BamBam said:
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.
Here i would suggest Perception system if we have enough we "see" the target and get a indication in ui wich of us it is that is what this is for right ? If you have enough you see target if not guess the best you can.
dorotea said: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.
"new" tought on this is it possible to have 2-3 players drop/stack an interrupt on named bosses to interrupt key wipe abiliteis ex : raid leader "ok Baz and Grizzly you keep an eye out for a wipe and Baz start count when to interrupt" this way it may be more challanging to decect and handle hard encounters to be able to combine player abilities to tackle boss fight.
Is it possible for VR to go this way with fights to be able to combine abiliteis for better/moded result ?
Grizzly said:dorotea said: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.
"new" tought on this is it possible to have 2-3 players drop/stack an interrupt on named bosses to interrupt key wipe abiliteis ex : raid leader "ok Baz and Grizzly you keep an eye out for a wipe and Baz start count when to interrupt" this way it may be more challanging to decect and handle hard encounters to be able to combine player abilities to tackle boss fight.
Is it possible for VR to go this way with fights to be able to combine abiliteis for better/moded result ?
Wildstar did this with what they called Interrupt Armor. I actually liked the idea. It caused some issues but overall it added another mechanic that had to be planned for. If this would work in Pantheon's system, I don't know. It really all depends on how they set up combat. So we'll have to wait and see in alpha/beta how things pan out.
Personally I've always found the most enjoyable boss fights to be those that are wars of attrition. Velious raiding in EQ was the pinnacle of this, because it was all about getting a clean pull, a slow landing before the tank died, then from there on getting the boss down before the clerics ran out of mana.
I have always despised gimmick wipe mechanics and much prefer the more strategical approach, because after a wipe instead of cursing the retarded wipe mechanic that we screwed up, I'm inflecting on how we can make our force just a little bit stronger, what changes we can make to get just another ounce of dps or conserve a bit more mana.
I guess in a nutshell I much prefer preparation combat over reactionary, however I don't think they are mutually exclusive. I believe you can have a few things be reactionary, like interrupting a spell or using a block ability to dodge a powerful attack, but I don't want to see that be a common thing that happens constantly during a fight, because we need time to have conversations and create friendships to keep us playing the game, and we can't be doing that if we're spamming buttons nonstop countering left hooks and stiff jabs.
Preparation is fine, but preparation is 90% of EQ's gameplay. I don't even want to skew the balance heavily towards reactionary, I just want it to not be a snoozefest. I also don't want to be able to carry a boatload of bad players through content, which is another major flaw of EQ's. Five people making good decisions can get dozens of clueless morons through content.
Liav said:Preparation is fine, but preparation is 90% of EQ's gameplay. I don't even want to skew the balance heavily towards reactionary, I just want it to not be a snoozefest. I also don't want to be able to carry a boatload of bad players through content, which is another major flaw of EQ's. Five people making good decisions can get dozens of clueless morons through content.
I think I agree with you in principle. I think it's possible to achieve this by avoiding simplistic mechanics. For example, we should probably limit mechanics that result in things like:
- Everyone get on one side and push.
- Everyone run behind the boss and stack
- Everyone run behind the rock to break line of site.
Instead, maybe more things like:
- Send groups to work the gate switches and slow down the adds that are joining the fight
- Half the raid attack the left head, and half attack the right head, and try to keep them within 5% health of each other so one doesn't enrage
Essentially, preparation matters, but mechanics take the form of giving different people different things to do in order to respond, instead of everyone responding the same way.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I would like to see. I think the absolute bare minimum would be one or two entry level raids that are essentially DPS checks, serving as a gate to the harder content. For the more advanced fights, balancing HP between multiple mobs in an encounter is honestly a little too lenient for me. Balance fights are extremely tedious, but not really difficult.
If I were to design an entry level encounter that isn't a burn fight, it would likely involve exercising individual responsibility from all of the archetypes in the game.
1. Let's say every 25% the mob casts an incurable AE debuff that really hurts the raid's performance, unless the mob is burned that 25% in under 30 seconds.
2. At the 25% increments (regardless of if the 30 seconds dps check is met), the boss goes inactive and spawns 9 adds. The adds are named in such a way that it is vaguely indicative of whether they are rootable, mezzable, or immune to both. These will be divided into groups of 3 for each category, so 9 total as mentioned before. The adds will hopefully be strong enough that a moderately geared raid will need them to be locked down or the raid will get overwhelmed and die. This assumes a raid size that isn't able to have 9 tanks on a single raid.
3. The mobs that are immune to CC will randomly target a non-tank and one shot them if the mob is not picked up by a tank in less than 5 seconds.
4. Timed AoE of some sort. Curable or incurable, damage or debuff. Doesn't matter.
An encounter like this puts stress on every role of the quaternity. Tanks need to be active and managing their defensive abilities to tank the 3 adds every 25%. Classes with CC abilities need to be active, locking down their respective adds every 25%. DPS needs to be able to push buttons well enough to meet the requisite 30 second timer per 25%. Healers will be generally stressed from healing the main tank as well as off tanks and anyone else who gets damaged by adds when they pop. AoEs will also require some heals and/or cures.
Take note that this fight wouldn't even be that hard once it was learned. I did say "entry level".
Agreed, Nephele, some of those are good principles.
For myself, being able to perform my role during all content, raids included, would be a welcome change. In EQ even, immunities to role defining spells and skills was a chronic source of disappointment, for me and the guilds I was in.
Simple example? Can't CC anything on the raid. Ok... so... hm... yeah, that's a bit of a kick in the face for the CC classes. :) Oh, you want to damage this creature? Nah, he's immune to 90% of all damage in the game, yours included. Oh, you want to heal your group mates? Nope. Oh, you want to tank that add? Nope.
And if you try to perform your role? You will wipe the raid, so sit on your ass and be happy your have your chance at one upgrade per month just for being in attendance.
All the content up to that point? I could always perform my role. Get to the raid content, and some key element of someones role was always just... *poof* gone.
I'm being facetious, but only a little bit.
Enitzu said:Wildstar did this with what they called Interrupt Armor. I actually liked the idea. It caused some issues but overall it added another mechanic that had to be planned for. If this would work in Pantheon's system, I don't know. It really all depends on how they set up combat. So we'll have to wait and see in alpha/beta how things pan out.
It doesn't feel good to have to "waste" entire spells to get stacks of resilience down just to land one spell then have to repeat. Wildstar tried and while it was possibly better than not being able to CC at all it just didn't feel good.
I'd rather see a system of flexible cooldowns for CC spells. For instance you may have a 3 second stun and it would land for a 3 second stun but would also have a long cooldown of a minute+, but after around 25 seconds you can use the ability at reduced effectiveness for a 1 second stun. Or a 30 second mez being reuseable for a 10 second mez unless you wait for the full cooldown and so on for other hard CC spells.
As for other NPC/Boss mechanics, I'd like to see variance in the bosses usage of abilities instead of a scripted "Boss does A then B then C then everyone moves to the south wall before attack D." Some triggered abilities based on whatever factors the group is doing, maybe your wizard just got a critical with his big nuke so now the boss saves a counterspell/interrupt move for the wizard's next cast of the same spell or your healer just nailed a clutch group heal bringing 2 people out of critical hp status so the boss instead saves interrupt for the pesky healer.
I'd also like to see some interesting changing of atmosphere in some boss fights, something like fighting a boss in a dungeon chamber and he has the ability to flood the room completely, requiring some form of water breathing OR chasing down sporadic air bubbles. Maybe some make the ground icy so players slide with any movement with a % chance of being knocked down.
I don't want to see the enrage mechanics prevalent in the modern MMO, where if the fight goes past a certain timer the boss becomes godly and wipes the group. Maybe extremely limited variations on the idea such as a boss that slowly gets stronger over time (maybe passively feeding off some energy source) so at a certain point he becomes too difficult to overcome, the time in which he does being different for every group based on their collective skill level.
Edit: A wind boss (and climate) would be very interesting as well. Your character constantly being pushed in a certain direction, the boss changing the direction at times and also throwing out the occasional microburst for a strong push. Another could be an NPC/boss that creates a temporal instability in which your party phase shifts/blinks randomly around the room at different intervals.
Chel'Drak in EQ2 was a pretty cool fight. He would spawn adds every minute or so that could only be damaged by a specific archetype. The 4 archetypes were tank/healer/scout/mage. The healer spawn was the most difficult to deal with because healers obviously did less damage than any other archtype ... not only that, but Chel'Drak and the adds did a lot of damage and when your heals have to focus on doing DPS things can get dangerous. It was a total RNG fight though ... sometimes you would see healer adds spawn multiple times in a row and that was really taxing on resources. We brought in 2 furies (they did more DPS than any other healer class) to ensure we had enough damage coming from healers. Basically whenever you saw the healer adds pop, that was time for the MT group to use their temporary buffs. Incoming heals would be reduced while the adds were being dealt with and the boss itself hit like a truck. He was orange con and also had multiple AoE's and a really powerful knockback. Positioning was super important. You had to continually adjust your back to the middle of a wall ... whenever the knockback hit you would definitely get moved around. You wanted to be as centered as possible to prevent a huge knockback that would throw you in the corner. If you ever got knocked away from that center wall it was a wipe because the rest of the raid would then get destroyed by frontal/barrage attacks with a huge hit box radius.
Liav said:EQ2 in general had some pretty well designed raids, however I only played from TSO up through CoE.
Agreed! I was going to say that in response to your earlier post sketching out an "entry level" boss fight. Sounded like something you would see in EQ2 - The raids there held my interest for 6 years and were very well done imo! Would love to see that style of raiding in Pantheon.
I remember that Vanguard's gateway raid (the name escapes me, but it was the one you had to do for the APW key) had that mechanic where he would stun everyone behind him, and so the tank had to turn him to cleave everyone and break them out of the stun. Incredibly simple once you learned it, but hilarious to watch people trying to learn.
One thing I really want to see is the use of the environment and the surrounding area as "part" of the raid boss fight. Either as added risk (getting feared into lava, etc) or as part of the strategy needed to defeat it.
oneADseven said:Chel'Drak in EQ2 was a pretty cool fight. He would spawn adds every minute or so that could only be damaged by a specific archetype. The 4 archetypes were tank/healer/scout/mage. The healer spawn was the most difficult to deal with because healers obviously did less damage than any other archtype ... not only that, but Chel'Drak and the adds did a lot of damage and when your heals have to focus on doing DPS things can get dangerous. It was a total RNG fight though ... sometimes you would see healer adds spawn multiple times in a row and that was really taxing on resources. We brought in 2 furies (they did more DPS than any other healer class) to ensure we had enough damage coming from healers. Basically whenever you saw the healer adds pop, that was time for the MT group to use their temporary buffs. Incoming heals would be reduced while the adds were being dealt with and the boss itself hit like a truck. He was orange con and also had multiple AoE's and a really powerful knockback. Positioning was super important. You had to continually adjust your back to the middle of a wall ... whenever the knockback hit you would definitely get moved around. You wanted to be as centered as possible to prevent a huge knockback that would throw you in the corner. If you ever got knocked away from that center wall it was a wipe because the rest of the raid would then get destroyed by frontal/barrage attacks with a huge hit box radius.
This sounds great. It would be good to see more of this sort of thing. The raid preparation: bring more furys. Tactics: be ready for anything.
This would keep you on your toes, and require preparation. It would also encourage the use of classes that are not neccesarily the pinacle of their archetype.
Nephele said:I remember that Vanguard's gateway raid (the name escapes me, but it was the one you had to do for the APW key) had that mechanic where he would stun everyone behind him, and so the tank had to turn him to cleave everyone and break them out of the stun. Incredibly simple once you learned it, but hilarious to watch people trying to learn.
One thing I really want to see is the use of the environment and the surrounding area as "part" of the raid boss fight. Either as added risk (getting feared into lava, etc) or as part of the strategy needed to defeat it.
The Fungal Abomination key raid was fun!
I know everyone is responding on here with how they want the boss mechanics to work but seriously: i want the regular every day mobs to be smarter and behave like they have a brain. Encounters aren't a scripted thing that has to be a per area type script, but the mobs themselves will react and change by what you do in the fight.
a small example of this: what i see in most games. Pull group. Figure out an aoe method of killing said group fast, wash rinse repeat. = boring
in Old EQ and DAOC the group pulling was involved. you had to get a good pull just to get a larger group to give you half the mob instead of the whole dungeon. you had to time it right to avoid patrols. if you didn't or they ran for help and you didn't prevent this, the whole next room comes and smacks you down. if we are talking about a harder/more challenging game, its not just about the boss. i don't want to ZZZ all the way to 50 and fight bosses 4-5 nights a week with a guild getting that sort of skill as the only "challenge". skill of your group members was valued.
A truely challenging game is one that has every dungeon with a group of 2 = a hard fight that makes you feel fulfilled at the end of the night when you finally beat that evil eye at the end of the long multilevel hall you pulled and killed just right.
also: loot randomizers suck I haven't read far enough in to see if thats what we have on here but i hope not. i would rather have a challenging fight into a dungeon and get a rare item than to have it randomly drop off any mob in the zone or worse the zone drops items with random listed names and 27/29/31 points of stats and random effect on all rare-ish items.
My 2 cents.
