Meteor Shower (mission type)

[silverhound]

Not sure how to start, so i'll just throw it out there:

On default difficulty Meteor Showers come across as rather... easy, boring, and taking long to complete.

-I spend the majority just standing at one stack, occasionally shooting a meteor out of its path towards it.
-When the last meteor has fallen, even the stacks I didn't defend usually have one or two crates left each, sometimes more.
-That 100 of them fall only makes it take long, if it wasnt for my character's health i'd just walk away (pretty much the only reason i dont walk away).

And while i was writing this, i completed a Meteor Shower by just waiting invincible at the border for the last meteor to fall and then cleaning up all npcs. (yes i know, exploity. Had to know for sure though, didn't want to make an unsubstantiated statement that it might be possible)
Granted, there was only 1 crate left, but i expect there to be more left the next time.

To be honest, the biggest problem to me personally is that this mission takes so long compared to other missions, and involve so little action.

My suggestion:
Decrease the amount of meteors, and make them explode upon hitting the ground for additional damage that even hits crates that werent in its direct flight path.
This would put more pressure on the player to alter the path of all meteors approaching the stack he is defending, increase the chance of stacks he doesnt defend to have disappeared entirely after the last meteor has fallen, and make the mission itself shorter.

[BobTheJanitor]

Agreed, 100 meteors is just too much. I'd rather have higher damage meteors that are fewer in number. And since 1 crate is equal to 50 crates when it comes to rewards, there's not much point in defending anything but one stack.

[x4000]

Thanks very much for the feedback -- I'd been having some similar feelings myself, but wasn't sure what others thought, and wasn't sure what to do about this just yet.  I've found it more eventful than I think you have, but still too little.

Going with fewer meteors that do splash damage would certainly be one way to resolve the issue.  However... that's going to amp up the risk of death quite a lot, since when you destroy meteors they are exploding in your face.

------

What if we simply upped the spawn rate for meteors?  That would be more like the original missile command anyhow: basically at the moment it normally spawns 1 meteor, but has a low chance of spawning 2 at once.  What if we doubled that, so normally it spawns 2 at once, but has a low chance of spawning 4?

The points about the various stacks all being the same is also well taken.  What if we had several different kinds of supply crates?  Different colors/icons for different kinds of supplies?  Medical supplies, food supplies, magical ingredients, and survival gear?  Or something like that?  Then each stack could be made up of only a single type of supply, and to win you'd have to have a single crate from each kind of supply remaining. 

So that would mean you'd have to defend at least four stacks, more like in the original missile command again; and that would give you more reason to run around, as well as more risk.

The game could even introduce these gradually; first starting out with only two kinds of supply crate, and then gradually upping it to four as you get better at it.  That way it's not insane-o hard at the start, but it gets moreso pretty fast.  Like umbra vortex missions.  And either way, it's taking half the time and having twice the chaos as now, with the meteors coming in larger batches.

Thoughts?

[zebramatt]

I think that sounds pretty good.

[Hyfrydle]

The changes sound very good. One tip is to use Storm Dash to move between the stacks.

Something I noticed not all spells knockback the meteor is this intended? If so maybe this should be noted somewhere.

[x4000]

Something I noticed not all spells knockback the meteor is this intended? If so maybe this should be noted somewhere.

The meteors are subject to the same knockback as any other enemy.  There's nothing magical going on with knockback: enemies have weights, and spells have knockback amounts.  If the knockback exceeds the weight, it does some amount of knockback (more the more it exceeds the weight).  The meteors have a very standard weight, same as most monsters, so if you can't knock back a skelebot with your spell, you can't knock back a meteor, either.

[Penumbra]

I think, along with making them spawn faster, the mantis issue about the meteors being blown away by the wind trivializes them. Only 1 in 10 meteors will even come near a pile of crates in a wind storm.

[Bluddy]

I think what made these old style of games interesting was the variation in the spawn rate. You get a slow trickle of meteors, and then it speeds up more and more until it's really a shower, then it slows down again to let you catch your breath, and then it increases to a rate even faster than the original shower. Then you get some jumbo meteors. Mixing up the rate and size is what makes things interesting. You could have monsters spawn between meteor attacks.

[KDR_11k]

I'd suggest making the spawn rate increase as the mission goes on so there's a progression that the player can see.

Also the mission currently ends when the last meteor spawns, not when it lands.

Meteors hit brutally hard when you touch them.

[Hyfrydle]

Speed and number should also be dependant on difficulty level. Reading all these ideas is getting a bit scary, hope I can still complete these missions when the changes are made.

[keith.lamothe]

Also the mission currently ends when the last meteor spawns, not when it lands.

Odd, I thought I had it check for any hostiles left (so that you have to get the monsters and spawners too) but perhaps that's not noticing the meteors for whatever reason.

[x4000]

Also the mission currently ends when the last meteor spawns, not when it lands.

Odd, I thought I had it check for any hostiles left (so that you have to get the monsters and spawners too) but perhaps that's not noticing the meteors for whatever reason.

Meteors don't count as a hostile, since they technically count as more of a "shot" than a monster.  So you'd have to explicitly also check for meteor counts.

[silverhound]

Thanks very much for the feedback -- I'd been having some similar feelings myself, but wasn't sure what others thought, and wasn't sure what to do about this just yet.  I've found it more eventful than I think you have, but still too little.

Heh, sorry if i made it sound like that, i already had a feeling my post was sounding rather negative but i didn't know how to make it sound better when i wrote it.
Only edited it like 5... 6 times? (and still thats the best i could come up with, yes i know, pathetic )

Going with fewer meteors that do splash damage would certainly be one way to resolve the issue.  However... that's going to amp up the risk of death quite a lot, since when you destroy meteors they are exploding in your face.

Actually, like i mentioned i prefer to just knock them out of their path, takes less shots and has the same result (i havent been able to destroy a meteor since something dropped my damage in the last patches vs them), so the risk of them exploding in my face is rather small (and usually a case of me being too close to em when they hit the ground).
Besides, what if you make it so they only explode when they touch the ground rather than when they die?

What if we simply upped the spawn rate for meteors?  That would be more like the original missile command anyhow: basically at the moment it normally spawns 1 meteor, but has a low chance of spawning 2 at once.  What if we doubled that, so normally it spawns 2 at once, but has a low chance of spawning 4?

That could definitely work, but again it doesnt remove the issue of 'it doesnt always kill all crates even if none of the meteors are intercepted'.
The only reason i had 1 crate left was because of the npcs bumping into the rest, if i just clean out npcs i'd still end up with crates left over without actually doing what the mission is supposed to be about, protecting the crates from the meteors.

The points about the various stacks all being the same is also well taken.  What if we had several different kinds of supply crates?  Different colors/icons for different kinds of supplies?  Medical supplies, food supplies, magical ingredients, and survival gear?  Or something like that?  Then each stack could be made up of only a single type of supply, and to win you'd have to have a single crate from each kind of supply remaining. 

While i like the sound of this, it would require a change in the rewards for the Meteor Shower mission, at the least more rewards than i've got up to now (only 2 items max).
Also, if you do that please, please add a signpost to each stack that tells us what we get if we protect that stack. Colors alone wont do, and this allows you to separate even individual reward items from the same category amongst the stacks.

The game could even introduce these gradually; first starting out with only two kinds of supply crate, and then gradually upping it to four as you get better at it.  That way it's not insane-o hard at the start, but it gets moreso pretty fast.  Like umbra vortex missions.  And either way, it's taking half the time and having twice the chaos as now, with the meteors coming in larger batches.

Thoughts?

I'm all up for gradually, but maybe make it differ between the tier the continent is on rather than the amount of this type of mission you have done?
Since you get a wider variety of rewards at higher continent tiers, it would be a nice way to combine the two.

[x4000]

I still need to make the stacks different, but this is a start:

* Fixed a bug in prior versions where you could win a meteor storm mission while a meteor was still falling if all the monsters were destroyed first.

* Previously, meteor storm missions would spawn 1 meteor or sometimes 2.  Now they spawn 2 meteors or sometimes 4.

[LintMan]

I just tried the meteor shower mission for the first time and got my butt kicked.  What spells do you need to use?

I had energy pulse 2, creeping death 2,  and fireball 2, and those barely scratched the meteors before they hit the boxes.  I also tried Launch Rock 1 without any luck.    Then I tried Spalsh Back 1 and finally made progress since it would push the meteors back a bit.  But that spell fires pretty slowly and I had to stand almost right in the meteor's path to push it, so I quickly ended up dead.  What spells work better here?

Also, is there generally supposed to be a wall of terrain too high to jump over between the sets of crates?  I had to stack boxes to move between sets of crates.  Was this just bad luck?