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.



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  1. #1
    Senior Member Golliathe's Avatar
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    Critical hits, bad behavior & "end game" content

    You might wonder how these are related. But first I would like to request a formal clarification :

    1. Are the critical hits supposed to be like this? (where they can one shot a fully geared, perfect rolled, maxed buffed tank).

    If the answer is yes then I will relegate my honest attempt at building a tank set and I will do what I see and hear people do - make a build around tactics that completely negate the intended difficulty mechanic. I don't know about anyone else but I think it's complete bullshit that a tank with ~750 health and ~1100 goes down from a rng "oopsie". What's the point of having 55% mitigation if it doesn't work vs critical hits? Making a build that tough gives up a ton of dps; in a game like this it realistically means having a special tank set (meaning you bother to make a second amazing yellow set, and roll it perfectly - ignoring the pitfalls with that).

    Is there a post somewhere that I missed that says this is what I have in mind on how these should work?

    I have heard people say well it keeps the game interesting. No... it really doesn't. What I see is that people react to what feels like a dirty mechanic by playing dirty and working to ignore the mechanic. Furthermore overtuned critical hits just make the game feel unappealing from an advancement perspective (in other words someone might give up early and not keep playing and not be interested in buying vanity gear from the PG shop).


    A. Root

    I don't know exactly why but it seems like we are missing an incredibly basic function for root effects : If the highest priority target on the taunt list is out of range, then the monster will immediately switch to the next target on the list. Project Gorgon doesn't do this and I have no idea why. Can we please have this in the game? It's a step towards fair play that needs to be a part of the game or people will just abuse root functions.

    *counter argument* : Nerf root! No! Roots generally speaking are special and most classes do not have them (this is good). I have heard people say they liked the root system in WOW where damaging the mob had a chance at breaking the root. That's stupid because then what are you going to do with a root? The only thing that spell has just become suited for is running past content. Is that what you want a root to do? I think not. Root effects are rare, do not last long and generally have pretty long cool downs. I think we just need some tweaks to enemy AI behavior.

    Furthermore I request that rooted mobs revert to range attacks if available. For example I would love to see infiltrators in Gk revert to range attacks while rooted unless engaged in melee. This creates a window where your powers are still very useful but you have to be careful when and where you apply them. This would mean that a poor root could cause a wipe if you made two ranged enemies start immediately using ranged attacks.

    B. Overtaunt

    There are apparently combos in the game where you can apply a taunt greater than the mob's life bar (or close enough to its entire life bar). In other words you can apply 8,000 taunt with a single ability to a mob with ~10,000 health. This makes the game silly because the mob has zero interest in any other party members (we can assume that no one person is going to do more damage than the tank's taunt). The tank is free to run around a circle in a large room or up and down a cleared hallway. I completely shun this type of sillyness. You can also combo this with root so the mob ends up attacking no one (even if we applied the target liste changes mentioned earlier). I want to emphasize that I don't think people would bother with cheap tricks like this if critical hits were on the order of remotely fair.

    Cow might need to get nerfed a bit so this isn't an option people can abuse.

    C. Mezmerize effects

    I'm really not sure why but it is currently possible to apply a bunch of dots to a monster and then you can mez it so that it can't fight back. For whatever reason the game doesn't register the dots as breaking the mez so you can kill very strong single pull mobs with extremely low risk. This is not right. As far as I know mezmerize effects should break as soon as the target takes damage.

    When that is not the case you are actually talking about a hold effect (see city of villains/heroes). These are quite silly because you can attack a target and it can't fight back at all. I hope we don't ever get hold effects in PG.

    D. Boss resistances

    While on the topic of City ov Villains let me mention an interesting game feature in that bosses needed 2x of a specific effect before they were affected (so 2 holds, 2 stuns, etc with a short window of time). I think it might be interesting here if we just said as a general rule bosses were twice as strong against these effects so generally speaking they will only last half as long. Maybe this isn't necessary for stun effects as there is already a feedback limit for those.

  2. #2
    Member Murk's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    C. Mezmerize effects
    When that is not the case you are actually talking about a hold effect (see city of villains/heroes). These are quite silly because you can attack a target and it can't fight back at all. I hope we don't ever get hold effects in PG.
    I have not experienced the end game proper, but I would say that such a combination of venom strike + mez for example, to hold an enemy at bay is an interesting tactic. In fact more of these types of things in general would be welcome as it makes for a more interesting experience.

    On the other hand, if as you say the tactic is overpowered then it may need "looking at". I'd not want to see such a thing removed personally, although I don't use it a lot, and cannot kill high level mobs in this way at present.

  3. #3
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
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    I also find 'instant death' crits from mobs intensely irritating and leaving me feeling very unsatisfied, but it does add a certain degree of risk that I find entertaining.

    Two points to consider: Please forgive me if the words below are obvious to you, but for those who have not played current end-game it might be useful.

    PG is not designed around the concept of the 'holy trinity' (tank, healer, damage).
    Many groups use a puller (bring the mob to the group), stunner (crowd control the mob) and damage dealers.
    Healing is often taken care of by AOE healing & the puller having a healing skill as secondary,

    This works well unless you are part of a 'speed run' where many mobs are pulled at once. Then you need a dedicated healer, but this requires very well geared groups.

    Secondly, it is my observation (to be confirmed) that most crit deaths happen from mob rage attacks.
    My experience is that if you rage control the mob, a lot less crit deaths occur
    Perhaps groups should ensure they focus on stuns and rage reduction rather than prioritise armor and health?

    Currently, I have not identified any way of surviving a crit hit from a mob, but I think using stuns and rage control skills reduce the likelihood of them so that they become 'rare' & tolerable.

  4. #4
    Banned spider91301's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    You might wonder how these are related. But first I would like to request a formal clarification :

    1. Are the critical hits supposed to be like this? (where they can one shot a fully geared, perfect rolled, maxed buffed tank).

    If the answer is yes then I will relegate my honest attempt at building a tank set and I will do what I see and hear people do - make a build around tactics that completely negate the intended difficulty mechanic. I don't know about anyone else but I think it's complete bullshit that a tank with ~750 health and ~1100 goes down from a rng "oopsie". What's the point of having 55% mitigation if it doesn't work vs critical hits? Making a build that tough gives up a ton of dps; in a game like this it realistically means having a special tank set (meaning you bother to make a second amazing yellow set, and roll it perfectly - ignoring the pitfalls with that).

    Is there a post somewhere that I missed that says this is what I have in mind on how these should work?

    I have heard people say well it keeps the game interesting. No... it really doesn't. What I see is that people react to what feels like a dirty mechanic by playing dirty and working to ignore the mechanic. Furthermore overtuned critical hits just make the game feel unappealing from an advancement perspective (in other words someone might give up early and not keep playing and not be interested in buying vanity gear from the PG shop). .


    Quote Originally Posted by poulter View Post
    I also find 'instant death' crits from mobs intensely irritating and leaving me feeling very unsatisfied, but it does add a certain degree of risk that I find entertaining.

    Two points to consider: Please forgive me if the words below are obvious to you, but for those who have not played current end-game it might be useful.

    PG is not designed around the concept of the 'holy trinity' (tank, healer, damage).
    Many groups use a puller (bring the mob to the group), stunner (crowd control the mob) and damage dealers.
    Healing is often taken care of by AOE healing & the puller having a healing skill as secondary,

    This works well unless you are part of a 'speed run' where many mobs are pulled at once. Then you need a dedicated healer, but this requires very well geared groups.

    Secondly, it is my observation (to be confirmed) that most crit deaths happen from mob rage attacks.
    My experience is that if you rage control the mob, a lot less crit deaths occur
    Perhaps groups should ensure they focus on stuns and rage reduction rather than prioritise armor and health?

    Currently, I have not identified any way of surviving a crit hit from a mob, but I think using stuns and rage control skills reduce the likelihood of them so that they become 'rare' & tolerable.
    Honestly the most crits I have ever survived was 4-5 only due to my quick reflexes and to my shield mods 101% avoid death great bacon and having 1k armor and 750 health to sacrifice 250 health and recovering the armor with shield armor recovery abilities aka 605+ and sword mods 500+ armor recovery that and running after aggrowing the fk out of the entire hall then running away like a bch and praying my group kills them before they kill me honestly I hate this crap but its the only option till they balance everything, another thing I would like to point out is armor mitigation does shit and 1k armor is useless for most builds except probably something similar to me where I only have 1k armor for instant heal also the most mind fking thing is a enemy swordsmen can crit but I cant that and the 2nd most mind fking thing with crits is we don't bypass enemy mitigation from their armor but they do their crits can make hour armor into tissue paper which leads me to believe that their crits our on another system from our own which is good considering if we could do the same that would be op af

    Also in alot of cases you die before a healer can save your a**
    Last edited by spider91301; 03-17-2019 at 08:26 AM.

  5. #5
    Member ErDrick's Avatar
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    Critical hits from mobs are sucking all the fun out of this game, spent all morning being 1 shot by non-elite trashmobs when I had 600 health and 935 armor.

    Dice said you lose, so you lose...is in no way whatsoever fun or challenging, it's just random.

    I mean, it's "funny" a few times, but not actually fun.

  6. #6
    Junior Member Lyramis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by poulter View Post
    This works well unless you are part of a 'speed run' where many mobs are pulled at once. Then you need a dedicated healer, but this requires very well geared groups.
    I am most often in this sort of GK group. When I run as the healer, I find it challenging and exciting to try to keep everyone alive and well. It's fun...until crit instadeath on a well-geared, fully modded, full armor/hp character. Healing is so much more fun than resurrecting.
    When instead I run with fire/staff, I find myself often dead because of crit if I take aggro from the tank. I've started to use blocking stance almost every pull just in case of crit.

    I really do dislike crit.

    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    B. Overtaunt

    There are apparently combos in the game where you can apply a taunt greater than the mob's life bar (or close enough to its entire life bar). In other words you can apply 8,000 taunt with a single ability to a mob with ~10,000 health. This makes the game silly because the mob has zero interest in any other party members (we can assume that no one person is going to do more damage than the tank's taunt). The tank is free to run around a circle in a large room or up and down a cleared hallway. I completely shun this type of sillyness. You can also combo this with root so the mob ends up attacking no one (even if we applied the target liste changes mentioned earlier). I want to emphasize that I don't think people would bother with cheap tricks like this if critical hits were on the order of remotely fair.

    Cow might need to get nerfed a bit so this isn't an option people can abuse.

    C. Mezmerize effects

    I'm really not sure why but it is currently possible to apply a bunch of dots to a monster and then you can mez it so that it can't fight back. For whatever reason the game doesn't register the dots as breaking the mez so you can kill very strong single pull mobs with extremely low risk. This is not right. As far as I know mezmerize effects should break as soon as the target takes damage.
    Overtaunt: Running in the above type of GK group with fire/staff I somehow manage to take aggro from our tanks (modded well with taunt) a little too often. And my set has very little dps on the staff side. It's almost entirely utility. Most of our dps take aggro. I wish we had more of this taunt issue that you have mentioned here.

    Mezmerize: I actually enjoy this mechanic!

  7.   Click here to go to the next staff post in this thread.   #7
    Administrator Citan's Avatar
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    There are some good discussions going on here and I'd like to keep them going! But I'd like to ask for more specifics. I don't get to participate in a lot of group combat recently. I don't have time -- I'm working 12-ish hours a day on the game, so even having time to solo is hard. So I rely a lot on feedback for group combat, and we really don't get a lot of feedback about grouping that's in a format I can act on.

    I say I don't group a lot, but 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.

    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.

    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.

    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. Could you have countered the crits if you'd had more healing available? 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!

    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.

    -------

    The OP from @Golliathe is a good example, and the reason I chose this thread -- those details about roots/mezzes are good insights and I would love to hear more discussion about those and related things -- things that need focus or improvement, either because they're too good or too irritating.

    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.

    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.

    RE: "overtaunt" -- I'd need lots more specifics here to be able to tell what's up.


    ------

    Thanks for your feedback. Also, I've mentioned this before, but since this is a contentious topic, I wanted to remind here: I really appreciate people who are able to separate their emotions from their feedback -- it makes it a LOT easier for me to process it if you aren't outraged at the same time. I'm only human, the game is made by humans, there are lots of mistakes and some of them are stupid mistakes we should have fixed a long time ago. But it's not too late -- we can fix them.

    The more you can give me info in a format like "my group did this thing, and we expected this result, but got this other thing", and the less "only a crazy idiot would think X is working", the more practical help you're giving!
    Last edited by Citan; 03-18-2019 at 06:28 AM.

  8. #8
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
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    Personally, even though I find an instant death /1-shot kill frustrating, I do think the mechanic adds spice and variety to the game and that it should remain.

    To be clear in relation to the comments below, I am referring to group runs of usually 5 or 6 people.

    The issue that I have is not the crit itself, but that you go from full-health to dead in the blink of an eye, without any chance of healing /mitigating

    I have tried maximising both armor and health and whether I run with 500, or c. a 1000 of each, I still instantly die.

    To minimise crit deaths I have tried:
    Physical damage reduction /shielding builds & evasion e.g. cow /unarmed (i.e. a tank build) - still instantly die (sometimes with what looks like 80%+ mitigation active)

    Damage reduction /Shielding build with healing secondary & evasion e.g. Unarmed /Psychology - still instantly die (don't get the opportunity to cast a heal)

    Might only be my perception, but it appears that mitigation doesn't impact a crit hit e.g. does a crit hit for 10k damage so that mitigation is irrelevant? i.e. Are crits intended to be unstoppable (excluding avoid death & immunity mechanics)

    Rage reduction /stun /fear with evasion builds e.g. Deer /Unarmed, Spider /Druid - success as the mobs rarely get a chance to do damage, never mind crit

    Using the last build I can go through a GK run with 0 crit deaths. With other builds I often die 3 to 5 times /run from crits.

  9. #9
    Senior Member Aionlasting's Avatar
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    Citan, you can't counter 1 shot mechanic with more healing . 1 shot mechanics excluding undergearing, should be limited to player avoidable mechanics. They should not be random unavoidable events. I'm surprised yo u find that appropriate.

  10. #10
    Senior Member Celerity's Avatar
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    Here's my 2 cents on crits:

    The reason why people dislike crits is because of the randomness involved and the inability to properly react to them.

    Firstly, the randomness. This means doing the same fight twice can have very drastic results, one time it's easy and another you get a crit on a rage attack and die from near full health. This just leads to frustration since you essentially only lose the fight because of a bad dice roll.
    This would not be such a problem if it wasn't for the fact that crits have such a large impact on the fight, which leads to the second point.

    There is no way to properly react to crits since if you're not above 90% hp or so, you will simply die instantly.

    An example which I used before was the unbreaking worg. While fighting it with a full group of geared lvl 70s I took a rage attack crit which dealt just over 1k damage, since I was only at 80% hp and armour, roughly 500/600 for both, I died. This just simply felt bad even if it didn't lead to a group wipe, since it felt outside of my control from both the rng as well as having essentially no way to react to it. I could have healed up to full health and been able to just about survive, but due to rng I had no way of knowing I was going to be crit and thus needed to be on full hp rather than 80% hp and certainly didn't have enough heals to keep on full health all the time.

    Even if you don't die instantly, you will usually die to a followup attack, which may be too quick to get off a heal if there is more than 1 mob attacking you. The damage is far too spikey and there's just too much of a jump from the damage of a regular attack to that of a crit. This problem is amplified even more when it comes to rage attacks, most rage attacks do a large amount of damage already and if they crit it's basically a game over. I already talked about how this can be slightly mitigated with rage control in a different thread, but the real problem is the randomness means you either have to rage control every single rage attack, which is impossible or you simply accept you will still die, just less often.

    Now, if you have a properly composed and geared group you will never wipe simply to a crit or even a chain of crits, since even if 1 person does goes down, they can be rezzed easily enough or the fight won without them most of the time. This might suggest that crits are doing a good job then, they aren't preventing groups from being able to do anything at all while making the content more challenging from the "cakewalk" it certainly used to be. But the problem is for the individual player who can get taken out of the fight at almost any moment, it just feels bad.

    The solution in my opinion is to limit the fluctuations in combat that crits create. This can be done in several ways:

    One way would be to simply lower the damage that crits do to maybe 1.5x or so and increase the base damage that mobs, especially elites do in order to make up for it. I feel this would be an ok solution if balanced properly, but I can easily see this leading to elites simply dealing too much damage for an unprepared group to handle/forces groups to have a geared tank in order to survive.

    Another way would be to stop rage attacks from being able to crit. Poulter mentioned this, but also from my own observations I have seen that most of the deaths are from rage attacks critting while a normal attack critting mostly goes unnoticed, unless there is a chain or 2 at once or some other such bad rng. There's also potential to make rage control better but I feel doing this would simply lead to it being op/required.

    There is also the idea that Citan suggested of limiting the frequency of crits. I personally don't feel like this is a good solution as although it would alleviate some of the problems of crit chains, I feel the damage would still be too spikey and lead to upset, simply less often.

    Finally, there could be a mechanic put in to be able to reduce crit damage. I imagine this as being an attribute that tank builds would be able to make use of in order to mitigate the damage. It would still make content harder overall since you would have to dedicate some of your mods/abilities to raising crit defence rather than some other mitigation or taunt. The problem with this is it could lead to a situation where a tank is absolutely required.

    Overall, I think the crits as they are now are not a fun game mechanic and although I agree that something was needed to make group content harder, I don't think crits, as they are now, are that solution. The bigger problem imo is that elite hp is simply too low which means you can usually cc them for the entire fight with just 1-3 different abilities, which needless to say, across a group of 6 is very easy to pull off. I'll leave discussion of that for another time however.


    A few followup thoughts on what Golliathe mentioned.

    I think roots work fine as is, from my experience the mobs DO switch to ranged if they have it available and them changing targets willy nilly just doesn't make much sense to me.

    Mezs again, similar to what Citan said, if they broke on DoTs, I don't think anyone would ever use a mez in group content aside from perhaps on the healing suit tester/gargoyle before initiating the fight in order to kill the adds. As it is it's already difficult to coordinate people in order to not break mezs and I think having DoTs break them would make it close to impossible.

    Overtaunt I have never seen. Perhaps on a single target such as a boss but aoe taunt is one of the hardest things to achieve in the game and even the best tanks in the game cannot always hold aggro from the high damage aoe dps.



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