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I just had an epiphany.
The Apothecaries could be our turret monsters. Say their ranged attack is slow and, perhaps, very lightly homing until it passes the player. It does LOADS of damage, but it's sort of easy to dodge. The attacking Apothecary, IMO, wouldn't move except to block the player from getting to the healer one -- but both Apothecaries would be capable of some pretty damn fast speeds when they DID move. This makes one's role as "defender" more useful, as it can, with the right amount of speed, actually take long range sniper-rockets for the sake of the healer. Furthermore, it means that running away from the apothecaries isn't necessarily a working tactic because they'll follow -- and fast. This makes them multipurpose enemies, a VERY big danger. A pair of apothecaries and a room full of corpses could be easily equal to a gug or a full-on boss in terms of pure "WTFPWNtential". At the same time, a brave enough player won't have much trouble plastering both of them, adding a strategic layer to their encounters -- do you have enough health/the balls to axe them or enough ammo to scrap them at range? With this set-up they work VERY well as end-of-episode minibosses. Have a gauntlet of normal enemies in a big room initially, setting you up for (after all enemies are dead) the appearance of two apothecaries, who immediately show up their rather frail appearances with punishing hails of returned enemies and slow-but-hard-to-keep-track-of balls of pure condensed pain. The panic... it's almost PALPABLE. --Caitie, the -evil- game designer so, playing some nwn2... seems like the d20 games have some kind of flat damage reduction where, say you had 10 points of damage reduction, it would simply reduce all damage by 10.
if your attack does 10 or less damage, you basically don't do any. it would be cool to implement something like this on a monster where the NG would be completely ineffective, as would shotguns of both types (you'd see the grey bullet puff particles instead of blood) but the SNG would work with reduced damage. it would also reduce the effectiveness of the LG since it's damage is delivered in a constant stream. over time, more damage would be reduced from the LG or SNG than from rockets which deliver large chunks of damage slowly. One of the issues with flat damage reduction is that it makes rockets the far and away most efficient choice for tackling the target, when they are already the weapon of choice a great deal of the time. I suspect this is why the shambler takes reduced damage from explosions instead. The flat damage reduction could be used intentionally like that though, if you wanted to create a monster which prompts players to use up lots of rockets, in order to make a later horde combat more difficult. Like zombies, but without the ability to kill many at once.
One final technical issue you need to overcome is the part of the shotgun which combines several damage updates into a single hit. If all the pellets hit the same target, then you end up with 1 call to t_damage inflicting 24 damage, not 6 calls inflicting 4 each. Perhaps the best way to resolve that would be to add a third variable, multi_hitcount, which is incremented by 1 each time a hit builds up, and reset in all the right places. Your damage reduction code then needs to spot when that is non-zero, and reduce damage by reduction_factor * multi_hitcount. If you wanted to create a monster which was resistant to low rates of damage, but more vulnerable to high tier weapons, you could employ limited, fast rate regeneration. An example monster could have 150hp, along with a pool of 400hp it could regenerate back up to that starting value. So it always dies after 550 hp of damage, but if you can deal damage faster than it regenerates, then you can kill it in much less. At 60hp/s regeneration, 2 consecutive rockets or grenades kill it, and 6 cells should also do it in. But constant fire from the nailgun would take 5 seconds to take one down. The regeneration also means that you have to focus one down in order to kill it, the benefit of using a high tier weapon is lost if you allow it time to regenerate. Rockets lose some of their power against a group of these enemies, as most splash damage will be regenerated anyway. The problem is that this is quite a complicated mechanism, and you might have to worry about player feedback. Otherwise they might get the impression that these monsters just have random amounts of health. If you encounter them with low tier weapons, you might feel you've learnt that these monsters have 500 hp, and then when they start dying to 2 rockets you'd end up confused. Would borrowing the health kit sound, or some recognisable variant of it, and playing it in pain animations be a good start? reading those comments about a worm that would consume someone from the inside out made me wish i had thought of this before:
it would have rocked if you could put a entity key on a voreling so that it would search for large corpses like ogres and shamblers near it when it's spawned. it would move to them and go inside them and hide there so if you're backtracking through an area with a bunch of dead monsters, these things could burst out when you get near (with a nice little shower of blood and a squelching sound of course). it could even periodically play a chewing sound like it's eating the organs and stuff in there. We've got lots of plans for corpses.
In Quoth could cause problems with the corpse fade flag though. I had an idea for a monster a while back that was basically a maggot kind of thing that would crawl into an enemy corpse and start consuming it and then eventually pop its head off as it got bigger and would use the monster's body as its own.
Somewhat similar to how Resident Evil 4 and 5 had those centipede creatures pop out of a zombie's head if you shot it. working on a mod called AWESOME QUAKE and it pretty much contains all of the ideas shared in this thread already TBH.
Plus Helicopter-Ogres. You'll see I'm betatesting my level and the funny thing arises I can't kill my monster by gibbing it.
It hadn't occured to me as I always shoot them to death, and then they're finished. When I blast bones with my rocketlauncher its head keeps attacking me untill I'm killed. Suddenly it has become untouchable. Must have to do with the qc. Can't imagine bones read these posts. lets help a DarkYoung, not an Endboss, but well..,
http://members.home.nl/gimli/dark.gif one go on its way. even though i remember it being invisible but here is picture
http://www.3x6.net/vhoorl/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/yog-sothoth_couleur.jpg (cept i imagined it with feet sense it was trudging through the woods knocking down the trees and/or town) Concept:
http://dougbot.com/forum/meatHoleDemon.jpg A real wizard, physically he's taller yet thinner than a Shambler. A number of magical ranged attacks as well as summoning abilities and physical regeneration. When the player first sees him he's seemingly dead, impaled on a lance jammed into the wall, on their approach he disimpales himself and uses his regenerative magic to recover from the wound. Throughout the battle the player wears him down despite his regeneration until he resorts to destroying the floor, levitating himself around the arena. Heavy attacks can disrupt his concentration though, causing him to fall into the void revealed below. That is clearly not Yog Sothoth, but instead is obviously the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/ga/ul/781008102041/inlineimg/Y/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster_2-thumb-514x514.jpg 3d, though I don't want to post a shot of it - it's too squat and needs a structural rework.
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