tad10
Elisha Dushku
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Wrong as usual. I most enjoyed being a non OP monk. If people preferred gmode everyone would be asking to be a hybrid and the ability to solo to cap.
Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO
- Thread starter gogojira_sl
- Start date
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Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Hey stop telling me what to do!!
Ha I'm spreading the word. They are still paying gamers. Just saw a lot of misinformation so figured I'd post Brads replay from here in regards to his past. But yea that site sucks. I've been wanted for trolling...
I guess it depends on what patch/exspansion those Eq wizzys were on, at some times they were crazy OP.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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@Flip. You are confusing the ability to heal oneself while dpsing with OP (a feature of the ot/dt targeting system) VG classes were asymmetric and the healers were much better soloers. The only truly OP class in VG was the DK after he got the AoE lifesteal. Now that shit was ridiculous.
Quaid
Trump's Staff
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It's no use. 99% of those mouth breathers started playing MMOs when WotLK came out.
Lithose
Buzzfeed Editor
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I think any raid caps are a poor choice. Design targets around a certain amount of people, and more importantly, design loot drops to supply that many people. If raids want to bring more, that's fine, but they get less loot per person--and since loot is rare, that loss should be a significant sting. But that's the trade off for lowering difficulty of the encounter--and that's what zerging does, lower the difficulty but without the obtuse need to recolor loot and change the encounter to retard status. (Instead, you just get less of it.)
The main reason I like systems like this though, is that they put more emphasis on strategic or big picture play. In other words, the difficulty usually falls on guild management, not on individual players. Guild officers need to decide what's a good "difficult vs size" for their players skill. Guild officers/leaders need to decide how they should recruit different classes to fit into their strategy. And the entire meta game should be set up to make those choices meaningful. A raid with groups composed or Rogues/Paladins/Chanters/Bards (Ect) should play completely differently from a raid composed of other class--buffs interacting should change based on the chains they form in groups. Forming a raid should be like forming a deck in a TCG card game. Recruiting players should be like searching for a special card to make your strategy work.
Why? Because again, all this difficulty falls on guild leadership, and people who are naturally more prone to devote more time and have a better understanding of the game. It increases the difficulty of the whole game, without putting the brunt of it on the individual difficulty the players experience. So the pot head who can come twice a week? Well, that's fine, because we don't have caps, and the management has set the raid up in such a way that he can only be a help. And he's not a hindrance if he misses certain encounters, because we didn't have to be so stringent on recruiting, so I can have two pot heads to fill one slot...Why? Because what's important is the LEADERSHIP and the "core group" of players knows the strategy, not the more casual person on the ground (They just need to know their job).
MMO's lost a lot of this "big picture" difficulty when they whittled everything down to pattern replication. And that felt like a bad move, because it pushed the difficulty on the lowest common denominator of every guild--how sane is it to simply expect the soccer mom who plays twice a week will be able to memorize an encounter if she can't make every raid? It's not sane, at all, especially when you have to shove all the difficulty into pattern recreation and you end up with 300 variable fights that would tax even skilled players to memorize. When that happens, what it ends up requiring that you have a difficulty shift downward to accommodate her, which, if your guild is trying a higher difficulty, means she can't come and has to find a guild which does the lower difficulty and eventually it means you need a "dumb switch", ala WOW LFR.
But if these decisions were left up to the players? Then management in a guild could build their strategies around perhaps having people like that. She could be an addition of DPS that hangs in the back, or someone that's brought to finish a buff chain, that will greatly help the more skilled players, without requiring her to do much. I could instead use the higher attendence players to do the heavy lifting. Since encounters are only designed with a set amount in mind--the "extra" or "support" players, like the soccer mom/pot head would be there to pad strategies, not key players in and of themselves--but the important part would be that they would be with their friends, DESPITE the difference in skill level. They would be defeating encounters WITHOUT the need to move to a different subset of players.
Anyway, long and short is that guilds should be able to design the way they play in the world, as much as the designers do. We've kind of lost that grand/strategic view of the world. It was another causality of the "lobby-->Game Room" evolution. And I'm not saying that evolution was bad. I, unlike most people, think WoW is a great game. But I think it would be neat if someone really explored the other direction--went on the road that was not traveled. Really explored making the "world" better, instead of the "game" (I don't think anyone is going to make a better game than Blizzard--but a more interesting world? Maybe.)
The main reason I like systems like this though, is that they put more emphasis on strategic or big picture play. In other words, the difficulty usually falls on guild management, not on individual players. Guild officers need to decide what's a good "difficult vs size" for their players skill. Guild officers/leaders need to decide how they should recruit different classes to fit into their strategy. And the entire meta game should be set up to make those choices meaningful. A raid with groups composed or Rogues/Paladins/Chanters/Bards (Ect) should play completely differently from a raid composed of other class--buffs interacting should change based on the chains they form in groups. Forming a raid should be like forming a deck in a TCG card game. Recruiting players should be like searching for a special card to make your strategy work.
Why? Because again, all this difficulty falls on guild leadership, and people who are naturally more prone to devote more time and have a better understanding of the game. It increases the difficulty of the whole game, without putting the brunt of it on the individual difficulty the players experience. So the pot head who can come twice a week? Well, that's fine, because we don't have caps, and the management has set the raid up in such a way that he can only be a help. And he's not a hindrance if he misses certain encounters, because we didn't have to be so stringent on recruiting, so I can have two pot heads to fill one slot...Why? Because what's important is the LEADERSHIP and the "core group" of players knows the strategy, not the more casual person on the ground (They just need to know their job).
MMO's lost a lot of this "big picture" difficulty when they whittled everything down to pattern replication. And that felt like a bad move, because it pushed the difficulty on the lowest common denominator of every guild--how sane is it to simply expect the soccer mom who plays twice a week will be able to memorize an encounter if she can't make every raid? It's not sane, at all, especially when you have to shove all the difficulty into pattern recreation and you end up with 300 variable fights that would tax even skilled players to memorize. When that happens, what it ends up requiring that you have a difficulty shift downward to accommodate her, which, if your guild is trying a higher difficulty, means she can't come and has to find a guild which does the lower difficulty and eventually it means you need a "dumb switch", ala WOW LFR.
But if these decisions were left up to the players? Then management in a guild could build their strategies around perhaps having people like that. She could be an addition of DPS that hangs in the back, or someone that's brought to finish a buff chain, that will greatly help the more skilled players, without requiring her to do much. I could instead use the higher attendence players to do the heavy lifting. Since encounters are only designed with a set amount in mind--the "extra" or "support" players, like the soccer mom/pot head would be there to pad strategies, not key players in and of themselves--but the important part would be that they would be with their friends, DESPITE the difference in skill level. They would be defeating encounters WITHOUT the need to move to a different subset of players.
Anyway, long and short is that guilds should be able to design the way they play in the world, as much as the designers do. We've kind of lost that grand/strategic view of the world. It was another causality of the "lobby-->Game Room" evolution. And I'm not saying that evolution was bad. I, unlike most people, think WoW is a great game. But I think it would be neat if someone really explored the other direction--went on the road that was not traveled. Really explored making the "world" better, instead of the "game" (I don't think anyone is going to make a better game than Blizzard--but a more interesting world? Maybe.)
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Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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tad10
Elisha Dushku
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Money is money and kickstarters need all the press they can get.
@lithose great post. How do you feel about contested raids?
Quaid
Trump's Staff
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Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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We are lucky enough to have Brad posting here. His reply to me was pretty insightful and once I saw that thread going mouth breather I figured I would pimp hand it with his post. I think the thread took a turn for the better.. I also took time to call the CoS folks scammers ha
So I might buy eql beta...but wish this ks would launch first.. Wonder if launching before eql alpha would help him in anyway?
So I might buy eql beta...but wish this ks would launch first.. Wonder if launching before eql alpha would help him in anyway?
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
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Quaid
Trump's Staff
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Iirc disc could solo well but had mediocre dps and second rate healing... They were super fun though.
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Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Going after VG for OP classes isn't really fair.. That game never had the subs to meet its design.. You can't nerf classes that could bring in new players and also complete groups in several ways. Had VG not had low pop issues those classes may of gotten the stick.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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lol. My bad. Realistically there aren't many good mmo discussion boards. I never cared for SA and penny arcade is run by Nazis.
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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Disciples were dps op at the end of beta but got nerfed 3-4 weeks into live as did monks and bards. But always Terrible buffers.
popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
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My favorite class ever was blood mage, and it's somewhat comical to me that you say it's OP because when I rolled a blood mage early in launch I literally had people laughing at me. I died more on my BMG than probably all other characters in all other mmorpgs I'd ever played combined, because that was the trade-off of the class. I spent a lot of time soloing when I'd be actively rejected from groups, being told BMG wasn't a 'real' healer. People would get pissed when I rolled on 'caster' gear not understanding how BMGs could be played as offensive, not defensive healing. People would freak out at all the hp dancing up and down and actually STOP groups to look for a 'real' healer. People would argue the class needed a ton of fixes because it was shit, all while calling me a liar when I posted videos of myself soloing 4 dots (back before gear inflation so it was actually hard and took timing and skill) that made other people declare the class overpowered.
Sure, years later when the average person realized a really good player could make the BMG look easy and over powered everyone declared the class flavor of the month despite that same average player jumping on the bandwagon and being complete shit at playing the class and unable to figure out exactly how or why they thought it was OP.
I guess I'm okay with classes that good players make seem overpowered, if the shit players make it seem like the shittiest class ever. I'm okay with classes that bad or ignorant players will whine are over powered, when you have just as many people claiming the class is under powered. It means there is a lot of variation in how a class is played, and to what level of ability on the part of the player.
The complexity of some Vanguard classes was cool in that way. It wasn't so cut and dry, good or bad, op or shit, because the classes were complex, and good in some situations while bad in others, etc, like class balance should be. If it's as easy and black-and-white as 'that class is op' or 'that class is best' then the devs have done something wrong and need to throw away their cookie cutters.
popsicledeath
Potato del Grande
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