Okay, this kind of ties in with my other topic of Gear sets.. but it is different so I am putting it in another topic thread.
Now, say I am tanking in normal gear.. fine. All of a sudden, I'm stupid and engaged this fire breathing dragon that emits natural flames from itself making everyone, but especially the tank take crazy amounts of fire damage. In some games, I can just go "Oh.. whatever" and hit a macro button that lets me change into my Fire gear, despite being engaged in combat completely. That is.. uh, well I do not want to see it in Pantheon. To be clear, I absolutely am saying we should have mutliple gear sets for different reasons.
Yet, the idea of somehow.. without any real comprehension behind it other than. "We can, and whatever." I can change a full suit of platemail? Hell, even changing into a new set of leathers is preposterous outside of a superhero in a phone booth and he was loosing clothes more than gaining them. Now, if they want to somehow allow us to change weapons or shields.. fine.. but even that isn't really interesting to me. We should prepare ahead of time, and the consequence for making a mistake with our gear should play out appropriately.
Aradune said:I know where you're coming from, as well as the other side of the argument, but I'm wondering if we have to choose soley one or the other?
You don't want complete outfit swapping because 1. it doesn't make sense -- you couldn't do that and remain in combat and 2. because we believe that perparation for a battle is almost as important as the execution of the actual plan during battle.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Obviously then if you know yourself and your allies, what makes you weak and what makes you strong, then you can prepare accordingly and this would include the gear you are wearing when the enemy is engaged. Likewise if you know the strengths, weaknesses, and strategy of the enemy you can even better plan tactically.
And of course I've said many times that we want who you are, what you have, where you are, who your allies are, and what you're going up against to all matter in Pantheon, especially or at least for special/boss mobs. This extra depth isn't simply being pursued because it's more realistic or because I sleep with The Art of War under my pillow. No, it's because generally depth means more to learn, allows for more variables to exist (and therefore less prediction), and a variety of experiences in general (to battle Groundhog Day, a battle MMOs/MUDs have been in from day one).
But I'm also on record as a big advocate of the rule that what's right, or workable, or even fun more often lies not on either side or extreme but rather in the center.
Conclusion (for me anyway, at this time): A subset of gear (and other configurable options) should be the exception to this rule and swappable even in battle. Could your friend distract the ghast long enough for me to switch swords, or to retreat and switch from a melee weapon to a ranged one? I think so, yes. Too far beyond that, however, and we'd either simply not allow it, or perhaps make a way for you to have a chance to disengage.... While difficult, couldn't a skilled warrior taunt a mob so effectively that they, at least temporarily, forget about you? How about if the mob you are fighting isn't that intelligent anyway... it's disposition and behavior could reflect that it's not smart but still quite dangerous, using effective tactics but tactics dissimilar from those you'd see a more intelligent entity employ.
We'd have to be careful... it would be very easy to get into a situation where either 1. it's almost always beneficial for me to micromanage my equipment and change things and therefore we need a warrior to free me up or 2. it's so difficult to taunt a mob to that degree that I very rarely have the opportunity to make serious changes, so I just don't.
Lastly I also really like the idea of 'waves' for some of the more challenging battles... it wasn't too long ago that RL combat involved bringing in different units at different times... one general would perhaps use his archers to soften up the enemy, then send in the calvary to disorient and disrupt them, finally sending in the swordsmen to kill the enemy and win. Something similar could also be implemented during more difficult encounters, both by players and NPCs. I'm just riffing here, but perhaps the first wave against a particular boss mob is always hit be a massive fire AoE. Why? Justin or someone could come up with something really cool, but for now I'll just say he loves fire. But then once you've survived the firestorm (assuming you do), you learn that if you can keep him stunned the fire AoEs aren't cast and he goes crazy DPS, targeting perhaps the member of your group that appears least prepared to mitigate a ton of damage. So in Wave 2 (who until now were in another room, or at least both far away and not within range of the AoE) you have a tank and off-tank engage and hope they can endure the fast DPS.
Why did I riff a little? Couple of reasons. 1. to encourage you guys to keep up doing the same. 2. I love coming up with examples as to why situational gear creates a deeper, more rewarding combat experience and makes planning ahead that much more important and 3. because I think we could achieve without undue difficulty rules that prevent both people swapping outfits in the middle of a nasty encounter but to still allow them to swap a few things, and even more things if they could somehow disengage.
Definitely something to play with in alpha/beta.
You guys also bring up dynamic encounters. Unless I'm missing something I don't they are always part of situational gear -- they're two systems, rather distinct. An encounter could have one, both, or neither. Maybe additional examples of what you guys are thinking about when 'dynamic encounters' is mentioned. Sometimes we hear and think very different things.
Pretty sure I've said this before frequently, but it never hurts to bring up again: While I've met designers and messed with games where a 'dynamic' experience is part of the core design I've never seen it employed successfully in an MMO. Let me be more specific. People want to learn about the game, the world, the environment, the mobs, etc. Having that knowledge doesn't just feel good, but it could get you into a good group because you can help out with the navigation. It's been a few years (thank God) since the buzzword was at it's peak but Procedural Content seems on the decline again. I think every once in a while a really smart programmer comes up with some procedural algorythms that on the surface (and perhaps even deeper at times) looks really good, looks natural. Then producers get really excited and imagine not needing very many world builders at all, saving all sorts of money. Then the tech actually goes into use, the product is obviously procedural and therefore unusable in any game where the audience wants hand-crafted detail, and it's abandoned. People go back to work doing the hard but rewarding job of handcrafting amazing places and then suddenly another advanced algorythm rears its head, rinse repeat.
The same holds true of a world that is too dynamic. Like a procedurally generated world, the mind perceives patterns and the landscape just doesn't feel like real life. Dynamic content done half-assedly isn't interesting, the patterns are still recognized in short order, and since RL appears designed by creativity and including beauty, scrambling data around in a 'dynamic' way also results in something we don't see in real life and therefore it bothers us in-game as well.
When we talk dynamic it's really something pretty different. First, what's ideal? We're not going to have dynamic encounters all over the place for a variety of reasons. First, again, RL isn't that way -- humans detect patterns, they recognize the product of design as different than a product of random forces. Lastly, we mentioned above that learning ones world should be fun and make you more valuable. If the environment, population, whatever is too dynamic, too frequently changing, it's also that much harder to learn about (to discern patterns) if it's doable at all.
Just wanted to get that out of the way -- pretty sure NOBODY wants a procedurally generated world filled with truly dynamic and random content.
Dynamic is also hard if you're really trying to hide its nature.... if you don't want people to see patterns, or something repeating, etc. then that's a lot more work than simply scrambling stuff around. MMO players want emersion, they want visual rewards for exploring, etc. And if content begins randomly but then has to be massaged so it's not obviously random down to the point that it feels handcrafted..... it IS handcrafted.
Anyway, enough of what I don't mean. The whole 'dynamic' buzzword, and it's been a buzzword for as long as I can remember, way back to the MUDs, etc. means different things taken to different degrees. The first goal is a general one: the world is handcrafted, and much of the content, landmass, etc. are learnable. There, we've ruled out taking 'dynamic' too far pretty easily!
The other extreme might be, oh, random atmospheric events, or birds and butterflies that cruise around (but aren't actual mobs), etc. Well, that's already been achieved and it is pretty but after playing a few weeks, since it has zero impact on gameplay, fewer and fewer people care about it. Again, because we want to bring the E back to PvE, we definitely want to take many of these 'only there to look cool' effects and, when it makes sense, put them into our world but with the rule that there is some sort of effect. It matters somehow -- I'm sure some rare events could really change things while something that happens fairly regularly you wouldn't want to have major impacts on gameplay.
Ok, finally to what we usually, mostly mean when we talk about dynamic this or event driven that:
1. Believable variability. Simple example: soldiers guarding Thronefast aren't always the same mob.... names change, hail text changes, even behvaiors could change.
2. Same with a dungeon, although we need to be more careful, again not going so far as to invalidate learning an area.
3. Basic chat all the way to quest text changing depending on weather, time of day, holidays, something about your character or something you did.
We'll see if I'm right, but I see the game launching with some sweet dynamic content but until the tools really mature and we have a better idea of what dynamics make for a better game vs. those that don't, that the quantity (and quality) of dynamics slowly rises.
The Event System is something different, which most of you know, but I have seen it confused or at least used in same sentence as other systems, usually unrelated.
The Event System can actually be summarized pretty easily: Things have a status. Things listen for event triggers. Event triggers can be anything and you could keep adding and adding them. It could be a simple time of day. The thing is a mob of a pretty woman, status non-aggro. It listens for Time of Day triggers. The change of the clock to midnight creates a trigger that the woman becomes aware of. The Event is that when the midnight trigger occurs, the woman transforms into a vampire. It's really a very open system that could be taken very far (and I hope it eventually is).
The goal is Dynamics in a sense -- the content is not always the same and it can change. And again anything that minimizes obvious repetition and the Groundhog Effect plague is generally a good thing.
Smart use would be to start with simple triggers and events, nothing that truly impacts the game or the players, but something that is at least noticible when you are playing and makes exploring our world a little different and varied.
The slightly more advanced example I've given before (although we've still only scratched the surface) is the Hill Giant/Storm Giant War.
There is a Hill Giant camp in the world, and it is *nasty*. Either even a raid couldn't break into the camp or perhaps we don't allow raids there.
But sometimes the Storm Giants come out of the heavens and attack the Hill Giants. What triggers this? It could be player driven, and could be obvious and simple or very complex, requiring you to have a guildmate on the other side of world who must ring an ancient bell that triggers earthquakes. Sometimes the Hill Giants are forced into disarray because of the earthquake, their guards move inside the gates, the inhabitants are distracted and not watching as vigilantly for an attack. The earthquake happens while you and your friends are watching, hiding from a distance. Sure enough, a Storm Giant army dynamically spawns and heads towards the gates of the Hill Giant fortress. You follow at a safe distance. A huge battle breaks out, giants of both varieties are dying on all sides. What would have been impossible normally (free movement in the Hill Giant region) is now possible. The Hill Giant mobs could change to as they react to the invasion. Certainly the Storm Giant mobs are interesting because they're not normally even spawned.
The adept and clever guild watches for events like this and opportunistically takes advantage of them. In this example they let the two giant clans battle it out, occasionally coming out of hiding a picking off a few mobs that don't normally spawn. Lo and behold, they also spawn with items that are only attainable during this Invasion Event. The game's content changed, rare items were temporarily obtainable, and it made you and your friends pay attention to what was going on in the world.... if you don't have someone, for example, at least occasionally checking to see if the Storm Giants have attacked then you're going to miss it (and the players who pay better attention won't). Or perhaps nobody paid attention, it was off-hours, and the invasion took place but there were no players around to do anything about it.
Regions could be enterable in certain conditions but not in others. NPCs could interact with each other with the result being meaningful to the player. Items can be made very rare but appear more naturally... instead of the valued vambraces only dropping 1 out of 500 times, encouraging players to kill the mob over and over again (boring, repetative), you could have the trigger for the Storm Giant invasion be just as statistically rare, but since you're following an event and killing the mob that only spawns during the Invasion once, you not only got the desired item but obtaining it was hopefully much more entertaining.
Iksar said:Aradune said:I know where you're coming from, as well as the other side of the argument, but I'm wondering if we have to choose soley one or the other?
You don't want complete outfit swapping because 1. it doesn't make sense -- you couldn't do that and remain in combat and 2. because we believe that perparation for a battle is almost as important as the execution of the actual plan during battle.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Obviously then if you know yourself and your allies, what makes you weak and what makes you strong, then you can prepare accordingly and this would include the gear you are wearing when the enemy is engaged. Likewise if you know the strengths, weaknesses, and strategy of the enemy you can even better plan tactically.
And of course I've said many times that we want who you are, what you have, where you are, who your allies are, and what you're going up against to all matter in Pantheon, especially or at least for special/boss mobs. This extra depth isn't simply being pursued because it's more realistic or because I sleep with The Art of War under my pillow. No, it's because generally depth means more to learn, allows for more variables to exist (and therefore less prediction), and a variety of experiences in general (to battle Groundhog Day, a battle MMOs/MUDs have been in from day one).
But I'm also on record as a big advocate of the rule that what's right, or workable, or even fun more often lies not on either side or extreme but rather in the center.
Conclusion (for me anyway, at this time): A subset of gear (and other configurable options) should be the exception to this rule and swappable even in battle. Could your friend distract the ghast long enough for me to switch swords, or to retreat and switch from a melee weapon to a ranged one? I think so, yes. Too far beyond that, however, and we'd either simply not allow it, or perhaps make a way for you to have a chance to disengage.... While difficult, couldn't a skilled warrior taunt a mob so effectively that they, at least temporarily, forget about you? How about if the mob you are fighting isn't that intelligent anyway... it's disposition and behavior could reflect that it's not smart but still quite dangerous, using effective tactics but tactics dissimilar from those you'd see a more intelligent entity employ.
We'd have to be careful... it would be very easy to get into a situation where either 1. it's almost always beneficial for me to micromanage my equipment and change things and therefore we need a warrior to free me up or 2. it's so difficult to taunt a mob to that degree that I very rarely have the opportunity to make serious changes, so I just don't.
Lastly I also really like the idea of 'waves' for some of the more challenging battles... it wasn't too long ago that RL combat involved bringing in different units at different times... one general would perhaps use his archers to soften up the enemy, then send in the calvary to disorient and disrupt them, finally sending in the swordsmen to kill the enemy and win. Something similar could also be implemented during more difficult encounters, both by players and NPCs. I'm just riffing here, but perhaps the first wave against a particular boss mob is always hit be a massive fire AoE. Why? Justin or someone could come up with something really cool, but for now I'll just say he loves fire. But then once you've survived the firestorm (assuming you do), you learn that if you can keep him stunned the fire AoEs aren't cast and he goes crazy DPS, targeting perhaps the member of your group that appears least prepared to mitigate a ton of damage. So in Wave 2 (who until now were in another room, or at least both far away and not within range of the AoE) you have a tank and off-tank engage and hope they can endure the fast DPS.
Why did I riff a little? Couple of reasons. 1. to encourage you guys to keep up doing the same. 2. I love coming up with examples as to why situational gear creates a deeper, more rewarding combat experience and makes planning ahead that much more important and 3. because I think we could achieve without undue difficulty rules that prevent both people swapping outfits in the middle of a nasty encounter but to still allow them to swap a few things, and even more things if they could somehow disengage.
Definitely something to play with in alpha/beta.
You guys also bring up dynamic encounters. Unless I'm missing something I don't they are always part of situational gear -- they're two systems, rather distinct. An encounter could have one, both, or neither. Maybe additional examples of what you guys are thinking about when 'dynamic encounters' is mentioned. Sometimes we hear and think very different things.
Pretty sure I've said this before frequently, but it never hurts to bring up again: While I've met designers and messed with games where a 'dynamic' experience is part of the core design I've never seen it employed successfully in an MMO. Let me be more specific. People want to learn about the game, the world, the environment, the mobs, etc. Having that knowledge doesn't just feel good, but it could get you into a good group because you can help out with the navigation. It's been a few years (thank God) since the buzzword was at it's peak but Procedural Content seems on the decline again. I think every once in a while a really smart programmer comes up with some procedural algorythms that on the surface (and perhaps even deeper at times) looks really good, looks natural. Then producers get really excited and imagine not needing very many world builders at all, saving all sorts of money. Then the tech actually goes into use, the product is obviously procedural and therefore unusable in any game where the audience wants hand-crafted detail, and it's abandoned. People go back to work doing the hard but rewarding job of handcrafting amazing places and then suddenly another advanced algorythm rears its head, rinse repeat.
The same holds true of a world that is too dynamic. Like a procedurally generated world, the mind perceives patterns and the landscape just doesn't feel like real life. Dynamic content done half-assedly isn't interesting, the patterns are still recognized in short order, and since RL appears designed by creativity and including beauty, scrambling data around in a 'dynamic' way also results in something we don't see in real life and therefore it bothers us in-game as well.
When we talk dynamic it's really something pretty different. First, what's ideal? We're not going to have dynamic encounters all over the place for a variety of reasons. First, again, RL isn't that way -- humans detect patterns, they recognize the product of design as different than a product of random forces. Lastly, we mentioned above that learning ones world should be fun and make you more valuable. If the environment, population, whatever is too dynamic, too frequently changing, it's also that much harder to learn about (to discern patterns) if it's doable at all.
Just wanted to get that out of the way -- pretty sure NOBODY wants a procedurally generated world filled with truly dynamic and random content.
Dynamic is also hard if you're really trying to hide its nature.... if you don't want people to see patterns, or something repeating, etc. then that's a lot more work than simply scrambling stuff around. MMO players want emersion, they want visual rewards for exploring, etc. And if content begins randomly but then has to be massaged so it's not obviously random down to the point that it feels handcrafted..... it IS handcrafted.
Anyway, enough of what I don't mean. The whole 'dynamic' buzzword, and it's been a buzzword for as long as I can remember, way back to the MUDs, etc. means different things taken to different degrees. The first goal is a general one: the world is handcrafted, and much of the content, landmass, etc. are learnable. There, we've ruled out taking 'dynamic' too far pretty easily!
The other extreme might be, oh, random atmospheric events, or birds and butterflies that cruise around (but aren't actual mobs), etc. Well, that's already been achieved and it is pretty but after playing a few weeks, since it has zero impact on gameplay, fewer and fewer people care about it. Again, because we want to bring the E back to PvE, we definitely want to take many of these 'only there to look cool' effects and, when it makes sense, put them into our world but with the rule that there is some sort of effect. It matters somehow -- I'm sure some rare events could really change things while something that happens fairly regularly you wouldn't want to have major impacts on gameplay.
Ok, finally to what we usually, mostly mean when we talk about dynamic this or event driven that:
1. Believable variability. Simple example: soldiers guarding Thronefast aren't always the same mob.... names change, hail text changes, even behvaiors could change.
2. Same with a dungeon, although we need to be more careful, again not going so far as to invalidate learning an area.
3. Basic chat all the way to quest text changing depending on weather, time of day, holidays, something about your character or something you did.
We'll see if I'm right, but I see the game launching with some sweet dynamic content but until the tools really mature and we have a better idea of what dynamics make for a better game vs. those that don't, that the quantity (and quality) of dynamics slowly rises.
The Event System is something different, which most of you know, but I have seen it confused or at least used in same sentence as other systems, usually unrelated.
The Event System can actually be summarized pretty easily: Things have a status. Things listen for event triggers. Event triggers can be anything and you could keep adding and adding them. It could be a simple time of day. The thing is a mob of a pretty woman, status non-aggro. It listens for Time of Day triggers. The change of the clock to midnight creates a trigger that the woman becomes aware of. The Event is that when the midnight trigger occurs, the woman transforms into a vampire. It's really a very open system that could be taken very far (and I hope it eventually is).
The goal is Dynamics in a sense -- the content is not always the same and it can change. And again anything that minimizes obvious repetition and the Groundhog Effect plague is generally a good thing.
Smart use would be to start with simple triggers and events, nothing that truly impacts the game or the players, but something that is at least noticible when you are playing and makes exploring our world a little different and varied.
The slightly more advanced example I've given before (although we've still only scratched the surface) is the Hill Giant/Storm Giant War.
There is a Hill Giant camp in the world, and it is *nasty*. Either even a raid couldn't break into the camp or perhaps we don't allow raids there.
But sometimes the Storm Giants come out of the heavens and attack the Hill Giants. What triggers this? It could be player driven, and could be obvious and simple or very complex, requiring you to have a guildmate on the other side of world who must ring an ancient bell that triggers earthquakes. Sometimes the Hill Giants are forced into disarray because of the earthquake, their guards move inside the gates, the inhabitants are distracted and not watching as vigilantly for an attack. The earthquake happens while you and your friends are watching, hiding from a distance. Sure enough, a Storm Giant army dynamically spawns and heads towards the gates of the Hill Giant fortress. You follow at a safe distance. A huge battle breaks out, giants of both varieties are dying on all sides. What would have been impossible normally (free movement in the Hill Giant region) is now possible. The Hill Giant mobs could change to as they react to the invasion. Certainly the Storm Giant mobs are interesting because they're not normally even spawned.
The adept and clever guild watches for events like this and opportunistically takes advantage of them. In this example they let the two giant clans battle it out, occasionally coming out of hiding a picking off a few mobs that don't normally spawn. Lo and behold, they also spawn with items that are only attainable during this Invasion Event. The game's content changed, rare items were temporarily obtainable, and it made you and your friends pay attention to what was going on in the world.... if you don't have someone, for example, at least occasionally checking to see if the Storm Giants have attacked then you're going to miss it (and the players who pay better attention won't). Or perhaps nobody paid attention, it was off-hours, and the invasion took place but there were no players around to do anything about it.
Regions could be enterable in certain conditions but not in others. NPCs could interact with each other with the result being meaningful to the player. Items can be made very rare but appear more naturally... instead of the valued vambraces only dropping 1 out of 500 times, encouraging players to kill the mob over and over again (boring, repetative), you could have the trigger for the Storm Giant invasion be just as statistically rare, but since you're following an event and killing the mob that only spawns during the Invasion once, you not only got the desired item but obtaining it was hopefully much more entertaining.
This is definitely the guy I want creating my MMO's. Can't wait to experience this again when Pantheon finally releases. Definitely in this one for the long haul, considering I played EQ for 14 years.
I am personally not a fan of being able to change any gear while mid-combat. I don't feel it adds any depth to the experience, as inevitably it will just be macro'd in to some ability. It also leads to pointless inventory clutter. It's one thing to maintain a healing set, dps set, and tanking set, with a few situational trinkets here and there you swap out for individual bosses but I don't really see what in-combat weapon swapping would add to an experience. Now, if VR wanted to treat it similar to GW2 or ESO, where you have two weapons equipped and swapping between them is a regular, core mechanic of class play, that's another thing entirely.
Bad feelings toward FFXI's system there.
- I support melee/ranged weapon swapping. It makes sense that a character might start with one weapon and end up switching to the other depending on the ebb and flow of a battle.
- I support swapping between different melee/ranged weapons if and only if weapon damage types are a thing. Ie, if your sword really isn't doing much to that skeleton and you need to switch to a blunt weapon.
- I generally do not support swapping worn equipment (including jewelry) during combat, with the possible exception of grabbing a shield to go with your one-handed weapon. My reasoning here is that I want to preserve the concepts of preparation and meaningful choices. If we allow people to swap resist gear (as an example) mid-fight, then it takes something away from both concepts.
For me it all comes down to players having a reasonable amount of counter play opportunity. I definitely appreciate the idea of the preparation phase of combat but feel that the reactive phase is just as important. If we can predict what type of abilities and damage types that NPC's can use then it doesn't really matter if we can swap armor in-combat because that is something that will be handled in the preparation phase that leverages previous encounter experience. If encounters are going to be dynamic in the sense that sometimes they spawn fire-nuking wizards, or hydra-spitting leviathans, it would be nice to have some flexibility. I don't want things to be too rigid and would prefer to see an option to switch our characters on the fly. Whether it's our hotbars or our gear I would like to see it as a possibility, even if it's situational/temporary like what Brad alluded to in his post.
I dont see any issues with swapping weapons in combat. If I'm holding 2 swords and decide to pull my dagger out, it's not unreasonable to think I can sheath my sword and draw my dagger.
Same with shields. You should be able to pull out or put away your shield whenever you want.
Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Porygon said: Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
I understand armor being locked, but why Jewelery/trinkets? You don't think somebody can slip off a ring or necklace and put on another pretty quick between spell casts?
I dunno about Porygon, but I'm not too keen on the idea of having to macro specific trinkets/jewelry to specific spells just to get the most out of them. Doesn't really add anything.
Naunet said:GoofyWarriorGuy said:Porygon said: Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
I understand armor being locked, but why Jewelery/trinkets? You don't think somebody can slip off a ring or necklace and put on another pretty quick between spell casts?
I dunno about Porygon, but I'm not too keen on the idea of having to macro specific trinkets/jewelry to specific spells just to get the most out of them. Doesn't really add anything.
I don't know for you, but I don't see how you can swap rings, necklaces or earrings with gloves, chest armors and caps of some sort.
I mean, even if we swap it in one clic out of battle, technically it's forcing you to : drop/sheathe your weapons, remove an armor piece, remove the jewelery piece, put it in a pouch, get the replacement from the pouch, put it on your finger/neck/ear, put the armor piece back, draw or grab your weapons back.
I mean, in the best nostress scenario that around 20 or 30 secs, if your don't mess something like dropping your open pouch full of rings, or sweat so much you can't remove the ring of frost vulnerability facing an ice dragon.
I get games aren't made to be realistic, but that seems overcomplicated for a switch of some sort.
Naunet said:GoofyWarriorGuy said:Porygon said: Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
I understand armor being locked, but why Jewelery/trinkets? You don't think somebody can slip off a ring or necklace and put on another pretty quick between spell casts?
I dunno about Porygon, but I'm not too keen on the idea of having to macro specific trinkets/jewelry to specific spells just to get the most out of them. Doesn't really add anything.
I think it would add value to situational gear in general. I could see there being certain items that you very rarely want to use, especially when it comes to trinkets. You may have a specific trinket or ring that is best for stats but then have another one that has no stats but allows you to break free from certain types of CC. It's a little bit of a slippery slope but if you make these items incredibly rare and difficult to acquire, I would love to see items like that. I think this would also be a great way to add desirable situational gear to the lower level content.
EQ, the bandolier worked. In Fable, they had the sanctuary, a magical location where the hero could wisk himself away and swap out magic, armor, weapons, clothes, etc. In Dungeon Siege, they had the packmule. In World of Warcraft there was the the Argent Squire and Jeeves. Each of these games provided players a means of holding gear sets, or swapping gear, or performing crucial non combat actions, vending, repair, banking, mail, etc. I don't think that integrating similar things would make having a set of ice/snow/cold resist gear difficult. Yes, being prepared for battle is important, so it is important to have the right tools at your disposal to solve problems.
World of Warcraft, if you had several specs, you literally just carried your differing spec gear in different bags, which they sort of addressed with mirror stats. If you pvp'd you carried a set of pvp gear as well.
I don't think swapping gear in the middle of battle is feasible and shouldn't be allowed, but a bandolier definitely works. A squire does as well to an extent, as that was their job during battles, to get to the pack animals and bring their knight his 2H sword, or his shield and mace.
Part of this also comes down to the idea of world vs. game for me. Whenever we propose allowing characters to do something during combat, I'm always thinking in terms of "if this were a movie, what would it take for the character to be able to do that while the fight is raging around them?"
So for example, let's say that your group is in a dungeon when suddenly and unexpectedly, a giant fire elemental comes charging around the corner:
Option 1 (no/limited equipment swapping while actively in combat): Our heroes defend themselves with the weapons and tools at their disposal, and if they're lucky one of them might find a way to buy time (by distracting a creature or raising a barrier of some sort) so that some members of the party can quickly reach in their bags and down potions of fire resistance or throw on that amulet that's at the bottom of their pouch.
Option 2 (equipment swapping allowed): Without missing a beat, our heroes magically reach into their bags/pouches/etc and select just the right items needed. The warrior pulls on a new armored shirt while simultaneously parrying swipes from the elemental, the rogue reaches his hands in his pockets and in a feat of dexterity removes them with different rings equipped, and the cleric drops his backpack to one arm, deftly opens it while simultaneously casting a healing spell on the warrior, and pulls out a potion. He then tosses the potion in the air, flipping it over so that its contents pour into his mouth at just the right moment, midstream through casting another heal *and* shrugging his backpack back onto his shoulders.
Which one seems more realistic to you?
Now I realize in games that we click on things and they just magically somehow work, but the way I see it, every action taken in combat should preclude doing something else, and some actions are complex enough that they might force the character to lower their guard. In game terms, unless you can attach an animation and a timer to gear swaps, this needs to translate to limitations on what you can do while you're actively on an aggro table.
The things I absolutely do not want to see are macros that allow someone to swap out half their gear midfight, whether that's putting on their resist set, or equipping all their strength items just before using their big attack. That sort of thing might get results in terms of game mechanics but it absolutely breaks the fiction - it's just not realistic.
Now, if the party saw the fire elemental coming and had a moment to prepare before engaging? That's a totally different discussion :)
oneADseven said:I think it would add value to situational gear in general. I could see there being certain items that you very rarely want to use, especially when it comes to trinkets. You may have a specific trinket or ring that is best for stats but then have another one that has no stats but allows you to break free from certain types of CC. It's a little bit of a slippery slope but if you make these items incredibly rare and difficult to acquire, I would love to see items like that. I think this would also be a great way to add desirable situational gear to the lower level content.
I'm fine with situational trinkets, but I don't think they should be swappable in-combat. To use your exammple, if you know that a boss has a CC effect that you may want to break out of, then you would enter that encounter with the break-free trinket equipped. It makes your gearing decisions more meaningful and doesn't reduce encounters to, "I need to have X trinket macroed to X spell, Y weapon macroed to Y spell, and Z trinket macroed to Z spell." That's essentially how it was in FFXI and I don't think that added any depth to the combat at all.
@Naunet
Fair enough. I think it added depth in the sense that there was more relevant situational gear that players could acquire and the overall sense of progression was expanded. I understand what you are saying about making choices more meaningful but in my experience (in games where you can't swap gear in-combat), the situational trinkets (or armor/jewelry) are rarely or almost never worth using later on because whatever effects they offer are easily trumped by the constant stat bonus from a higher level item. I guess a lot of this depends on what kind of itemization we'll see in Pantheon and how important stats will be for the really difficult content.
With trinkets, an easy way to avoid the problem of people choosing to use stat boosting ones over situational ones is to simply remove the stats from all trinkets. Just give them an on-use effect. Gadgets in WildStar are like that. I actually carry several gadgets on me to change out depending on different healing needs for any given encounter. (That game also has a slot called an Energy Shield which adds a kind of extra health in the form of a shield that can absorb a certain percentage of hits and recharges at different rates depending on the shield. The higher ilvl shields also have special effects - such as an aoe heal whenever my shield is depleted, on an internal cooldown - and those are sometimes situational and something I change out for specific encounters as well.)
I think as long as your auto attack is off, you should be able to swap equipment or spells. I think that requiring agro to be wiped to change equipment or spells is a HUGE MISTAKE.
Say you are running from a mob and you are far enough ahead from it to sit down and change spells to help fight it. Could you image not being able to do that becuase you have agro? You just need to stand there and die. Same with changing weapons or equipment.
If auto attack is off, let gear/spells be changed.
I'm glad to see this is so controversial of a topic, especially with the Aradune bomb at the start. Given it is a nice load of info. Obviously, I'm against gear swapping mid-combat. I can agree however to perhaps allow changing weapons or shields. I think there should be a penalty for this however, only a small one. For instance, FFXI makes you lose all your TP when you swap (Which is the resource you use to use Weaponskills for those whom do not know) which limits you. If I weaponswap it should gimp something, or prevent me from flowing straight into combat for a moment. Not perfect, but it should exist, or perhaps at least put a few seconds on skills when you swap before you can use them.
Now, as for the actual Gear-swapping. As I said, I dislike it.. and there is a few games that do it.. but let us be honest. My primary target is in fact FFXI, a fantastic game.. and yet gear swapping kind of.. trivializes combat to a degree. Let me lay this out for us.
I go into a fight in pure physical armor as a Paladin tank, but wait!? I'm a moron and forgot to cast my pre-spells to properly do thing, so I hit a macro and it automatically equips my casting gear. Which grants me all sorts of haste buffs to cast spells faster, and I can get those off faster. But wait, while I was doing that? I've lost a lot of threat, I click this other button and BOOM, my pure threat gen armor is on and I can spam two things real fast and bam.. threat is mine for the moment. Now that they are on me again, I switch back to my physical defense armor. Super, but it doesn't end there! This boss is going to do something big, a fire breath attack and then I just.. equip my magic resist armor mid combat instantly as well, and then back to phys.. and then back to magic.
If I do crap like this, why stop there? Why not allow me to change my skills, change my class, change everything all on the fly? At this point, why not just allow me to set loadouts for entire gear-sets and skill sets and weapon sets that allow me to change key talents around as well? It really makes things far to lame, and also makes content easier. I can only hope I am not in the minority.
I'd be ok with VR approaching penalties for gear-swapping that resembled Attacks of Opportunity in DnD.
As you're sheathing your weapon to grab another one, the mob notices and gets a "free" hit on you. Depending on your AC, health, and quantity of engaged mobs, that could be a heck of a penalty.
I hope they take the hands off aproach to this matter, and give players the freedom to swap gear, spells and weapons in combat, but enforce penalties for doing so.
You want to change a piece of gear in combat, fine it requires a 5 seconds "cast" for each piece you want to swap, in addition it increases aggro, draws attention, makes you vulnerable to attacks and getting it by anything interrupts the "equiping cast"
For weapons allow players to choose 2 sets of weapons that are pre-equiped and he can freely swap between them with a minimal penalty (maybe loose some auto-attacks, take some oportunity damage, empty out their main resource bar etc). if the player want to go beyond those 2 sets of "pre-equiped" weapons, he needs replace one of the weapon sets and it will take the same 5 seconds like the gear switching.
For spells, make it work like EQ1 it was a well desinged system, or maybe go a step further and allow for 2 memorizing bars, but only one can be active at a time, and switching between the different mem bars takes a big % of mana, reduces mana regeneration and requires a 5-10 seconds cast before the change is complete.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Porygon said: Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
I understand armor being locked, but why Jewelery/trinkets? You don't think somebody can slip off a ring or necklace and put on another pretty quick between spell casts?
When I was writing this, I was only thinking of earrings lol. I dont know why I forgot that necklaces and rings existed.
MauvaisOeil said:Naunet said:GoofyWarriorGuy said:Porygon said: Armor, jewelry, trinkets... this should be locked in once combat starts.
I understand armor being locked, but why Jewelery/trinkets? You don't think somebody can slip off a ring or necklace and put on another pretty quick between spell casts?
I dunno about Porygon, but I'm not too keen on the idea of having to macro specific trinkets/jewelry to specific spells just to get the most out of them. Doesn't really add anything.
I don't know for you, but I don't see how you can swap rings, necklaces or earrings with gloves, chest armors and caps of some sort.
Such a good point I'm mad I didnt come up with it myself lol.
