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Something very goofy is apparently going on in the castle. I've had reports of super monsters, with up to 10 times the normal hit points. Also reports of minimal regeneration from HP/PP steal items. Apparently it's not every time, it's just some of the time, and it even appears that certain foes get triggered for certain people but not for others. Clockwork beetles for some, castle guards for others, etc.

I think this happened in conjunction with a back-end rework of how foe resistance and weaknesses are figured. However, my rework of those items was *supposed* to not change anything, just revamp the accounting, but keep the exact same value. Still, the timing probably isn't a coincidence, and I suspect there's a bug of some sort. I just have no idea what it is.

If anyone can figure out what, exactly, triggers these unusual encounters, I'd be very appreciative. My guess is it's either certain gear or certain buffs, possibly gear that's related to elemental damage or elemental resistance, but maybe something else, that's triggering this weirdness.

Some more data points that might help:

* Prismatic items (pants/bra) don't seem to be the cause; I met super monsters wearing nothing but my pendant, a pegasus, a xent shield, and hammer time.

* TNT's percentage damage is still working off the proper HP. Last night I used TNT for ~141 damage, and then proceeded to shoot with my Gigaguy for another 1500.

* This doesn't seem to operate anywhere else. Adventuring in the Triassic park wearing pendant, pegasus, xent helm, xent pants, brick wall, low-jump boots, and using lethargy pill, my bare hands were dealing roughly 100 damage. Each monster took two hits; nothing uncommon.


There were reports of it happening in the Cube, but I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary on multis, and haven't heard anything more concrete than "someone said..."

_________________

The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

This may be an important note, may not be. I adjusted TNT yesterday to diminish damage on physically resistant monsters. However, that resistance should be either 50% or 100%, so what you report doesn't quite line up. Also, at most one of the monsters in the castle is physically resistant.

I believe I used the TNT on Castle Guard, Redux.

_________________

The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

More info, with numbers!

Fighting Castle Guard, Redux:

TNT for 175 damage.
Attack for 358+5
357+5
323+5
342+5
338+5
326+5 (+19 fumble)
359+5 (+79 strikeback, more or less)
358+5 (dead)


Then I used a Lost Toy and grinded stupid until I found another Castle Guard, Redux. This one had roughly 2000 HP like the one above. Each attack only leeched 1PP, even though normal monsters there would give a total of roughly 11PP.


Gear:
Virtual Reality helmet
GigaGuy cannon
prismatic sports bra
fingerless gloves
Amazing Technicolor Dreampants
sneakiers
xentrium shield
Hero's Cape
shoehorn
Livia's icicle pendant
pegasus

_________________

The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

The mishmash is 50% resistant to physical. Every other foe out there is either resistant 100% or 50% to one element. None of them is resistant to more than one.

Off topic (sorry), but when you do something like this, could you post a trivial update notice or something, so those of us who pay attention to such things don't go nuts wondering what we did wrong, to make things not work the way they used to?

Also (still off topic), I had been trying to test for physical resistance using telekinesis, but gave up because I didn't seem to be getting any useful results. Should physically resistant monsters resist telekinesis, and do they now, or will they when you have finished the changes you're making?

Doctor M, that's a reasonable request. Sometimes I don't want to clutter things up too much, particularly with more complicated mechanics. But I could see how that might confuse people.

Per your question, telekenesis--as of yesterday--also does less damage to physically resistant foes.

There are very few physically resistant monsters at this point. That's a tough resistance to beat, so I'm mostly keeping it for special occasions. The mishmash listed above may be one of the few in the game at this point.

EDIT: I'm insane.

Telekinesis does physical damage.

_________________

The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

I spun away my turns in the castle today and I noticed a couple things that were odd. The "super monster" was the Castle Guard, Redux. He was only super if I kept attacking him with a weapon. I could get into 30+ rounds of combat before 5x80-100+5 killed him. But I could end combat at any time with Psionic Blast. First round, tenth round, 22 round, it didn't seem to matter, 337 worth of psychic damage would end the battle. The other odd thing, my PP return was 1 per attack every time. I get 4-8 per from any other monster in the zone.

That seems somewhat significant to me. It's definitely a bug in damage recording for physical attacks; Magi was right. I'm betting you could kill it with a non-% percent damage combat item, or any other non-physical damage skill (or who knows, maybe skills circumvent it, physical or not), too. Seems like to me, only fractional amounts of the damage you're dealing is being done. Probably a bug introduced by the physical resistance, and, most likely, an error in the logic that determines if an enemy is physically resistant. So it's a combination of two bugs. Bug in seeing if an enemy has physical resistance, and bug in calculating damage when the enemy /is/ physically resistant. Displays the right value, but uses another when saving the damage (or, perhaps, it's displaying the wrong value and using the right one when saving). Actually, that makes alot of sense. The code's confused, in one part it knows that the enemy is not physically resistant, so it shows you the correct amount of damage (or perhaps universally thinks no enemy is physically resistant), in another, when it's calculating, it uses the physically resistant value. Which may or may not be wrong for the given enemy.

EDIT: I would bet that this can happen in any zone that contains one or more physically resistant enemy, but not in a zone with none. Perhaps a session carry-over variable from the combat is also not getting unset? Dunno.

On my alt, Lord Jareth, the Clockwork Beetle has been the one with mega HP for three days now. Usually around 2200 it seems.

Tried out all 3 of the Naturalist combat skills on it today, and even though it says they did huge amounts of damage (400-800) I still had to sit through 12-13 rounds of hitting it with my weapon before it would die.

Can this be not only castle H?

Here's what I just had with flamethrower pillar from outskirts of Base Cochise. I wanted to make sure it is an electronic robot so I hit it with EMP device. It did 70 damage or so, about what I expected, pointing at something like 120 HP. I then used a badly bent knife, doing 25. Then a GigaGuy rapid boomerang doing 150 (yes, I now try to cover all bases). It already seemed to have too much HP.
It took at least four more hits,400ish damage each to actually kill it.

Also weird, I'm almost positive some time ago it was immune to psychic damage. But now it took 8 psychic damage every hit.

That's never happened to me....
I wonder why.

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Vincent DeMoore (My Character) loves the Farthest Reaches of Insanity!

It doesn't happen to everyone. Hasn't happened to me either.

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That's why I'm wondering if there's a second factor. Most likely candidates would be things that affect elemental damage or elemental resistance.

castle guards become super for my character when wearing hotpants (+5 fire damage). the automaton becomes super when using pocket van de graf generator (+2 electrical damage). without the additional elemental damage mobs act as normal.

my weapon is a xentrium crossbow hitting 7-8 times / round.

Ah, perfect! The guard is supposed to be fully resistant to fire, and the automaton fully resistant to electric. Somehow your dealing the correlated damage is messing up the calculation for physical along side it. Gotta run to work now, but should be easy enough to track down tonight. Thanks detective deflective! And all the others who contributed.

What about the alchemist and the clockwork beetle? Also, it /did/ happen for Cris with no elemental modifiers, if I'm not mistaken. Fairly sure it happened for me without them too, but can't say so 100%

It fits my post above regarding flamethrower pillar, a psychic damage immune mob, while I was wearing wolley's index, +8 psychic.

clockwork beetle is immune to psychic. I just had him mega with wolley's. Clockwork beetle is immune to electric. Cris reported it on Castle guard, redux, resistant to ice, while wearing Livia's icicle pendant, which does ice damage.

Hey! So this should be fixed. Turns out in my update I'd mixed up some of the elemental damage variables with the physical one, and all kinds of weird results were coming out.

Let me know if any weirdness persists. but I think this should do it.

I CALLED IT!

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Thanks Ryme! No more super beetles, and now it's showing the proper +1 for psychic damage instead of the full +8 from the Wolley's. I should have noticed that sooner. >.>

I noticed another thing, the clockwork mismash has a 50% resistance to physical damage, but when I have my sidekick use Egyptian Knife Fighting she does the normal amount of damage ... and isn't that a physical form of damage The same thing happens with the karate expert , the self-defense expert , and basic understudy I don't think that should be happening.

_________________
Vincent DeMoore (My Character) loves the Farthest Reaches of Insanity!