Behind the Mask: Elite doesn't mean casual

Back in the early days of Champions Online, there was no difficulty slider. We got stuck playing the same stuff regardless of player or character ability, and often that meant high-skill players and their nigh-invincible god characters smashed through insignificant minions like freight trains. When Serpent Lantern launched, Cryptic added in difficulty settings, beginning at the base normal difficulty and ending at very hard. Later on, the devs added an Elite difficulty, touted to be even tougher than VH.

Since then, high-powered heroes have had a way to challenge themselves... sort of. When Serpent Lantern first launched, doing it on VH was reasonably challenging due to the many annoyances (mostly pulson guns) placed in it by the dev team. When players rightfully complained that the pulson guns ripped through well-statted tanks, the devs nerfed the guns and the difficulty became mostly a joke. Normal difficulty is still mostly synonymous with "cakewalk," while Elite is more like "sorta dangerous, maybe."

Why Serpent Lantern's challenge didn't work

The original problem with SL wasn't even the difficulty slider; SL's problem was and has always been team scaling. A few guys with pulson guns weren't a big deal because even on VH, they were torn apart in seconds. The problem was in five-man teams with huge swarms of them. In these large team situations, a tank had no way to survive; the vast number of pulson gun-armed VIPER just ripped through his defenses, turning him into a squishy and making it virtually impossible for him to play his role in the team.

When challenge is inserted into a game (any game), it needs to have the guise of fairness. A swarm of minions with defense-piercing laser rifles doesn't feel fair; it feels cheap because none of your defense works. And sadly, this isn't a true action game where the real answer is to avoid getting hit by skillful maneuvering.

In order to inject "cheap" challenge into a game, a bit of tweaking is in order. Things that unfairly take control away from the player in whatever form should be predictable and avoidable through some strategy, rather than being random or continuous. A good (if obvious) example is the various charged attacks enemies use; they are telegraphed by a long windup and an obvious BOOM! icon over the enemy's head. If you failed to block it, it's your fault.

There is a significant problem even with that, though: In solo play, it's easy to concentrate on a group of five enemies or less and watch their attacks. In group play, it's impossible to deal with 20 or more enemies all focused on you individually. The answer to that situation is just to block continuously, rather than try to attack or taunt. Obviously that passive style won't hold threat for long, and it takes away from dynamic gameplay choices. It's better to have to decide when to block than to have to hold the block button down continuously.

The best way to handle mass enemy challenges in a game like CO is to put the real "cheap" attacks on unfair boss mobs, like the Enforcers in many lairs or adventure packs. On lower difficulties, these mobs should be removed entirely. On higher difficulties while you're solo, these enemies should be easier to kill but not less dangerous. On higher difficulties, these enemies should be very tough to withstand large volumes of indiscriminate AoE and/or concentrated high damage single-target DPS.

In Serpent Lantern, the Serpent Mages that exist on every difficulty are a good example of what works and doesn't work. They are the same enemies (albeit with more life and damage) on every difficulty setting, and their annoying disable is random and unavoidable. They are also not really durable enough to stand up to focused melee DPS, which limits their threat in teams. However, the fact that the Mages are deadly threats and somewhat harder to kill means teams can and do focus on them and cut them down before they can pose a problem. In many ways, that's a mission accomplished, even if it isn't a perfect solution.

Why Elite doesn't work

Elite difficulty gives all enemies a moderate (it's 30% as far as I know, but I could be wrong and it's not documented anywhere) increase to damage, damage resistance, and increases a few other things like dodge chance. It also causes certain tougher enemies to spawn (or at least, spawn more frequently) although this is only true in adventure packs and lairs.

The real problem with Elite is that the minor increase in enemy damage is laughable to almost any character with a passive that increases survival. Even Personal Force Field probably laughs at Elite mobs, and Aura of Radiant Protection certainly does, despite not being a defensive passive (Medical Nanites doesn't count; it's almost like having nothing in your passive slot). The increase in enemy toughness is more significant, since it actually does make a noticeable difference. The problem is that a tougher enemy that deals effectively zero damage just takes longer to wear down and isn't any more threatening.

In normal gameplay, enemies don't get new attack patterns or spawn Enforcers when the difficulty is ramped up to Elite. This makes normal questing rather easy regardless of difficulty. While Elite gives minimally increased rewards (making the extra time investment not worth it), the real problem is that the intrinsic reward of more challenge isn't really present. Enemies just take longer to kill; they aren't really more dangerous at all.

Some of the more hardcore forumgoers suggest that Elite needs to give more than +100% bonus damage for Elite to be dangerous; some theorycrafters recommend giving as much as +300% (that's quadruple) damage output to mobs. I'd have to see it in action, but I'll be pretty frank about this: Elite should be hard, and gating it so that teams are required (even two to three person teams) is OK in my book. Quadruple damage isn't that extreme to a dedicated tank; it'd mostly just be a problem for really squishy DPS or healers who probably shouldn't solo on Elite anyway.

I don't want normal difficulty to change

That also brings up an important point: I would prefer that the difficulty settings hard and below stay mostly the same. I think that a small overall increase in enemy base damage would be good for the game, but any increases should be very small. It should be possible to play normal on virtually any build, including one without a passive using only Rebuke as its main damage.

I think that very hard and Elite should be reserved for teams and very gifted soloists who have extremely polished builds. Most high-end players feel the same, although our ideas vary widely on how exactly to make the game harder. We know that pulson guns didn't work, but there are plenty of ideas out there that do.

When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.