/assist

[Niph]

@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?

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.

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

There you go.