Right now, you might run a Monolith with a “Enemies deal 50% more damage” and it says “for the next 5 monoliths”, and you can “Stack” or accumulate multiple modifiers over a few runs to where the monolith gets ridiculously hard.
So, my suggestion is to make all modifiers only apply to one monolith (the one you’re about to run). But, your overall Stability acts as a multiplier to the mods, making those mods harder. “50% increased damage” with high Stability could elevate to 100%, 150% or even 200%. “Rare enemies have increase cooldown recovery” could elevate to faster recovery (imagine Avalanche Spam…)
An alternate idea is for Stability to come with a fixed “Set” of modifiers. For example, Stability increases all monster health and damage by a small amount. So, no matter what the modifiers on that particular monolith run, you also are dealing with just plain harder monsters due to your Stability level.
I’m open to even more ideas around this. My main suggestion is for monolith modifiers to be “one and done”, so if anyone has other ideas towards that vein, here’s the place for them.
Say you pick one which says “Enemies have 45% more health and damage”.
Old system: it also says “This will last for the next 5 monoliths”
New System: that 45% health and damage are increased based on how much Stability you have, but they last for only for this Monolith.
i.e. the farther you progress in the web, the harder each monolith becomes (because your stability is increasing).
Alternate idea would be that Stability doesn’t just boost the mod itself, but instead, Stability applies its own modifiers to every monolith.
For example, maybe Stability does the following:
Increases monster health by 0.5% per point (250 stability increases mob health by 125%)
Increases monster damage by 0.25% per point (250 stability = 75% more damage)
Increases monster cooldown recovery by 1% per point (250 stability = 250% increased cooldowns)
etc. (other static modifiers)
So, in my previous example, you run the “Enemies have 45% increased health and damage” would be only that for a new Mono run, but after you travel the web for a while, it becomes that + the stability modifiers above.
You were clear, that 45% health/damage would only affect the mono you choose it for, not the quest echoes, so they would be substantially easier.
One can devise all sorts of mechanics to make monoliths harder the further you go, but, IMO, the current system is sufficient. You could even argue that the current modifier durations should be increased which would mean that the modifiers stack up quicker & persist for longer making the deeper monos harder.
Also, I’d say that cooldown reduction should be excluded from anything like this since it risks allowing the quest echo bosses to chain their bigger attacks constantly. Could you imagine Rahyeh being able to constantly do his pie attack, or the Dragon Emperor doing his circular AoE attack back to back?
Yeah, Cooldown can be excluded, but you can add in most of the other mods you see normally on echos - damage reduction, resistances, “Deadly until approached” etc.
And I was thinking the flat “Stability” idea would be better, so that it could also be used for Quest Echoes.
The idea was more about predictability of the challenge vs. the random nature of it now, while trying to keep the difficulty the same.
