Hi there, Excuse my English its my 2nd language.
So this topic is about Pantheons potential Np's and boss mechanics.
I got to the understanding that the Npc's in Pantheon will be "smarter" than our average mmo mobs/Npc's. Due to advanced coding system they use. (Great stuff)
Mobs will be able to adapt to certain situations, ect. Fruit basket is empty => i go get more food.
What my idea is, is to use this advanced system, to take our fights to the next level.
What if we had no more static boss fights? By static i mean linear coded boss fights and mechanics. You start at x and end at y.
Imagine every try on a boss would turn out a little differently. The Boss will have a certain amount of skills and tricks, as any other mmo mob, like we are used to.
But its how, and when the boss uses these skills, we can adapt. This would put the player in a situation of high awareness. Forced to be ready for whatever trick, the boss decides to pull out of hes pockets.
We would Avoid the situation, where you done certain content a lot, you got the gear drops and now you are basically just face rolling through the content. Pressing 1 2 3 repeatedly.
You know evey single skill and even in witch order the skills will be used. Its like we are some kind of oracle knowing the future, leaving us in a situation of more repetitive and less surprising gameplay.
I would personally really love to see. No more raid warnings, No more holding hands, No more autopilot!
It will demand a lot from the support players, to truly be ready with the big fast cast emergency heal. What if the boss is going to use this skill next i have to be prepared.
Make the enchanter paranoid constantly looking behind he’s back, ready to charm or mess potential summons or adds.
Keeping the tanks on their toes, ready to taunt, stun, or pop defensive cool down. If S*** hits the fan.
Situations i personally would LOVE to avoid is:
"Careful the boss will enrage in exactly 20 sec." Why can it be within 40-60% the boss will enrage, at some point... Leaving things more open, fresh and exiting!
it could happen exactly at 60% it could also be at exactly 40%, the fun thing is - We don’t know for sure, so we got to be on our toes.
"2nd phase will start at 70% be ready with cool downs" We are the oracle knowing what’s coming next... And that is.. less surprising and less demanding.
"Next skill will be X, be ready to do Y" We killed this bastard of a boss 10x times, we remember the skill order by now... Leaving us in a repetitive situation.
"Boss will clear agro meters in 5 sec." Retaunt it please, What if the agro just drops after a short cast animation. Tanks would have to constantly be ready hit the ohhh shiit bottom. and pray to Adune we get through this hell hold. Leaving things exiting, challenging and demanding!
The system will be more rgn based. And yes this could make the same fight a bit easier, than the last time you did it. It could also be the complete opposite.
Only thing we know for sure is - that it definitely will be challenging.
I truly hope Phantheon will give us a fresh challenge,
Focus on the gameplay, the group dynamics and that they mix it up a bit.
The system is there - Id say lets use it!!
Best regards from Denmark - To the team and to all of you <3
BamBam - The Humble Monk.
It's doable, but mechanics have to be nerfed to compensate.
Let's say enrage is well tuned and will basically instantly kill any melee dumb enough to swing into it, that's fine because it's predictable. Playing a melee and knowing that you could instantly die to a random enrage at any point in the fight isn't fine, though. They'd have to reduce how strong enrage is.
Part of being a good player is being able to adapt to situations, I agree with that. Random, unpredictable instant death is not fun though, and it gives you no opportunity for counterplay.
I totally agree, there has to be opportunity for caunterplay, and rng kills would be a tough one to handle, and could be a salty salt generator amoung players :)
In one of the Twitch streams in the Mad Magicians tower the Wizard of the group got instantly kill by a spell, this spell targeted a random group member, and she got 1 shot. To me it seemed quiet brutal, but if done right, this could singelhandly be the most exiting thing i have seen in any mmo so far!
In my oppinion the pros of a system like this, overwrites the cons fast. Because a good cleric, would see the mob cast animation, see the direction the mob is facing and with this infomation he might cast a protective shield on the team member that is "think" is being targeted.
There have to be visual indication of the "enrage stage" "Taunt clearance" The smart player might want to stop attacking the boss for 5 sec. to make sure transition goes smoothly. sacrificing hes dps output for a shot time to make sure all is safe. Its a desition, he could rock on with dps, and he might get agro, if the tank is not ready to taunt. Its could also be that the cleric save this meele dps with a protective spell and all is good.
My point is a system like this will put the players to the test, how reactive are you truly? Did you really prepare properly? did you anticipate a sertan skill, cause the boss did not use that specific skill yet.
it will force players to keep being engaged in the situation, to give the player a true feeling of fighting an awesome opponent. And give the player a feeling of never being safe! Also you will apriciate your team mates a lot more, imagin that the boss turns on you, and you basicly dead if your healer or ccer do not have your back. This will give tales to tell your grandchildren of our awesome fight where 1 + 1 was = 9000 :)
This topic of "dynamic combat" has come up many times. BamBam, you are using some very strong keywords that I have also been using in other posts, specifically "reactive" "adapt" "opportunity" "random" "awareness" etc. From what I have gathered, Pantheon combat will be based on preparation more than reaction. I can't imagine many encounters that have the ability to change randomly, because how do you prepare for an encounter like that? One must keep in mind that the penalty for death is supposed to actually sting in this game ... how can you enforce such a harsh penalty while also having "dynamic combat" that one cannot prepare for?
We know that our hotbars will be limited to the point where we won't be able to use our entire ability/spell kit. This means that certain spells/abilities will be useful for one encounter but not another, and knowing when to pick and choose what abilities you bring to a fight is going to be crucial. When you add random or dynamic elements to combat that can't be prepared for, in a game where mistakes can be lethal, and where dying is quite the punishable offense ... RNG could literally become a nightmare.
Now, in another sense, if this random factor is just based on timing ... maybe that would be okay. If we know for sure that a mob is going to enrage somewhere beteen 60-40%, we can still prepare for that. If we know that mob is definitely going to use fire/ice/confuse spells in a fight, we can prepare our hotbars to compensate. So in that sense ... we can indeed see some degree of randomness with combat ... but it has to be stuff we can prepare for. If a mob has the chance to use random abilities or spells ... you can't "react" to that if you don't have the right counterplay available. Seeing how VR balances preparation/reaction in combat is something I am really looking forward to seeing.
@BamBam
Nice post mate, I created one similar to this a while back, it's here if you wanna read it ( https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/6579/encounter-design ), there's also some replies further down teh page, going into random ability timers during encounters.
I agree fully with everything that you posted, in part because it goes hand in hand with what I believe the game should be like :)
@oneADseven
I've been thinking about the limited hotbar situation, and how it could be inproved to allow a bit more leway in the creation of dynamic encounters and combat, without making the preparation and skill selection trivial or worthless.
If you've ever played Pillars of eternity, they have a caster system where you also need to scribe spells in a tome, and it can't be changed during combat, but they allow you to carry multiple tomes (up to 6, but you loose all potions slots if you do cary the max tomes), so if you have the need to switch you skills set you can but it comes at a time cost and penalty. My sugestion is giving all caster 2 tomes, that can be switched during combat, but when a tome is switched the caster looses a susbstancial ammount of mana and gets a penalty to metidation mana regen, so it works like a "oh **** I need this other spell now" and it allows for combat to be a bit more dynamic in the sense of what you can throw at unexpecting players, giving them the option to loose some mana and adapt or try and survive with what they currently have.
>but it has to be stuff we can prepare for<
I would disagree here. A mob should be able to use any ability it has at any time.
Having the mob programmed to always cast Sphere of Player Destruction whenever its health reaches a certain amount - not before and not after - makes combat too much like a programmed dance where knowing the steps is all that matters not how well you can play your class and use any ability on your quickbars whenever needed. This is what I do NOT want - boss mechanics where until you learn the steps the fight is impossible and after you learn them its simply a matter of doing 5 things at the right times in the right order while standing on the right pixels.
Instead of memorizing what the boss will do and when it will do it - and we all have seen this type of fight many many times - we should be able to see what the boss is doing AS it is doing it and have some time to counter it if the attack is especially deadly.
So the boss might make a normal melee attack with no warning but if it has a "wipe the party" ability that can be interrupted we should be able to clearly see this as it happens with some time to use whatever interrupts we have. Or get out of line of sight if it cannot be interrupted. Some games will have the warning in the chat box (Sally begins to cast Death to All - beware). Some will have a bar over the head of the boss giving the name of the ability that is being prepared (often in such small type that most of us cannot read it). But ANYTHING is better than the totally programmed sequence that you seem to be recommending.
@Dorotea
If you read my post again you'll see that I agree with you in regards to the randomization of timing on spells. No argument there at all. When I said "but it has to be stuff we can prepare for" I was talking about having access to counterplay on our bars. If a mob can cast every type of damage in the game, cast every CC, so on and so forth ... you cannot prepare for all of that with limited hotbars. Random timing or positioning elements would be perfectly fine. What I don't want to see is a mob having the chance to use "Sphere of Player Destruction" one time, and then the next fight it's replaced with something else. I hope that makes more sense ... dynamic timing/positioning where players can react is fine ... but you can't "react" to "oh crap he's using Spell X this time instead of Spell Y" if your hotbars need to be configured pre-engage.
*Edit -- one thing I would like to add really quick is that I have seen a discussion going that could allow players to switch their abilities mid-combat. Brad mentioned having "waves" or the ability for players to "disengage" ... or like Jpedrote said, maybe create an option to do so but with a cost. As long as we have some sort of workaround ... a way to utilize our kits and make our counterplay accessible in a reactive way, then the randomness can also extend to abilties/spells rather than just timing/positioning.
I really want to see something along these lines. One thing I really hate about current games is that you can always just go to youtube and look up a fight and then just copy what someone else has done. You literally don't have to do anything but what you watch them do. I want to see mobs (named ones at least) with a pool of skills and abilities they can draw from. They will not use them all every fight. And maybe sometimes some of the things they do are more powerful than normal.
They still need to stay within there theme, like a fire dragon isnt going to suddenly start dropping disease dots all over. And you still need to be able react to, counter or somehow be able to deal with whatever is happeneing. I just want to see a situation where when a group or raid is about to take on a named and there is someone new in the group and they ask "ok, how does this fight go?" the rest of the group can't give them a cookie cutter this is how it has to be done answer. All they can say is "well these are the things that we know can happen, and this is what we do if a, b, c, or d happens" and then you can discus how to change tactics if later during the fight there is a change.
I really hate timers and insta wipe mechancis. EQ2 Shadow Odyssey I think it was was big on raids where is only a few people missed the nscript the raid was wiped. Always hated that. Made no sense. I undrstand why those mechanics exist in other games, I just really hope having a better ai can remove some of those things.
I agree with the basic point that players should have some way to counter particularly deadly attacks, and the group shouldn't wipe because the boss casts a fog-based spell and the only player with the ability to counter it just had fire and ice on a very limited quickbar. Correct me if I still am misunderstanding.
"If we know for sure that a mob is going to enrage somewhere beteen 60-40%, we can still prepare for that."
is what I was focusing on in your earlier post (and should have quoted). It made me think of the precisely programmed raid mechanics that I particularly abhor. On the other hand
"If a mob can cast every type of damage in the game, cast every CC, so on and so forth ... you cannot prepare for all of that"
is something I can readily agree with. On the one hand, a mob's abilities can often be properly limited. If fighting a fire giant boss one prepares for him or her to use fire. (Although I suppose a smart boss might have traded with a tribe of ice giants to get a scroll of ice-based player wiping just in case.)
On the other hand the players can be given more general abilities. An ability to interrupt an instant wipe cast based on any elemental type of damage. Or multiple classes having interrupts so that in a normal party two or three or four players should have something they can use.
On balance limiting a bosses abilities may be the best approach. It still means wipes while learning what the boss *can* do and learning from experienced players what to prepare for in the encounter. On the other hand it isn't a programmed dance where you just memorize the steps - and logically no enemy should be able to do everything.
Hopefully I am on the same page you are now.
First of all thanks for the replys guys!
@Dorotea
I did not imagin the Mob would have acces to all spells in the game, i imagin the boss have a specific set of skills, that he would use in a non specific order :)
To get the "random" feel. Players that fight this kind of mob, will learn the skills of this specific mob has. But will never learn the order in witch it will use them, cus its random.
So you could prepare for the Area fear spell, and put up grp fear resist buff on everyone before the fight starts. But in the fight the mob might not "chose" to use that skill even though its in hes arsenal of skills.
@Sabot
Great point! That's one of my main issues, you go online and get the "quick guide" and now the raid just got way way way easier. Execute these few steps, in a perfect order and you get the boss kill done.
This to me is not the direction i personaly want to move towards, It removes a lot of the desitions a player would have to make. And it creates a standart version on how to play vs this boss. (Limiting our player desitions, because this guide is the optimal way to kill this specifik boss)
You seen in the guide if you are this level, have this grp composition and have these skills, you should be abel to get the kill, if you preform right and use your skills at the right time.
it dumbs down the fight to a degree where we no longer have to really mind whats going on, cus you already know the next 2-3 steps, that for me is not gameplay thats called memory :)
Topics like these are resolved when the devs finally disclose their design goals for combat mechanics. In particular, as was discussed at length in another thread last month, whether or not you are going to be able to swap gear, skills, spells, or weapons while in combat. If it's a design goal that you can, then encounters can be dynamic.
If it's a design goal that you can't, then encounters can't be dynamic, as it's just pure frustration to the paying customer.
Similarly, if you emphasize preparation, then you can use instant kill mechanics, because the encounter is challenging exactly once. Once you have seen it, you know exacly how to prepare and exactly what will happen, and it's no longer challenging, it's just learning the right dance moves, dancing that way, and winning.
I have both read and posted a bunch of ideas regarding how these combat mechanics -might- work in Pantheon, but until the devs give us their design goals, we might as well be talking about a completely different or purely hypothetical game. Some dev posts say one thing, but the videos demonstrate completely the opposite, and all under the caveat "everything is subject to change" even though that is very unlikely. Hopefully once pre-alpha starts next summer, we'll see what the reality is for this game.
@Vjek, @Jpedrote and @OneaDseven Thanks for your 2 cents, appriciate it. <3
I agree, we dont know enough yet. I just wanted to shine some light on a topic that have annoyed me since ultima online, EQ 1 and then got to a way too casual friendly version in WoW.
Where you basicly just play after a scripted alert system, if you did you would be safe from wipes and eventually got the boss down. Dont get me wrong, i can enjoy these kind of fights.
But i just think there could be more to this, more than our current mmo raid version.
Liav said:This is why PvP will always be the most engaging form of combat in video games.
:D
It's certainly fun though I prefer coop PvE. Always fun to go hunting with the guild. But I will say this, Darkest Dungeon's AI has been doing a fair job of kicking my arse for a while. lol Adaptive AI will be a thing in the future, and it will probably destroy us all.
There have been a couple of games that have tried to create adaptive combat. The problem is that it is still a computer program. Each fight, is a script, no matter how you look at it. They can code multiple versions that it could randomize from at the start of a fight to make things change, but eventually, people will know them all.
What you're asking for is a full fledged AI to battle against. While it would be awesome, it's not likely to happen anytime soon and would cost millions. Right now boss fights in most games either follow a direct script, triggers, or a combination of both.
AI can realistically dumpster a human player 100% of the time. Well designed AI has to be significantly reduced in effectiveness to better mimic a human player.
It is possible to make really solid AI, but a lot of games fail in that regard. An example would be For Honor, where the highest level bots will counter guardbreak 100% of the time if it's done from neutral. Even the best players in the game screw up sometimes, but bots respond almost instantaneously. It feels very fake. The flip side is that the bots are still terrible because they have a tendency to only do things that are very reactable compared to players. The balance simply isn't there.
Adaptive AI that functions similar to a human really works best in a 1v1/single player scenario. Scripted encounters work best for masses of players participating. It's intended to be more about the teamwork component than the individual component. Even PvP falls apart over a certain amount of players. Dark Age of Camelot 8v8s are probably close to the largest amount of players that can participate in a single fight and still have a high level of individuality. Zerg-style gameplay turns the best fights into a laggy spamfest. This is why I am strongly against fully scalable encounters that some people have suggested. At a certain point, it just becomes a giant loot dispenser.
As always I am late to the discussion :)
I think we need to be careful about comparing Pantheon combat to other MMOs, because most other MMOs today use telegraphed attacks of various forms as "mechanics", along with forcing players to watch the enemy cast bar and react. They did this as a way to force players into situations where they couldn't just sit there and spam their best attacks in whatever the optimal "rotation" was.
Don't get me wrong - I've had some really fun and dynamic fights in those games, but it is completely different from the way that Pantheon is being positioned, which is much closer to EQ than even Vanguard was (which was saying something).
In EQ, the first thing to recognize is that most fights didn't have a script, not as we think of it today anyway, although raid mobs would change tactics depending on their hp level. The mobs did what the mobs did, and you had to react. That orc's casting a heal? Stun him! Fights were more about managing the overall encounter - getting your debuffs, mezzes, roots, snares, all that stuff that's been marginalized in a lot of newer games. Push - whether it was you pushing the mob, or the mob pushing you - was a big deal, because movement had a chance to interrupt ability casts. The environment mattered too - ice was slippery and a knockback might send you flying into a spike pit. Lava hurt really bad, so you didn't want to get feared into it. For some raid fights, watching for the big attack and breaking line of sight to avoid it was a necessity. Or making sure you had that resist gear so you could handle the damage it would put out. All of these things combined to make combat challenging without being fast-paced button mashing.
I'm not saying everything done in more recent games is inherently bad - I've seen some really clever boss fights and mechanics in a lot of games. But I think there will be a different paradigm at play in Pantheon. They have enough expertise on the team I think they'll do pretty well. My only real piece of feedback for the developers on the subject is don't be shy about using the environment against us, or going back to the old EQ/VG playbook when it comes to raid encounters. Make us think, make us plan, and then throw something unexpected at us :)
Liav said:This is why PvP will always be the most engaging form of combat in video games.
:D
and also the most egregious for that matter. Take ARC for instance. Great game. Not for the faint at heart. Great if you're good or in a good tribe. If not, you're screwed. They can literally prevent you from playing for days. ....
Durp said:and also the most egregious for that matter. Take ARC for instance. Great game. Not for the faint at heart. Great if you're good or in a good tribe. If not, you're screwed. They can literally prevent you from playing for days. ....
You can't cite a specific game with bad mechanics and extrapolate that all PvP is egregious.
PvP is seldom done well in MMOs but that isn't a flaw intrinsic of PvP.
That said, it isn't the topic of this thread. I was mostly making a joke.
Liav said:Dark Age of Camelot 8v8s are probably close to the largest amount of players that can participate in a single fight and still have a high level of individuality. Zerg-style gameplay turns the best fights into a laggy spamfest. This is why I am strongly against fully scalable encounters that some people have suggested. At a certain point, it just becomes a giant loot dispenser.
I think the level of individuality in a fight depends on the roles available to players within the fight. I did some fleet fights in EVE with 30ish players to a side where we never felt like it was blob v. blob warfare - though larger than that and it very quickly did turn into "who brought the most ships". Granted, you're not really talking about PvP, but the reason it worked with that many unique players was just that there were varied roles (in the form of ships and their capabilities) in play in the fight.
For PRF PvE, we can count on "tank, healer, dps, CC" as being the four primary roles. You can scale that up somewhat to get a decent sized raid encounter without people starting to feel disposable - even with the classes that have been announced, I can see running 18-person raid groups and wanting to try to have every class represented. Beyond those numbers, I thnk you're right that individuality will start to disappear, unless the encounter itself gives players additional roles - whether that's splitting a group or two off to manage adds, or interact with the environment in some way. Imagine a fight where your main raid force has to engage the boss, while support groups protect objectives on the field. Lose an objective and the boss powers up, or heals, or becomes invulnerable - so protecting these is key to winning the encounter. However you have to also put enough people on the boss to get him down, so it's a balancing act. That's just one example, but I think there's room to make larger raid sizes work without it turning into a zerg fight.
I'll note that I'm big on environmental challenge in encounters - the reason why is that it's much easier to scale and tune this sort of thing than it is to scale and tune the AI on a single NPC, as you've mentioned.
Nephele said:In EQ, the first thing to recognize is that most fights didn't have a script, not as we think of it today anyway, although raid mobs would change tactics depending on their hp level. The mobs did what the mobs did, and you had to react. That orc's casting a heal? Stun him! Fights were more about managing the overall encounter - getting your debuffs, mezzes, roots, snares, all that stuff that's been marginalized in a lot of newer games. Push - whether it was you pushing the mob, or the mob pushing you - was a big deal, because movement had a chance to interrupt ability casts. The environment mattered too - ice was slippery and a knockback might send you flying into a spike pit. Lava hurt really bad, so you didn't want to get feared into it. For some raid fights, watching for the big attack and breaking line of sight to avoid it was a necessity. Or making sure you had that resist gear so you could handle the damage it would put out. All of these things combined to make combat challenging without being fast-paced button mashing.
Everything you're noting here is exactly what scripts and triggers are. Bosses in EQ did follow them. They casted things in a sequence, did things at certain %s, and sometimes even changed their spells cast/order of casts after a %. They summoned if their agro target was out of melee. Mobs casting heals if below a %. All of this is scripts. And early EQ raids were actually terrible. They were mind numbingly boring with so much lag because dial up couldn't handle the amount of crap going on. So they had to be easy. Now we can have actual mechanics and things to react to other than hide behind the wall at certain casts/%s
I am hoping to see uncapped raids, especially if we have to deal with lockouts. It's always a sad day when you have people sitting out on raids because of number restrictions. At the same time, I know it would be much more difficult to balance high end encounters if you can just throw an army at them. To combat this, you can utilize mechanics where mistakes cause penalties. A death can heal the mob ...the more people who get hit by an AoE, the stronger the mob becomes. Make it so that bringing more players doesn't necessarily make the encounter easier. Beyond that, the more people you bring, the harder it is to get people geared up. This is just my opinion but I really am hoping to see a larger than 24 man raid cap.
The biggest issue is that, in my opinion, uncapped raids severely lower the ceiling on how difficult a fight can be.
A disturbingly low number of players can not follow trivial instructions, and the number of people who can follow complex instructions is much smaller. I'm trying to imagine some encounters from raids I've participated in scaled up to double or triple the raid size, and I just don't see it getting done.
This is one of the reasons that I say EQ is an easy game. Zerging a dragon with very simple mechanics allows for a lot of mistakes to be made and still secure the kill. The logical answer is to just increase the complexity, but my point is that people are already making mistakes against the simple stuff. How are you going to find 100+ skilled individuals to kill something that severely punishes minor mistakes?
The outcome I see is that one server will hoard all of the good players, meaning the content will go unkilled for exorbitant amounts of time on other servers. As far as sitting out goes, I mean, join another guild? There are a finite number of people to select from in a game, if you're not comfortable with sitting then just bounce.
The other alternative I see is balancing the content around a higher raid size while making sure it stays killable with a smaller raid size. This gives guilds more flexibility in recruitment numbers. Let's say the content is balanced around 54, perhaps a skilled guild will manage to do it with 42 (two less groups). When I say skilled, I mean maybe 3-4 guilds across all servers will have the requisite gear and skill to pull this off. If content retains this level of balance all throughout, you will have a pretty easy time maintaining a functional roster. The one stray person may occasionally have to sit out, but it would be quite rare.
Either way, it's a balance nightmare for the devs. Don't even get me started on loot distribution. Why should I show up to raid when 4-5 people out of a raid of 130 has an opportunity for loot? I'd rather play a game where I can be adequately rewarded for my time and effort.
I'd like to add varied, less-predictable boss mechanics don't necessarily require players switch weapons/armor/whatever during combat. Attacks and behavior can vary within a scope that wouldn't require entirely different gear to counter.