Designing Encounters, Part 3: Individual Mook Role Design

Let's review:

A mook is one of the faceless horde of monsters that serve to get cut down with relative ease by the player. Mooks derive most of their challenge and difficulty from the fact that they can come in a large swarm and the relative make up of the mook composition.

In this post, I'm going to talk mostly about the basic mook roles and basic comparisons between roles.

Know that the principle goal of any encounter is to challenge the player not to kill the player. It is incredibly tempting to destroy the player instantly with unfair tactics but monsters should be fun and challenging to kill, not painful and frustrating.

The Tank:

(Other names include: Brutes, Tanks, Meat Shields)

The tank is meant to absorb damage from the player. The tank is meant to deflect damage from the more fragile monsters to maximize damage/disruption from the other monsters.

Good abilities for Tanks to have:

Large Size - Hindering mobility equates to hinders the player's ability to target effectively. Alternatively an effective large "size" can be created from having many smaller enemies.
High Health - Greater lasting power enables them to do their job longer.
Moderate Mobility - Too fast and they'll be too effective at their job, completely limiting his options.
Moderate to Low Damage - Low DPS, as you want them to be circumvented, not feared.
Deflection - Being able to avoid certain missile types or stop missiles soaks damage for their allies.
Aura Damage - Encourages the player to avoid prolonged combat

Dangerous abilities for Tanks to have:

Damage Reflection - Tanks generally have high hp. Damage reflection punishes the player for doing what he is supposed to be doing, killing monsters. :/
High Damage - A Tank with high damage is being both offense and defense. Perhaps your monster is doing too much?

Other forms of Tanking: Reducing player speed at range, Increasing defense of allies, Healing on Death of Tank

The Healer:

(Other names include: Doctor, Priest, Cleric, Leader)

The healer's role is to actively reverse the damage the player is doing, whether it is by negating the damage, or negating the abilities, all the way to actively replacing the monsters the player has eliminating.

Good Abilities for Healers to have:

Healing - Directly negate the damage the player is doing to nearby monsters.
Summoning low damage monsters - Reversing the death of monsters by providing weak replacements. (Note: Summoning is a HEALER role.)
Resurrection - Reversing the death of monsters by providing exact replacements.
Reducing Player Damage - Fight the player by reducing the amount of damage he can deal
Increasing Monster Defense - See above.
Proportional Size to Effect - The size of the healer should be roughly equal to how bad it would be for the player to ignore him. Highly effective healers should be large.

Bad Abilities for Healers to have:

High Health - Healers with high health are both Tanks and Healers. The troublesome part of this is that they are both tanks and healers in the same unit and thus there is no strategic way one can split the two apart by eliminating the healer or the tank part.
Small Size - Smaller means harder to hit. You want players to target healers.
Large Groups - There is nothing more annoying than a group of healers. Because the threat of their damage mitigation surpassing the players damage output is quite likely.

Other forms of Healers: Summoners

Melee DPS:

(Other Names include: Scrappers, Rogues, THOSE GOD DAMNED BATS)

Melee DPS' main goal is to damage or kill the player outright. They are NOT supposed to hinder the player. Their objective is to damage and swarm, not to hinder the player's mobility, but to destroy the player. This is different from the Tank in that the Tank is designed to defend and absorb damage, while the Melee DPS only focuses on destroying the player.

Good Abilities for Melee DPS:

Damage - Obviously.
Fast Movement - Melee DPS needs to be dangerous. Fast movement allows them to actually reach the player. It also allows the player to separate them from the other monsters that make them *more* dangerous.
Burst Movement - Melee DPS that moves in bursts tend to be more easily controllable. It gives the player breathing room at times, and surprises them at other times. For example, monsters that charge at you every so often is exciting. Monsters continually charging at you is a little more boring.
Low Health - Melee DPS' tends to be a damage race. This is fine, because the only way of stopping Melee DPS generally is to separate them from their support and kill them. Low health makes this easier for the player.

Bad Abilities for Melee DPS:

High Health - Melee DPS with high health tends to be a nightmare because they pose such a dangerous threat that fighting becomes absurd.
Large Size - Larger sizes actually hinder Melee DPS' function, which is to surround the player with as many of them as possible and damage them. A large amount of smaller foes attacking the player is better than a few larger ones surrounding the player, damage wise.

You never want to get into a situation where the player is "safe" because he is only surrounded by a few large Melee DPS'ers.

Ranged DPS:

(Other Names include: Snipers, Assassins, Hunters, Archers, Artillery, Mages)

Ranged DPS' main goal is to restrict zones that the player can enter, or keep the player constantly moving. Their secondary goal is to damage the player.

Good Abilities for Ranged DPS:

Stationary Damage Effects - Poison clouds, jets of fires, traps are all effective ways to keep the player out of certain areas.
Moderate but Scaling damage - The goal of Ranged DPS is to prevent the player from being rooted to one spot and attacking. Thus, ensuring that large groups of Ranged DPS can effectively stack their attack on the same spot is important. (For example, a large group of artillery is ignorable if they fire at different positions. But the instant they focus fire on one spot, you better damn well move. It is not the fact that individually they do lots of damage, but that they can focus their damage after a while.)
Little or No Mobility - Generally, Ranged DPS shouldn't be lured away from positions. This generally leads to very odd things happening (For example, luring them behind a wall or something where they are completely ineffective.)
Easily Destroyed at Melee Range - They should be designed to crumble or be decimated the instant the player can *reach* them. Not being able to reach/affect the ranged DPS should be the primary difficulty of players.

Bad Abilities for Ranged DPS:

High Health - This disincentives blitzkrieg attacks by the player. The player should always feel compelled to rush in and destroy the Ranged DPS by going crazy on them before the other mooks catch up to him.
High Damage - Ranged DPS should be a threat, but more of a continual threat rather than a threat that destroys you instantly.

Other forms of Ranged DPS: Increasing damage of allies, summoning suicidal minions, continual life sapping mechanism.

Spice

Spice is used to liven up a generic mook encounter. However, Spice needs to be use infrequently, because otherwise the encounter might be hard to manage, design wise.

Here is where all your cool off-beat ideas come in about how to design an encounter. However, realize that each wild element also has to be understood by the player and you on how it affects the encounter. Thus, add Spice sparingly.

Examples of Spice:

Teleporting Melee DPS
Summoning by Splitting
Player Debuffing
Obstacle Summoning
Strength buffs on death
Player debuffs on death
Multi-form enemies