Hi all. I am new member to the forums, so please forgive me if anything shared below is a repeat or a regurgitation of already shard ideas. I am slowly getting through the various threads that have already been created and commented on.
I did want to share some thoughts or viewpoints on how I hope this game will develop. After watching and reading the various details for Pantheon, it seems pretty evident this will be the true successor to EQ1, which as far as I am concerned is a good thing seeing as there is no other game that I have dedicated more time to than EQ1 (I still play emulator versions of EQ1 as well as had my own server at one time, so I am still playing EQ1 almost 20 years later). Having an updated version of EQ1 has been a wish of mine for a number of years, so I am pretty excited for Pantheon.
Skills and Spells not becoming obsolete
A big complaint I had with many of the newer MMOs were 50+ skills or spells a class would receive over the length of their career. Most becoming useless after a few levels to simply be stored in a skill book or spell book, never to be used again. On the other side of the spectrum, EQ1 from the perspective of the melee classes, I always wished for a little more variety and functionality with skills. Although the melee classes did receive disciplines, they generally had pretty long cool downs, so you were always very selective in usage, as were the AA abilities.
I would like to see a middle ground here, somewhere between modern MMOs and classic EQ1. As has been mentioned by devs in some of the streams I have watched, there will be situations where to get the truly master abilities, you will need to venture out and locate Sages or Masters in the world. I think taking this concept and carrying it even further with our common skills and spells will help keep old skills and spells relevant and exciting. I will use an example:
Warrior – Kick ability
In EQ1 one, kick was merely a small supplemental DPS ability until you manage to use AAs to add a chance for a stun component to the skill. In all honesty, I could go entire fights and never use kick or slam, and my team would have no idea. The ability just wasn’t impactful enough to be considered something that should be used whenever possible. I would love to see in Pantheon, skills continue to be useful, but evolve and grow as our characters grow. Let’s take the Kick ability again and enhance it:
Kick – Lvl 5 – Does % damage based on Strength
In areas attuned to around level 20, there is a Gladiator veteran in a zone who offers you the ability to enhance your already learned skill to be something more. He can share knowledge to learn different choices as well, but you can only choose one at a time, but you can come back and convert anytime. So, let’s take this Kick skill and enhance it:
This Gladiator can show you how to perform the following two options (granted you complete some effort):
Kick -> becomes Chest Stomp (Think the Spartan kick will all love) – It does increased damage and knocks an NPC to the ground, thus disengaging or breaking conflict until it gets up (1-2 secs).
or
Kick -> becomes Thunderous Stomp – The Warrior stomps the ground with such great force that all attention in a set distance is directed to the Warrior for a couple seconds (damage % based on strength (less damage than a normal) as it is AE, and not a true AE taunt, but pulls attention for a few seconds then releasing).
The warrior keeps using the kick skill, but it grows in power and usability throughout the career of the warrior. The same process can occur one, possibly two more times, perhaps level 40 and level 50. I think there should be good time stretches in between for the addition of other class abilities and time to learn the best ways to use these skills. Not to mention, if you are doing a similar practice with other skills, there will be plenty to keep you busy between stretches for all skills.
This same process can be done with spells as well. Getting Wizard Burn at level 2, and in a few levels it gets moved to the back of the spell book and forgotten. The craft of learning a spell that causes fire should be something that is expanded on instead of disregarded after causing a few brush fires.
Burn – Level 2 – Does % points of damage based on class stat
@ level 20 Sage offers:
Burn -> Burning affliction – Burn now increases in damage and adds a DoT. When a target is afflicted with Burning Affliction, any targets adjacent will also catch fire and be afflicted by the same DoT.
Burn -> Fire Damnation – Does increased damage and adds a Fire debuff, so all following fire spells do an increased amount of damage.
Instead of giving the wizard 20 different versions of fire spells, they grow their existing spells to become more useful, which provides the same experience of getting something new as they grow without making existing content obsolete. Note: this does not exclude the introduction of other spells or abilities through the growth of the character. In the wizard example, they would get a variety of different spells that could follow the same process, but instead of having 50 or 60 things in their book, they have a spell book of 15 or 20 abilities they have refined to fit a specific fight style.
I think there should be a combination of common trainers to enhance skills located in cities and the more elusive and hidden NPCs. Having to complete a potentially difficult trek to enhance a skill every time could become challenging and somewhat remove the luster of the NPC being special. The more challenging to get to the trainer, the better the improvement.
I think also, making the improvements stackable would be preferable, but could posed some balancing challenges. The cross combining and the numerous combination possibilities grow with the more opportunities to enhance are implemented.
For example:
Kick – Damage -> Chest Stomp – Kick Damage plus Knock Down -> Face Stomp – Kick damage, Knock Down, disorientation after standing for 5 seconds. (a longer reuse timer on kick)
Just me throwing some random thoughts around. Input always welcome. If I don’t put the thoughts down, they tend to become forgotten and at a later time I have to bang my head against the wall trying to remember the details :P
Of course this has been discussed, but at this stage everything has been is discussed. Hah.
Think they have mentioned this route, and trainers that are a little tougher to find to enhance skills. Under the clashes they have SOME skills listed not all of them. You can see some kind the same, my understanding is these are the same skill that are being advanced.
I always did like the EQ2 skills lvls. Simple one can be bought, random drop chest had upgrades, names even more upgrades. And every once in a while you could find the master version or whatever. Not to mention they were books, so they could be used in trades.
Roxxers said: A big complaint I had with many of the newer MMOs were 50+ skills or spells a class would receive over the length of their career. Most becoming useless after a few levels to simply be stored in a skill book or spell book, never to be used again.
So far from what we know, in Pantheon your abilities will scale as you level. So instead of needing to get a new rank of a spell that does more damage, you will instead just do more damage with the ability as your characters innate power increases.
You may want to check out the screen shots for the abilities from the CohhCarnage Dire Lord video. You can find them in NickHotS Dire Lord Stream Summery. Just scroll down to the ability screenshots.
At the bottom of the ability descriptions, there are "Modifiying Attributes". This will allow these abilities to scale based on those attributes. So for example the 'Thresh' ability: Str (20%), Agi (20%), Int (10%). We are not sure yet how these things will calculate exactly, but it lets us know that as Str and Agi (and even Int to a smaller scale) go up so will the damage of this ability.
If you want to see all the Streams and Summeries, you can find them in my Post stickied in the General Forum: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/9329/stream-links-all-in-one-post
Roxxers said: As has been mentioned by devs in some of the streams I have watched, there will be situations where to get the truly master abilities, you will need to venture out and locate Sages or Masters in the world. I think taking this concept and carrying it even further with our common skills and spells will help keep old skills and spells relevant and exciting. *snip* I would love to see in Pantheon, skills continue to be useful, but evolve and grow as our characters grow. *snip* Kick -> becomes Chest Stomp or Kick -> becomes Thunderous Stomp.
So in regards to this part of your post... There will be ways to get updated rare versions of spells by going out and exploring. Finding them in dungeons or off unique NPC's in far off places. So in these cases, you can get stronger spells that do more than the base versions do.
But, your idea of a 'This or That' choice for your abilities is not going to be part of Pantheon. You won't have to choose between Chest Stomp or Thunderous Stomp, and thus be limited to whichever you choose. Instead, you will go out and find Chest Stomp, and then go out and find Thunderous Stomp, and then you will have both abilities at your disposal. Perhaps they might share a cooldown, and so in any given situation you might choose which one you use for that cooldown. But choosing one would not prevent you from ever having the other.
When you have that kind of 'Choose between these two abilities' situation where that choice is permanent, this creates a form of 'Specializiation'. From what we are told, Pantheon does not want any type of Specialization. Any difference between players of the same class will only be from what they have been able to earn so far. So if Player1 found the rare NPC and got a new ability that Player2 does not have yet, this could make them play differently.
But there won't be a case where they both find a rare NPC and then make a choice between 2 versions of an ability... Player1 chooses abilityA and player2 chooses abilityB and then are locked to those choices and are now different 'sub-classes' because of those choices. That is not how Pantheon will work.
Roxxers said:A big complaint I had with many of the newer MMOs were 50+ skills or spells a class would receive over the length of their career. Most becoming useless after a few levels to simply be stored in a skill book or spell book, never to be used again.
I find this confusing. Because Everquest did this exact same thing. There was almost 0 reason to use your lower level spells once you upgraded them, so it wasnt just modern MMOs that did this...
Porygon said:Roxxers said:A big complaint I had with many of the newer MMOs were 50+ skills or spells a class would receive over the length of their career. Most becoming useless after a few levels to simply be stored in a skill book or spell book, never to be used again.
I find this confusing. Because Everquest did this exact same thing. There was almost 0 reason to use your lower level spells once you upgraded them, so it wasnt just modern MMOs that did this...
It's a common D&D feature from scratch, however in D&D you had fixed spell level slot, meaning you kept low level spells as a tool for less dangerous encounters or when out of other solutions.
When games switched from a pre-memmed spell system to a manapool system, things like Damage per casting time, Damage per mana spent, became prevalent, making low tier spells rarely worth it due to lower ratios. It kept relevant in early wow (untill the end of TBC) because spell power was static and not capped for every of the same "spell". Which made, with good amounts of spell powers, deranked spells better at mana conservation for a manageable cost in damage.
Ultimately I found that the deranking gameplay was really interesting but as it wasn't intentionnal, it was not functionnal to the point you had much interest in burning your mana for high rank spells, the difference in damage beeing not worth the mana cost.
Porygon said:I find this confusing. Because Everquest did this exact same thing. There was almost 0 reason to use your lower level spells once you upgraded them, so it wasnt just modern MMOs that did this...
Even more confusing, the modern trend is toward limited action sets and decreasing the number of buttons available - quite the opposite from what is described there! xD
Sorry for the coofusion, as casters in EQ were guilty as well, but in the more recent MMOs I found this issue more prevalent for all classes in later MMOs. I should also detail that I haven't played many MMOs the last 5 years as the trend had become fairly obvious of the type of MMO it was going to be, so I did not waste my time trying them anymore. I may be a bit out of touch if things have changed in the more more current releases.
MauvaisOeil said:Porygon said:Roxxers said:A big complaint I had with many of the newer MMOs were 50+ skills or spells a class would receive over the length of their career. Most becoming useless after a few levels to simply be stored in a skill book or spell book, never to be used again.
I find this confusing. Because Everquest did this exact same thing. There was almost 0 reason to use your lower level spells once you upgraded them, so it wasnt just modern MMOs that did this...
It's a common D&D feature from scratch, however in D&D you had fixed spell level slot, meaning you kept low level spells as a tool for less dangerous encounters or when out of other solutions.
When games switched from a pre-memmed spell system to a manapool system, things like Damage per casting time, Damage per mana spent, became prevalent, making low tier spells rarely worth it due to lower ratios. It kept relevant in early wow (untill the end of TBC) because spell power was static and not capped for every of the same "spell". Which made, with good amounts of spell powers, deranked spells better at mana conservation for a manageable cost in damage.
Ultimately I found that the deranking gameplay was really interesting but as it wasn't intentionnal, it was not functionnal to the point you had much interest in burning your mana for high rank spells, the difference in damage beeing not worth the mana cost.
Yea, I almost rarely used max level holy light during TBC. And we were urged (pretty much required unless we got an early burn) to use lower ranks on Brutallus due to literally needing to spam the tanks nonstop.