JustVine wrote: » So we can make bosses more difficult just by 'active participants'. This feels like this would lead to opposing guilds just rolling up, pinging the boss, and letting the harder version of the boss overwhelm the enemy party till they are more killable. Thoughts?
NiKr wrote: » Pretty much what George said. This is an intended owpvp interaction. You want others not to interrupt your farm? Prepare to fight them and protect your farm.
Azherae wrote: » Ok, but does this mean that whenever someone dies, the boss difficulty goes back down? Any counterstrategy to this, or moreso 'just assuming that bosses will lose strength again when someone on their combatant list dies'? I'd have no specific problems with that myself, but it's interesting enough to think about.
maouw wrote: » JustVine's point is hinting at a problem from an old discussion: When access to a boss is too open, and you want to have PvP contest for the boss, then you necessarily have to reduce the difficulty of the boss so players can actually fight two+ battles at once without being overwhelmed. Personally, I think this is fine for most bosses, as long as there are also going to be bosses where the PvP contest is rewarded with access to a boss - and those bosses can be more fine tuned. Last time I checked, a bit of both was the intention.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » Ok, but does this mean that whenever someone dies, the boss difficulty goes back down? Any counterstrategy to this, or moreso 'just assuming that bosses will lose strength again when someone on their combatant list dies'? I'd have no specific problems with that myself, but it's interesting enough to think about. What if we incorporated flag status into the consideration? Say there's an 8-man party boss. The boss has a zone around him that tracks any player action, including movement. As soon as a player steps into the zone, they go on the combatant list. If that person is the 9th+ on the list - they contribute to the stat growth of the boss. The stat growth could just be a few %s per additional combatant, with several steps of anti-zerg mechanics ramp-up. Any non-movement action generates threat. The boss' nameplate has general dmg trackers (shown in %s), visible to anyone (though this could be argued against). Any attacker gets their own line in the tracker. Parties are shown with their leader's name, same for raids. Threat values are only visible to tanks who've casted a particular ability on the mob (this is my personal preference and could be omitted for this example). Flagging up starts to remove your threat value on the boss (say, 2% a second). While flagged, you will generate 1/2 (or maybe lower) the threat per action. If your threat goes away completely, you get removed from the combatants list, but, as long as at least one member of your party is on the list, your party's looting rights remain. Any death would immediately half your threat. Becoming red removes you from the combatant list and removes all threat. Stepping out of the boss' zone starts to remove your threat at a greater pace than flagging up, and removes you from the combatant list immediately if you had no threat at all. This way the starting party are encouraged to flag up first, because it would move the enraged boss onto the newcomers much faster, especially if they decide not to flag up themselves and to just hit the boss. Conversely, if the first group gets flagged upon by the newcomers, they'd definitely want to fight back immediately, because the enraged boss would stay on them for longer otherwise. What do you think? Is this too convoluted? Would it even work? Are there huge exploits that I missed?
Azherae wrote: » This seems to mean that you are okay with DPS being able to shed hate and drop off a combatant list by having a sacrificial green healer within range that they can hit, as long as this, in turn, puts them into a Flagged State for any competition to come by and start trouble with them. Here's my confusion/concern. Your other point is that technically, one should almost always flag up to protect your farm, so it would then be difficult to claim that this 'Flagged Threat Shedding' is not an intended form of gameplay. So I'm just making sure that you expect/intend that outcome before anything else.
NiKr wrote: » Azherae wrote: » This seems to mean that you are okay with DPS being able to shed hate and drop off a combatant list by having a sacrificial green healer within range that they can hit, as long as this, in turn, puts them into a Flagged State for any competition to come by and start trouble with them. Here's my confusion/concern. Your other point is that technically, one should almost always flag up to protect your farm, so it would then be difficult to claim that this 'Flagged Threat Shedding' is not an intended form of gameplay. So I'm just making sure that you expect/intend that outcome before anything else. Yep, if the OG farming party is weak enough in their tanking abilities to require a flagged state - they should be ready to engage any incoming party that's willing to fight them over the boss/content. This also has a secondary function of reducing the drop rate on death in case the boss kills them. The additional green would have to be off-party, off-guild and off-raid, so they'd need to be constantly watched over and cared for, so that's another small addition to the overall complexity of the situation (though obviously a really small one). As for the example you mentioned. Anti-zerg mechanics would engage as soon as Group A enters the boss' zone (its radius would obviously have to be tested and balanced). So if Group A decides to buff up and do other prep for the pvp in that zone - they'll start generating threat as green already. And while writing that out I can't believe that I somehow missed that Group A's threat from buffing up as greens would obviously start going down too. My bad. Maybe the rate at which the threat drops could be tied to the damage done to the boss? But I feel like this would truly be waaay too convoluted for any normal player. I was just trying to think up a way of helping out Group B in situations where Group A doesn't want to flag up and just wants to mess up the farm. Mainly because to me pvping under the boss is a totally normal thing, so if both groups decide to flag up - that's the "proper" way of figuring out whose farm it should be. Pvping under a boss is obviously difficult and pvping as a group that's already been fighting the boss for a while would be doubly so. But to me that's just the nature of owpvx. My opinion might change, depending on how Intrepid design the anti-zerg mechanics and just the general difficulty of most bosses.
novercalis wrote: » Another Idea is - When Entering the field - you also entered into the Boss threat list. The Boss Mechanics should have: * Snap Aggro on a random player. Usually target the player with the least threat. Therefor it would randomly attack the invaders. * Room Wide AoE (Falling pillars, pool of lava, etc)- this hits everyone * Boss AoE - This hits everyone * Random Adds spawn - this will be on everyone, usually goes after healers and low on the threat list. So this will disrupt the invaders as well. They too have to deal with the Boss while trying to kill the original group.
novercalis wrote: » where did u read about buff strength decreasing for larger guilds??? this is news to me
The higher the guild's member cap, the fewer available skill options will be available to that guild The maximum size for a guild that chooses all available skill options will be between 30 and 50.