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TOPIC: Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge?

Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #25

Matthew Hayward wrote: I'm curious what people think Nightmare stats should be to give advanced parties a challenge?

Right now Nightmare monster stats seem to be around:

  • Monster to-hit: +12-18
  • Monster Save Threat DC: 22
  • Monster AC: 20-28
  • Attacks: Generally 2, sometimes retribution or AOE
  • Damage per attack: Usually 12-20, occasional heavy hitters in the 40 range or "save or die" range

Monsters often also have special defenses, ways to waste player turns, etc..



Here are stats I'd suggest for Nightmare, or perhaps a new Nighmare-but-worse level:

  • Monster to-hit: +25
  • Monster Save Threat DC: 27
  • Monster AC: 28-34
  • Attacks: Generally 2, sometimes retribution or AOE (this could be scaled up, but we don't want the monster turn to take too long)
  • Damage per attack: 30-35, occasional heavy hitters in the 40 range or "save or die" range

I'd also suggest that there be around 1d3-1 saves each dungeon for which evasion/imroved evasion matters.


How I come to those levels, is this goal:

For parties at the relic level:
  • Monsters should hit the heavy armor classes around 50% of the time.
  • Monks should fail their saves around 50% of the time.
  • Players should need to slide around a 10+ to hit.
  • Monster hits should not one-shot people who've made some investment in bumping up HP, but should put almost everyone into 2 hits and you're dead territory.

I'm curious whether other people think Nightmare should be ramped up, or a 4th difficulty added?


I admit it could be a pretty big mistake to make it this hard - as at the 1-2 UR and good rare parties would probably get massacred.


If needed, I'd rather see this kind of upswing for Nightmare rather than the "Nothing you have will kill the monsters and nothing you have will save against the monsters attack" scenario" that I have seen a couple times in the recent past.

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #26

I pulled the data out of the XP system into a spreadsheet in order to understand a bit better about the various difficulty levels.

You can get your hands on the data and summary here:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xlbBH8ZpP2_8YdD22610YU2Tdx1pWwAEaFgTmmvFt8E/edit?usp=sharing

Here are the things I thought were interesting:

1. It looks like in 2011/2012 around 75% of runs had recorded XP, it dropped to 38% in 2013 and lower beyond. I wonder what changed between 2012 and 2013?

2. I don't see any event titles that indicate "hardcore" between 2008 and 2012. Did hardcore exist during this time? What would signal in the XP database that a run was hardcore?

3. For the last 4 years, around one third of runs have had entries in the XP system. Of these, around:
  • 60% of recorded runs were normal
  • 20% of recorded runs were hardcore
  • 20% of recorded runs were nightmare

4. I can't tell about survival rates, but I can tell who reported surviving to room 7 on their XP system.

Overall, over the last 4 years, out of 2115 reported nightmare runs there have been only 34 players who didn't make it to room 7 (1.6%).

The percentage of rhardcore reporting runners who made it to room 7 is similar.

Both are higher than the proportion of normal reporting runners who make it to room 7.



I think based on this, it's pretty clear that one of these things is true:
  1. The ~33% of reported runs at Nightmare are not representative.
  2. A large proportion of people who report their runs are lying about what room they survived to.
  3. Nightmare is a largely cakewalk for the people who decide to run it, with nearly 99% of players making it to room 7, such that you can count on your fingers the number of nightmare runners who don't make it to room 7 and register their Xp each year.

My money is on number 3 :laugh:

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Last edit: by Matthew Hayward.

Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #27

Matthew Hayward wrote: I pulled the data out of the XP system into a spreadsheet in order to understand a bit better about the various difficulty levels.

You can get your hands on the data and summary here:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xlbBH8ZpP2_8YdD22610YU2Tdx1pWwAEaFgTmmvFt8E/edit?usp=sharing

Here are the things I thought were interesting:

1. It looks like in 2011/2012 around 75% of runs had recorded XP, it dropped to 38% in 2013 and lower beyond. I wonder what changed between 2012 and 2013?

2. I don't see any event titles that indicate "hardcore" between 2008 and 2012. Did hardcore exist during this time? What would signal in the XP database that a run was hardcore?

3. For the last 4 years, around one third of runs have had entries in the XP system. Of these, around:

  • 60% of recorded runs were normal
  • 20% of recorded runs were hardcore
  • 20% of recorded runs were nightmare

4. I can't tell about survival rates, but I can tell who reported surviving to room 7 on their XP system.

Overall, over the last 4 years, out of 2115 reported nightmare runs there have been only 34 players who didn't make it to room 7 (1.6%).

The percentage of rhardcore reporting runners who made it to room 7 is similar.

Both are higher than the proportion of normal reporting runners who make it to room 7.



I think based on this, it's pretty clear that one of these things is true:
  1. The ~33% of reported runs at Nightmare are not representative.
  2. A large proportion of people who report their runs are lying about what room they survived to.
  3. Nightmare is a largely cakewalk for the people who decide to run it, with nearly 99% of players making it to room 7, such that you can count on your fingers the number of nightmare runners who don't make it to room 7 and register their Xp each year.

My money is on number 3 :laugh:


Was 2012 the last year xp was recorded in the epilog room and after that players were given codes to enter it on their own? That would explain the huge dropoff. A lot of players may just not care about xp enough to take the time to enter it. I'm sure a small percentage lost their codes, but even they probably could have asked for an alternative, but just didn't think it was important enough.

#2 does not surprise me at all. While I'm sure a lot of people made it to room 7, I'm also sure some people don't think it's a big deal to claim maximum xp. It the kind of "crime" that no one can catch and they probably feel like no one cares.

I would think the people who run nightmare or hardcore are more likely to take the time to enter xp, so the actual percentage is probably lower.

Again, we can probably estimate trends through this data, but it's hard to think of it as highly accurate.

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #28

If honest room survival tracking is desired it shouldn't be tied to XP. Since XP offers monetary rewards (extra treasure) there is little value in honestly entering data.

Everybody got all three treasures from the dungeons this year. Perhaps everybody should get full XP as well.

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #29

Chris Heuer wrote: If honest room survival tracking is desired it shouldn't be tied to XP. Since XP offers monetary rewards (extra treasure) there is little value in honestly entering data.

Everybody got all three treasures from the dungeons this year. Perhaps everybody should get full XP as well.


I choose to believe that true dungeon fans are not such perfect species of homo-economicus that the prospect of getting 1 extra treasure chip after playing a minimum of 9 distinct dungeons as to lie about it.

If people want to steal treasure they simply need to lie and announce they are 6th level. They don't need to lie about their XP entry in a multi-year confidence game.

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #30

For #2, for that period of time True Dungeon replaced Hardcore difficulty level with Nightmare difficulty level. After that True Dungeon (wisely in my opinion) brought back Hardcore and offered both options.

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #31

Matthew Hayward wrote: I pulled the data out of the XP system into a spreadsheet in order to understand a bit better about the various difficulty levels.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xlbBH8ZpP2_8YdD22610YU2Tdx1pWwAEaFgTmmvFt8E/edit?usp=sharing


Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this! What really surprised me on this and something we have to consider in general...

Matthew Hayward wrote: 3. For the last 4 years, around one third of runs have had entries in the XP system. Of these, around:

  • 60% of recorded runs were normal
  • 20% of recorded runs were hardcore
  • 20% of recorded runs were nightmare

  1. That 66% of all Gen Con TD people don't report their XP. Which means either they don't know about it or don't care. Both indicate that they play it for the experience of the game (hopefully coming back the following year).
  2. Of the recorded 20% only chose Nightmare. We can make the assumption that most the unrecorded probably aren't playing Nightmare because they aren't looking for XP. So the impact of making it more difficult or adding another difficulty impact approximately 520 tickets out of 8,000 or 7%. of the community.

I am not trying to make a judgement here just stating what your numbers said to me.

Ed
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Last edit: by MasterED.

Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #32

I think we can safely say it appears rooms 1 through 6 are surivable by that majority of nightmare players that reported xp, assuming they are doing it accurately.

We have no information on room 7. We don't know if anyone died and was resurrected in the room they died. We also don't know that rooms 1 through 6 were a cakewalk because we don't know the experience that they had those rooms.

This year I took both my puzzle runs through nightmare. I used literally hundreds of HP potions in puzzle rooms to get everyone to rooms 7. I planned this because we had a huge stockpile I wanted to run through. Our healers used very little spells though. Without the potion stockpile I believe we would have had made it to 7, but died quickly. I would also have not defined it as a cakewalk. Out of our 18 players (we were short two Sunday morning) I imagine only 3 of us recorded xp.
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Last edit: by jedibcg.

Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #33

Possible explanations for less-than-100-percent participation in the XP system:

Newbie "one and done" players are unlikely to record XP.

Players who solo or duo won't enter XP for the 8 or 9 ghosts. It's impossible to know if they were normal or nightmare ghosts.

If someone runs multiple times a year, maybe they don't enter all of them. You can only get XP for two anyway, so maybe that's all some people enter. Just put in two that got you to room 7 and leave out the others, some of which they may have died sooner. (This effect skews things towards max HP without any lying involved.)

Observation: the fact we have multiple players who have or plan to run solo nightmare, when the event is planned for a team of ten, is all you need to know to say there needs to be an Epic level.

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Last edit: by Brad Mortensen.

Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #34

Brad Mortensen wrote: Observation: the fact we have multiple players who have or plan to run solo nightmare, when the event is planned for a team of ten, is all you need to know to say there needs to be an Epic level.


+1

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #35

Dave wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Observation: the fact we have multiple players who have or plan to run solo nightmare, when the event is planned for a team of ten, is all you need to know to say there needs to be an Epic level.


+1


+2 :)

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Nightmare Stats for Advanced Party Challenge? 7 years 6 months ago #36

Chip Bowles wrote:

Dave wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: Observation: the fact we have multiple players who have or plan to run solo nightmare, when the event is planned for a team of ten, is all you need to know to say there needs to be an Epic level.


+1


+2 :)

+3
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