Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



User Tag List

Page 2 of 7 FirstFirst 1234 ... LastLast
Results 11 to 20 of 68
  1. #11
    Senior Member Ranperre's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2018
    Posts
    116
    Mentioned
    1 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    If you're unhappy about crits, the questions to answer are: Who was involved (levels, general combat skills type info), what did you fight, what did you do to counteract all that the surprise damage (I assume your team had sidebars full of healing/support abilities, for instance... so were those not good enough? Not fast enough to use?). I need to know how you tried to adapt to the problems, and why it was still unfairly difficult. Help me to understand the issues.
    The issue is with troopers in GK. I have a relatively fully modded cow tank with 800 HP and 1000 armor. I go into GK with fire resist meditation (-20% damage), and stoneskin/fire shield pots. These things can almost one shot me with a crit rage attack. People may complain about the ranged interrogators, but most people with 600+ armor shouldn't get one shot by those.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    RE: mezzes and DoTs: mezzes are supposed to ignore DoTs because, until recently, most DoTs lasted 15+ seconds, often lasting 30 seconds... making mezzes useless if even a single group member used DoT effects. Finding the right power curve for DoTs has been extremely challenging, and I didn't feel like DoTs needed the extra stigma of "don't use DoTs asshole, you'll break mezzes". Now that all DoTs are 12 secs or less, it starts to make more sense, but I still worry they would break too many mezzes.
    One of my solo builds is fire/ice. I can go super fireball (dot) > fire breath (dot) > freeze solid. That isn't my entire volley, but then I can just wait around for my cooldowns to refresh and heal myself. It feels like cheating. Note: soloing at a range works best because then you don't have to deal with trooper rage crits.

    -----

    Re taunt: My cow/unarmed deadly emission does something akin to (900 damage + 1100 taunt) * 325% taunt mods (1 on cow & 2 unarmed), so a little over 6k in equivalent damage, with my infuriating fist doing about 6k too. I remember Yaffy saying his unarmed/shield does about the same in aoe and a 12k single target. I'm surprised to see people complain about this, one of my complaints is how hard it is for your average person to make a tank build. It requires a bunch of taunt and mitigation mods, such that tanking is a luxury rather than a core position. I honestly believe there are fewer than 10 real tank builds on the server, maybe even 5.

  2. #12
    Senior Member Niph's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2016
    Posts
    433
    Mentioned
    16 Post(s)
    Tagged
    1 Thread(s)
    My strategy for handling crits:

    • Keep current armor and health as high as possible. My own max health is low (I see people mention number as high as 800, but I usually have less than 500) but my max armor is high. Keeping the current value high is the key, and for that my builds have high armor regen. When a crit hits me, half of it goes to armor, and I will survive. I suspect that people that die had they current armor too low to absorb it.
    • Debuff the mob damage, for example with But I love You (-25% damage).


    As an example, my Priest/Psychology build is full of delayed heals that bring the health of everyone as close to the max as possible every 10s, my gear has all the armor regen I can get (which I spam on the tank), and my finger is on Triage.

    In the future, things could be changed as follow:

    • Make rage control more accessible / powerful, so that one dedicated rage controller has a chance to do their job. Currently, in a group one healer will be enough, but it feels like you need two people to control the rage created by other members.
    • Add crit management tools to tank skills. For example, an ability or mod to nullify the next crit.
    • Add crit debuff tools, for example an ability or mod to lower the chance to crit by N%.
    • Make only some categories of monsters to crit for +100%, while others could crit for less.


    I like the concept of crits and I think something like that is needed in the game. For example, I much prefer mobs having crits than mobs having evasion.

    This said, crits for +100% are a problem because you kind of need to gear up and prepare for that, and it makes the rest of the game too trivial. If mobs had a lower base damage, but crit for +400%, the whole fight would be reduced to managing crits, with all other forms of damage meaningless. Therefore, perhaps the right solution is in balancing this +100% value.

  3. #13
    Junior Member Lyramis's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2017
    Posts
    25
    Mentioned
    1 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    I had a longer post in my head but @Celerity already said most of it.

    Let me just add a couple details about my previous comments. These GK runs usually have one person being carried or one person with a half set. That person is almost never the cause of death though. The rest are usually fully modded and geared level 70s. There is a ton of dps. There is a dedicated tank and a dedicated healer. We often, but not always, have fully-modded extra skin. On a typical run we try to pull as many mobs as we are able at once for the challenge of it. I totally expect and want people to need lots of healing and for people to die. We use various cc skills depending on who brought what...usually an aoe freeze, an aoe fear, sometimes a single fear or mezz, and a stun or two. All of it makes the fighting more fun. For myself, what I enjoy most as a healer ofc (pig/priest), is trying to keep people alive during these pulls, whether they are normal pulls of 2 or 3 elites, or crazy ones of 5 to 7 elites. It's the struggle to stay alive that makes it enjoyable. Crit spoils the struggle. As Celerity explained, you are just dead. No one gets a chance to heal you, you don't get a chance to run away or throw on some defense. We have this issue with both the infiltrators and the troopers.

    As far as taunt goes I think it's in a really good place considering dps amounts. Accidentally stealing taunt would be less of an issue without crit because it's fun to try to survive after sometimes taking aggro.



    @Ranperre I have yet to run a GK with the updated cow version. Sounds fun!

  4. #14
    Senior Member Golliathe's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2018
    Posts
    122
    Mentioned
    6 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    I've managed to get in enough pick-up groups to know that grouping wasn't particularly difficult or engaging before we added monster crits. It was basically a cakewalk. (And it can still seem too easy, depending on the level range and group composition... but the crits at least make people pay more attention!) In fact, I do think the monster crit system has been good for the game because it changed the equation from "grouping is too easy" to "grouping is frustrating because it's too hard to control X, Y, Z things." This seems like a step forward to me. Maybe we can dig into more fundamental problems, the kind that we very rarely get feedback on.
    I have 2 basically perfectly rolled gearsets on max equipped/leveled characters. I made a tank set that was not crap damage (because screw that) and I have a pretty good full dps set also. I usually run into GK with 4/5 or 6 people who are using the same quality gear. I have looked into mods and I could make a "way tankier" option but I don't see the point because crits scale to such a degree that all the mitigation stacking options from skills like shield team would do nothing.

    Let's consider two scenarios:

    In both scenarios we have a "raid tank", full spec healer and the rest are dps with mix of support.

    1. We pull a few mobs at a time carefully
    2. We pull groups of mobs recklessly with cheap tactics.

    Due to how monster crits are tuned right now it's just dumb in my opinion to go with option #1 . Generally speaking most good pulls will be 1 or 2 mobs with a possible add (often a late add - so it's pretty safe).

    I find it to be unacceptable when a trooper and an infiltrator can hit a tank who has : 55% mitigation, ~1100 armor and ~700 hp and the tank goes from 100% health and armor to just dead. This is how overtuned your critical hits are right now. A gazluk keep trooper can pretty much kill you outright and so can a lieutenant.

    Therefore, standing like a chump in front of the monster is stupid. So it is better to use cheap tactics (that Im asking you to remove so that we have to do the dungeon "straight" - under the condition that you make critical hits massively more fair).

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    And yes, there are situations where I won't be sympathetic: if you're trying to solo-kill a large number of monsters at once with a CC-mitigated "AoE pit", then I want the monsters to kill you a lot -- a lot more than they probably do now, actually. That's insanely dangerous and should generally result in your death. Were you trying to solo-kill (or duo-kill!) an Elite? Again, I actually want that to result in your death most of the time -- and will probably make those types of scenarios MORE difficult, not less.
    It's all fun and games to exploit the dungeon and get loot - but I'd rather everyone was having a fun experience overall. I'm glad you agree that aoe pulls should be more dangerous than single/double pulls. The reality is that cheap tricks+ aoe pulls are safer and faster than pull a couple mobs at a time with a group of highly trained professionals.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    Monster crits were added because monsters were too predictable and they dealt too little damage. This solution addresses both problems! It's a first attempt at a solution, and I could fine-tune it (lowering crit damage, reducing the chance of chain crits, etc.), but I'm not sure that's the thing to do right now -- it really was added as a quick-fix so that I could look for other underlying problems. I'm not sure if we'll keep monster crits at all: we may want other solutions to the underlying problems.

    If you're unhappy about crits, the questions to answer are: Who was involved (levels, general combat skills type info), what did you fight, what did you do to counteract all that the surprise damage (I assume your team had sidebars full of healing/support abilities, for instance... so were those not good enough? Not fast enough to use?). I need to know how you tried to adapt to the problems, and why it was still unfairly difficult. Help me to understand the issues.
    What more can I do? I can drink booze, do high level meditation, have shaman infusion on a +hp neck/ring that already both give health and stack mitigation to about 50 for slashing,piercieng, etc. It does literally zero vs critical hits. I get 2 chances to cheat death and the potions to shorten that timer drop like candy. In a more fair world the yard trash would never trigger both before the other one was up again. It would be super cool if the cheat death mechanic was available for a bad boss pull or something. All it really does is help save on diamonds a bit.

    I am 100% maximum geared for this content (other than say missing the complete tree for small amounts of health from death, lore, hollistic wellness, etc.).

    What I see right now are basically 4 categories of people.

    1. Gazluk keep is impossible and I'm too weak about thinking about going there (me last year).
    2. I put my foot into GK with a few friends and got one shotted by a few things (people who are in 60 gear and should be going here for loot but dont)
    3. We do a chest run to Melandria or MAYBE sometimes a few bosses with the right friends.
    4. We kill everything shit on their graves and write our names on the walls.

    It is my experience that all 4 groups suffer from the same problem : "oops lul got hit ko'd".

    That tells me critical hits are WAY overtuned.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    But if you're talking about a full group that gets wiped repeatedly because of crits, that's something I don't want to see. Maybe I just need to add a cooldown-timer so crits don't happen too often in a row... but I really suspect that'll hide deeper problems again. I want to dig in.
    That is exactly what is happening right now. I dont think a cooldown timer is the right way to go - again because one mega super crit and one other hard hitting mob (infiltrator) will still kill the tank outright. As a reminder the Lt. can still kill you in one hit.

    In order for the dungeon to be fair we need crits to be more counterable as an idea. For example if you are doing a dungeon and you have a room full of wizards in the next room as a shield tank you go hold up.... and you pull out elemental ward to take less damage from spells.

    Critical hits currently allow for no room to smartly engage them other than stacking health, armor, mitigation or evasion. I made this thread because I want to help you build a better game.

    What if you made critical hits be something that happened based on % armor remaining?

    As the player you now have a chance to reduce the amount of crits you will take by actively keeping your armor up. This would make your armor bar just as important as your health bar. This is a possible solution based on the tools already available in the game as many class combinations have mods available to restore armor to self or others.

    This would make certain classes far more desirable in terms of helping to prevent crits. For example I would love to see groups say.... damn we don't have a mentalist who can use armor wave - maybe we shouldn't go down to the second floor tonight.

    This would also give EVERYONE in the party a chance to help keep the tank alive while still doing damage. Why? Because at the very least everyone can save their armor patching for the tank.

    I would like to suggest a couple of rules:

    1. Only bosses can critically hit players while their armor is 90% or higher. As your armor % goes down the chance for you to be critically hit goes up.
    2. Mitigation either needs a complete revamp or should soften critical hits BEFORE their massive damage modifier (currently other options are like 5x better)***
    3. Keep critical hit damage high but preventable with smart play; you might start a fight with 1000 armor and be like iron but if your armor drops to zero then you become soft like butter. This gives players room to build armor setups that restore armor mid fight (or team composition to do that) and keep armor out of dangerous one hit kill zones though active play. In order for that to happen rage attacks should probably not be able to critical hit (except maybe with bosses- I would be 100% ok with them being special and mean). The idea of only a boss being able to critical hit with a rage attack further gives value to the idea of active play as your job as a member of the team is to reduce the boss's rage bar while dealing damage.

    *** n.b. : I am sure are aware that mitigation is currently kinda crap; you gain invulnerability to low level mobs and only take a minor amount of reduced damage from equal level content.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    Could you have countered the crits if you'd had more healing available?
    Let me repeat. In a category 4 group the tank often goes from full health to dead on a 2 mob pull. In my opinion that should happen when something goes wrong like : the tank got snared (and the priest went afk 2 seconds and can't cast unfetter). How would you do more healing? Full health - both mobs hit you (one hit is a critical hit) - you are dead.

    This is beyond garbage and should not be a thing that people who play in GK just accept on any given day. There is no "fun" way to counteract that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    Are you carrying a bunch of weaker players in the group, and we need better group-composition tools? Or are you not focusing damage well, and the group needs better coordination tools? Better de-aggro? Is taunting just completely useless? Is healing too weak? Is monster detection too good?

    This provides an opportunity to improve the game's full-group issues... and I'm not even sure I know what all the fundamental full-group issues ARE. But if you have some clues, I would appreciate your insights!
    None of those things are an issue. You are alive - you take a critical hit + one more hard hit - you are dead. Please delete this from the game forever as it currently stands.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    tldr: I can tweak the "band-aid fix" of crit damage -- but first I need to know it's not bandaging over a more serious problem.

    RE: mezzes and DoTs: mezzes are supposed to ignore DoTs because, until recently, most DoTs lasted 15+ seconds, often lasting 30 seconds... making mezzes useless if even a single group member used DoT effects. Finding the right power curve for DoTs has been extremely challenging, and I didn't feel like DoTs needed the extra stigma of "don't use DoTs asshole, you'll break mezzes". Now that all DoTs are 12 secs or less, it starts to make more sense, but I still worry they would break too many mezzes.
    Maybe this one isn't so bad. I always hated looking back at some games when the Mez was broken by a DoT. You wouldn't want to load up a boss with dots and then mezz him for example - it would just fill his rage bar with sub par damage.

    I just wanted to mention it for full coverage.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post

    RE: monsters not picking a new target if they're rooted -- that's just crappy AI that I haven't tried to improve. I didn't really think too long about that case, because it opens a can of worms. If a monster changes targets because they're rooted, isn't that a general case of "I should change targets if my most-hated foe is unreachable"? They're the same thing, right? So where do I draw the line? If the monster is moving too slow to keep up (because the player has super-cranked movement speed), should the monster just attack somebody else nearby? Or are we talking about a specific hack for "monster is rooted = find a new target"? In that case wouldn't a 75% movement-slowdown be more effective than a full root? It gets weird. I don't know where to draw the line.
    Some things should probably be kept secret. I can tell you 100% that most people wont be able to make use of scary snare tricks (how many aoe snares are there in the game anyway besides ice). The problem with kiting is that it requires a safe empty run space. Does GK have that? No.

    Looking back at older mmo games, I think they went with : If I am rooted then I seek the highest threat that I can reach.

    What if you added a fallback % that you keep secret? For example say you said ok if you deal 20% of my life I'm gonna switch to you if the tank is way out of range - in the case of a snare or maybe a root too.

    Quote Originally Posted by Citan View Post
    RE: "overtaunt" -- I'd need lots more specifics here to be able to tell what's up.
    I don't know how this works either. I've seen people as a cow go - "watch this". And then suddenly no matter what you do after an initial touch taunt you cannot get the mob to attack you. I put this in the category of fun but abusive (and generally opens the door for cheap tricks).

    The short version is basically you can do some combos with gear/consumables and you taunt for almost all of the monster's health. Essentially you can taunt for around 80% of the monster's total life. What are the odds one person in the group will ever do more damage than that with 6 (possibly 5) people attacking the monster? And then say that is the case - one person has done 81% of the monster's total life and they now have aggro. It doesn't matter because the monster is 81% dead and will be all the way dead in just a moment. Up to the point of 80% health damage done the monster was trying to find the person that did 80% taunt but he couldn't so no one in the group even got attacked.




    I think you asked earlier is it too hard to taunt. It may be too easy to taunt with cow relative to human counterparts. Can anyone who has this build or close to it for example fill in how the math works?

    http://www.gorgonexplorer.com/build-planner

    jtei455r


    *Nerf cow?* - I don't think so. If you could wave a magic wand and changed crits to what I suggested cow would still be a good tank. It would be easier to taunt relative to a human while still being very tanky; it would however be more vulnerable to critical hits after losing armor. This I think would make more end game armor sets be appealing in end game content rather than the nearly pervasive thought - cow or gtfo.

    The only issue I see with tanking right now is that you pretty much have to stack in a stupid way to make a tank work. It shouldn't NEED to be that way. An obvious example of what I'm talking about is shield/unarmed. If Yaffy would be willing, I would love to see his setup (or anyone else running a variation). Unarmed is "meant" to be played without anything in your hands and using a shield obviously breaks the intent. I hate to see needing to play classes "incorrectly" to create a work around to be able to tolerate critical hits.

    What are the other viable combos? Staff/shield, Sword/shield. Are there any others? Ah yes of course... I forgot the fabulous bunny/unarmed combo.

    What if we did change the rules with armor as a primary defense to critical hits? Would that not open the door to more classes being viable as a tank? I think that would be good for the game as a whole. One of the selling points of this game is that you hear people say : any two classes put together makes for a good combination. Currently that's a lie.

    Let us consider something that nobody has probably ever considered: Ice/shield.

    build code is :jtekbn0x

    I threw this together in a short amount of time with a great deal of care. Unless I made a mistake every armor/jewelry piece has been left with expansion for +armor and + health (considering a crafted armor build).

    You would get laughed out of a group for showing up with this currently. It's a noble idea for a tank build that just doesn't work. But it would probably be decent as a tank (enough to do the first floor Gk bosses maybe besides golem) if keeping your armor nearly fully protected you against critical hits.


    I realize this post is rather long so I'll make some closing thoughts.

    1. I have not heard of any other ideas for critical hits that gives the player an active way to counter them (other than passively stack defenses). I feel like this is the most important part because as the player it's not so bad facing a difficult game element that you can overcome with planning, careful attention to detail/game skill and hard work (grinding out mats for armor and experiencing the joy of that yellow crafted piece). The only counter right now is : stack health/armor/evasion and bring lots of diamonds.

    2. If crits are based on % armor remaining it doesn't nerf any current working tank builds (except maybe by proxy as a new hotness has emerged); you will expect to take less damage on the front end and more damage on the back end as the enemies chew through your armor. I think this would help keep many players happy as nobody wants to wake up to find that the gear they worked for is now worthless. This change would also not require any new gear mods to be added to the game!

    3. This opens the door for people to try new things rather than go to one of the 5 builds that works. I feel this is also a necessary component in a game like this because nobody really enjoys when you can play 90% of the content as any two classes. But then when you get to the end game you find that your build is not suitable for max tier content. Nobody wants you and you can just go right back to sub end game content or change to one of the builds that works. I personally hate elitism of that sort and I really don't like it when a game forces you to pick ABC even though there are all these other combat class options.

    This is exactly the type of thing that bugs me - you see people in chat say : don't play necro, don't play knife, dont play ice. I'd love to reinvent certain aspects of the game so that people would say things like "man I wish we had a necro/ or a knife guy for this boss - otherwise he is so hard".
    Last edited by Golliathe; 03-18-2019 at 11:03 AM.

  5. #15
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2016
    Posts
    131
    Mentioned
    0 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Regarding Taunt:

    Using a Fire build, I often draw aggro off the puller /tank, but it is self-inflicted and is usually caused by the Super Fire Ball mod that enrages target by 300%
    e.g. A SFB hitting for a base damage of 1593 + 2 to 202 for times 3 aggro is my issue not the games, as I have the option to use /mod it or not.

    Pro-tip: If you use a max modded fire build, learn to kite, stun, heal or carry self-ressurection potions - or use secondary skills with damage immunities.

    Fire builds are the only ones that I typically break aggro lock on a geared puller /tank.
    I would consider taunt to be in a good place at the moment.

  6. #16
    Senior Member Golliathe's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2018
    Posts
    122
    Mentioned
    6 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Ranperre View Post
    The issue is with troopers in GK. I have a relatively fully modded cow tank with 800 HP and 1000 armor. I go into GK with fire resist meditation (-20% damage), and stoneskin/fire shield pots. These things can almost one shot me with a crit rage attack. People may complain about the ranged interrogators, but most people with 600+ armor shouldn't get one shot by those.

    -----

    Re taunt: My cow/unarmed deadly emission does something akin to (900 damage + 1100 taunt) * 325% taunt mods (1 on cow & 2 unarmed), so a little over 6k in equivalent damage, with my infuriating fist doing about 6k too. I remember Yaffy saying his unarmed/shield does about the same in aoe and a 12k single target. I'm surprised to see people complain about this, one of my complaints is how hard it is for your average person to make a tank build. It requires a bunch of taunt and mitigation mods, such that tanking is a luxury rather than a core position. I honestly believe there are fewer than 10 real tank builds on the server, maybe even 5.
    This is probably an excessive amount of taunt when you think about other mmo style games (but do we want this game to be like all the others?). You shouldn't need to go to this extent to try and hold mob aggro. But by the same token I don't think you should press one button and then the group is "safe" from damage until they deal more than 6k damage. Correct me if I am wrong here but that is exactly what I'm talking about with overtaunt? That leads to silly and almost effortless play as a dps character. You can just unload with your biggest damage hits without thought or regard to the consequences.

    Most games have a flowchart of ideas and one of the principle concepts is that the tank is supposed to be getting hit not the dps. The damage character wants to lead with their most damaging spells in descending order. And doing that usually gets you killed because you pulled aggro off the tank. So they almost have a little mini game to play - learning when they can use their big hits (hint: it's at the end of the fight not the beginning).


    I'm asking the question: Is this the intended design you have for the game? Is it ok for a tank to have a 1 tap press so that nobody in the group gets attacked? Maybe thats why the taunt %'s are so high for cow and this is in fact an intended design feature for cow.

    As a dps character I love it. But like you mention about your fire/ice build... it kinda feels like cheating. In most rpg games like this I would be dead on the floor if I started fights with 5,000 damage with 4 spells.


    I suppose I am suggesting the following based on how other games work:

    1. Give all tanky sets an innate taunt % so that they don't have to "waste" mod slots on extra taunt.
    2. In exchange reduce some of the massive aoe taunts.
    3. Maybe nothing is wrong here. Maybe I'm an idiot and this is part of what makes PG special. Tanks have an "I win" taunt button that keeps anyone from being attacked for the rest of the fight. (to be clear this isn't sarcasm).
    Last edited by Golliathe; 03-18-2019 at 10:58 AM.

  7. #17
    Senior Member ProfessorCat's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2017
    Posts
    115
    Mentioned
    4 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    A couple of thoughts about the unbalance regarding unexpected or "cheap" tactics the enemies use.

    Chain stuns:
    I love the stun mechanic, and it really is needed for most builds, and certainly any group dungeon attempt. However getting chain stunned - resulting in death - brings my joy level to zero, and my blood pressure to rage attack. A really noticeable place this can happen is Yeti cave with the yeti war screamers, where even a small group of 3 yetis (often most battles in yeti are 3+ mobs)can kill a level 70 player.

    Another place I see chain stuns happen are in longer combat with multiple mobs, whether soloing wolf cave, or fighting a handful of orcs in GK. Let's say you're tanking, and the group is fighting 4 of the same mob. If the whole group is focused on the first mob, then the other 3 are building their rage bars in sync. Let's say all 4 mobs are still alive when the monster rage bars get full. Now the initial puller has a stack of 3 or 4 stuns on them, and once again you find that frustration where you are stunned for too long of a length of time to have a response. Yes, this is where healers should come into play, but being stunned for 5+ seconds is never fun. Ever. Battle is fun and stressful - in a good way, but with high emotions during combat, its easy to turn a positive rush of emotions into an equally powerful negative emotion.

    Skill Lockout
    A couple examples I see skill lockout as a positive are the Llamia mobs, and the Golems rage attack. These are FUN mechanics that are also expected. I love the thrill from back when Lab was top dog. If you had new players, you always had to stop and explain "expect this lockout on burst, manage rage, have your heals, and stack your DOTs" The one time a group actually survives a "whoopsie" 2 golem combat was legendary, and made us feel powerful! Such a fun way to handle a frustrating mechanic. Same to be said for the llamias. Let the tank get locked, and archers/mages better go for the llamia first!

    An example where it makes me want to throw my monitor out the window is combat with the tacticians in GK. It's too common. As the above situation with the stuns, if you have 2 or 3 tacticians, their rage attacks are going to be around the same time if you cant kill them before they rage - which isn't probable, and also probably not intended to be able to kill gk elites before they rage.

    I've always thought that if the lockout on rage was intended to make the combat longer, then why don't they just have more hitpoints. I understand the differences between lockout and stun. One you can move while under the effects, the other you cant. I would dare say that stuns are less frustrating, due to their shorter length, and typical single target mechanic. The Tacticians use it as a burst, reducing fun for the entire party at once. If there was a mod for panic charge that gave monsters lock-out, I'd wager 3/4 the server would use mentalism.

    Critical hits
    Honestly, reading Citan's reply makes me think the crits are working exactly as intended. I've also never gotten as upset about crits as I have stuns/lockouts. I play defensively most times, and anticipate entering combat and plan my shields, heals and buffs guessing I'm going to be crit a couple of times. I've not noticed any more death in my solo adventures than I did before crits were released.

    I understand this will be an unpopular opinion, but I think crits are working as advertised, and don't net me a noticeable loss of fun. We should all have gotten used to dying in Anagoge, or the original cave. And if you're in GK without a res, you're a bad teammate. Similar to above where I mentioned it's a memorable experience to take on a difficult situation. It's a memorable experience if a party wipes, and you can choreograph everyone being revived without having to re-spawn. These are those moments that make PG special. I certainly don't want an easier time. Just less frustration.

    One hit kills - Regardless of HP/Armor
    I'm not talking about crits, I'm talking about the kraken burst attack. When I had over 1k armor, and 900hp, with a 40% damage mitigation buff on, the kraken did 1700 damage to me. I understand it's an event monster, but there is virtually no way to block that attack if you're melee (you're also usually stunned before it goes off if you have agro, so you cannot run) I can't think of other mobs that this is capable of, but if there is any boss that can crit a burst rage attack for over 900 damage, it's not ever going to be perceived as fun (scale for the intended levels of course, at level 100 I hope I have more than 1k hp)

    Possible Solutions
    Pulling mobs without calling for help. With the GK patch, came a "correction" to hook shot(archery) and grappling web(spider). Both of these skills now make mobs call for help, where they did not int he past. This made the impossible task of pulling that beetle before Llamia locks us all out of combat actually doable. We've never had a GK experience with this option either.

    I understand it was unintentional, and was corrected. I put in the suggestion a couple of times in game, but I'll beat the drum again, and suggest a rare mod to bring this back. Those two skills IMO are the best ones to use it, as they are the only two "pulls". Thematically, I really can see grappling web shot over a mobs face, keeping them from calling for help. Hook shot.... well maybe change it to Net shot, or harpoon. Even if these two skills don't get this option, I believe pulling a single mob without calling for help on a longer cooldown skill would add value to the game, without breaking it.

    Crit immunity? Perhaps you cannot be crit again for 5 seconds after suffering a crit. I'm not a coder, and I'm sure that's a lot of extra work. I've noticed that it's usually getting crit back to back that results in my death, rather than just one.
    -------------
    I hope it doesn't come as a self plug (but hell, self plug too!) I've qued up start times of GK groups from a few dungeon crawls in case you wanted to view a sample of what it looks like.

    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/397008732?t=00h39m14s
    Semi-coordinated full group doing all bosses in GK in a little over 3 hours - fairly reckless pulling, and a handful of deaths, I dont think we wiped until the end.

    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/391967574?t=01h36m51s
    Group of 5 going until we got "stuck" on the map, and had to recall beginings to get out.

    https://www.twitch.tv/videos/395568646?t=02h06m08s
    Group of 6 making their way to the bottom, and wiping to a group of a million beholders

    I had a very enjoyable time on each of these runs.

    ---------------------

    Lastly, I can't thank the devs and admins enough. I love this game. It makes people feel excitement in a way they haven't since childhood. I get so heated when I lurk the forums or discord, and unfortunately sometimes ingame chat, because the negativity is always the loudest. I know the internet has been heading that way as a whole, but it saddens me to see it seep into this community.

    I spent some time as a volunteer firefighter, and when I found myself frustrated, I would remember that we only see the people who are struggling and in need of help. The regular, upstanding, and healthy people don't call 911. I think that sentiment applies here, and the majority of people who play this game aren't going onto the forums to tell you how much they appreciate all this hard work, so please please please don't take the emotional criticism to interpret that people aren't enjoying Project Gorgon.

  8. #18
    Junior Member Lyramis's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2017
    Posts
    25
    Mentioned
    1 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by poulter View Post
    Regarding Taunt:

    Using a Fire build, I often draw aggro off the puller /tank, but it is self-inflicted and is usually caused by the Super Fire Ball mod that enrages target by 300%
    e.g. A SFB hitting for a base damage of 1593 + 2 to 202 for times 3 aggro is my issue not the games, as I have the option to use /mod it or not.

    Pro-tip: If you use a max modded fire build, learn to kite, stun, heal or carry self-ressurection potions - or use secondary skills with damage immunities.

    Fire builds are the only ones that I typically break aggro lock on a geared puller /tank.
    I would consider taunt to be in a good place at the moment.
    Very true! It usually is a fire build. But also lycan/psy build (still) and even sometimes AH/necro build. I am sure there are others. But like I said above, this isn't really a problem once you take crit out of the equation. It's fun to scramble after someone steals aggro. If no one ever took aggro from the tank, it might be a little boring.

  9. #19
    Senior Member Yaffy's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2018
    Posts
    237
    Mentioned
    18 Post(s)
    Tagged
    1 Thread(s)
    My biggest problem with critical hits now is that it heavily limits what kind of builds you can make for tanking. Currently I believe the only "proper" tanking skill in the game is unarmed, and critical hits only make it more blatant how much better it is than other tanking skills.

    The first and biggest reason for this is the huge difference between percentage based mitigation and flat mitigation. Percentage based mitigation is great because it can reliably tone down the damage you take. Whether you're taking 10 damage or 1000 damage, 50% mitigation is going to cut the damage by half. Percentage based mitigation was already great before critical hits were a factor, but now that they are, it's basically the only way to reliably mitigate them. The problem is that percentage based mitigation is uncommon and only found in a few rare places, so most people don't have the ability to survive against crits.

    Even considering all the skills with percentage based mitigation, unarmed is still the most consistent, because it gains its mitigation passively and through attacking. Skills like Staff/Shield/Ice Magic have the ability to reduce damage by a percentage, including by 100%, but the issue is that they rely on cooldowns to do so and don't have 100% upkeep on these buffs. This means if you rely on tanking with these skills, your game plan is to run in, taunt enemies, and then hope your party kills the enemies before your buffs run out or use another method of negating damage (Ex. Rooting the enemies and then running away). That's not to say this kind of strategy can't work, especially if your party's DPS is very high, but you're not so much tanking as much as you're just delaying the enemy by a fixed amount of time.

    And then even on top of that, unarmed still has weaknesses. That's a good thing obviously balance wise, but it does reflect on issues with critical hits and show how limiting critical hits are. For example, unarmed doesn't have the ability to mitigate elemental damage. That means even if you can reduce the damage of everything else to manageable levels, you can still eat a huge nuke from elemental mobs like Gazluk troopers. Fire damage is a very common damage type throughout the whole game, but fire mitigation is extremely rare, especially % based mitigation. Aside from elemental ward on shield, deflective stance on staff and cryogenic freeze on ice magic, tanks have no way to cut down elemental damage by a percentage. This means every tank needs to be running one of these skills to mitigate elemental damage. If you're an animal tank, then mitigating elemental damage is extremely difficult outside of using very specific, low level armor pieces which naturally have fire resistance. Even on top of elemental ward/deflective stance, EVERY tank should be running meditation 39 for that extremely valuable fire resistance no matter what. This isn't too bad since it's available to everyone, but as an unarmed tank every other meditation and all the other effects are worthless compared to 20% fire resistance, and I don't think this meditation should be so ridiculously important.

    Aside from building within these very specific guidelines, there are some ways players build around crits, but these methods are generally unreliable and not suited for tanking multiple enemies at once. For example one of the more common methods is just stacking lots of health and armor so your health pool is large enough to take a big nuke. This isn't sustainable though because unlike mitigation, it's extremely difficult to heal someone who is only surviving on health back up to full, and your effective HP is still significantly lower than someone using percentage based mitigation. There's some other forms of mitigation as well, like evasion which animal forms tend to be good at, but these are also random and unreliable unless if you're already very tanky.

    If you don't have a reliable way to tank/cheese enemies or burst them very quickly so they can't properly attack you, then gameplay boils down to making your revives come off cooldown faster than party members die, which isn't very fun. You don't have much control over this aside from standing around and killing time between pulls to give your revives some extra time to come back. This is the kind of gameplay everyone really hates that might be mistaken for "Difficulty" or "Interesting" game play since it slows people down. I don't mind the game being more difficult, but just because the game throws out random deaths and people have to slow down to let revives come off cooldown isn't making the game more skillful. At the very best you could argue that people have to come more prepared, otherwise the difficulty is just artificial.

    Also I should ask just to make sure, but it is correct to assume a dedicated tank player should be able to pull more than one mob right? Currently a group with no tanks can still clear Gazluk quite reliably, meaning tanks aren't necessary. That's 100% fine, but that means in order to be useful, a tank needs to be able to allow a faster, more reliable clear compared to a full damage team. This usually means having the ability to pull more enemies at once or consecutively so damage builds can take advantage of AoE abilities and to lessen downtime between pulls to make up for the loss in damage.
    So basically how many enemies should a group be pulling in group dungeons? Should a full DPS group be pulling only 1 elite at a time? Should a group with 5 DPS and a tank/healer be pulling 2? A group with a tank and healer be pulling 3 or 4? Should a group with no dedicated tanks/healer even be able to beat the dungeon? I would really like to know because it'd really help us give feedback to what you want group play to be like.

    For an alternative to critical hits, I think a better alternative to critical hits would be enemies having a larger move pool (At least two non-rage attacks), and then having enemies randomly select between them. This would keep combat much less predictable, while being more interesting. If an enemy feels too easy, then one of their moves could be purposefully stronger than their normal attack as a sort of "Mini-crit".

    There's a lot of potential to make some enemies more fun and interactive with this. For example, Gazluk Tacticians have a lightning sigil move that might as well not exist. Usually because they just place it in a stupid location where it'll hit no one in combat, it's not very powerful, it dies to AoE pretty easily, and they usually die before the cool down lets them place another. But now imagine if tacticians had a 25-50% chance to summon the sigil instead of their normal attack. This would mean sometimes you'll fight them and they'll never use it, or sometimes you'll fight one and they'll decide to summon 10 in a row. This means that the group needs to play differently depending on what the tactician decides to do, and be ready with AoE and/or knockback skills to destroy the sigils if the enemy tries to overwhelm the group with them. It would make the enemies feel more alive and players will have to react based on what the enemy does.

    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    Unarmed is "meant" to be played without anything in your hands and using a shield obviously breaks the intent. I hate to see needing to play classes "incorrectly" to create a work around to be able to tolerate critical hits.
    I don't think that's true. Unarmed has lots of abilities that you can use with one hand empty or no empty hands. If it was intended to only be used with two empty hands then why would those abilities exist? Plus, the very first skill set given to you is Unarmed/Sword which leaves you with only one hand.
    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    Let us consider something that nobody has probably ever considered: Ice/shield.
    People have used this build before, but it basically works the same way Staff/Shield does. You're not really tanky, you're just relying on cooldowns to avoid damage entirely. In this case you can taunt enemies, root them and run away, then cast cryogenic freeze and then hope they die before it runs out.
    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    I find it to be unacceptable when a trooper and an infiltrator can hit a tank who has : 55% mitigation, ~1100 armor and ~700 hp and the tank goes from 100% health and armor to just dead.
    Are you sure they had mitigation for the correct damage type? If they were indeed cutting damage by 55% they should be able to survive two crits at that health. One big reason Troopers are dangerous is because getting fire resistance is hard, so most people will eat 100%-80% damage from them.

    Also just as another thing about overtaunting, yes unarmed/shield can taunt for 10-12k with Take the lead into Infuriating Fist. This is an extremely high amount of taunt, but one issue with taunt abilities is that you usually only have one or two taunts per skill line so they really have to count. With unarmed/shield you have three which is great, but depending on your set up you might only have one or two real taunt skills on lengthy cooldowns. I wouldn't mind gameplay where the DPS actually have to manage their aggro and give the tank some time to build taunt before using nukes, but there's two big problems with that.

    The first is that battles are just too fast. An elite enemy can die quite quickly, so having to wait around to build taunt is pointless. Plus if enemies aren't dying, the tank can die very quickly too, especially on nastier pulls.
    The second is that tanks aren't necessary to go through dungeons currently. In order to make tanks useful, they need to build up taunt quickly, otherwise the party might as well just nuke the enemy to death. Giving the tank 5-15 seconds to build up aggro is only necessary if the enemy being pulled is strong enough to rip normal players to shreds, otherwise you might as well just start fighting it.
    Last edited by Yaffy; 03-18-2019 at 03:28 PM.

  10. #20
    Senior Member Celerity's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2018
    Posts
    102
    Mentioned
    4 Post(s)
    Tagged
    0 Thread(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    In order for that to happen rage attacks should probably not be able to critical hit (except maybe with bosses- I would be 100% ok with them being special and mean). The idea of only a boss being able to critical hit with a rage attack further gives value to the idea of active play as your job as a member of the team is to reduce the boss's rage bar while dealing damage.
    I actually really like this idea, removes the high damage spikes like I mentioned in my post but keeps rage control viable since against a single target, such as a boss it is actually possible to control rage.



Thread Footer

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •