Since each mobs initial introduction, none of them have changed much. The mobs from alpha are still functionally the same as the mobs today. While mechanically, this is okay, there are some polish issues with them that were acceptable when the game was in alpha/beta, but are no longer acceptable today.
I shall go through the mobs one by one and express my issues with each one and my advice for improving each one.
What will be covered: Hostile mobs (and Endermen)
What won't be covered: Passive mobs and boss mobs.
EDIT: Slowly adding passive mobs on!
First of all, a general improvement that could apply to every mob.
Assuming the player is standing still, they should only be able to see you while facing you. When you're moving, the noise you make can still alert them to your presence. Additionally, if they're close enough, they'll notice you whether you're moving or not, because scent. If wind is ever added to the game, then wind direction could help/hinder them in sensing you, depending on the direction the wind is blowing (not that I'm suggesting that wind should be added).
THE ZOMBIE
The Zombie AI was changed a little (I think in 1.2) to implement door breaking. The feature has not been revisited since then, which is unfortunate because there are some significant problems with the behavior:
1. It triggers on all difficulties, despite the fact that it can only be successful in hard/hardcore.
2. Players and doors appear to have the same target priority.
3. Zombies will break down doors regardless of whether players are present, making wooden doors useless in hard...
4. ...unless you fake out the zombie by placing your door so that the game thinks it's open when it's actually closed.
5. In the zombie invasions in villages, the vast majority of the zombies will all focus on one door instead of spreading out across the entire village.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Prevent zombies from attempting to break down doors on Easy/Normal.
2. Make zombie invasions spread out across the entire village instead of focusing on a single door.
3. If the player walks by a zombie that is trying to break down a door, the zombie should forget about the door and attack the player (assuming no villagers are in the equation)
4. Zombies should only break down doors in order to reach players/villagers. While they may be brainless, they're monsters and should be able to smell that you're not there.
Edit: It has come to my attention that baby villager zombies absolutely destroy villages due to not burning in daylight. This should be remedied, since it's cheap and overpowered, because villagers don't fight back.
THE SKELETON
Before alpha's Halloween Update, skeletons did not carry bows (they still shot arrows). When the skeletons were given bows, they were never given an animation for using the bows, which was okay, because the player didn't have an animation for using the bow either (this was back when the bow didn't have to charge, which was changed in Beta 1.8). But now the player has to charge their arrows before firing them (which makes sense). Skeleton bows were apparently not updated in 1.8 along with the player's, since the skeleton bows still behave like the pre-beta 1.8 ones (except they fire slower).
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Change the skeleton's attack to have a charge instead of a cooldown...
2. ...which should also help alleviate the issue of skeletons firing at you without facing you.
3. When the player gets near, the skeleton should hear you, prompting it to ready an arrow.
4. If the player is sneaking, the skeleton should not hear you, allowing the player to sneak up on a skeleton.
Edit: I've seen concern that this could nerf skeletons. Damage would probably need some adjusting for this to work well. At minimum, however, I don't see any reason for them to not have an animation for using the bow. Of course, maybe the skeleton bow could also behave like the player's, where it can use a fully charged shot to do a lot of damage with good range or can fire several low damage, close range shots very quickly.
THE CREEPER
The biggest threat from a creeper is not that it might kill you. It might destroy your base. (Of course, if it sneaks up on you, then it can still kill you). The knockback on a sprinting melee attack is enough to get the creeper out of range to damage you, but not enough to prevent it from exploding. In other words, creepers have an annoying tendency to explode without dealing damage to the player.
They're more or less completely harmless on servers that prevent creeper explosions from damaging the terrain, a decision made by some server admins to prevent griefing and/or to keep the server looking nice because not all players fill in the craters. Of course, by default, creepers should still damage terrain. But they should still be able to harm you without that ability.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Either adjust the distance required for creepers to cancel their detonations, or increase the power of the detonations. Either one of these should adequately solve the problem.
2. Their ability to sneak up on the player could use some improvement.
THE ENDERMAN
Endermen are more nuisance than threat. While they deal a lot of damage in combat, it's fairly easy to avoid a confrontation with them. Their block moving ability is not and never has been an actual threat, and really serves no purpose other than to trigger OCD in certain players. After all, before the ability was nerfed, it did nothing except require base maintenance. When it was nerfed, it lost the ability to do anything except mess with the terrain (which, like I said, does absolutely nothing except trigger OCD in certain players). In other words, no simple buff/nerf can fix the Enderman block carrying ability. The only thing that can salvage it would be a change in how it works.
The teleportation behavior needs some tender loving care. It looks ridiculous because you can see the enderman moving to its new location, and it has a tendency to remove Endermen from combat that may have otherwise been a threat to the player, especially when the Enderman is encountered underground.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Since it doesn't do anything, remove the block carrying ability. Alternatively, change it to only remove blocks for the sake of reaching the player when aggro'd (which could be a nice buff if it was well implemented).
2. Find some sort of fix for the awkward teleportation animations. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to make the Enderman briefly invisible, invincible, and harmless while teleporting. Maybe implement a particle effect as well.
3. Endermen should only teleport freely on the surface. Underground, they should generally avoid teleporting. If the current Endermen AI takes its health into account (as far as I know, it doesn't), then it should always be allowed to teleport when low on health.
4. Finally, Ender Pearls are already nerfed by the fact that they deal damage to the user. So why make them only stack to 16 as well? Make them stack to 64 like everything else. Actually, the few remaining items that still only stack to 16 should be changed to 64, since there's no real point in them not stacking to 64.
THE SPIDER (and its variant, the cave spider)
Actually, I feel like this is probably one of the least flawed mobs in the game. It might benefit from a new animation for climbing. Also, sometimes when climbing a wall, instead of climbing down safely, it will jump down and take fall damage. The AI could probably be improved to avoid that when possible. (They should still of course be knocked off by weapons).
Edit: Someone mentioned that spiders shouldn't take fall damage at all. It's worth considering, although I'm not sure what I think of it not being possible to knock them off cliffs for massive damage.
THE GHAST
There's not much to say about this one. However, it is overpowered on lower render distances because it can see the player from farther away than the player can see it.
THE ZOMBIE PIGMAN
Their large groups benefit from lag. Not sure if this is due to the way the game is coded or due to server issues.
Edit: Okay, after fighting more Zombie Pigmen, I'm noticing that fighting them is entirely about whoever has the upper hand. If you try to fight them head on, you don't stand a chance; however, if you set up some basic fortifications, or stand on a tower of a minimum of three blocks high, they don't seem to stand a chance. Basically, they're strategy-driven to the point where it feels brokenly cheap. Also, golden sword droprate seems a bit high compared to the rare drops of other mobs.
OTHER NETHER MOBS
Overall, they're fine, but you don't really see them much. Wither skeletons and magma cubes should probably be free to spawn anywhere in the Nether.
SLIMES
Very weak. Some sizes can't even do damage to the player, and those that do damage do very little.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
Make it so the small slimes do an insignificant amount of damage instead of no damage.
---
Also, part of this edit: I'm going to start adding suggestions about passive mobs, starting with villagers and pigs. Others to be added later.
THE VILLAGER
It has one purpose in life: dying. Villagers are hunted by zombies, and have basically no defense. On hard, their doors don't help. On easy and normal, their pathetically bad AI can get them stuck outside to die. The lack of torches in villages also sentences even more of them to death.
Sure, there are iron golems. If the player wants to build up the village. Few, if any villages spawn with enough villagers to spawn iron golems. Of course, in the early stages of the game, there is little a player can do to protect a village. Fortifying it takes time, and running around fighting mobs all night is risky. Besides, it doesn't take long for a village to be completely wiped out.
They are also not worth protecting. Most of the trades are bad. There are a few good ones, but even so, I find it to be significantly easier to just mine for the diamonds needed for diamond armor. After all, the diamonds will always be there until I mine them, unlike the villagers, which will die once I decide to leave them unattended for a night. You'll find melons in an abandoned mineshaft eventually anyway.
I could go into more detail about why the trade system is terrible, but I think there's enough to be said there to warrant a new thread about it.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Give them better defenses against zombies. An easy (but cheap) way to improve this would be to make the last two villagers in any village immune to zombie attacks, although if this was done, it would need to be changed later. It would, however, be a starting point. A better way to solve it would be to make the villagers themselves fight back in a way that would at least give them a fighting chance. Still, though, some sort of method to prevent villages from being wiped out by zombies would need to be implemented. It would still need to be possible for players to wipe them out.
2. Redo the trades. Should emeralds be worth a lot, or worth a little? Right now, the value of an emerald is all over the place. If the emeralds are to be worth a lot, then all of the trades should reflect that, as opposed to just some of the trades. The spawn rate of emeralds within extreme hills should be taken into consideration, and, if needed, it should be adjusted.
THE PIG
It was useful until animal farming was introduced, when it was replaced by the cow. This is because steak has the same stats as pork, cows have the same droprate as pigs, cows are easier to breed than bigs (because carrots are either obtained from village farms or as an extremely rare drop from zombies, and the seeds needed to make wheat are abundant), and cows drop leather in addition to steak. Other than for the sake of having a farm of every passive mob, there is no reason to breed pigs.
Of course, you can put a saddle on a pig, but now that there are horses, why would you want to?
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Give it something to distinct it from the cow, whether it be another, unique drop, or increased drop rate of pork. This could also come in the form of a nerf to the droprate of steak to make pigs a superior food source.
Very well done Dullstar, I like these improvements.
They are well thought out. However, I feel a few of
these improvements would nerf many mobs, as
skeletons having to charge up shots and being
able to sneak up on mobs would way to easy for
the player. Other than that, good work and well done
Is my suggestion really so bad that no one even wants to bother with it?
Why does something like this get ignored when someone can just post a few incomprehensible sentences and at the very least get acknowledged with a "No, just no..."
It's not that the idea is bad, you just need to be patient. There are a lot of users online right now just not as many as there are twelve hours ago. Again patience.
nice, similar to my mob buff threads and one part is identical to my mob senses thread, but still different enough in my opinion.
support.
How fitting, I just noticed that thread myself and commented about how that was a component of this. LOL! (Of course, yours came first, but that's beside the point)
Well done. How about silly and simple attacks for the villagers, such as headbutting zombies, slamming their arms in the doors, and the little villagers all swarming one zombie and a time?
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I shall go through the mobs one by one and express my issues with each one and my advice for improving each one.
What will be covered: Hostile mobs (and Endermen)
What won't be covered:
Passive mobsand boss mobs.EDIT: Slowly adding passive mobs on!
First of all, a general improvement that could apply to every mob.
THE ZOMBIE
1. It triggers on all difficulties, despite the fact that it can only be successful in hard/hardcore.
2. Players and doors appear to have the same target priority.
3. Zombies will break down doors regardless of whether players are present, making wooden doors useless in hard...
4. ...unless you fake out the zombie by placing your door so that the game thinks it's open when it's actually closed.
5. In the zombie invasions in villages, the vast majority of the zombies will all focus on one door instead of spreading out across the entire village.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Prevent zombies from attempting to break down doors on Easy/Normal.
2. Make zombie invasions spread out across the entire village instead of focusing on a single door.
3. If the player walks by a zombie that is trying to break down a door, the zombie should forget about the door and attack the player (assuming no villagers are in the equation)
4. Zombies should only break down doors in order to reach players/villagers. While they may be brainless, they're monsters and should be able to smell that you're not there.
Edit: It has come to my attention that baby villager zombies absolutely destroy villages due to not burning in daylight. This should be remedied, since it's cheap and overpowered, because villagers don't fight back.
THE SKELETON
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Change the skeleton's attack to have a charge instead of a cooldown...
2. ...which should also help alleviate the issue of skeletons firing at you without facing you.
3. When the player gets near, the skeleton should hear you, prompting it to ready an arrow.
4. If the player is sneaking, the skeleton should not hear you, allowing the player to sneak up on a skeleton.
Edit: I've seen concern that this could nerf skeletons. Damage would probably need some adjusting for this to work well. At minimum, however, I don't see any reason for them to not have an animation for using the bow. Of course, maybe the skeleton bow could also behave like the player's, where it can use a fully charged shot to do a lot of damage with good range or can fire several low damage, close range shots very quickly.
THE CREEPER
They're more or less completely harmless on servers that prevent creeper explosions from damaging the terrain, a decision made by some server admins to prevent griefing and/or to keep the server looking nice because not all players fill in the craters. Of course, by default, creepers should still damage terrain. But they should still be able to harm you without that ability.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Either adjust the distance required for creepers to cancel their detonations, or increase the power of the detonations. Either one of these should adequately solve the problem.
2. Their ability to sneak up on the player could use some improvement.
THE ENDERMAN
The teleportation behavior needs some tender loving care. It looks ridiculous because you can see the enderman moving to its new location, and it has a tendency to remove Endermen from combat that may have otherwise been a threat to the player, especially when the Enderman is encountered underground.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Since it doesn't do anything, remove the block carrying ability. Alternatively, change it to only remove blocks for the sake of reaching the player when aggro'd (which could be a nice buff if it was well implemented).
2. Find some sort of fix for the awkward teleportation animations. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to make the Enderman briefly invisible, invincible, and harmless while teleporting. Maybe implement a particle effect as well.
3. Endermen should only teleport freely on the surface. Underground, they should generally avoid teleporting. If the current Endermen AI takes its health into account (as far as I know, it doesn't), then it should always be allowed to teleport when low on health.
4. Finally, Ender Pearls are already nerfed by the fact that they deal damage to the user. So why make them only stack to 16 as well? Make them stack to 64 like everything else. Actually, the few remaining items that still only stack to 16 should be changed to 64, since there's no real point in them not stacking to 64.
THE SPIDER (and its variant, the cave spider)
Edit: Someone mentioned that spiders shouldn't take fall damage at all. It's worth considering, although I'm not sure what I think of it not being possible to knock them off cliffs for massive damage.
THE GHAST
THE ZOMBIE PIGMAN
Edit: Okay, after fighting more Zombie Pigmen, I'm noticing that fighting them is entirely about whoever has the upper hand. If you try to fight them head on, you don't stand a chance; however, if you set up some basic fortifications, or stand on a tower of a minimum of three blocks high, they don't seem to stand a chance. Basically, they're strategy-driven to the point where it feels brokenly cheap. Also, golden sword droprate seems a bit high compared to the rare drops of other mobs.
OTHER NETHER MOBS
SLIMES
My suggestions for improving this mob:
Make it so the small slimes do an insignificant amount of damage instead of no damage.
---
Also, part of this edit: I'm going to start adding suggestions about passive mobs, starting with villagers and pigs. Others to be added later.
THE VILLAGER
Sure, there are iron golems. If the player wants to build up the village. Few, if any villages spawn with enough villagers to spawn iron golems. Of course, in the early stages of the game, there is little a player can do to protect a village. Fortifying it takes time, and running around fighting mobs all night is risky. Besides, it doesn't take long for a village to be completely wiped out.
They are also not worth protecting. Most of the trades are bad. There are a few good ones, but even so, I find it to be significantly easier to just mine for the diamonds needed for diamond armor. After all, the diamonds will always be there until I mine them, unlike the villagers, which will die once I decide to leave them unattended for a night. You'll find melons in an abandoned mineshaft eventually anyway.
I could go into more detail about why the trade system is terrible, but I think there's enough to be said there to warrant a new thread about it.
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Give them better defenses against zombies. An easy (but cheap) way to improve this would be to make the last two villagers in any village immune to zombie attacks, although if this was done, it would need to be changed later. It would, however, be a starting point. A better way to solve it would be to make the villagers themselves fight back in a way that would at least give them a fighting chance. Still, though, some sort of method to prevent villages from being wiped out by zombies would need to be implemented. It would still need to be possible for players to wipe them out.
2. Redo the trades. Should emeralds be worth a lot, or worth a little? Right now, the value of an emerald is all over the place. If the emeralds are to be worth a lot, then all of the trades should reflect that, as opposed to just some of the trades. The spawn rate of emeralds within extreme hills should be taken into consideration, and, if needed, it should be adjusted.
THE PIG
Of course, you can put a saddle on a pig, but now that there are horses, why would you want to?
My suggestions for improving this mob:
1. Give it something to distinct it from the cow, whether it be another, unique drop, or increased drop rate of pork. This could also come in the form of a nerf to the droprate of steak to make pigs a superior food source.
They are well thought out. However, I feel a few of
these improvements would nerf many mobs, as
skeletons having to charge up shots and being
able to sneak up on mobs would way to easy for
the player. Other than that, good work and well done
It's not that the idea is bad, you just need to be patient. There are a lot of users online right now just not as many as there are twelve hours ago. Again patience.
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Curse PremiumHow fitting, I just noticed that thread myself and commented about how that was a component of this. LOL! (Of course, yours came first, but that's beside the point)
"On a scale of one mile to Lord of the Rings, how far did you walk today?"