Foe spawn mechanics and "Call to the torment" skill mechanics

[Spirit Of The Beer.2013]

Hello,

this is a very specific question about some game mechanics. A handfull of people - me included - are spending a lot of time trying to finish the Domain of Anguish (elite area in end of nightfall campaign) in Hard Mode in the fastest time possible only as a single player (no heroes, no henchmen, no other players). By over 7 years of effort put into this, players have made it to beat the entire area in less than one hour now. Going so fast means that you have to take huge risks for some quests, leading to almost certain fails for most runs. This is what makes the whole thing so hard. Especially one quest is very very likely to fail: Escaping the foundry of failed creations. The player is required to save 3 allied NPC Forgotten (snakes) from spawning titans. In order to get the snakes away from those spawning enemies, we just run away (snakes follow the player anywhere) and hope the titans will lose aggro before they can kill the snakes. This can only happen when the titans spawn far away from the snake and not in it's pathway. Now those places where the titans can spawn seem very random, but after years and years of doing this, we kind of can see a pattern that the titans have a handfull of different locations where they can spawn, where some of those (far away from the snakes and not in the desired running pathway) are good, others lead to a fail of the quest...

So my question is, how the game decides where those titan mobs spawn and if there is some underlying cycle that we can somehow detect and then wait for a "good" spawn, or if it is completely random and cannot be influenced at all.

My second question is concerning the skill "Call to the torment" that is used by torment creatures in Ravenheart gloom. When a torment creature has less than 50% health, it can use this skill to make a copy of itself. This skill has a recast time of 10 seconds in Hard Mode, but the torment creatures usually do not use it every 10s, especially when there is a large number of >50% health tormentors around. It seems like there is an upper limit for duplicating tormentors per time unit... maybe you can give us some detailed information on how and why this is working the way it is?

I know those are very specific questions, never the less it would really improve the quality of life of some of us if we knew more about it.. :)

 

Greetings

 

Mike

[Joe Kimmes.1357]

I only had a little time to take a look at the spawns for this quest, but at a glance it appears that the spawns are random within a set area, so unfortunately there isn't anything you can do to influence the specific locations.

 

Call to Torment has a soft limit that prevents the torment creatures from duplicating indefinitely and slowing the map down. It checks the number of torment creatures already in the user's group and ignores the skill if the conditions aren't appropriate, but for the sake of research I won't disclose the exact count.