
Mob AI was something that always bothers me; there seem to be many mob modes available (from simpler canMove and canAttack flags to more involved boss, plant, and detector flags (the latter of which doesn't seem to do that much, I still have yet to look into how a lot of those flags work)) but I don't think there is a Flee flag among them..
Mob AI (or the lack of) has always been rather problematic; mobs are quite content to walk along towards a stack of more than a dozen high level characters over the corpses of their fallen clones. Some way to customize at what times a mob is content to engage in combat, some way to customize at what times a mob will attempt to flee, at what times a mob will give up running away and attempt to do what damage it can in it's (suspected) last moments...
Even some intelligent (non-random) target selection would be nice, though I don't have the slightest idea how the per-mob dmg log works (another thing that I will hopefully find the time to look into at some point...)
Tinkerbell wrote:so you must have at LEAST 1 archer to get her attention (battlemagic will not work).
Not sure how this would work; I'm not even sure the mob knows the difference between ranged, conventional, or magical attacks right now (though I think I recall seeing some flags being set in battle.c; I'm not sure if that's persistent)
Or were you thinking of a more implicit requirement, wherein archers do ranged damage at a high enough rate of fire (or the mob doesn't rely on dodge enough for magic to be more effective than conventional attacks, assuming some flee system was hacked into tmwAthena)?
Tinkerbell wrote:She can cast heal on herself, so you must have 1 mage to cast stop-spell on her, often, (I spoke to Fate who said this COULD be made a level 3 magic spell).
I had been working on something similar, but it used heal status effects (through a mob skill) and another status effect that cancels it (through a player character spell) (I don't think mobs can use magic at the moment?)
Tinkerbell wrote:You would need at least 1 mage to heal the party, as said... she hits HARD. And of course, many warriors.
It will be nice to have something that poses a good challenge ingame
Tinkerbell wrote:She can call other scorpians, as she is the mother of all scorps in game, they will do anything to help momma out.
That was a skill that I always thought was rather underused, given the possibilities. I'll need to check the available skill conditions, but it should hopefully be possible for her to summon only when she is under attack, rather than just idly summoning assistants for no apparent reason, as the slimes do
Tinkerbell wrote:I also like the idea of a NPC who predicts when she will show up...
If an NPC script is used to summon her, adding something like this in (possibly with a bit of random variance?) should be easy
Tinkerbell wrote:Hope you like.
Definitely.
---Freeyorp