Noaani wrote: » I know we've had this discussion before, but not all of the difficulty of a top end encounter needs to come from DPS. That is coming from a primarily glass cannon player. Things like this are great for DPS checks, but as a general rule, a check of any sort that is this tightly gated only works in a game witha fairly linear gearing paradigm. In most top end raid fights (actual raids, with 20+ people), someone being down for 30 seconds can be made up with two or three DPS gear upgrades spread around the raid. If there is that small of a gap, it means your raid doesn't have a shot at the content until they have literally all the gear previous to it.
Noaani wrote: » Vhaeyne wrote: » I used FFXIV as a case and point. It is not a decision the devs make to add a enrage timer to each fight in savage/ex. It is outright mandatory when all healers can battle res, and some DPS can battle res. If there was no enrage time many of the fights could be cleared in a hand full of pulls. It would just be too easy. Not going to lie, if a timer is the only thing giving content challenge, that is bad content. I expect better than this from WoW developers, let alone Ashes.
Vhaeyne wrote: » I used FFXIV as a case and point. It is not a decision the devs make to add a enrage timer to each fight in savage/ex. It is outright mandatory when all healers can battle res, and some DPS can battle res. If there was no enrage time many of the fights could be cleared in a hand full of pulls. It would just be too easy.
Vhaeyne wrote: » That just sounds like loosely tuned fights.
Vhaeyne wrote: » Noaani wrote: » Vhaeyne wrote: » I used FFXIV as a case and point. It is not a decision the devs make to add a enrage timer to each fight in savage/ex. It is outright mandatory when all healers can battle res, and some DPS can battle res. If there was no enrage time many of the fights could be cleared in a hand full of pulls. It would just be too easy. The content is great, but if you had 20-30mins to do a 8-11 minute fight. You could get away with a lot of mistakes. If you spend 20 minutes on an encounter that has a mechanic that can wipe the raid occur every 30 seconds, then you need to succeed at that mechanic 40 times. If the encounter takes 8 minutes, you only need to succeed 16 times. It should be fairly obvious which of these will be easier and which will be harder. If the encounter is designed so that mechanics can be cheesed, that is once again bad content.
Noaani wrote: » Vhaeyne wrote: » I used FFXIV as a case and point. It is not a decision the devs make to add a enrage timer to each fight in savage/ex. It is outright mandatory when all healers can battle res, and some DPS can battle res. If there was no enrage time many of the fights could be cleared in a hand full of pulls. It would just be too easy. The content is great, but if you had 20-30mins to do a 8-11 minute fight. You could get away with a lot of mistakes.
Noaani wrote: » Tuning in an encounter can come from a number of reasons. If the encounter has 4 or 5 mechanics that will wipe the raid if done incorrectly, then the encounter becomes harder the longer it goes on for - due to player fatigue.
Noaani wrote: » I've had contested encounters (where if we fail the pull we will lose the encounter) that should have taken 10 minutes take upwards of 45 minutes instead, due to needing to recover from near wipes several times. This is far more interesting content than having everything tuned for max DPS all the time.
Vhaeyne wrote: » Noaani wrote: » Tuning in an encounter can come from a number of reasons. If the encounter has 4 or 5 mechanics that will wipe the raid if done incorrectly, then the encounter becomes harder the longer it goes on for - due to player fatigue. Player fatigue is nothing. It is a myth. I have wiped on a single encounter for more than 16 hours straight and not had a pull where I was going 110% percent. At most I might have to take a piss or grab a drink once ever 3-4 hours.
Vhaeyne wrote: » That is not interesting. That is a scrub group getting a kill they did not deserve.
I don't want to play a game where ass hats can fuck up a pull so bad it takes more than 4x as long as it should be and we still get loot.
Noaani wrote: » It isn't a myth. If you are pulling an encounter for 16 hours straight, you are not giving it 100% concentration for that whole time. You are concentrating for the pull, the raid is wiping, and you stop concentrating. With a long pull, you are giving it 100% of your focus for the full duration - and it can indeed be tiring.
Noaani wrote: » This statement suggests you think the only factor involved in a guild not being considered a scrub guild is the DPS they can output. That seems very one dimensional to me. Every raid progression should have DPS checks in it, but if that is the only thing it has going for it - or even the main thing it has going for it - it is bad content.
Noaani wrote: » You mistake what I said. With the encounter I talked about above, we didn't almost wipe because of anything the raid did wrong. We almost wiped several times because the AoE's on the encounter that particular pull happened basically at the same time. This is a downside to raids having some aspects of them being random - sometimes things happen that make the encounter far harder than they should. If the encounter were instanced, we would have wiped and given it another pull with a better AoE timer. That wasn't an option, there was another raid ready to pull. As soon as the other guild saw when the AoE's were triggering, they laughed and started getting ready, they had the assumption that we were 100% going to have to end the pull. We didn't. We carried on. We managed to deal with the mechanics the encounter threw at us, but we did so many times by using literally every character in the raid other than the tank and his healers. That obviously meant DPS on the encounter itself was all but non-existent for minutes at a time. We managed to survive 32 hits of those two AoE's (they were 72 seconds apart). We almost didn't survive on 4 of them. It is perhaps worth also pointing out that this was the only time that encounter ever spawned on our server. The contested content at the time had 12 encounters - and one of these would spawn about every week. Some servers never saw some encounters at all. This was a top end encounter that we had one pull to try and kill-that spawned with a near broken AoE timer. You say that you would leave to find a better guild on that situation. We finished off the day as the un-denied best guild on the server - because the only other guild that was in the running watched us repeatedly survive situations as a raid that they would have wiped from. Again, DPS checks are great - just not for every encounter. There should be encounters that test other aspects of raiding, and many of these aspects are mutually exclusive with having a timer. Hell, I've seen raid encounters that had a maximum DPS the raid could do on it - and if you went over that maximum allowed DPS it would wipe the raid.
Cypher wrote: » Combat Rez yes. Throwing out cooldown numbers right now is useless because we have no idea what to balance it around. That being said I can’t imagine a cooldown longer than 10 mins for a Rez.
Vhaeyne wrote: » Noaani wrote: » It isn't a myth. If you are pulling an encounter for 16 hours straight, you are not giving it 100% concentration for that whole time. You are concentrating for the pull, the raid is wiping, and you stop concentrating. With a long pull, you are giving it 100% of your focus for the full duration - and it can indeed be tiring. Ever hear of chain pulling?
I honestly believe that at a minimum, any encounter without some sort of enrage timer is too easy. The enrage timer does not have to be "balls to the walls" for every boss in a raid tier, but it should exist to guarantee at least some level of competence to clear the encounter.
I did not mistake anything you said. It just sounds like awful raid design.
akabear wrote: » Having healing and fast rez by certain classes and slower by general classes makes the choice to whom to attack first in pvp more strategic.
Noaani wrote: » I have, but it doesn't work in the situation you talked about.
Noaani wrote: » I sort of agree with this in the absence of fail mechanics. If an encounter has mechanics that will wipe the raid if they are failed, an enrage timer is not needed as the longer a fight goes on, the less likely you are to succeed. Adding an enrage timer to literally everything means literally everything is basically the same. Raids in games with this as a design decision can literally be nothing more than a few mechanics on top of a DPS check. A good raid game should have raid encounters that are all about DPS, that are all about doing what the raid asks of us and then getting back to DPS, but should also have encounters that are vastly different. The best raiding I have seen had in an encounter that was all about mana preservation - there was a specific percentage band that you had to stay in between. If you didn't, bad things happened. That same expansion also had an encounter where 90% of the damage done to the main boss was not done via class abilities. It also had an encounter where CC was the key element. It also had an encounter where DPS on the main mob needed to be within a specific band. It also had about a half dozen pure DPS fights, and another 20 or so that were somewhere in between all of this. With this, if you are a scrub guild, you won't progress. However, if all your guild is able to do is DPS, you won't progress. You need to know how to do more than only max pew-pew, though max pew-pew IS a requirement to get to those encounters that ask more of you. It almost seems as if FFXIV raiding is only the entry level raiding of a game with a good raid game - honestly. It is testing your raid to make sure that you have the basic minimum DPS needed to be able to raid, but then they forgot to add in the content that this was a check for. To me, this is one of those things. If all you have done are WoW raids (not that this is you), then it is often hard to think that raids done differently to that can be good. If all you have done are encounters with enrage timers (this seems to be you), then it can be hard to see how raids can be made in any other way that still retains their difficulty. If you have raided in games that have enrage timers everywhere and also in games that use them sparingly, you can see why they are great sometimes, but not needed for every encounter.
Noaani wrote: » It sounds to me like the exact kind of thing Ashes will see with raids, since we will have some elements of encounters be somewhat randomized. It is very hard to do that randomization without there occasionally being a combination that makes it far harder to kill than it should be - which is what happened to us. In an instance, this isn't an issue. You accept the wipe and go again.
Vhaeyne wrote: » Basically, people will be on the next pull within 5-10 seconds of their last pull in FFXIV
It is a constant required amount of pressure that makes encounters harder, and in my opinion that is good for any MMORPG.
Your 45min raid boss just sounds like the DEVs were throwing mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, and that is awful. It is not something to be celebrated or encouraged.
Noaani wrote: » I am used to games that have a number of encounters where it is a literal, factual impossibility for everything to go your way. FIghts where deaths are guaranteed, and good raids recover from that rather than wiping and trying again. To me, a guild that can't recover from a few deaths in a raid is a scrub guild. Yes, enrage timers mean guilds can make more mistakes - but only if the guild is good enough to recover from those mistakes.
Noaani wrote: » I mean, I agree with this, but my point is that enrage timers (or timers of any sort) are not the only way to apply pressure. There are other ways to apply pressure on to a raid, and a good game with good raid content from good developers will try and find as many different ways to apply that pressure as they can, and spread them over different encounters. Thus, enrage timers are great, sometimes, but so are other forms of pressure, sometimes. Your 45min raid boss just sounds like the DEVs were throwing mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, and that is awful. It is not something to be celebrated or encouraged. Nope, the encounter was actually very well tuned in comparison to other encounters in the same game and in WoW at that time - other than the timer of two specific AoE's being able to be started fairly close together. I watched a kill of the same encounter on another server a few days later. They had about 7 seconds between those two AoE's and killed it in about 8 minutes with only 4 or 5 deaths.
