Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Good job contributing to the problem geniuses.

If you have no position on the topic(s) at hand then don"t weigh in, and if you do, jump off the vague fence you"re striding and explain yourself. Faggots.

Ukerric said:

Why do I suddendly have a flashback of Item magic with Mattekar Robes (if you don"t know what I"m talking about... that"s only for Asheron"s Call old timers)

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Matty robes weren"t especially good, they were just favorites because they were the easiest thing to bane back when the hardest-hitting thing in game was the tuskers. But let"s see... aa/a/a/ba/u/a/u 40 AL?

wru~?

Also, every design argument will continue endlessly and circuitously because no two people share the same definition of enjoyable. I find the DIKU archetype very enjoyable and loathe FPS, another person doesn"t. We could squabble in a spite-filled argument for as long as we cared to. Until we got bored, and the topic"s post count drops. Until bored again some afternoon, it starts up again.

Just like the forum section that already exists.

Gecko said:

I think there should be positives and negatives for bringing different classes. Choices and fun should weigh more than making things so vanilla the goal is just to get any 25 with 16 DPS, 6 healers, and 3 tanks of any variety.

Really, what they are talking about is what EQ2 did at release. They should check out how that worked out before making that change.

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There would be positives and negatives, but the negative would never be "we can"t do this" as long as the group was at least somewhat diverse (not saying a group of all Rogues or whatever should be able to do all content). For example, if you have a Monk tank he"s probably going to be playing more defensively than otherwise, and your Bard or other support classes are going to be focusing on buffs that play to his strengths or shore up his weaknesses. Or maybe you"ve got a Necromancer healing, which is a little slower than a Cleric, your tank will want to play very defensively as well instead of being able to do more DPS like he might with a Cleric. Things like that are all you need really to keep things interesting, and if designed properly people wont feel like they always need a specific set-up.

I don"t see the parallel between that and EQ2"s class design. EQ2 classes are a nightmare due to the way they created good/evil versions of most of them.

I"m talking having fewer classes, and specs NOT changing your class role. EQ2 has what, 24 classes? If you count specs, WoW has 30? This creates a huge balance issue when it comes to class desirability. The game I"m armchair designing only has 12 classes, each able to perform two roles at the same time without respeccing, they merely sacrifice a little performance from one to maintain the highest ability of the other. I think it"d work out perfectly.

Eh, as much as I advocate removing healing in the traditional sense (I believe it would make far more sense for support characters to be designed around preventing damage, not restoring players after it"s done)....it wouldn"t change much in terms of game mechanics.

We"d be trading Brutallis for Reliquery Phase 1. Instead of the static enrage timer we"d have a roaming auto-fail timer when you run out of guys to soak up damage.

All games since the dawn of good guys vs. bad guys rotate around three simple constants.

1) Prevent bad guy from doing bad shit
2) If that fails, don"t get hurt by the bad shit
3) If both of those fail, heal the bad shit

You can change how much you focus on these, but that"s really all there is to it.

I always thought healing could be made a bit more interesting if healers had to respond to specific circumstances and injuries instead of just managing whack-a-mole mods while trying to avoid AoEs. For instance, a shaman could use a "Flame Spirit" to cause fire damage or cauterize bleed effects on a player. A priest could "Clear Mind" to grant a combat bonus or counteract a head injury. A druid might use a regeneration spell to restore a lost limb or flesh.

Obviously a game like that would be a bit more about decision making and people managing abilities and injuries during combat. At any rate nothing currently on the MMO scene could support such a thing without drastic overhaul, but I think healing could be more interesting without the need for throwing more AoE damage or merely making healers do more dps and heal less.

Palum said:

I always thought healing could be made a bit more interesting if healers had to respond to specific circumstances and injuries instead of just managing whack-a-mole mods while trying to avoid AoEs. For instance, a shaman could use a "Flame Spirit" to cause fire damage or cauterize bleed effects on a player. A priest could "Clear Mind" to grant a combat bonus or counteract a head injury. A druid might use a regeneration spell to restore a lost limb or flesh.

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That"s just the same thing with a different skin. You already have various heals to use for different needs in WoW (well, sort of, I guess that could be debated for classes like Paladin and Shaman... but they SHOULD). Also, while what you"re describing is an attempt at different, you have to ask, is that really fun? It sounds annoying to me.

I think instead of trying to reinvent healing, something could be done to simply make it more fun by looking at the mechanics behind the classes. Make all of the spells interesting and fun and try to get away from simple "Heals for X health" spells. Chain Heal is cool because it"s good on a single target but also has a chance to heal others. I think stuff like that should be played around with and applied to nearly every healing spell. Classes like the VG Blood Mage are another good way to go, but there are people who prefer to just sit back and heal, so I wouldn"t make all healers combat oriented. Still, things could be done to make them more interesting too.

Grave said:

That"s just the same thing with a different skin. You already have various heals to use for different needs in WoW (well, sort of, I guess that could be debated for classes like Paladin and Shaman... but they SHOULD). Also, while what you"re describing is an attempt at different, you have to ask, is that really fun? It sounds annoying to me.

I think instead of trying to reinvent healing, something could be done to simply make it more fun by looking at the mechanics behind the classes. Make all of the spells interesting and fun and try to get away from simple "Heals for X health" spells. Chain Heal is cool because it"s good on a single target but also has a chance to heal others. I think stuff like that should be played around with and applied to nearly every healing spell. Classes like the VG Blood Mage are another good way to go, but there are people who prefer to just sit back and heal, so I wouldn"t make all healers combat oriented. Still, things could be done to make them more interesting too.

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The people who want to sit back and heal can fuck themselves, IMHO. There should ALWAYS be something to manage besides mana vs health bars. Good healer shouldn"t be "spam the person taking the highest dps!"..Good healer should be someone managing something, be it combat vs healing, debuffs vs healing, their life vs healing, etc..

Grave said:

That"s just the same thing with a different skin. You already have various heals to use for different needs in WoW (well, sort of, I guess that could be debated for classes like Paladin and Shaman... but they SHOULD). Also, while what you"re describing is an attempt at different, you have to ask, is that really fun? It sounds annoying to me.

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I said it wouldn"t work in today"s MMOs. I imagine a more fluid combat system with large battles and people having to react to situations which aren"t scripted, like your "tank" losing his shield arm because he didn"t block an attack or someone getting lit on fire by flaming debris falling from the sky. Obviously many people still enjoy stabbing giant-things in the ankle 187,000 times for some reason so it will probably be awhile before we see any real innovation in the genre that doesn"t turn into a failing niche title.

For those of you in favor of tanking but not of healing, what is it about the whack-a-mole game of healing health bars that is so terrible compared to the build-up-threat game of watching threat meters?

Not meant to be pedantic, just trying to instill creativity to theft from one and add to the other.

Palum said:

I always thought healing could be made a bit more interesting if healers had to respond to specific circumstances and injuries

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You mean like cure disease, cure poison and dispel magic?

It"s gonna be whack-a-mole regardless.

Your best bet is to just move away from healing altogether. The best heals are the ones you don"t have to manage/babysit. You want to know my favorite heal as a paladin? Judgement of Light. I cast it once, it heals the entire raid for 20 seconds, done. I can do other shit while it works it"s magic.

I don"t have to spam the MT with a cancel-cast macro, I don"t have to keep my eyes glued to 25 little squares on my screen. I can play the fucking game.

So let"s roll with that instead eh? How about I drop a barrier somewhere on the battlefield and anybody standing between it and the mob takes less damage for the remainder of the fight or unless I move it? I cast a buff on the MT that absorbs 20% of the damage he takes until i cancel it or cast it on somebody else.

Anyways...

There"s your basis for a non-healing game as well. Just a bunch of "absorbs 20% of damge" buffs and the like for your support-classes. Nearly all positional. Fire and forget and unless you have to change where your buffs or who your buffs are placed on you spend the rest of the fight dodging void zones and killing the mob.

I don"t see why healing has to be removed altogether to achieve what you"re looking for there Zehn. You"d be one of the people that would want to roll the combat-oriented healer who heals by DPSing or whatever without having to directly manage the heals much. One class could even have the Wards you bring up tied in with that, like the EQ2 Mystic. But why get rid of targeted heals when some people enjoy healing like that?

Because some people also enjoy grinding AA"s for 8 hours a day to get a 1% bump in dps. Why? Because fuck those people. That"s why.

Alternative post:

Because that would defeat the point? If you"re looking to remove targeted heals, which was the point of my post....you can"t achieve removing target heals by leaving targeted heals in.

Fuck healing classes. They need to go. I was one of the first to post that they need to go away a couple weeks ago and basically got laughed at. MMO"s need to do what Diablo did and let people take care of their own healing. I"m sick of every mmo relying on a class that few people like to play and it needs to change.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Because that would defeat the point? If you"re looking to remove targeted heals, which was the point of my post....you can"t achieve removing target heals by leaving targeted heals in.

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I get that was the point of your post, but I"m simply curious as to why you and others think moving away from healing is at all necessary.

The only people advocating it here seem to be the people thatpersonallydo not like healing in the traditional sense. You fit this description perfectly based on what you said in your post, you don"t want to think about healing while you do it and want to do other things. The perfect solution to this is to give you a class that heals while DPSing or tanking. It makes no sense to attack a core element of MMOs just because certain people don"t like to do it when it"s just as easy (easier, really) to simply offer them an alternative to achieving the same goal.

Edit:

Araxen said:

Fuck healing classes. They need to go. I was one of the first to post that they need to go away a couple weeks ago and basically got laughed at. MMO"s need to do what Diablo did and let people take care of their own healing. I"m sick of every mmo relying on a class that few people like to play and it needs to change.

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Fewer people like to play them because usually the mechanics are not fun and there is often less glory involved in healing than there is tanking or dpsing. If you hybridize the classes more this becomes less of a problem. What if Holy Paladins in WoW healed by DPSing like Ret, procing crazy group heals and rune-like damage absorbing buffs? Maybe some cool extra healing effects when they crit with an offensive attack? You"d have a lot more people playing healing Paladins then, without the need to restructure the entire game because you removed healing altogether.

I think the best way to do healing is like this.. make healers DPS classes and make it so their heals are group wide. As they do damage they also heal their groups. This way you can concentrate on fighting a mob while at the same time healing your group. The more damage you do the more your group gets healed.

Camerous said:

I think the best way to do healing is like this.. make healers DPS classes and make it so their heals are group wide. As they do damage they also heal their groups. This way you can concentrate on fighting a mob while at the same time healing your group. The more damage you do the more your group gets healed.

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lol. Grats on skipping like the past 2 pages.

But yes.

ToeMissile said:

Anyone that hasn"t, should get the Vanguard trial just to play a Bloodmage.
Vanguard - Trial Download

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Which is (part of) what I was getting at before I had two pages of people yelling at me for unoriginal discussion (yet apparently suggesting we remove healers is perfectly ok).