Not sure what class you played in EQ Crazzie, but as a necro, swapping spells mid fight was very common. On raids it was required if you wanted to maintain high damage by stacking 12-14 dots. And there was actually some skill in setting up and swapping your spell sets because you had to plan out your full rotation in 2-3 min windows and that changed for every fight due to different resists on each boss. On top of that there were utility sets for when we had to change roles like mana dump/mindwrack, cc's, etc.
Not trying to sway this discussion either way, but just wanted to correct the idea that people did not swap spells mid-fight. You are probably right for classes like wizard that just spammed their best nuke over and over. But for classes like nec, dru, shaman, enc, etc. having spell sets and the ability to swap quickly during the fight was very important.
Pretty much all of the caster classes. I would not sit down during a boss fight. It was pretty tough to do, plus it put you out of the dps race.
Most of my time was spent as a mage.
Edit = But as a mage we had spell sets ready to go, pre boss fight, or before the fights we would buff with macro sets. Most of our time was handling rains, with nukes. As a necro i can see how you managed being the top dps.
I wish i played a necro on some of the boss fights, your dps was insane. We did well enough until they nerfed our pets :(
I dont mind lots of spells, as long as MANY share cooldowns.
The downside of the VG model was the gigantic 'all in one' macros. Less macros, more decision making please.
P.S. Even if the game doesnt have an ability to group spells, 3rd party tools can easily cover the gap.
flec said:Not sure what class you played in EQ Crazzie, but as a necro, swapping spells mid fight was very common. On raids it was required if you wanted to maintain high damage by stacking 12-14 dots. And there was actually some skill in setting up and swapping your spell sets because you had to plan out your full rotation in 2-3 min windows and that changed for every fight due to different resists on each boss. On top of that there were utility sets for when we had to change roles like mana dump/mindwrack, cc's, etc.
Not trying to sway this discussion either way, but just wanted to correct the idea that people did not swap spells mid-fight. You are probably right for classes like wizard that just spammed their best nuke over and over. But for classes like nec, dru, shaman, enc, etc. having spell sets and the ability to swap quickly during the fight was very important.
I thought about what you said more, your dots stacking would require 12 to 14 slots. Which makes total sense.
This is why i suggested having a spell bar that had 2 pages or more allowing you to load your custom spell sets like we had in eq. But instead of that, we had page two as a utility spell set. So we just had to switch the page instead of loading. Most of our problems as casters was sitting there hitting and making macros to just load out utility buffs.
The major issue we had was the amount of good utility spells to load. As a mage we would summon many pet items, also buffing pets and others with DS.
So in a mage case, we might need 3 pages for spells approx 14 gems long to 20. It all depends on what Pantheon would give us. If we have something the same to what mages are today in EQ i would totally agree we need 3 pages so we just had to flip to them instead of making macros to load the specific spell set.
1. Rains, nukes
2. Pets, buffs, summon items/
3. Utility buffs such a DS if we have not enough room on page 2.
See where i am coming from? Because Flec i can see where you would need page 2 and page 3.
This is all on the spell gems part, instead of loading in a book, or by macros.
Options to save spell sets are very important. Option window on the spell bar itself.
Also options with allowing casters to make macros.
xtnpd said:The 8 skill limit saw that each class had to focus on what their role was;
I agree with this. I dislike having a ton of button mashing to do. It makes you focus too much on your UI and not enough on interacting with your group. It's an MMO not a single player game. Elements of the game should keep you engaged with your group/raid not pull you into whack a mole cool down watching, etc.
Within reason, less is more. I've said it before in many different ways, but it's all about making things matter. Whether it's strong class differentiation making people sacrifice one thing for another, limited fast travel making getting somewhere more meaningful, rare spawns and a slower pace of combat decreasing mudflation, or having a limited number of spells making each one you pick an important choice, less = more.
Rattenmann said:Kilsin said:... the limited skills just makes you prepare before travel/combat and limits your content to that ability set, having them all available at any time not only opens you up to any situation it also makes you even more aware of your surroundings and what abilities/spells you may need to use at any given time, having used both for many years, the unlimited skills is definitely more of a challenge and has a higher skill ceiling than the limited ability sets, without a doubt and, in my opinion, better suits my style of play, but as I said, each to their own, there is no right or wrong answer here and both styles would feel right at home in Pantheon but we are going with the limited abilities set. ;)
Spot on explanation.
Limited skills are always brought up as some kind of added "challange", when in reality the opposite is true. How hard is it to look up a skill set on a wiki? Compare that to having to pick the right skills in a fight. Where is the challange in only having 8-12 skills. That almost removes the need to think about what you are pressing.
Personally i hate the other aspect more tho: Not being able to adapt to unexpected or new eviroments. If visiting a new zone for the first time, i don't want to look up a skill set on a wiki. I also don't want to outright die just because i picked the wrong skills while knowing i could have done it with other skills that i SHOULD be able to use anyways.
Noone forces anyone to use more then 1 hotbar. If you like swapping out skills for every situation: Go for it. You can always limit yourself as harsh as you see fit. Don't force that on others please :-)
As Kilsin said, its a matter of preference. One is not better than the other.
Limiting the number of active abilities places a greater emphasis on strategy. Its a form of gameplay that involves knowledge and planning, things that most people can do fairly well given the desire and time to learn. I'm not a psychologist, but I'd venture to guess this is a pretty low stress, low fatigue type of activity.
Having an unlimited number of active abilities means more decisions, increased complexity and has a greater emphasis on not only mental acuity, but also dexterity (yes, pressing 30+ variations of keys with modifiers (ctrl, shift, alt) requires dexterity). This raises the barrier of entry, and while I'm still not a psychologist, would guess this is more mentally demanding and stressful, even if its good stress.
Then there is the physical side of combat. I'm not talking Worf killing aliens on the holodeck, but more about dexterity (the ability to quickly and accurately aim or move your character) reflexes, and visual acuity. In games, this translates to aim or action based combat. This has a much higher barrier of entry to excel at, is far more stressful, and causes greater fatigue to the player.
When we talk about classic rpgs (or even pen an paper), the combat was firmly entrenched in the strategy side of the spectrum. Your character was the hero, you were the General making the decisions. Your success was largely dependent on the skills and attributes of your character. You learned your abilities, when to use them, and ways to empower (or "progress") your character further. You spent time strengthening your character. For the most part, the character was not subject to the player's mental or physical limitations but was empowered by the player's knowledge, decisions and time devotion. I think that is what made these games so enjoyable. You were basically playing a story. What a novel idea (pun intended).
When EQ showed up on the scene, I believe that novelty is one of the things that made it so compelling. It was very much like its Pen & Paper, MUD and RPG predecessors in that the player's success was still mostly derived from their knowledge and time investment, which translated to statistical attributes (or stats). Despite its harshness and huge initial learning curve (1st 3d mmo), it played easy (long sessions, as often as possible). I know some contend that its design was merely due to the "technical limitation" of the time, but I think it was intentional.
What is the point of all this blather? The point is that, while it may seem like a small thing to add unlimited active abilities (or a heavy emphasis on aim based or action based gameplay for that matter), you start to move an MMORPG away from the traditional strategy and character progression side of the spectrum. You are effectively changing the core game from one that can be enjoyed by anyone to one that places a greater importance on the mental and physical acuity of the player. While there is NOT anything inherently wrong with that for some games, its something you have to carefully consider when making a game that endeavors to recreate a classic MMORPG experience; especially an experience akin to EverQuest.
A little visual representation, based entirely on my experience, and my opinions.
I greatly prefer an unlimited set of abilities. I find it to be more console style where you have a fixed and limited set of abilities. Perhaps a compromise would be a bi-level system, where you could prepare certain abilities (as if studying, refreshing, rehearsing, memorizing them) and those would be more effective. You could also have, at your disposal, every ability you know because you didn't just forget them while in combat, but since you are digging deep into your arcane memory in the heat of battle maybe those spells aren't quite as efffective.
That way you could use everything, but also prepare with a subset of them.
Raidan said: Honestly VG's hotbar setup would be fine. The problem with VG's combat versus EQ's was the lack of resource management. So you could cast or use way more skills/spells per battle than EQ. If you limit the amount of resources available to a player in Pantheon, regardless of what system is used, more tactical selection of abilities within combat will be used, which would liken a player's choices within combat similar to EQ's even if all spells/skills were available. I do still think EQ's system adds an element of strategy pre-combat, but I often memorized spells mid combat in EQ in a group if I had the wrong one's memmed or to rebuff. Where EQ's system hurt a player is soloing. I know I had forgot root a few times and had those "oh crap" moments and had to adapt With that said, I still prefer EQ's model, but wouldn't care either way as long as there's no in combat mana regen (outside of meditate similar to EQ) or super fast out of combat regen.
Resource management is the bigger issue in combat, but I didn't want to side track to that. Since you brought it up, it falls right in with what I said above. The tendancy to use more abilities more often, is moving away from strategic combat.
Personally, I'm not fine with VG's hotbar setup. I played a disciple, and I had more keybindings between my abilities and items than in any other MMO I've played. Probably more than any other two MMOs combined. While I know I can manage that, I felt like it was already moving away from strategic combat, before I even considered the bigger issue of resource management.
@Dullahan
I agree with your post and your well-thought out and explained previous post. However, even if you had all your abilities keybound in VG, if VG would have had EQ launch's finite resources versus VG's nearly unlimited pool, you wouldn't have been able to use them all, or if you tried, you would have been highly inefficient for grouping much like a wizard burning through all his mana on one pull on EQ then doing nothing for the next 5 mins.
With that said, I don't agree with Kilsin's opinion that full hotbars makes combat more difficult (strategically), but would fall more in line with your thinking, combat is more difficult for some in VG due to having more keybindings and having to recall those, or locating where a spell/skill is on 4+ hotbars versus having 8-10 abilities. My point was that in the end, it's not that much different (for me at least) as I memorized my spellbook in EQ as well, and instead of having the ability on the hotbar, I used maybe 1-2 secs to click my hotkey for /spells and load the spell to use in EQ. What trivialized VG's combat for me is that combat turned into more of a button mash since I knew I would recover my resource quickly (if I needed to recover it at all - on a bloodmage), so I could spam abilities.
In the end, it's a moot point as Kilsin had confirmed limited skill sets, but, I just try to emphasize my shameless plug of the importance of resource management/downtime wherever I can (much like your point on not having one healer, cleric, to rule them all). And for the record, I am for limited spell sets for the pre-combat strategy and due to it making it more difficult to solo (and box).
*Edit After thinking about your keybinding point more, I would definitely say I would agree with the limited set simply for that fact.
Raidan said:@Dullahan
I agree with your post and your well-thought out and explained previous post. However, even if you had all your abilities keybound in VG, if VG would have had EQ launch's finite resources versus VG's nearly unlimited pool, you wouldn't have been able to use them all, or if you tried, you would have been highly inefficient for grouping much like a wizard burning through all his mana on one pull on EQ then doing nothing for the next 5 mins.
With that said, I don't agree with Kilsin's opinion that full hotbars makes combat more difficult (strategically), but would fall more in line with your thinking, combat is more difficult for some in VG due to having more keybindings and having to recall those, or locating where a spell/skill is on 4+ hotbars versus having 8-10 abilities. My point was that in the end, it's not that much different (for me at least) as I memorized my spellbook in EQ as well, and instead of having the ability on the hotbar, I used maybe 1-2 secs to click my hotkey for /spells and load the spell to use in EQ. What trivialized VG's combat for me is that combat turned into more of a button mash since I knew I would recover my resource quickly (if I needed to recover it at all - on a bloodmage), so I could spam abilities.
In the end, it's a moot point as Kilsin had confirmed limited skill sets, but, I just try to emphasize my shameless plug of the importance of resource management/downtime wherever I can (much like your point on not having one healer, cleric, to rule them all). And for the record, I am for limited spell sets for the pre-combat strategy and due to it making it more difficult to solo (and box).
*Edit After thinking about your keybinding point more, I would definitely say I would agree with the limited set simply for that fact.
You and Dullah both made great posts man but just to touch on the keybindings comment, I never used key bindings in VG, many of us didn't, I had 4-5 hotbars stacked with abilities in order and row of most used to least used with 2-3 combat macro's, that was it, (we are talking grouping/raiding here too - not typical gameplay as I used to turn a lot of my UI off for more immersion or crafting/diplo etc.).
I used my mouse to click an ability if I needed it, so keybindings do not play a part in the skill comparison I was talking about, it was more in line with Dullah's post as he had the right kind of idea, I still do not agree with the chart, though, but it was his personal experience so there was no point in me trying to counter it ;)
I could make the same argue for unlimited abilities/spells quite easily though, and by using his graph demonstrate how it is more challenging and takes more skill by requiring more ability/spell knowledge, more experience of what they actually do and planning where to place them on your hotbar for the most efficient layout to be called upon when needed, it would take more memory to know where they are located on your bar but very little to no dexterity at all (on par with EQ), due to not using any key binds, I just click the mouse or a number 1-9 like you would in EQ, reflexes and coordination would be on par with EQ, except VG differs a bit here with reaction chains but that is a combat mechanic not player controlled, and to finish, memory, focus and concentration would be slightly higher than EQ due to the expanded ability and skill sets available, there is a larger pool to choose from at any given time, which requires a good memory and focus during combat and tends to rely more heavily on critical thinking.
So again, it is personal choice but I just cannot accept the argument for the limited style being more challenging or skillful due to setup/strategy reasons, as in VG the same could be said for organizing 4-5 hotbars over 2-3 spell sets, in EQ you just get punished if you forget to memorise or bring an ability or spell but in most cases, you can just sit down and grab what you need anyway, if you're not being attacked. ;)
Also, in VG you could just as easily burn through your Endurance and Mana, using up some bigger costing abilities/spells and not managing them properly, Healers especially in VG had to manage their mana very carefully in the proper VG days (ignoring the last couple of years when everything was ruined and made easier or to OP) even to the point that my Rogue had to auto attack while waiting for Endurance to come back to use an attack or put a debuff/DoT back up.
I will say though, it is pretty hard to try and compare EQ and VG, while similar in vision and core mechanics/gameplay they were definitely different beasts and VG was basically experimenting to try and evolve from what the Devs learned from making EQ, some things worked, some things didn't but I believe the VG combat was an improvement for the most part, but again, this isn't something we can really argue over as it is just our differing opinions and experiences.
But yeah, it is a pretty moot point since we are using the limited version in Pantheon, hopefully, we can get some good feedback during testing and tweak it to suit Pantheon a little better and evolve our own combat that takes some good parts from both EQ and VG to form our own style. :)
I'm sorry you think VG was spam fest mash buttons and you didn't have to watch your mana or end. The only thing I can think of that you didn't have to worry to much about mana or end was in a decked out raid with bard in every group. I also had very specific rotation when soloing to save on mana with my druid. Many times the only thing I could cast was graping roots or my slow because I was out of mana. Now in raid with bard I came close to running out of mana but hardly ever did unless bard died and I didn't have berries.
Everyone talks about spamming the same buttons over and over what do you think happens in EQ and VG. EQ you only had so many buttons and VG you had macros. Only diference was EQ LIMITED your spells and VG let you use them all even lvl 1 spells. Though the lvl 1 spells hardly hit a lvl 50 mob so they were useless you might get away with lvl 40 spells but much less than that they wouldn't hit the mob or do much less damage.
Like we are all saying now it doesn't matter cause we already know that we will be limited on spells/abilities, but like all are saying it is preference on what you like EQ or VG. I just hope I can have more than 12 abilities up on a bar, but it looks like the bar only holds 10, it won't stop me from playing or automatically disliking it I will have to try it then will voice my opinion in the end. I do like VG's right now though so will see if I will like something like EQ.
Every MMO I've played so far has multiple hotkey bars that you can switch between (usually shift-1, -2 etc), although only one is shown on the screen at a time. That's fine with me, and I used that system extensively (bar 2 for buffs, bar 3 for rarely used abilities, ..). Things get ugly IMO when you require multiple bars on the screen at the same time because all of these abilities are "combat use". That's what I had in VG as a disciple (and then still several hidden bars as above). Two bars are about the max I can handle well personally, anything above that and I tend to lose focus. If you can handle many bars without problems, good for you! But I think Dullahan is spot on with his post above: The game is supposed to be a RPG, not a twitch action shooter. The challenge should not come from "managing the hotbars".
Kilsin said:So again, it is personal choice but I just cannot accept the argument for the limited style being more challenging or skillful due to setup/strategy reasons, as in VG the same could be said for organizing 4-5 hotbars over 2-3 spell sets, in EQ you just get punished if you forget to memorise or bring an ability or spell but in most cases, you can just sit down and grab what you need anyway, if you're not being attacked. ;)
I'm glad you mentioned this because I found myself, even at the end of VG's life, always trying to perfect my hotbar setup. The same with you I'd placed specific skills in order of importance in specific places on my hotbar. Then I'd try to find the perfect place for those hotbars. I used an assortment of 'techniques' that ranged from being able to click abilities on my hot bar, clicking counters/finishers/intercepts buttons, clicking on PC's and NPC's via themself or via UI icons, using abilities via the 1-5 buttons and I'd also set up the many lettered keys surrounding my movement keys to activate skills. I'd set some of those letter keys to target my tank's target, to autorun, and I'd also set my movement keys to E, S, D, F rather than the default keys. Due to this I'd have to place my hotbars in very specific places so I could have easy access to them to click certain buttons while having a comfortable resting spot for my cursor.
I used many macros but most of those were text/skill combo macros since I pulled and CC'D alot. I didn't really use macros consisting of big chains of skills. Really my only skill combo macros were some of my DD's and DoT's because as a bard you could really produce good damage by doing this. Other than these, I'd click most of my skills with either the cursor or the button itself.
So yeah, there was definitely a LOT of strategy going on with the 'unlimited' style of VG's system. Both games required strategy which is a big reason both games are great. Each of them just required different types of strategy but to say one required more strategy than the other is again a moot point.
I am right here with you and hopefully we can find a great balance between the two games where we can roll with limited spell/skill slots but have enough slots to satisfy both types of players. I think the dev team has a great opportunity to give players that feeling of advancement by allowing their capacity to memorize spells to grow from 10 at the beginning to maybe 12 or more as they progress. How great would it be to play with 10 spell from level 1 to 30 knowing that once you hit level 30 you gained one or two more spell slots. And then again at level 50 you gained another maybe 2 or 3 slots.
Kilsin said:Vanguard had that feeling of needing to be aware of your surroundings, though, it wasn't mashing buttons by any means! It actually took more skill to know which ability/spell to use in any given situation, if you have 4 hotbars full of different abilities/spells then you need to know which one does what and know when to use them, at what time and during what situations, the wrong decision can cost you your life or cause the group to wipe, it took a deep knowledge of your classes abilities and spells to play your character to its full potential and while even a novice could try to "mash buttons" and have some kind of result, it was usually not a positive ending for that person.
I wasn't having a go at anyones preference, though, you are more than welcome to like the more limited and easier playstyle of 8-12 abilities if that suits your playstyle better but I was just countering the "challenge" and "skill" statements, the limited skills just makes you prepare before travel/combat and limits your content to that ability set, having them all available at any time not only opens you up to any situation it also makes you even more aware of your surroundings and what abilities/spells you may need to use at any given time, having used both for many years, the unlimited skills is definitely more of a challenge and has a higher skill ceiling than the limited ability sets, without a doubt and, in my opinion, better suits my style of play, but as I said, each to their own, there is no right or wrong answer here and both styles would feel right at home in Pantheon but we are going with the limited abilities set. ;)
Easier I'm not so sure of that, recently I was on P99 server playing my enchanter in duo with shaman inside howling stone duoing, It require a lot of micro management to handle charming, mezing, buffing, rooting, slowing, and it would have been 100x easier to have all my abilities on hotbars, instead i had to sit swap spells while having monster mezed/recharmed etc. you cannot have spells set on P99 forcing you to manually swap your spells and make decision with restrained time and deal with not having x ability on your bar at a given time. Crawling to Druzella as a duo enchanter/shaman was really epic and I don't see any recent game giving me such a challenge.
Kilsin said:
So again, it is personal choice but I just cannot accept the argument for the limited style being more challenging or skillful due to setup/strategy reasons, as in VG the same could be said for organizing 4-5 hotbars over 2-3 spell sets, in EQ you just get punished if you forget to memorise or bring an ability or spell but in most cases, you can just sit down and grab what you need anyway, if you're not being attacked. ;)
in eq 1-50 it was always stated by people, they wanted something changed with the book, to the spell gems. They didnt like being locked into the book. It was also a problem for people to have limited spell gems up. Always having to sit down remove one spell gem, to add in another for a buff.
50 + it started to change, not exactly the correct levels could have been 75 who knows. We had spell sets, save, delete and more spell gem slots by doing quests too ach. It was unlocked to have more gem slots. Also made life easier on the caster to have the ability to keep up more spells. Still wasnt perfect because they had to load new spell set each time like buffs, to dps, to utility gems. But it was much easier for the caster. Then along came mounts, which made life even easier with spell swaping while in raids and medding.
There was not 1 part of the game that i can remember over my 15 but it was 16 years playing, that i enjoyed about spell gems, the way they where added other then the new tools EQ had for us. This made life much better. So did macro sets, or /doability. I will admit having the mount while in a raid made life easier to load spells. But not once did i ever feel it being a challenge or any special skill set or made you unique.
The only thing that made you unique as a caster, was your gear, your name, and whatever DPS set you came up with, and always how you played. Otherwise it was never a challange to anyone to sit with a book in your face.
I would love them to put less effort into the book and make it much like EQ books, or scrolls and allow the modders to come up with fancy style books like our buddies did.
I agree with you kin, you where punished for it more then anything. While any other class just had to bandolier or swap out hotkeys.
Personally I won't sit here and claim that it Vanguard didn't take more concentration, energy, and memorization of bindings (I'm sorry Kilsin but if you clicked your abilities, you're just not as hardcore as I thought you were, we laugh at clickers) however I will say that having a more limited skill set, but a vast array to choose from, opens up the possibility for more strategy to be implemented.
We're not computers, some people can handle more than others, and the entry level skill required to play your game is an important factor in design because it sets the bar for how many players you'd like to be paying for it. That being said, with limited skill sets, the entry skill level can be set lower than having 50 abilities you have to worry about using every second. Then by contrast, you can place more emphasis on strategy in other methods, environmental hazards, mob aoes without circles or shapes telling you where they are, because you have more focus on the game world than on your UI/keyboard.
I think it’s already been said officially you will be limited to a smaller number or skills/spells. The idea being you must prepared beforehand for the battle rather than just bring every tactic you have to the fight blindly. Building a deck out of your total card pool to overcome the specific obstacle.
For me this really comes down to hating having so many options and not the idea of having them all available.
Having 20 different attacks just seems dumb and really makes them all feel watered down. In EQ getting an upgrade for a spell was a huge deal and it was always cool because you had so little so each one was precious. In EQ2 I really did not care when I leveled because 90% of the time it was just another small bump from Fire Ball 3 to Fire Ball 4 which was like 5% better and you probably don’t notice the difference without a dps parse going.
Just like getting to many items to often you end up diluting what you already have
Another issue (if not already stated) was that multiple key-bindings trivialized certain aspects of the game.
For example, you could bind forage to your movement key so every time you walked forward you foraged. Instant max skill and always a continuous supply of foraged stuff without doing anything.
You could bind a chat macro in a language to a movement key to max your language skills without doing anything. Same with sense heading, etcetera, etcetera.
There should never be macros allowing you to string together functions like that and you should not be allowed multiple functions to coincide on one key stroke.
The whole more vs less argument for abilities has been decided ages ago. Having more abilities has never raised the skill ceiling in any game. You always had those go to abilities that were in your rotation and the majority of others were used rarely. Looking at games like wow that are full, or were, of button bloat, we still only truely used maybe 7 of them. With 2-3 being cd's that were every couple minutes. Hell even Wildstar which only had 8 usable buttons at a time had classes that only really had a rotation of 3-4 with the rest being utility. So saying that more buttons means harder is 100% untrue. I have yet to see a game that created so many equal abilities that peoples rotations consisted of that many buttons.
What is the impact on one group of classes vs another group of classes in terms of limited available/active abilities (combat, buffs, utilities, etc)?
If this is more limiting and penalizing for one group of classes over another, then system should be rethought as it doesn't equally apply or equally affect each classes/player play experience (not xp experience, rather QoL).
Are people suggesting that limiting available/active abilities to 8 equally effects classes and the players playing them? If not, why is such a system being considered? If so, I'd like to hear how this conclusion makes sense because I honestly don't see it.
I'm trying to figure out if there's some seriously suggesting that one group of classes that doesn't need to redo their bars multiple times a night is fair to those that have to redo their bars or do special macros just to buff people and use their class properly (as other classes can already do without redoing bars).
spyderoptik said:What is the impact on one group of classes vs another group of classes in terms of limited available/active abilities (combat, buffs, utilities, etc)?
If this is more limiting and penalizing for one group of classes over another, then system should be rethought as it doesn't equally apply or equally affect each classes/player play experience (not xp experience, rather QoL).
Are people suggesting that limiting available/active abilities to 8 equally effects classes and the players playing them? If not, why is such a system being considered? If so, I'd like to hear how this conclusion makes sense because I honestly don't see it.
I'm trying to figure out if there's some seriously suggesting that one group of classes that doesn't need to redo their bars multiple times a night is fair to those that have to redo their bars or do special macros just to buff people and use their class properly (as other classes can already do without redoing bars).
I'm trying to figure out why you would assume that they would make the same mistake twice, EQ melee classes should have been under the same restrictions as casters, they also should have had a few more abilities. I still struggle to figure out why people are pidgeon holed into what they have experienced in previous MMOs, and assume thats how its gonna be.
Rallyd said:I'm trying to figure out why you would assume that they would make the same mistake twice, EQ melee classes should have been under the same restrictions as casters, they also should have had a few more abilities. I still struggle to figure out why people are pidgeon holed into what they have experienced in previous MMOs, and assume thats how its gonna be.
Other than something changing during testing....
Kilsin (page 2) said:"there is no right or wrong answer here and both styles would feel right at home in Pantheon but we are going with the limited abilities set"
My point was largely that some classes could be more effected by number of abilities available/active. Based on what Kilsin indicated, there's going to be a limited number of abilities that can be active if I'm reading that right.
Another thought about spells........don't think of the old MMO model - think of something "new" or more "realistic"....
A caster has certain spells that they know very well. They have studied them and used them and can cast them from memory (with more difficulties for movement, etc.) - but basically they "know" some spells.
In a battle, they don't "forget" a spell, then "memorize" a new spell.....that’s frankly stupid. What they do, instead, is think "oh boy, I need a different spell!"....then they open their book WHILE fighting and they read their book and cast the spell, not from memory, but from their book. It’s much slower and it’s harder to cast from your book, but that's what they do. Then *LATER* in a separate setting, they can study and see which spells they commit to memory.
I would think maybe they have skills of how many they can memorize. When low skilled, they can only memorize a couple....as they grow, they can memorize more - maybe one new spell per every five levels, but that memorized spell is NOT hot-swappable. That's it! If you want to memorize a different one and forget that one - you have to go study a while.
Just like a musician learning a song for a concert - they have to go and rehearse and practice and study it. And as they become more experienced they have more songs in their repertoire but if they don’t play a song for a long time they might forget it or be less good at it (maybe more fizzles).
But they can always look up a spell and cast from their book but it’s SLOW and cumbersome.
So, let’s think about a Bard and then use that model for a caster, so start with real-world musician, then morph the thinking to a bard, then to a wizard:
A musician learns to play an instrument. At first they cannot memorize a song. They have to have sheet music in front of them and the more they practice it the better they are at playing it without mistakes and the more they commit it to memory.
When they go perform, their performance will rely on how well they know/practiced a song or should they play from sheet music. As they get better, this musician can commit more songs to memory but if they don’t play a song for many years they might be “rusty” and not as good at it.
Instead of evocation/convocation/etc. skills, I think each individual spell/song should have a skill associated with it.