Monster Skill balance

[lukep]

Monsters having some skills over level 5 leads to balance problems IMO. This is most apparent in the case of high level drakes/wyrms/greater wyrms. Their breath attacks scale their range with level, leading to odd AI and having longer ranges than anything available to the player.

For example, a level 40 fire drake, with level 8 Fire Breath has a range of 12, further than any player skill, or even the natural sight range for the character. It is much more pronounced with a level 90 greater multihued wyrm.

I would suggest, instead of giving monsters 8 (raw) levels of a skill at 1.00 mastery, for an effective level of 8, give them 4 (raw) levels at 2.00 mastery, or 5 at 1.60 mastery, both for an effective level of 8, but without stacking effects past what is possible for the player.

[Final Master]

Just so you are aware, it doesn't matter at all what the effective or raw level or mastery or anything like that; it doesn't matter for an npc if it's talents scale. Know why? Because there isn't a cap level for npcs. Go cheat up the ID and drop down to ~lvl 500 and bring up anything with a ranged talent that scales. It's just bad business when you are talking things that don't have a cap [effectively]. Sure, the zones have caps which kind of controls this, but it isn't always enough to maintain balance [if that's desired]/to wrangle in something that might be a bit more plausible.

[lukep]

I don't mind monsters having skills at high damages, that is part of what makes them challenging. What I am saying here is that skills that use raw talent level to scale, use it for a reason, to limit those parts of the skill. Giving them raw talent levels above 5 breaks that balance.

Fighting the GMHW's in the room of death, the skills that they had broke their AI and destroyed the balance of combat. Their skills were around level 20 or so, giving them enough range to shoot 20 squares away, twice as far as the player. This led to their AI getting them to retreat to 12-15 squares, and blasting away from complete safety. If this was intended behaviour, then I would suspect that the final bosses or other powerful enemies would be able to do this as well.

FM, I really don't understand what point you were trying to get across. Just because an NPC is high level, doesn't mean it should get special powers. A high raw talent level skill on a high level NPC is broken because it gives effects past what should be the cap.

Some examples of skills that would be extremely broken at high talent levels (some aren't used by monsters, but you can get the point):

Quicken Spells level 17: 100% cooldown reduction
Tempest/Wildfire/Uttercold/Crystalline Focus level 11: 110% resist penetration (whatever that means)
Most breath attacks level 16: 20 range
Kinetic/Charge/thermal leech levels 8: 1 cooldown each

As you can see, these skills would be completely unbalanced at high raw talent levels, but still balanced at high masteries, at raw talent level 5.

[Grey]

It does come back a bit to the debate on nerfing talents at high levels to ensure you always get a diminishing return. Would help with both monster balance and player abuse.

[darkgod]

Then it's not a problem with them having high levels, it's just a problem on a few individual talents that needs fixing