Learn far more scenarios and gain experience. Its not a PvE encounter where there is a guide up and you just practice the mechanics until you can do it well enough.
Two points to just this line.
First of all, I have said many times that game with guides are not the rule. You are taking the most basic version of PvE and applying it to all PvE.
Stop doing that.
Second, each encounter in PvE is it's own scenario. You need to learn each of them. In EQ2, I killed well over 300 different encounters, with different strategies, each of them notably different.
There are not that many scenarios in PvP that a player needs to learn. If you are running the defense of a siege, for example, there would only be two or three viable strategies the attacker could use that has any chance of success. As such, you only have two or three strategies you need to consider and plan for.
In terms of PvP in the open world (whether just open PvP, guild wars, what ever), various games have various strategies (Archeages mageball, for example), but there is usually only a small handful of these per game, and very little that actually needs high level consideration other than such strategies.
Your view is very shallow on PvP yet again, it pretty much is akin you need to defend this so its not complex. There are multiple unique scenarios you need to deal with ever siege, manage and cycle people in combat. Everything needs to be done with quick reaction between all members of the fighter, when you are talking about 250 players for super high end the complexity of that is huge. Again im a broken damn record, not just battle but planning, strategy, drama, building the guild, retaining the members, teaching is all part of it.
Quantity means nothing, doing 300 dungeons isn't difficult content.... You look at the guide see what you need to do if its even difficult enough where you need a guide and beat the dungeon. It is a puzzle you are solving you know what happens when you figure you out and you play according to what you know will happen. That does not exist in PvP, things can change on the dime, go well or go bad. You don't go into pvp knowing what is going to happen unlike a PvE dungeon where you know the mechanics and its just about following the plan. That isn't hard content. Puzzle says go here, tanks agro certain mobs, burn things down in certain order, stand here to be protected while other group does dps, etc. Moment to moment combat again someone that isn't a programmed AI is going to have far more challenges then something you know exactly what it is going to do.
There is a reason why in PvP voice is much more important and why you have multiple leads, because of the complexity of dealing with other human being and needing to organize different groups since so much is going on you can't account for.
Then on top of it you throw more action based combat in the game and PvE is a joke compared to the difficulty of Players being able to make use of out playing people on moment o moment combat. PvP and PvE is different leagues. PvE being puzzle solving (lost ark added a bit of twitch action based to it), and the more action based in PvP makes the skill curve go from liner to straight up vertical on what players can do depending on how much players have access to. Which can lead to a group never being able to beat the other group because of the skill level they have reached. And that is just a extra layer onto of allt he other work that is needed.
I'm going to go back tot his again so i can continue to drive the point home from your own damn words.
From there, you move in to questions of "is everyone completely geared with exactly the best item in each slot that we have available to us right now?", "does literally everyone present know exactly what their role is, and what to do in any number of potential situations we may find ourselves in without needing direction?", "does everyone have the exact best spec for that player to be able to fulfil their assigned role to the absolute best of their and their characters ability?" and "are we all well versed in playing with each other to the point where we can anticipate each others thoughts?".
This is basic 101 in PvP this whole thing for you, gets taken to the next level in PvP since this is simply one layer upon many other PvP players have to deal with. This post actually shows your inexperience with pvp as well not being able to understand the bigger picture with pvp and territory control and the difficult of sieges. Again the combat is only part of PvP all parts come together including the guild building, planning, drama, etc. Dealing with real people both in ones you fight and the ones you have to work with is harder then PvE content.
This last line of yours is mostly just about the numbers aspect again, right? The 'Dev limit' in question. Or is it your opinion/experience that Devs generally or always specifically script how groups should take on harder PvE content?
It's mainly a response to Noaani's explanation of what "top lvl pve" for him is and his reasoning for why owpvp is always easier. "You're limited by the devs in pve, while you can always add people in owpvp". And my counter to that is "your upper limit in pve is dev-based, while my upper limit in owpvp is me-based". I'm sure you can beat 40-man raids with fewer people, but I'd assume Noaani would just says that it wasn't top lvl pve if you could. If I'm wrong on that assumption @Noaani pls correct me.
Ok, that does indeed sound like a 'numbers' aspect.
I doubt Noaani is talking about strategy or difficulty relative to numbers, based on what Noaani has explained relative to personal skill. I also am not generally speaking relative to numbers.
Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.
These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).
In this case, the Devs have indeed implied 'A fair fight here is a 6v6'. The instance is capped at level 60 (at the time it was made, it was possibly the cap, and continued to be semi-relevant content when the cap was raised to 75).
For some of these five encounters, I know where to find strategies. For a specific one, there are no easily available strategies that I could find in the usual places, because the specific combination of 'classes' employed by the Beastmen in question, plus their innate 'racial abilities', means you would basically never be able to come up with a strategy that isn't massively adaptation after about 3 minutes in.
So you'd have to just 'choose your team, choose your tactics, and adapt if the enemy uses certain techniques', which was in turn random (within the range of main options).
I can say with FAIRLY deep confidence that the Devs had NO intent, no 'script', no 'way you're supposed to beat this' other than 'probably should bring a full party of 6, they should probably work well together'. From the others that DO have strategies, some have many, some strategies are outright the reverse, people disagree on the best way to do it based on what risks they are comfortable with. There is no META for some of these fights that isn't a risk of 'well the enemy responds with a hard counter because you went for maximum damage and nothing else' or 'The enemy uses AoE sleep because you're all playing defensively' or such.
You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.
Again the combat is only part of PvP all parts come together including the guild building, planning, drama, etc.
This is the second time you have bought up things like this.
How could it be possible that you do not understand that these things exist in PvE as well?
The only answer I have to this is that you have never been in a PvE raid guild - and thus have never taken part in top end PvE.
I mean, PvE guilds don't just magically *happen*. They are built, just as PvP guilds are. They have the same requirements around planning, management, drama, rival guilds poaching players etc.
You look at the guide see what you need to do
This is why you feel you are like a broken record - you refuse to listen and just keep spewing the same shit over and over again.
Guides to content is not an inherent PvE thing. It is no more common than guides to PvP. Sure, games you play may all have guides to all the content, but that just says things about the games you play.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
Again, I have told you this outright several times in this thread. You not listening and understanding that point does not make it true, and you continuing to repeat the same incorrect assumption about PvE that you have due to not listening does not make your assumption true.
The fact that you realize you are sounding like a broken record, yet refuse to actually listen to the information that will enable you to move on is actually quite an interesting situation to witness.
Again the combat is only part of PvP all parts come together including the guild building, planning, drama, etc.
This is the second time you have bought up things like this.
How could it be possible that you do not understand that these things exist in PvE as well?
The only answer I have to this is that you have never been in a PvE raid guild - and thus have never taken part in top end PvE.
I mean, PvE guilds don't just magically *happen*. They are built, just as PvP guilds are. They have the same requirements around planning, management, drama, rival guilds poaching players etc.
You look at the guide see what you need to do
This is why you feel you are like a broken record - you refuse to listen and just keep spewing the same shit over and over again.
Guides to content is not an inherent PvE thing. It is no more common than guides to PvP. Sure, games you play may all have guides to all the content, but that just says things about the games you play.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
Again, I have told you this outright several times in this thread. You not listening and understanding that point does not make it true, and you continuing to repeat the same incorrect assumption about PvE that you have due to not listening does not make your assumption true.
The fact that you realize you are sounding like a broken record, yet refuse to actually listen to the information that will enable you to move on is actually quite an interesting situation to witness.
Lmfao if you honestly think the drama of PvE can equal to the drama of PvP where you can actually lose and gain more things is insane. You continue to try to dumb it down the point isn't jsut the drama itself but the work it takes from a lot of peoples parts to keep things together. No one person is doing everything its a whole guild effort, if you really want we can get into the nitty gritty details and the exact reasons and psychology why that is the case as well. Though lonst story short is any issue in pve with that is in PvP but on a much worst scale.
Guides to PvE tell you exactly what to do there isn't a huge change to formula there is only some slight rng at if a mob might have a unique rotation.
Guide to PvP if you find one isn't going to tell you what to do, and what exactly will happen in a fight. you can watch peoples video and see their thought process, planning, etc. But you aren't getting a video that says do this and you win.
If you are playing any modern mmorpg there are guides, else you are telling me your most relevant knowledge is older mmorpgs which doesn't exactly stand up to modern mmorpgs.
Im sounding like a broken record because I have pointed out your weaker points and you will still ignore it at the end of the day. I can clip the same exact line I did for the third time and repeat the big point you had you hadnt seen in pvp, is actually common knowledge in pvp and the most basic of that. PvP goes beyond that, but then again you won't listen. End of the day best way to settle this is if you really think PvE is more cahllenging. I want to see you do some PvP in a new mmorpg, how about you try black desert online
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
I'll also point out that I have yet to see an MMO with the following three things: actual competition; open world mobs dropping top end gear; guides for killing top end content.
This is why you feel like a broken record - you aren't listening, and instead just repeat the same incorrect bullshit over and over.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
I'll also point out that I have yet to see an MMO with the following three things: actual competition; open world mobs dropping top end gear; guides for killing top end content.
This is why you feel like a broken record - you aren't listening, and instead just repeat the same incorrect bullshit over and over.
I literately can say the same to you when you ignore points that counter your own, and try to label it as "incorrect" regardless of the facts brought up. And I'm guessing you don't have any relevant pvp experience another red flag if you have that strong an opinion on pvp making me feel again this is out of a weird sense of pride that makes no sense to me.
Like im telling you why PvP is more difficult and your big answer was debunked in why you thought pve was more difficult.... I don't understand why you can't just try to understand better where a pvper is coming from, that also had plaid a crap ton of Pve mmorpgs all the way wabk to everquest when I was a child as well as shadowbane being a hardcore pvp game.
You were repeating the same bullshit, I called you out.
If you think I am ignoring something you have said several times that you think it important and I am ignoring, call me out.
Don't say you could call me out, call me out. Saying you could call me out without doing it is pretty weak.
Then lets do it bit by bit so things can't be ignore
From there, you move in to questions of "is everyone completely geared with exactly the best item in each slot that we have available to us right now?", "does literally everyone present know exactly what their role is, and what to do in any number of potential situations we may find ourselves in without needing direction?", "does everyone have the exact best spec for that player to be able to fulfil their assigned role to the absolute best of their and their characters ability?" and "are we all well versed in playing with each other to the point where we can anticipate each others thoughts?".
This right here is the very basics of pvp If you aren't doing this at the minimum on high end pvp content you aren't winning. When I say the very basics i mean that it is the first layer.
Other layers include
1.guild alliances working with them so you don't get back stabbed and have the support you need for a fight. If you are making a deal its something you are going to have to fulfil
2. Any sort of recon if possible this is not limited to just watching their old pvp videos ( that would be not exactly but more close to pve guide) But trying to get real time information though connections you might have to find out their possible strategies, players they are going to bring, etc. As this will be important in your planning.
3. Unlike PvE where you know the encounter through guides and generally have you main go to plan on how to tackle the content. In PvP One plan isn't awlays good enough (as long as the siege is designed to be complex). You need to have some back up plans if things go south so you can recover and be able to adapt quickly to situations.
4. When you are doing a siege and you have multiple shot caller, that alone should show the challenge of the battle. Yes you have your main shot caller but other ones are important and defense leads as well. fromth e amount of effort that is required to be as effective as possible.
5. Politics more then just working with your alliance is knowing your enemies as well which is a very intensive task. This is very much part of pvp, this is akin to pre production or the ground work you lay out. You don't want to be overwhelmed with battles as wins are great but loses can be very bad and lower moral. It is a fun game to play as well of course but important since you want to always put yourself in a favorable position when it comes to pvp. Constant losing of battles, losing members, war burn out can break away your guild. To be winning in pvp ground work is important when it comes to managing people so you can pvp and be effective.
6. If you have a pvp battle with 250 people the scope of that is hard to read because in a fantasy mmorpg it is a rarity. You are taking everything and amping it up to the next level with the share amount of communication you need to manage. Example if you are running like 5 different discord voice chats with people coordinating in-between them, I've never seen that in any other game to be honest.
7. The big one action fucking combat. Of curse we don't know to the extent on how combat in this game is going to turn out exactly. But the more options skills have with action combat having mobility, dodge, block, etc the makes the out play potential be huge. Depending on the amount of action combat and what you can do it will allow hard core players to push the ceiling immensely. When a player can out play multiple people or never lose a 1v1 fight that is a big deal. When a group of skilled players work together it only amplify the level of difficulty some fights can have which is a very big deal. *ie if we think elden ring or fighting games though a mmo won't be on that level it shows the skill level of players against other players and AI
Sure i could think of a ton more but honestly I think it just be over kill at that point and just add too much to the convo so this would be the better starting point.
From there, you move in to questions of "is everyone completely geared with exactly the best item in each slot that we have available to us right now?", "does literally everyone present know exactly what their role is, and what to do in any number of potential situations we may find ourselves in without needing direction?", "does everyone have the exact best spec for that player to be able to fulfil their assigned role to the absolute best of their and their characters ability?" and "are we all well versed in playing with each other to the point where we can anticipate each others thoughts?".
I doubt the above situation has ever actually happened in an open world PvP setting. I have no doubt it has happened in an arena setting - but absolutely not an open world one.
Yes that stuff happens in top tier open world pvp groups too. It tends to just happen by default. It's expected of us. Of course occasionally an individual player might need some correction on his build and how it's fucking us. We are talking about not just top tier pvers, but top tier pvpers too. These are highly competent players, both groups.
Most of the people I've played in top tier pvp with not only used the best gear they could, knew what their role was, and what to do in as many situations as humanly possible, had the best spec, and got good at playing with each other.....they not only did all of that, they were fanatical about it.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
I'll also point out that I have yet to see an MMO with the following three things: actual competition; open world mobs dropping top end gear; guides for killing top end content.
If you want any reaction or thoughts to anything else. post it without mentioning guides, because guides are not an inherent part of PvE content.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
I'll also point out that I have yet to see an MMO with the following three things: actual competition; open world mobs dropping top end gear; guides for killing top end content.
If you want any reaction or thoughts to anything else. post it without mentioning guides, because guides are not an inherent part of PvE content.
Feel free to try again.
This is exactly what i mean you are literally too stuck up you think in "I". What i view is the whole picture and the normal experience for a player. How about i just link every modern mmo that has guides out there. AoC will have guides as well, people will beat the content and make guides on it. If your view point is you are the less then one percent that is going to world first everything before other people make guides that is fine and GL to you. That is not the normal experience for most players or very competitive players trying to gear as fast as possible.
Why Because only a small amount will be able to beat a boss first before there is steams and guides up. You assuming that is the normal experience for most players is as disingenuous as you saying you won't answer my post because of an actual fact. The fact being you and many others most likely won't be world first, MOST still be able to view the fight from stream and guides.
Why are you both debating about PvP vs PvE in a thread that should be off the first page by now? Neither is more difficult in every aspect. PvE is more technically difficult but simple to thoroughly prep for. PvP is less technically difficult but nearly impossible to thoroughly prep for. Both have their own challenges and require mostly noncomparable skillsets and mindsets. Both of which also have nothing to do with whether gear progression should be a major deciding factor in overall player power.
Why are you both debating about PvP vs PvE in a thread that should be off the first page by now? Neither is more difficult in every aspect. PvE is more technically difficult but simple to thoroughly prep for. PvP is less technically difficult but nearly impossible to thoroughly prep for. Both have their own challenges and require mostly noncomparable skillsets and mindsets. Both of which also have nothing to do with whether gear progression should be a major deciding factor in overall player power.
Was trying to bring the convo back to the original topic but got sucked back in. Think is argument is over though i made my point don't think much else is going to be said.
With PvE, players do everything they can to make it as easy as it can be - the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy. And yet it is still hard. If PvP players put that paradigm (the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy) in to PvP, then it would not be hard.
Here's a question that will give me the absolute answer for this situation: Have you ever tried to or heard of <40-man raid groups clearing top lvl 40-man raid instances in EQ(2)?
Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.
These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).
Same question to you, Azherae, have you tried/heard of people beating those Beastmen instances with <6 people?
You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.
The answers to my question will provide me with explanation. Or will at least let me make a parallel for the mentality of both groups.
With PvE, players do everything they can to make it as easy as it can be - the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy. And yet it is still hard. If PvP players put that paradigm (the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy) in to PvP, then it would not be hard.
Here's a question that will give me the absolute answer for this situation: Have you ever tried to or heard of <40-man raid groups clearing top lvl 40-man raid instances in EQ(2)?
A few qualifiers to this point.
First, I am only going to talk about EQ2. It is where most of my PvE raiding took place, and where I knew a lot about what other guilds were doing.
Second, with the above, we are talking about 24 people, not 40. I talk about 40 players a lot because that is what Ashes raid size is set to be.
Third, we are talking about top end raid content while it is top end, not all raid content, and not old raid content.
With the above three qualifiers to your question, the answer is no.
If we want to talk about raid content that is not top tier, then I have done it with four people in some cases, and multi-boxed some of it by myself as well.
This is perhaps something people are not grasping - "raid content" is an entire progression, from people just starting out and learning the ropes of it as a content type, up to the hardest encounters in the game. Every time there is a level cap increase, the raid content needs to create this teaching content all over again.
This is why I often talk about high end, top tier or similar, to denote the actual hard raid content as opposed to just any raid content. Not all raid content is hard, and some of it is indeed dead easy.
If your view point is you are the less then one percent that is going to world first everything
I have yet to play a game for any real period of time where I did not world first something.
In the case of EQ2, my guild achieved world firsts on multiple encounters in every content cycle.
As I said, stop your bullshit with guides.
Or how about while you go finding those PvE guides, you also find all the PvP guides that are out there, and are just as bad as most PvE ones.
Again i make a whole point about the small amount that can do world first and it gets completely ignored. All im hearing is you have not done world first since EQ2 and that is a dead and old mmorpg.
It honestly doesn't matter if you have done world first, this fourm post isn't you as the main character and how the experience is going to be for you. The post is about the general experience and world first without guides is not a norm. Until you get your head out of you ass and widen your perspective you won't listen to anyone else because it doesn't cater to only your very special experience. Again which is not the norm for over 99% of players...
With PvE, players do everything they can to make it as easy as it can be - the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy. And yet it is still hard. If PvP players put that paradigm (the maximum number of the best players, the best gear, the best tools, the best strategy) in to PvP, then it would not be hard.
Here's a question that will give me the absolute answer for this situation: Have you ever tried to or heard of <40-man raid groups clearing top lvl 40-man raid instances in EQ(2)?
Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.
These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).
Same question to you, Azherae, have you tried/heard of people beating those Beastmen instances with <6 people?
You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.
The answers to my question will provide me with explanation. Or will at least let me make a parallel for the mentality of both groups.
Assuming I'm allowed to use a parallel (because the Beastmen ones are rarely spoken about, people don't make guides for this type of content). There is a similar encounter against six giant Scorpions, meant to be done by the same 6 people.
The Legendary Red Mage Avesta can do it alone.
Forgive me if that's not helpful, I seem to be unable to make the connection between the two points, but I presume you will proceed to do it.
I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).
I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).
This is kind of my point. Yes, the "difficulty" in owpvp does usually come down to numbers, but any self-respecting pvper always tries to go for the lowest possible number on their side against the highest possible number on the enemy's side. A type of 300 Spartans approach to owpvp.
And what I was trying to get at by asking my question is whether pvers have a similar/same kind of mentality when it comes to pve. Noaani has said that he's beaten all EQ2 content at the time of him playing the game. That would mean that he overcame all difficulties of that pve. And by asking whether anyone at the time has ever tried beating the same content with fewer people I wanted to learn whether top lvl pvers had the same desire to prove themselves against, in their eyes, difficult content by making it even more difficult, by pushing it and themselves to the limit.
Because to me, the truly difficult content is something that I can't beat. I don't care if the limiters on my ability to beat said content were placed by the devs or by me myself. Either of those limits are arbitrary because someone came up with them. Devs designed encounters with some way to beat it. The only difference is that some devs don't really care how it gets beaten, so the encounter itself is quite easy, while other Devs make such granular and detailed combat designs that you might have a very limited amount of successful approaches to the encounter.
I do the same with owpvp. There's a guild of 200 people defending a castle? Let's sit and think up a way where we use the least amount possible of people to successfully siege that castle. If we win - we're super cool, but the content was still fairly easy. Let's make it even harder the next time. Let's maybe give that side some good gear or give them a boss that we previously controlled, so that they become stronger before the next siege.
Obviously this kind of approach is not widespread among the pvp population, but from my experience with thousands of people in L2, this kind of approach is always respected and is usually the goal for a lot of people. Everyone wants to be the 300 spartans, while the whole server are the persians.
This video ingrained this desire into me and countless other people back when we were just starting to play L2. It was also the main reason why I mained Dark Elf Tank for several years, but that came mainly from the coolness effect of the video itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1feB1I0ohQ
With the above three qualifiers to your question, the answer is no.
Just as an additional question to make sure: was there a reason for never even trying?
With the design of some encounters, it was a literal impossibility. Every single person in the raid had a specific role to perform, and any of them failing would cause the raid to wipe.
I'll give one example that is easy to understand even if you don't know the EQ2 combat system at all.
The boss spawns adds ever 30 seconds. These adds will pick a group within the raid, and will only be able to be attacked by that group. The add will have a massive AoE with a fairly long range that will one shot anyone other than a tank - but it only affects people that are NOT in the group that the mob has selected. The obvious way to deal with this AoE is to pull the mob away from the bulk of the raid, so that only the group that is immune is in range of this ability.
The add requires an effective tank and healer, and needs at least 3 DPS to get it down before the next add will spawn, and there wasn't enough room to have the boss as well as two adds at the same time - so two adds would mean at least half of the raid would be hit by at least one of the adds AoEs.
So far, we have a tank, a healer and three DPS in each group, with 1 spot left. That spot needed to go to a support class, as the fight was fairly long and mana would have been an issue about half way through without a support in each group.
So, that raid not only required a full 24 players, it also dictated that you needed 4 tanks, 4 healers, 4 support and 12 DPS. You would not attempt that raid with anything else, because it simply would not work.
This was only 1 encounter, to be clear (and actually was only a mid tier encounter, not even a top tier one), but it is an example as to why you would need a full raid, with every slot filled, that even those not familiar with EQ2 should be able to understand (assuming I explained it well enough).
For other fights, it was a case of working out the mechanics, and then working out what you need to counter them. Things like "we need four of this class with this ability to counter this attack, and we also need 2 of these over here. Then we need to make sure we have 5 healers with this cleanse, but we also need one of this other healer over here for this thing that only they do. Then we need 12 or so DPS, and we need some bards for mana regen - oh shit we don't have room left for a tank, who can we drop?
I have said many times on these forums that the notion of an off tank (as in, a tank that isn't specifically asked for by the content) is a ridiculous notion. This is why that is my opinion - a good raid will either ask you to bring that tank, or you will simply not have space in your raid for it.
I have said many times on these forums that the notion of an off tank (as in, a tank that isn't specifically asked for by the content) is a ridiculous notion. This is why that is my opinion - a good raid will either ask you to bring that tank, or you will simply not have space in your raid for it.
So yeah, this whole post was the direct example of "granular and detailed pve design", where Devs planned exactly what their players would have to do in order to overcome the raid barrier.
To me personally, "just adding more people" is the same limiter as this design was for you, except the direction of member amount is opposite. You couldn't decrease that number because the devs told you so, while I couldn't increase that number because I limited myself. Of course you can dismiss that kind of approach as "fake difficulty" or "unreasonable attitude", but that's just where we'll have to disagree due to differing opinions on the topic.
I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).
Because to me, the truly difficult content is something that I can't beat. I don't care if the limiters on my ability to beat said content were placed by the devs or by me myself. Either of those limits are arbitrary because someone came up with them. Devs designed encounters with some way to beat it. The only difference is that some devs don't really care how it gets beaten, so the encounter itself is quite easy, while other Devs make such granular and detailed combat designs that you might have a very limited amount of successful approaches to the encounter.
This video ingrained this desire into me and countless other people back when we were just starting to play L2. It was also the main reason why I mained Dark Elf Tank for several years, but that came mainly from the coolness effect of the video itself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1feB1I0ohQ
I understand you. So let's circle way back (yes I've been tracking the relevance of this to the rest of the game this whole time).
1. Self respecting PvPers are not usually the problem-person that 'casuals' face, as you probably know.
2. With a larger gear gap, the devs don't have to make the encounter easy for people, they can make it mechanically difficult to the point where even if you play perfectly you lose with insufficient gear but you can tell that's what happened.
3. The above means that you practice the run even if you don't have the gear to survive it, sometimes, while you gather that gear. This is an option for 'casual raiders'. Since 'top end' raiders don't expect the win EITHER, expecting the win as a casual player is not relevant.
But if the encounter is FUN, you don't need to win it. Winning it (assuming you get better gear) just makes it easier, a thing to do on days when you aren't at the top of your game (and hence it is still pretty challenging).
I must disagree with the idea that because Devs don't care exactly how a target is beaten, that the fight is easy. I don't want to say 'this must be L2's experience', but I certainly can see... no. I certainly can DESIGN fights where I don't much care how exactly you do it, but it still is not overwhelmingly easy for any given group mechanically. This is literally just a matter of knowing one's own balance levers, and adding things to 'counter' main strategies and obvious things. This is how PvE improves over time in games all the time.
But none of this 'makes sense' to players who haven't faced good PvE, and therefore finally back to the point of the topic. When a player thinks 'PvP will result in me dying if the gear gaps are big', they want a chance to win. You... don't. Not truly, as far as I can tell. You just want to 'fight'. To get better, to see yourself 'be yourself'. I am pretty sure I understand you in this regard.
The key point being made is that if you don't have good PvE experience, it is reasonable to conclude that PvP is the main source of this challenge, and unlike PvE where 'if I play perfectly and have great gear this should be beatable some of the time because it's designed to be' at MINIMUM, you get...
"If I play perfectly and my opponent is ahead of me in the gear progression this is not winnable."
The sensible thing to do here if you want a chance of winning is to ask for clamped gear progression, but that is based on the underlying 'wish to have a dynamic experience in the game'. If PvE is boring, but PvP is basically unwinnable even when at perfect skill, why play?
If PvE is interesting enough to engage the same part of your mind and then rewards you with gear, there is always a feeling of progression because the PvE encounter is static. If the only solution to this in a PvP heavy game is to make the PvP encounters 'gear-static' as well, rather than altering the behaviours of PvP players or adding enough PvE to give people other things to do, then I don't think one has a PvX game.
Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.
I have said many times on these forums that the notion of an off tank (as in, a tank that isn't specifically asked for by the content) is a ridiculous notion. This is why that is my opinion - a good raid will either ask you to bring that tank, or you will simply not have space in your raid for it.
So yeah, this whole post was the direct example of "granular and detailed pve design", where Devs planned exactly what their players would have to do in order to overcome the raid barrier.
To me personally, "just adding more people" is the same limiter as this design was for you, except the direction of member amount is opposite. You couldn't decrease that number because the devs told you so, while I couldn't increase that number because I limited myself. Of course you can dismiss that kind of approach as "fake difficulty" or "unreasonable attitude", but that's just where we'll have to disagree due to differing opinions on the topic.
You couldn't increase the number of people because you limited yourself.
That is the key difference.
There is a method to make it easier if you want to take it, but you are opting to not take it. That's cool, your prerogative.
I don't have that avenue to make it easier, whether I want it or not.
As an attitude, you are more than welcome to it. My point in this regard is that you can't say that the thing you are doing is hard, you can only say that the way you are trying to do it is hard.
Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.
And here's where I chime in with a "haven't you people ever heard of closing the god damn door" my suggestion of the Solo Tower instance (this one
What if we had a donation-like system. Time-hardcore players would obviously have excess of gear, so why not have a system that lets them exchange that excess gear for upgrades to their main gear, while sending all that excess down the power lvl pyramid.
You could tie this to social structures in the game so that players get better augments from their preferred social structures by investing their overtime into their future enemies. Make each gear piece have some arbitrary point value and set different point prices for different upgrades. Add some diminishing returns to repeatable donations, so that a player couldn't get 1k points for donating 1k t1 boots.
And on the side of the low lvl/casual players, have a tower-like solo instance where clearing floors would give them points that they need to combine with rewards for some open world quests, in order to buy the donated gear. This would give those time-casual people some constant content and a way to catch up faster. Add some reward scaling for clearing floors super fast and you'll have yourself a reward for all the hardcore-challenge casual-time players.
This system doesn't add gear into the overall market out of nowhere. It rewards everyone for doing things that they would've been doing either way and/or just like doing. It creates a soft equalization of gear on the whole server w/o creating direct systems that do so.
If you put some quantity limiters on the donation amounts per node (considering node's lvl) and add a caravan-like pvp event for transferring all the excess gear to another node - you have yourself an additional fun thing for the high lvl pvpers to do.
The instance tower thing could even go up to max lvl and give out some title/cosmetic rewards, akin to FF14's "The Necromancer" title.
from this thread) with this exact feature in mind. Give the casuals an alternative way to acquire gear w/o just giving out gear out of nowhere, while also giving higher lvled people some benefits.
Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.
And here's where I chime in with a "haven't you people ever heard of closing the god damn door" my suggestion of the Solo Tower instance (this one
What if we had a donation-like system. Time-hardcore players would obviously have excess of gear, so why not have a system that lets them exchange that excess gear for upgrades to their main gear, while sending all that excess down the power lvl pyramid.
You could tie this to social structures in the game so that players get better augments from their preferred social structures by investing their overtime into their future enemies. Make each gear piece have some arbitrary point value and set different point prices for different upgrades. Add some diminishing returns to repeatable donations, so that a player couldn't get 1k points for donating 1k t1 boots.
And on the side of the low lvl/casual players, have a tower-like solo instance where clearing floors would give them points that they need to combine with rewards for some open world quests, in order to buy the donated gear. This would give those time-casual people some constant content and a way to catch up faster. Add some reward scaling for clearing floors super fast and you'll have yourself a reward for all the hardcore-challenge casual-time players.
This system doesn't add gear into the overall market out of nowhere. It rewards everyone for doing things that they would've been doing either way and/or just like doing. It creates a soft equalization of gear on the whole server w/o creating direct systems that do so.
If you put some quantity limiters on the donation amounts per node (considering node's lvl) and add a caravan-like pvp event for transferring all the excess gear to another node - you have yourself an additional fun thing for the high lvl pvpers to do.
The instance tower thing could even go up to max lvl and give out some title/cosmetic rewards, akin to FF14's "The Necromancer" title.
from this thread) with this exact feature in mind. Give the casuals an alternative way to acquire gear w/o just giving out gear out of nowhere, while also giving higher lvled people some benefits.
I've seen it, so forgive my... arrogance?
They can do better. I know they can do better because I can do better and if they legitimately can't figure out how to do it better than me at least (in their own opinion) then they can just ask me how to do it better.
This is a lot of work, and systems that can be gamed, for a problem that can be resolved entirely via itemization. This whole thing can be solved via itemization and normally is. That's why this whole thread has morphed into what it has. It started with people not understanding balance via itemization (I blame WoW for this) and looped back around to that from the PvE perspective later.
I hope that Intrepid just blows this sort of discussion out of the water by implementing such finely tuned Itemization goals (greatness is a function of goals here) that literally everything, all 30 pages of this, is moot and a general waste of all our time (relative to them getting anything useful from it).
EDIT: Also just to be snarky, this system exists in the game already, it's called 'money'.
I hope that Intrepid just blows this sort of discussion out of the water by implementing such finely tuned Itemization goals (greatness is a function of goals here) that literally everything, all 30 pages of this, is moot and a general waste of all our time (relative to them getting anything useful from it).
EDIT: Also just to be snarky, this system exists in the game already, it's called 'money'.
How cheap do you think low-mid tier will become several months after release, considering that Intrepid plans to incorporate deconstruction and gear decay into the game? I'd assume there'll be at least some price growth just because everyone will have more money later on (unless the gold sinks are really finely tuned to stop that), and the price of that gear would grow too because, in theory, it wouldn't be too abundant.
So how exactly would a newbie easily afford some new gear to try and catch up to other players? Especially if we have a somewhat wider gear scaling.
And now that I think about it, my suggestion is a yet another gear sink, but one w/o removing the gear from the system completely. I think my love for L2's gear sinks just constantly shows itself in most of my design suggestions
Comments
Your view is very shallow on PvP yet again, it pretty much is akin you need to defend this so its not complex. There are multiple unique scenarios you need to deal with ever siege, manage and cycle people in combat. Everything needs to be done with quick reaction between all members of the fighter, when you are talking about 250 players for super high end the complexity of that is huge. Again im a broken damn record, not just battle but planning, strategy, drama, building the guild, retaining the members, teaching is all part of it.
Quantity means nothing, doing 300 dungeons isn't difficult content.... You look at the guide see what you need to do if its even difficult enough where you need a guide and beat the dungeon. It is a puzzle you are solving you know what happens when you figure you out and you play according to what you know will happen. That does not exist in PvP, things can change on the dime, go well or go bad. You don't go into pvp knowing what is going to happen unlike a PvE dungeon where you know the mechanics and its just about following the plan. That isn't hard content. Puzzle says go here, tanks agro certain mobs, burn things down in certain order, stand here to be protected while other group does dps, etc. Moment to moment combat again someone that isn't a programmed AI is going to have far more challenges then something you know exactly what it is going to do.
There is a reason why in PvP voice is much more important and why you have multiple leads, because of the complexity of dealing with other human being and needing to organize different groups since so much is going on you can't account for.
Then on top of it you throw more action based combat in the game and PvE is a joke compared to the difficulty of Players being able to make use of out playing people on moment o moment combat. PvP and PvE is different leagues. PvE being puzzle solving (lost ark added a bit of twitch action based to it), and the more action based in PvP makes the skill curve go from liner to straight up vertical on what players can do depending on how much players have access to. Which can lead to a group never being able to beat the other group because of the skill level they have reached. And that is just a extra layer onto of allt he other work that is needed.
I'm going to go back tot his again so i can continue to drive the point home from your own damn words.
This is basic 101 in PvP this whole thing for you, gets taken to the next level in PvP since this is simply one layer upon many other PvP players have to deal with. This post actually shows your inexperience with pvp as well not being able to understand the bigger picture with pvp and territory control and the difficult of sieges. Again the combat is only part of PvP all parts come together including the guild building, planning, drama, etc. Dealing with real people both in ones you fight and the ones you have to work with is harder then PvE content.
Ok, that does indeed sound like a 'numbers' aspect.
I doubt Noaani is talking about strategy or difficulty relative to numbers, based on what Noaani has explained relative to personal skill. I also am not generally speaking relative to numbers.
Basic example, there is an instanced content battle (technically five of them) in FFXI where you take your party of six players, and go up against an enemy party of six Beastmen.
These Beastmen, like most mobs, have all the abilities of their 'class', but they're explicitly tuned to this and work in a group, and can use the 'Ultimate' of their class one per fight. Their advantage is high HP, the player advantage is having consumables (minor) and being able to raise after falling (major until you are really good at it).
In this case, the Devs have indeed implied 'A fair fight here is a 6v6'. The instance is capped at level 60 (at the time it was made, it was possibly the cap, and continued to be semi-relevant content when the cap was raised to 75).
For some of these five encounters, I know where to find strategies. For a specific one, there are no easily available strategies that I could find in the usual places, because the specific combination of 'classes' employed by the Beastmen in question, plus their innate 'racial abilities', means you would basically never be able to come up with a strategy that isn't massively adaptation after about 3 minutes in.
So you'd have to just 'choose your team, choose your tactics, and adapt if the enemy uses certain techniques', which was in turn random (within the range of main options).
I can say with FAIRLY deep confidence that the Devs had NO intent, no 'script', no 'way you're supposed to beat this' other than 'probably should bring a full party of 6, they should probably work well together'. From the others that DO have strategies, some have many, some strategies are outright the reverse, people disagree on the best way to do it based on what risks they are comfortable with. There is no META for some of these fights that isn't a risk of 'well the enemy responds with a hard counter because you went for maximum damage and nothing else' or 'The enemy uses AoE sleep because you're all playing defensively' or such.
You simply 'know that the enemy can do XYZ things, and you prepare for those'. What I'm failing to see is if the ONLY thing people are discussing as 'the thing that makes PvP more challenging' is the 'numbers' part. Because it's entirely possible that they've just never 'had to face the equivalent of Grimshell Shocktroopers' in their games of choice and just don't think it can even be done.
How could it be possible that you do not understand that these things exist in PvE as well?
The only answer I have to this is that you have never been in a PvE raid guild - and thus have never taken part in top end PvE.
I mean, PvE guilds don't just magically *happen*. They are built, just as PvP guilds are. They have the same requirements around planning, management, drama, rival guilds poaching players etc. This is why you feel you are like a broken record - you refuse to listen and just keep spewing the same shit over and over again.
Guides to content is not an inherent PvE thing. It is no more common than guides to PvP. Sure, games you play may all have guides to all the content, but that just says things about the games you play.
Games I play do not have guides If the game did have guides being produced by players, then that would mean there is no competition between players, and so I wouldn't play the game.
Again, I have told you this outright several times in this thread. You not listening and understanding that point does not make it true, and you continuing to repeat the same incorrect assumption about PvE that you have due to not listening does not make your assumption true.
The fact that you realize you are sounding like a broken record, yet refuse to actually listen to the information that will enable you to move on is actually quite an interesting situation to witness.
Lmfao if you honestly think the drama of PvE can equal to the drama of PvP where you can actually lose and gain more things is insane. You continue to try to dumb it down the point isn't jsut the drama itself but the work it takes from a lot of peoples parts to keep things together. No one person is doing everything its a whole guild effort, if you really want we can get into the nitty gritty details and the exact reasons and psychology why that is the case as well. Though lonst story short is any issue in pve with that is in PvP but on a much worst scale.
Guides to PvE tell you exactly what to do there isn't a huge change to formula there is only some slight rng at if a mob might have a unique rotation.
Guide to PvP if you find one isn't going to tell you what to do, and what exactly will happen in a fight. you can watch peoples video and see their thought process, planning, etc. But you aren't getting a video that says do this and you win.
If you are playing any modern mmorpg there are guides, else you are telling me your most relevant knowledge is older mmorpgs which doesn't exactly stand up to modern mmorpgs.
Im sounding like a broken record because I have pointed out your weaker points and you will still ignore it at the end of the day. I can clip the same exact line I did for the third time and repeat the big point you had you hadnt seen in pvp, is actually common knowledge in pvp and the most basic of that. PvP goes beyond that, but then again you won't listen. End of the day best way to settle this is if you really think PvE is more cahllenging. I want to see you do some PvP in a new mmorpg, how about you try black desert online
This is why you feel like a broken record - you aren't listening, and instead just repeat the same incorrect bullshit over and over.
I literately can say the same to you when you ignore points that counter your own, and try to label it as "incorrect" regardless of the facts brought up. And I'm guessing you don't have any relevant pvp experience another red flag if you have that strong an opinion on pvp making me feel again this is out of a weird sense of pride that makes no sense to me.
You were repeating the same bullshit, I called you out.
If you think I am ignoring something you have said several times that you think it important and I am ignoring, call me out.
Don't say you could call me out, call me out. Saying you could call me out without doing it is pretty weak.
Then lets do it bit by bit so things can't be ignore
This right here is the very basics of pvp If you aren't doing this at the minimum on high end pvp content you aren't winning. When I say the very basics i mean that it is the first layer.
Other layers include
1.guild alliances working with them so you don't get back stabbed and have the support you need for a fight. If you are making a deal its something you are going to have to fulfil
2. Any sort of recon if possible this is not limited to just watching their old pvp videos ( that would be not exactly but more close to pve guide) But trying to get real time information though connections you might have to find out their possible strategies, players they are going to bring, etc. As this will be important in your planning.
3. Unlike PvE where you know the encounter through guides and generally have you main go to plan on how to tackle the content. In PvP One plan isn't awlays good enough (as long as the siege is designed to be complex). You need to have some back up plans if things go south so you can recover and be able to adapt quickly to situations.
4. When you are doing a siege and you have multiple shot caller, that alone should show the challenge of the battle. Yes you have your main shot caller but other ones are important and defense leads as well. fromth e amount of effort that is required to be as effective as possible.
5. Politics more then just working with your alliance is knowing your enemies as well which is a very intensive task. This is very much part of pvp, this is akin to pre production or the ground work you lay out. You don't want to be overwhelmed with battles as wins are great but loses can be very bad and lower moral. It is a fun game to play as well of course but important since you want to always put yourself in a favorable position when it comes to pvp. Constant losing of battles, losing members, war burn out can break away your guild. To be winning in pvp ground work is important when it comes to managing people so you can pvp and be effective.
6. If you have a pvp battle with 250 people the scope of that is hard to read because in a fantasy mmorpg it is a rarity. You are taking everything and amping it up to the next level with the share amount of communication you need to manage. Example if you are running like 5 different discord voice chats with people coordinating in-between them, I've never seen that in any other game to be honest.
7. The big one action fucking combat. Of curse we don't know to the extent on how combat in this game is going to turn out exactly. But the more options skills have with action combat having mobility, dodge, block, etc the makes the out play potential be huge. Depending on the amount of action combat and what you can do it will allow hard core players to push the ceiling immensely. When a player can out play multiple people or never lose a 1v1 fight that is a big deal. When a group of skilled players work together it only amplify the level of difficulty some fights can have which is a very big deal. *ie if we think elden ring or fighting games though a mmo won't be on that level it shows the skill level of players against other players and AI
Sure i could think of a ton more but honestly I think it just be over kill at that point and just add too much to the convo so this would be the better starting point.
Yes that stuff happens in top tier open world pvp groups too. It tends to just happen by default. It's expected of us. Of course occasionally an individual player might need some correction on his build and how it's fucking us. We are talking about not just top tier pvers, but top tier pvpers too. These are highly competent players, both groups.
Most of the people I've played in top tier pvp with not only used the best gear they could, knew what their role was, and what to do in as many situations as humanly possible, had the best spec, and got good at playing with each other.....they not only did all of that, they were fanatical about it.
Any post where you talk about this will get me reacting to literally only this, simply because I have told you many times that this is not the case.
A refresher;
If you want any reaction or thoughts to anything else. post it without mentioning guides, because guides are not an inherent part of PvE content.
Feel free to try again.
This is exactly what i mean you are literally too stuck up you think in "I". What i view is the whole picture and the normal experience for a player. How about i just link every modern mmo that has guides out there. AoC will have guides as well, people will beat the content and make guides on it. If your view point is you are the less then one percent that is going to world first everything before other people make guides that is fine and GL to you. That is not the normal experience for most players or very competitive players trying to gear as fast as possible.
Why Because only a small amount will be able to beat a boss first before there is steams and guides up. You assuming that is the normal experience for most players is as disingenuous as you saying you won't answer my post because of an actual fact. The fact being you and many others most likely won't be world first, MOST still be able to view the fight from stream and guides.
Was trying to bring the convo back to the original topic but got sucked back in. Think is argument is over though i made my point don't think much else is going to be said.
In the case of EQ2, my guild achieved world firsts on multiple encounters in every content cycle.
As I said, stop your bullshit with guides.
Or how about while you go finding those PvE guides, you also find all the PvP guides that are out there, and are just as bad as most PvE ones.
First, I am only going to talk about EQ2. It is where most of my PvE raiding took place, and where I knew a lot about what other guilds were doing.
Second, with the above, we are talking about 24 people, not 40. I talk about 40 players a lot because that is what Ashes raid size is set to be.
Third, we are talking about top end raid content while it is top end, not all raid content, and not old raid content.
With the above three qualifiers to your question, the answer is no.
If we want to talk about raid content that is not top tier, then I have done it with four people in some cases, and multi-boxed some of it by myself as well.
This is perhaps something people are not grasping - "raid content" is an entire progression, from people just starting out and learning the ropes of it as a content type, up to the hardest encounters in the game. Every time there is a level cap increase, the raid content needs to create this teaching content all over again.
This is why I often talk about high end, top tier or similar, to denote the actual hard raid content as opposed to just any raid content. Not all raid content is hard, and some of it is indeed dead easy.
Again i make a whole point about the small amount that can do world first and it gets completely ignored. All im hearing is you have not done world first since EQ2 and that is a dead and old mmorpg.
It honestly doesn't matter if you have done world first, this fourm post isn't you as the main character and how the experience is going to be for you. The post is about the general experience and world first without guides is not a norm. Until you get your head out of you ass and widen your perspective you won't listen to anyone else because it doesn't cater to only your very special experience. Again which is not the norm for over 99% of players...
Assuming I'm allowed to use a parallel (because the Beastmen ones are rarely spoken about, people don't make guides for this type of content). There is a similar encounter against six giant Scorpions, meant to be done by the same 6 people.
The Legendary Red Mage Avesta can do it alone.
Forgive me if that's not helpful, I seem to be unable to make the connection between the two points, but I presume you will proceed to do it.
I expect that a sufficiently skilled group could do at least Divine Punishers with five... Maybe four at an absolute stretch (at which point they would be extremely limited in which classes they could bring and still have a reasonable chance of winning, 'RPS' style, but not exactly, moreso classes that diminish the danger of the special attack type of the Beastmen in question for that one).
And what I was trying to get at by asking my question is whether pvers have a similar/same kind of mentality when it comes to pve. Noaani has said that he's beaten all EQ2 content at the time of him playing the game. That would mean that he overcame all difficulties of that pve. And by asking whether anyone at the time has ever tried beating the same content with fewer people I wanted to learn whether top lvl pvers had the same desire to prove themselves against, in their eyes, difficult content by making it even more difficult, by pushing it and themselves to the limit.
Because to me, the truly difficult content is something that I can't beat. I don't care if the limiters on my ability to beat said content were placed by the devs or by me myself. Either of those limits are arbitrary because someone came up with them. Devs designed encounters with some way to beat it. The only difference is that some devs don't really care how it gets beaten, so the encounter itself is quite easy, while other Devs make such granular and detailed combat designs that you might have a very limited amount of successful approaches to the encounter.
I do the same with owpvp. There's a guild of 200 people defending a castle? Let's sit and think up a way where we use the least amount possible of people to successfully siege that castle. If we win - we're super cool, but the content was still fairly easy. Let's make it even harder the next time. Let's maybe give that side some good gear or give them a boss that we previously controlled, so that they become stronger before the next siege.
Obviously this kind of approach is not widespread among the pvp population, but from my experience with thousands of people in L2, this kind of approach is always respected and is usually the goal for a lot of people. Everyone wants to be the 300 spartans, while the whole server are the persians.
This video ingrained this desire into me and countless other people back when we were just starting to play L2. It was also the main reason why I mained Dark Elf Tank for several years, but that came mainly from the coolness effect of the video itself
With the design of some encounters, it was a literal impossibility. Every single person in the raid had a specific role to perform, and any of them failing would cause the raid to wipe.
I'll give one example that is easy to understand even if you don't know the EQ2 combat system at all.
The boss spawns adds ever 30 seconds. These adds will pick a group within the raid, and will only be able to be attacked by that group. The add will have a massive AoE with a fairly long range that will one shot anyone other than a tank - but it only affects people that are NOT in the group that the mob has selected. The obvious way to deal with this AoE is to pull the mob away from the bulk of the raid, so that only the group that is immune is in range of this ability.
The add requires an effective tank and healer, and needs at least 3 DPS to get it down before the next add will spawn, and there wasn't enough room to have the boss as well as two adds at the same time - so two adds would mean at least half of the raid would be hit by at least one of the adds AoEs.
So far, we have a tank, a healer and three DPS in each group, with 1 spot left. That spot needed to go to a support class, as the fight was fairly long and mana would have been an issue about half way through without a support in each group.
So, that raid not only required a full 24 players, it also dictated that you needed 4 tanks, 4 healers, 4 support and 12 DPS. You would not attempt that raid with anything else, because it simply would not work.
This was only 1 encounter, to be clear (and actually was only a mid tier encounter, not even a top tier one), but it is an example as to why you would need a full raid, with every slot filled, that even those not familiar with EQ2 should be able to understand (assuming I explained it well enough).
For other fights, it was a case of working out the mechanics, and then working out what you need to counter them. Things like "we need four of this class with this ability to counter this attack, and we also need 2 of these over here. Then we need to make sure we have 5 healers with this cleanse, but we also need one of this other healer over here for this thing that only they do. Then we need 12 or so DPS, and we need some bards for mana regen - oh shit we don't have room left for a tank, who can we drop?
I have said many times on these forums that the notion of an off tank (as in, a tank that isn't specifically asked for by the content) is a ridiculous notion. This is why that is my opinion - a good raid will either ask you to bring that tank, or you will simply not have space in your raid for it.
To me personally, "just adding more people" is the same limiter as this design was for you, except the direction of member amount is opposite. You couldn't decrease that number because the devs told you so, while I couldn't increase that number because I limited myself. Of course you can dismiss that kind of approach as "fake difficulty" or "unreasonable attitude", but that's just where we'll have to disagree due to differing opinions on the topic.
I understand you. So let's circle way back (yes I've been tracking the relevance of this to the rest of the game this whole time).
1. Self respecting PvPers are not usually the problem-person that 'casuals' face, as you probably know.
2. With a larger gear gap, the devs don't have to make the encounter easy for people, they can make it mechanically difficult to the point where even if you play perfectly you lose with insufficient gear but you can tell that's what happened.
3. The above means that you practice the run even if you don't have the gear to survive it, sometimes, while you gather that gear. This is an option for 'casual raiders'. Since 'top end' raiders don't expect the win EITHER, expecting the win as a casual player is not relevant.
But if the encounter is FUN, you don't need to win it. Winning it (assuming you get better gear) just makes it easier, a thing to do on days when you aren't at the top of your game (and hence it is still pretty challenging).
I must disagree with the idea that because Devs don't care exactly how a target is beaten, that the fight is easy. I don't want to say 'this must be L2's experience', but I certainly can see... no. I certainly can DESIGN fights where I don't much care how exactly you do it, but it still is not overwhelmingly easy for any given group mechanically. This is literally just a matter of knowing one's own balance levers, and adding things to 'counter' main strategies and obvious things. This is how PvE improves over time in games all the time.
But none of this 'makes sense' to players who haven't faced good PvE, and therefore finally back to the point of the topic. When a player thinks 'PvP will result in me dying if the gear gaps are big', they want a chance to win. You... don't. Not truly, as far as I can tell. You just want to 'fight'. To get better, to see yourself 'be yourself'. I am pretty sure I understand you in this regard.
The key point being made is that if you don't have good PvE experience, it is reasonable to conclude that PvP is the main source of this challenge, and unlike PvE where 'if I play perfectly and have great gear this should be beatable some of the time because it's designed to be' at MINIMUM, you get...
"If I play perfectly and my opponent is ahead of me in the gear progression this is not winnable."
The sensible thing to do here if you want a chance of winning is to ask for clamped gear progression, but that is based on the underlying 'wish to have a dynamic experience in the game'. If PvE is boring, but PvP is basically unwinnable even when at perfect skill, why play?
If PvE is interesting enough to engage the same part of your mind and then rewards you with gear, there is always a feeling of progression because the PvE encounter is static. If the only solution to this in a PvP heavy game is to make the PvP encounters 'gear-static' as well, rather than altering the behaviours of PvP players or adding enough PvE to give people other things to do, then I don't think one has a PvX game.
Therefore my expectation is that the best way to 'protect casuals' is to make a good PvE gear-ladder where 'getting higher on the ladder requires more and more effort or allies'. Anyone who comes into the game thinking "PvE is just boring trash but I need PvP to be gear-homogenous" is missing the POINT and therefore some recent posters have had some attempts made to reach an understanding on this.
You couldn't increase the number of people because you limited yourself.
That is the key difference.
There is a method to make it easier if you want to take it, but you are opting to not take it. That's cool, your prerogative.
I don't have that avenue to make it easier, whether I want it or not.
As an attitude, you are more than welcome to it. My point in this regard is that you can't say that the thing you are doing is hard, you can only say that the way you are trying to do it is hard.
I've seen it, so forgive my... arrogance?
They can do better. I know they can do better because I can do better and if they legitimately can't figure out how to do it better than me at least (in their own opinion) then they can just ask me how to do it better.
This is a lot of work, and systems that can be gamed, for a problem that can be resolved entirely via itemization. This whole thing can be solved via itemization and normally is. That's why this whole thread has morphed into what it has. It started with people not understanding balance via itemization (I blame WoW for this) and looped back around to that from the PvE perspective later.
I hope that Intrepid just blows this sort of discussion out of the water by implementing such finely tuned Itemization goals (greatness is a function of goals here) that literally everything, all 30 pages of this, is moot and a general waste of all our time (relative to them getting anything useful from it).
EDIT: Also just to be snarky, this system exists in the game already, it's called 'money'.
So how exactly would a newbie easily afford some new gear to try and catch up to other players? Especially if we have a somewhat wider gear scaling.
And now that I think about it, my suggestion is a yet another gear sink, but one w/o removing the gear from the system completely. I think my love for L2's gear sinks just constantly shows itself in most of my design suggestions