EQ Never

Droigan you are talking about EQ enrage. Enrage timers in current gen MMOs are when the mobs activate god mode after 4.5 minutes because the raid didnt beat them quick enough. It's the replacement for the OOM healers that those games no longer have. Edit: nm thread still moves fast!

I am hoping the horizontal advancement is flat enough that being "tier 5" is a nice advantage but doesnt make things too easy (comparison: downscaling to lvl10 from 80 makes things too easy in GW2, I want the tiers to be less of a power creep). And I'm wondering if they are just going to put some epic mobs in some secluded corners with a "have at it" sign that simply roflstomp everything and arent meant to be beaten, like AoW at the start of velious. Would be nice to have if simply for players to try them until they come up for plan that is crazy enough to work.

Because if you took enrage timers away nearly every type of encounter would instantly become boring and trivial because you can bring a parade of tanks and healers. Seems pretty obvious.

Granted, they overdid the shit out of it with hard mode tuning in WoW, but that shit was made for poopsocking neckbeards that run 5 alts raids a week. I also prefer soft enrage to the instant YOU LOSE type crap, or more clever things like that fucker with the ice patches where you only got so many ice patches over the course of the fight, or the chick that infected an exponential number of players every minute.

So if you remove tanks and healers....then what point does enrage serve again?

Gear check. Make a diablo character with massive armor and health leech that is completely unkillable outside of a one-shot and oh.. crap.. enrage timer, now you can't kill Belial fast enough. I guess I'll have to add deeps and actually dodge the green fire instead of face tanking everything.

Remember how fucking awful Inferno mode was at D3 release? That's what you people are asking for here. A bunch of people soloing in the same direction while constantly having to run away to heal.

One little thing i liked about WAR was that extra resource that build up during combat and had a few addition abilitites you could use with it. Basically if a fight went longer you gained new options, often strong ones. Something like that I could settle for. a boss that simply novas for a million damage every 2 seconds at exactly 4 minutes after engage, not so much. Hell I would take death touches over that, which basically served the same goal of attritioning the attackers away.

Time limits can also create a sense of urgency and increase the perceived difficulty of encounters without actually making fights harder. Related, time scores be used as a factor for performance-contingent rewards, impacting motivation and behavior in different ways than task-contingent rewards.

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

I, for one, say fuck it. If people want to zerg shit, let them zerg it. Never understood why "Throw a ton of fucking people at it" isn't considered a valid strategy anymore. I've done the 12 man elite hit squad and the 200 person zerg swarm and I can honestly say both felt equally as rewarding. Don't even have to scale most encounters honestly. If EQ was any indication about 40% of a zerg raid force will just die on pull anyways because it's hard enough getting 10 people to pay attention let alone 200.

"But...but...the integrity of the fight and world firsts and and..." blah blah blah. It's 2013, who the fuck cares.

Click to expand...

Yep. Large vs Small raids already have a natural balance to them. Zergs get tons less loot per time in, for the benefit of less difficulty. While smaller guilds face more difficulty, but can acquire loot more quickly. It's essentially just like the "herp a derp" switch in WoW, except you don't actually need an artificial switch. Instead of switching it to "ultimate fucking pussy mode", just bring 10 more people. The smaller guilds, who do the mob with about the designed amount of players, will have their trophies/loot much faster though. At some point, there is going to be a split anyway, and the zerg guilds will end up feeding the smaller, more "elite" guilds.

Kreugen_sl said:

Remember how fucking awful Inferno mode was at D3 release? That's what you people are asking for here. A bunch of people soloing in the same direction while constantly having to run away to heal.

Click to expand...

So long as it's just one of a handful of viable strats, I don't see the problem. If one person wants to use hit and run, fine. Another team of people may zerg it down with 20. Another may take 5 monks and use some sort of immunity buff rotation to kill it. Whatever works. Enrage timers have their own set of problems like trimming healers or having to bring optimal DPS classes and telling your friend to sit out because you can only bring 25 people etc...

Big Flex_sl said:

Lurking.

Click to expand...

By the time he catches up with this thread the game will be released.

Lohk_sl said:

...unintentional play...

Click to expand...

Fuck that shit right out of the ballpark. The impetus is on the game designers to make the encounters genuinely challenging. Since they fail to do so they have to put in rubber bumpers on our bowling lanes to make sure everyone is doing their "hokey pokey" bullshit that they spent all of half a day coming up with.

If I want to spend 3 hours killing something because I can handle your mechanics with 3 of my friends, then just let me. Why is that so difficult? Do they not realize how horribly inefficient it is to do that, and that by spending hours on a fight that should take 15 minutes I'm doing so to my own detriment? I already have my punishment, which is taking 6x longer to do an encounter. Where is the logic in further punishing me by just hardcoding in some jack-off mechanic that auto-kills me after a half hour?

I'm not blowing up at you, bro. Just wanted to clarify that. I'm just really disappointed at the degree to which outside-the-box thinking is discouraged in games.

Uh, time limits obviously do make the fights harder. Without a time limit, you can have everyone die except your tank and healers and still win (limited by mana obviously. Which is possibly the most stale mechanic in the entire genre)

In normal mode wow, if you have great healers, you can use less healing and extra DPS. If you have great dps, you can bring extra healers. If both are great, grats, now you can go bash your dick in a drawer or move up to hard modes where you pretty much have no choice about what makeup you use. Whichever sounds more appealing. Point being, nobody is asking for that level of tuning.

Big Flex_sl said:

Click to expand...

Wish I could give you more rep

Wtf? Who doesn't like mana?

If there's a way to kill a mob with less people so you get more loot, that's the way people are going to kill it. Even if it takes 3 hours.

I'm not that concerned about raiding anyway. I may never play a game again where I have to have a goddamn schedule. I've quit MMOs four or five times now because "the raid was supposed to run from 8-12 but it didn't start until 10:30 and now its 2 in the morning.. fuck this, I like sleep better than this game." But anyway, I just think a group game that revolves around 2-6 people soloing together is absolutely fucking pointless. Diablo 3D, oh fucking boy. I'd just as soon play the offline version.

There's some sort of distinction between 'harder' and 'more technically demanding' that I can't find the words to properly articulate.

Edit: The notion that a time limit necessarily makes any encounter realistically more difficult is a bit goofy though. It depends on implementation. I said "can also" (ie in addition to the gear check and other possibilities that were mentioned), not "always."

Enrage timers are shit. The encounter shouldn't HAVE to end in a specific time unless the room is filling with lava or wtf ever else which is still a "enrage" timer just in a different way. All this does is make you drop people for moar deeps yo. Thats the problem with # specific raiding you have X amount of people in ur guild but you can only bring X amount on it and which classes is stupid. You should never be able to 2 man a raid boss even if you can avoid dmg and heal through there should be other mechanics that require you to bring more people. Thats the problem with having # caps on raids you have to turn people down. IF there was a dragon in the real world don't you think you would want EVERYONE you could to go and try to kill it with swords and shit? Obviously now we would just drone attack it or nuke that botch down. The point i'm trying to make is they should make it so you WANT everyone you can get to come help in some way.

Kreugen_sl said:

Uh, time limits obviously do make the fights harder. Without a time limit, you can have everyone die except your tank and healers and still win (limited by mana obviously. Which is possibly the most stale mechanic in the entire genre)

Click to expand...

While this is true I think raids were hard enough to be fun before they started to adding enrage timers to everything. I also wonder how many guilds that would bother with any serious raid stacking that would be around if raids were as easy as EQ/early WoW.

Kid Sized Coffin_sl said:

There's some sort of distinction between 'harder' and 'more technically demanding' that I can't find the words to properly articulate.

Click to expand...

That's what mods are for, bro. Have you got RecountFlexBarPitBullTimer addon 2.71a upgraded to the new patch yet? Can't raid unless you do.

On keying for dungeons and raid zones hell yah makes it way more epic to go in. Should it be like sleepers were theres 4 dragons in the world on timers that drop 1 key...meh maybe not maybe so depends on what guild your in. One thing I really liked about eq2 was there was TONS of group stuff to do in-between raid quests. You kill raid boss X then you have to do a bunch of group stuff to get up to the point where your prepared to enter the raid zone to keep progressing the quest. It gave you something to do all day or for a few days while you were in-between raids, and it was actually challenging and fun stuff.