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Mentoring Programs
consultant
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Jahlon said
Isn't the gear you get by clearing the dungeon enough of a reward for PvE?
Well purpose of post was player developement not necessarily rewards. But see how title could be misleading.
But if A system like Warforged Gear that WoW had. (Do not know if they still have it.) was implemented And if player performance as a group and individually affected the chance of getting Ashes of Creations lets say Flameforged Gear then yes it could work just using the gear.
Now in another post I said that Google and Forums is not enough for people to get raid ready. Maybe part of the reason for that is information is scattered abroad and it is like fishing in a really big pond hoping you catch something. Personally When I Watch videos or read forums have noticed I have to go through a lot of videos and lots of reading to get useful information. I researched key bindings for a long time to find out my set up did not matter to much cause I have all my bindings on my mouse. The problem with all the vidoes and post that I watched and read is they basically t tell you how they personally key bind. Not how to key bind.
But if Forums had real specific categories. Like place for people to post about keybindings. instead of broad categories like Raiding, PvP then it would be easier for people to find helpful information faster. Thing about keybindings lots people say that it is personal preference, but it is more like personal needs. For example keybindings for healers in 16 man raids have different needs than healer in 3v3 or let say just Dps vs Tank. So When a player posts about keybindings there should be fields to fill in. LIke classes played, mouse used keyboard used type of content that player does the most and so on.
Forums could also be use to post information about player development like getting raid ready but beit a lot easier if steps for doing would be in a Category like Raiding Fundamentals. My recommnedation is to get with people that are experts at it already (good raid leaders) probably notice them saying similar things and having similar problems and post critical information out of all the information gather.
One way to develope muscle memory is to make a mini game out of abilities. Now this idea came from a old game on play station 2 called Jak II In that game Xs and circles and squares and triangles and you would have to push the respective buttons. So same thing could be done with the icons for the individual class abilities. So you would have a target dummy targeted (two or more if practicing changing targets) and Icons would appear over there head telling you what ability to use next. Abilites would not have cooldowns of course. That the really simple version of the game. But could be waves of little demonic bunnies you have to kill that come towards you faster and faster as you go along.
Another thing you might want to look at is A raid leadership development program. Maybe they are not enough raid leaders out there. No suggestions there never been a raid leader.
Isn't the gear you get by clearing the dungeon enough of a reward for PvE?
Well purpose of post was player developement not necessarily rewards. But see how title could be misleading.
But if A system like Warforged Gear that WoW had. (Do not know if they still have it.) was implemented And if player performance as a group and individually affected the chance of getting Ashes of Creations lets say Flameforged Gear then yes it could work just using the gear.
Now in another post I said that Google and Forums is not enough for people to get raid ready. Maybe part of the reason for that is information is scattered abroad and it is like fishing in a really big pond hoping you catch something. Personally When I Watch videos or read forums have noticed I have to go through a lot of videos and lots of reading to get useful information. I researched key bindings for a long time to find out my set up did not matter to much cause I have all my bindings on my mouse. The problem with all the vidoes and post that I watched and read is they basically t tell you how they personally key bind. Not how to key bind.
But if Forums had real specific categories. Like place for people to post about keybindings. instead of broad categories like Raiding, PvP then it would be easier for people to find helpful information faster. Thing about keybindings lots people say that it is personal preference, but it is more like personal needs. For example keybindings for healers in 16 man raids have different needs than healer in 3v3 or let say just Dps vs Tank. So When a player posts about keybindings there should be fields to fill in. LIke classes played, mouse used keyboard used type of content that player does the most and so on.
Forums could also be use to post information about player development like getting raid ready but beit a lot easier if steps for doing would be in a Category like Raiding Fundamentals. My recommnedation is to get with people that are experts at it already (good raid leaders) probably notice them saying similar things and having similar problems and post critical information out of all the information gather.
One way to develope muscle memory is to make a mini game out of abilities. Now this idea came from a old game on play station 2 called Jak II In that game Xs and circles and squares and triangles and you would have to push the respective buttons. So same thing could be done with the icons for the individual class abilities. So you would have a target dummy targeted (two or more if practicing changing targets) and Icons would appear over there head telling you what ability to use next. Abilites would not have cooldowns of course. That the really simple version of the game. But could be waves of little demonic bunnies you have to kill that come towards you faster and faster as you go along.
Another thing you might want to look at is A raid leadership development program. Maybe they are not enough raid leaders out there. No suggestions there never been a raid leader.
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Comments
1. Warforged gear in WoW was a terrible system that I hope will never appear in any mmorpg ever again.
2. Here is your ultimate keybinding guide - use whatever is most comfortable to you.
3. If you had a specific "keybinding" sub-forum it would be practically empty. What's the point in having 50 different sub-forums with 1-2 threads in each?
4. Forums have a search function for a reason. If people can't be bothered to use it that is their problem.
5. The best way to gain muscle memory for your keybinds is to use them. In other words, play the game and your muscle memory will improve on its own. You don't need a special mini game to do this.
6. The reason why there are so few raid leaders is because not many people want the responsibility of the job.
Look, I love your enthusiasm and what you want to achieve but you are trying to solve problems that don't exist, with solutions that cause more problems than they solve.
It's like if you see a car that is working perfectly fine and you want to attach jet engines to it to make it go faster.
Learning how to keybind is something that you can do in any game. It just becomes about memorizing your rotation and where you have your keys and then making changes based on rotation order. There are times when someone has a usual piece of advice about keybinding, but keybinding is a gamer skill not a game-specific skill.
I do agree with Wandering about search functions. I mean, come on, you can't search for what you need?
1. Warforged gear was one of the many itterations that Acctivision-Blizzard tried to shift the focus of their playerbase on short term satisfaction. It should have never been implemented in my opinion. (Started with Mists of Pandaria i believe, could have started in Cataclysm but i didnt play during cata)
2. I personally like to bind my keys to q, e, r, f, t, x, Shift q, Shift e, Shift r, Shift f, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Shift 1, Shift 2, Shift 3, Shift 4. That is because i dont have high mobility in my hand and easily get cramps. I also know a few people who can use their whole keyboard and believe that keybindings are specific to the user. Some people may find it more intuitive to use the f1-4 keys and another to use others.
3. If you need to find a specific thing, then just create a new thread where you ask others specifically for that one thing. If others have not the path you seek, then be the pathfinder.
4. I trained for one whole week one a training dummy for 2 hours a day to get my whole rotation + cds + consumables correctly bound and trained. I could do it while i was half asleep, which i occasionally did tbh. There is no "easy" way to keybinds and muscle memory. Ask any professional chef how long they had to train to cut vegetables quickly and they will all tell you that they had to train hard, or that they just did it so many timey that their body learned it automatically.
5. Being a raid leader is an unthankfull job. I was a raid leader for about 4 years on and off. Here are a few things you have to do: learn all strats for bosses, cut the information down to a few sentences per role per boss so that your numbskull raiders can understand it, organize 20 people to get online at the same time, network to have replacements if necessary, organize potions and other consumables, because half of your raiders wont have them themselves, look out for idiots during fights, sift through all the mediocre dps to see if someone doesnt pick up their slack, keep overachieving idiots in line, see to it that not one lerson gets all the loot and watch out that raiders dont roll on unnecessary gear (i had people who rolled on items that were worse than their current gear for offspecs...) while others really needed the upgread. Thats just what i remembered of the top of my head. And do you want to know the best part? No one notices that you do all this. No one thanks you for sh*t. But we still do it, because SOMEONE has to. The show must go on after all.
Sorry to derail. Just thought it was interesting.
Still not even sure what warforged gear has to do with making players better at raiding, but just to clarify for those who don't know, warforging in a system in WoW where a dropped item could (at random) have a much higher item level than normal So you could kill a boss that usually drops level 450 gear but instead you get a piece of level 500 gear instead. Completely at random.
@damokles is right that it was implemented during the Mists of Pandaria expansion. The official reason given by Blizzard was that players were supposedly getting stuck on bosses despite having the best gear possible up to that point. Now I don't know about anyone else but I never encountered a raid which had everyone kitted out in the BiS gear and couldn't kill the bosses in the raid.
So instead of letting the WoW playerbase get good, Blizzard decided to start handing out free gear to help the players through, which has snowballed to the shitshow that we see in WoW today. Anyway, none of this has anything to do with mentoring programs so.....*shrugs*
I think giving players gear rewards for performing extra well (especially on a individual level) just makes the discrepancy between good and bad players worse. Players who are struggling are the ones who need better gear.
However, it might be okay to give players "Flameforge" bonuses for standing in so much fire that their gear gets tougher from the all the extra heat treatments. The name even fits.
This time it got derailed instantly by the thread creator
Good players will game it, obviously, but I still like it.
I'm not a huge fan of always giving the best gear to the best players in a competitive game, as that inherently reduces the actual competitiveness. It isn't a problem I have a solution for, but the above is still a good idea imo.
Probably enough where we could ask intrepid for our own separate sub-forum where we can complain about all the cats we have to herd away from the obvious fire that's going to kill you if you stand in it! :P
Another good idea from this thread...
An invitation only sub-forum on the official forums (post launch) for raid leaders. A place to share info without all the noise - and complain about stuff...
The flameforging could be nice if it was a passive on your armor with a limited duration. Say, it gets activated after standing in fire aoes and enhances the player for x amount for 15 sec, with a 30sec cd.
This would backfire spectacularly if it was implemented. Whenever you have buffs like this the good players will take full advantage of it by stacking all their other buffs and cooldowns on top of it, something that the less skilled players wouldn't think to do. This creates a huge gap between the good and the bad players which in turn makes tuning the fights impossible.
If you tune the fight under the assumption that all the players will optimally use the buff, the less skilled players who don't use it won't be able to kill the boss. If however you tune the fight assuming players won't use the buff, the good players will destroy the boss and complain that it is too easy.
It's a catch 22 situation waiting to happen.
The exact same problem would happen that I detailed in my last post. Also I have to ask, why do you want to give benefits to bad players? Why should they get statistical advances over the good players?
I don't understand why you are trying to even the playing field in such an artificial way.
Nah man, I was joking. It's a terrible idea. Fire should always be bad. People shouldn't get anything good from standing in it.
If you want to buff bad players, you can only give them small consolations after a significantly worse setback. Like FFXIV has a system for some of it's medium-difficulty bosses, where you get a 5% stacking buff to HP and damage every time your party wipes, but only if you spent a few minutes fighting. That way wiping always costs you time overall, but bad players get a little bit of help to eventually clear the content.
While you don't want to reward failure, game developers of a PvP game need to remain aware that if one group of players always beats the other, and thus always gets the rewards, it will become exponentially harder for the first group to then catch up.
This is a situation that is negative for both groups of players. Both groups lose any notion of competition with each other. Obviously just handing the losing side an advantage isn't the right answer (nor do I suggest that I have such an answer), but it is something that needs to be taken in to account.
You bring up a good point, which is why I favour static arenas as a place for competitive PvP. Since it is a closed environment you can easily control the power levels by giving each player access to the same gear.
As for the winners pulling further and further ahead in an arms race, I just don't see that happening realistically, unless arena rewards are incredibly powerful, or caravan materials are important for individual progression and can't be attained in other ways. There might be a runaway arms race in node or guild wars, but it will probably depend more on recruiting a larger fighting force than on gear levels.
I prefer thar as well.
Unfortunately, that isn't really an option in Ashes.
I mean, we'll have arenas, but the fact that they exist won't remove PvP over resources from the open world.
Personally, I consider PvP over resources to be the real competition, rather than PvP over ladder position.
To me, that is removing a part of the game. I don't think gear progression should be the only thing that decides a fight (as it does in a lot of games) but I find it sad when it's completely cut out of pvp. To me, it's a part of the game and another aspect of the game that players get to think about.
A big reason I see games cut it out seems to be because they also use gear (and by gear, I mean gear score) as a gating mechanic for pve content. I know some enjoy that aspect of pve and think there should be games out there for them but it would be nice if some games didn't go down that route. If you really need a gate, there are other ways of doing it wither it's through the contents difficulty or other in-game requirements(attunements). One of Ashes core mechanics, Nodes, already is a huge gating mechanic for pve content.
You can even use gear as a gating mechanic without the mechanic only being about power. Easy example is things like resistances which you can take in a variety of directions. You can also make stages of the content require special items to defeat the content. To beat the frost dragon, maybe you need to get everyone set up in frost resist gear and have a certain number of people equipped with special harpoons that they use to prevent the dragon from flying away.
There are ways to create gear so players can be rewarded for progression but not be the only thing that decides a pvp fight.
You are greatly mis-stating things here.
Gear upgrades are the defining aspect of PvE content.
You kill encounters to get better gear (a reward), which then allows you to kill harder encounters, which then results in getting better gear so that you can kill harder encounters.
Gear upgrading is the central pivot of this system, and not only will developers not want to spend time trying to develop another central pivot for a multi-million dollar game, but players will immediately reject it even if they tried.
Even if it weren't an absolute fact that players would largely reject a game where gear upgrades were not the central pivot, developers wouldn't take a mechanic that offers such easy and obvious rewards from a PvE situation and move it to a PvP situation.
This is because PvP is self defeating in terms of maintaining a healthy persistent game.
If you put a PvE reward structure in to a PvP environment, it wouldn't take long at all before one group of players had caused the rest of the server to leave the game. Then that group of players would fragment due to having no one to fight, which would then see one of those fragments win more than the other, get better gear, and chase off the losing fragment.
Which brings us back full circle to why it is not always a good idea in PvP to always reward the stronger group of players if you want to maintain a healthy persistent world, and why I still have no solution to the problem (other than telling PvP players to just suck it up and deal with the game as it is, I suppose).
The thing is, if you did this, the only challenge you could then offer in the next wave of PvE encounters is attacks on those resistances.
If you want to put in a challenge for the raid to maintain a specific amount of DPS on a specific target (or targets), then the gear in the previous content needs to contain DPS focused gear for all DPS classes. If you want to put in a challenge for the raid to be able to survive an unmitigatible AoE, you need to add in high HP gear for all classes. If you want to put in a challenge for the raid where the healers need to heal ridiculous amounts of damage, you need to provide them with gear that increases their healing output.
On top of all of that, the rewards for a specific encounter need to be somewhat balanced across all classes. If one encounter (or group of encounters) requires high DPS, then the encounter (or group of encounters) before that needs to provide DPS players with high DPS gear. In order to maintain balance though, that/those encounters also need to provide at least a few pieces of gear for healers, tanks and support as upgrades to what they already have. There are, but the only way to make that happen in a realistic environment (ie, one where you don't want to sacrifice your PvE game for a PvP game) is to have different stats on gear in PvE and PvP.
I think it's silly that you say that players need to be reward with power and later in my resistance example you trivialize the reward and say all they get is new resistances. All you want to reward is power, just stats that make your numbers bigger and prettier
What's the diff?
What's the difference between content giving power vs content giving you something more unique, like a resistance. Especially when giving out so much power has caused so many issues that devs have resorted to removing the power (the pve reward) from certain game modes i.e. pvp. In some games, the power you get from pve means little to nothing outside of pve.
Giving players power, as a reward, obviously has caused issues for the rest of the game. Would it not be ideal to find a way to balance the rewards from high-end pve so that they can be used in other content like pvp without it being the only thing that decides a fight?
Resistances were just an example of a reward and a requirement. There is a large variety of interesting passive, active, and set abilities they could tie to pve content which could reward players and give them interesting options without rewarding them with out of control power. Remember, not every reward from content needs to be a requirement for the next stage of content and not every requirement for the next stage of content needs to come from the content before it.
It's about horizontal progression.
Optimized dps should be about mastering your character's rotation while reacting to the challenges of the encounter. I don't see much of the difference between doing that with stronger gear vs gear with some unique stat for the encounter.
At the end of the day, you are requiring the player to get gear. Why does it matter if it's power or something more focused like a resistance?
If you prefer power as a reward that then cool but I'm going to push back if you say that's the only way to reward players for pve. As I said, I still think there should be games that go down the route of constantly giving out power. I don't agree that it's the only way of doing things.
If my raid is regularly killing content that requires a combined raid DPS of 10,000, and then the next encounter we take on still only requires 10,000 DPS, but has a need for greater cold resistance, then my DPS are not improving.
If this were the case on all encounters, where the only thing that needed to be increased were resistances, then raid DPS would be static - there would never be any improvements to be had.
It isn't about bigger numbers per se, it is about being presented with a challenge that we can't overcome just yet, and each individual within the raid as a whole then improves on their specialization, until the point where we have all improved enough to be able to take on that challenge.
Sure, the end result of this is a bigger DPS number, but that isn't the goal. The goal is being able to defeat the content. The majority of bragging about DPS numbers is done in an ironic fashion - at least by those that know what they are talking about - as the numbers inherently mean nothing past proof of improvement towards a specific goal.
The fact that some people don't get that irony is not something to dwell upon.
Put perhaps more simply, players play classes on raids that do a job they enjoy. Progression of their character should progress that one job that they perform, as that is what they are on the raid to do.
Providing a DPS with loot on a raid that only increases their survivability is akin to providing a PvP player with a PvP reward item that has a passive that increases their damage output, but only in PvE combat.
In both cases, the reward is simply not appropriate. However, if the raid item also increased DPS, and the PvP item also increased damage output in PvP, then both items are suitable.
Indeed it has, hence this discussion - not the one the thread started about, but the one we are having regardless.
Yes and no.
If we are talking about MMO's in general, then yes. If we are talking about Ashes specifically, then no.
In a game where the vast majority of items are able to be crafted, bought and sold - and thus obtained by anyone willing to pay for them - I don't see an issue. If I am coming at you with raid equipment in PvP, you have no one but yourself to blame if you don't also have raid equipment on.
It is no more available to me than it is to you in Ashes.
To me, the fact that all gear will essentially be available to all players nullifies the need to try and keep PvE loot from being powerful in PvP.
Horizontal progression is a placebo. It's one that only a small handful of people fall for, and so can't be used as a replacement for vertical progression for very long.
Your statement - not every reward from content needs to be a requirement for the next stage of content and not every requirement for the next stage of content needs to come from the content before it is quite false.
It's true that not every reward from content needs to be for the next stage, indeed most rewards should be somewhat general purpose. However, to the rest of that thought, if a specific piece of content doesn't need anything from the piece of content before it, then the piece of content before it is pointless as people will just skip to the latter one.
The only reason to not skip it is if it is needed for flagging zone access - which all that does is cause resentment in the raid population, who will literally run the content the minimum number of times to get everyone flagged, and then never do the encounter again. From that point on guilds that have done that encounter will only ever recruit players in to the guild that have that flag - effectively cutting the raid population in to two distinct segments (as bad an idea as cutting the PvP population in to two distinct segments). Games that have "rotations" are not worth my time to play.
Players master their character in the first two or three raid encounters of a game. How exactly do you propose they improve their output over the next several hundred encounters (or, if you want to talk EQ/EQ2, several thousand)?
Gear with properties unique to an encounter are not rewards, they are tools. This notion also conflicts with the idea that not every item reward needs to be for the next encounter, or series of encounters. If a reward is to be generic in terms of it's use, then by definition, it can't be specific in terms of it's use.
And I'd also like to point out your earlier statement...
What is providing raiders with gear that only works on specific encounters, if not removing gear from PvP?
This is why I am saying this is a problem with no real solution, as any solution may work for some players, but absolutely won't work for others.
Giving your dps gear with a higher gear score isn't improving them as players. They are doing the exact same thing they did on the previous fight but in gear with bigger numbers.
It's the same thing as giving them frost resist gear. Instead of the boss having big numbers that require them to have gear with bigger numbers, the boss has a bunch of frost damage that the need gear with frost resist to help mitigate.
In both scenarios, they are doing the same thing but in different gear.
Once again, resist is only an example of a raid requirement. I'm pretty sure you could take 1 minute and think of a variety of different item requirements (other than bigger numbers) that could be needed for different bosses.
Yes, mastering your class doesn't take long but in a pve encounter, you have to optimally use your class while performing the unique actions of an encounter (it's mechanics). Dps (as well as other roles) improve by learning the different encounters so they can perform mechanics as quickly as possible to maximize the time they spend performing their role.
Another crazy thing that can happen when there is more to gear then larger numbers, you can have gear sets that complement different abilities and changing how your class plays. Another thing players can do to perfect their performance at their role.
If you like endless number scaling then cool but from what I'm reading, it sounds like you are saying it's the only way to reward pve content which I disagree with. If you think horizontal progression is a placebo then I'm not sure if you have really given it any thought. I believe if you took a second you could think of meaningful rewards that could be given to players that aren't flat power. You can still prefer big, pretty numbers, but there are other things you can give players as a reward.
All horizontal progression means is you are being rewarded with something that is different, not flat out more powerful. It can be stronger, especially depending on how it synergizes with other things but it doesn't flat out have more stats/power.
If horizontal progression is a meaningless placebo, does that mean you are never going to change your augments or go for new ones? Are you never going to switch your secondary class because that's just a horizontal move? What about reworking the gear you get for different stats? The weapons power isn't going to change so what's the point of changing it from a weapon that has bonuses to defense to a weapon that has bonuses to damage?
I'm talking about good gear, not gear with a high gear score.
The notion of players improving as a player is as much a fallacy as anything else. Most raiders are as good at their class as they will ever be after the first few raids, all they need to do after that is adjust to the encounters they are faced with.
This is the same with PvP, most top end PvP players are as good as they are going to be after only a few days of having access to all their abilities. From that point, all they need to do is adjust to the new PvP meta as it develops.
The only way players ever need to "improve" as players - whether PvP or PvE, is when the game gives them new abilities to use that need to be mastered.
Character improvements is more important than player improvement in an MMO. This may not hold true in a BR, or in a FPS game, but character improvement is what MMORPG's are about, not player improvement.
Yes, but all of them confer the same level of benefit in PvP content.
If I have high resists due to having raid level gear, and you attack me with attacks corresponding to those resists, how well do you think that will work for you? Since there are many raid encounters, there will be resist gear for each resist type, meaning raid level players can always have much higher resists to all damage types than other players, meaning all damage types will do less damage to those players.
Anything you can come up with will have this same effect unless you put in encounter or content type specific effects on gear - which is that whole thing of removing gear from the PvP equation again, something we are both against. I'm not at all saying it is the only way, I am saying it is the main way.
Further, I am saying that this is the case by necessity.
You can't keep players engaged in a content type if that content type doesn't give them and their character a way to improve at the singular thing they are in that content type to provide. This applies to all content types (solo, group, raid, PvP, crafting, naval etc), and to all things players bring to those content types. If you are in a raid, and you are a healer (just so I'm not talking about DPS all the time), if an item doesn't improve your ability to keep your charges alive (whether that is a specific person, group of people, or the whole raid), then you don't use it.
On the other hand, if that item does allow you to better do the one thing you are in the raid to do, it is vertical progression (or arguably angular progression - but that is just a term people that advocate horizontal progression use to argue their point when it becomes obvious that characters still progress vertically regardless of the game).
I am going to make use of the augments that deliver the best results. There may be encounters or situations that require different setups of augments (though, since we can't just change them at will, I hope not). If this is the case, getting these augments is the part of my statement where I said it can't be used as a replacement for vertical progression for very long.
If players find themselves having to hunt out new augments every time they want to take on new content, the game won't last very long.
All of that said, going back to the base argument of raid level loot having too much influence over PvP, I'm still waiting to hear any reason as to why this is an issue if that raid level loot is able to be bought and sold.
This is why it's important to have stats like Crit, spell casting speed and cooldown reduction, as these are things that you can feel as a player. If my character crits more often I will notice that. If I'm able to cast more spells in the same amount of time, I can feel that.
Oh and @noaani I disagree with you that players no longer improve after their first few raids with a character. There will always be improvements even after you've played 1000 hours or 10,000 hours. That's why speedrunners are constantly getting better and better times despite the games themselves never changing. As we play, we learn and understand more and more about how the mechanics of the game work in order to optimise as much as possible. For example, the first ever recorded speedrun of Super Mario 64 back in 2004 was 2 hours 57 minutes 47 seconds long. The current world record is 1 hour 38 minutes 54 seconds. Sure the improvements are slow, but they do add up over time.
Also, those stats I talked about above like spell casting speed can alter the gameplay so drastically that it is like learning a new character all over again. Give a character enough extra spell casting speed and their rotation completely changes without any new abilities added.
Rewarding gear with increased stats is the standard for all RPGs but it is by no means the only way to reward players. Cosmetics and different mounts are more and more popular these days and these are fantastic rewards that don't affect the balance of power. There are other things you can do too. GW2 has nearly all horizontal progression as stats on gear are capped and it is very easy to get the best gear possible. So instead, GW2 rewards horizontal progression with its mastery system, which mostly boil down to things that make exploring and moving through the world easier.
In GW2 the main reward for the raids are the legendary insights which are used to craft legendary armour and weapons. The legendary items aren't more powerful than other gear in terms of raw combat stats but they have the benefit that you can change the stats combinations whenever you like for free (something you cannot do with regular gear).
This shows that horizontal progression can be done well as long as it plays into the rest of the game. You couldn't copy the horizontal progressions from GW2 and put them into WoW for example.
Top end raiding is all about results.
Speedrunning is the equivalent of working on the same piece of content over and over again. It is the like working on one raid boss for years and years - you aren't getting better at the whole game, you are just getting better at that one piece of content.
The different is that the piece of content speedrunners are doing over and over again just happens to be the whole game. This is due to the fact that such games are very limited in terms of content. If someone took the same engine and made new content, those players wouldn't automatically be speedrunning that content, which suggests that it isn't the players that improved, it is only their ability on the specific piece of content.
Agreed.
Even better, have it change during combat - then their rotation changes on the fly.
This is something EQ2 does, which is what makes it such a good raid game. Spell cast speed, along with recast speed, spell power and GCD all being able to be affected mid combat in that game is why you don't have a spell rotation, but rather a spell priority.
You need to think fast in order to maximize your output, and that makes for a much more enjoyable game than simply deciding before the fight exactly what your rotation will be - even if it is different from the previous fight.
It isn't the only reward, but it is (and will always remain) the main reward. I've never argued that such things can't exist.
My argument here is simply that gear upgrades as rewards for PvE raids that in turn allow the raid to take on the next level of challenge will always have to be a part PvE raiding, and any game that wants open PvP as well as PvE raids will simply need to work around that basic fact.
To make myself clear, i don't think it is a problem that raid loot is stronger then loot outside of raiding, my issue is the power creep that happens when they constantly increase the power with each new iteration of raid content.
I also think there should be some items that are legendary and strong compared to the others, I just don't want every new item to be a flat upgrade on new content release. I'm not sure if i have made this point clear but i'm not recommending all rewards be hyper focused on giving you what you need for the next fight, the gear should have interesting stats combinations, passives, active, and set bonuses. I want gear rewards to be something more interesting then the same base item with a little bit more stats. Maybe killing the frost dragon gives you a set of gear with frost dragon themed bonuses. The weapon might give you bonuses to frost damage or convert a portion of your damage to be frost and has an activatable that allows you to shoot a frost wave. In ashes, maybe there is an augment for some or all the classes.
I don't see getting gear with bigger numbers as improving. If you do then cool but i much prefer getting gear with a variety of different effects and trying to figure out how i can combine these different effects to maximize my effectiveness or just change my playstyle. Once again, i'm not saying that no game should ever have endless gear scaling, i'm just saying that horizontal progression is an option. I also just like the option to do things a little differently then others.
Damage resist was an easy example to give that some people might be familiar with. It wasn't necessarily the route they have to go. The idea is that if the devs think they need to make a gear requirement for a fight, they can do so with something more specialized and fitting of the theme of the fight instead of requiring x amount of numbers. Maybe it's resist gear or specialized damage gear, maybe it's a special amulet or ring that wards off a dangerous effect, or maybe it's some kind of consumable. Once again, this is only if the gating mechanic they want is gear related, there are other ways of gating people out besides gear, if they even feel the need to gate people at all.
Yes, if i build my character around a damage type and you try to hard counter it with the resist gear, then i would be at a disadvantage but you would also be at a disadvantage against anyone who doesn't focus on the damage type you are resisting. If it's horizontal progression, then you traded something for those resists.
I love it how your title has absolutely no connection to your thread at all, but anyway
Well if you reward little bit better gear for good performance would not that encourage people to do better.
Instead iwell it is jus another dungeoun and prepare them for raids. Right? You understand the concept right? See how the are connected. Good performance for little bit better gear.
As far as the search function. Well does not work to well in my experiencing. Have to go through a lot of threads to find right info. Better to have useful information to develope toons all in one place for the most part. But thing forums would be good place to put that info after all cause not all good players make videos.
But could be encouraged to share what they know in a Forum. No such categories exists. Would be cool if category like Player Developement was there a place for toons to contribute knowledge.
Another thing Intrepid could do is to allow guilds to have spectator mode for dungeouns and raids for their guildies so they could learn the fight that way.