How difficult should all PvE, dungeons, mobs, raids, world bosses, be?

Manueljf

I always been dreaming of having a really challenging world where people can't just go around aoe memeing everything.

Is it too crazy to dream of an MMO with very high difficulty for all PvE encounters? From regular mobs to dungeons and bosses? It is a wet dream for me to have an MMO where people have to actually put some effort on every fight. Progress would be slow but a lot more satisfying.

What you guys think? Should an MMO be hard or would that scare too many people?

Really disgusted of the modern games trend of just AOE fest everything down.

Ludullu

A full range of difficulty across all player sizes, but with waaaay more really difficult ones than easy ones.

Azherae

Manueljf wrote: »

I always been dreaming of having a really challenging world where people can't just go around aoe memeing everything.

Is it too crazy to dream of an MMO with very high difficulty for all PvE encounters? From regular mobs to dungeons and bosses? It is a wet dream for me to have an MMO where people have to actually put some effort on every fight. Progress would be slow but a lot more satisfying.

What you guys think? Should an MMO be hard or would that scare too many people?

Really disgusted of the modern games trend of just AOE fest everything down.

This isn't a 'real thing' though.

Players will just always take on whatever they can do.

What you're talking about is a high 'skill cap' for PvE encounters, which DOES stress players because most players are average by definition.

Many posters have talked about wanting a very challenging world, but what ends up happening is that the game must give bigger rewards to those who can meet the challenges, and the average player gets left behind, complains, then often leaves.

For many, the question is 'why play if I can't keep up AND it's very hard?'. Single player games, you 'try until you succeed and then you feel good'. There's no one 'getting ahead of you because you aren't so skilled yet.

novercalis

Everquest level difficulty

Dungeons were Open Dungeon, no leashing, high aggro range, nearly impossible to solo. Dungeon level range were anywhere between 10-20 level difference. Easier at the entrance and progressively harder the deeper you went.

Raids had a large spawn window to make things unpredictable and not to be locked down by 1 guild and forced a race of contesting / tagging.

The AOE Meme in Everquest was difficult to do and not practical and most zones. However we had other issues / loophole that could have been fixed by tweaking a class. Bards had the ability to solo kite unlimited amount and not be touched. They were few spots to do it safely w/o worrying about range mobs.

I think some of the issues with AOE spam that EQ didnt have is - dmg didnt scale insanely high. So killing a mob did take a decent time. Not 5 seconds. The Damage output players can do isnt absurb like most other mmo. 10k, 100k, 300k, 500k, 1mil damages and whatnot. They also made AOE have a cap of how many can be hit and mages would then have to deal with aggro.

AGGRO is another big factor - shouldnt be easy to pull back aggro. Aggro in EQ is rough. Casters werent allowed to start DPSing until 20% of the HP has been dealt, in risk of getting aggro, because chances are - the tank wouldnt be able to regain aggro. The damage output of the NPC were also pretty high to non-tank classes. 1-4 hits can kill you. So doing aoe meme spams wouldnt work out too well in EQ in most places and would subject the mages to death.
Lastly - EQ IS UNFORGIVING WITH LOSING XP / DE-LEVELING. So most ppl aint gonna fuck around and find out when you lose XP, De-level, have a 10-30 minute corpse run.