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Feeling "threatened" while leveling/questing
Dawmery
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
The recent blog post on the Fellbeast Macaw got me thinking about tricky enemies and the dangers of being swarmed. A lot of players treat leveling like a simple chore that must be done before endgame. Personally, I want to enjoy leveling but also feel challenged during the experience.
Are there any enemies in other MMOs that have ever dominated you? Do you prefer a harsh leveling environment or a more passive experience? Let's discuss.
Are there any enemies in other MMOs that have ever dominated you? Do you prefer a harsh leveling environment or a more passive experience? Let's discuss.
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For everyone who did not play it: these adds where miniature versions of a raptor. They spawned in groups of around 10 and had the ability to jump on you. The problem was that they had extremely high burst damage and could oneshot newly arriving players that didnt know about this.
I really like hard content as long as its fair. Give the enemy some specific weakness for the player to work around it.
It is always boring if yoj can just pull half the zone and aoe them down without spilling any sweat.
The elite Panther moms linked to Panther Cubs gave me a lot of grief in vanilla EQ.
But, that taught me to always fight with my back to a wall so I'm not surprised by adds.
And also taught me how to pull to spots where adds won't appear.
I like to snare and kite a lot. I generally don't feel mobs are overly harsh unless they are significantly above my level. Usually the problem arises when the majority of mobs I can easily find are elite or significantly below my level.
Yes that sounds obvious and yet I've played many mmorpgs where that isn't the case.
The one thing I hate most in games is when the game feels one way while leveling up, and then a totally different way once you are at the level cap. This makes it seem like the developers created a game at the level cap and then created a pre-game game for leveling up.
I hate games in which:
Mobs stop chasing you very easily.
You can navigate around mobs 100% of the time if you chose to do so.
Mobs are always easy.
PvP is not allowed in most of the game.
when you saw the micro raptors you knew you had to run
I loved it.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
I feel the same my friend!
The kobolds themselves were crazy strong at the time. They could debuff armour, ran away when they had low hp (which pulled more of them) and had high aggro range.
This is Tera in a nutshell. The leveling is a joke and the first dungeons you do are so easy you can go through them solo with almost any class. For the rest of the dungeons leveling up you just have to go in with 2-3 people and steamroll everything. THEN you get to endgame . . . first real max level dungeon you do after getting your first set of gear will kick you in the teeth, smash your face to the ground, and pour salt in your wounds because why the fuck not. It is so much worse for healers and tanks as well when they get in their first dungeon because the whole team depends on them.
This is the difficulty scale in Tera:
Level 10 - EXPLOSIONS, fun combat, and feel like a god
Level 50 - Enemies and dungeons have gotten slightly difficult and at least require you to use abilities instead of just auto attacks to get by
MAX Level - fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, fuck, AAAAAAAAAHHHHH NOOOOOO!!!!! I never learned any of this leveling up, WTF! "Sorry guys, I'm dead"
Gnols
Defias mages in westfall.
Murlocs are the worst!
I'm not going to lie, I picked up TERA a couple of months ago to see if it could grab my interest and I stopped playing at level 20, shortly after getting my first Avatar weapon. As soon as I got it and started demolishing the world with it, I immediately went onto the official forums and asked if it was like this for the entire levelling experience. I was told that yes, this is how it will be until you reach max level and instantly uninstalled the game.
I knew as soon as I got that reply that end-game would be a complete nightmare, with players unable to do the content having not been challenged at all during the levelling process. The irony is that both WoW and TERA (among others) try so hard to help players through the levelling process that they inevitably cause them to fail at end-game.
The endgame dungeon crawling can be as difficult as Dank Souls bosses, so it tends to be a great experience once you learn how to play. Otherwise, yea I get where you are coming from. It is a slog leveling up.
Here is a link to one of the hardest boss fights to tank or heal in the game.
But this is the problem. If you put a sudden huge leap in difficulty between levelling and end-game, players are going to hit a brick wall and quickly give up. This reduces the number of players in the pool and makes it harder for the competent players to find teammates to do the content with. The response to this is usually to reduce the difficulty of the end-game content so that more players can cope with it.
Luckily the koreans who can actually get their point across and change the direction of the game don't think like that. They love the difficulty jump and so did I for 7 years, but I got bored after a while though and havn't gone back
Oh don't get me wrong, veteran mmorpg players probably are fine with the difficulty jump, but I can tell just from looking at how the levelling works that newer players will struggle hard at end-game. Again, the irony of all this is that apparently the Avatar weapons were implemented to help players who thought the levelling was too hard. The devs listened and introduced these overpowered weapons that just caused more problems further on down the line.
I don't know what Intrepid intends for the leveling experience but I am willing to bet that WoW classic will have more players then modern WoW(BFA). A lot of players want the "rpg" back in their mmos because, a lot of the rpg elements have been watered down and strip away in the newer mmos. I don't really know how much I will enjoy ashes if they make a pve a easy press a few buttons and kill everything kind of game.
It just feels bad now.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Aion experience was extremely fun for me.
I don't enjoy respawning mobs that much, I just killed them, kills immersion to have them come back. I do prefer an option for mobs to "call for reinforcements". For example, if you don't kill them fast enough or one detects you're killing them, they should ask for help.
Help that doesn't appear immediately, but takes some times, so you can recover or escape. This will give some players the option to avoid additional mobs.
Think the levelig process should be long enough and challenge players skill moderately with options to do harder content if they wnat. So I would not personally force hard mobs on the entire server but there should be there as an option if the player wants to.
I think its okay to make open world mobs more challenging, especially if you make it so everyone that contributes to a fight gets XP and rewarded for the fight to encourage people leveling in the same area to watch each others backs even without grouping.
As far as lower level instances, these should have mechanics introduced early. I have always believed that your starter dungeons should have toned down mechanics that start teaching you and add mechanics at each level jump for dungeons. These mechanics should get progressively more damaging, larger AoEs, etc as the dungeons progress and lead you to endgame group content.
Then the endgame single group content should introduce small scale raid mechanics to help teach players.
If more MMOs took this mentality you could design your later level stuff to be much harder because you have trained your player base, but since most of the time leveling and lower dungeons are snooze fests no one learns anything and they have to make easier end game content or the difficulty curves spikes way too far and people can't handle it.
Cheap shots and surprise attacks, like pocket raptors and rolling devils in gw2, are never fun.
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