Question on cause of nanoskill debuff uselessness in PvM

[Xtremtech]

Hi All,

I thought I'd drop by the mechanics gurus to ask why it is that nanoskills debuffs have no appreciable effect on most mobs. It's common knowledge that after landing even Nano Shutdown (-2000 all nanoskills) - mobs often continue casting roots/heals/snares/nukes. I've seen two reasons suggested in the past:

1) Mobs spawn with a set of nanos that they will use based on their skill at spawning and there is no skill check done on the mob when the nano is actually used. (or the nanos selected are from a group allocated to the mob type and not based on skill at all)

2) Mobs have such high skills levels that debuffs have no appreciable effect

Can anyone tell me which one it is for certain? Or is there another reason altogether?

X

[Wobble]

bump

enquiring traders want to know.

[Hibernation]

Not an official answer but im quite sure that the mobs use a list of nanos depending on what and who they are. No skillcheck is involved its predefined what nanos they can use.

[_______________Vydas]

Mobs don't have skills (although I guess they do have initiatives). That's why no debuff works on them (weapon debuffs, as well as nano debuffs).

[assassimon]

If you cast NSD almost all mobs stop using nanos, so it does effect them.

[Xtremtech]

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!

Lol I had this discussion with you months ago Azzazzimon and you swore black is white that NSD had no effect. Now I agree with you and you're trying to tell me that it does have an effect???

As it happens I went and did testing on this for an MP board thread.

QL152 mission. Main room had three traders. Set myself full def and heal on me with no attack pet so the mob would survive for a long time. Pulled each one in turn and fought them.

I kept NanoShutdown running on the mobs the whole time. It landed most of the time and when countered/resisted I recast immediately.

The mobs continued to cast the whole time: Major Health Plunders, Advanced Health Plunjders, Plunder skills Major, AC reducers etc...

Normal Mobs are not affected by NanoShutdown or these mobs had 2800 skill levels.

X

[Wobble]

nerf trader mobs!!

(woot I got to join in with everyone else )

[Unit99]

I've always noticed when I completly drain a mob he don't cast spells. Although his weapon dmg never goes down. Before the general game nerf oops 14.2 I was soloing 180 missions and if I couldn't get the NT mobs drained they would nuke the hell out of me. If I got them drained they died like good lil NT's

[Xtremtech]

Unit99,

You should try it without trying to kill them. Take an easy mission, put yourself full def and drain a casting Mob.

On the test I did above, one of the trader mobs didn't cast anything for a couple of minutes - but then at the end was casting everything despite still being shutdown.

In normal play when you're trying to kill the mob, you'll quite often just happen to kill the mob before he got around to casting anyway. This gives you the impression that your drain worked... but in rigorous testing as done above, the mobs continue casting despite -2000 on all nanoskills.

X

[Unit99]

I will indeed try that. I've always been curious, but as we all know this sort of thing is viewd as top secret by FC. So we'll see what conclusions we can draw.

[Mercatura]

It was never our intention that skill drains would have an effect on the MOBs. These nanos are meant to counter the effects of wrangeling your team. We may look at the possibility of having the drains effect MOBs in the future.

Everything I see ingame agrees with it 100%. Mobs are fairly random on nano usage, but most tend to not use them that often anyways.

From what I can tell, mobs have a weapon of some sort, AMS rating, evades/resist and a list of nanos they might use. If they even have weapon/nano skills, they aren't invloved in any calculations used while fighting.

[Xtremtech]

Hi Mercatura,

I can just about see the logic for a trader drain not being meant to affect Mobs but instead counteract the skills loss of the wrangles... Still - what do we say for the MP Nanoskills debuffs? We have two entire lines of single skill debuffs and the big one:

Unmakes (T/S, MC, BM, MM, PM, SI)
Dominates (T/S, MC, BM, MM, PM, SI)
Nano Shutdown

All almost utterly useless in PvM. Nanoshutdown works on a few unique mobs like Nelebs and may work on some of the friends of these unique monsters - we've noticed that the mobs in Steps of Madness cast nanos that buff their own Psych Mod, so it may be reasonable to assume that the Psych Mod debuffs may have an effect there too.

I'm tending towards the feeling that the answer to my question is that the normal mobs in game simply don't use nanoskills as you say and that it isn't just wildly high skill levels.

I remember an article (which I'm having trouble finding in the archives) in which Gaute stressed the power of the debuffing classes as a support role. We'd be able to reduce our opponents skills and abilities to benefit our team mates....

In reality, even our stat reducers like AC reduction, Nano reduction, Nanocost increasers (which MPs have and never use either) have extremely little effect on most Mobs due to their having such high levels to start off with. An old Trader professional posted once that trader drains reduce Nano by 1% on most mobs... which isn't a wildly high figure.

And then skills reduction debuffs don't seem to work at all on 99% of the mobs.

With that, much of the support role in PvM simply disappears.

X

[assassimon]

Originally posted by XtremTech
ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!

Lol I had this discussion with you months ago Azzazzimon and you swore black is white that NSD had no effect. Now I agree with you and you're trying to tell me that it does have an effect???

As it happens I went and did testing on this for an MP board thread.

QL152 mission. Main room had three traders. Set myself full def and heal on me with no attack pet so the mob would survive for a long time. Pulled each one in turn and fought them.

I kept NanoShutdown running on the mobs the whole time. It landed most of the time and when countered/resisted I recast immediately.

The mobs continued to cast the whole time: Major Health Plunders, Advanced Health Plunjders, Plunder skills Major, AC reducers etc...

Normal Mobs are not affected by NanoShutdown or these mobs had 2800 skill levels.

X

Try NSD on a unique boss like The One or The Pest or other nano using bosses, work 100% correct, so that is fixed, no idea about missions mobs they die to fast to land a NSD on them.

[Xtremtech]

Hey Azzazzimon,

Yup Unique mobs from Nelebs upwards will usually be affected by NanoShutdown - though I'm told on the MP boards that some have an innate resistance (the jury seems to be out on that one still). Since in most people's gameplay unique mobs make up less than 1% of their weekly kills, your statement:

If you cast NSD almost all mobs stop using nanos, so it does effect them.

really can't be said to hold true.

It's not just NSD though. What about Dominates and Unmakes at lower levels? What about trader debuffs too?

X

[Mercatura]

XtremTech, I never said I agreed with the way they (don't) work...just pointing out facts.

[Xtremtech]

I understood that but it wasn't clear from my post you're right.

X

[hashy]

for what it's worth, we've observed that doc mobs who wear the energized helmet with the purple cross (links?) tend to be aggressive caster types (inits n dots), whereas the ones who wear the energized helmet with the red cross tend to cast only a rare ch here and there (didn't fc say that wouldn't happen anymore?)...
i also have yet to fight a soldier mob wearing a kevlar chest-piece who uses tms. it's quite uncommon, but several times while fighting a tms soldier i noted he was wearing a metaplast body...*shrug*

on a somewhat unrelated note, why the hell do mobs get fat when they die? and why do atrox mobs take three times longer to become corpses?

[Bothead]

I've always noticed when I completly drain a mob he don't cast spells. Although his weapon dmg never goes down.

Unit99, I think the reason you don't notice weapon damage going down after draining a mob's weapon skills, is your high AC. Mobs doing minimal hits will not hit for even less when drained, I suspect. Hmm, how about removing your armor prior to fighting to confirm this, though I could be wrong But seriously, I am curious about this too.

[Thorlicious]

I think it would Smacdevil, cause with my NT (he's right now lvl 63) i used one of the low blinds just to test them, and the min damage i recieved was lowered by one point (used a -20 to all off blind) so i think drains (if they would affect the weapon damage inflicted by mobs) would affect it too, and as Merc pointed out the damage doesn't change a bit if you drain a mob, or don't drain him at all.
Then again, my drains on Neleb prevented him from casting his shield, so i guess on some it works, "maybe" this is also the reason why traders can't drain those uber high mobs, cause maybe those mobs would be affected by the drains.

[Bothead]

Hmm, maybe it's just a case of weapon skill drains not modifying the mobs AMS then, whereas nano that affect AMS directly *can* have an influence? I understood that mobs don't have the same attack and defence skilla players have, but that they do have AMS and DMS. I also read somewhere that to be able to calm the uber high unique bosses, one would have to use just the right nano for it to work.. I think this means that each of these unique npcs/mobs have a list of which nanos that can affect them. As I have not yet participated in any of the killing team for those mobs, I cannot provide any empirical data. Anyone got some info?

And yes, debuffing nanoskills on mobs appears to work in some cases. Again, this might be enabled on that particular mob.