Everyone loves Monstrology minions, and with taking a monsters animus, plenty of knowledge of the creatures throughout the spiral is taken by our wizards. So lets take that idea further, to the point of creating a "Custom" monster to use help you fight through combat!
Right away by "Custom" I primarily mean creating a creature with assets already used in game. But before anything, let me suggest the Monstrology Workbench. This is where the creation would happen! Here you decide what you want your monster to be/look like, school, strength and cards. But all with a limited source based on your monstrology level. Let's take it step by step first.
When creating a monster, first you need a base creature. That being any creature's model, a number of animus is required to choose the monster body type. For example: Using a Oni body type may cost 100 of any one elephant creatures animus. Where as, a lost soul would cost 20 ghost animus. The body type does not affect power, that's next. We could take it a step further to add color pallets to the chosen monsters, but the amount of work would be time consuming to implement right?
After choosing the body the school and stats come next. Here, a UI like our own character sheets pop up, with sliders under the monsters health, critical, damage and so on. Though the stats can't just all be high, there is a cap on the amount of one stat a monster has, and that depends on your wizards level, and monstrology level. Not only that, when adding a number to one stat, another gets affected. For example, adding damage to your monster, would lower it's defense, or increasing it's health would affect it's damage. (This is just an example, getting into numbers and such is obviously a drag, but hopefully the point comes across.)
After the school is selected, boost and weaknesses are accounted. If you want it to take less damage from the opposite school for example, you would have to use more animus, and perhaps a custom reagent to lower the power of the opposing school. For example: Your monster is fire, and ice attacks boost on it by 80%. To lower it, you use 50 Ice school monster animus to lower the percent to 50%.
After all of that mess, cards can finally be chosen. Here, a panel like the "Trading Treasure cards" UI shows up. Plenty of spells are shown, and depending which you put on your monster, determines it's rank. But there is a limit of course. The more cards you choose, the weaker they have to be, and the stronger, the less cards they can use. Most cards of their school will appear, but you have the choice to use lower rank spells from other schools as well. But be aware of the stats you chose for the monster, because cards are filtered through them. For example, if you make a monster with high outgoing, not only will their health be a bit lower to balance; more offensive cards won't be able to be chosen. So sadly that monster wouldn't be able to use higher tier life damaging spells, but possibly could use higher rank healing spells!
Next a name could be used, with presets most likely like all other names. And finally, if you are maxed rank of monstrology, and have a chosen number of animus, you could add a cheat. A single, simple cheat to said monster. Nothing crazy, but one like, stealing blades, or sometimes using a neutral attack in response to something.
Although this idea may be a bit overwhelming, adding custom monsters or bosses would be great when it comes to the monstrodome! And if the balancing is correct, none should be overpowered in PVE as well, just good fun to use overall. I know this idea is crazy, but it's better to put it out there then to bottle it up, that's what ideas are for right? Thanks for reading through!
