I missed some posts and I'm high on jasmine tea, so here goes:
LOOK!
I also love low-mid content PERHAPS more than anyone? I asked a new dev to make a level 10-20 zone JUST RECENTLY and I got the Cesspits and people love it!
Nice.
I love getting lucky and winning a fight due to a good roll of the dice! IT IS A GREAT FEELING! I would rate it 7/10 cool feeling. Here is the problem: LOSING a fight for the SAME REASON is a 10/10 on the SUCK SCALE!
Hmm. I hate dying too, or at least I did originally before it was made to not really matter very much. But the thing with what you are saying there, is that it's just not really a common issue imo. Even when I ditch my 'box' and just solo in a dungeon somewhere, it's not all that common that I die because the dice just didn't roll my way. If I do die in a situation like that, usually I put that down to:
1) Me taking on something I shouldn't have (ie: a white con instead of a blue, or two mobs instead of one etc..)
2) I did something wrong (mixed up my routine or tried something new and it didn't work).
3) Just bad luck
But my point is that it's this 'possibility' of dying which makes the whole thing so compelling. If you are scared of dying, or just want an easy life, then you can just do all the typical and usual stuff - namely, the outdoor 'overland' content which is all pretty easy, kite-able, and easy to flee from. It only gets more hardcore when you go to a dungeon *by yourself*, which is at least something you are bringing on yourself. But reduce (or remove) that chance of dying and that would just completely kill my interest. It's the reason I get bored of almost all the other RPG's and MMORPG's these days - because nothing really has a consequence anymore. Everything is SO well designed that it's over engineered, it has all become so ordered and structured that nothing ever goes wrong. It's good for money, because even my 9 year old niece can play and she just can't lose because all the mobs come alone and you can literally spam your number keys with your eyes closed and your character leaps around decapitating everything.
EQ was never like that. Soloing in a dungeon is dangerous, but that makes it really exciting.
Not being able to cast on ANY MOB IN PLANE OF TORMENT as a Mage sucks A HUNDRED out of ten.
I agree with that completely, I would be glad for any change to tweak that. Just don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Having to take on faith that Charisma helps or that your Malosini does anything sucks. KNOWING that statistically, for some fights some times, even though your Malsoini landed or you got that CHA boost it had ZERO EFFECT sucks (this is getting pretty ethereal and is unknowable to a player, honestly, but it still is real and sucks).
I actually had issues with this too about a year after SoD started. Originally, landing spells was easy. But Wiz changed it and introduced the charisma thing, and he had lots of people help him with parses and whatnot. I never felt like he completely perfected how it eventually ended up. I always felt like resists are bit too common in this game.
But still, as I said somewhere else, they are just one of the few mishaps left in this game. Zaela can make fun of me all she wants about the link dead and mobs coming out the walls thing, but the fact is, that's how EQ was! And it was exciting. Fixing those things is probably for the best, but you can't make *everything* predictable without it just becoming boring and sterile. At least leave one or two random elements, otherwise we may as well just play WoW where nothing goes wrong ever and everyone is wrapped in cotton wool.
I know I'm just addressing one issue (the topic of the thread) but please understand no one made this decision because they hated old players or hated the old game or anything. If you want to talk about 'power creep' or 'mudflation' there are cool arguments to be made there and, perhaps, handsome solutions to be found. But for THIS change in THIS instance it is better in both the short and long runs for everyone.
I haven't even got the energy to worry about mudflation, but with this issue in particular, I'm still not convinced. As Zaela described, Wiz has already tweaked this game massively, providing xp boosts, making death far simpler, etc.. basically making it easier to zoom through the levels without much resistance. I like 'most' of the things done to this game. But you can go too far, and I think this change would be a step too far. It's not even *that* huge of a change... although I would notice it, but it's mainly the principle I'm trying to defend.
Nothing, including this change, really prevents anyone from taking the slow path if they want to, perhaps with a group of friends.
The thing that has changed since the old days isn't really about mechanics at all, it's just that most of the people who kept playing eventually got to 65 and stayed there. This happened during Wiz's tenure, and here are some of the things he did about it: decreased the amount of exp needed between levels, added "new area" exp bonuses and flat zone exp bonuses, took out corpse runs, added quick travel between cities, increased the rate of mana restoration from meditate ("meditative trance"), added quests that let you skip several levels (the Main Quest), added one of those "best exp at level x" areas (Heartlands robots), added charms that require huge amounts of cash grinding in order to benefit one character at a time, let Xeldan make Sepulcher and Caverns of Darkness to fill gaps in raid progression and make it easier for a guild to move up to OP and IP, had new Devs (TM and Wold) make raid zones, lowered the raid cap from 36 characters to 18 so more guilds could focus on raiding, added Codex of Power tomes when people started maxing their AAs, and so on.
All those things do make the game easier though, but I do like most of that stuff. There are only so many years that someone can be bothered running around naked, looking for their corpse, etc... so yeah most of these things I like. But as I said above, it's possible to go too far. That's quite simply my issue with almost all other MMORPG's since about 2004 or so. They have streamlined the gameplay and taken out everything that isn't 100% fun, but they went too far with it imo. They made everything in to a big yellow plastic child proof equivalent of what I used to play and enjoy, and they are all so anti-climatic to play after playing the original EQ. Had I never played the original, I might think differently, but I can't unlearn it. I tried almost every game on the market and gave them all a fair chance, but they are all just so simplified. They are the alcohol free beer to EQ's budweiser. I know the latter contains nasty stuff, but the alternative is just so bland in comparison.
He could have kept it more like classic EQ, but maybe he realized that most people would have gotten bored of that after a few months and left.
I can't really argue against that. There's a 'possibility' that focusing more on the journey than the end game 'might' pay off by attracting new people who want to play that aspect of the game, but I don't know for sure either way. I think really you can only do what you are already doing and try to make both as good as you can.
But just in this one idea alone, I think something thought up mainly with the end game in mind, is going to cannibalize on the rest of the game.
tl;dr I don't think SoD was ever the game you seem to want it to be, robots.
SoD, I'm not sure, but WR definitely was. The only real difference was that when I played WR, it was new so the majority of players were all still in "the journey" part of the game, and I loved it. I was in a guild of newbies and we all leveled up together, helping each other out etc, doing Dragon Necropolis in our full sets of Draconic Silk crap, before mudflation went haywire. It was very much like old school EQ and was pretty much my perfect game. As I said, I've got about 4 years of time in this game and had a lot of fun, so I'm not worried about the past, just where it goes. Admittedly if ArcheAge turns out well, I'll be all over it, but it would be nice for SoD to still be an option for me, and that wont really be the case if it gets whittled down in to a typical streamlined mmo.
definitely no way to plan for a room full of scriptless tank-and-spank mobs
You really shouldn't turn your nose up at standard content though. From a devs point of view, complex raid mobs are far more interesting and exciting, but from my point of view, they aren't the be all and end all of MMO gameplay. I've had some great times in SoD raids, and some of the encounters are really challenging and amazingly well designed. But that doesn't mean that general group play is boring, and in fact I think it can be as good, at times.
A room full of scriptless tank n spank mobs might not do anything special, but they can still easily wipe a group, and the fact that a good group could survive whereas a bad group of players would die, is something I find really exciting. Again, when dying is verging on meaningless, travel is almost instant, and everyone has a t9 cleric camped nearby, then it kind of kills the tension.... but still, working your way down to the depths of Mielc and then having a bad pull and end up swarmed is still something that gets my blood pumping. Maybe that's just me, but I love it, and I love watching the group and in situations like that, it really separates the wheat from the chaff.
picking a mob to tank and tanking it is different every time
watching red bars and trying to prevent anyone's from falling to 0 is different every time
cc'ing stuff the tank isn't tanking is different every time
Yeah there's plenty of room for improvement with that stuff, but that's just an issue we have with playing classes designed around 14 years ago.
turning on auto-attack/sicking pet/casting nukes is dif... no wait, that never really changes.
Too bad none of our players have learned to do any of these things in years, don't have the balls to think on their feet and do the exact same crap pull after pull after pull after pull zone after zone after zone after zone
i will agree that our game doesn't have enough bugged pulls these days though
Such a cynical view of the game we love! The only way I can reply to that is with a story. You talked from the point of view of a pet class and my main in EQ was a Necromancer so it made me want to explain how it's not always just send pet, cast spells. I remember a fun fight from around 9 years ago.. which says a lot. It says I'm a huge dork, but it also says that the game was pretty special and had some great moments.
So Kunark had just come out, and even with some old world raid gear, the content was a lot harder than ever before. I ended up in a group and we went to Sebilis, and upon arrival I used my last two coffins to help some people who were at the end of a bad night. We headed down in to the dungeon, without an evaccer, knowing that if we wiped it was going to be a huge downer. We would *have* to come back and get our corpses, and it was a long run as the only way to get back was to teleport to that spire in the far end of Dreadlands and then run that long ass way back.
We head down and take a left, and fight to that big room where the Froglok Bonecaster Robe dropped. We realised that we had ended up with a really strong group, everyone knowing how to play, and how the other classes worked. We camped in that room for a while, and felt brave enough to see what was beyond that door at the back. We ended up in a room to the side there, and the tank would go and pull mobs to us, but after a while, as buffs were fading too, we were starting to struggle to keep on top of spawns. We were also now trapped, as the Bonecaster room behind us had completely respawned.
Then it all goes bad. A bunch of respawns outside the room, join the ones were already fighting, and then we end up with respawns inside the room too. In total we have about 7 or 8 mobs in this tiny room with us, and each one is hard to kill. Most normal groups would easily wipe at this point, but not this group. So two mobs are beating on the Warrior and he is trying desperately to aggro a third, one is fighting the mage's pet and winning, one is fighting my pet and winning, but one is also attacking the Enchanter and Cleric. So chanter bites his lip and casts his AE stun, and then his AE mez, something that hardly ever seems to happen in SoD these days... We watch him cast it, and watch it land... and I see him turn to face me to watch. If EQ characters could show facial expressions, his would have been =O
The reason being... when mezzes landed on a mob back then, pets continued fighting and any damage would break it, so his mezz landed on half the mobs in the room and one of them was the mob me, my pet, and the mage were blasting. But the Mage and I were watching what he was doing, and because we were familiar with the time it takes to cast... I manage to hit my "pet back off" at the split second the mez lands and the Mage disengages too, otherwise it would have gone straight for the chanter and killed him, and we would have wiped for sure. His =)! in chat suggests he was impressed.
Anyway, he now ends up with a few mobs beating on him, and the Cleric heals like crazy to save him, which then draws major heal aggro from two mobs. The warrior already has his hands full with at least 3 other mobs, and the Rogue is trying to help kill those. The Cleric needs saving but I have a plan. I use my Screaming Terror spell on one of them, and the other one is on about 50% health. I cast my hugely powerful Envenomed Bolt on it, and then a bunch of my other huge dots, which is suicide in terms of aggro, but I manage to peel aggro off the cleric, and it comes after me. I then hit FD, which fails... but then I hit my Harmshield (which most Necros never even used). The mob now has to find someone else to rage on, but my several dots have hurt it so much, it's easy for the mage to finish off with one big nuke. So one down, a bunch more to go. At this point, both the pets die from tanking unaided. The Mage quickly makes a new pet, and the chanter mem blurs one of the mobs so that the Mage pet can take over the aggro. Meanwhile I unload on another mob to draw aggro off the Cleric (who had been trying to save the pets), and I run it to the corner of the room and root it on top of me, then run away and leave it stuck there. I now quickly sit down and memorize my charm spell because some of these mobs are undead. I charm one and the Mage unloads and manages to kill some more, and the chanter manages to get the last one or two slowed, but at this point we are all low on mana - besides the Cleric who is completely out... The Chanter now charms my previously charmed pet, and uses the last of his mana to single target mez a couple more. I quickly sit and un-memorize a few slots, and replace them with all of my pact/heal spells. I use all of them combined on the tank, which manages to hold his HP steady on about 10%, as my health plummets to satisfy the pacts. If I hadn't just got the new Vexing Mordinia spell, I would probably be toast at this point, but that combined with my new fast lifetap spell lets me basically take over as the healer for a minute or so. The Cleric 'parks' another mob in another corner with his root spell, and hits divine aura to let him sit and get some mana for one more heal, and we manage to finish off the remaining mobs.
By the end of the fight, we were all completely out of mana, all battered and bruised and on low health, and all pets dead. It was a close call, but we all knew that most groups would have just wiped and would now be spending the next hour or two doing a miserable CR, instead of going to bed.
I can remember a few other fights like this, and it doesn't include the things I did solo, like soloing Howling Stones, which required levetating in to the zone and hitting FD before the two mobs unload their two harm touches on me. The only way to even survive that first encounter is to charm one, and have them use their HT on each other, making this only possible for Necros and no other class. I also remember soloing the Ghoul Lord when nobody else would even dream of doing that, by using little more than dooming darkness and just aggro kiting him in circles around the pillar outside the hand room, for ages.
The moral of this long (and probably boring for you) story, is that EQ and SoD can provide some incredible moments. But easing things like death penalty, travel, etc.. eats away at the potential for these moments, and making it so that all nukes will land, no matter what, just makes me think that it's all going too far.
