Zenya said:I searched, but didn't find anything on this, so here goes.
I was listening to the podcast on here the other day, and AAs were mentioned as well as them not being a case of griding, but rather a metasystem of systems. What could those systems be about?
I'm all for variety, so I'd be happy if some were long quests, or collecting a set of torn pages around the world that need to be assembled (possibly by a player with a certain crafting skill?) to become readable with a riddle to solve (yeah these will be revealed on the net eventually, but if you put in e.g. 10-20 riddles that are randomized and also perhaps replaced over time, it might at least delay the spilling of the secret sauce), travel all over the world, including starting zones to talk to NPCs (some are in dungeons), perhaps some involve the help of druids who can see the heart of Terminus, some might involve the spawning of a mob or a rare event etc.
What say you?
I agree^
More so, a Character's "Additional Attributes" will most likely be gained in a multitudinal ways. Almost any idea can be incorporated into gaining an additional ability, etc. I think we will see much of this in Pantheon.
Liav said:I'd basically port EQ's AA system, tbh. The only difference is that I don't like the idea of abilities come from AAs, only passive bonuses that modify existing abilities. Just to prevent bloat.
With EQ's AA system, respecs aren't necessary because it's possible to max out every AA you have given enough time.
Hey Liav, we agree on something for a change! High five! :)
As much as I hate AAs, I hate character trees even more! That's the long and the short of it.
Like some point out, it should never be the case of "How many AAs do you have" but rather, "Are you better at healing or melee?" In the case of my druid, she was pretty decent at both but never went "end game" because it just wasn't fun any more and it was more of a job. Not my style of playing!! If that meant she stayed with lower levels, so be it. I quit buying expansions for a couple of reasons, besides money! ;)
I tried some other games with the "trees" and gave up. Not to mention, the horrible practice of the company deciding things aren't "balanced" enough and wiping them all, screwing up the game (things should NEVER be "balanced"...that's what different classes are for!) and making you start again.
Anyway - not going to sound off more.
Aredhel said:I tried some other games with the "trees" and gave up. Not to mention, the horrible practice of the company deciding things aren't "balanced" enough and wiping them all, screwing up the game (things should NEVER be "balanced"...that's what different classes are for!) and making you start again.
Ehhhhh, not really.
Balance is an important consideration in basically every game ever made. MMOs even more so.
Pantheon will have people complaining about balance. A lot of it is just noise, but an important fraction of it is valid. You can't, for instance, have Dire Lords tank worse than a Rogue. It defeats the purpose of the entire class to the point that it might not even exist. You can't have Rangers doing 50% less damage than Rogues if both of the primary functions of the classes is DPS.
In EQ, Druids were horrible at healing compared to Clerics. In exchange, Druids got some other tools to make up for it, but they were still an underplayed and underutilized class because SOE is/was awful at class balance. The same can be said of Rangers. Why do you think there are so many jokes about Rangers? You have a class that does less DPS than tanks, tanks worse than tanks, and doesn't bring anything else unique to the table to compensate.
So yes, balance is important.
Hey you brought up a good point about balance. I am sick to death about the whiners that kept getting classes nerfed because they whined so much over class balances. If only they would suggest things and not pour out to the rest of the community and complain so much about other class what and how they are up against yours.
Pure bred classes vs hybrid utility classes should have better things in the end. So if we could have a suggestion system for AA's i would like to see it work this time around.
I know this is off topic a tad but it was important also to the AA's we got. If nobody mentions this, nothing will get done. What steps do we have in place to allow people to suggest AA's, spell sets etc..?
There is one thing we could do, and thats if AA's are being used the utility class could be one step behing the pure bred. So if we say healing lines are 44-50-51 the hybrid class could be 44 while the purebred class could be 50. This way its not too far from reach but still be effective in groups if the pure bred isnt available.
The utility class could offset to go pure bred healing if using enough AA's to compensate and be effective. If we look at the tanking or DPS it might be somewhat of a trade off. We cant go down the route like they did in EQ making the tank feel useless against his counterpart hybrid tank. No matter what something has to be done this time around.
Otherwise it will end up in the same boat as it is today in EQ. Many tanks left the game, because of this. Somehow I believe the tanks should be able to hybrid themselves by AA's and be different then other hybrids trying to be the main tank. Giving the tanks more then just meatshield abilities in the AA department, but also allowing them to dps some might be helpful this time around. So if we have 1 MT, 1 ST using themselves as meatshields, the others could use AA's to be like the Zerker and still feel useful. They would not have the AC or HP the MT or ST would have.
So what i am getting at is the respecing classes we had in WOW and Rift, we could use AA's to respec on the fly. Does this make sense?
Crazzie said:What steps do we have in place to allow people to suggest AA's, spell sets etc..?
Depends. I don't really think having the community pitch in for AA deas is a good idea, unless it's a very small number of people who are hand picked with intimate knowledge of game mechanics to give meaningful suggestions. I can see a place like that just getting spammed to death in a flurry of white noise.
Crazzie said:There is one thing we could do, and thats if AA's are being used the utility class could be one step behing the pure bred. So if we say healing lines are 44-50-51 the hybrid class could be 44 while the purebred class could be 50. This way its not too far from reach but still be effective in groups if the pure bred isnt available.
The utility class could offset to go pure bred healing if using enough AA's to compensate and be effective. If we look at the tanking or DPS it might be somewhat of a trade off. We cant go down the route like they did in EQ making the tank feel useless against his counterpart hybrid tank. No matter what something has to be done this time around.
Otherwise it will end up in the same boat as it is today in EQ. Many tanks left the game, because of this. Somehow I believe the tanks should be able to hybrid themselves by AA's and be different then other hybrids trying to be the main tank. Giving the tanks more then just meatshield abilities in the AA department, but also allowing them to dps some might be helpful this time around. So if we have 1 MT, 1 ST using themselves as meatshields, the others could use AA's to be like the Zerker and still feel useful. They would not have the AC or HP the MT or ST would have.
Warriors are still the most effective raid main tanks in EQ in 99% of situations.
Allowing people to spec a tank into a DPS is kind of not in line with Pantheon's tenets. The trinity means relatively strict adherence to a specific role based on the class you play.
Crazzie said:
So what i am getting at is the respecing classes we had in WOW and Rift, we could use AA's to respec on the fly. Does this make sense?
Like I said above, I'm not a fan of AA specs. Here's what happens. Some AAs are determined to be objectively worse than others, because true balance is difficult. You end up with a very cookie cutter "tank" spec, and a very cookie cutter "dps" spec. You also violate the concept of the trinity by allowing people to essentially switch classes at the flick of a switch.
Liav said:Crazzie said:What steps do we have in place to allow people to suggest AA's, spell sets etc..?
Depends. I don't really think having the community pitch in for AA deas is a good idea, unless it's a very small number of people who are hand picked with intimate knowledge of game mechanics to give meaningful suggestions. I can see a place like that just getting spammed to death in a flurry of white noise.
Crazzie said:There is one thing we could do, and thats if AA's are being used the utility class could be one step behing the pure bred. So if we say healing lines are 44-50-51 the hybrid class could be 44 while the purebred class could be 50. This way its not too far from reach but still be effective in groups if the pure bred isnt available.
The utility class could offset to go pure bred healing if using enough AA's to compensate and be effective. If we look at the tanking or DPS it might be somewhat of a trade off. We cant go down the route like they did in EQ making the tank feel useless against his counterpart hybrid tank. No matter what something has to be done this time around.
Otherwise it will end up in the same boat as it is today in EQ. Many tanks left the game, because of this. Somehow I believe the tanks should be able to hybrid themselves by AA's and be different then other hybrids trying to be the main tank. Giving the tanks more then just meatshield abilities in the AA department, but also allowing them to dps some might be helpful this time around. So if we have 1 MT, 1 ST using themselves as meatshields, the others could use AA's to be like the Zerker and still feel useful. They would not have the AC or HP the MT or ST would have.
Warriors are still the most effective raid main tanks in EQ in 99% of situations.
Allowing people to spec a tank into a DPS is kind of not in line with Pantheon's tenets. The trinity means relatively strict adherence to a specific role based on the class you play.
Crazzie said:
So what i am getting at is the respecing classes we had in WOW and Rift, we could use AA's to respec on the fly. Does this make sense?Like I said above, I'm not a fan of AA specs. Here's what happens. Some AAs are determined to be objectively worse than others, because true balance is difficult. You end up with a very cookie cutter "tank" spec, and a very cookie cutter "dps" spec. You also violate the concept of the trinity by allowing people to essentially switch classes at the flick of a switch.
Agree with Liav here. This game isn't a solo friendly game or a PVP centric game. Therefore you don't need to achieve balance between all the classes regarding their ability to kill an opponent one on one(player or NPC/mob). Also, cookie cutter specs kill any kind of perceived choice with AAs/talents.
FierinaFuryfist said:Agree with Liav here. This game isn't a solo friendly game or a PVP centric game. Therefore you don't need to achieve balance between all the classes regarding their ability to kill an opponent one on one(player or NPC/mob). Also, cookie cutter specs kill any kind of perceived choice with AAs/talents.
I don't know how you inferred that first part from my post, lol.
I think soloing and pvp should both be valid in Pantheon, to an extent. Centric, as in central, as in the centerpiece of gameplay? Certainly not.
I think classes should be reasonably balanced within their archetype. I don't want to see Druids be inferior healers like in EQ. I don't want to see Rangers be inferior DPS like in EQ. I don't want to see Paladins be inferior in every respect to their SK counterpart.
FierinaFuryfist said: Eh. You didn't say that but without having to worry about PvP balance etc devs can let each class have their own flavors without being 100% equal. And yes, balance within archetype is much more desirable than overall.
PVP and having classes with unique flavors is not mutually exclusive. Nothing will ever be perfectly balanced, that's just life. You can, however, do the best you can to minimize imbalance. Getting the game to a point where class toolsets are relatively comparable, and people can fulfill their roles comparably, that's all that needs to happen.
If a Dire Lord can stack 3 self buffs that gives them a 3% damage mitigation advantage over a Crusader, that's so negligible in the grand scheme that it isn't worth complaining about. Ideally they would be completely even, but that can't reasonably happen without extreme levels of homogenization. If Rogues get an infinite stunlock or the ability to one shot players without them being able to react, then that is a problem.
I just want to make sure that there aren't any extreme outliers, like "Rangers and their AAs are just so bad that they're going to eat death touches because literally any other class is more useful".
I'm not a fan of the way EQ did AA points. At first it was interesting but it turned into a perpetual grind. I eventually quit EQ because I couldn't keep up with the AAs for my guild while I was deployed and lost interest when I had to spend hour upon hour grinding to get AAs.
I think AAs should add flavor to a charcter instead of something required to make a character competitive.
So AAs should add things like pets/familiars, mounts, wardrobe customizations, and such. There could be hundreds of thousands of AAs like this which players could get and none of them would affect a characters ability to perform in combat or for crafting.
Ruar said:I'm not a fan of the way EQ did AA points. At first it was interesting but it turned into a perpetual grind. I eventually quit EQ because I couldn't keep up with the AAs for my guild while I was deployed and lost interest when I had to spend hour upon hour grinding to get AAs.
I think AAs should add flavor to a charcter instead of something required to make a character competitive.
So AAs should add things like pets/familiars, mounts, wardrobe customizations, and such. There could be hundreds of thousands of AAs like this which players could get and none of them would affect a characters ability to perform in combat or for crafting.
I disagree, because then you lose a lot of the incentive to do it in the first place.
While falling behind due to a deployment or something kind of sucks, I could make the same argument for normal character levels and the perpetual grind that arises as a result of level cap increases. I don't think there's a good way to make the game easy to get caught up in without removing a significant portion of the incentive people have in the first place to do those grinds.
FierinaFuryfist said: Eh. You didn't say that but without having to worry about PvP balance etc devs can let each class have their own flavors without being 100% equal. And yes, balance within archetype is much more desirable than overall.
PVP hjas nothing to do with it.. It is simple to code PVP changes and PVE changes. They did it in EQ2 if a wizard was hitting a raid tank for 100k using ice comet and the raid tank only had 10k health they tweaked the PVP code to allow ice comet to do less damage in PVP while never touching the PVE aspect. They in fact had a little check box next to every spell and every gear with proc that showed PVE damage and PVP
Dekaden said:Liav said:I'd basically port EQ's AA system, tbh. The only difference is that I don't like the idea of abilities come from AAs, only passive bonuses that modify existing abilities. Just to prevent bloat.
With EQ's AA system, respecs aren't necessary because it's possible to max out every AA you have given enough time.
Hey Liav, we agree on something for a change! High five! :)
I liked how you could max Akk AA but I also hated doing it. I felt EQ2 had a good system as well at least until the shadow expansion. You couldnt max everything but they allowed ytou to change between 2 specs. Being a paladin that was amazing. I had a bad ass Raid tank spec and an Offtank/DPS spec. But they only gave you 2 profiles that was it and to respec your AA was expensive
Kalgore said:Dekaden said:Liav said:I'd basically port EQ's AA system, tbh. The only difference is that I don't like the idea of abilities come from AAs, only passive bonuses that modify existing abilities. Just to prevent bloat.
With EQ's AA system, respecs aren't necessary because it's possible to max out every AA you have given enough time.
Hey Liav, we agree on something for a change! High five! :)
I liked how you could max Akk AA but I also hated doing it. I felt EQ2 had a good system as well at least until the shadow expansion. You couldnt max everything but they allowed ytou to change between 2 specs. Being a paladin that was amazing. I had a bad ass Raid tank spec and an Offtank/DPS spec. But they only gave you 2 profiles that was it and to respec your AA was expensive
Yeah, the biggest problem I had with EQ2's AA system was how so many AAs were just horrible.
Especially in the EoF trees for pretty much all classes, there were like 6 good choices out of a total of 20. You invariably had to spend AA points in useless stuff to unlock the endlines. It would have been a much better system if they bothered to keep updating the AA trees and make them worthwhile.
For instance, once 100% reuse speed (hard cap) became the norm for all classes, you still had a bunch of AAs that would reduce the reuse speed of specific abilities, but effectively did nothing at all because the hard cap had already been reached. The only exception were the one or two AAs that modified the base reuse, which always stayed relevant.
Liav said:Kalgore said:Dekaden said:Liav said:I'd basically port EQ's AA system, tbh. The only difference is that I don't like the idea of abilities come from AAs, only passive bonuses that modify existing abilities. Just to prevent bloat.
With EQ's AA system, respecs aren't necessary because it's possible to max out every AA you have given enough time.
Hey Liav, we agree on something for a change! High five! :)
I liked how you could max Akk AA but I also hated doing it. I felt EQ2 had a good system as well at least until the shadow expansion. You couldnt max everything but they allowed ytou to change between 2 specs. Being a paladin that was amazing. I had a bad ass Raid tank spec and an Offtank/DPS spec. But they only gave you 2 profiles that was it and to respec your AA was expensive
Yeah, the biggest problem I had with EQ2's AA system was how so many AAs were just horrible.
Especially in the EoF trees for pretty much all classes, there were like 6 good choices out of a total of 20. You invariably had to spend AA points in useless stuff to unlock the endlines. It would have been a much better system if they bothered to keep updating the AA trees and make them worthwhile.
For instance, once 100% reuse speed (hard cap) became the norm for all classes, you still had a bunch of AAs that would reduce the reuse speed of specific abilities, but effectively did nothing at all because the hard cap had already been reached. The only exception were the one or two AAs that modified the base reuse, which always stayed relevant.
I will agree with that but thats more of a Dev issue then an AA issue. But it also made for some hard choices. I reallyt wanted a certain end ability but I wasted a lot to get it, is it worth the trade off ?
Liav said:Ruar said:I'm not a fan of the way EQ did AA points. At first it was interesting but it turned into a perpetual grind. I eventually quit EQ because I couldn't keep up with the AAs for my guild while I was deployed and lost interest when I had to spend hour upon hour grinding to get AAs.
I think AAs should add flavor to a charcter instead of something required to make a character competitive.
So AAs should add things like pets/familiars, mounts, wardrobe customizations, and such. There could be hundreds of thousands of AAs like this which players could get and none of them would affect a characters ability to perform in combat or for crafting.
I disagree, because then you lose a lot of the incentive to do it in the first place.
While falling behind due to a deployment or something kind of sucks, I could make the same argument for normal character levels and the perpetual grind that arises as a result of level cap increases. I don't think there's a good way to make the game easy to get caught up in without removing a significant portion of the incentive people have in the first place to do those grinds.
People are always looking for new and interesting ways to customize their character. They will spend hour after hour doing different tasks to get specific items to add a bit more flair to their setups. I don't really think the argument "no one will want to get AAs if they are just cosmetic" holds any weight.
You mention the level rise as something that has to be perpetually considered but that isn't really a big deal when coming back from a leave of absence. Most of the time you only see 5-10 levels added in big expansions which happen maybe once a year. That is a fairly easy number to knock out with the help of friends or even on your own while getting used to the changes in the game. Trying to deal with 300-500 AAs added during that time, plus the levels, plus gearing up to be useful becomes an insurmountable task. Which is why I think AAs should be fun instead of a combat necessity.
Something else to consider is that I'm not a fan of grinding and based on your last sentence it seems you think there should be mechanics emplaced to encourage grinding. I think questing, raiding, and completing content should be the only grind in a game. Constantly having to farm mobs for hour upon hour in order to gain exp to make small improvements which are needed to stack up to make your character competitive is a horrible way to run a game.
Give me epic quests which take weeks or months to complete and I'll play the game for a long time. Expect me to sit in a few high EXP spots day after day hitting the same buttons over and over is how you lose customers.
I do realize that is just difference in expectations though. All I ask is that you consider the impact of requiring a high number of AAs to make your character competitive and how it can drive people away instead of encourage them to keep playing. Keep in mind the most successful MMORPG to date doesn't require AA farming.
Liav said:Whether it's 5-10 levels or 500 AA doesn't matter, it's the rate that you get them. If you can get 500 AAs in the time it takes you to get 5 levels, then it isn't really any different. The quantity of the AA points and character levels themselves is largely arbitrary.
You are absolutely correct, but history shows most of the time AA levels get set to be the equivalent of high end level. So instead of five levels of work to get 500 AA's you would need 40-50 levels which is a monstrous grind requirement.
Ruar said:You are absolutely correct, but history shows most of the time AA levels get set to be the equivalent of high end level. So instead of five levels of work to get 500 AA's you would need 40-50 levels which is a monstrous grind requirement.
I think history shows a wide spectrum of potential outcomes. I'm not willing to write the system off as a whole because history shows that some developers decide to make the AA grind ludicrously difficult.
Liav said:Ruar said:You are absolutely correct, but history shows most of the time AA levels get set to be the equivalent of high end level. So instead of five levels of work to get 500 AA's you would need 40-50 levels which is a monstrous grind requirement.
I think history shows a wide spectrum of potential outcomes. I'm not willing to write the system off as a whole because history shows that some developers decide to make the AA grind ludicrously difficult.
Agreed. I love a deep, complex AA system where you can eventually aquire 100s or even 1000s of AA points.
On the subject of trivializing content, I'd argue that "content" is not a singular thing. A completely stacked level50 character with tons of AA might find that level 45 content that was previously challenging is trivialized to a degree. But it doesnt mean that the level52 raid trash will be trivial for a full group of 6 fully stacked level50 characters.
This is just as it is with gear. You wouldnt argue that end-game raid loot should never allow any content to be trivialized, would you?
Regardless of how an AA system is presented, IMO it should never contain any "essentials". Like /pet hold for pet classes, or endless quiver for rangers...things that change the way you can play the game.
Fluff abilities or small improvements to stats are fine, anything else should be regular abilities gained through leveling/questing.