EQ Never

jello_sl said:

It has probably been discussed before but would any of you game play aficionados care to explain what made original EQ combat pacing different from games we are seeing today?

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How interested are you? Because I'm the biggest EQ combat geek you'll ever find. (Proof below). There are a lot of things that make EQ's combat unique. I could probably ramble about it for hours but I'll try to bullet point just several that come to mind:

1) There are a lot of spells at your disposal but you can only memorize several of them to use in battle. So the classes are as deep as any other game, but unlike WoW you can't just do anything at any time. You have to pick what to use for a battle, and if something unexpected happens and you don't happen to have a spell suitable for that, you are shit outta luck.

2) It's just simply balanced to be hard. For example in WoW (or Vanguard or whatever else), with some mobs you can just engage auto attack and win. With harder mobs you would maybe need to add one or two spells to win. But in reality you have 15 spells and you can spam them all a second apart, so you smackdown the living shit out of mobs with ease. EQ just isn't like that. If you engage auto attack and stand by a mob, it will eat you in no time. In fact, big tough tanks are the only ones who can stand near mobs for any length of time, the other classes just get munched to death in seconds. And of the several spells you have, some will be utility, some will be for specific situations (root / snare etc), and leaving only a few to actually fight back. And they have long cast times, so casting something is a commitment and an important decision.

3) Shit happens, a lot. - Spells sometimes fizzle meaning you use the mana but the spell doesn't fire. Sometimes a spell fires and lands but then gets resisted, again using the mana and using the long cast time, and achieving absolutely nothing. There's also combat mechanics like rogue mobs do massive backstab damage so if one sneaks up behind your group, it could be catastrophic. Or mobs running away when they get injured which can aggro all nearby mobs. In some dungeons, if you fail to kill a mob that runs away, you can end up with 15 mobs coming to get you a moment later, and they will happily just wipe out your entire group. There are no ez mode ways out. There are no one click AoE taunts like Vanguard, and huge healing ability, and turning things in to sheep with ease etc. You play on a knife edge even when you are fighting just a few mobs. If you get 10 then you will likely just die no matter what.

4) Everything matters more and everything is more significant. Mana is a really big deal. Big spells can use about a fifth or sixth of your mana. In other words, you can only cast that spell 6 times max. Maybe one resists, one fizzles, and then another mob attacks your healer so you need to blow a bit of mana casting Root to lock it down. That means by the time you are even ready to start casting your nukes, you only have enough mana left to cast a few of them. Not only that, but it regenerates insanely slowly. This has a huge effect on the game in more ways than one. In other games you just unload like a psycho on every mob, because mana is not important. Not only do you get to shoot dozens of nukes without fear of running out of mana, but even if you do get low, it regenerates moments later. In EQ, getting out of mana is a serious problem, because you only get it back by sitting down for a good 5 minutes or so. And when shit constantly happens like mobs showing up out of the blue, it means you desperately want to use as little as possible in every fight. Because one fight can easily turn in to a second fight with no rest, leaving you totally out of mana. If another mob shows up at that time.. you are in big trouble. Also, when mobs hit you while you try to cast a spell, they interrupt the spell casting. You can occasionally slip a spell through, but generally if you end up with a mob hitting you, there's a good chance you'll die. So aggro management is vitally important and again, when some spells take several seconds to cast and a squishy caster can die in 5 seconds, it's very important that you think about consequences BEFORE they happen so that you snare or root mobs or do whatever you need to do to make sure nothing ends up hitting you in the face.

5) The length of the fights is significant too, not just because it makes the battle itself very tactical, but because it commits you. I noticed in other games that you do a dungeon, you start fighting some roamer mob, and another roamer mob shows up at the same time, nobody really gives a shit. All that happens is that people spam their 1,2,3,4,4,4,4,4,4 routine a bit faster and the first mob dies several seconds later. Then they can kill the second one. EQ's not like that, especially in the higher levels as mobs get more HP. When a big bad mob attacks, or a few of them, you can be locked in to that fight for a minute or more. Maybe you don't have a wizard, or maybe the wiz is low on mana from a previous fight or something, the reality is that you have 3 or 4 mobs to kill and it's going to take you a good 3 or 4 minutes to kill them. And there is no other option, you have to kill them or you are all dead. Now say another 2 or 3 mobs are wandering nearby, if those join the fight, you are locked in to maybe several minutes of constant fighting and you probably just don't have the mana to fight that long. So for this reason, groups tend to huddle very tight in the corners, scared shitless of being attacked. You don't just go charging through a dungeon like a bunch of modern MMO'ers, you hide in the corner and think about self preservation. Then one person goes and looks for mobs to bring to the group, but only after they have memorized patrol routes to make sure they only come back with a manageable amount and no chance of extras.

6) Like I mentioned, there are no over powered abilities in EQ. In Vanguard there are guaranteed taunts, there are ways for spell casters to recover ALL their mana mid fight.... there are potions and all kinds of other noob shit that mean that you really have very little to fear. You have none of that in EQ, but there are some 'ok' spells and abilities and they become vitally important, especially to a skilled player. For example the Root spell locks something in place, but if you cast nukes on it the root will break, and if the mob is a spell caster, then it will do more harm than good because the mob will just stand there and nuke the shit out of everyone. But in the right hands it can save a battle. For example all hell breaks loose (which happens often), the tank is fighting 3 mobs at once and struggling to hold aggro on all of them. The healer is frantically trying to keep the tank alive. The dps are desperately trying to kill one of those so that it's 2 instead of 3. And the crowd control has his hands full with a 4th and maybe 5th mob. It's scary but you might just pull this off. Now say a 6th mob shows up, that could easily turn the tables and make you all die. But a clever dps might think fast, nuke the new mob in the face and make it chase him, then run away from the group and then root the mob in place. Then he can return to the fight and continue as before. The group will still need to handle the 6th mob eventually but at least for now it's not doing any harm. Fear works in a similar way, but in a dungeon it's too dangerous.

7) Ok last one. This is an extension of point number 2. The game was just fucking hard. For example, in modern games when an extra mob shows up, the crowd control turns it in to a sheep, and job done, ez. In EQ, there were only a couple of classes who could do crowd control and it was an artform. For a start, the mez spell tended to get resisted a LOT, so often the caster would have to cast a magic resistance debuff on the mob first. But this spell REALLY annoyed mobs and caused them to attack the extremely squishy crowd control guy. So first he had to stun the mob, then magic resist debuff it, and then finally do the mez spell. But even now, the mez spell doesn't change the mob in to anything or cause it to lay down or anything, it just makes the mob stop still. The mez is also broken by any damage at all, so if someone else in the group doesn't notice that a mob got mezzed, and then hits it... the mob will wake up and go straight for the squishy guy who mezzed it and likely kill him. So not only does the crowd control have a tough job, but everyone in the group needs to be constantly aware of what is going on around them. If you accidentally do an AoE or something and you wake up a mezzed mob, it can easily wipe the entire group. It happens a lot. Not only that but even spells cast before you mez the mob, can wake it up. So if you cast a DoT on something and then it gets mezzed, the dot will wake it up right away. So mezzers need to be very carefully which mobs they mez, and dps classes need to be careful not to do any DoTs on any mobs that might end up needing to be crowd controlled.



There is even more than this but I'll leave it there or nobody will read this post. Also bear in mind that there is no way of knowing ANY of this stuff. There was no tooltips in EQ, even spells didn't tell you what they did etc. There are also NO addons, so there is no aggro meter, dps meter, or any other ez mode shit like that. People learned all this stuff by going to a dungeon in a group and everyone dies horribly. They tried to work out what happened and they will have learned one of these things. These catastrophes happened again and again and again, and that was just part of EQ. Only after a long time and massive perseverance did people learn all these things for themselves. In other games it's all about getting experience to level up your character, but in EQ, the players themselves earned very important experience by playing the game too. You could give the same level 50 character to a newbie and to someone who had made it to 50 the hard way, and the difference between the two players would be gigantic.