When we do eventually get to end game content I hope there is some digression from "old-school" rules.
Raids I've been involved with (years of such via EQ, EQ2, Rift etc.) have all pretty much been the same thing. Use a tracker, read the logs and find the timers.
Once timers have been found, calculate them out, use a 3rd party program and vola raids made easy.
What I'm suggesting is that raid mobs (bosses) scripts stay the same, but a randomizer is added to the timers of some of their abilities, changing them from a very static "Ever 33 seconds his AoE goes off, cast blockers or get to max range."
If the timers are randomized from 33 seconds to 20-50 seconds, then it would actually take a bit more attention to the game, the mobs actions or even if there is pre-text accompaning an attack, hopefully that text is different everytime so it can't get programed. Or at least not as easily.
The puzzles of figuring a raid mob out was fun, but as soon as ACT had it's information it was easy mode.
Would adding random timers and a script of 10 lines or so, all of which indicate the same thing per attack help this issue?
Absolutly, "random predictability" is amazing for Boss encounters, I made a similar post a good while back talking about this, and If I'm not misremembering Kilsin said the devs were on top of this, and would make the bosses have "random predictability" in their abilities.
I think that having a program that teels you how to do the fight, or what going to happen next in the fight wiht and exact timer atatched to it is one of the worst things plaging MMO gameplay currenlty, and hope Pantheon stays away from that, making abilities work like you suggested would be the first step in that direction.
Some of my best memories of EQ are simply that we failed due to a streak of bad events. Wether it's a double flurry in succession, a fizzle, a bad timing on rune-ing the tank. I do not think PVE is hard when it works accordingly to a plan. That's just playing a music according to a partition. I do think meaningfull PVE is when killing it is a feat of skill and luck, and not a fully controller environment.
I like the concept of bosses using their attacks based on random predictability; however if this is implemented, then the more devastating boss attacks should have "wind-up" animations, so that players have time to react to these attacks.
This being said, I am not a fan of flashy AoE indicators that hold your hand and show you exactly where not to step. I feel like it breaks emersion and takes away some of the fun.
I will lament the day that there is a Deadly Boss Mods for Pantheon. I understand that there will be no in-game mods, but the same *could* be achieved by an external program reading combat logs.
Hopefully, if there is combat logging to, say, a text file or csv, it is delayed by something like 5-10 seconds to help prevent something like this. I think that would be a good compliment to the "random predictability" initiative.
To avoid easy chatlog scraping to program timers, they might move away from boss chat cues altogether.
In a game that is eliminating mini maps to get players to look at the world and not the stupid GPS, animation behavior and audio cues should drive players' combat predictions: the days of Nagafen standing in place spamming NPC_DRAGON_CLAW_ATTACK_ANIM01 over and over again then randomly dropping a fire AOE from his navel are long gone.
If a dragon is gonna use a breath weapon, it steps back and inhales first. Get away from his face!
If he's gonna fly up and do a strafing run, he crouches down and spreads his wings first. Then he flies out of sight beyond a tree/ridge and positional audio of him roaring tells you what direction he's going to come in from.
If a frost giant king is going to cause a shockwave AoE, he draws back and really winds up to smash his warhammer into the ground. Back doze arses up!
If an ancient earth elemental is going to split the ground open and try to get players swallowed up by the chasm, he turns, stomps in that direction, and the ground starts shifting/rumbling/pushing boulders up.
A visual cue that "Stuff is about to go down" in physical relation to where the boss is facing is a little harder to have a script pick up, and as long as it's not on a predictable initiation timer (randomizing is a good idea there, within reason) it can still be set to give players a predictable window of warning that they need to scoot, scatter, or die in 3, 2, 1...
edit: heck, why limit that to just raids/bosses?
Please don't remove text cues from the logs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing whatever it takes to make it impractical to have some third-party program notify you of what's about to happen in a boss fight. And I have no problem at all with a delay in writing the text to the log file, or even read-locking it while the client is running - whatever works.
But I'd really like to be able to review the log to find out what went wrong, and to clue me in on what to look for in the future. Of course, it's still my job to make sure I'm not getting tunnel vision, and I'm actually paying attention to all the things I need to be paying attention to :)
I would love some reactive AoE's, that'd be cool. Like every time the tank blocks it impacts so hard that there is a small AoE blast around the warrior. Some stuff like that which you can't predict would be awesome to see.
But I agree, in EQ2 it was required to run the combat tracker, which pretty much made raids stupid easy. You had to be retarded to die to an EQ2 AoE or something lol. Anyways, would hate to see those come into the game making it just a faceroll fight.
Now in EQ1 they started playing with some tactics, such as the Xegony fight. It was a pain and it took like 3 hours because the warrior just about solo'd her the whole time so all the other groups could stop the wave of adds that were coming. They had a few other fun little tactics and they tried. But you can keep the combat logs, just make AoE's random. Like X% chance to send off AoE for every 1% HP loss, and the X% stacks. So say it's 5% for the boss to toss an AoE for every 1% HP loss, if you don't get it on the first one, at 2% it's a 10% chance, and so on. Things like that would be cool.
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MettleRoo said:This being said, I am not a fan of flashy AoE indicators that hold your hand and show you exactly where not to step. I feel like it breaks emersion and takes away some of the fun.
When I first saw this in BD, thats when I said nope to that game. Horrible, horrible mechanic.
I would love to mobs with the ability to be unpredictable in so far as their abilities. Give each named something like 10 or 15 ability that they can use, but they will never use them all in a fight. Limit them to about 30-50% of their abilities in any given fight. This would make the player able to know generally what they are up against (even with spoiler sites and tutube videos to watch) but never knowing exactly what they will face. I think that alone would shake things up pretty good.