The following are inquiring details about Pantheon for those who never played WoW or Ever Quest from the creators of Pantheon.
This was posted originally in the Champion Forum. However, most people interested in the answers to these questions are unable to view responses. So a repost was made here.
Most Old school players of FFXI still play today after 20 years since launch and greatly rejected the new FFXIV MMORPG gameplay. One of the main reasons for this rejection was for the same reasons Pantheon is creating a new MMORPG which is to satisfy the Old School gamer mentality.
While I have followed Pantheon since its launch, I’m having a hard time finding answers to the questions the FFXI community has that would entice these hardcore players of moving to another MMORPG unless it mimics some of the gameplay they love in FFXI.
I understand the gameplay in Pantheon will greatly follow the old school mentality of which was a staple in the old school MMORPG gaming community 20 years ago. While some of the biggest question(s) have been answered, which are: Will Pantheon have hard core grinding for gear and experience, community involvement, fishing and crafting, which all have been answered by Pantheon, as yes’s, which is a great draw to the game since it’s a big part of the community of FFXI. Some questions are still left unanswered.
The questions for the Pantheon creators we would like answered for the FFXI community are:
Question 1 – Will Pantheon have Notorious Monsters and Hard Notorious Monsters? Notorious Monsters are special/rare monsters which appear after the place holder is killed and which drop rare items at a 1-3 percent rate (give or take of the percentage) and Notorious Monsters which show up every 24 hours after death and in some cases only when certain parameters are met within the environment.
Question 2 – Will Pantheon have class specific gear? Will Pantheon have race specific gear?
Question 3 – Will Pantheon have (what FFXI calls it) Relic weapons? These are weapons which take an extremely long time to quest.
Question 4 – Will Pantheon have a Death penalty (10 percent of Max Exp Loss)? This adds a great deal of strategy and fear of consequences of a player’s action.
Question 5 – Will Pantheon have Weapon Skills, Skill chains, Magic Bursts? This allows coordinated attacks instead of spamming attacks and makes the game more strategic and group orientated.
Question 6 – Will Pantheon have subclasses? Example Monk/Warrior or Wizard/Cleric?
Question 7 – Will Pantheon have a class lock into a specific role? Or will there be flexibility? While I understand every job will excel at their specific job, and a Warrior isn’t designed to produce the same Damage output as a Rogue, having the flexibility of being able to fill that role at even 50 percent capacity would help in creating more opportunities within the community and or group.
Example 1: If the main tank goes down, will there be opportunities for a Monk/Rogue/Ranger to step in and tank while the main tank is down or healing? Or will the party be unable to continue? This creates unwanted downtime.
Example 2: Would a Warrior or Dire Lord be able to step in and be a Damage Dealer? Or a Wizard or Summoner be able to take over healing duties?
Question 8 – Will Pantheon have an auction house?
Question 9 – Will the starting position in Pantheon be the same for all players, or will there be different starting positions depending on what race or class (job) you pick? And if it’s the latter, will there be a focal point (town, city or place) of where the community will eventually gather as a whole?
Question 10 – Will Pantheon have a level cap? And if so, what will the level increments be based on expansions.
Question 11 – Will Pantheon allow you to view other players gear? (Which is free advertisement of what the game has to offer and allows the community to see gear that is available).
Question 12 – Will Pantheon players be able to view the level of the monsters, and if yes, will this show the level of difficulty?
Question 13 – Will Pantheon have Passive and non-passive monsters? If so, will there be aggro (aggressive behavior) from non-passive monsters towards characters when parameters are met (I.E. Blood aggro or characters under leveled?
While some of the answers to these questions are not make or break for players of the FFXI community to transfer over to Pantheon, these answers will help spread the word to the community with more detailed answers to popular questions.
Thank you.
These were answers provided in the Champion Forum section so far.
Question 1 – Will Pantheon have Notorious Monsters and Hard Notorious Monsters? Notorious Monsters are special/rare monsters which appear after the place holder is killed and which drop rare items at a 1-3 percent rate (give or take of the percentage) and Notorious Monsters which show up every 24 hours after death and in some cases only when certain parameters are met within the environment.
Answer: There will be named mobs that can spawn and I believe that there will be placeholder mobs. To go a step further there has been some talk about bosses appearing with dispositions attached to them. These mobs have been termed manifestations and are suppose to have an enhanced loot table. It's been a while since this was stated though, so things may have changed.
Question 2 – Will Pantheon have class specific gear? Will Pantheon have race specific gear?
Answer: I think they have mentioned something about the class-specific gear being a potential thing. I'm not 100% sure about the race-specific aspect. Most things are currently planned to be subjected to free trade. If you go under the classes and view the available armor types, there are general limitations to what each class can and cant use.
Question 3 – Will Pantheon have (what FFXI calls it) Relic weapons? These are weapons which take an extremely long time to quest.
Answer: I think class epics have been mentioned in passing. Right now the focus has been on skills and abilities. There will be epic abilities for each class that will require players to discover the means of unlocking them.
Question 4 – Will Pantheon have a Death penalty (10 percent of Max Exp Loss)? This adds a great deal of strategy and fear of consequences of a player’s action.\
Answer: There will be an experience loss incurred upon death. As of right now, they don't want this experience loss to de-level players.
Question 5 – Will Pantheon have Weapon Skills, Skill chains, Magic Bursts? This allows coordinated attacks instead of spamming attacks and makes the game more strategic and group orientated.
Answer: It has been said that there will be skill-ups such as for weapons and climbing. There will be group synergies that will allow players to combo off each other, by putting enemies into certain states. Ex off-balance, scorched, windswept... etc. I don't think there will be anything like a limit break, however.
Question 6 – Will Pantheon have subclasses? Example Monk/Warrior or Wizard/Cleric?
Answer: There may be NPCs that break the norms, but this is not planned for player classes.
Question 7 – Will Pantheon have a class lock into a specific role? Or will there be flexibility? While I understand every job will excel at their specific job, and a Warrior isn’t designed to produce the same Damage output as a Rogue, having the flexibility of being able to fill that role at even 50 percent capacity would help in creating more opportunities within the community and or group.
Example 1: If the main tank goes down, will there be opportunities for a Monk/Rogue/Ranger to step in and tank while the main tank is down or healing? Or will the party be unable to continue? This creates unwanted downtime.
Example 2: Would a Warrior or Dire Lord be able to step in and be a Damage Dealer? Or a Wizard or Summoner be able to take over healing duties?
Answer: Classes are being designed with a primary group role in mind. Classes will have some flexibility like a monk being able to tank or a rogue being able to cc, however, this flexibility will come at a loss to their primary role. For example, if a rogue CCs their damage capability is hurt, or if a monk tanks their damage capability is hit.
To address your specific examples: Yes the monk can step up and tank temporarily. A tank would probably be able to pull off some temporary damage increase at the loss of tanking ability if a DPS goes down. A wizard or a summoner would not be able to heal the party, however, because it's not part of their kit. A necromancer might be able to do this depending on their kit. It is important to note that the group size is 6 which allows flexibility in team comp. If you want to be safe it might pay off to take a healer and a spot healer/dps as that last spot.
Question 8 – Will Pantheon have an auction house?
Answer: There will be auction houses, currently the plans are to make these regional instead of connecting.
Question 9 – Will the starting position in Pantheon be the same for all players, or will there be different starting positions depending on what race or class (job) you pick? And if it’s the latter, will there be a focal point (town, city or place) of where the community will eventually gather as a whole?
Answer: There will be three continents at launch and three races on each. Each race will have its own starting location and I assume that each class within the said race will have its own starting location. There will probably be some sort of city/town for each race that acts as a primary gathering point. However, be mindful that factions are a thing and certain races may be killed on sight in certain areas.
Question 10 – Will Pantheon have a level cap? And if so, what will the level increments be based on expansions.
Answer: There will be a level cap. I think 50 is the current cap. They haven't gone into detail about how future expansion will affect the level cap.
'Question 11 – Will Pantheon allow you to view other players gear? (Which is free advertisement of what the game has to offer and allows the community to see gear that is available).
Answer: I'm pretty sure there will be some kind of "inspect" feature. I don't think anything has been said about a "try-on" feature though.
Question 12 – Will Pantheon players be able to view the level of the monsters, and if yes, will this show the level of difficulty?
Answer: Right now that is the plan. A player will be able to see up to 5 levels above them and anything over that will appear as question marks. This is constantly being evaluated and may change before launch.
Question 13 – Will Pantheon have Passive and non-passive monsters? If so, will there be aggro (aggressive behavior) from non-passive monsters towards characters when parameters are met (I.E. Blood aggro or characters under leveled?
Answer: Both passive and aggressive mobs will exist. Considering a mob will be the only way to tell if they are passive or aggressive. Aggressive monsters will generally engage in combat once a player enters their aggro radius. It may be possible that over leveling will reduce the aggro chance. Social aggro will also be a thing. This social aggro may affect normally passive mobs, depending on what the group is engaging with.
The above response is mine. I wanted to clarify that for anyone who is new and viewing this post for information. I want to be clear that I am not a member of the development team. I am just a fan who has been closely following since 2016.
All information shared above is public. I wish that I could share a link. However, the information comes from various developmental streams, development round tables, community streams, developer responses in community streams, and old Q/As. Many of these can be found on YouTube with a quick search.
Some of the answers contain speculation. I tried to make the speculation as clear as possible. Any answer containing may, might, or could is probably speculatory.
For anyone looking for links to official VR content, a link to their youtube channel and twitch channel is below. New developer round tables are released every month, and a new development stream on Twitch is released the first Thursday of every month.
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4MbaiykerIrjKWRA6407tQ
Twitch Channel: https://www.twitch.tv/visionaryrealms
Good answers, Fated. I'm an old school FFXI fan that has been following Pantheon since the beginning. Having read/watched most of the info that has been released by the devs over the years, I have internalized most of what you said above, but it's nice to see your answers to the posted questions. Thumbs up.
1: No
There will be rare spawns with rare drops. There will be dynamic spawns that require certain parameters to be met. It won't be exactly like you described, no.
2: Yes
3: Yes
4: Yes
5: Yes
6: No
You can not multiclass.
7: Yes
If you consider "50% capacity" being able to fill the role then yes there is flexibility there.
8: Yes
9: No
Each race will start in their own home city.
10: Yes
50 if we get to release.
11: Yes
12: Yes
13: Yes
Almost all of these could include extra explanation but I'm simplifying it for you. All of this info is available and has been discussed by VR but most of it is subject to change.
My recommendation is to check back in a few years if we get to beta for more details.
Thanks for the the brief answers Philo, but Fated Emperor went into great details in answering the questions the FFXI community was asking. Again, thank you Fated for taking the time in answering these questions (including your disclaimer).
If there are any inaccuracies or updates to these questions, maybe Pantheon Devs will answer some of these questions they feel weren't accurately answered by the Pantheon community. Until then, this is a good start.