Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Well.. I think/hope that Brad is just going to go back to original EQ and start from there. Most likely tweak it a bit as he goes instead of making the bigger jumps games like WoW made in regards to Travel, death penalty, etc

Rhuobhe_sl said:

sigh too many new bright ideas destined to fail. let them clone everquest 1999-2001 first ask questions later.

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Haha! I swear to you I wish someone just simply CLONE EQ (maybe different world, dungeons but exact same mechanics classes.. maybe add more healers/support). I know it would be guaranteed satisfaction.

My problem is when someone try to change a little bit too many aspects and end up with a mutation of a game that doesn't work.

If Brad allows erudite paladins to solo exp 1-50 just as well as any other class we will all have a fit.

At least I will. I am the voice of reason.

Draegan_sl said:

Your combat scenario exists in any game where a characters has 100 abilities and 5 hotbars. What you basically want is to give players a myriad of skills to use because some creatures might be resistant to some and not others.

Here's the problem, once someone does this dungeons once then everyone on the internet knows the resistances. Even if you never look at a website or a forum, you'll learn the first time and the second, you just don't cast fire spells anymore in the Dungeon of Fire Elementals. I really don't see any special type of combat here, the scenario can describe any dungeon experience I've gone through in almost any MMORPG in the last decade. Especially in a new game where you really don't know what to expect.

Rift did difficult dungeons in the beginning but then they were nerfed. I'd be happy to go with that level of difficulty again.

As for Free to Play, you really really under appreciate how much people spend on cosmetic shit or extra bag space or whatever. Games make a killing with that kind of thing. Just look at dopey things like Candy Crush.

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Yeah I don't really need anything wildly new. I would ideally take a MTG rip off any day, but I think that might be too much to ask, especially of an indie game. The resistances thing was just one example. There are infinite other scenarios, like if your group gets jumped and things are going bad, do you focus on nuking one mob dead, or do you help out with healing, or do you focus on crowd controlling some stuff. It's different solutions and each could work well or badly depending on the situation.

And yeah it already happens in games but the difference is that in modern games - none of this shit ever matters. Take Rift for example, there is basically no "cast time" on spells so you don't have to choose one approach to a problem. In the above scenario you can just do all three... heal a bunch of people in 1 second, then sheep a mob or whatever in another second, and then nuke the hell out of everything happily. Vanguard is the same more or less. Also mobs die so fast, there is never really any need to crowd control or focus on some long term heals over time or anything. Because the best option is *always* just... 1,2,3,4,5 spam the hell out of everything with your lightning bolts and everything will be dead in 5 seconds. So that's what I want to see done properly, every mob to basically be like a raid boss, ever mob takes at least a minute to kill, so that when you get 5 of them in a dungeon, it's a big fucking deal that people think OH SHIT! and you can't just spam your routine and watch everything drop dead. Someone needs to crowd control, maybe more than one person, the healer needs to save multiple people multiple times, the tank needs to run around desperately trying to aggro stuff and smack stuff, and the dps need to be careful about which targets they pick because nothing dies fast, so if they all shoot different mobs the group will die. You have to focus fire on one mob and get it down, and you better be sure to use the right spells too. Sometimes its better to cast a slow/debuff on a very fast melee mob than it is to just nuke it.

And the thing about resistances doesn't matter. Everyone will eventually know everything anyway, spoilers or not, but the point is that people need to actually learn from their experience and then apply that experience. That's what separated good players from bad in EQ. A good player would see that maybe a mob had a damage shield so would disengage it and hit something else until it got dispelled. Or if a mob has a resist they would stop trying to nuke it with a spell that might not work very well and use some other spell instead. It doesn't matter if there are spoilers online, what matters is that if there are random scenarios that regularly happen in group play that you need to react to, a good player will make the right decision, and a bad player will potentially screw up so bad that it wipes the group. That's what I want. There were resistant mobs in EQ too but there were 100 other things that players needed to learn how to handle and if they didn't handle it, bad things happened.

I guess I'm just confused. You're just asking for the same old thing, but with harder hitting mobs with more hps.

Exactly But that's what EQ was all about, and we never had anything like that ever since. It's only been done well that one time in MMO's. It is just traditional D&D style RPG combat, but tuned to be challenging. You play well or you die. Everything since EQ destroyed that and turned it in to whack a mole with hotkeys. The only exception is raid mobs but in EQ it was like the entire game was full of raid mobs.

Draegan_sl said:

The only thing VG did well was classes. World Design? There were areas that were really cool, and there were areas that were really bad. I wouldn't label it best in class but it had it's highlights. I disagree with the dungeon design, but I didn't do any dungeons past Tsang's so I didn't see a lot of them. If you're comparing them to WOW's shitty dungeon design, you're probably right, but they're not better than WOW's raid design though (from what I"ve seen which is not much either so others can correct me).

Classes, well I agree there. VG had a really fantastic class design. Probably the most interesting I've seen and probably will see for a while. For example, Wildstar's class design will be most likely mediocre unless they change a lot.

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Still think VG had incredible world design, the different environments and areas were all very interesting and there were so many opportunities for leveling/content and it wasn't a "line em up and knock them down" design... it felt real and it felt like a world, with some danger and not 100000000 mobs every 2 feet. Quite often i would find new leveling areas as there was so much to explore... guild member would say "hey i found this cool cave" and the fact that vanguard had so many leveling options it wasn't necessarily easy to "map" you had to explore a bit to find the goodies. There was not a bad area in VG in my opinion ( of the ones that were finished ) they all had unique flavor to them and the cities were incredible. ( loved the waterslide in Leth Nure ). Compare this to today, 1. Everyone takes the same path 2. there are what, 5 dungeons ish throughout a leveling path ? its horrible and i will not play another one of those titles. vanguard had 100s of dungeons literally.

Mostly I want an RPG not an action game with watered down RPG elements. As for the combat, DDO had action combat and is probably the deepest character building experience in ANY MMO so it can be done but what i do not want is a watered down RPG experience so people can use a controller or have 4 skills to mash nor do i want anything that requires twitch or mario skills, RPGs were not about that until the action crap invaded. I play those games too but i don't want that in an MMO.

( Examples of shit i hate: 1 weapon per class, limited abilities that are all damage without concern for typed damage and what kind of mobs you are encountering, twitch combat, no buffs, no real group coordination ( need CC and Trinity please ). ) Most games out there are like this today and they hold people for what 3-4 weeks ?

If i had to point to a gaming system other than VG/EQ that i would want to play again it would be D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder. From character building to combat and mob complexity its all there ( mob resists, damage reductions, typed damage ( crush pierce slash ) every pull you have to think about what you are going to do and that is not a slot machine game at all.

I want blackjack or poker not "pull handle, make sound, profit"

VG had some great dungeons too. Tsangs was ok but that's just a low level dungeon. The great stuff is like Vol Tuniel, Dargun's Tomb etc. Gigantic sprawling dungeons often with a theme to them. Like crystals that drain your mana if you stand near them or whatever. In Vol Tuniel there are mobs that see invis, there are undead paladins and lizard healer types which complete heal themselves if you don't manage to stun them or counterspell, and those mosquito things that spam nasty AOE damage. Of course none of that matters anymore because the game was destroyed by adding overpowered gear, but back in the day, it was really dangerous.

There are also lots of big named fights, each in their own interesting locations, all within the same dungeon. It's like the equivalent of 2 or 3 other dungeons in one. The only thing I didn't like is how the combat played out in these places. It's just so boring because it's tuned all wrong. But they are great locations.

Draegan_sl said:

There's really only one and a half games that are "action combat". That's TERA and the half is GW2 because it's a hybrid of tab target and action combat. Unless you want to start counting some Korean games or F2P games like Dragon's Nest or other hybrids like NEverwinter.

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Guild wars 2 combat is the most mindless joke I have played, other than neverwinter.. I don't want diablo i want D&D.

With you on that Shab , and Laura's bit about quit making all the classes "equal" needs to be a cornerstone for this game.

Balancing for equality makes for bland and boring shit.

If my necro can pull off shit solo my warrior couldn't dream of so be it , my warrior can pull off necessary things in a group my necro can't - leave the "balancing" at that.

Dahkoht_sl said:

With you on that Shab , and Laura's bit about quit making all the classes "equal" needs to be a cornerstone for this game.

Balancing for equality makes for bland and boring shit.

If my necro can pull off shit solo my warrior couldn't dream of so be it , my warrior can pull off necessary things in a group my necro can't - leave the "balancing" at that.

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/agree make all classes as unique as possible if they all can't solo equally who freakin cares... that balanced design hurts group "roles" every time.

Not terribly important but i hope elves are called elves, gnolls are gnolls and humans are humans. I didnt really dig the made up names on VG lore.

Fish1_sl said:

Exactly But that's what EQ was all about, and we never had anything like that ever since. It's only been done well that one time in MMO's. It is just traditional D&D style RPG combat, but tuned to be challenging. You play well or you die. Everything since EQ destroyed that and turned it in to whack a mole with hotkeys. The only exception is raid mobs but in EQ it was like the entire game was full of raid mobs.

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DDO Dungeons
Original Rift Heroics
TBC Heroics, Early Cata Heroics

To name some off the top of my head. You're completely wrong in your assertions.

Well there are some exceptions but they are just occasional content, Rift only had several dungeons in total, and like you said, they were nerfed anyway. EQ was different because every mob was like that. Literally at level 1, your first steps in the world you come across a wolf or something and it could easily kill you even if you played well. Every mob was tuned to be tough. And dungeons even at low levels were the same, and that was for everyone, there was no heroic mode or ez mode or whatever, it was just hard for everyone.

Rift had 10 dungeons at launch. Even their low level dungeons were hard if you did them at the appropriate level.

I don't remember them being hard? Some of the boss fights were for sure tho. If that's what we are only referring to?

I remember killing the Thought Horror Overfiend with my guild one night, and I really needed to do a shop run. So I parked up behind it and went over the road and did my shopping, took about 15 minutes. Walked back in the door and THO was on about 25% with me still merrily stabbing it in the back.

We could have had an army of bots in a chain heal rotation on the tank, while the dps just /afk'd, 95% of all EQ boss fights were like that.

You talk about EQ being hard, because you might encounter a wolf that was 20 levels higher than you. All NPC power (bar a few of those pesky undercons, you know the ones I mean.. that fucking derv for example) was linked to level. There was also no mention at what level you'd no longer be able to reliably solo something.

Which is exactly the same thing that WoW had with say, Stitches in Duskwood, or the fucking Son of a Bitch Werewolf in Silverpine.

Convo_sl said:

I don't remember them being hard? Some of the boss fights were for sure tho. If that's what we are only referring to?

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There were some boss encounters and trash pulls that were a pain in the ass that could wipe you.

Hell, even freaking LOTRO has some challenging group content if you do it on-level with typical quest-gear rewards.

But it's not required, so you just skip it doing the easy solo game.

Just human nature. Plenty MMOs (in fact, almost all of them) DO have challenging content, just noone will do it (unless it's at end-game and required for progression for gear or whatever reward they want).

I think what people are really wanting are just all progression to be tied to challenging content, instead of optional side content being challenging that's easily skipped. And when/if a MMO comes out that does that, the bitching will be enormous, even if it's just "ole EQ die hards".

Draegan_sl said:

Rift had 10 dungeons at launch. Even their low level dungeons were hard if you did them at the appropriate level.

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RIFT was very close to being the game for me. The classes were cool at launch before they tried to balance PVP however the dungeons were all linear IIRC ( but fun for linear, cool bosses ). If RIFT had multiple leveling paths, content choice and non linear dungeons i likely would not have left.

I recall starting out as a chloromancer and switching to more of a necro style at some point.. it was cool to be in the wild and trying a build then heading back to respec and trying another, it was much like DD 3.5 but much easier to handle as D&D 3.5 can be daunting when considering multiclassing as you can gimp yourself pretty easily.

Ohh shit and the Riftstalker was in my top 5 of classes of all time. They are: 1. VG bloodmage 2. DDO or D&D 3.5 wizard ( various flavors ) 3. VG psionist 4. SWG bounty hunter ( for the obvious ) 5. Riftstalker tank ( RIFT ). ( honorable mention to VG bard, VG DK, VG disciple, VG shaman, eq2 Fury ).

D&D 3.5 wizard really should be #1 if you like a wizzy rather than a Sorcerer there are endless combinations of ways to play it. I have done it several times in different games and my favorite was a CC wiz and/or Palemaster with stealth ability and a dagger for poking fuckers in back. I play a similar toon in Skyrim, illusion magic with good stealth and backstab. CC them and stab em in the back LOL