I'll toss in a suggestion here @Gnog.
Instead of CD on passive things. Perhaps ca's could be restricted to doing damage to a limited amount of foes at the same time. So aoe would only effect 6 mobs at the same time, maximum. Any more and they would not get hurt, even if the player has taunted them into battle. (Another way would be to put a limit on how many mobs a player can taunt at the same time. So after nr6, taunting a 7th mob would not be possible even with an aoe. Although this is an option, I doubt it feels right when coming across this limitation in game.) The amount of aoe damage could also be shared amongst its foes where the most damage could obviously fall onto the foe that the player is targetting/confronting directly.
This restriction...alters the possibilty and method of how a high lvl player could train or clean a zone from low level mobs. He'ld still have to pull all of them but can't just round up the room and nuke them all at the same time. And of course one could have greyed out mobs, not being affected by aoe. So that a player can taunt red,yellow, blue, green mobs. But grey mobs would no longer react to your aoe's and only single target ca's would work on them. (I chose grey, but you can choose green mobs if you really want to ofc.)
If players are skilled enough to nonestop fight and taunt new mobs..that's a different ballgame all together for me. But that isn't your suggestion here.
Feyshtey said:Gnog said:Btw, I don’t feel strongly about this at all. It‘s a super minor point about combat calculations. I am more just tired of the EQ default being so doggedly defended.
I can respect that. But sometimes the best approach really is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I believe many feel that the EQ combat system and mob AI was way too simplistic and unengaging. In order for combat to feel engaging things are going to need to change just to account for this development. If health gain and armor gain is either linear or log growth then 3 level 30 mobs would be almost as dangerous as 2 level 50 mobs.
Additionally fighting swarms of low level mobs that other players would be killing at an appropriate is also an anti-social behavior.
I don't think that low level mob farming will be quite so bad as people seem to think. I also don't see how it is anti social for someone who needs to kill a mob for a legitimate reason ( not out of spite to screw other players ) is anti social behavior. If you want exp from wolf_1283, and I want a fine wolf pelt from wolf_1283, noone really has a claim over it, just like any open world mob.
What is much more likely to happen is you get to the area with said mob, then /shout paying 1plat for 100 wolf pelts. Then you go buy them and go back to normal adventuring and don't waste your time farming yard trash low level enemies. The numbers and mobs in said examples are not exact or fixed but the point stands. It makes no sense to spend time farming that stuff when you could just pay a low level player for said items and save yourself the time and they make something for their effort. If there are no players there farming the stuff then there is no low level player being screwed by your farming.
It would be better if there was no good reason for High level players to farm low level mobs in-mass. Most of the time this is only done to find an ultra rare drops that are desired at max level or for crafting resources. So long as no ultra rare drops are put on trash mob loot tables then that reason will disappear, world wide ultra rare drops are fine though as any mob could drop them.
If leveling crafting is more about time spent crafting then quantity of generic crafting resources spent then there is also no need to massively farm crafting materials. The optional ingredients that make a base crafted item into a highly player desired item could still be rare drops from mobs or rare found environmental objects. This will also cut down on inventory bloat for crafting which is a win win.
Trasak said:Feyshtey said:Gnog said:Btw, I don’t feel strongly about this at all. It‘s a super minor point about combat calculations. I am more just tired of the EQ default being so doggedly defended.
I can respect that. But sometimes the best approach really is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I believe many feel that the EQ combat system and mob AI was way too simplistic and unengaging. In order for combat to feel engaging things are going to need to change just to account for this development. If health gain and armor gain is either linear or log growth then 3 level 30 mobs would be almost as dangerous as 2 level 50 mobs.
Additionally fighting swarms of low level mobs that other players would be killing at an appropriate is also an anti-social behavior.
Your idea doesn't address "normal" pace of combat, complexity of combat, or level of engagement for combat.
In EQ (back in the day) monopolizing big chunks of content was considered abusive play. You could petition it, and the GM's would respond. That changed over time because Sony and they Daybreak all but abandoned in-game petition response. But VR has hinted if not outright stated that GM/Guide response is something that they will provide.
As for it being anti-social (when not being abusive to other players), it is no more so than sitting at a forge and crafting, or traveling around picking up quests, or going thru books in the in-game library reading lore, or mining ore nodes, or chopping trees for wood, or a dozen other activities. You need resources, you go get the resources. If those resources happen to be low level then you don't need to waste anyone else's time gathering them.
Yes, you could buy those resources from lower level players, and yes this would be a social activity (a plus right?!). But if you make it so great a burden that its as time-consuming or nearly so for a high level as it would be if you were doing it at an appropriate level, you break the economy. The value of mundane items lower level players collect thru normal leveling becomes so inflated that higher level wealthy players pay ridiculous sums for those mundane components. This is because the ONLY thing the high levels get from gathering the mundane items are the components. 50p might be a meaningless sum to a high level to throw out to a low level character compared to many hours of harvesting. But for the low level player that 50p they recieve skews the value of anything they earn in the gameworld appropriate to their level. It allows them access to gear much more powerful than they could have otherwise obtained, and trivializes the content they then experience to whatever degree the exchange rate provides.
Kastor said: At the launch of EQ I remember saving my copper, silver, and gold to buy my spells. I didnt spend it on anything else. I was a High Elf Wizard and didn't have enough cash to buy all my level 4 spells. Then I leveled up to 6 or 8 and had to decide which spell I should buy because I only had enough gold for 1 or 2 spells of my appropriate level and was still missing a few level 4 spells as well!! I think players were buying orc belts at that time to hand in to a NPC in Kaladim... but it wasn't anything like how you speak of the example above. Times were rough!
Exactly my point. I went back and started a new character on a new server about 3 years after I quit (something like 10 years after release). You could sell spider silks for 1pp each. Not per stack. Each. By level 10 I had a couple hundred plat, had every spell available to my class, and I was buying gear it would have taken me into my 30's to obtain anywhere near release of the game. Subsequentaly I was stomping thru content, mostly solo.
And this is the product of just drop rates. Imagine if high levels also had risk from trying to farm low level mobs, could only fight 2-4 at a time, and those mobs could potentially pose a credible threat?
I think we agree Kastor. I am in no way a proponent of making it harder for high level characters to farm low level mobs.
And the OP's idea really is only a very small component to the equation. Realistically a riposte only triggering every 5 seconds rather than every 1 second shouldnt matter much at all in the long-term. Given a significant enough level spread the mobs should rarely be able to even hit the character, and even when they did hit it should be for such an inconsequential amount that regen skills/spells/potions/gear would absorb all of it every tic.
Which brings me back to the first question I asked in the thread, which was essentially "What are you fixing?".
Gnog said:I think there should be an internal cooldown on passive combat skills that mitigate or negate damage. This would make high-level toons more susceptible to being overwhelmed by a large number of lower-level mobs. Why? The scenarios in which this internal CD would kick in are situations in which the high-level player has pulled agro on a very large number of mobs well below his level; those situations tend to be where the high-level is power-leveling or camping/running to a rare spawn way below his level, which are not things that will promote community in the game.
what do ya’ll think?
I don't think they should waste time on non issues. A high level player wanting an item that drops from a lower level mob 100% does "promote community".
Yeah exactly Fey, the mob wont even hit the high lvl player. The cooldown makes no difference and I think it should be per attack anyway (depending on how high % you can reach). The reason it gets a cooldown in other games is because of PVP balance.
I agree with Keno.
I can agree with the request of the OP. Even if the abilities are passive, yeah, I can see that they shouldn't be unlimited.
A character, no matter how high level, shouldn't be dodging/blocking/parrying/reposting dozens of enemies at once. No matter how good of a fighter you are, you can be overwhelmed.
I like discussions like this because I think it's very easy for players to ask for 'more power' but not easy to ask to have power taken away.
I said this on the last page but the issue is easily solved with improved AI. You shouldn't be able to round up 20 mobs and have them all stand right in front of you. As long as NPC's naturally fan around you they will achieve flanking positions where block/parry/riposte wouldn't take effect.