EQ Never

EQ's combat downtime wasn't -that- bad, especially at the top end. You never really needed to wait for FM to pull if you had a reasonable group, and after bards/enchanters had their mana regen stuff, it wasn't nearly as long. EQ's downtime was horrendous in the early levels, though.

The pacing complaint I have is more along the lines that the respawn, especially in public dungeons, was retarded +5 and that is what lead to shitloads of sitting around doing nothing.

mkopec_sl said:

Removing downtime essentially removes any need for resource management and instead we get ADD rotations and whack a mole combat. No thanks.

Basically what he said ^^^

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While I am ok with a little downtime, removing it does not automatically remove resource management. You can make your game with strict "in-combat" flags that remove the high regen you would enjoy out of combat. I'm not a big fan of the concept, just pointing out there are alternatives to DDR besides downtime.

Personally I didnt find EQ downtime that bad in groups, and solo downtime could probably be tweaked to avoid the gaps between warriors without fungi and necros that EQ had, put it somewhere in the middle. I liked the food/drink concept WoW had, not sure if they still use that. meant a downtime of more or less a minute and a slight expense in exchange for getting back into combat quicker (still talking solo play). For group play I think buffs should be a downtime mitigator, just spread the buffs out between classes/archetypes instead of enabling the heal+buffbot syndrome EQ had at times.

Yea the respawn was terrible. And the downtime, if you had a bard or chanter it was no big deal. But if you had a bunch of casters and no chanter/bard then it was pretty painful. Thats why chanters became 'essential' in groups which was pretty dumb.

I also found that early on, casters never needed more than 30 seconds or something, because you have such tiny mana pools. It was only in the 30s once you had a good robe and bunch of good gear, the mana pool got far bigger but there was no improved regen.

I'll accept your single quotes around essential.

mkopec_sl said:

Removing downtime essentially removes any need for resource management and instead we get ADD rotations and whack a mole combat. No thanks.

Basically what he said ^^^

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We can't differentiate between in combat and out of combat regen?

althuna_sl said:

Yea the respawn was terrible. And the downtime, if you had a bard or chanter it was no big deal. But if you had a bunch of casters and no chanter/bard then it was pretty painful. Thats why chanters became 'essential' in groups which was pretty dumb.

I also found that early on, casters never needed more than 30 seconds or something, because you have such tiny mana pools. It was only in the 30s once you had a good robe and bunch of good gear, the mana pool got far bigger but there was no improved regen.

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You also had to /sit to increase your mana regen which further encouraged the sit in one room all night playstyle.

I'm all for approaching the problems of boring combat, excessive downtimes, respawns, soloing, etc differently than recent games have. But denying they were legitimate problems in EQ makes you a delusional fanboy

Quaid_sl said:

Gotta disagree. If mana never runs out, it's a pretty meaningless stat. I'm not advocating 10 minute absurd downtimes, but after a pull that fully drains your mana bar, there should be at least a 60-120 second regen time from 0m to FM.

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That is a time frame I can live with. The extremes that EQ had is something I personally would not be interested in anymore.

Abefroman_sl said:

That is a time frame I can live with. The extremes that EQ had is something I personally would not be interested in anymore.

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I'm playing a mid level druid right now on p99 for shits and gigs... I think a full mana bar is something like 12mins. I'm decently twinked, but that's still ridiculous.

100 mobs per level or so, 20 if you kill something big and you can quad on some classes.

So if you want to make the journey longer, you either increase down time or require killing more mobs.

I prefer the down time increase that can greatly be negated by grouping (and item or whatever else rewards from group "required" content) and maximizing each others' effectiveness with buffs or filling gaps in each others' skill sets.

Difficulty increase, xp loss on failure

How long before release do companies release recommended system specs? Beta right? My rig is way overdue for an update.

I'm wondering since this is going to be released on PS4, if the game will be optimized for AMD products.

No downtime (regen) means you are essentially chained to your keyboard the entire time you are playing. No downtime means groups become more intensive, and less friendly. Its no social all kill. Talk after the dungeon. Some like that. Some dont.

On a side note:
Things I liked about EQ.
Staff of Temperate Flux
Jboots
Fishbone Earring
Playing with a really good Enchanter/Bard
Getting random SoWs
Running through Sirens Grotto
Racing to a Spawn
Breaking into Fear
Ogres
Large Raids (raiding with 50+ people feels like your are in a small army, WoW sucked when raids got smaller, and more needlessly complex. It felt like being a dancer in a bad JLo Video.)
GM Events
Cazic Thule
Running from Karana to Qeynos as a level 4 to change bind spot and being scared shitless of every single thing I saw.
GFluxing.

Now, there was plenty that sucked too. Dont get me wrong. But at the core there were assloads of really great moments in EQ. In WoW, it was fancy and flashy and slick and well done, but nothing was really memorable. I guess EQ was kinda like getting laid in high school in the backseat of your moms car. It was exciting, and sloppy, and poorly done, and you wouldnt necessarily do it again... but it was fun. WoW was like fucking a stripper. Its was fun for a bit, she was hot and sexy.. but in the end it got too needlessly complicated, and you have glitter everywhere.

Hopefully what we get with EQ Next is that girl from high school grew up and is now a sexy classy woman with no drama issues who is fun to hang out with.

The downtime made things far more fun, and I liked camping too. The only issue with EQ is that it was all just a bit too extreme and a bit too strict. Like it was only really the higher levels when it started getting slow and they refused to give anyone else access to Clarity or whatever, you had to have an ench/bard.

The big thing though was I remember when the respawn time in lower guk was something like 16 minutes or whatever. Then one day I log in, and they had changed it to 30 minutes! I couldnt believe it... You set up camp in the Exe or whatever and kill the mobs, and it was half an hour until they popped again, so you had to go pulling mobs from anywhere. And because it was totally over crowded, there would be a group in every room and that's where it all went to shit, people were bickering over stolen pulls and the big camps like Frenzy ended up with queues to join the group which was just ludicrous. But this was all from a game that was far bigger than ever intended. Vanguard solved all that by having a far bigger world with far many more dungeons. If only Vanguard worked in the same way, it would have been perfect. Take one dungeon like Vol Tuniel, there were probably 30 different rooms in there that could have been sweet camp spots. But there was also several other dungeons just the same. But sadly it became just another quest grind with instanced style dungeons where you blast through it. We still have never had a game that works like EQ, but with a decent budget and a proper scale.

In other words, if there were a few more lower guks, it wouldnt have needed to be so strict with respawn time, wouldnt have been so overcrowded, and wouldnt have been so down-timey.

Lleauaric_sl said:

No downtime (regen) means you are essentially chained to your keyboard the entire time you are playing. No downtime means groups become more intensive, and less friendly. Its no social all kill. Talk after the dungeon. Some like that. Some dont.

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I wouldn't want to see downtime in Next that is the same as EQ, but I wouldn't mind heading back in that direction. As has been pointed out, a lot of that downtime was just because of spawn timers rather than waiting for mana and health. I much prefer sitting at a spawn point and waiting for a rare mob to spawn and hoping it drops a rare item to clearing and re-clearing instances. And no, that wasn't sarcasm.

Lleauaric_sl said:

No downtime (regen) means you are essentially chained to your keyboard the entire time you are playing. No downtime means groups become more intensive, and less friendly. Its no social all kill. Talk after the dungeon. Some like that. Some dont.

On a side note:
Things I liked about EQ.
Staff of Temperate Flux
Jboots
Fishbone Earring
Playing with a really good Enchanter/Bard
Getting random SoWs
Running through Sirens Grotto
Racing to a Spawn
Breaking into Fear
Ogres
Large Raids (raiding with 50+ people feels like your are in a small army, WoW sucked when raids got smaller, and more needlessly complex. It felt like being a dancer in a bad JLo Video.)
GM Events
Cazic Thule
Running from Karana to Qeynos as a level 4 to change bind spot and being scared shitless of every single thing I saw.
GFluxing.

Now, there was plenty that sucked too. Dont get me wrong. But at the core there were assloads of really great moments in EQ. In WoW, it was fancy and flashy and slick and well done, but nothing was really memorable. I guess EQ was kinda like getting laid in high school in the backseat of your moms car. It was exciting, and sloppy, and poorly done, and you wouldnt necessarily do it again... but it was fun. WoW was like fucking a stripper. Its was fun for a bit, she was hot and sexy.. but in the end it got too needlessly complicated, and you have glitter everywhere.

Hopefully what we get with EQ Next is that girl from high school grew up and is now a sexy classy woman with no drama issues who is fun to hang out with.

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This. back in the day we may have been in opposing guilds L2 but I agree with you 100%.

Hmmmmm I never thought of EQ as being like high school sex... If anything, EQ was about a lot of not having sex in high school... For me anyway...

Jesus I just looked it up... I lost my virginity in grade 11 exactly 30 days after Luclin was released (and I stopped playing EQ)

Quaid_sl said:

Hmmmmm I never thought of EQ as being like high school sex... If anything, EQ was about a lot of not having sex in high school... For me anyway...

Jesus I just looked it up... I lost my virginity in grade 11 exactly 30 days after Luclin was released (and I stopped playing EQ)

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shut up. no one cares about your penis meeting an anus for the first time.