stellarmind said: any skilled pvper > raid boss >:O ok real talk, if ya haven't played undertale, there's a hidden end game boss named sans. at some point players will figure out the pattern and eventually beat the boss. after repetition, the encounter becomes easy and any other encounters like it. because of technology now too, how fast we get information, it trivalizes these types of designs. what guide to look up read up on this practice that there hasn't really been an innovative way to design raid bosses due to game physics or engine limitations. most raid bosses have become a glorified dance dance revolution because they've gotten lazy with it. raid bosses really don't need to have some fancy ai tbh.
stellarmind said:there's a lot of other things that can be done with acclimation to change raid bosses. boris the blob eats players with high nature acclimation, spits acid at members with high frost, laughs at raiders with physical damage, goes super aggro on players with high intelligence(yes tank wizards lez goooOOOO) or you can have ur tank get intelligence gear LUL, essentially caps ur casters from having more int than ur tank. really tho..
vjek said:dorotea said:IMO the answer is very simple. And very different from what most MMOs do now.
Do NOT have boss fights rely on mechanics at all. Dancing from pixel to pixel based on a preset script makes the fight too easy for those that know it and too hard for those that do not. Plus it suddenly transforms months or years of learning your class and gearing up into an exercise of following a script. ...
IMO:
This right here has been a 20+ year annoyance for me.
You play your class for hundreds of hours (or hundreds of days, YMMV) to get to xx level. You've done your best to become the pinnacle of your role. You anticipate. You know the tricks. It's all there. Your group is a well-oiled machine of accomplishment.
You get all the gear necessary to reach a Tier1 raid.
You enter the raid, and everything you spent in the leveling and learning is now tossed out the window, and you play DDR avoiding the fire. Hm. And this is FUN?
I've never understood that design goal: "Let's have the players learn how to be a finely tuned machine performing their role with almost supernatural ability for xx levels and hundreds of hours, and now, STOP doing that! Huzzah!"
Everything you learned? Pointless! Useless! Yay! :)
Cleric, hide, look at the floor, and press this one button! If you don't press it within 250ms of when it should be pressed, we all die. No pressure.
Warrior, tag off the Monk, move to and stand in this one spot and taunt. Don't go LD or we all die.
Melee DPS, joust. You get to hit the target for 2 seconds out of every 30, unless the script timing is off or buggy and then you all die. Enjoy.
Ranged non-magic DPS, auto attack.
Enchanter, mana-regen & haste everyone then logoff and switch to your main.
Wizards, sit on your ass until the mob is at 20%, then chain nuke until OOM. If you stand up before 20% so help me Brell, I will boot your ass from the raid.
Kill all the pets. NO PETS!
Necro, all DoT and feign. If you stand up, we all die.
Monk, pull and feign. If you stand up, we all die.
Paladin/SK, You're the rampage target, try not to die. Use your pocket cleric to keep you alive.
Druid, relog to your main after you provide your one buff someone might want.Personally, if raiding in Pantheon is going to be me NOT performing my role? I won't be inclined to consume that content. I want role-playing content. Content where I get to play my role. The role that I'm really really really good at, because it took me xx levels to get here.
At this point, I would be happy if raiding simply meant challenging multi-group content, where you needed 2-4 groups, because there are 2-4 encounters that needed to be resolved, concurrently. Leave the DDR avoiding the fire to all those other games.
Under those conditions, at least what I learned for 50 levels wouldn't be thrown out the window.
Not going to lie i just saw this, and they isn't anything hard about RTing, or CH chain, or much of anything you just mentioned, i would rather it be DDR than any of that you said, I've been in a CH chain, and could fall asleep and do it correctly.
Your making this huge deal about if it do this one thing wrong "We all die" which isn't even close to the truth, in any game, not even EQ. The thing that made EQ hard was internet connection and lack of communication, which just isn't a thing anymore.
Now I'm not saying it needs to be completely DDR as some people call it, but I definitely don't want to just stand/sit there and not worry about anything hit me while i make myself a sandwich either.
And I in turn will add that difficulty isn't at all the point.
I want encounters to be based on my using my class skills and the gear I have accumulated whether that makes the encounter harder or easier. I do not want the encounter to be a scripted dance instead of a real fight - whether that makes the encounter harder or easier. I am not arguing because I think scrpted dances are too hard. I am not arguing because I think scripted dances are too easy. I am arguing because they are simply not what I think a fight should be. I played FFXIV for a while. It had many good features and is one of the more popluar MMOs. It also has a plethora of scripted dance boss fights - after you progress a while almost every normal dungeon - dungeons that are fairly mandatory to do - has some. Not just raids - not just special dungeons - darn near all dungeons. When I figured this out I left despite the things I liked about the game.
vjek said:
I've never understood that design goal: "Let's have the players learn how to be a finely tuned machine performing their role with almost supernatural ability for xx levels and hundreds of hours, and now, STOP doing that! Huzzah!"Everything you learned? Pointless! Useless! Yay! :)
Cleric, hide, look at the floor, and press this one button! If you don't press it within 250ms of when it should be pressed, we all die. No pressure.
Warrior, tag off the Monk, move to and stand in this one spot and taunt. Don't go LD or we all die.
Melee DPS, joust. You get to hit the target for 2 seconds out of every 30, unless the script timing is off or buggy and then you all die. Enjoy.
Ranged non-magic DPS, auto attack.
Enchanter, mana-regen & haste everyone then logoff and switch to your main.
Wizards, sit on your ass until the mob is at 20%, then chain nuke until OOM. If you stand up before 20% so help me Brell, I will boot your ass from the raid.
Kill all the pets. NO PETS!
Necro, all DoT and feign. If you stand up, we all die.
Monk, pull and feign. If you stand up, we all die.
Paladin/SK, You're the rampage target, try not to die. Use your pocket cleric to keep you alive.
Druid, relog to your main after you provide your one buff someone might want.Personally, if raiding in Pantheon is going to be me NOT performing my role? I won't be inclined to consume that content. I want role-playing content. Content where I get to play my role. The role that I'm really really really good at, because it took me xx levels to get here.
At this point, I would be happy if raiding simply meant challenging multi-group content, where you needed 2-4 groups, because there are 2-4 encounters that needed to be resolved, concurrently. Leave the DDR avoiding the fire to all those other games.
Under those conditions, at least what I learned for 50 levels wouldn't be thrown out the window.
Paladins and shadow knights had it worse. All of those levels invested into tanking to suddenly have that role undone thanks to no defensive disc; even rangers had weaponshield for emergencies. Paladins could have had the AE heals clerics rarely ever used. That would have allowed paladins to stay in with the melee, healing the DPS versus damage shields and AE DOTs/DDs. Clerics even got blackstar, 1hb with a 100hp group heal proc only to be relegated to sitting at a wall out of LoS.
Bard was the class that seemed to keep true to its role for the most part, especially with the epic in hand, but even then it often involved a lot of manasong playing. Solo, swarm/charm kite. Group, pull/cc. Raid, pulse mana with cantata or twist haste in with resists, and the occasional OOS.
In my opinion, everyone should play PT if they want to know how any game, not just horror, should be made. It's a fully scripted 2 hours of content. But every time you do it, it is almost always different, because there are so many subtle things happening in the background, changing what you will ultimately experience. Lots of scripting can be hard work, but it is worth it in my opinion.
What if a raid had some event that forced you to go in a different direction? Fight the same boss in a different location on your second run? Boss dispositions? Different adds depending on the things that are happening while you are raiding? Slight differences in boss stats and fighting styles? There's lots of options, just depends on how much can be reasonably programmed in a short time.
My understanding of raid mobs is that they are super powerful mobs that require an army of people to kill. This usually coincides with the mob not being intimidated by the players, or fearful that they will not succeed in killing this incursion.
A wizard raid mob stands in melee because he's not concerned with the petty mortals beating on him.
A raid mob that just runs in circles trying to avoid being meleed would be absolutely horrible.
To the OP. Its very difficult to compare classic wow karazhan to being difficult or not. When TBC released. Kara was actually a fairly difficult raid dungeon and caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. Knowledge is king. And now that everyone knows the mechanics, which trash is hard, what classes to bring, it ends up being easy.
The same thing would happen to pantheon. The raids will likely be difficult at first and once people begin to widely understand the mechanics of the fights, they will decrease substantially in difficulty.
I don't mind having bosses that cam spawn with 2 out of xxx additional modifiers making then more difficult and different, but all that does is create difficulty for the first time you see a specific mechanic. This happens in mythic wow dungeons, once you understand how to handle the additional mechanics, it becomes fairly easy to adapt to them
Main point is that the raid should be fun, with part of that fun being challenge.
Machine learning could be very easiely tuned to be deadly (kill the healers first , stupid) but each encounter would be very samey and not very fun.
Tuning ML to provide fun rather than deadly would be very hard, mainly as fun is subjective and varies from player to player.
Does this mean you couldn't integrate ML to make some decisions ? no. But at that point its arguable you may as well script / randomise and save the cost of realtime ML (which could prove a lot if used widely).
Unique mechanics with some reactivity and randomness is probably all we have for now.
Predictability is the killer of challenge.
If you know what you're going againstm then it really justa script of if..thens.
Mobs should have the abilities of the class they are, if players are restricted to a certain number of slotted skills/spells, so should the mob, and those could be assigned on spawn. Meaning that each raid has no idea if the raid boss as a caster has memmed a bunch of DD or DoT or AoE spells. And those spells should not be so easy to recognize when they begin casting that you can have a "plan" for it.
Boss mobs, all mobs for that matter, should fight more like the players do. If the players tend to take out healers/casters first, the mobs should have a desire to go more the healers/casters. not just endlessly beat on a tank who is getting full heals every 15 seconds. Sure animals, undead, etc might just attack nearest target or first target that engaged, but intelligent mobs should use that intelligence to some degree.
Fulton said:/snip
If the players tend to take out healers/casters first, the mobs should have a desire to go more the healers/casters. not just endlessly beat on a tank who is getting full heals every 15 seconds.
Agree in general re variety, however be careful what you wish for on mob letality - an obvious winning tactic is to kill healers focus fire.
This might bea fun thing ocasionally (maybe via a random disposition, or a certain zone) but if it is lots of times then no one will play a healer as will be really unfun.
Mobs don't know how much someone is getting healed for. That's the entire purpose of am aggro/threat table. Based on the warriors abilities he's able to appear as the most threatening attacker.
Raid mobs aren't players, they don't get to see health bars and ignore threat tables. That would render tanks completely useless.
Also. People should really stop looking at everquest as the status quo for raiding. If pantheon raids are even the slightest bit similar to everquest raids VR has failed us miserably. Raiding, and raiding mechanics have come so far since then. We should not have anything that remotely resembles any fights in the first 7? Expansions of EQ. (GoD actually had compelling raids)
Not sure if it has been said as I did not read all of the comments, but what about a raid NPC that can take control over your pets if you have any and have them attack the raid making you focus on killing the pets. Maybe an NPC that does different tactics during different seasons, wears different styles of armor for the weather that mitigate different types of damage?