Consumables. Do we really need them?
novercalis
Member, Founder, Kickstarter
I am bias and love EQ. I see a lot of potential for this game as well. One of the aspect that persuaded me into kickstarting AoC was hearing Action has Consequence and Player Driven events.
When I hear player driven events - I hear teamwork. Not just individuals doing their own things and things just happens.
I hear goals.... team orientated goals. Everything is made by the players, shaped by the players.
This all funnels down to Reputation and accountability as well.
Now what does all of this have to do with Consumables?
In everquest, HP Pots and Mana pots didnt exist. There were all sorts of significant downtimes, from XP Loss, Player Death - Corpse Run and having to sit down and wait for HP and Mana to refill.
Consumables is a CONVIENCE thing. Without it - we have to wait to fight again,
Solo player can kill a mob but wont be able to fight the next one for a few minutes.
In everquest, it wasn't rare to wait 5-6 min before you kill again. You can see 10-15 mobs all around you, but you can only kill 1 every 5 minutes.
Thus it encouraged players to group, to maximize XP.
Some quick math of EQ leveling
level 39 enchanter, fighting a level 39 Hill Giant (These are factual numbers pulled from EQ xp chart)
the XP needed to hit 40 is 5,336,400
Hill Giant gives 114,075
5336400 divided by 114075 = 46.77 aka 47 Hill Giants needed to kill.
As a solo enchanter, the fight encounter will take me 2 minutes to kill 1 and depleting most of my mana.
47 giants x 2 minutes = 94 minutes
I now have to sit for down for 5 minutes to recover my mana to full.
94 x 5 minutes = 470 minutes divided by 60 minutes = 7.88 hours. Almost 8 hours of me grinding solo on Hill Giants.
During these downtimes, I am chatting, socializing with guildies or world chat.
It encourages. IMHO We should slow the pace of our PvE content down, make it meaningful.
Consumables is a cheap cop out and takes what makes Healers important.
Let's revisit the above scenario
47 Hill Giants are needed x 2 min to kill = 94
downtime is now 2 minutes (potion CD = 60 sec worse case) = 188 minutes / 60 minutes = ~3 hrs
Those pots erased 5 hours of content / grind
Since I am now on the subject of XP, using EQ equation.
5 level 39 players fighting a lvl 39 hill giant.
Hill Giant gives 114,075 x 1.25 bonus = 142,593 XP divided by 5 players = 28,518 per kill.
You need 5,336,400 XP to level up.
5,336,400 divided by 28,518 = 187 Hill Giants to kill.
As a Group it takes 25 seconds to kill 1 and there are plenty of roamers. Let's say 8.
Respawn rate in EQ open world is 6 minutes.
8 Hill giants at 30 seconds (added 5 second for travel/pull time) = 4 minutes kill time, 2 minutes downtime = total 6 minutes - just as they are respawning again.
Hill Giant XP= 28,518 x 8 Hill Giants per rotation = 228,144 per 6 minutes
5,336,400 total XP needed divided by 228,144 rotation = 23.4 rotations needed.
24 rotation x 6 minutes = 144 minutes to level up as a group divided by 60 minutes = 2 hours 24 minutes.
Consumables little bit over 3 hours solo.
I'd rather have them solo without consumable, it is still VIABLE to play that way, but the game encourages and rewards grouping.
Now, u got 2 min downtime, chatting with party mates. Or 5 min downtime, chatting with node/guildies.
When I hear player driven events - I hear teamwork. Not just individuals doing their own things and things just happens.
I hear goals.... team orientated goals. Everything is made by the players, shaped by the players.
This all funnels down to Reputation and accountability as well.
Now what does all of this have to do with Consumables?
In everquest, HP Pots and Mana pots didnt exist. There were all sorts of significant downtimes, from XP Loss, Player Death - Corpse Run and having to sit down and wait for HP and Mana to refill.
Consumables is a CONVIENCE thing. Without it - we have to wait to fight again,
Solo player can kill a mob but wont be able to fight the next one for a few minutes.
In everquest, it wasn't rare to wait 5-6 min before you kill again. You can see 10-15 mobs all around you, but you can only kill 1 every 5 minutes.
Thus it encouraged players to group, to maximize XP.
Some quick math of EQ leveling
level 39 enchanter, fighting a level 39 Hill Giant (These are factual numbers pulled from EQ xp chart)
the XP needed to hit 40 is 5,336,400
Hill Giant gives 114,075
5336400 divided by 114075 = 46.77 aka 47 Hill Giants needed to kill.
As a solo enchanter, the fight encounter will take me 2 minutes to kill 1 and depleting most of my mana.
47 giants x 2 minutes = 94 minutes
I now have to sit for down for 5 minutes to recover my mana to full.
94 x 5 minutes = 470 minutes divided by 60 minutes = 7.88 hours. Almost 8 hours of me grinding solo on Hill Giants.
During these downtimes, I am chatting, socializing with guildies or world chat.
It encourages. IMHO We should slow the pace of our PvE content down, make it meaningful.
Consumables is a cheap cop out and takes what makes Healers important.
Let's revisit the above scenario
47 Hill Giants are needed x 2 min to kill = 94
downtime is now 2 minutes (potion CD = 60 sec worse case) = 188 minutes / 60 minutes = ~3 hrs
Those pots erased 5 hours of content / grind
Since I am now on the subject of XP, using EQ equation.
5 level 39 players fighting a lvl 39 hill giant.
Hill Giant gives 114,075 x 1.25 bonus = 142,593 XP divided by 5 players = 28,518 per kill.
You need 5,336,400 XP to level up.
5,336,400 divided by 28,518 = 187 Hill Giants to kill.
As a Group it takes 25 seconds to kill 1 and there are plenty of roamers. Let's say 8.
Respawn rate in EQ open world is 6 minutes.
8 Hill giants at 30 seconds (added 5 second for travel/pull time) = 4 minutes kill time, 2 minutes downtime = total 6 minutes - just as they are respawning again.
Hill Giant XP= 28,518 x 8 Hill Giants per rotation = 228,144 per 6 minutes
5,336,400 total XP needed divided by 228,144 rotation = 23.4 rotations needed.
24 rotation x 6 minutes = 144 minutes to level up as a group divided by 60 minutes = 2 hours 24 minutes.
Consumables little bit over 3 hours solo.
I'd rather have them solo without consumable, it is still VIABLE to play that way, but the game encourages and rewards grouping.
Now, u got 2 min downtime, chatting with party mates. Or 5 min downtime, chatting with node/guildies.
{UPK} United Player Killer - All your loot belongs to us.
1
Comments
Making sure that you filled your pack with a few provisions makes you run around the town a little bit before heading out; the group even tells one another "did you get the pots?" and even out in the open world some times strangers come to you and say "hey man, can you spare a couple of alacrity potions?".
I think they are good for mmos.
Just Math alone, a solo player shaved 5 hours off with consumable, almost matching a group of 5 players mitigating the damage with a healer and grinding more mobs. That is just silly when you look at it that way
Also, why do you go from solo to group? Isnt there anything else in between?
All you said was "my mmo didnt have consurmables".
Well L2 did and none of the issues you create here were a reality.
Raid Mechanics would matter more - since you cant pot out of it. Healers skills would mean more. If you know u got a 5k hp pot and not moving from a aoe attack from as to not slow your dps down, cause u can just pot is lame as well.
you, the wizard pulled aggro and the tank finally pulled the mob off of you, healer knows u got pots and ur only at 50% hp, you can pot urself back up as he can continue main healing the tank.
People act vastly different when Pots arent there.
and reduces what i think is important, is down time.
I want to encourage and faciliate social interactions whereever possible. Consumable pots takes that away imho.
Look, regardless of which one you mean, you are asking for a severe nerf in quality of life just to force people to talk a tiny bit more. Even then, if its a pug group they might not even talk to each other. I just recently played Embers Adrift, a new old-school mmo that aims for your sort of social interactions and downtime. Hardly ever talked in the pugs unless it was important for clearing whatever objective we needed to do. Plenty of time sitting down. I normally used it to take a piss or let my dogs out. Nothing special or immersive there.
Now, another thing to note is that even Embers Adrift had healing potions and food that both helped with recovery time or fights. They did not trivialize combat, they just made things faster and gave the player more agency. These sorts of consumables at the end of the day have value derived from utility and availability. If high level potions/foods are hard to acquire you will not see entire raids of people using them. they will be once in a blue moon items used for difficult content.
All of that was to say, do not remove a proven concept from the game just for the sake of sitting there doing nothing for one more minute.
And the higher quality pots were still quite expensive. And even when they became "less expensive" at higher lvls, all the mobs required you to have buffs to even attempt them, so you were in a party by default.
And L2's mana pots only came in the form of those 5m cd ones, so you still had to sit on your ass and restore your mana (burnthrough rate was way higher than the pot could regen).
In other words, it's not about the existence of pots but about their design and balancing. And as Sathrago mentioned, usually these big pots were only used during emergencies, because their cost was waaay too damn high to just use them after every single mob. Hell, in earlies updates of L2 you wouldn't even use the plain regen pots, cause the costs never justified the use. You'd keep those pots for the potential pvp or when you wanted to run away from mobs who were about to kill you.
Let me explain you why it was so good. In vanilla WoW potions were not everywhere, you could buy them from alchemists, but while leveling they usually were making them for themselves since content was hard to level vs mobs. During leveling phase you could buy potions, but you would spend a lot of money and since you need mount at level 40 that costs around 80g, you would not have anywhere near that amount if you were spending gold on potions, since you need them a lot you would spend them a lot. Usually you would get around 50g until level 40 and then you would need to farm gold until you get 80g, which takes so long at this level, some players even proceed leveling to 45-50 until they get gold from quests, other do professions/grinding mobs and selling gray items to vendors. Mount is important, so everyone is aiming to get it on level 40.
Mana potions were more rare, I am pretty sure they did not exist in profession of alchemy, you could only find mana potions from human mobs or chests which were rare to find because of population of server. You could get recipe from dungeon on very low drop chance 6%. Some people got lucky and they were making money, others didnt and had to buy mana potions since they were mandatory, mana worked same way as EQ99.
Food consumables (buffs) were expensive because it took long to farm them, for example chimera tenderloin costed around 20g (raw meat that drops from elite chimeras that takes 3 people - tank,heal,dps to kill one - fight lasts about 3-4min and only one person can get loot at 10-15% drop chance), when processed this meat gives 25 stamina buff which was mandatory for tanks to do raids which costed around 30g on auction. To make these processed meat, you would need engineering supplies, some powder and many things from vendor, this is why it was so expensive, both because it was expensive to make and raw meat was farmable only from elite mobs. It was also strong buff - around 400HP bonus.
Flasks - some costed 50g some 120g, considering you could farm anywhere from 40-120g per hour, the most (120g) coming from chimera tenderloin elite farm. It made game much more immersive because you would feel importance of gold, it wasnt made like New World where you can farm for 1hour and have consumables worth of 2 weeks, it was pure hard core experience, where you would need to farm 4-5 hours in order to prepare for weekly raid, and there were usually going on 2-3 runs per week.
World buffs - also mandatory for hard core raiders, because you would get flat 40% increased dmg buff from both hit chance/attack speed/crit and so on. Every buff provides something, and to get these buffs you would need to go with raid group of 40men around world and gather some resources like felwood flower buff or to kill raid in stranglethorn vale (zul gurub) which was easy, but provided buff once you hand in quest to deliver last boss head to ritualistic stone NPC. flat 15% stat increase from that buff only. Buffs such as to deliver head from 10men dungeon in orgrimmar to - thrall - horde leader, then he would yell and everyone would hear when buff is going to drop, it gave so much power that people would do all this before raid. Buffs lasted 1-2hours and were deleted upon death, so PVP mattered a lot, there were PVP guilds that would gank these raid PVE groups in front of entrance of raid, there would be massive 40v40 fights in open world. This is reason why WoW vanilla was the pinnacle of wow, some say wotlk, but wotlk was start of modern era (retail theme park MMO), combat was more competitive thus people were delusional and spoke of it as pinnacle of wow.
Why I am saying this? It takes effort and it has this sense of danger when doing/collecting these materials/buffs, why you do this? because your group would get 50% stronger with all buffs and you would finish raid 50% faster. It was also fun and people were doing it just for sake of fun, even if they knew someone might wait them near raid entrance and they would lose all this. This was time of MMO games where people did not care about selfish desires and how to rush/get to end results. There were no quest markers or anything like that, full hard core yet casual friendly MMO. This is another story why wow was casual friendly, but I won't go into this, AoC team has a lot to learn from that masterpiece of game, no wonder why it was such a big hit, im telling you its true, wow was the best MMO to this date, but only Vanilla WOW - first wow, base game.
Well balanced consumables and decent resting regen rates are nice quality of life features, even EQ added them eventually. I can understand missing the days when MMOs were more social, but I think there are better ways to try to recapture that than bringing back extensive downtime.
Pots I'd like to see.
Health, Mana, Poison, Sticky, Invisibility, Purge, Giant, Resistance, CC Duration, Cooldown Reset.
Gotta grease them wheels of industry, somehow.
Those two are huge material and gold sinks
In my opinion, 90 seconds is enough for more common potions.
Archeage had a full range of potions that had fairly short cooldowns, but it also had a rare consumable that was basically instant full HP. It was rare, and thus it was expensive, but using one well could swing the tide of even 20v20 PvP. If someone wanted to throw down a consumable in PvP that cost them the equivalent of 2 days labor, have at it imo. Sure, it may mean I lose this fight, but the cost to that player was so great that I would consider it an outright win.
I think it is something that would make sense to be dropped upon death. But also gives resources a sink that can both be consumed and also dropped and used by others which I can only imagine would have a somewhat net positive effect on that aspect of the market.
I agree that cooperation should be supported more instead of everybody vs everybody systems
I also came to the conclusion that MMOs are just sophisticated chat environments.
During those downtimes some would still prefer to fight some low level NPCs nearby.
The healing potions and food can indeed make healers feel useless.
But the game can also be balanced so that both are needed.
When a healer cannot keep a tank alive, it may not be the healer's fault but the tank, with low gear and no proper consumables. In such cases, the tank should fall back to lower tier NPCs, but the game balanced for consumables will give little XP or low tier drops for players at that level.
Also I think healing potions could be fast-heal during fight while food should be a very long time buff, like for a few days. And food effect should run out gradually over days. Eating often in taverns should be needed. And there you can chat too while you eat
That would keep the two artisan classes relevant in two different ways rather than having to carry to short-time buffing items in your inventory, which do not stack.