Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Managing threat can be fun IF it does not all come down to the tank's skill level.
AoC wants to encourage people to play together. And difficulty is often not an issue when you play with people you know. But imagine puging group content as a healer or DPS if the tank skill floor is high. It will be extremely boring (even more so than usual) for above average DPSers and healers to play with below average tanks since they... well, quite literally can't play at their fullest potential due to the tank not being able to handle it. Thus it will just make the bed for even more segregation between player base and discourage good DPSers primarily from helping out pug groups every now and then.
How can one solve this then? My suggestion would be to give all base classes some form of way to deal with threat. A rogue or ranger would perhaps faint their presence with some kind of "hide" action (in TT terms) or "faint" (in common MMORPG terms). A cleric or bard would perhaps put something on the tank to make them "extra shiny" (and thus more threatening) to distract foes and increase the tanks threat gained. A mage would use something similar to "fade" (MMORPG term) or mirror image (TT term) to decrease their threat generation. These are just general suggestions, but you get where I am going. Have the abilities have short durations and slightly longer cooldowns to increase the skill requirement while avoiding the mentality to "spam this on CD".
The foundation of RPG combat is to synergize with the other players in your group to devise tactics and strategies which defeat your encounters. With the group having a diverse config of classes that can maximize everyone's strengths and cover for everyone's weaknesses.
Yes. Part of that is learning when you are doing too much and curbing some of your strengths so you don't overwhelm the others in your group.
Last year of junior high, at 9th grade camp. My best friend and I participated in a 3-legged race.
I was sure we would win because we were both fast runners.
He was a top-tier cross-country runner. I was a top-tier sprinter.
We failed miserably. I was shocked!
He told me the whole point of the 3-legged race is working together. He wasn't capable of matching my sprinting because his skill-set is different. I should have adjusted my tactics for a group endeavor, rather than what I would do solo.
In MMORPGs, combat is not supposed to be, "I just focus on my rotations so I can DPS as fast as possible without any repercussions from tour opponents."
MMORPG combat is not supposed to be, "I just focus on healing everything as fast as possible without my opponents figuring out that if they kill me first, it will be much easier for them to kill my mates."
We should be expecting NPCs to figure out who is the greater threat at any given moment.
And that perspective might change depending on who is doing the most damage or who is doing the most healing.
So... yes... you might have to realize you are doing to much damage and let someone else gain some threat.
Yes. You might have to slow down your healing and let someone else gain some threat.
Someone might need to quickly generate more threat to act as a distraction/decoy.
The OP is basically saying we should be able to ignore that we are standing in the fire, so we can just focus on our individual rotations. It's not fun to have to move out of the fire. We shouldn't have to stop attacking or stop healing just because we are now standing in a pyre of debri.
Pay attention to the changing dynamics of the encounter.
Expect one of those changes to be enemies choosing different targets based on what the individual members of your group are doing.
Also expect one person in your group to be the best at whatever the equivalent of Taunt/Grapple is.
Thanks all! We appreciate all of your thoughts, opinions, suggestions, and feedback
If DPS all only had one attack type, DPS would be boring. DPS is only interesting when you have interesting mechanics attached to damage abilities, and is only ever as interesting ad those mechanics.
Same with threat. If all tanks have is a taunt that increases threat, it's boring. If they have abilities that do more than that though, it can be far more interesting.
A story I've told a few times on these forums seems fitting for this thread. In EQ2, for quite a while, my guilds standard pull technique was for the tank to grab the mob, and then for me to use an ability that would deal massive damage, but leave me with no mana (was dealing literally 10 times the amount of damage as the second highest damage ability in the game).
After using this ability, I would obviously pull the mob off the tank, I'd be so far ahead in threat that regular taunts would have no hope of being able to pull the boss off me before I was killed. However, the tank would use a ability that would increase his threat position by one. Since I was on top of the threat list and he was a distant second, that increase in position on the list then puts the tank at exactly one point of threat above me. Then I'd use an item that lowered my threat by 24 positions on the list.
The end result is that the tank is so far ahead on the hate list that it is almost impossible for anyone to catch him up, and I am at the bottom of the list (with no mana, but that wasnt much of an issue).
Most other guilds didnt do this, because they had other mechanics they used to keep threat on their tanks, this was just one method my guild used.
This was a fun mechanic. If you look at threat as just a tank standing there using taunts with no interest added to them as abilities then yeah, threat management sucks.
However, that is a fault with individual games and their design, it isnt a factor that is inherent to all games.
If you want to go ham on a boss and not pull threat, use your threat reduction skills, which exist in tank/healer/dps games for a reason.
If you want to go ham on a boss, get a better tank.
Your ideas remove depth from a RPG, making it less fun.
You speak for yourself, not for me.
Aggro management, non-solo friendly and slow recovery were the biggest reasons why people left EQ and went to WoW. I don’t understand people who want to recreate mechanics that killed MMOs.
Those people are probably the sort of people who think WoW is what 'killed MMOs'.
They’d be wrong. I didn’t play WoW for a long time after it was released because it killed my EQ guild. Looking back now I see that people moved because it was a better game, most of the people conflate the good memories they had with the game mechanics themselves. Some things were fun, but threat management and slow recovery had nothing to do with it.
To each their own, I guess?
But I feel like the fact that you're surprised is technically the point to note, as you did. If a lot of people who like it happen to be here, then it's likely that those people find it fun. Are those people the majority of MMO gamers? Probably not.
Ashes is full of things like that, so you'll find subgroups who want all sorts of 'weird' and 'oldschool' things that the sort of person who finds WoW to be more fun doesn't necessarily appreciate. Good luck to Intrepid in managing that.
What killed MMORPGs is MMORPGs trying to not be MMORPGs anymore. What killed them was trying to change MMORPGs into something that would appeal to people who fundamentally do not like MMORPGs. And what you're left with is a genre that appeals to basically no one except a dwindling vestigial fanbase. And instead of realizing this mistake, they double down and try to squeeze more and more money out of their dwindling fan bases.
By the way, WoW had threat mechanic, so leaving EQ for WoW to escape threat mechanics would be like leaving the United States for Mexico to escape hot temperatures. I don't really remember anyone having a problem with threat mechanics themselves, I think the move to essentially get rid of threat mechanics was based more around the desire to create safe, predictable, sterile content that wouldn't upset the remaining pay pigs.
I'm not sure I follow.
Games with threat mechanics (even basic threat mechanics) still require positioning, timing, general awareness, all of the things you are talking about here.
In a hypothetical sense, I understand and even agree with you that games where tanks don't have to put some major thought in to positioning, timing or awareness would suck. The thing is, I've not seen a game where a tank doesn't need to think about these things, regardless of threat mechanics.
Incorrect - WoW was a huge feeling of an MMORPG.
seamless world, artistic graphic, SOOOOO many Questing, where "EverQuest" Questing was few and far between.
They still kept the social aspect of things Until WotLK.
A lot of people left WoW too and went to L2, RuneScape and back to EQ.
EQ killed themselves at Luclin and nail in the bed with the PoP expansion. That and the refusal to upgrade its dated look when every other mmo looked soo much better. But in the end a lot of us mmorpg gamers who grew up to this genre all ended up going to TLP or P99 / L2 / Runescape (dont know much about this game)
Why because their games was fundamentally sound and damn difficult.
apparently FF14 from what I've read. Some tank can do something a few times and then stop doing anything and he will still have threat for the next 10 min.
paraphrasing
Well, I would agree that this is a fairly shit way of doing things, if it is indeed like this.
However, this is an issue with the design of one game (an issue I would agree with), not an issue with the general design of threat in MMO's in general.
While threat is not the perfect system in it's current form, or the most exciting historically speaking, there are many ways it could be improved and there's never been a better time for it. It requires more sophisticated, smarter AI that calculate threat as an equation and not just an invisible number. It requires AI to be lethal if the right actions are not taken to avoid or mitigate damage with evasive and/or defensive abilities for all players involved. Mechanics should be a factor in fights that have the potential to ignore threat, targeting specific party members or hard switching targets and using abilities on them instead.
Threat should be calculated on each individuals total combined damage, heals, buffs, and debuffs so any type of class could be targeted no matter their playstyle or kind of contribution. Then line of sight and distance from the target. Threat would lose it's effect while you are outside an enemies field of view and/or further away. Each type of enemy should also apply threat multipliers based on your class/race. Some might go out of their way to attack mages, while others hate elves.
All of this would create memorable and exciting gameplay, and open the door for unique encounters.
It would require the entire game be built in tight corridors.
Purely block based tanking doesn't really work in wide open space.
And giving tank a buff or a synergistic mechanic that works off of the number of "protects" you did. So the tank would not only simply tank in the party, but would also support the dps or healing or whatever. And it could be skill-based, if Intrepid add enough varying protective abilities and proper mob/boss mechanics to utilize them.
I just think that tank can be made more interesting, even outside of the basic boss mechanics of "dodge this red color on the floor or use this ultra defensive ability at this particular time".
A game where you are relying on body blocking for tanking would require all content to be in corridors.
Also, for the most part, bosses in dungeons are in rooms, not corridors. Large rooms, at that.
Obviously this would have to be properly balanced with CDs and protective strengths, so that tanks wouldn't just permaprotect some dps who'd constantly put out 100% of their power, but still.
I mean, you are basically saying "lets take aspects of bards and healers and give it to tanks, just because".
Tanks should have "oh shit!" buttons. Healers and support should have abilities that are used in a pre-meditated manner.
If you are giving tanks these abilities that are more than "oh shit!" abilities, you are encroaching on the role of healers and tanks.
I don't really get what the point of trying to take aspects from one role and give it to another role actually is. Sure, you are potentially making the tank role a little more interesting, but at the expense of the healer and support role.
Surely the better way to make the tank role more interesting would be via the games content, not via cannibalizing other roles.
And tank/healer will already have aspects of a healer. And tank/bard will have aspects of a bard. This is why I'm saying that Intrepid could try smth new with the archetype. When the lines are blurred - it's the perfect time to push those lines further.
If you can use it every 15 minutes, it becomes a fairly standard part of your gameplay, and makes the game too easy. People you are grouping with will come to expect you use your "oh shit!" button to cover up their mistakes.
But either way, I think we just have differing views on how the pve interactions should be designed so I'm not sure if we'll come to a consensus on this particular topic. And Intrepid have obviously not shown any real indication of what their tank will end up being. Cause ooooh boi that showcase definitely did not show good tanking, let alone AI that would require good tanking.