A Few Things that Need Attention

[The Avatar]

Capping is not the way to go, as Darvin Pointed out. Perhaps they should just completely remake it, as it's hard to nerf without making it too complex or absolute crap.

[Picotrain]

In the Alpha, I used to love AA. I could fireball them, then APHEELSIK them and continue the process until they lost their first death protection. They they'd only have one HP and several layers of death protection left. It would take a lot of resources to kill a level 5 AA as a level 1 assassin, but the vault was nice. I could probably vault to level 6 by only killing 2 or 3 of those things.
I have not yet seen them in the beta. After the first layer of death protection is removed, do they go back to the original HP? If the AA are like those in the alpha, then they are fine. Otherwise, something needs to be done about them.

[Darvin]

AA's had 1 HP in the alpha, you didn't even need poison. Unless you're talking about Boss Hive, where they're basically identical to their beta incarnation.

As a comparison, here's the stats of some monsters from Hard Halls of Steel:

Level 7 animated armor: 80 damage, 70 HP, 7 death protections
Level 7 Goblin: 60 damage, 108 hit points, first strike

The goblin is an above-average monster. I don't see how you can remotely justify a whole seven death protections on top of that kind of damage/HP.

[The Avatar]

Sure they're susceptible to fireballs once their low, but that doesn't justify their stats. I say give them the square root of their level rounded up.

[Lujo]

Right about now, I'm more interested in why some of the things are the way they are if we've been complaining about them for ages. Whatever they were supposed to test has been tested, and whatever was supposed to be tested but isn't being because of them - isn't getting done.

This is about the AA's. And some of the rest of the stuff - talk to us, please!

[Kuranes]

[Darvin]

Problem with that is that a pure caster with BLUDTUPOWA has no compunction or difficulty staying permanently at the brink of death. It'd play similarly to the old avatar's symbol warlord. Just activate B2P and stay near the brink of death for maximum damage output.

[Kuranes]

[Picotrain]

[Darvin]

Every monster has its weaknesses, and there will always be some approaches that are more effective than others. We would expect a high-damage/low-HP monster to be weak to spellcasting. However, AA's are so over the top that even when loaded out with a character ideal for killing them they're still too difficult to be worth pursuing. And for those that aren't well-equipped for fireball regen fighting, they are so insanely powerful as to completely overshadow the boss in terms of difficulty.

For instance, to knock out 7 layers of death protection on a level 7 animated armor you'll need at least 4 extra fireballs. Accounting for burning damage, a level 1 character's fireball would deal 18 damage (higher level characters would deal even more damage than this). Those 4 extra fireballs are equivalent to 72 extra hit points. In effect, the animated armor has 144 hit points, significantly more than the equal-leveled goblin. In other words, even when exploiting the AA's weaknesses to the fullest extent he's still significantly stronger than the goblin (an above-average monster), who you will kill much sooner using the same strategy. This monster is far and away the most dangerous in the game.

The most egregious example is in Gaan-Telet. The Gaan-Telet forces you to fight through a random assortment of floors that contain level 10 monsters. There is one floor populated by animated armors... it's largely regarded as a game-ender.