/assist

Hello. Relatively new to the game here, but MMO player of many years.

First, really enjoying your game. Thank you for it.

Second. I'm searching the wiki and forums for a way to better participate in the group environment. Above all other aspects of a MMO, grouping to complete a dungeon is my favorite. After tagging along in a group last night, that I was surely under geared and under leveled for, I found myself (and my group) struggling to properly assist the tank and target to heal him / her. Somethings I noticed are listed below.

• Healing: How do you quickly target group members for healing? Tried clicking the group / party GUI but that seems not to work. Rest of the party was 50 / 50 on this, so maybe it's a bug. I found F1, F2, etc to work. Indecently, right clicking party member names allowed some interaction. Left clicking did not.
• Group Window: I did not see a way to resize it. This would help a bit with all aspects. Targeting to heal (if left click to target worked), and right clicking to assist. But to be honest, the party window was just to small. I expected to be able to drag the edges like other windows, but that dd not seem to work.
• Assist: What's your preferred method? Right clicking the party window seems inefficient.
• Macros: This applies to all above. I Googled for this, and all I got was "you will be banned" on other websites. I want to be clear, I'm talking EQ style /assist macros. /assist, /target for example. Not fully automating anything. Just wanting to make grouping easier to manage.

Again, I really like this game. I know it's in alpha and if "That's just how it is" is the answer, that's fine. But right now the grouping environment seems a bit of a mess. Curious of others thoughts.

Thank you,

Good question. I’ll be curious to see what the response is as this seems to be an issue with almost all games.

Preface I go not spent a tremendous amount of time in parties however when I do I nearly always play support/ White Mage. Having said that perhaps it is because of my experiences with ff11/ff14 but I always found the F1-ect. keys the easiest way to target the party members in need.

perhaps an option in PG to select key bindings for either next party member and or specific party slots 1-6 ect.

I'm pretty sure left clicking the name in the party window works. It does lack solid, visible feedback that it did work, and that you are targeting your chosen ally. Your targeting orb might switch to them, and you will spin to face them and move towards them to cast, and their hit box might be up around them. But those indicators require looking away from the party window and that is kind of the last thing you want to do. Some sort of highlight or indicator in the party window would be nice, like a drop shadow or a bullet point for the active.

It is easier to notice that your abilities are working at higher levels, when adding back a couple of hundred HP to someone with 500 HP it easier to notice that you did that. Still there is confusion most of the time, because you don't know for sure that you are the one that did the heal. They could have healed themselves, got a combat refresh or been healed by someone else. If the stat bars filled up with white for a second if someone else did the repair, and filled up with some other color to indicate you did it that would give extra feedback to the players. But battle is confusing and not sure if any amount of feedback would remove that confusion.

Assist? Some game mechanic from some other game? There are so many ways that you can assist an Ally I don't see how one right click could know what to do. First Aid, Reconstruct, Revitalize, Pep Talk, Healing Injection, Lend Grace, Mud Bath, Rally, Moment of Resolve, and probably plenty more. Even if you made it easy and simple said Use Major Healing ability on Right Click of Party Member name there still be the question of which if you had one Major Heal on both ability bars. If it was automated and controllable, it would require it's own GUI. If it was automated but preset, then people would want use minor then major healing, use major then minor, use the healing that gets closest to getting them full without going over, use all heals until they are full. And that doesn't touch on Armor or Power boosts or evade or protection or accuracy. Or maybe I just misunderstand what this Assist is and what it should do.

I think the best choice is to identify particular issues and offer ideas that might address that issue. Somethings might be too difficult to implement, somethings might be on Citan's todo list already. But feedback can help improve the game, especially if it is detailed and constructive.

SB,

I believe that by asking for /assist, it was meant as something that would make it quick to target the same enemy that your partner is targeting, making the killing more efficient.

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Originally Posted by Ryker

SB,

I believe that by asking for /assist, it was meant as something that would make it quick to target the same enemy that your partner is targeting, making the killing more efficient.

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ah, didn't know. Thank you for the info. That might be helpful.

I haven't spent a lot of time working on the grouping UI elements since the UI-rewrite. (And I can't test it out at the moment, though I will later tonight when my build machine is available again.) Clicking on someone's name in the group window definitely should select them. For people familiar with the old group window, do you know what element of feedback is missing now?

There's no immediate plans for simple in-game macros (though we've done a bit of exploratory work for that and may add them at some point). There is however a key command you can bind in the options called, I think, "Target Selected's Target" or something like that. (Again, can't use my machine atm, it's doing heavy processing. Will update when I have the exact wording!) It will select the target of the thing you have selected. So you can select a party member than use that key to select what they have selected. You could also select a monster and use that command to target whatever the monster is attacking, so you can heal them.

Looking in the Setting>Keys there are
Select Target of Current which has a default setting of Ctrl + Backspace
also
Select Enemy Targeted by which has no default setting.

I don't remember the old group window, sorry.

To add some context to the OP question, I'd like to explain why /assist (or similar feature) is wanted. In EQ it used to be (and probably still is) dangerous to fight too many mobs at once, even in group. You had few AoE options and a dedicated class for crowd control, so it became expected that everyone would hit the same mob and for this you would target a "master assist" character in the group and hit a /assist macro.

Eventually, the UI allowed you to tag people in group with roles (such as "tank") and you could also /assist <someone>, or /assist tank.

I don't expect PG to reach the same level of difficulty, and so far a joyful, blind slaughter of whatever comes back with the puller has been working for me. As long as people are careful to not bring more of course. Crowd control is very limited, sometimes a bad thing to do. It seems /assist isn't as useful as in EQ, but time will tell.

I think that there are potentially two easy adjustments that can be made that would make grouping easier. Selecting a member on the party screen works for me, so I'll ignore that one.

1) It would be nice if selecting a party member would also select that party members target for offense skills, or even if there was a toggle to enable that feature. This is the case in several other MMOs, and it makes it easy to select the target of the tank or the designated puller without the necessity of cycling through mobs.

2) There's currently no feedback, aside from some skills with visuals on the character, that you've healed or buffed someone in a party. A small border around a party member's health, energy, and armor could flash, blink, or path around the bar. Something like that could be an easy visual feedback mechanism that wouldn't require a healer or support character to shift focus away from the party's meter area.

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Originally Posted by sudostahp

1) It would be nice if selecting a party member would also select that party members target for offense skills, or even if there was a toggle to enable that feature. This is the case in several other MMOs, and it makes it easy to select the target of the tank or the designated puller without the necessity of cycling through mobs.

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Currently, if you nuke someone you damage their target, and if you heal a mob you heal the mob's target (not too sure about that last one though).

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Originally Posted by Niph

Currently, if you nuke someone you damage their target, and if you heal a mob you heal the mob's target (not too sure about that last one though).

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Fabulous, that's definitely helpful to know. I wasn't aware that was already implemented.

Yes, those auto-targeting behaviors should be implemented now. We did a complete UI rewrite recently that may have broken things like that, though, so if it doesn't work right please bug it!

I'll look at ways to add more visual feedback to the group window for casting actions soon.

So, assisting similar to EQ /assist is exactly what I was talking about. I view this personally as very valuable for the reasons listed in previous post. I'll add a little more to what some one posted earlier. Yes, EQ needed crowd control, and assisting was very important (when I played anyway). But, in addition to crowd control it just makes difficult situations easier when all are on the same target. ie kill them faster so healing is not wasted by the damage being spread out. Damage should be focused on the ones designed to take damage.

I've not played this game long. But, it appears to be designed around the holly trinity for grouping. A simple, fast way to assist will be pretty important to keep things fun. Challenges are what make games fun, in my opinion. Leveling to a point of a DPS class being able to tank a difficult mob makes the dungeon fun for a less amount of time.

In the group example I had that triggered my post we could have progressed in the content by working better together. And, it would be possible (it sounds like) with existing tools. But I would argue the tools should be even simpler, and the game (which I think appears to be designed with group content in mind) should offer these to the player to learn.

Also, I tested it again. Left Clicking the group window worked for a while, then didn't. I'll try to reproduce with better data next play session. Right click kept working from start to finish like before.


I should add, I do not feel our did not succeed because there was no /assist tool. We were very disorganized. That is why we failed. But the disorganization pointed easily to the lack of some functionality that would help.

I always forget that heals heal the mob's target. ^-^

Does that include First Aid and Potions or exclude those?

[MENTION=2605]Marrz[/MENTION] - I'm sorry, I still feel like I'm missing something... what does the /assist command do that the key bindings don't let you do already?

I really don't think "everybody in the group should now make a macro with my name using /assist" counts as an easy-to-use tool. :) Most players don't even know about critical (IMO) commands like /isearch, so I'm wrapping those commands in UI features. Although we'll add more slash-commands over time for people that like them, the golden age of that kind of stuff is long over. We need to make the game intuitive without needing to type commands or make macros. So I'd really like to understand when binding a /assist macro would be more useful than binding the assist-like command that already exists in the game. Or did I miss your point?

(I grouped a lot in in EQ2 (early days post-launch was great grouping, though it's mostly a solo game now) and I've based lots of the commands and targeting logic on that game. I don't think we ever had /assist in EQ2, or if we did, I never used it.)


[MENTION=15]Crissa[/MENTION] - it should include abilities like First Aid, but not items like potions, which are always self-use.

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Originally Posted by Marrz

And, it would be possible (it sounds like) with existing tools. But I would argue the tools should be even simpler, and the game (which I think appears to be designed with group content in mind) should offer these to the player to learn.

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Ok, So let's say the Tank (or main assist) is party member 3. I press F3 to target him and then "Select enemy targeted by" which I have keyed to numpad - . (I think you could also use "select target of current" default bound as ctrl+backspace.)

I hit two keys: F3 then numpad -

I'm wondering how this could be easier without creating a macro system and more hotbars to put macros on. I played EQ from the beginning for several years so I understand the "/assist Marrz" macro, but hitting two keys is just as easy plus if the tank dies or you get a new group there's nothing to rewrite.

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Originally Posted by Citan

@Marrz - I'm sorry, I still feel like I'm missing something... what does the /assist command do that the key bindings don't let you do already?

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It's a long story. Let's see if I can summarize it.


For a long time, aggro abilities in PG had some issues. Add to that the fact that most of our time is spent soloing (or in duo), and that a gear set to keep aggro takes some room in inventory or storage, in the end nobody really geared up to play tank in group.


Also, several people including myself, coming with a EQ background, wanted to play healer because "it saves groups". But again in PG for a long time fights were extremely fast, between 3 and 8 seconds easily. During that time mobs can be stunned and don't deal real damage, so bringing DPS is more important. Since it's also more efficient when soloing healers wannabe moved to balanced builds. Today the assumption is basically that everyone has a way to heal themselves if things go really bad, and that killing fast is more efficient in the end. You don't loose anything when you die anyway.


Fights last longer than they used to now, but heals aren't too strong. I can tell because I'm using a Ice/Psychology build with almost all heal mods, and one-to-one I can heal, but two-on-one I cannot (I'm talking about healing someone else). In the end, you don't find dedicated healers in group. Even if they would be useful sometimes, they don't have the tools for the job.


Last but no least, crowd control suffers from the existence of many aoe abilities. Like healing, it's more efficient to kill everything at once fast than one mob at a time. And like healing crowd controllers don't really have the tools for the job: mostly single target, long refresh mezzes. No option to move mobs away from potential adds, no option to move a dead tank away from a mezzed mob, and I'm not sure you can reliably completely erase a group from a mob's hate list.


So if you look at a group today, it doesn't have a tank, a healer nor a crowd controller (sorry to contradict you Marrz, but that's my observation after 3 years of playing). But it does have a puller. So, why would you want /assist? The target is there, there is no doubt about what it is.


If a pull goes bad: everything can be killed at once with AoE, or is off-tanked, or is kited. /assist is good, it's more efficient, but it's not necessary. You don't break any mezz!


And Madmatx is right, you need to press two keys to obtain the same result than EQ's /assist tank. It's too long, too many risks of missing a key because it's a sequence you seldom use, and who's the tank anyway (there is none), who's the master assist (no group I know agree on one)?


The feature is in game but it's not practical to use.

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Originally Posted by Citan

I don't think we ever had /assist in EQ2, or if we did, I never used it.

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There you go.

[MENTION=80]Niph[/MENTION] Psychology works really well as a heal/tank build. You generate tons of aggro that way with direct aggro and heals.

PG is full of crazy stuff like that. My tanking builds have been Unarmed/Psych and Cow/Psych (although I've since lost my Cow gear). Worked reasonably well all the way through the crypts.