Heroes Boost

[yerkyerk]

The slaying of random encountered heroes in Titan Quest so far is not really satisfying - mostly because they're not challenging enough, nor do they give good loot.

To make them more attractive, I have several suggestions. The numbers are a bit random, but they should paint the general picture of what I want to achieve with this. Keep in mind that these recommendations apply to random spawned heroes, not fixed ones.


Give all heroes a 16 yards command aura - increase health by 100%/150%/200% (N/E/L), increase total damage by 25%/50%/75%, increase total speed by 25%/50%/75%. This will apply to the heroes themselves too.
Motivation: enemy units are greatly inspired by fighting besides a hero, as well as the hero picking the best troops in his personal guard.

Equip heroes with artifacts: Lesser/Greater/Divine (N/E/L). These artifacts however, should not be droppable. Personally, I think it would be cool if the formulae necessary to create the artifact would drop, and than make formulaes hero-only, but that specific suggestion would prolly require a new thread. Heh, how cool would it be to have a hero near-death, only to see him suddenly spawn the Avatar of Bask.
Motivation: Artifacts can be seen sort of as the souls of the heroes. It's what makes them heroes, perhaps. Either that or they got it as a tribute from their clansmen to honor their herodom.

Greatly increase relative health: With relative health I mean the health they have opposed to their non-hero brethren. This, so they can last longer and give the player some real opposition. I suggest a rather big increase, to really make it an epic fight. 10/20/30 times (N/E/L) as much health as their normal counterparts.
Motivation: They are not just mere mortals, they are heroes, their powers are granted by divine (or undivine, so you will) intervention. They didn't survive this long just to be killed by some random heroboy. They survived because they were to tough to die.

Give heroes random (passive) skills. I'm not sure if heroes will actually use active skills given to them, but we can at least equip them with passive skills. These can be randomly drawn from a pool of passive hero skills, new and old ones. For old ones, e.g.: Death Ward, Distortion Field, Heart of Oak, Lucid Dream, Battle Rage, Dodge Attack, Anatomy, etc.. In Normal, they'll get 1-2 random skills, in Epic 2-4 and in Legendary 4-5. Also, the skills will be at 25% of their max level in Normal, 50% of the maximum level in Epic, and at max level in Legendary.
Motivation: See previous motivation

Better loot: Give heroes: 0.5 uniques, 1 relic/charm, 0.10 MI, 0.2 scrolls and the rest yellows with increased chance of double affixes - It's much more satisfying to beat a hero and actually get something out of it. Equipping the hero with good stuff will also actually make the hero more powerful and harder to beat, this can make a huge difference if the previous recommendations are applied.
Motivation: the heroes will either be granted the best equipment by their kin, or they'll simply steal it from them. An overlord isn't exactly going to stand by with his Flimsy dagger of Rust while his weak, lowly, underpayed minion wields Sapros the Corrupter. The manual says relics only drop from exceptionally powerful monsters - heroes fit that description.

[Poinas]

Give all heroes a 16 yards command aura - increase health by 100%/150%/200% (N/E/L), increase total damage by 25%/50%/75%, increase total speed by 25%/50%/75%.

Command aura sounds fun, but these numbers are just too much. Think of the faster heroes, like Jun-Shan (tigeman). Basically you can aggro him from off-screen with ranged attacks, and two second later you're at the last rebirth fountain. Even if you notice him early enough, you may not have any possibility to outrun him if he gets +75% total speed.

Comman aura increasing health sounds awkward to me, but total speed and damage bonuses sound reasonable. Maybe +15/30/50% damage and +5/10/15% total speed.


Equip heroes with artifacts: Lesser/Greater/Divine (N/E/L). These artifacts however, should not be droppable.

That would be good. Although some artifact skills should be modified for heroes, some of them can be instakills.


Greatly increase relative health. 10/20/30 times (N/E/L) as much health as their normal counterparts.

Yes, yes, yes! I'd say 5/10/15 but 10/20/30 doesn't sound too bad unless you're a TQ newbie.



Give heroes random (passive) skills and better loot

:rockon:

[Rhekarid]

I'm a bit iffy on the command aura and massive health increase (though they do need one), as combined with the other stuff I could see them getting a lot harder than the fixed bosses. It would seem odd to have an epic battle with some random guy milling around and then pound a telkine into dust in 10 seconds a moment later. One possible alternative to the aura, or as something to combine with a weaker one, might be to have them spawn with a small group of underlings. As it is it's pretty easy to separate heroes and take them on solo.

The other concern with that is how they would compete against different builds. There's a pretty big gap between Average Joe heroes and those youtube videos of people killing three hydras in five seconds. I realize that a balance patch by nature is probably going to narrow that gap, but I think care should be taken not to make them totally impossible for imperfect characters. Personally I don't generally make "highest possible damage" characters or do massive item farming, since I find that road boring, and those ordinary characters don't need to be running into uber-Toxeus every ten minutes.

I've got no qualms with giving them artifacts, but I'm less thrilled about making them the only source of artifacts, depending on the drop rate. It can already be a pretty big pain to assemble a divine artifact, and taking away fixed sources like bosses could make it a hopeless effort. If it were a near-certain chance, I'd be fine with it, depending on how often you fight heroes...I never really paid attention to how many of them show up per act.

The rest sounds good. One thing that comes to mind, regarding animal-type heroes. Since they never drop any sort of equipment, and the occasional charm fragment (maybe even a whole charm, depending on the effort) is a pretty lame reward for a tough battle, is it possible to give them unique charms? Not necessarily name-referencingly unique, but a hero fury might drop Boiling Fury's Heartblood or something instead of the normal kind, with similar but better stats. Collecting a complete hero charm would definitely be something special.

[yerkyerk]

Heh, yea, the animal heroes do need some better form of reward. I was actually thinking of making certain animal heroes able to drop Erebus shards, as I think it's lame that you can only get a good one regarding how lucky you are. And mainly because it's undoubtly the most powerful charm in the game if you get the +skills completion bonus..

But, wether you let the hero spawn with underlings or a command aura, the player is still able to seperate the hero from his minions. A command aura is a lot easier and more natural. The command hero numbers are probably a bit much though. +15/30/50% damage and +5/10/15% total speed sounds reasonable to me too. I'd increase their health mainly because they would just die way too soon, leaving their overlord alone before they could even engage in battle.

My suggestion was considering the part that heroes will always drop one formulae, btw. But that merits another topic. And regarding the artifacts; it should prolly be looked over to see what is and what's not acceptable, though I prefer to leave the originals as intact as possible.
And, since the balance patch will increase the difficulty, bosses will probably be buffened up too, so I'm not sure if heroes could compete against them. Personally, I wouldn't mind all that much.

[Chase]

Overall, I love this idea, but I'd like to see some more variety besides the command aura. I'd like to see some heroes with maxed out trances, a maxed out Deathchill tree, a maxed out Art of the Hunt tree, a maxed out Battle Awareness tree, etc (randomly generated).

As far as underlings go, I'd suggest giving them some special abilities, like stuns, skill interrupts, and/or energy drains.

[i.n.s.a.n.e]

Hey,

Giving them aura that affects themselves and monsters around is awesome!

Increasing their health is also awesome!

I would also prefer if we had more heroes (more of one creature kind I mean) out there...

[RBradleyM]

I would like to see the hero's buffed as well but the drops need to be improved. I would like to see more chance for the monster infrequents or rare monster armors on the Hero monsters. The hero animals should drop completed charms. As far as artifacts go sure but lets not go overboard some of those artifacts are pretty powerful.

[yerkyerk]

Heh, yea, we're not going to implement the artifacts blindly.

Oh, one other thing: if we buff the heroes, we should probably also increase the xp they give. Perhaps increase it by 2/3/4 (N/E/L)?

[i.n.s.a.n.e]

Heh, yea, we're not going to implement the artifacts blindly.

Oh, one other thing: if we buff the heroes, we should probably also increase the xp they give. Perhaps increase it by 2/3/4 (N/E/L)?

Hey,

More xp gain sounds great. If the fight is tough, we deserve it! :)

[Rhekarid]

How much control is there over when/where heroes spawn? One possibility might be to have them appear on certain difficulties and certain acts, coinciding with the current system of artifact formulae appearing in specific areas. For example, Rotbone only appearing in Act 1 Epic and always carrying Spirit Blight, or something. That way heroes could have their abilities tailored to their individual theme instead of just being universally more powerful, and artifacts would still have known locations to hunt through, while still being a lot less easy to find than farming a boss. I loved the fact that there were optional superbosses that appeared on higher difficulties when I first encountered them, and things like legendary heroes could add a lot of unique new encounters to look forward to and be curbstomped by.

Also agreeing with more experience.

[Galefury]

I only read the first two posts. I agree, except with some numbers. The amount of the health increase seems a little high, maybe go 5, 12, 20 (after applying the command aura, if it also affects the hero himself). Item distribution should be more MI biased IMO, it's too hard to get good ones. And monster heroes would probably get them more easily than they would get epics and legendaries. After all MIs are manufactured by the monsters themselves, while they would need to get epics/legendaries from humans.

Obviously this would require some rebalancing. The dual wielding tigerman Poinas mentioned is already crazy powerful. Same for neanderthal rider heroes.

A slight increase in the amount of heroes would also be nice. They should still be somewhat rare, but right now they are too rare IMO.

Also a bit off topic, all champions should get an HP increase. Something like 50-100%.

[Kuaera]

Since there is no system of morale ingame, perhaps a monster hero could convey a hitpoint regeneration and resistance aura [the latter, similar to the defense tree]. I don't know how effective this could be, but it does seem more appropriate to me than increasing the base hitpoints or speed of nearby mobs.

We should also ensure that these effects do not stack. Some of us play using xMax, and I have had six of the turtle heroes on me at once. I would think that +15% speed * 6 would have had me very thoroughly dead.

[yerkyerk]

We could spawn unique difficulty-bound heroes if we want. Just like the Manticore, DragonLiche, Hydra, etc... we just wouldn't be able to use new meshes for them.
I wouldn't want a set position for the regular heroes or a surefire way to spawn them, as I kinda like the random encounters (even though most, if not all, heroes are bound to an Act).
Still, having more unique superbosses seems like an exciting idea :)

[zelfana]

Beast heroes should maybe drop 2 charms since they won't drop anything else unless you implement guaranteed formula drops which I don't vote for unless you completely remove chances for formulas from normal mobs. But I'm happy with at least one guaranteed charm (or relic for other types) drop from heroes. Killing beast heroes who don't drop anything is starting to **** me off.

(Somewhat unrelated: does Yeti Fur have ridiculously high chance to drop or other charms very very low chance or am I just lucky/unlucky? I honestly don't need the Yeti Fur, only a couple artifact formulas need it and the resistance is pretty much only needed for the boss yeti and neanderthal.)

And yeah, it's weird if you see a hero with broken short sword and one of his minions has Soul Carver. 0.5 uniques is a bit high, though, and 0.1 MI too low, maybe swap them or something? MIs can have sucky stats but uniques are always the same with slightly varying stats.