Whether you don't get it, don't like it, or just want to cause people to cry, what feature(s) would you remove from Pantheon without replacing them with anything?
I expect the top response to be PVP or disguising your armor, but I secretly hope you all start a race war or something.
I am still sad they will have mastery respecs. Live with your choices or reroll!
Hands down my top pick would be PVP. I feel it is impossible to have PVP with out having an impact on PVE. I know you can minimize it but even putting some resources into PVP effect the amount of resources that could be put into PVE. Even with the best intentions PVP will have a lasting a negative impact on the PVE portion of the game. All that said I realize the decision has been made and I will be happy with PVE first and PVP second approach.
I would add raiding next but you have the rule of not replacing it with anything. I also would not want to remove it completely I would just want to make it even smaller part of the game then it looks like it will be. I want more group content to replace it.
Removing warriors physical banners might be a little less contested or maybe more? I am trying to imagine a group with more then one warrior or a couple groups in the same area or heaven forbid raiding with banners being dropped all over the place. I just feel like it adds clutter and could be done differently.
I just imagine going through a dungeon full of junk left behind by all the other adventurers. Broken walls that were summoned, trays of food, someone decided to build a campfire in the hallway, banners everywhere. Cant even see the floor below all the corpses.
First one I have seen to complain about the banners though. I would assume they are low key. I tend to get more fed up by the tsunami of spell effects overlaying on eachother.
- The really annoying agro sound.
- The sepia colored lighting/shader in Faerthale.
- Level indicator/spell icons/health bar above NPC's.
- Extreme climate system
- Perception system
- Interface color scheme
- Archai, Dark Myr, Gnomes, Skar
- Spriggan
- Cosmetic gear
- Quest log
- Puzzles
- Respecing
Nekentros - Are you sure Pantheon is the game for you? LOL!
I would personally remove inconsistencies between the "core" parts of the game, like dungeon delving, and everything else.
Everquest was an amazing niche game in my opinion because of it's consistency. Unless the times/funding just didn't allow a particular hardcore feature, as much hardcore as possible was in literally every aspect of the game from dungeon delving, to trade, travel (minus the automated boats), tradeskills, factions, etc.
Because of this, people who typically hate everquest largely quit it early on, which is excellent in my opinion. It's a shame hearing about WoW players who enjoyed the game for a long time but then quit it due to regular exposure to inconsistent features like daily quests, abandoned cities, or automated grouping.
From Pantheon, I would take away the inconsistency waiting to happen: the goal to make this game attractive to hardcore generations while having handholdy features to attract the spoiled newer generations. In my opinion, this is a definite way to ensure the hardcore players run into the inconsistencies often enough that even though they enjoy the game for the first couple years or so, they end up hating the game, causing it to go the way of Vanguard.
Games like Tarkov or the Souls series stand as shining lights in the hardcore niche, showing us that newer generations can and will enjoy hardcore games so long as "hardcore" is established and consistently built around early on.
______
My best example in Pantheon of an inconsistent feature would be auction houses. They let you hand off your trade requirements to npcs.
To me, that's like going to a dungeon and having the realistic(let's be honest here) option to pay an npc to clear it for you. I don't care if it's really expensive, you can only do it so often, you need to travel a bunch before finding the npc you want, and/or the player base doesn't have time for raiding in their busy lives and want to get to something else. Automating dungeon delving turns Pantheon into something else, and telling me I still have the option to clear the dungeon myself doesn't cut it.
Why should trade be automated when dungeon delving is not?
A similar example would be npc controlled boats. We can get/make and sail our own boats. Of course, if VR can't afford a powerful boat system that's fine.
-Class gauges : I would remove the class ressources except for mana & stamina and run something more aking the the old school "magic costs mana, physical attacks cost endurance". I do like that every class use similar ressources but in a different manner, sometimes cheaper, or sometimes simply having active conservation of it. I do not like "costless abilities" or such, and I do not like when magic is used without any cost or burden, especially heals for the paladin that currently do not seem to cost anything or have a meaningfull cooldown, which does go in the irrelevance of downtime.
-Active Mana/ health regeneration : would also remove non long cooldown based abilities to regenerate mana outside of sitting. I feel it goes too much in the non-stop-fighting way of things to alleviate things like mana pauses, that will have a direct impact on health regeneration. While I agree that regenerating for 5 or 10 min was too long between fights, I do feel that cutting that numbers will only hurt the overall experience by making players too prone to play alone and make healing relevant only in the case a tank looses 100% of his health in a single fight.
The mob level being displayed bugs me, a lot, these days. If you know the exact level a mob is, why even bother having a colour-coded system to display the relative level vs your own? If you know anything that's a set number of levels above you is red, then having that visual cue is completely irrelevant. The fact that you don't know the exact level of the mob you're fighting makes the combat far more challenging, I think.
You're low on mana, and you've just been jumped by some roaming blue con mobs... are they high blue, or low blue? Knowing the level will make your tactical choices far too easy, especially when the number addicts start calculating the exact resist percentage of each mob, for each level, for things such as mez.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, if you always know exactly what you're facing, you will always know exactly what to expect, and that sucks when you're trying to make combat challenging.
1: Perception.
I'm concerned about the timing of undesired notifications. It doesn't seem like it will be fun. The positive part about questing has never been the dialogue. It's about the tasks you have to do to finish the quest. This seems like over complicating the dialogue portion. Hopefully I'm wrong.
2: Combat resources other than mana.
Managing a lot of bars on screen is why I don't play healers. I've never found being required to focus on combat resource management bars fun in other games. I'd much prefer combat to be about timing and skill selection instead of managing "bars".
Mathir said:Vandraad said:Floating combat numbers
Buffs/Debuff icons appearing on the player/NPC name cards
Progeny
No switching of spells/abilities while in combat
The CS staff
This.
I agree, those floaty combat numbers could be toggled on, or off, but the main issue with having them there in the first place is people start to become acutely aware of them, and subsequently, overly obsessed with them, relentlessly hunting for more, more, bugger, bigger... It's one of those carrots that you chase for an eternity, but never quite taste it.
I agree with the others, too, apart from the buff/debuff icons appearing over the main target's head. I think it reduces some of the UI clutter, and I actually like the feature where the icon will start to blink when something is getting close to wearing off, mez, in particular. I just think it's a good tool for resource management, allowing you to avoid re-mezzing mobs way too early if the combat is hectic and you're not sure when the current mez is about to break.
Vandraad said:Floating combat numbers
Buffs/Debuff icons appearing on the player/NPC name cards
Progeny
No switching of spells/abilities while in combat
The CS staff
You want to remove the only people that will help you with account-related issues, including anything game related...nice, let's hope they don't see this or your tickets may take a bit longer than most :)
Kilsin said:Vandraad said:Floating combat numbers
Buffs/Debuff icons appearing on the player/NPC name cards
Progeny
No switching of spells/abilities while in combat
The CS staff
You want to remove the only people that will help you with account-related issues, including anything game related...nice, let's hope they don't see this or your tickets may take a bit longer than most :)
I thought it was clear I was joking when I said, "or just want to cause people to cry"
vjek said: One tradeskill per characterOne character per account
I thought tradeskills was up in the air still and the characters per account was entirely unknown. I can't imagine they would remove the option to have alts.
Not giving any material rewards for the perception system. If its just some faction you can gain it just does sound a lil boring and not worth the time you need to implement it. Sure i like lore but just if theres actuall truth behind it not just words with no effect.
Acclimation system if its purely used to limit zone advancement sounds not that great if you add some bonuses to better acclimation gear it might make things worthwhile.
Progeny. An interesting concept but I don't really see a lot of interest from the community so it seems like it would be a waste of dev time.
It's to late now, but probably crafting if it was earlier in development. For the record, I craft in every MMO and enjoy it to at least a small extent but it always seems like a huge development effort for something that upsets so many. If you can make top gear then you take away from adventuring (which is the primary focus of these games). If you can craft consumable buffs then you take away from class defining spells. If you can't make top gear or buff consumables then crafters won't be happy as noone wants therir wares. (except bags and housing stuff). It always feels like a no win senario for something that takes so much dev time. I like Brad's original stance of no crafting or a super simple crafting system like the one they had in pre-expansion EQ. Feature creep is just unavoidalbe sometimes.