I am really not sure how to think about this topic. I agree, that it is not realistic to change pants during fight (or to change a complete set of armor), but it is not realistic to do so in the middle of a dungeon as well. I hope switching between complete sets of situational armor will not be possible by the simple fact, that inventory space and weight matters, so that you are just not able to carry so many pieces of equipment, even between fights. This way, you have to decide, what you put into your backpack before the journey.
Not being able to switch equipment between fights will make it much harder to explore new content, where you just dont know what equipment is best for the encounter. I just dont want to stand in front of a mob and realize, that we will not make it due to the wrong equipment.
In my opinion, EQ had a good apporach (at least for switching spells): If you dont have aggro, you can sit down and memorize the spell. If you are a threat to the mob (so your aggro is nearly as high as the tank), the mob will think "that guy is dangerous, and he is sitting down! Great, I will beat the crap out of him!". So you have to wait, till you are no longer a threat to the mob. Maybe this apporach is also valid for switching equipment other than hand held items.
The whole concept of this idea makes me laugh at the thought of it. ( sarcasm alert )
You and your party are in combat, fighting up to three enemies and you suddenly begin taking off your cloths. The enemies stop attacking ....ummmm... things get uncomfortable. The enemy is confused and your party is getting scared as you stand before them half nekkid, digging into your backback. " Hold on everyone, Its in here somewhere " you say, as you continue to rifle through your bags looking for that one piece you need to swap out.
...The idea is so insane and could never happen, but it hilarious to think about. :D
I'm pretty sure it's already been stated that we'll be able to swap a full set of gear with one or two clicks via saved loadouts while out of combat. Citing realism as a case against in-combat swapping isn't really that compelling of an argument in my opinion because swapping an entire outfit in seconds is just as impossible while you are standing still doing nothing as it is while you're actively swinging at something. I understand the world vs game argument and if it's possible to magically switch an entire set one moment, but not the next (because I shot an arrow at something 30 yards away), that feels like a game mechanic, not world immersion.
It is just such a concerning thing to me. If they allow it in any level, I feel it brings down the game quite a bit. If they are going to allow it.. it should be kept to weapons and the penalty should be of importance.
IE. I'm a Warrior, tanking.. and I'm fighting this fleshy sob with my axe and it is working just fine. But then some gigantic skeletal horror comes up and I need to switch to my mace. Fine, I do so. This is what should happen.. or close to. I can switch somewhat quickly as it is only a weapon. Fine, however.. while I should be able to maintain my auto-attacks. I should not be allowed to use any skill at all for at least five seconds and I'm not allowed to switch weapons again for another fifteen.
Now, this sounds stupid initially.. but I'll go on another tangent scenario. Say I'm fighting as.. I dunno.. a Monk, I'm rocking some fist weapons and punching the crap out of stuff and building up my Chakra gates and blah blah. But, if I whip out some kind of giant daibo. (again, I am only speculating gear and whatnot.. bare with me) it has more flat damage. I can switch, instantly.. no repercussions and use my big giant damage hit and then swap back. In my scenario, you truly should have to think about whether switching is going to aid you in combat long term.
Not being able to use a skill for five seconds will punish you immensely not only as a Tank, but.. anyone. DPS, Controller, or Healer. It may sound painful, but more or less.. the idea is.. if weapon types are a true thing, my Warrior breaking out a mace will help long term, albeit it sucks initially. Whereas there should be no instant gratification if there is a swapping system. There isn't any way I can explain why this would happen in realism terms or anything, but.. if we are going to allow swaps. There should be SOMETHING in place to make it matter and not just.. allow people to do whatever, whenever.
From reading these posts I thought of a sort-of compromise. Have jewelry,trinkets, or maybe semi-rare armors that had clickies, that allowed you to use a consumable that provided a brief or timed acclimation boost.
So there is the option to use items to permanently acclimate gear (I think in the cohh stream in amberfaet with the wind and frost on the bridge they showed some of this). My idea is you can temporarily and semi-effectively get some armor acclimation from a clicky that consumes a acclimation potion. The personal quest would be to get trinkets or jewelry that could accomodate all environments, so you could have ring of fire that boosted fire spells but had a clicky to acclimate to frost if you had the consumable. Or the uncommon-ish boots of windshear that had nice STR and AGi for any player but had a clicky that used a consumable to allow you to stand your ground in a windy area as opposed to the cloak or scarf armor that provides protection against windshear because it is a proper imbued piece of armor.
The effect from the clicky would not be permanent, and not be complete protection so you could manage the encounter, but it would feel like cutting a steak with a butter knife.
Maybe the same mechanic can be used out of combat to permanently imbue a piece of armor for acclimation like a wrist piece, but I am not sure how irreversible this should be. A hard-core part of me thinks if you want to keep the ring you continually get partial acclimation using consumables, or to permanently imbue a piece of armor it takes 2 or 5 comsumables and destroys the ring. So you end up with a nice piece of armor that will last 20 levels and room for another or better ring.
I am ok with swapping weapons or primary/secondary pieces in combat, that makes sense. Like a WAR isung two, one-handers and then when the battle is getting tough and people are almost dieing- slamming the two one-handers together magically into a two-hander that like a claymore id brutal and final. Or a paladin crossing his sword and shield while speaking holy words causing the sword and shield to become a AE of damage that blinds or maims the undead, while at the same time providing courage and some healing to the group in this paladin made environment bubble, where the paladin has to remain praying anf unable ot fight for a bit while the group attacks through the bubble at the wounded undead oncomers/
This hopefully is a much ado about nothing topic for me.
This isn't diablo 2 where you swap your gear slots out for +10 to some buff and then quick swap back to your normal gear. People are going to be doing things like pulling with a bow and then switching to dual wield, or dual wielding and when they draw aggro switching to a 2 hander or shield to draw less aggro and take less damage.
If someone forgot to put their 20 fire resist helm on before fighting the fire goblin magi, they can click around in their bags until they find it and throw it on.
These are not ridiculous/illogical unbalanced things.
Is replacing your breastplate with a couple clicks of a button realistc in medieval warfare? Of course not, but as long as the game is designed properly, this isn't going to be a mechanic that is ripe for abuse or over powered.
Hot keys for entire gear sets? No thanks. An individual swapping gear around 1 by 1 themselves during combat? You betcha. No big deal.
"Oh crap my levitate is wearing out, I'd better equip my lev clicky cloak" is not something that should require you to be out of combat.
In fact, when it comes to clickies, making some/many/most of them require being equipped could balance them out and play right into this.
On a serious note. I would say make it so that you have to change armor, jewelry or spells out of combat, but weapons I would be okay with changing during combat. I know its only a game, but logicially speaking your weapons are closer at hand than trying to go through your bags to find anything else.
My two plats
I'm mostly just commenting to bump this. I mostly just want to hear more comments on this and what people think. I am still VERY strongly against Gear Swaping in any regard, as I firmly believe people should be prepared before hand and not during. As I mentioned before, I don't want this to become like FFXI where gear swapping is macro'd to skills and it just becomes a matter of "Swap to this set for this enemy skill and this set for this skill and this set for another skill" etc.
Mostly due to the fact that eventually, somewhere it becomes a matter of who has the most gear. This eventually snowballs into everyone getting ALL of the gear, and uniqueness starting to become lost. Now, I won't lie.. I can find a middle ground in the area of PERHAPS allowing weapon and shield/offhand to be changed, but I think that is as far as it should be allowed to go. I'd love to hear more opinions on this.
I think a cooldown on gear changes would solve most problems. Somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes on a slot. If you know there is a fire mage boss at the end of said dungeon I think you should be allowed to use appropriate gear to fight it but not spam gear changes constantly.
As Brad mentioned on the first page:
"
... 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. ...
"
If you don't allow players to dynamically adjust to combat, you can't dynamically adjust encounters. Allowing a Rogue to switch from Piercing to Blunt, during the fight, allows you to change the encounter to have creatures that are immune to Blunt and Piercing, in waves.
Same goes for casters, but in that case, they just need to mem both fire and ice ahead of time.
Changing damage types makes designers (and players, even if they don't know it) happy, because they can have a small amount of variability to react to. It allows the brain of the player to have a role.
Even more so if they were to tie perception to determining these immunities and weaknesses before and during the fight, but that's a conversation for another thread.
I agree with *both* of Bronsun's two most recent posts especially the first.
It is immersion breaking to the point of being beyond ridiculous to change armor in the middle of a fight. It is bad enough if you even can *carry* a second set of armor while you are out exploring or adventuring. With the exception of something very light and packable like cloth.
Even most current MMOs with all of the "you can do anything at any time" focus will not let you change gear in combat.
It would be an interesting balance if each different type of item: accessory, weapon, clothing, leather armor, chain armor and plate armor had an equip timer. While you were changing the item you stop doing everything else and you basically become flat footed so your avoidance AC goes away which can make you very vulnerable. Each and every piece would need to be put on individually.
Sheathed weapons – 1 second
Bagged Weapons – 6 seconds
Accessories - 6 seconds
Clothing – 6 seconds
Leather armor 12 seconds
Chain Armor 18 seconds
Plater Armor 24 seconds
This way you “can” change equipment in combat but do you really want to?
Which is why games don't punish the players over such a trivial thing, out of combat, currently. At least, no game I've ever heard of makes you stand there for 24 seconds doing nothing to change gear, out of combat. Not even Pathfinder:Kingmaker.
The discussion so far in this thread is around in-combat. If you're out of combat, who cares? Why make them stand there for 24 seconds doing nothing? It's not fun, challenging, innovative, or thematically consistent. It's just boring.
I don’t think I would say it isn’t challenging or thematically consistent for a gritty game with long travel times and real consequences for death. Part of the annoyance of corpse runs could just be straight up the time it takes to pull your equipment off your old body and re-equip it. This would make getting your corpses to a safe spot that much more critical as you need time to get your gear back on.
If no one else times putting on gear then by definition it is innovative, if not very novel or original.
The real question is does it add to the game and that’s harder to gauge. Things being “unfun” can be a real benefit to the game if those “unfun” things are consequences of failure. This adds risk to certain choices which then usually increases the adrenaline response when you almost fail. Most raiders are actually adrenaline junkies if not to the same extent as paint ballers or sky divers.
In terms of combat complexity having equipment swapping take time could be an actual function of the perfectly executed encounter. Say in wave one there is no elemental damage, in wave two there is a lot of fire damage and in wave 3 there is a lot of negative energy damage. Equipment can be itemized in such a way that you cannot have one piece cover both needs. Part of the encounter is tactically having people be able to back out of combat to take time to switch gear for the next wave but you need to protect them and survive for the time it takes to swap the gear, which could be considerable for a plate tank. Even gearing choices could be driven by the timer as tanks would value accessory swap items over armor swap items.
Swapping weapons from sheathed locations should be rapid and absolutely incorporated into encounter design.
vjek said:If you don't allow players to dynamically adjust to combat, you can't dynamically adjust encounters. Allowing a Rogue to switch from Piercing to Blunt, during the fight, allows you to change the encounter to have creatures that are immune to Blunt and Piercing, in waves.
Same goes for casters, but in that case, they just need to mem both fire and ice ahead of time.
Changing damage types makes designers (and players, even if they don't know it) happy, because they can have a small amount of variability to react to. It allows the brain of the player to have a role.
Even more so if they were to tie perception to determining these immunities and weaknesses before and during the fight, but that's a conversation for another thread.
^ This. For anyone interested, there is another thread where this topic was discussed at great length.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3564/quick-switch-for-gear/view/page/1
Some quotes:
vjek said:Aradune said: ... 5. Switching to your optimial outfit for the next encounter if primarily about Bosses. There could be a dungeon that has a theme to it (say it's really cold). Then you need to prepare before you enter said dungeon. But we're not stopping there -- in different areas of this dungeon there may be different atmosphere/climates. Our dungeons are huge and I don't see why environmental conditions would remain static. And then there's the bosses. It's quite possible one outfit is serving you well in one region of a dungeon, but then you come across a boss mob that changes that equation (by his behavior/disposition, by the types of spells he/she casts (fire based? cold based? ethereal? etc.). So while you're not swapping outfits constantly, encounter to next encounter, making it a hassle, *special* encounters may encourage you to Outfit yourself in a specific way....
And the other big thing, as mentioned, is making the boss mobs require different tactics. Death to tank'n'spank mobs (e.g. simple bosses that just have a ton of HP). That's the lazy way out. In Pantheon you'll need to learn the best tactics for a region or a specific mob. Variety is good. Learning how to overcome a particular environment is key. Not simply employing the same tactics regardless of boss mob is important to us.
And this goes beyond having the best gear for the situation. It goes into having the right abilities prepped, the composition of your group, positioning of your party during the battle, etc. One of our goals is trying to minimize repetition, and that includes there being one or only a few ways to deal with every important mob.
Outside it could mean that you approach an encounter differently depending on weather conditions (again, making E important, not just pretty because we made rain or snow look cool). Inside there could be rooms filled with absolute darkness, or areas of high pressure, etc. Then again add in there different dispositions and behaviors -- having particular mobs choose different tactics during the battle and having to learn the right way to counteract those behaviors is a big part of the game.
...
I see the appeal to the consumer for systems like this, but it's all unraveled by one simple possibility: IF the encounter changes Environment without the opportunity to change equipment or spells.
In my opinion, that severely limits the designers options when designing encounters or content. If you have the options to change equiopment and/or spells IN-combat, then you have significantly greater options. In other words, designers will always _want_ to change Environments mid-fight, but without the mechanics to support allowing the player to adapt to that mid-fight change, it's pure frustration for the customers.
Put another way, I don't think having dynamic encounters without dynamic gear/spells is going to work. This isn't really something that requires testing, it's a logical design issue. You can trivially see the outcome before any content is even created. As the developer, you need to set the design goal before you make the content. Is it a design goal to have players change gear & spells in-combat or not? Based on that, the rest falls into place.
Aradune said:Good points and I agree in general: if we change something in-game dynamically, then you guys need to be able to react dynamically (of course, the same is true for NPCs -- if they see you change something (say, weather) dynamically, they may react as well).
Well Aradune qoute basically stated what i was going to state in my follow up comment. if you cannot change on the fly, then every encounter has to be designed to fit a formula that can be prepared for in advance. Hence, it limits creativity of what you may encounter in a chaotic experience. Personally, I rather utilize suspension of disbelief and be able to change gear so that developers are free to be more creative oh what possible changes could occur in an a single encounter.
Personally what I'd like to see is gear and abilities able to be swapped out in combat BUT incur some kind of palpable penalty. Also, the ability to macro this in any way should not be possible. Manual changes only with some kind of slot based cooldown is a good path to explore I think. It shouldn't be so frequent that you have to constantly change things during a fight or encounter, but it should definitely be an element.
For example: Encountering some kind of chromatic dragon, you do not know what type of breath damage it can potentially AE with. Once it finally breathes you realize it's using frost, so you hotswap some cold resist gear to try and adapt. Maybe the dragon has a potential to posess 2 damage types on a spawn cycle. So now after you've seen frost, you're still on your toes for a 2nd damage type.
I don't want things to be crazy to the point we have to be constantly swapping things around. Some activity is good for combat/etc, but I'm personally VERY sick of MMO's requiring constant keystrokes between fighting, movement, etc. Downtime is needed for strategy, thought, and discussion.
There are, of course, alternatives to allowing us to take off our plate armour in the middle of getting whacked on and put on a new set. Which with all due respect I still consider too unrealistic to be a good answer to any design problem.
One solution is to have items that are smaller and easier to swap out. Let us take fire and cold as the only possible scenarios to keep it simple. If your plate armour is +10 against cold maybe you can have a ring or bracer or magical hairnet (+2 if the character has long hair?) that allows you to reverse polarity and make it +10 against fire. Is this good - no - it means you can get by with just one set of armour and the hairnet. Is it better than ignoring encumbrance and weight and letting you carry around a complete extra set of plate armour? To me it is. Is it better than letting you strip almost naked in the middle of a melee and replace the whole set of plate armour? Darn right it is!
A second solution is that if the developers want to change environments in the middle of a boss fight give us a way to cope that does not involve our armour. Spells that a caster needs to have available rather than 200 pounds of armour that the tank needs to keep available. Or devices unrealistically placed in the boss room that let the party change environment back.
These comments relate exclusively to boss fights in dungeons. Differing environments in landscape and carrying multiple armours where you can switch them back and forth out of combat aren't totally realistic (I spent too many years playing games with weight and encumbrance limits) but a lOT better than doing this inside a dungeon in combat.
vjek said:Which is why games don't punish the players over such a trivial thing, out of combat, currently. At least, no game I've ever heard of makes you stand there for 24 seconds doing nothing to change gear, out of combat. Not even Pathfinder:Kingmaker.
The discussion so far in this thread is around in-combat. If you're out of combat, who cares? Why make them stand there for 24 seconds doing nothing? It's not fun, challenging, innovative, or thematically consistent. It's just boring.
Exactly, who cares about out-of-combat activities? I see those much like the "and time passes" in old D&D tabletop games where you could do any number of things 'in the background'. Switching out anything you want out-of-combat is just that, a background activity that can be skipped over for sake of keeping the story moving along. In-combat, though, is a wholly different matter. Under those circumstances things should take time or not be allowed at all. We've seen in the streams already that casters cannot change out spells on their spellbars while in combat so why should a melee be allowed to change out a BP, or their boots, while in combat? Switching out weapons can be done just by taking into account the delay of the weapon. Putting away your current weapon takes the amount of time equal to the delay and equipping the new item takes into account its delay. So switching out fast weapons is fast while slower (and usually larger/heavier 2HD weapons) is a slower process.
Vandraad said:We've seen in the streams already that casters cannot change out spells on their spellbars while in combat so why should a melee be allowed to change out a BP, or their boots, while in combat?
I don't really understand your argument here. Melees can't swap out their spellbars either. If they do end up being able to swap out their BP or boots, casters would most likely be able to do the same thing. I guess I can see an angle where tanks could benefit more than casters from being able to swap their gear on the fly? I think we could just as easily flip that narrative though as there are plenty of game mechanics that are more advantageous to casters than melee.
oneADseven said:Vandraad said:We've seen in the streams already that casters cannot change out spells on their spellbars while in combat so why should a melee be allowed to change out a BP, or their boots, while in combat?
I don't really understand your argument here. Melees can't swap out their spellbars either. If they do end up being able to swap out their BP or boots, casters would most likely be able to do the same thing. I guess I can see an angle where tanks could benefit more than casters from being able to swap their gear on the fly? I think we could just as easily flip that narrative though as there are plenty of game mechanics that are more advantageous to casters than melee.
The argument basically is that once in-combat, you are locked into using whatever it is you have memorized, worn, etc at that time. I would be very open to the possibility of, again, having delays involved for switching out anything (spells, abilities, armor, weapons) such that you could do that in combat but it would take some amount of time significant enough that doing so really needs to be considered carefully as it takes the player out of action while performing the swap.