I haven't seen any topics on this. I know levitate in general is a HUGE part of EQ creating different dynamics especially in a PvP situation and useful in PvE content. I know i haven't seen any use of this in videos or far as my knowledge goes in pre alpha. That being said, im not a fan of flying mounts at all... and im currently undecided about it being good or bad IF done correctly.
My questions are.
1) Will there be levitate/dmf/peg cloak clicky type spells/effects/items?
2) Should there be since it brings such a huge element of change?
3) 2 part question
a) If there is levitate will there be different atmospheres that dictate how you float (i.e. you maintain levitating longer for better/worse duration)
b) Will there be spells like dispel/cancel magic/pillage enchantment etc to provide coutner play for buffed/levitating targets ?
Considering that there will be zones that require you to have special gear, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a levitate spell/gear piece. Maybe some zones will block that ability, while other it's required in some parts.
I think it's safe to assume there will be levitation, probably from an Enchanter.
From the FAQ:
19.1 Will there be mounts and other ways to increase a player’s travel speed?
Yes, there will be a variety of mounts, as well as spells and abilities that can be obtained which increase travel speed. Players will also be able to acquire items for their characters that allow them to climb vertical surfaces.
19.2 Will there be flying mounts?
While there will certainly be flying NPCs, whether or not players will have the ability to fly is undecided at this point. What we can say is that if we do offer flying mounts, either before or after launch, the goal will be to make travel more fun; not to allow players to avoid, bypass, or skip over large chunks of content.
So not for levitate specifically but I'm in fan of environmental utility spells that can be used by players as tactics during fights (as long as it's recognized that it *is* a tactic, and sometimes that there's a drawback to using it.
I'm going to use concepts from some single-player games just as an example of my thinking, but by no means should anyone take that as a suggestion for implementation - it's more just to get us thinking in the idea of states and counters to those states.
Here are some example states, what those states enables, and what counters them.
1) Levitation - enables you to avoid damage from attacks that impact the ground (like earthquakes). However, if you're levitating, you might be adversely affected from wind-based attacks
2) Related to the above, a "Heavy" state - slows your movement, but increases your resistance to wind-based attacks. However, ground-based attacks are going to hit you much harder.
3) Reflection - reflects both positive and negative magic cast on you back to the caster (or on a random target). This means that someone trying to hit you with something would hit themselves instead - or worse, hit the wrong target
4) Confusion - causes your target to randomly change, however, prevents you from being affected by mental based effects like charm/fear.
5) Cursed - causes you to take damage from traditional heals, but renders you immune or highly resistant to certain damage types.
I could probably do more but hopefully that helps illustrate my thinking here. That is - I'd like to see tools like levitation both be counters to certain kinds of attacks/damage in combat, but also have liabilities that prevent us from all running around with levitation on all the time. As a stretch, it'd be awesome if this sort of state-counter logic enabled us to use effects that would normally be detrimental to our characters as tools in combat as well. ie, if I root myself, I can't be feared away.
Some people cite "flying mounts" as one of the first major mechanics that reduced player interaction in WoW and basically the beginning of the death spiral towards the single-player game that it is today. Basically, if you can just fly to any destination without interacting with the world it has the same chilling effect on random player interactions as teleports.
I'm sure they will balance levitate with reagents or something, but yeah in EQ it really dramatically reduced the risk you were taking while traveling.
In EQ, lev would allow you to literally cross entire zones far above the terrain and denizens and out of agro range.
I'd like to see an implementation where you have a base hover height which is just a few inches above the terrain. If you jump/lev off a cliff, you should drift down to the base height at a moderate rate. Enough that you could perhaps cross over a narrow chasm, but not enough that you can float around at that height and avoid combat.
I'd also like to see zones where lev spells/items fail extra quickly, making their use almost always a "bad idea" (TM).
No, levitate as it was in EQ was awesome! Only mid-level characters had access to it anyway, making it a sign of an experienced fictional character. Only the highest level levitates would enable characters to fly across a zone top without descending - the mid-level levs brought the chars down slowly. Why shouldn't the highest level, most powerful characters be able to fly across like that? They're ultra badasses at that point! I loved levitate as it worked in EQ, and it was not abused. It was great fun, novelty, and immersion =)
Why shouldn't the highest level, most powerful characters be able to fly across like that?
Yes, flying is fun. The problem is that it can trivialize the game.
It reduces the need to continue to interact with the game world. Once you can fly, the entire game now revolves around flying back and forth between the bank where I store my stuff and the one singular task I currently want to min\max on. This allows me to tunnel-vision through inconvenient distractions like game content, other players or server events happening in-between those destinations.
Here's the death-spiral that lead WoW from being an actual MMORPG into a single-player game.
At each stage, the player's respect for the game world decreases until you reach the point where there is no game world. Then you start to reduce the dependence on other players. Suddenly you've distilled out a single-player experience from what was once an MMORPG.
It's not that limited flying is bad. It's that it's a slippery slope.
endylendari said:Why shouldn't the highest level, most powerful characters be able to fly across like that?Yes, flying is fun. The problem is that it can trivialize the game.
It reduces the need to continue to interact with the game world. Once you can fly, the entire game now revolves around flying back and forth between the bank where I store my stuff and the one singular task I currently want to min\max on.
I understand what you mean, but this wasn't the case in EQ. Few classes could even cast the spell, and it was available at a very high level. By that point, they were more powerful than most zones. Levitate also didn't increase run speed, and required the player to first climb up to their desired elevation. The highest level zones in EQ are crazy and have enemies that could still aggro a levitating player. To avoid aggro, players would become invisible. None of this broke the game or trivialized any content. Levitate as it worked in EQ was so, so little like the flying mounts of WoW. I say this just to defend what was a truly fun, great spell and mechanic - Aradune already knows this.
What about levi at half height, just 2 character heights above the ground only for pulling over the ground changes.
Utility type buff, but allows the puller to not get stuck.
Doesnt have to be exactly like the old school levi this time around. Still was a very good utility buff for those smaller races and or pulling, splitting, etc..
Levitate was not unbalanced in EQ and I don't feel like it trivialized the game at all. It did allow you to take a few shortcuts here and there, slow fall down a cliff or two, but those were the exceptions not the rule. Unless later expansions introduced more oppurtunities for such activities as flying over the entire zone. I do like that levitate required reagents and like camo or invis, could drop prematurely with very little notice. Added a little spice to your trek across a zone 15 levels too high for you.
I do wish that flying mounts take a VERY LONG time (if ever) to come to Pantheon. Unless they were implemented as simply a better more reliable form of levitate. Even then though, I don't know, takes a bit of hard work to open your mind to get past failures like WoW to try and consider it in a fair and unbiased way.
I'm fine with abilities like levitate, but would hope to see them modified in a way similar to what Celandor suggested. Also, I'd like to see some Willy Wonka type situations where if you have levitate on it's only a matter of time before your character ascends into a spinning blade of death. Add some areas in game where levitate could be useful but you need to time it right and really control your movements to make the most of it. I like the idea of "skill jumps" or whatever you want to call them where you might have to float down the side of a mountain to try and land inside a small chamber on a nearby mountain that is otherwise inaccessible. Risk vs Reward ... would love to see it take shape in as many ways as possible!
What about levi at half height, just 2 character heights above the ground only for pulling over the ground changes.
I would wholeheartedly support this. I could totally see this enabling players to explore more... lava, water, high cliffs etc. That's awesome. It increases player\world interaction.
Few classes could even cast the spell, and it was available at a very high level. By that point, they were more powerful than most zones.
In EQ I believe spells like this needed to be found and were relatively rare, so even being high level didn't guarantee you had the spell. They were also gated by reagents so you couldn't just spam it on anyone who walked by. So as long as there's some checks and balances to just flying anywhere I want all the time it might be OK.
It wasn't like it was the one single thing that killed WoW either. It was just the first step down a slippery slope.
EQ's implementation of levitate worked (at least, up until OOW) worked as many of you have suggested that it *should* work. If you had it on you, you would float a couple of feet above the ground. Not so much that a halfling could run underneath you, but enough so that it was noticable. If you jumped off a high place you would float down at a slightly reduced rate compared to normal free fall, and obviously take no falling damage.
By itself, levitate wasn't really letting you bypass too much content. Some zones were an issue, because you'd have a zone-in point that was really high up vertically and then other parts of the zone that were much much lower. Really immersive on foot, but someone with levitate on could run off the super high cliff and get a really fair distance before they were close to the ground again.
Where this really become exploitative however was when it was combined with runspeed buffs like high level SoW. Zone in, off you go, and half the time you're waiting at the zone line to fall far enough so that you can actually zone across.
So, point 1: The problem wasn't really levitate by itself. It was levitate + runspeed that was overpowering in certain zones.
Some have claimed that this wasn't a really big deal and, early on, it wasn't. Getting a levi was pretty rare, it wasn't something people thought to hand out. While you could usually bum a SoW off a passing druid, ranger, or shaman, there wasn't a central place you could easily go to grab buffs pre-Luclin.
Unfortunately, Luclin and PoP changed availability of the buffs. Now you could go to the Nexus or PoK, and if you asked, you could probably find people there to buff you with whatever you wanted for donations. So suddenly, *everyone* was running around with SoW, Levi, and the high-HP cleric buffs on (the name escapes me right now). All the time.
Point 2: This is the kind of problem I was getting at in my "three years" post. No one considered that these buffs could essentially enable mass bypassing of content until a combination of factors made them far more available to players than they were in the early game. It was only after all those other factors converged that they were a problem - and then, it was really too late to do anything that wouldn't have amounted to a massive nerf.
To be clear, I don't think levitation, runspeed, or similar utility effects are bad. I would be upset if the game did not have them. Which brings me to...
Point 3: The right way to prevent these sorts of problems is not to nerf the abilities, but to provide environmental/situational counters to them - literally, to make it so that for every time you *want* to be levitating, there's a time when you probably really *don't* want to be levitating. That makes using these buffs a strategic choice rather than a default action for players.
The Levitate spell in EQ wasn't hard for casters to get, it was part of their normal repertoire. Druids and shaman got it at lvl 14, enchanters 16, wizard 24, bards 31, mage could summon a lev ring at 39, necros had DMF at 44, not sure who else. The three times I would always use lev (on my druid, and always with SoW), was 1) in Lavastorm running over the broken landscape that would probably kill you from falling damage if you had a SoW without lev and was not careful. 2) Running over water in one of the ocean zones, and 3) running from the druid spires in Dreadlands to Karnor's, or another place on that side of the zone.
The Dreadlands run is probably the biggest example of maybe needing to tone it down, since we were flyign so high I could barely see the ground. (Pro Tip: don't run on top of Karnor's Castle, the walls are too high and you won't be able to get off without a port!) Things like this could be moderated in Pantheon though with their environmental effects.... maybe one of the no-magic areas....or if it's an area players should still be able to use magic, maybe strong winds above a certain height will blow the player to the zone wall where everyone else running on foot is trying to travel (if it's a dangerous zone you don't want to be in the middle of), etc.