Improving on the solid foundation that is the Combat System

[Crissa]

you need someone to be able to buff/debuff if you want a monster with insane resistances/armor; you need someone to heal effectively if fights are prolonged; you need someone to be able to manage multiple mobs if you want group encounters; and you need a pure tank if you want to have creatures that hit for very high damage.

...But none of this means that players have to be specialized in these tasks, only that the team needs to carry enough into the fight.

The whole idea of tanking as a solitary thing and not something you mix with DPS is silly theatrics made for simplifying a game. Or to only heal. You just need enough of each for the fight.

The tank could be the healer. There's no particular reason not: Healing provides global threat, exactly what a tank wants. The only reason not is so that in PvP the healer can be taken out by crafty players. Enemies aren't so crafty.

We don't play classes in PG, we play skills. And we don't level skills if we're not playing them. Making a skill not useful to soloing (craft or combat) puts an extra burden on those who want to level it.

[Roekai]

"...But none of this means that players have to be specialized in these tasks, only that the team needs to carry enough into the fight."

...But none of this means that players have to be specialized in these tasks, only that the team needs to carry enough DPS into the fight. FTFY

"The whole idea of tanking as a solitary thing and not something you mix with DPS is silly theatrics made for simplifying a game. Or to only heal. You just need enough of each for the fight."

The whole idea of tanking as a solitary thing and not something you mix with DPS is silly theatrics made for simplifying a game. Or to only heal. You just need enough DPS for the fight. FTFY


"The tank could be the healer. There's no particular reason not"

Fuck it, why bother having game balance. Why not just let the player do whatever he/she wants, and be able to tank the mob, heal the mob, charm the mob, and make dinner and babysit the kids too. I mean, after all, I don't play video games for a challenge, I play to feel like God. Oh wait, no I like skill and challenge - I like to have to make decisions that impact my future instead of being able to do whatever I want whenever I want because that certainly isn't boring.

"We don't play classes in PG, we play skills. And we don't level skills if we're not playing them. Making a skill not useful to soloing (craft or combat) puts an extra burden on those who want to level it."

Way to play semantics, Crissa. I said classes instead of skills, therefore my whole argument is not valid; you win, I concede. Making a skill not useful to soloing or crafting puts an extra burden on nothing. It gives the people who don't want to play a DPS role (such as myself) the option to play a CC role, a tank role, a debuffer role, a puller role, or whatever the fuck role I want.

But yeah, we should just keep doing what we're doing and everyone can spam dps as fast as they can like a ball of zerg fuckery because why bother addressing an obvious problem when we can bury our in the sand.

basically, fuck the people who are worried about having "an extra burden." you cant be a top level scientist, a great dad, a professional athelete, and and ER surgeon at the same time.

sorry for the vitriol but im in a bad mood and frankly do not care for crissa's opinions for as long as i can remember.

edit: and for the record, i fucking love the combat system and this game. its unique and incredible how many different builds you can make. but its a god damn shame how all of those builds boil down to different ways of doing dps.

Citan, you played Everquest; tell me that roles and structure in group combat isn't a goal of yours and ill stfu forever and take a fat L on this issue and wait for that crackheads new game to come out as much as i hate McQuaid.

edit II: this is my last post on the subject. i'm becoming bitter and i've said what i think so theres no point in me shitting on every dissenting response and making an asshole of myself.

ITS FOR CHURCH, HONEY

[Crissa]

"...But none of this means that players have to be specialized in these tasks, only that the team needs to carry enough into the fight."

...But none of this means that players have to be specialized in these tasks, only that the team needs to carry enough DPS into the fight. FTFY

...When you learn how to use tags and actually respond to the arguments given, instead of replacing your foes with straw.

I'm out of this.

-Crissa

I'm also recovering from surgery, so maybe I'm off base, but I don't see anything to respond to in Roekai's response. He took my points, insulted them, and then created a version of them to knock down rather than what I meant.

[Aionlasting]

I think the vast majority of people want to see the same thing. More reason to play a class other than just as a DPS. Some people have expressed concerns, it appears, that if we make some classes excel at specific tasks such as debuffing, buffing, healing, tanking, and add any other role you can think of, that these classes will subsequently lose the ability to solo.

This concern however is mitigated in my humble opinion by the fact that project gorgon does not bind any player to one class.

There are...

1) two classes you can play at once which allows you to spice things up.
2) Secondly, and theoretically if some classes became more specific for certain roles, you could easily switch to a new class that was more solo friendly or dps oriented to maintain that soloness for those times you wanted to solo.
3) Thirdly, the changes to make some classes more role specific does not preclude all combat abilities. It is possible to give some classes more niche roles where they excel at things like group buffs, or healing, etc... without completely gutting their ability to solo.


I think Roekai was saying that without a change to classes in this game where they can be more role specific we will forever see a very bland group game style where everyone is simply smashing dps buttons because monsters don't have mechanics that force groups to assign roles and the reason monsters don't have these mechanics is because there isn't a class really that exists currently to counter them because everyone is really just a dps in disguise.

Ok.. i'll leave it at that. Hopefully that was accurate.

[lileth]

Ok.. i'll leave it at that. Hopefully that was accurate.

Excellent summary imho, ty.

[Roekai]

Excellent summary imho, ty.

agreed. he expressed what I meant far better than i did. /tips hat

[Citan]

We'll definitely see more group roles in the future... and we've had tanky content in the past. In fact, I can probably restore the "tank" role to Gazluk Keep with a single change that gives group mobs their hit points back. They were nerfed because when there were ~50 people online, there were simply no tanks available. Most players do not want to tank at all. It's not a popular role in general and never has been. And while it's definitely possible to build practically-invincible tank characters, they do take a lot of preparation. Lots of gear.

So anyway, right now, the monsters can all be burst-DPS'ed to death, and so people do that. If I give group monsters more mitigation, armor, and health, players won't be able to DPS them efficiently -- meaning they'll have to take lots of damage in the fight -- and support and tank roles will be more useful. Lots of tuning needs to happen beyond that, of course, but often in the past what has happened is that players just choose to solo instead. There weren't enough players to form groups. We do have a lot more players online right now... and probably enough to reliably have some tanks and supports... but I'm not sure if enough are high level yet.

So I'm torn -- I may restore GK elites and bosses in this upcoming update. That would be useful because we can see where things are at, and what needs to change. But I don't want to make GK basically unplayable again. So might wait another few updates for more players to get higher-level. (The somewhat lower-level dungeon known as the Labyrinth could also be made more tanky pretty easily, but again, pretty high-level.)

Also: as you may know, we have another support skill, the Priest, waiting in the wings. I haven't bothered getting it ready to go because, well, no grouping means no need for healers. But it can be made to go with a couple weeks' work. Combined with the existing healing builds, that will give us lots of coverage of the basic trinity roles. I'd like to add some other roles as well, including armor-removal and crowd control. It will take iterations and lots of feedback, but it'll happen.

[Karamasha]

We'll definitely see more group roles in the future... and we've had tanky content in the past. In fact, I can probably restore the "tank" role to Gazluk Keep with a single change that gives group mobs their hit points back. They were nerfed because when there were ~50 people online, there were simply no tanks available. Most players do not want to tank at all. It's not a popular role in general and never has been. And while it's definitely possible to build practically-invincible tank characters, they do take a lot of preparation. Lots of gear.

So anyway, right now, the monsters can all be burst-DPS'ed to death, and so people do that. If I give group monsters more mitigation, armor, and health, players won't be able to DPS them efficiently -- meaning they'll have to take lots of damage in the fight -- and support and tank roles will be more useful. Lots of tuning needs to happen beyond that, of course, but often in the past what has happened is that players just choose to solo instead. There weren't enough players to form groups. We do have a lot more players online right now... and probably enough to reliably have some tanks and supports... but I'm not sure if enough are high level yet.

So I'm torn -- I may restore GK elites and bosses in this upcoming update. That would be useful because we can see where things are at, and what needs to change. But I don't want to make GK basically unplayable again. So might wait another few updates for more players to get higher-level. (The somewhat lower-level dungeon known as the Labyrinth could also be made more tanky pretty easily, but again, pretty high-level.)

Also: as you may know, we have another support skill, the Priest, waiting in the wings. I haven't bothered getting it ready to go because, well, no grouping means no need for healers. But it can be made to go with a couple weeks' work. Combined with the existing healing builds, that will give us lots of coverage of the basic trinity roles. I'd like to add some other roles as well, including armor-removal and crowd control. It will take iterations and lots of feedback, but it'll happen.

Very nice to hear, it's the group content that makes me play MMORPG.
I do like grinding and crafting too but if it's just that and solo play it gets boring really fast.
Priest/Mentalist in the future FTW

[Aionlasting]

Yes I agree, this is great news Citan. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and why you did things the way you did. I think the larger player base will give you more data to work with and hopefully find the right balance. I'm really excited to hear about the priest class and your desire to add more ways to make group content more interesting by providing players other ways to contribute besides just dpsing! I will gladly provide more input post changes to GK if and when you do make those changes to help you with your data gathering. I think you can even try some changes targeted toward the lower level group content if you want keeping in mind that lower level players won't have all the skills necessary to deal with more mechanically challenging group monsters unless you provide the classes with their more role specific abilities earlier on in the leveling process.

[Niph]

In fact, I can probably restore the "tank" role to Gazluk Keep with a single change that gives group mobs their hit points back.

Allow me to respectfully disagree. From my own experience, as just a player and not a game designer like you are, increasing hit points of monsters is a boon for damage dealers, not tanks. If you consider extreme settings, with creatures having very high life but dealing normal damage, most types of character can sustain a fight and the winner in this kind of game is the character dealing the highest damage.

In my opinion, to make the tank role more significant, one needs to increase damage output of monsters and increase non-damaging-aggro generation + resistance on some player classes. Considering extreme settings again, with creatures having normal high points and dealing very high damage, few types of characters can survive a fight and winners are those that manage to survive long enough to kill their opponent.

Now I agree that few players like the tank role, and few players like the healer role, so increasing monster damage too much could be a bad thing too. And I agree that we can already build almost invincible characters (quoting @Odinar "I don't need heals"), but I'm not too sure we can hold aggro. At least not as reliably as you could in, say, EQ.