Patrols Rework Idea

I don’t believe avoiding a patrol is fun, interesting or adds anything to the gameplay. Does anyone?

This is an idea to make patrols on Cata more interesting for a wider variety of weapons and an important part of the gameplay, like how bosses are.

Suggestions:

  • A boss wall would be added until the pat is defeated. You would be able to choose when you fight the pat, but you must defeat it to proceed to the next area. This is to make pats a full gameplay element instead of one that can often be skipped like a skippable boss. The aggro/avoid choice is often easy (any open area, the 3rd pat on Screaming Bell etc.) or is like an auto-trigger in QP (like the pat in the ravine in Athel). Coupled with avoiding one just being wall hugging, pats currently add nothing to half of the games played that they pop up in.

  • Patrols would always turnaround at the end of their path and repeat it if they had not found any players yet. This is so some pats with specific paths couldn’t be avoided until they left the map.

  • Patrol compositions would be changed. They would be more like super hordes than the pats we have now. There would still be a high number of elites, but more infantry and unarmoured mixed in. There would only be slightly less armour, and a lot more unarmoured. This would make pats harder overall as they would be larger, but also fairer to a wider variety of team comps, giving players with non-armour damage weapons more targets to focus.

  • The last elite in a patrol would drop a Loot Die, like a boss. This is to keep the gameplay rewards consistent, as like a boss due to the boss wall added it would not be possible to avoid a pat.

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I think it’s fine to leave avoiding patrols an option. Sometimes you could be down a few players, lacking supplies or simply under too much pressure to deal with that on top of everything else. For the average player it’s usually easier to clutch through a monster than 20+ stormvermin bumrushing them. Also, I wouldn’t add a die reward to patrols as you’d probably end up with friction within the group between players who are chasing loot at all costs and those who would play more conservatively and aim to actually win the run. I think it’s more interesting anyway to evaluate the opportunity of avoiding a patrol versus pulling and killing, with the final scope being that of making it through the section safely. Avoiding is not always the best plan, as neither is pulling.

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I love this idea.

I dont, i think patrol is something that should be feared and avoided, and highly punishable upon trigger. As it was back in v1.

I dont like the fact that you can just kill them with no problem.

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I always like challenging and more varied scenarios in the game, but agree with @Throne_of_Rats that dodging should always be possible.
I find even boss walls rather inelegant and would prefer it if bosses were not triggered spawns but roaming enemies (why not more than 1 on higher difficulty levels) but for that are also dodgeable.
Or you could “convert” the loot rats and give them a small bell instead of a bag, when they escape they trigger a boss (or other support troops), just a kind of alerter.

Furthermore, this topic was also discussed HERE before.

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The same arguments could be made for bosses. Just a gradient of difficulty really. It’s fine, but I think it could be a more interesting challenge in a game that’s pretty much all about fighting/action.

I added it to the list of suggestions because they all go with each other. All or nothing.

There would be less armour in total. There would be a buffer of infantry too. 20 SV on their own are more likely to stack their more dangerous running attacks, especially when they are all next to each other from the start (instead of being spread out) and have no infantry surrounding them.

It’s just ‘How’s our health and armour damage?’. Fighting a super horde with a lower amount of elites (but still a high amount) in it, with more unarmoured elites, is a more complex challenge that requires more skill to overcome that that doesn’t overly favour high armour damage weapons.

I’d prefer something to be feared, can’t be avoided and can’t be killed easily, with armour damage weapons struggling against them as much as infantry/unarmoured damage weapons do.

This sounds like a simpler and easier game where players can chose to screw their teammates up if they want to or are being mindless. Skippable triggers are silly because they’re an integral part of the game’s difficulty.

The focus of that thread was rewarding the player, like through loot die. I barely care about the reward part, it’s a minor consistency thing that would go along with the other changes. I care about the challenge.


The following isn’t directed towards anyone in particular, just adding it to the end of this reply to avoid making another one just for it.

Armour spam is a difficult but overly simplistic challenge in a game where combined threats make for the most fun challenges. This is a part of why the balance is skewed towards versatile weapons that deal high armour damage, despite most of the health of hordes coming from infantry. Always being able to pass a threshold is more important. Horde elite waves being very heavy sometimes instead of spreading elites throughout the entire horde in lower density is another part of it.

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I’m fine with pats being avoidable tbh, main thing I miss is how threatening they were in VT1

like if you pulled a V1 pat you’d need resources/plan to deal with it, these days they’re pretty easy to just brute force your way through.

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Thing is, it doesn’t have to be non-stop action, unless the player specifically desires that. For that situation there exist options like the modded community with plenty of challenges or twitch mode with unforgiving settings. I think it’s fine for the official realm to have some pacing to the action, with highs and lows, a little bit of atmosphere here and there and even the opportunity to just sit back for a few moments and enjoy a nice view.

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Good point. I’ve forgotten that everyone plays for enjoyment, and that what they get out of the game isn’t necessarily going to be the same thing I enjoy.

In a game where everything is about fighting, I think they add a rather unique and interesting element by being a danger which can (and should) be avoided and one which “can” reward being aware of the surroundings.

As such I can not support in any way an idea to make them unavoidable and also not to give an incentive for fighting them by giving them a reward. We have already enough people erasing them from existence by bombing / career skill usage.

If anything I would like to make them far more threatening so that pre-mature bombing will be punished severely. This has to go hand in hand with some fixing though to make sure that they are 100 % avoidable at all times.

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This isnt a good idea. Patrols currently can be avoided and many runs have been lost due to someone feeling good about themself aggroing patrol and dying. Forcing you to fight patrols wouldnt be good idea since youre not always in good situation for that. Party can be on low hp, no bombs, no hard burst careers. Too many times Shade or Zealot just rushed into Patrols just to die in a second and cause us to have hard time or even lose at times. Patrols in current state are great addition - u can choose to fight them or try to avoid them which sometimes bites you in the as* when horde spawns, pins u down in choke while patrol comes back at ya. Too many ppl dont know how to fight patrols since they mostly avoid them - which causes so many ppl to die to them. Changing this into something u can’t avoid would destroy the whole purpose of patrols. It would change them into events that would just lose meaning later on. I would say patrols should even be buffed - depending on current state of the team patrols should get stronger or weaker. Everyone is low hp, no bombs, no burst damage = weaker patrol. Everyone is 50%+ hp, lots of bombs and hard burst career ? More enemies. When u have alteast 2 bombs and decent Shade or any other high burst melee career u can just wipe patrol in seconds. Especially since Trollhammer Torpedo is a thing now. Engineer with Concoction can wipe patrols in seconds too or alteast weaken them.

So the reason of this thread is simply to express personal opinion and not to discuss anything? Well then, I’ll keep it as simple as possible and try not to expand on a topic but just take a position on option A or B:
Non-evasive patrols are silly because they are an integral element of the player’s tactical freedom of choice. Quality thread 11/10 :ok_hand:

? Every thread is here to express personal opinion with discussion sometimes following and sometimes not. On first look, he didn’t say anything which did hinder you to express your own personal opinion or discuss.

And we discuss the same stuff all the time anyway. One thread more or less will not hurt -_- Especially, since he has a different focus.

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Maybe I’m misunderstanding it, but to me this statement sounds:

very much as if it is completely irrelevant for the OP to consider the issue beyond the solutions he himself proposes…
If the topic is “Patrols Rework Idea”, then maybe you should also look at the topic as a whole and not stop at the sub-points that interest you.
Thereby, these topics were after all touched upon in points 3 and 4 of the OP, so I don’t quite understand why the other thread is then declared irrelevant at this point.
I mean if you do not like other approaches all well and good, but then please address the entire post and not just 2 points.

Pats having the option to be avoided is fine as is. Playing around them, avoid/reposition or kill, has more depth to it than monsters, wouldn’t take this away from players. Also, creating more arbitrary arenas with boss walls gives me the shivers.

Certain patrol paths make sense to be only a one-way pat, depending on the location. Some paths wouldn’t work that way or would be extremely annoying.

The only issue I agree with is that pats are pushovers at the moment, especially Skaven and Beastmen variants. Sometimes you barely even notice you were fighting a triggered pat inbetween horde waves. Changing their compositions (add monks/zerkers?) seems reasonable.
Personally, I’d change all stagger resistance values of pat units to match Deathwish values, and slap different skins to pat SVs, pat Bestigors, etc. to set them apart from regular elites. Then they’d pose some sort of a threat again when triggered that can’t be dealt with easily by spamming cc ults.

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I think that patrols should be avoidable but we can make them less avoidable dependent on context.

I always found it weird that you can be fighting a horde a few yards away from a patrol and it never triggers them. I would just make it so that the trigger radius for the patrol increases if there is fighting in the vicinity and the more enemies that you are fighting the larger the radius. This would mean that if you are silently hugging a wall not engaged in melee combat it will be easy to avoid the patrol but if you are in a death struggle with a horde and lobbing bombs then the patrol will notice and attack.

To make patrols more challenging I think you just add a couple of specials. So an SV patrol will have either 2 ratling gunners or 2 packmasters in their retinue, and a Chaos patrol would automatically summon 2 leeches when triggered (don’t know about beastmen, maybe a metric tonne of archers are in the line). Anyway, this would make patrols more of a challenge as you’d prioritise the specials and might easily get clipped by the armoured units.

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Let’s not make this into a big deal. I’ve already accepted that others enjoy the game differently and that I was making subjective points.

This is a curious thing to say to/about the topic poster. I think this is a simple misunderstanding.

I never said it was irrelevant. I said “I barely care about the reward part” which is what that linked thread is mostly about. I barely care about that thread but I can see the merit in some of the points made in it. The topic of this thread was outlined at the top:

The avoiding part is the main focus. People are free to discuss the reward stuff, and I’m not going to nor can tell them they can’t. Just don’t expect really thoughtful and nuanced replies on that part from me because I didn’t put as much thought into it (points one and three are the ones that I thought more about). I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t discuss it. The other two points were minor additions I added at the last minute before posting because they would have to be done in order for an unavoidable patrol to make sense/be consistent with other gameplay elements.

I’m sorry but this just seems like semantics to me.

I’m totally down for pats to generally become more spicy

SV and Beastmen pats are real sad at the moment. Also kinda 1 dimensional? Chaos Pats at least have some decent-ish variation going on and a chaos warrior squad presents a challenge for the average player typically (especially if pulled at a bad time)

Like SV pats should at the very least have some Monks in the mix

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Good idea. Doesn’t affect me since I always instapull patrols as soon as possible anyways, but I think it’d be better if people were forced to my way of thinking. We need to save people from a weak pacifist attitude.

On another note, I feel as if that patrols have been getting less and less threatening over time. The increasing amount of careers and weapons that counter them has been growing, and nowadays every time I pull a patrol, they get obliterated before even doing anything. Trollhammer torpedo is a significant perpetrator in this. It’s not like I think that the weapon is super overpowered or anything, but it specializes in literally killing fun by blowing up patrols better than anything else. Multiple times now I’ve pulled a Chaos Patrol, only for an engineer to pump loads onto their faces, depriving the rest of the team of any action. And then just power creep in general over the years has made them less threatening. Kinda sad.

That or I just get kicked, and then I join back in to see that they’ve lost. Why would you kick me before fighting a patrol? You need me. And why are you avoiding the patrol anyways? The field is empty and we have a Shade, BH, IB and me as HS. Like bro, just Shade kills 2 because not Mist, I kill 2 or 3 with longbow ult, BH kills guaranteed 1 and IB ults and takes all the pressure away during that time. Half the patrol is dead anyways. How do you lose? and pls why u kick me men?

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I think your philosophy and limited, primitive ismash allcusican way of thinking is self explanatory imho…

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