Champion monsters?

[dos350]

rofl , champions in diablo 2 always dropping potion~ remember this!

[Max Stats]

That is a really cool idea.

That's a really cool idea.

Separated at birth.

But one of you developed a penchant for contractions later in life.

[Magnate]

But one of you developed a penchant for contractions later in life.

No no, that's his wife.

[Zikke]

Champion monsters would marginally raise the difficulty level, but more importantly it adds a little more variety and flavor. I remember in Diablo II, the game seemed less like a grind when every so often you would find a Champion and you would have to snap out of "auto-pilot" and think "okay how do I counter this?"

The player ghosts feature is indeed very similar and I'd love to have that back in the game. My only issue with it was that all of the player ghosts were undead uniques, which makes sense being ghosts, but the champion idea would allow the large amount of other monster types to be "special".

I just wanted to get some discussion going on these topics. I realized that my least favorite part of the game is when I 1) have killed most of the uniques, but 2) still need to scum for more consumables before fighting Morgoth, and champions would make that period more interesting.

Also, increasing the frequency of champion generation as the player kills more and more uniques would actually regulate the difficulty of the end-game. Right now, when you're done taking out the uniques, the game is REALLY easy. Champions would allow the difficulty to remain closer to constant no matter how many uniques you have killed.

[Derakon]

The player ghosts feature is indeed very similar and I'd love to have that back in the game. My only issue with it was that all of the player ghosts were undead uniques, which makes sense being ghosts, but the champion idea would allow the large amount of other monster types to be "special".

I'm certain I remember being attacked by a "player unique" in the town way back in the day, presumably based on the highscores table (showing a character of such-and-such class and level that was not yet dead). Of course most people won't have many living characters at any given time, but there's no reason you couldn't procedurally generate adventurers to throw at the player...though probably in the dungeon, not the town. Heck, we already have race-appropriate random names; that's the only hard part that this has over standard player ghosts, really.

[Blue Baron]

You might want to look at the hero monsters of Z+ Angband.