Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Nola_sl said:

I don't understand why devs just can't scale an encounter to how many people in your raid. Unless there is some kind of programming issues that won't allow it. Wasn't City of Heroes like that?

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I think the problem with this always gets to be that you're essentially having to balance a raid around a variable. Is having 40 people on your raid significantly harder than having 20? What's the largest number of people you can have before it bumps up to the next difficulty? People would just find out what number of people makes raids the easiest and keep their numbers to that. It didn't really matter as much in City of Heroes since there really wasn't much in the ways of loot.

I'd say they could increase the quality of loot you got if you had more people (and if they went a way that made more people = harder raid), but I don't think many of the vocal MMO players would be receptive to that idea.

Sutekh_sl said:

The whole one person fucking up and the entire raid wipes concept is garbage. All it does is make you hate the people you're with. The most angst and hatred I've ever had for people were on fights like that. Oh what's that? Your brain dead shaman got ghost form on Gorefiend fight? gg wipe it. Some fuck nut walked in to a skull on M'uru and it one shot the raid? Wipe.

The randomization aspects of fights can be good, if they're beatable when randomized still, unlike in WoW where if you got bad luck on a combo you just instantly wipe and that's that. Either way, it seems like the game is gearing heavily towards pvpers, which will be reason alone for me to play if it isn't a gigantic failure like Guildwars2.

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Truth.

Sean_sl said:

Also amplify drama, nonsense, and hate by a few orders of magnitude if there are females involved.

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That's the god damned truth.

Mippo, for example.

Gaping vag.

Sean_sl said:

You're kidding, right? Those shit bags that we had to carry were the absolute worst people in the guild to be around. You must have raided in an entirely different universe, because 99% of the bads and warm bodies that I knew were absolutely obnoxious people that most good players loathed because they had to carry their dead weight.

40 man raids are either: A) A joke, because they let you carry a lot of terribles or B) A nightmare, because fielding 40 good players in a single guild is nearly impossible.

You end up with 60-100 people rosters of cliques within cliques that cannot stand each other and tons of retarded drama. Also amplify drama, nonsense, and hate by a few orders of magnitude if there are females involved.

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So fucking true. The only thing a 40man raid did was test your ability in logistics, advertising/recruiting for members, and patience. None of which were actual tests of in-game ability, or fight mechanics, etc.

40 man raiding also led to the constant revolving door for the mid to low level raiders, where if things went slightly askew, their most dedicated players ended up drifting into the servers big boy guilds to get their shit. Of course, those same drifters would be the dedicated deadweight who were functionally retarded, yet showed up every night at 7pm, so you put up with their inability to cycle 4 horsemen debuffs. Guilds just had a core of like 10-15 people, and the rest were a constant carousel of idiocy, who'd come when things were going well, and would magically burn out at the slightest whiff of difficulty.

In the 40 man days, I was in T2 raiding guild, and we had an old man with one arm that raided with us on a rogue, it was good night if he out dpsed the tanks. But since he was disabled and never left the house he was a farming monster, he would always bring tons of consumables to the raid for everyone, always had great old man stories. Though when TBC hit and the raid slots got cut down by 15 he found it harder and harder to find a slot to raid in. Had a grandmother too that raided with us on priest, very shitty healer, but would bake cookies and send to people in the guild too.

You did it all for the cookie?

Some of the best, best as in most capable of completing the raid, guilds I've been in it's all trash talk and f-bombs. People didn't care about each other so much as to finish the content.

I like my current guild. We talk about our morning commutes and other old people stuff. And we don't do very well at raiding...

What was the question?

They can add all the hardcore raids they want, entirely different encounters/zones for 20/40 and open world raiding too. Throw that in with 4 versions of PVP, apparently deep and specialized crafting, 4 different paths they want to provide content for, easy and hard dungeon grouping, Events and public meta quests in the open world and the claim to provide 'more solo content and solo dungeons' because that playerbase is huge and usually neglected.

So really, my only question is where do they get the time/money to do all that, AND keep it going at a good pace after release. It sounds too good to be true, and usually with pre-release hpy that translate to a "play for 6 weeks" fail.

They'd cater to the biggest audiences after launch. Whichever features see the most use will get the most content. But hey common sense isn't so common any more.

So a content patch with a new 20 player raid, a 5-corridor group instance and a rep you can grind through dailies for a mount in a different color once or twice a year. The other features abandoned and never heard from again. Gotcha, lowering expectations now is better then after release.

yeah. alot of that shit mentioned is why I hate rage timers, and shit.
Later WoW's 1 mistake wipes, or bleeding edge consumables/optimum damage spec required is complete horseshit.

One of the best fights in wow, was Azurgoes. Mechanics were not that super hard. he would pull you in, drop some aoe. And if you died, and ran back, would get hit with a freeze.
He also had a ton of hp, and didn't hit that hard. He could in theory by duoed, by a tank+healer.. Although, would take a very long time. But this was ideal. Because of that, you could tag him as soon as you saw him, call for your guild to come. Kite him across half the zone, if you weren't a tank/healer combo. Holding tag, till friends showed up. When they did, you killed him, still fairly slow, due to good hp base. the minimum need of tank and 1 healer, allowed the rest of your raid/party to dps him, and/or fend off attackers. And this is why he was the best. You could have a 20-40 man raid. 2 people tanking/healing. 3 dpsing, and 20 people pvping. Cthun also had alot of leeway, after its nerf. you could have 3-5 people die and still beat him. More dynamic fights like that, are way more fun. Recovering from a mistake, is way more fun then instant wipe, and having to start over. (or worse, not instant wipe, but having slow dps and falling to meet an enrage timer)

Kazzak and the green dragons were so tight in the requirements. it was basically. dps burn and kill before any pvp happens. or, start the attack, then GW2 style get 40 people charging you, and instantly wiping your raid, because 1 instant arcane power nuke on your tank in addition to the dragons attack was a dead tank, and loose dragon.

They're an MMO company, they are aware their work is extremely easy until launch, then they have to pick up their shit and really start working on the game. I think they're aware of what they are doing. Of course, some content may come out slower than others but here's to hoping they can release enough content to hold some people off until the next patch.

There's no real way to tell. We can only just sit and hope.

I hope the 40 man raids are tuned where the more skilled players can carry quite a few casuals and not so skilled players. You guys might make fun of timmy, but timmy is a really cool guy and fun to talk to. I want timmy back in guilds.

Abefroman_sl said:

I hope the 40 man raids are tuned where the more skilled players can carry quite a few casuals and not so skilled players. You guys might make fun of timmy, but timmy is a really cool guy and fun to talk to. I want timmy back in guilds.

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yeah, or at the same time. hey we only have 37 online. fuck it lets do it anyway. fine tuned for 40 of the specific classes, was shitty.

I liked 40 man raids once I didn't have to help organize anything, lmfao. It's a nice little atmosphere, or at least it was in my case.

With the Telegraph system there's literally actual visual cues that you deal with the entire game.. so I'm sure 40mans won't be as bad as 23 retards standing in fire anymore. Although there still will be those select few special ed cases.

xzi_sl said:

I liked 40 man raids once I didn't have to help organize anything, lmfao. It's a nice little atmosphere, or at least it was in my case.

With the Telegraph system there's literally actual visual cues that you deal with the entire game.. so I'm sure 40mans won't be as bad as 23 retards standing in fire anymore. Although there still will be those select few special ed cases.

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haha yeah. I wonder how much being an officer/gm has changed my perception of raid design.

It really depends on how they plan on scripting the raids. In the last 6 years or so we've seen raids become more and more finely tuned. You need 1000 Raid DPS to win and if you have 999 you auto-lose to enrage. If Jimmy dies or misses a cue, you lose. If timmy misses an interrupt, you might as well wipe.

It's hard to balance fun with difficulty but it's not impossible. A hard raid encounter doesn't have to be defined by how flawless you are. There are a lot of different things you can do if you just use your imagination and have a bit of development help behind just scripting encounters. Here are a few examples:

A)Timed events with tiered rewards- Raid Boss A (or Encounter A, doesn't have to be a single boss) has 10 phases and you have 10 minutes to complete all of them. If you wipe on phase 1, 2, 3 you get nothing. If you wipe on p4 you get loot from table A. p5 on table A+B, p6 on table A+B+C. Essentially the higher you go, the more loot you get.

B)Multiple group gauntlets- This could be timed or not, but essentially you break your raid down into individual groups. Could be 4 groups of 10 or 8 groups of 5, it doesn't matter. Build a portion of the raid so that it splits off into four different sections. It could be simple passageways, or bigger areas, or "dimensions" you have to enter and win. Doesn't matter. Each group needs to fight their way to the end. Each group needs to be successful in order to continue on. Here's one example.

You enter a large throne room and the princess is locked up by four energy chains. By the base of each chain is a portal to an instanced area that acts as a pocket of whatever (insert lore here) where the chain is bound. It's a 40 man raid so you can take up to 15 people into each instance, but it's geared for 10. Instance one is a "Jungle" that you have to fight through waves of mobs to get to the end where the Jungle King is protecting the chain's energy source. Think about the temple sequence in that's in ZulFurrack in WOW.

Instance two consists of jumping puzzles and platforms. Get to the top, unlock the chain. You can design it so you need 10 people to complete it, where 9 people need to channel certain portions of the puzzle to unlock the final piece.

Instance three can be "arena" style boss fights. Like 10 people need to defeat the previous 9 bosses in the instance in miniature form. Instance four can be some other puzzle or gauntlet like event.

Oh ho ho, then you can do all sorts of things with this. If group A finishes with one instance, they can split up and help out other groups. Or you can make all of these timed, and if you beat the time you get extra rewards.

Then once the chains are complete you unlock Bowser and you have to beat him to save the princess.

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There are a lot of other ideas out there for raid/dungeon design that I think could be hilariously fun. You can make a dungeon with a ton of trash, but trash that dies really fast like in DDO/Neverwinter and just toss waves of it at groups and if you beat them all in a certain time or beat them without dying you can unlock different mini bosses. Raids need more minibosses anyway and less shitty boring trash.

Essentially more GW2 like encounters in place of trash pulls.

You can also incorporate Zelda like dungeons where your raid needs to split up and jump around to unlock different portions of the map. Get keys to unlock doors. Limit certain areas to X amount of people. Use the housing interface that Wildstar seems to have, to build things within the raid to make platforms to jump up to certain areas. You can make boss encounters have different phases that you unlock. So if a boss has 4 phases and you wipe on phase 3, you don't start all over again, but you start on phase 3 again. Then put a counter on it, so if you fail 3 times on phase 3 you go back down to 2. This way you can design really long encounters that are fun, but not force groups to re-do each one every single time you make a mistake.

There is a ton of stuff you can do outside of just having boss mechanics and hallways of trash mobs. Developers just need to create tools that allow this sort of thing. Wildstar SEEMS to have the right attitude of creating challenge and not caring if everyone can't beat the dungeon.

Lang rant sorry, but I could play these DIKU games and the raid game if devs just made dungeons more fun. How many times have you played through a Zelda dungeon and only have fun at the boss? Those fucking dungeons were entertaining from beginning to end. There is no real need to innovate combat/classes as much as innovating the content to not be retarded.

edit to add:
As others have mentioned how enrage timers suck. They do, and it's a retarded encounter. That's why you have "timed" events. If you defeat an encounter in the designed amount of time, then you get Reward tier A, if you took an hour to beat it, then you get Reward Tier B. Of course you should keep the enrage timers on some encounters. Some encounters should be difficult and you should be forced to beat it a certain way, but EVERY encounter doesn't have to have one.

40 man raids. The "healer group" channel and then the "special ops" group channels in voice chat per encounter (Brood Lord) where the one group talks shit about all the other groups. It promoted effort and intercompetition. Loved when everyone would collapse back into the main channel after not being told to do so to have it out royal rumble style finger pointing.