I think OP's comment about modern MMOs being "easy" was more in reference to how much work someone has to put in to get rewards out of the game. There is no question that modern MMOs with the faced paced, high coordination gameplay are physically more challenging then old MMOs.
I like to use FFXI and FFXIV as examples because they come from different generations and I have played both extensively...
FFXI - Combat is slow and simple. I could watch TV and play the game, for example. However, it took a year to get to max level on one job and during that process you attained gear... sometimes lvl 50-60 gear was still relevant at level 75. Your accomplishments felt rewarding, it felt like it was "hard" to attain that max level and the gear you acquired in the process.
FFXIV - Combat is fast, dozens of skills, have to dodge AOE, full focus required at high level raids.. I'll be honest, it is pretty hard the first few times you run some dungeons/raids. However, you can level all jobs to max level in 6-9 months. Your gear is sometimes replaced each and every level. If you are someone who does the savage raid content and gets the gear, it is irrelevant within 6 months. Worse yet, the difficulty to get those items is drastically reduced after the "new raid" comes out, so everyone has all the rare items. It really makes it feel like these crazy items are handed out to everyone... The entire game just starts to feel "easy".
I do not have much experience with WoW during the last 10 years but I have heard WoW and FFXIV have a lot of similarities in terms of how they handle content.
zewtastic said:Wow raiding difficult? Thats a laugh.
WoW raiding, at least in recent expansions, could be considered difficult but it's not the same kind of difficulty we experienced in EQ. WoW raid encounters are complex with "do it perfectly right or die instantly" mechanics, several layers of them and multiple stages in each fight. EQ raid encounters required coordinating dozens of players without voice support wherein everyone had to play their role precisely or everyone died, particularly the tank and healers. EQ also didn't have threat meters so everyone had to be pro at maximizing damage output while "just knowing" where they stood on threat with the boss; One hit or crit too many and you died instantly. Not to mention the endless search for sufficient gear, or the correct gear, to win a fight. These were both difficult but in very different ways.
Personally, I prefer the longer climb to raiding in EQ and the absolute satisfaction of beating a raid boss in that game over the super technical dances one had to perform to win in WoW.
Porygon said:Also, we should set the record straight. As someone who has raided high end EQ and WoW. WoW raiding is significantly more difficult. Yes the game itself is easier to an extent, but once you get to endgame, which is going to be the goal for most modern mmo players. I really really doubt pantheon will be able to even scoff at WoW in terms of difficulty.
I mean, prior to gates of discord there was a handful of fights in eq that I would even deem difficult.
I've raided in both, and I disagree. Neither is is more or less difficult than the other, it's simply comparing two different sports as if they are the same. WoW raiding is pro hockey, EQ1 raiding is pro soccer (football). WoW is the Olympic 110 meter sprint, EQ1 is the 26.2 mile marathon. Etc etc. Both have similar tolerance for error, but the punishment for errors is manifested differently. It's unfair to both games to compare their raid game as if they are the same kind of game. They aren't.
Even leveling, where EQ1 is demonstrably harder than WoW, they are really two different games. WoW was designed so that everyone could solo level, EQ was not. Basically, all of EQ1 is in what WoW would call heroic mode. If all of WoW, even the yard trash in the newbie zones, was elite/heroic, it would be much harder and more like EQ1. But Blizzard designed around a different philosophy than that, including how they designed raids.
The MMO player of today has options, even old school hardcore. All PRF is doing is adding an option. If they are smart, they stay with the old school market segment, since only emulated EQ1 and emulated FF11 really fill that niche right now. Every other MMO in existence occupies some flavor of the WoW option, and WoW keeps killing the competition.
As far as PVP, it wrecks class based PVE games wherever it gets implemented, regardless of what the Fortnite kiddies sa they must have. Pantheon from the time it was announced was planned as an old school, PVE only/mostly, group centric MMO harkening back to early MMOs.
zewtastic said:Wow raiding difficult? Thats a laugh.Of course you never played original EQ1, raiding with 70 people, with no voip. Doesn't get much tougher than that.
Early raid boss fights had maybe one or two mechanics, tops. I enjoy the challenge of coordinating a large group of people through complicated, often chaotic (because mistakes are inevitable), multi-phased fights, and raid bosses of early MMO years just didn't have that. The only challenge came from encounters often being very long and tedious and players lacked things like voice chat, threat meters, etc (and, in some cases, ridiculous over-tuning on the boss's part that was later nerfed so that the encounter was actually beatable *cough*C'thun*cough*).
Personally, I prefer when the challenge comes from the mechanics of a fight, not the shackles on my legs weighing me down.
zoltar said:philo said:Temmi said: Although the common parts of a game like WoW are very simple, some of the mythic raiding and dungeons do become very challenging. In mythic dungeons, you simply aren't going to finish quickly or smoothly unless your rogue is sapping the mobs when they can, and your mage is rooting properly. And while the high end raid content in WoW is contrived, it doesn't make it less difficult. Many of the end game, high difficulty raid bosses require a LOT of coordination and communication, with up to 40 players.I guess it does depend on what you are comparing it to, but I can't say I agree with this ^ part. Even during vanilla wow (which many consider a time when the game was challenging) it was laughably easy compared to EQ during the similar time frame. Requiring sapping and rooting is just basic competence. That doesnt mean it is challenging gameplay. Granted, it is coming from a place of less difficulty from the very beginning because 40 person raids take much less coordination than raids with higher numbers of people. It is indeed less difficult in my experience. But everyone has an opinion on that and that's perfectly fine.
First off, using some CC is an insignificant part of the challenge in WOW's mythic dungeons. They can be pretty difficult in terms of the mechanics involved IMO.
You say WoW was laughably easy compared to EQ during vanilla, but only 24 guilds in the WORLD cleared the most difficult raid (Naxxrama) before TBC launched. I don't know much about raiding in EQ, so I can't speak for the difficulty. But I guarantee that 99.9% of the people going on about how much more difficult EQ are similarly unqualified to talk about raiding in WoW at the highest levels. So going back and forth arguing about which was more difficult is pointless. Suffices to day that raiding in WoW at the highest levels is/was extremely challenging.
Finally, in regards to the term "watered down", in WoW's case I don't think the difficulty has been watered down so much as it's been compartmentalized. If you want to play ez mode, it's there for you. If you want to play normal difficulty, it's there. If you want a really challenging exerience, it's also there. It's a great approach for the type of MMO that WoW is trying to be. Some people may dislike that approach and prefer a more unfied experience based on challenging group content. I appreciate both myself.
OK I can top this when there were raid targets in EQ people didn't even know how to raid, had cappy Internet they could easily kick you, anyone remember lady vox? And no third party communication programs, so yes I can definately say eq was a lot harder, without even thinking about it
Naunet said:zewtastic said:Wow raiding difficult? Thats a laugh.Of course you never played original EQ1, raiding with 70 people, with no voip. Doesn't get much tougher than that.
Early raid boss fights had maybe one or two mechanics, tops. I enjoy the challenge of coordinating a large group of people through complicated, often chaotic (because mistakes are inevitable), multi-phased fights, and raid bosses of early MMO years just didn't have that. The only challenge came from encounters often being very long and tedious and players lacked things like voice chat, threat meters, etc (and, in some cases, ridiculous over-tuning on the boss's part that was later nerfed so that the encounter was actually beatable *cough*C'thun*cough*).
Personally, I prefer when the challenge comes from the mechanics of a fight, not the shackles on my legs weighing me down.
OK maybe one your 2 mechanics but they made you play a certain way, CH chains with great cooridnation, learn how to raid period since it has never done before eq, had to compete with other people, trains, death touches, summons, spiky damage output, limited mana pool, and a ton of other things and these were things you never have to worry about in today WoW world.
As far as raiding goes, I'm not sure how best to define challenge. Some of the hardest fights I've ever done, in terms of individual player skill requirements, were 4, 8, 12, or 18 person fights (in several different games). By no means were they easy, at all. You earned that victory. Some of them relied on heavy positioning, others on perfect execution, others on coordination between people involved. The most memorable ones used a mix of all three aspects.
This doesn't mean that I don't have fond memories of taking 36 people into Hate or to Vox, or taking a full group of 20 to handle some of SWG's hardest space missions. But I don't necessarily know that size is a component of challenge when it comes to raiding. Yes, more people makes it harder to plan and schedule, but it can still be done. I think the other aspects of the encounter design are far more important.
For Pantheon, I'd prefer to see a range of content - there truly should be some things you should need an army for, but they should be tasks appropriate for an army. Not "kill the big mob" tasks, but "assault the fortress at multiple locations" tasks. For the "kill the big mob" stuff, the fights should be more about individual challenge for the players involved.
Riahuf22 said:OK maybe one your 2 mechanics but they made you play a certain way, CH chains with great cooridnation, learn how to raid period since it has never done before eq, had to compete with other people, trains, death touches, summons, spiky damage output, limited mana pool, and a ton of other things and these were things you never have to worry about in today WoW world.
I don't know what death touches are, but I don't personally enjoy fighting over boss spawns with other groups, nor trains. I can't speak for WoW today (I don't really raid in WoW anymore outside of an occasional LFR), but I'd be willing to bet there are classes with significant spiky burst damage. I know those classes exist in WildStar, which I do raid regularly in; if an esper or stalker isn't playing VERY carefully, it's extremely easy for them to rip threat off the tank, and in a high prime dungeon or a raid encounter, that pretty much means getting squished instantly.
While the concept of team-coordinated large boss fights was new back then, it isn't new now. I think if you dropped a boss in front of a group of players that had nothing but a ridiculous amount of HP and a one or two periodic mechanics, they would get bored with it before their first pull was done.
zewtastic said:Frankly that fact that WoW successfully copied other MMOs functionality gives them no veracity other than being good at stealing content.
What they did was see what worked well and then implemented it better. I deny the assertion that observing the market and seeing what's working well is somehow bad design. That's smart! If someone has a good idea, and you like it (improve upon it with a few tweaks here and there), then that's a recipe for success.
Naunet said:zewtastic said:Frankly that fact that WoW successfully copied other MMOs functionality gives them no veracity other than being good at stealing content.What they did was see what worked well and then implemented it better. I deny the assertion that observing the market and seeing what's working well is somehow bad design. That's smart! If someone has a good idea, and you like it (improve upon it with a few tweaks here and there), then that's a recipe for success.
Well I will assume your opinion of 'better' means very dumbed down. The actual pervailing facts say otherwise. It speaks volumes for your statements though.
Back when I played my first MMORPG I had to walk uphill, both ways, in the snow with newspaper [shoes] to get to the bank...and with no minimap!
WoW had more subscribers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were better.
McDonalds has more customers than any 5-star french restaurant. Are they better, though?
With Pantheon, the goal is to produce a reasonable middle ground - not something just for a couple dozen hardcore-gourmands, but not something for a total mass market either.
Will it be accepted? It can, like Dark souls was, in the following way, if BOTH of these conditions are fulfilled:
1) It must be a good game.
People will go through pain and suffering... if the game is good enough to justify it.
2) The game must stick to its principles, to its Vision (tm).
If the game is watered down and made soloable and easy within the first six months, then it won't really matter what any of us thinks.
Dark Souls stuck to its principles and it did not change, it remained hard... and people bitched about it, and whined about it, and played it anyway, and loved it.
Same as EQ, come to think about that.
I think you will be surprised with the new MMO crowd. I know many people have reached the threshhold of WoW that they want something more challenging and meaningful. WoW is making some classic servers and millions of people are willing to go back because they think that era is hard and meaningful. Most bosses wern't that bad except Firemaw....that fight was a pain no matter what raiding background or gaming background you had. You won't attract the solo players, but you will attract the interested groups that play new mmos. And since Pantheon is free the first... I think 10 levels, then you will have a lot of people trying the game out regardless.
With the recent raiding aspect agruement going on right now,I would choose neither WoW or EQ raiding style. EQ was really tough because of limited outside technology help, but now it's quite easy. Also everyone was new to mmos. WoW tried to make it harder by adding a dance. With the dancing it made learning the mob more tedious, but with negligible death consequences figuring the bosses took maybe a week or two in classic for the average guild. But once you figured out the dance then the bosses became way easier. However, WoW introduced a rage timer at some point soo you need optimal gear to clear some bosses.
I would like a hybrid of WoW and EQ raiding style with several different patterns the boss can take or change up...to try and find that threshhold of the boss feeling different the next time around. That would be my ideal raiding enviroment.
If you dont find wow raiding difficult you are on another level of playing. And I congratulate you.
I just will never find ch chains something that are difficult to coordinate. Yes. You have 72 people. But very few of those people have to be coordinated. Your pure dps only need to manage their buffs and determine when to disc. The tanks coordinate themselves for the most part. And the clerics just have to be told an order and a pause.
I feel pantheon will be in between both games in terms of style and difficulty.
Porygon said:If you dont find wow raiding difficult you are on another level of playing. And I congratulate you.
I just will never find ch chains something that are difficult to coordinate. Yes. You have 72 people. But very few of those people have to be coordinated. Your pure dps only need to manage their buffs and determine when to disc. The tanks coordinate themselves for the most part. And the clerics just have to be told an order and a pause.
I feel pantheon will be in between both games in terms of style and difficulty.
Your looking at it as in today standards, back than they're were nothing known as a CH chain it was created by the players, and how many wipes did it take to make it? Prolly a ton after realizing normal heals wasn't mana efficent and actually explaining it and than laying down the plan to preform such a function after a while became easy, but the actual creation of it is what I am talking about it not like eq devs saidHey here's you a text book for you on how to raid" in fact they weren't even suppose to be raids it was yet a player base creation that people arrived for to complete.
Porygon said:Also, we should set the record straight. As someone who has raided high end EQ and WoW. WoW raiding is significantly more difficult. Yes the game itself is easier to an extent, but once you get to endgame, which is going to be the goal for most modern mmo players. I really really doubt pantheon will be able to even scoff at WoW in terms of difficulty.
I mean, prior to gates of discord there was a handful of fights in eq that I would even deem difficult.
I agree fully with this. In EQ the hardest part was getting keyed or flagged until Uqua. Uqua was awesome but we also have to remember that WoW built upon EQ and while it may have been more challenging at the end game boss runs they still had red circles and mods that dumbed it down.
At least in EQ when you wiped guilds had to check logs and see what effects killed them...you didn't get an alarm then 5 seconds to move before feeling it. You wiped, analyzed and tried again.
Also in EQ, guilds guarded their strats while during WoW you could find the strats in a video posted online by money grubbing hoors who posted for likes and subs etc.
Truthfully when I raid in WoW I don't even pay attention half the time. You listen for your raid leader to say "move here when the boss does the shinny light effect" otherwise you stand in one spot and nuke the boss down in under 5 minutes. Even though WoW has mechanics that are meant to increase the difficutly of an encounter its really only the first time you do it then after that you don't even have to pay attention to what is happening on screen anymore.
Compare that to Lineage2 (the first MMO I played) where raids required 100s of people in some cases to take down the toughest raid bosses who remained unkilled for months or even over a year after they were released. I can dance around, or stop moving, for 3 quick minutes but trying to maintain a strategy over the course of an hour long fight making sure 100 people are doing the right thing to make sure the group doesn't wipe seems way more difficult.
As for the OPs actual question I think a fun game with a fun world to explore is enticing enough. I could be wrong here but I think Pantheon is going more the route of not needing to be max level to enjoy "end game" content and raids. If the max level raid bosses are in the open world people who are under the level cap can still attack that mob I would assume. As I said I played L2 and in that game you could attune for any raid content that was around when I was playing at level 60, the level cap was level 75, but with it taking an average of a year to reach max level you have to let people get in on the end game stuff before that. I feel Pantheon will be similar to this, unless they have stated otherwise somwhere else already. I believe this will help with the issue of the game being too "hardcore" for the more casual younger faced paced crowd, along with the game being a fun experience.
zewtastic said:Well I will assume your opinion of 'better' means very dumbed down. The actual pervailing facts say otherwise. It speaks volumes for your statements though.
That's quite an assumption, considering I've made numerous posts about my love of challenging group and solo content.
Things Blizzard has borrowed and/or improved upon that made it stand out:
- Customizable UI
- A large number of quests (honestly, the variety in leveling paths in WoW is not something I've seen matched in ANY other MMO, even moreso now with zone scaling; most newer MMOs have gone the route of funneling everyone through a single path of zones)
- Steady improvement on features that assist in finding groups, which frees players from being tethered to a major city to spam "LFG ____" in chat
- Gear/level syncing in dungeons (used to be just during Timewalking dungeon events, but now with scaling all dungeons in an expac remain available to you to run)
- An honestly solid understanding of how to make combat animations feel smooth and impactful
- Evolution of talent trees (regardless of rose-colored glasses, the old talent trees represented zero customization, whereas the current iteration provides opportunities for frequent situational customization)
- Polished, instanced raid boss encounters that are more than just a boss-in-a-box (looking at you, FFXIV *grumble*); Blizzard has consistently delivered innovative boss encounters and what's more, they provide varying levels of difficulty to meet a variety of players' needs
And that's just what my early morning brain can come up with. WoW isn't really my primary MMO anymore (that would be WildStar, whose raids are THE best I have EVER experienced), but it did spend quite a few years as my primary MMO. While they've had a number of fumbles throughout the years, it's foolish to try and deny that Blizzard is good at analyzing their market and developing features that provide a variety of content for a variety of different types of people.
Riahuf22 said:Your looking at it as in today standards, back than they're were nothing known as a CH chain it was created by the players, and how many wipes did it take to make it? Prolly a ton after realizing normal heals wasn't mana efficent and actually explaining it and than laying down the plan to preform such a function after a while became easy, but the actual creation of it is what I am talking about it not like eq devs saidHey here's you a text book for you on how to raid" in fact they weren't even suppose to be raids it was yet a player base creation that people arrived for to complete.
Pantheon is being developed today, not 10+ years ago. Therefor, it will and must be judged against today's standards of difficulty.
Bankie said:Compare that to Lineage2 (the first MMO I played) where raids required 100s of people in some cases to take down the toughest raid bosses who remained unkilled for months or even over a year after they were released. I can dance around, or stop moving, for 3 quick minutes but trying to maintain a strategy over the course of an hour long fight making sure 100 people are doing the right thing to make sure the group doesn't wipe seems way more difficult.
Bloated HP pools requiring massive numbers of people to whittle down =/= challenge
Gdub01 said:In EQ the hardest part was getting keyed or flagged until Uqua. Uqua was awesome but we also have to remember that WoW built upon EQ and while it may have been more challenging at the end game boss runs they still had red circles and mods that dumbed it down.
Blizzard added those more difficult mechanics *because* there were mods that dumbed them down. Their devs have even acknowledged this. They consistently ramped up the complexity of boss fights due to the mods that they knew would be used to make the fights easier. It was a constant escalation until it finally turned boss fights into a paint-by-numbers endeavor and they decided to hamstring the mods to return to sanity a little bit. That had debatable success as at that point the boss fights were still a technical nightmare but the reasons for that, and the players' means to mitigate it, were gone. The net result was that boss fights were damn near impossible to win for a short time.
I'm not sure that counts as difficulty in a boss fight sense. Sure, it was hard dodge this acid spit and avoid that fire when you had no warning but failing meant instant death and/or a raid wipe. Complex mechanics are fine if screwing up means the raid needs to coordinate to fix the problem but when they mean "dance perfectly or die" you have a problem and not one that's difficult so much as irritating.
WoW's current end-game boss fights are admittedly a bit more like their early boss fights in that the raid needs to know what to do but you still have that one-screw-up-and-you-wipe problem that leads to long nights of back to back attempts that won't be feasible in a world where corpse dragging is a thing. Pantheon needs to have more nuanced boss fights where winning isn't about the off chance that everyone performs perfectly but rather coordination and teamwork are the more important factors.
Akilae said:long nights of back to back attempts that won't be feasible in a world where corpse dragging is a thing. Pantheon needs to have more nuanced boss fights where winning isn't about the off chance that everyone performs perfectly but rather coordination and teamwork are the more important factors.
This makes a good point. Unfortunately, Pantheon's current death penalty system encourages mechanically simple boss fights, where the difficulty is only in duration. This is disappointing.
I do think there's a comfy middle ground between "one little mistake from one person = wipe" and the boring simplicity of boss fights of yore. WildStar does a good job at this, where 2-3 people making small mistakes is something you can recover from but certainly makes things more challenging. For example, if a couple people die early on in the System Daemons encounter, you're not necessarily SOL, but you may have to think on your feet and reassign interrupt duty on the two bosses (the interrupters are the most likely to die, as they're soaking a dot and an increased damage taken debuff), swap around people to go downstairs to make sure you have enough CC/damage, and the loss of damage from those deaths is going make the phases last longer (thus increasing potential for further mistakes). If both deaths happened on the same Daemon, that could also result in lopsided damage, and since the boss' health pools need to be kept withing 5% of one another, that will necessitate increased awareness on the part of the other group (or call someone over to help the now lacking group).
Porygon said:Yes. You have 72 people. But very few of those people have to be coordinated. Your pure dps only need to manage their buffs and determine when to disc. The tanks coordinate themselves for the most part. And the clerics just have to be told an order and a pause.
The Rathe Council would like to have a word with you, as would the inhabitants of Uqua the Ocean God Chantry and Txevu Lair of the Elite.
That said, yes early EQ1 raids were little more than Tank n' Spank...all out DPS killing it faster than it kills you. Later one though quite a few raids become quite complex where even a few people not paying exact attention could wipe an entire raid in short order. So to say all EQ1 raids were simplistic is patently false, as is saying all WoW raids were complex.
Vandraad said:Porygon said:Yes. You have 72 people. But very few of those people have to be coordinated. Your pure dps only need to manage their buffs and determine when to disc. The tanks coordinate themselves for the most part. And the clerics just have to be told an order and a pause.
The Rathe Council would like to have a word with you, as would the inhabitants of Uqua the Ocean God Chantry and Txevu Lair of the Elite.
That said, yes early EQ1 raids were little more than Tank n' Spank...all out DPS killing it faster than it kills you. Later one though quite a few raids become quite complex where even a few people not paying exact attention could wipe an entire raid in short order. So to say all EQ1 raids were simplistic is patently false, as is saying all WoW raids were complex.
Well back in the day...Classic bosses by in large had Death touches, their aoe, and a few had siphon and...holy crap the switching from one tank to another when they got death touched while keeping the CH chain going was a field day...But yea I've heard Rathe Council was a huge pain to take down.
If you look at the charts of the amount of time it took to clear classic WoW raids to current raiding, it's insane. It took way longer to clear classic raids, mainly due to the mobs respawning and their being a lot of them to clear through.
In the end though, I did enjoy WoW raids more then EQ raids, but EQ raids are way more memorable. I think pantheon shouldn't make bosses easier because of corpse runs, but maybe make it easier to get back to your corpse in raid designated zones. Although, they should make the bosses pretty tough since most people are use to MMO's now. So they shouldn't hold back on difficulty of the raid bosses. We know to many things now in MMO's. I remember in EQ hiding behind a tree from a griffin...like that was gunna help. We know how to play MMOs well now. So I hope they don't hold back on the raid boss difficulties because of corpse running.
Watemper said:We know how to play MMOs well now. So I hope they don't hold back on the raid boss difficulties because of corpse running.
If they don't hold back on difficulty, you'll get a few wipes in and then have to go spend some oh-so-fun time farming mobs to get your level back. That sounds like the opposite of fun to me, to be honest.