Intro:
Hello Pantheon community! You may have seen me comment a few times around here but I am starting over in a sense. I have never played Everquest and I have played so little vanguard that I may as well say I have not played it (only played a little when it was free to play to see what it was like and then they announced it was closing so I stopped). I have however played the vast majority of MMORPGs and there is a special place in my heat for one called Final Fantasy xi.
Final fantasy xi, I have held for quite some time now, had a lot of similarities to Everquest original (It was inspired by it and has a similar play style from what I understand such as leveling parties, open world dungeons, zone based, etc.). In its later years it lost its way, not unlike what happened to Everquest from what I can tell. There is nothing out there even remotely like ffxi aside from everquest original which is why I was drawn to this project.
So why have I made this post? Two reasons: For one I want to better understand where the differences between everquest and ffxi lie so that I can interact better with the community and provide feedback and suggestions. Secondly I need to know that this will actually be a home for me/people like me. This is the first of several threads I plan to make to address questions I have about everquest/vanguard/pantheon and hopefully I can bring some ffxi influence to the game without uprooting any of the good from the everquest/vanguard or even 'new' elements.
The question: Endgame
In the last podcast I listened to for pantheon there was a segment about "raids" and I understand that there was raiding in Everquest (and probably vanguard too) as well. In Final fantasy xi there was large scale endgame content but nothing was called raids. I assume this was the case because all of the endgame was different. You had one event (called Dynamis) which were extremely large scale with 18-64 players, you had another (called nyzul isle) where it was just 6 players navigating a labyrinth with semi-puzzles and special rules to climb floors (1-100) and you had other endgame where it was ??? players fighting open world bosses (HNM) and many more. I greatly prefer that type of endgame to something like modern raids (instanced, usually following the exact same model of gameplay... easy example is WoW and most games built in its shadow). So what are we looking at when we say raids in pantheon? What was it like in everquest and vanguard? Would YOU like to see a variety of endgame content styles or would you rather raids be a more static model like World of Warcraft's?
You are in for a treat then if you missed both EQ and VG, a quick google led me to this video of New Genesis raiding in APW (Ancient Port Warehouse) in VG, just to give you a taste of what it was like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLo3HjcUOSE
And one of my favorite videos from VG was made by an old friend Demethir, the guild leader of Veracity, here is their short video on a mix of VG raiding and other content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVuYlOL3Hc
It's a 1 hour video but you do not have to watch the whole thing, there are many other videos too I just picked this one at random because it shows the Shiver fight within the first few mins and I loved that fight for it's "idiot check" values lol
Raiding in EQ had rather simple mechanics at least as far as early game raids went, they started to get more complex as the game aged. Most raids/raid mobs were contested so had to be engaged relatively quickly or even instantaneous depending on how many end game guilds you had on a server. I'd compare a large majority of the earlier raids to the Dynamis, though take in consideration I never did endgame in FFXI, just from what Ive read and seen do I make this comparison.
I hope this info helps answer some of your questions Mephiles.
Forgive me if I am missing something but the videos you chose to show look like somewhat standard raiding to me. To be clear, im wondering if the extent of endgame revolved around standard raiding. I am not against standard raids existing but I would like to see endgame not only focus on them.
For example, there were standard-ish raids in final fantasy xi which would offer pretty good top end gear. However, you could also get gear about on par with it (gear was horizontal, they had different uses) from low man content as well that was endgame. I am not anti-raid, but I want there to be different kinds of things to do at endgame and I want it all to be relatively rewarding.
Kalthir said:
Raiding in EQ had rather simple mechanics at least as far as early game raids went, they started to get more complex as the game aged. Most raids/raid mobs were contested so had to be engaged relatively quickly or even instantaneous depending on how many end game guilds you had on a server. I'd compare a large majority of the earlier raids to the Dynamis, though take in consideration I never did endgame in FFXI, just from what Ive read and seen do I make this comparison.
I hope this info helps answer some of your questions Mephiles.
Final fantasy offered both contested and non-contested endgame (some was instanced but not really in the way you would see an instance in world of warcaft) so it is probably closer to compare it to HNMs (high notorious monsters) and NMs in dungeons which were random or timed spawns that could be claimed and would vary in difficulty / party requirements or maybe SEA/SKY (high level zones containing a variety of endgame challenges such as spawnable bosses, trial fights, story missions and puzzle elements).
You can expect raiding to yield better rewards than what you could acquire in a group. Raiding in EQ basically took place in all sorts of areas and formats. There was some very hard group content that would yield valuable items and trinkets along the way, but by in large the best items took 30+ players to achieve with many encounters requiring groups of even 50-100 people. You could find this content in the depths of what seemed like a normal dungeon. Out in the open world in the corner of some area. Even some entire outdoor areas were full of raid mobs. There were also different dimension called planes where you could get wiped the second you entered them, and had raid challenges that scaled up.
I expect Pantheon will once again redefine what this genre thinks of as raiding to some degree. Most of us would be happy seeing traditional raids, but I'm going to bet that this team has new ideas that will be easier than ever to implement with their new tech.
Kilsin said:
You are in for a treat then if you missed both EQ and VG, a quick google led me to this video of New Genesis raiding in APW (Ancient Port Warehouse) in VG, just to give you a taste of what it was like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLo3HjcUOSE
And one of my favorite videos from VG was made by an old friend Demethir, the guild leader of Veracity, here is their short video on a mix of VG raiding and other content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVuYlOL3Hc
It's a 1 hour video but you do not have to watch the whole thing, there are many other videos too I just picked this one at random because it shows the Shiver fight within the first few mins and I loved that fight for it's "idiot check" values lol
2 things that stick out to me from the first video are:
#1: He is using an ability at almost all times on global cooldown, there is pretty much zero time during the fight where he isn't using an ability, and on top of that he's not using up his resources for doing it. I hope we don't have this spamfest WoW regurgitation for combat in Pantheon.
#2: It looks like he has no less than 30 buffs on him, this is a bit crazy, and I'm not sure if 30 is the cap, or if that's just every buff he could possibly acquire.. but I hope to see something more along the lines of the Everquest 15 buff limit. Having to choose which buffs to keep and which buffs to drop is an important strategy element that need not be removed. Buff stacking was an important metagame in Everquest that I enjoyed a lot.
Mephiles said:
Forgive me if I am missing something but the videos you chose to show look like somewhat standard raiding to me. To be clear, im wondering if the extent of endgame revolved around standard raiding. I am not against standard raids existing but I would like to see endgame not only focus on them.
For example, there were standard-ish raids in final fantasy xi which would offer pretty good top end gear. However, you could also get gear about on par with it (gear was horizontal, they had different uses) from low man content as well that was endgame. I am not anti-raid, but I want there to be different kinds of things to do at endgame and I want it all to be relatively rewarding.
I was just showing you what VG raiding was about since you said that you did not raid in either EQ or VG. There was Dungeon raiding, Overland raiding, 12/24 man raids, different mechanics involved like incorporating Crafting during a raid, not using certain abilities like Mana at 20% of the bosses HP etc. Some require keys to enter, which came with their own raid based quests (APW key, PotA Access), Some required faction, most were open to anyone of the appropriate level though.
I have not played more than 10 levels of FFXI before I uninstalled it, so I cannot compare to that game but Pantheon is being based on EQ and VG, if you would like there are plenty more videos on YouTube to show the style of raiding that both had that Pantheon will be incorporating.
VG raids had no equal in relation to gear, Crafted was good but raid gear was the best in game due to the level of skill, time and effort involved by so many people, plus the risk vs reward, in the beginning, raids were extremely hard, that is how I would like to see them in Pantheon too with Crafted gear being a very close second. The only exception was PotA, which was both group based, crafted and faction related plus had a very high cost associated with it.
Rallyd said:
Kilsin said:
You are in for a treat then if you missed both EQ and VG, a quick google led me to this video of New Genesis raiding in APW (Ancient Port Warehouse) in VG, just to give you a taste of what it was like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLo3HjcUOSE
And one of my favorite videos from VG was made by an old friend Demethir, the guild leader of Veracity, here is their short video on a mix of VG raiding and other content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVuYlOL3Hc
It's a 1 hour video but you do not have to watch the whole thing, there are many other videos too I just picked this one at random because it shows the Shiver fight within the first few mins and I loved that fight for it's "idiot check" values lol
2 things that stick out to me from the first video are:
#1: He is using an ability at almost all times on global cooldown, there is pretty much zero time during the fight where he isn't using an ability, and on top of that he's not using up his resources for doing it. I hope we don't have this spamfest WoW regurgitation for combat in Pantheon.
#2: It looks like he has no less than 30 buffs on him, this is a bit crazy, and I'm not sure if 30 is the cap, or if that's just every buff he could possibly acquire.. but I hope to see something more along the lines of the Everquest 15 buff limit. Having to choose which buffs to keep and which buffs to drop is an important strategy element that need not be removed. Buff stacking was an important metagame in Everquest that I enjoyed a lot.
Let's not derail Mephiles thread, VG is far from spammy, VG raiding was a lot more complicated than shown in those videos, you can only see the person filming at all times, not what everyone else is doing, VGs classes were unique and played very different roles in raids, you are also looking at some of the best geared players in the game for the second video, that had every single raid mob on farm status while the first video showed a very new player to raiding.
Buffs were a debatable topic even within the VG community, they were not implemented properly and people relied on them to raid in the early stages but they are not being discussed here, raiding is and I used random VG videos to show the OP what it looked like briefly to raid in VG. In the second video they had passive buffs, civic buffs, player class buffs, clicky buffs, potion buffs for some of the hardest raid content in VG.
Have you raided in VG mate?
Kilsin said:
Mephiles said:
Forgive me if I am missing something but the videos you chose to show look like somewhat standard raiding to me. To be clear, im wondering if the extent of endgame revolved around standard raiding. I am not against standard raids existing but I would like to see endgame not only focus on them.
For example, there were standard-ish raids in final fantasy xi which would offer pretty good top end gear. However, you could also get gear about on par with it (gear was horizontal, they had different uses) from low man content as well that was endgame. I am not anti-raid, but I want there to be different kinds of things to do at endgame and I want it all to be relatively rewarding.
I was just showing you what VG raiding was about since you said that you did not raid in either EQ or VG. There was Dungeon raiding, Overland raiding, 12/24 man raids, different mechanics involved like incorporating Crafting during a raid, not using certain abilities like Mana at 20% of the bosses HP etc. Some require keys to enter, which came with their own raid based quests (APW key, PotA Access), Some required faction, most were open to anyone of the appropriate level though.
I have not played more than 10 levels of FFXI before I uninstalled it, so I cannot compare to that game but Pantheon is being based on EQ and VG, if you would like there are plenty more videos on YouTube to show the style of raiding that both had that Pantheon will be incorporating.
VG raids had no equal in relation to gear, Crafted was good but raid gear was the best in game due to the level of skill, time and effort involved by so many people, plus the risk vs reward, in the beginning, raids were extremely hard, that is how I would like to see them in Pantheon too with Crafted gear being a very close second. The only exception was PotA, which was both group based, crafted and faction related plus had a very high cost associated with it.
To be clear, all of the endgame in final fantasy was relatively the same tier. Some things were harder or easier (look up pandemonium warden and absolute virtue, they're notoriously difficult endgame that were not raids by my standards but did require large groups, a lot of xi's endgame had very tactically challenging mechanics Edit: see bottom of post) so I am not talking about ease. In fact just about everything in ffxi was relatively difficult and challenging by comparison to just about everything available today. I am totally fine with raids offering top of the line gear, I just would hope there would be a variety of content that does as well (the nyzul isle example I gave above is a good one, more so its revamped version as the original was easier and dropped lesser rewards than the revamp did which was insanely hard to clear... only used 6 people but was harder to accomplish with those 6 than the 40 man raids in world of warcraft for example).
I don't really want to challenge the idea of raids so much as maybe open up pantheon to the idea of what was offered in final fantasy xi. It may be slightly off topic but I am curious why you ended up quitting at 10 levels in.
Edit: I decided it would be better to link and explain pandemonium warden and absoulte virtue than to tell people to look them up.
Pandemonium: http://www.wired.com/2008/08/pandemonium-war/
Notorious for being an 18 hour long fight (it was not actually that long, the problem was people weren't adapting to the fight well enough and it ended up reseting itself so it took that long. Done right the fight isn't that long (and they eventually made it disappear if you failed to kill it within a certain time due to the negative press) but it was strict and difficult enough that it took a very long time before people managed to legitimately beat it.
Absolute Virtue: I got too lazy to find the article from history but the fight was about as notorious as pandemonium warden. It was so hard players claimed the devs made it impossible to beat on purpose. The developers later made a video which was intending to hint to players what ways there were to beat it.
Both of these are not what I think of as raids, and by everquest standards I would say they might be a few bars below the sleeper which if I understand correctly was not intended to be beaten at all (where these were intended to be beaten, just at an insane level of difficulty).
Ephemeros said:
FFXI is great, its like a more polished and improved version of Everquest. Everquest really needs an overhaul or something.
I'd say it was like a highly polished, more recent (it came out 4 years after Everquest) take on Everquest with its own spin on the mmo genre. There really isn't anything like it anywhere currently (not even FFXI itself) and with pantheon being the only mmo in development really aiming for that kind of game I am hoping that 'some' ideas from it could be embraced here too.
There is no doubt for me that pantheon is the closest thing to what I am looking for in an mmo since then. I hate having to flaunt the name all over this place and Im sure people will get tired of it but we're all looking for our mmo home in pantheon so I gotta put forward the things I liked about this kind of mmo and see what pans out.
Gawd said:
VG did have some single group content at engame that gave raid level rewards.
Harakhan is the one that tops my list of great rewards the only problem is that the loot belongs to a personalized box and any type of weap can come out of it, here is what my paladin got
I have the say thats a testament to the type of changes I did not enjoy in Vanguard. Both the random reward, and making raid quality loot accessible to a more casual audience.
Rallyd said:
Kilsin said:
You are in for a treat then if you missed both EQ and VG, a quick google led me to this video of New Genesis raiding in APW (Ancient Port Warehouse) in VG, just to give you a taste of what it was like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLo3HjcUOSE
And one of my favorite videos from VG was made by an old friend Demethir, the guild leader of Veracity, here is their short video on a mix of VG raiding and other content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEVuYlOL3Hc
It's a 1 hour video but you do not have to watch the whole thing, there are many other videos too I just picked this one at random because it shows the Shiver fight within the first few mins and I loved that fight for it's "idiot check" values lol
2 things that stick out to me from the first video are:
#1: He is using an ability at almost all times on global cooldown, there is pretty much zero time during the fight where he isn't using an ability, and on top of that he's not using up his resources for doing it. I hope we don't have this spamfest WoW regurgitation for combat in Pantheon.
#2: It looks like he has no less than 30 buffs on him, this is a bit crazy, and I'm not sure if 30 is the cap, or if that's just every buff he could possibly acquire.. but I hope to see something more along the lines of the Everquest 15 buff limit. Having to choose which buffs to keep and which buffs to drop is an important strategy element that need not be removed. Buff stacking was an important metagame in Everquest that I enjoyed a lot.
In Vanguard you didn't spam moves at all... yes you did hit a button every time your global cooldown was up but what you pressed was generally a decision not just a reaction...You were constantly dropping in counter spells and controlling your crit chains all while keeping your CC's up and trying to get in some dps when you can.
Spamming is just mindlessly pressing keys in a given order much like in EQ2.
For instance if your playing Street Fighter... yes you can just button mash, but this will only get you so far.
If you want to play against me you better learn perfect timing and execution or I'm gonna win every time.
I want to be pressing a key every time my global cooldown is up and I want it to be a meaning full decision.
It sounds like you just want to auto attack and occasionally hit an ability.(maybe there should be a class like this ?)
As far as running out of mana well we have to have enough so that fights can go on for a while. You didn't just instantly run out of mana in eq1 / vanguard but you did have to have some form of resource management like a bard/chanter boosting your regen and maybe even a good drink could help. Shaman's Cannibalize also comes to mind.
It was after the fights where you had 5+ minutes of downtime while you licked your wounds and med'd up.
An unwanted add could really test the limits of this. I even remember keeping a mob CC'd now and then while the
healer med'd up.
Kiz~
P.S. Recently I had a stint on p99 and as a Shaman I was constantly casting spells every single time my global was up.
As a warrior tho you didn't even have spell gems and you only had to worry about your discs and a few abilities like taunt.
Gawd said:
VG did have some single group content at engame that gave raid level rewards.
Harakhan is the one that tops my list of great rewards the only problem is that the loot belongs to a personalized box and any type of weap can come out of it, here is what my paladin got
That wasn't raid level mate, there were a ton of Legendary (Red) items available throughout your level 1-50 (and then 55) adventure that were pretty good but not the best by any means, that weapon was not very good at all even though it looks all Red and shiny, there was much better weapons that were Raid level that made that look poor by comparison. CIS is a quick example of a Legendary (Red) quest reward at level 30+, there were others too like Cragwind weapon quest, both 6 man groups with nice Legendary rewards but not raid quality by any means. Also crafting with ancient powders produces Legendary crafted gear and weapons that were below raid quality. (Sorry not trying to drive the point home, it just made me think of all these items! lol)
NN (Nusibe Necropolis) was a fun dungeon and I really liked the Pharaoh Harakhan fight for the Dps burn for griffon quest (beating heart of Harakhan) but the chest was a poorly designed reward system, I agree with Dullahan, I did not like those types of RNG rewards for specific tasks.
Video of the fight (warning headphone users - turn sound down or off): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfusV8cFcYA
Seeing TASC brought back a ton of memories though, I used to be in that guild when I took a break from hardcore raiding to help them with their APW raids and helped run a few gearing up events for a lot of the members, they were a great bunch of folks that I hope to see return for Pantheon :)
Dullahan said:
I have the say thats a testament to the type of changes I did not enjoy in Vanguard. Both the random reward, and making raid quality loot accessible to a more casual audience.
Why do you consider the difference between a raid and a group to be the difference between casual and not? Above I gave an example of content where a 6 person group content was extremely difficult (to the point where only top tier groups were succeeding, not unlike what is generally expected of raiding) so I don't associate the size of the group or even the way content is presented to matter as much as the difficulty of the content. Secondly, I don't believe in intentionally segregating parts of the community (such as saying 'this is for casual play' and 'this is for hardcore players'), that kind of distinction should happen naturally (something being more difficult or requiring a more significant investment).
In EQ/VG style MMOs, large format raiding is typically considered to be more skill intensive because of how hard it is to get large groups of people (72 in Everquest) to work together.
Getting a large group of people is time intensive, you're juggling a lot of different personalities, play styles, time commitments, and as such deserve to be rewarded for it.
Mephiles, To answer you, I think their plan is to make sure all raid content pre max level and at max level are engaging, skill based and reliant on solid strategy. I think the paths or styles of raid content will very greatly to accomplish that. With AI being so smart now days I have a feeling the ability for boss's to change strats , spells, offensive/defensive abilities will be a useful tool in that vision as well.
I believe you will enjoy it, AS LONG AS, you are someone who believes effort should equal reward. If you have the mentality of someone who thinks they bought they game so they should get everything for free or ease it won' the enjoyable.
Glad your around.
Xan
I personally feel raiding should look like the old nutrition pyramid. The lowest tier has the most content and as you move up you get a little less till the very top has just a few very hard encounters. It is very important to have "easy" raid encounters in a games release because you really want content for people to get there feet wet. This intro raiding tier needs to also be quite large because its the group that has the most competition. The real raid guilds will be out of this tier fairly quickly but it might be as high as most non raid focused guild get so you should have enough for them to be happy with.
One thing I have to add: I don't understand the h8 for instance content. It helps so many things work/feel/perform better. You dont have to be bothered by outsiders, and (if you played EQ1 endgame) you dont get shafted on encounters for....MONTHS because you are on the wrong time zone.
( My guild in EQ1, blocked the ENTIRE server from Vulak'Aerr 58 out of a possible 59 times. Oh and yes, we were letting loot rot. How many people do you think we made quit? Guilds.)
Amsai said:
Welcome Mephiles. Fellow FFXI vet here. Played for 10 years and did Endgame content for 7 years. Garuda Server represent! Something I always keep in mind is that the original kickstarter said that Pantheon would draw from VG EQ and XI. Though to be sure we are the minority compared to the EQ and VG vets here. That being said there are several design systems that look like some influence was from XI. Such as horizontal/situational gear, gear swaping, skill chains and MBs(though ive read VG had similar as well), class uniqueness, interdependent group play( not just 5 or 6 joes whacking the same mole), and something similar to XIs limit break system of tasks to continue leveling. There are other things too and I do realize some might be present in the other 2 games as well. As for endgame I loves Sea Sky and Limbus the most. But my old LS did everything and it was straight 7 days a week lol. My fav thing from XI was the CoP missions. I beat it pre nurf with me as Ninja and a thf rdm whm and 2 bst from start to finish. To hell with ideal party set up lol. PS Like that avatar too ^^
This stuff was before the dev team changes Amsai. It is a little different now and the current dev team has less awareness and interest in ffxi from what i have see. It is totally cool with me that they focus on what they know best, and thats why we have community feedback. I just dont want to promote ideas and systems if they won't be considered (which is why I decided to start this thread and plan to do a few more asking questions so I understand the environment I am in before making a lot of comments). Also thanks and nice goblin :)
Fingurs said:
One thing I have to add: I don't understand the h8 for instance content. It helps so many things work/feel/perform better. You dont have to be bothered by outsiders, and (if you played EQ1 endgame) you dont get shafted on encounters for....MONTHS because you are on the wrong time zone.
( My guild in EQ1, blocked the ENTIRE server from Vulak'Aerr 58 out of a possible 59 times. Oh and yes, we were letting loot rot. How many people do you think we made quit? Guilds.)
I would agree with this to a small extent (having some bother and more interaction in an open space is important) but I think you don't quite see what the problem is. A lot of the hate is pushback against modern models where the actual games world has nothing in it and if you want to do anything its in an instance. I think that use of instanced content as fine as long as priority is given to open world content. If they offer open world dungeons with interesting mechanics and other interesting open world elements then decide to put in some instanced fights I am completely fine with it. Again, as long as we dont end up with an instanced dungeon grinder I think some use of it is ok.
