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.   This is the last staff post in this thread.   #11
    Administrator Citan's Avatar
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    I've been thinking about this also. (Mentalism is coming up in the rotation for skill revisions.) The original goal of the waves was to let players pull off EQ1-bard-style buff interleaving. But I'm not sure that's ever going to be worth the hassle.

    Originally gear was the big limiter here, it was just too hard to gear for multiple waves. But now that most treasure effects apply to multiple waves at once, it's relatively easy to gear up for a two-Wave setup. Even so, when I playtest Mentalism these days I always end up just using one Wave over and over, because it's too hard to keep track of which one to interleave each time.

    So ... yeah, maybe it's time for that design to go.

    ---

    So why not just make them toggles? We could conceivably do that now (with a few days of coding) : just press the Wave you want, and you get that one at max potency forever. Switch to a different Wave and you get the new one at max potency but the old one ends.

    One problem here is the Power cost (and action cost): if you only have to use it one time, out of combat, who cares about the cost? The ability doesn't need to be thought about at all. And we partially balance gear based on things like power cost, casting time, and reset time... so most of the treasure effects would get weaker as a result. In many cases, too weak to be useful.

    Since so much of the mentalist's power comes from the waves, I think there NEEDS to be some interactive element, for balance purposes. It can't just be a toggle. I'm just not sure what that should look like.

    I recently tested out an idea where you toggle which wave you want, and then every 20 seconds it just "casts it for you", still charging you the usual Power cost. But it's really confusing and clunky. (You still have to wait 60 seconds before that system gets up to full power, switching Waves doesn't do anything until the next 20s time is up, and most importantly, suddenly having your character stop and cast a buff during a tricky fight is ... not always okay.)

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    I could definitely change the reset time from 20s to 30s. I just don't know if that'd be enough to change peoples' minds if they thought 20s was annoying.

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    So anyway, more thoughts are welcome!

    The most brain-dead simple way to "fix" the waves is to just make them last 20s, the same as the reset time, and have them be 3x as effective, so just using it once gets you the full potency for 20s. After 20s if you want to press a different one, you can. (There would probably be Power cost or potency changes as a result, but they'd stay roughly the same power.) What do you think of that idea?
    Last edited by Citan; 06-11-2019 at 02:25 AM.



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