Hey everyone!
I want to preface this concern with this: I understand that it is very likely that the people in the streams are likely either over-geared, over-leveled, the dungeon isn't tuned yet or some combination of this. I am more asking this question because especially after playing WoW classic again this is one of the biggest fears that haunt me-- and it haunts me because I really want to love pantheon and play it for decades (yes decades). I am only writing this post to put my fears out so the dev team will hopefully keep this in mind.
With the release of WoW Classic I got to experience first hand some of the things that I look forward to in Pantheon, even if WoW Classic is simply a small taste of what Pantheon will hopefully offer. With all the good that I got to experience (actual player interaction, a real player economy and many other things of that nature), there are also some negative things that I experienced that I hope pantheon will be able to avoid.
Instead of going over all the negatives and positives (I could spend quite a lot of time going over them) I'd like to highlight one thing in perticular-- and that's because it worries me the most especially after watching the streams.
The biggest issue I have with Classic, especially when compared to retail and other more modern mmo's, is the lack of real difficulty. During my journey to max level in classic I basically did no solo quests, I dungeon'd the whole way. While doing the dungeons I was fairly disapointed with a few things. *edit* I would like to clarify that by lack of difficulty I mean with the assumtion that everyone in the group has put in more than the required amount of time and resources in being prepared for the dungeon/encounter/raid and has the appropriate knowledge. I'm specifically referring to application of knowledge and class through reaction and decision making.
1) The biggest cause of wipes was people not being careful-- wipes caused by lack of perfomance almost never happened.
2) If the group was cautious-- every dungeon (and honestly raid) is either moderately difficult or extremely easy, no dungeon was actually challenging given that everyone had good gear and was careful. The only time it gets difficult is when extra adds get pulled or the group bites off more than they can chew.
3) Bosses are easier than trash packs because of reason #1
I guess I probably could have boiled all three of those things into one point but w/e.
How does this relate to Pantheon and it's streams?
While watching the streams, to me as a viewer there seems to be a lot of feigned excitment (like oh this guy hits really hard or something) when in reality the fights look incredibly easy. I mean they put all this effort into CCing mobs and off-tanking but it looks like they are doing it to put on a show. The mobs they face rarely hit hard enough to really matter. As someone who heals in MMOs mostly I'd be downright depressed if the encounters were that easy all in the name of 'slowing things down'.
I worry that from watching this that the dev team will balance encounters with a focus on how well they do in them and that they will not make it difficult enough for players who are more mid-core or hard-core. Especially with the limited abilities you're able to use at a given time.
It would be very nice if one of these streams they would showcase some content that is actually difficult. Perhaps even content that having someone in the group who has no idea what they are doing makes that content impossible.
Does anyone else share this fear? Anyone else worry that the game is being designed with 90% preperation and knowledge and only 10% skill/micro decisions? It is my hope that I will find plenty of challenge even with the adiquate preperation. It is also my hope that there will be content that I will never complete just because it's too difficult. I hope that not everyone will be able to do all the content.
/rant off
You definitely aren't alone. You may recall some of my posts from another thread:
Particularly:
oneADseven said:For me, it has always come down to finding a balance of proactive / reactive gameplay. Let's consider this excerpt from the FAQ:
10.4 Will multi-boxing be allowed in Pantheon?
Our reaction to multi-boxing is to try something first before we even entertain the idea of artificially restricting it. We want to make combat, especially mid and higher level combat, so tactically intense, with so much going on, so much to do, so much to counter, so many companions to keep alive and the timing of many abilities crucial, that multi-boxing is extremely difficult if not impossible and likely far inferior to having an actual real person in your group.
I don't see how a limited hotbar would help realize that goal. I would argue that it actually contradicts it. The above excerpt focuses on "reactive" gameplay. If the goal is "to make combat so tactically intense, with so much going on, so much to do, so much to counter, so many companions to keep alive and the timing of many abilities crucial ..." -- a limited hotbar does more bad than good. While it's been stated that Pantheon won't focus on having "twitchy" combat, it does appear that players will have to navigate a steady amount of APM (Actions Per Minute) as per the design philosophy. By expanding the amount of abilities that players can use at any given time, it opens up more depth and breadth to the choices that players can make.
Whatever the desired APM ends up being, combat will be more spammy if the amount of available actions are condensed into fewer ability choices. Simple mathematics prove that you can't really have your cake and eat it too, in this scenario. I would prefer a system where every class has at least 12 "situational abilities" that have longer cooldowns, which need to be managed dynamically. If the game emphasizes preparation too much, that would make it predictable. I would rather see dynamic combat where players have to adapt to what is happening in real-time. If I have an emergency ability with a 10 minute recast, I should always have access to it. If you can consistently "predict" emergencies then that would be a sad state of affairs, in my opinion.
When I think about that quoted excerpt, and then look at the class reveal for the warrior ... I like to imagine a combat system where all of those abilities could be leveraged at any given point in time. I'd like to see NPC's throw the kitchen sink at us players and it doesn't seem possible if our ability pool is purposely gimped. When I think about the phrase "the timing of many abilities crucial" -- I'd like to see encounters where I need to time all of my abilities in order to be successful, even if that means not using that which is available in order to conserve precious resources. Reducing the number of abilities that I'm responsible for at any given point in time only serves to dumb down the potential scope of dynamic combat.
I had plenty to say on a related topic some months ago: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/9899/should-spells-buffs-persist-after-removed-from-bar
"It all comes down to priorities. I explained, in detail, how there are multiple goals that have been shared for Pantheon that are on a crash collision course with each other because of the LAS, and the LAS only. (Meaningful preparation vs intense/difficult combat) -- I think the preparation phase of combat is extremely important and it's definitely something I am excited about with this game. That said, I know it's possible to have a very meaningful preparation phase outside of the confines of an LAS system. There are plenty of significant variables that can be played with when it comes to preparing for combat and the LAS just doesn't feel like something that has been "missing" from my previous MMO experiences. I played Wildstar to max level and don't remember their strictly enforced LAS being much of a factor at all. I spent plenty of time strategizing in previous games and even more time testing out the theories of those strategy sessions. When it comes to challenging content there are several factors that we can look at but I think there is a quote that really sums up my thoughts. "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad."
Knowledge and wisdom should both be important when it comes to overcoming challenges, but so to should execution. It helps that execution isn't something you can look up online, and in this day and age, that is more of a rule than an exception, especially if we're talking about a game with a meaningful death penalty. The combat system described in the multi-boxing excerpt sounds like something that should focus on execution more than knowledge and wisdom. While planning for the battle ahead is indeed tactical, it isn't intense. In order to achieve the ideal combat system, as it was described, we're really going to need to see an evolution to EQ style combat. We're talking about taking something from one end of the spectrum (EQ had a notorious reputation for being one of the easiest MMO's to multi-box) and putting it on the totally opposite side (making boxing extremely difficult, if not impossible) -- this is going to require consistent doses of tense moments where timing and critical decision making are the difference between victory and defeat. The combat system, as it has been described, is going to be intense, broad in scope, and highly active. In order for that to be true, we need to set the stage properly.
By limiting the maximum size of a hotbar, you're also limiting the breadth of the actions that players can make. That runs directly counter to goals related to the combat system that is described in the FAQ. While it's possible that the desired APM (Actions Per Minute) could be funneled into the LAS, we have to stop and think about what that means. When I try to do that, all I can see is a very muddy picture. The idea that 12 abilities are the maximum amount of actions that I can be responsible for, at any given moment, in an extended and intense fight, feels very limiting. That means there are less abilities that I can counter with, and less abilities that require critical timing. For me, that translates into less difficult combat, and more difficult preparation. I don't think this is necessary when there are already 4 major "Pantheon Differentiators" that will be elevating the preparation phase: Situational Gear, The Living Codex, Dispositions, and the Climate System. It's possible that the Perception feature could also tie into meaningful preparation.
Considering everything I know about Pantheon, this is not an area that I am worried about at all. I fully expect the preparation phase of combat to be an integral part of finding success in this game and that I will be "counting down" engages for all challenging encounters. Combat, on the other hand, seems different. The idea that Pantheon is going to be difficult to multi-box is more of a sad joke than something people are actually taking seriously. I would like to see that narrative change as soon as possible and believe that removing the LAS is the best way to make it happen. I want to see the world unleashed from the same restrictions that govern player behavior and turn into something much more intense, demanding, and dangerous. (If players have their scope of abilities limited, so to must the development team while designing encounters, to compensate.) Access to more abilities (with conditional logic), more temporary buffs (with longer cooldowns), and more potential for errors that lead to consequences. That would make multi-boxing difficult, in my opinion. Well ... that and XP Chains / Skill Chains."
I'm not a fan of what I have seen thus far and hope that the LAS gets scrapped. Multi-boxing is antithetical to the overarching spirit and vision of this game.
Unfortunately, the FAQ excerpt that explains why multi-boxing would be difficult in Pantheon (in the vein of reactionary gameplay) ... it's several years old, and appears to be irrelevant at this time. Challenge has been more recently defined as:
"When we say Pantheon will be a challenging game, what does that mean exactly? Difficulty can be measured in many ways and is rarely one-dimensional. Some games tune and measure difficulty in terms of actions per minute (APM) or rapid pattern recognition and response. They are challenging because combat requires the player to respond on cue to exact patterns or to fire off a rapid sequence of keystrokes in a short timeframe with little margin for error. But with Pantheon, our philosophy of challenge puts less burden on nimble fingers and more on what we call strategic depth: designing gameplay around a longer-term curve that asks players to make decisions not based purely on reaction time, but by increasing players long-term reward or lowering their long-term risk based on a growing knowledge of the game."
https://pantheonmmo.com/newsletter/2019_march_behind_the_design/
In other words, it appears that the focus on how "challenging combat" will be delivered has shifted in the opposite direction of what is listed in the FAQ. It's very disheartening to a lot of folks who prefer to play a game that isn't infested with multi-boxing.
Hopefully our fears get proven wrong and they showcase a fight that is challenging.
Another pitfall I could see happening is mysterious fights can often be disguised as a challenge. I need challenge that given all information (fast forward a year past launch) fights are still difficult with good preparation and watching a youtube video on good strategies to defeat the encounter. FFXIV is a perfect example of fights that seem hard initially but once you learn them they are a joke.
I do think having low APM strategic combat is possible however I just don't see it yet in any of the demonstrations or concepts written out in articles. They haven't yet (to my knowledge) described how fights will be challenging even with low APM design. I don't see how they can force micro decisions with a low skill count low apm design, which at the end of the day is the only way to have low APM skill.
Say what you want about Wildstar, it was the only game I've played in a long time where normal dungeons were seriously a challenge for at-level characters - and not just the boss fights, either. Some of that was down to the positioning requirements in Wildstar's gameplay but a lot of it was simply in the numbers as well. Things were tuned hard, on purpose.
It was honestly refreshing for me as a gamer, to play a game where things were NOT simply handed to me.
I think Pantheon has an opportunity to make things challenging while keeping the pace less frenetic. There were many fights back in early EQ, for example, that were seriously challenging simply in terms of the numbers - where success or failure were balanced on a knife edge, and you could do everything right and still lose just because the monsters got lucky. The issue however is that player power will increase over time. If there's any chance at all that players can find a way to out-gear encounters, or use certain abilities together, or anything else to trivialize gameplay, they will do it.
So what we need to see from VR is not only a commitment to make things hard initially, but to keep them hard, by actively working to limit players from becoming too powerful.
Most games fail at doing that. We'll see if Pantheon can buck the trend.
In some of the older videos the groups wiped repeatedly on content that was the same level and above. The latest streams and videos they've showed they have been 8-5 levels above the content and/or geared out in very top end gear.I wouldn't take the streams/videos very serious in terms of difficulty, as we've seen a wide range of failure and success.
https://youtu.be/L_oFEy4YGTg?t=2282 (wiping on boss - think they wipe 3 or 4 times trying the boss in that video - was on level for content)
https://youtu.be/KwEiwRLQzTU?t=2804 (successful boss kill after 2-3 attempts - was on level for content)
https://youtu.be/eq6ftMk21FA?t=116 (Fighting two mobs and dying in glorious fashion - they where slightly below level)
https://youtu.be/2FXXE4IWu6k?t=500 (grossly over geared)
https://youtu.be/UNbcrIWk8B4?t=1160 (grossly over levelled for the content)
I know these videos links may not really help ease any worry about the game difficulty I just hope it shows there is a challenge when you do content on level with level appropriate gear, but the challenge is more from numbers, such as Orcs hitting hard and taking a fair bit of time to down. I don't think we will see any real challenge until we start seeing raid content or high level content right now all we've seen is low level content up to mid level on the ramparts. I don't expect this game to have a high action per minute requirement and with the limited action bar your not going to see frequent oh **** moments that cant be handled via normal means. I only really expect challenge to come from the hard numbers at this point and maybe some reaction skills such as getting out of lighting or climbing surfaces to avoid encounters.
I believe they can make a challenging game with limited action bar and slower actions per minute requirements, i'm just not sure we've seen it yet.
So your saying you want bosses that run around chasing you or Teleporting to you, so they can one shot players causing chaos among the group as everyone runs in circles, while at the same time has to dodge the floor hot spots that appear, or the mystery lasers that comes from the walls killing those who touch them.
Nubi said:I mean, not sure about getting oneshot by something un-avoidable but the rest of that sounds fun.
Nothing wrong with wanting what you want, but thats a modern MMO style of gameplay where the playing crowd is throwing back redbulls and fireball shots, not juggling a colostomy bag while dreaming of the glory days saying things like “Back in EQ”.
They said low APM not low reaction. I hope I can't just play with one hand behind my back while watching TV. Dodging a hazard is not even a 'modern' mechanic for MMO's it has been around for a VERY long time.
Is there a difference between three adds spawning that your tank needs to pick up or party needs to CC or they will kill your healer instantly and having to dodge a mechanic on the ground?
Will the damage be so low that you don't need to react quickly as a healer to get that 3 second cast time off to drop a big heal on the tank who's getting pummled hard by a boss who suddenly enraged?
All these things require quick THINKING and reaction-- not APM.
I sincerly hope that by low APM they don't mean low input stimuli. Just because the game doesn't require smashing buttons every 1.5 seconds doesn't mean it can't have it's chaotic, difficult and intense moments where multiple things are happening at once and you have to prioritize your thoughts and decision making quickly and correctly.
They did say you'll have around 3 seconds to get out of the lighting aoe or it instant kills you, and has a splash radius so the closer you are to the centre the more damage you take. So there will be avoiding ground targeted aoes, we just have not seen any yet other than the lighting animation. (https://youtu.be/UNbcrIWk8B4?t=3176)
and the tanks that are on level and not over geared do take high damage in the videos we've seen.
I think you'll get what your asking for when we see the raid encounter they are working on for Project Faerthale, lighting to dodge, climbing during combat, high spike damage and I imagine positioning and much more.
I'm glad to see that-- forcing casters to be mobile occasionally is a great way to add complexity without adding much APM. Hopefully that is just the tip of the iceburg and they will have some faster AoE's to avoid as well. Three seconds is a long time.
Edit: I was re-reading OneA's post and one thing really resonated with me, "Access to more abilities (with conditional logic)". On one of the streams I saw a warrior ability that's a small aoe stun if you're below 20% HP. Abilities liket that are fantastic and awesome and add so much to the game. I just hope the limited number of ability slots will allow for those types of abilities to shine through.
I'm not too worried by the apparent difficulty in the videos - they found it easy when they were overleveled and hard when they weren't - we've also seen a 'real' group of people (Bazgrim etc) from pre-alpha having a EQ-like hard time just doing normal group stuff in Black Rose Keep once they got to level appropriate content. It's all to be balanced still in testing anyway.
But I'm not a big fan of the very limited toolbar approach shifting much of the tactics to preparation. I don't want an 'action' game and I don't want 5+ toolbars of 10 skills, but 2 toolbars might be better than one. Much of the skill in *any* game should come from meaningful choice. To have much of that choice shifted to before the encounter and then locked when in it just strikes me as frustrating and not as interesting/fun as it could be.
There can still be a ton of prep with gear and buffs, both of which could be made as hard as you like to change when in an encounter.
Classic EQ wasn't perfect and this is one of the aspects I found very frustrating. You would set up your toolbar of skills (for a caster anyway) and at relatively low level find you have many more spells than toolbar slots and just aren't using spells that you weren't in common need of because it would be mad to slot them in favour of stuff you regularly need. Swapping out spells during combat was horribly painful, not just from the intentional (?) mechanics, but from the multiple UI click-click-clicks and the spellbook flipping it required.
Later incarnations of EQ saw the addition of a few more hotbar/spellgem slots, the ability to load in different pre-defined hotbar/gem contents and improvements to the spellbook. It was still painful and an irritant, not an immersive, tactical choice.
I have hopes that VR will eventually make a good choice in this regard, but am worried, too, that they might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They appear to be attempting to balance preparation and action (maybe too much toward preparation) and somewhat disregarding the skill and fun of having options/choice available when you are *in* an encounter.
Also it does link back to the concern of the OP re. difficulty. If you make encounters difficult and you make a large part of the challange be toolbar preparation the upshot must be that a lot of unfamiliar encounters will simply get you killed quite unavoidably. This could be very frustating if the difficulty and death penalty are anything like high enough to make the game exciting most of the time. But if you set the difficulty such that, even with sub-optimal toolbar preparation, you can squeak through an unfamiliar encounter, well, then when you *do* know what the setup should be, the encounter will be too easy.
It just strikes me that this would be further exacerbated by encounters being in any way dynamic. It would be excellent fun/excitement for monsters to react somewhat differently from time-to-time - it's a common player request for encounters to be dynamic and VR are introducing stuff like Dispositions, but if the difficultly of an encounter is largely related to preparation, dynamic encounters, which to some extent cannot be prepared for, will get you frustratingly killed. Didn't know that Orc would be an Alarmist, so you didn't select your Snare when you ran low on toolbar slots. Group died when it ran to fetch friends. So slot Snare next time. Oh dear, this time it's Hasted and you slotted Snare instead of Slow. Group dies because you couldn't cut down its damage output. Etc.
I would rather there were more choice in the skills you can employ during an encounter so that going into something unfamiliar is an exciting exercise in mixing your skill use in new way rather than just discovering you weren't prepared and dying horribly to come back and try again.
I hope VR are developing the toolbar/spellbook/buff-casting/gear-equipping systems such that prep and usage techniques can be tweaked and balanced as testing goes on.
I may be old, but I can remember and choose from more than 10 skills during an encounter.
I'm not saying I want *no* preparation to be necessary, but I would like it to be more evenly balanced than 90% prep.
I remember watching earlier streams of "dev" groups, and they (dev group) would be getting hammered. After a single pull the group would have to rest. Nice.
Recent streams I haven't been seeing that. The most recent one with Cohh looked like any other EQ2 or WoW group I've seen for the past 10 years.
Two or three mobs came, they were able to get two mezzed before anything silly happened and the just slowly take them down. It was a bit of a let down. Maybe they were much higher level than the mobs...I don't recall.
disposalist said:
But I'm not a big fan of the very limited toolbar approach shifting much of the tactics to preparation. I don't want an 'action' game and I don't want 5+ toolbars of 10 skills, but 2 toolbars might be better than one. Much of the skill in *any* game should come from meaningful choice. To have much of that choice shifted to before the encounter and then locked when in it just strikes me as frustrating and not as interesting/fun as it could be.
Exactly. Give me 3 hotbars of abilities and let me mess up badly enough that I lose. If I die, at least it would be from bad decisions I made during combat, not from ignorant preparations. I just think it's exceedingly silly to say "Oh you have this ability but you can't always use it."
"Gotta put it on your ability bar with only 9 others to be able to use it."
I'm just hoping if it's level appropriate, if 3 mobs come, by the end of it, a couple people are dead, and everyone is out of power. High power regen (especially out of combat) would be nice, but the use of our abilities needs to be a part of the combat puzzle. We need to calculate if we should use this ability or considering the power costs and the point at which we are in the fight if it's a good time to use this ability or that.
Honestly, until there are smart AI's mobs/raids will be nothing more than a dance. Even current WoW it's just a dance. Once you figure out the formula you just dance and win. Until there is some sort of smart AI, or some randomly or purposful generated move sets and behavior patterns bosses will be easy to learn.
An example would be let's say a raid mob was destroying the main tank with a tank buster...so the raid brings in additional tanks so when one dies they can get rezzed and back into the fight by the time the others die...and you rinse and repeat. However, the raid mob's perception sees that you brought more tanks and decides to call in some elite followers with certain auras and a whole list of other problems to deal with.
Another example would be lets say your raid is having trouble with the aoes of a certain raid boss. You start to stack more healers for next time and then the raid boss sees that and decides to do a summon on a random healer and kill the healer, or starts to cc healers in the back and causes other players to dispell.
In these examples the boss changes based off the raid makeup. Now you can try to find the easiest set up, or you try to figure out what you need to do with what you got. If the raid bosses/mobs in general are the same every encounter...then they become easy later on. Then you can add another layer of patterns that a raid boss will take. You can have several variances of this. Now this takes time to do...but in the end if mobs/bosses don't go this route then it's basically still a dance. So whichever MMO goes down this path will probably be the new revolution of MMOs...along with Virtual reality.
Make Pantheon like EQ and FF11 difficulty, challenges , risk and reward. I'll gladly pay $25-35 subsciption if its mean this game is NOT going to be a cookie cutter modern mmo, treadmill, hold your hand, ( ! ) everywhere, run throught mobs combat action spam sizieure, flamboyant gear dying, microtransaction cash shop p2w, stupid cosmetic gears, and other dumb mondern mmo garbage.
also PLease no marriage in mmo.
/outburst over
Hell i remember FF11 i was lv 20 doing Main story quest the Boss Instance (BCNM lv15-20) fight. I was geared but i lost so much that i needed a sh*t ton of health potion just to win and even that i had 12% Hp left and i didnt have 9 ability to use only 4-5 maybe. That Boss forced me to lv up, gear up, buy tons of potions, I really enjoy that challenging fight i had to keep buying potion everytime i LOST...
I understand your concern OP but let see what this Live Stream coming up on 10/23/2019 going to be like!
this is not a break down of words just responding to certain points-
... it haunts me because I really want to love pantheon and play it for decades (yes decades). I am only writing this post to put my fears out so the dev team will hopefully keep this in mind.
ya don't have to want to love XD
... even if WoW Classic is simply a small taste of what Pantheon will hopefully offer. With all the good that I got to experience (actual player interaction, a real player economy and many other things of that nature), there are also some negative things that I experienced that I hope pantheon will be able to avoid.
i think it's unfair to compare wow classic tastes to pantheon. they are going to be completely different beasts. there will be pros and cons. i think it's important to accept the totality of the game.
The biggest issue I have with Classic, especially when compared to retail and other more modern mmo's, is the lack of real difficulty. During my journey to max level in classic I basically did no solo quests, I dungeon'd the whole way. While doing the dungeons I was fairly disapointed with a few things. *edit* I would like to clarify that by lack of difficulty I mean with the assumtion that everyone in the group has put in more than the required amount of time and resources in being prepared for the dungeon/encounter/raid and has the appropriate knowledge. I'm specifically referring to application of knowledge and class through reaction and decision making.
these bit here is due to societal changes i would say. everyone wants to be winners. everyone is entitled to 'stuff'. the reward without the work, trial and errors, hardships and failures is what we've(western society) been moving towards.
Does anyone else share this fear? Anyone else worry that the game is being designed with 90% preperation and knowledge and only 10% skill/micro decisions? It is my hope that I will find plenty of challenge even with the adiquate preperation. It is also my hope that there will be content that I will never complete just because it's too difficult. I hope that not everyone will be able to do all the content.
fear is what makes it exciting ^.^ i do agree that preparation is a bigger part with the las12, but maybe not a 90/10 split with skill. adapting to a disposition(think this shouldn't be obvious in ui, but information should be observed) will probably fill this role.
AbsoluteTerror said:Make Pantheon like EQ and FF11 difficulty, challenges , risk and reward. I'll gladly pay $25-35 subsciption if its mean this game is NOT going to be a cookie cutter modern mmo, treadmill, hold your hand, ( ! ) everywhere, run throught mobs combat action spam sizieure, flamboyant gear dying, microtransaction cash shop p2w, stupid cosmetic gears, and other dumb mondern mmo garbage.
FF11 was uniquely positioned to offer slow-pace strategic combat, where resource management was intense, where group coordination/communication was imperative, without the modern "don't stand in the bad" telegraphed combat and hyperactive button-mashing that we see in games like WoW/FFXIV/Wildstar. XP Chains and Skill Chains went a long way toward making that happen.
oneADseven cited this as something to be concerned with:
"When we say Pantheon will be a challenging game, what does that mean exactly? Difficulty can be measured in many ways and is rarely one-dimensional. Some games tune and measure difficulty in terms of actions per minute (APM) or rapid pattern recognition and response. They are challenging because combat requires the player to respond on cue to exact patterns or to fire off a rapid sequence of keystrokes in a short timeframe with little margin for error. But with Pantheon, our philosophy of challenge puts less burden on nimble fingers and more on what we call strategic depth: designing gameplay around a longer-term curve that asks players to make decisions not based purely on reaction time, but by increasing players long-term reward or lowering their long-term risk based on a growing knowledge of the game."
Not out of love of fast paced, all that matters is how quick your fingers move, action combat - but out of concern that that this will make multi-boxing easier. Unless I badly misread the post.
From my perspective, multi-boxing cannot possibly be as bad as abandonning the concept of "strategic depth" as outlined in the quote. If multi-boxing is an issue, there *have* to be better ways to combat it than turning Pantheon into an action-combat game.
I have never multi-boxed. I do not plan to multi-box. But in MMOs I have played it has seemed to be a minor annoyance to the rest of us not a serious problem. Outside of being used by goldsellers where the issue wasn't that their teams would sometimes get in the way - the issue was the goldselling and spamming. And the use of "bots". Let us not forget that multi-boxing and botting are very different things and typically in MMOs botting is banned and multi-boxing is not.
*oneADseven. Are you seriously concerned about multi-boxing because it is often associated with botting, because it is sometimes associated with goldselling and spamming, because you fear so many of us will multi-box that it will make it materially harder for those that do not to get groups, because of a potential impact on the economy as solo *players* with multiple *characters* take down group content, or have I totally missed the issue? Is it a serious concern to you because of what you fear it will do in Pantheon or because of what you have seen it do in other MMOs?
Perhaps my *lack* of worry about multi-boixing in Pantheon is ignorent or short-sighted.
dorotea said:*oneADseven. Are you seriously concerned about multi-boxing because it is often associated with botting, because it is sometimes associated with goldselling and spamming, because you fear so many of us will multi-box that it will make it materially harder for those that do not to get groups, because of a potential impact on the economy as solo *players* with multiple *characters* take down group content, or have I totally missed the issue? Is it a serious concern to you because of what you fear it will do in Pantheon or because of what you have seen it do in other MMOs?
Perhaps my *lack* of worry about multi-boixing in Pantheon is ignorent or short-sighted.
The allowance of multi-boxing is antithetical to the spirit of this game. Originally, VR had a stance where they were going to make boxing "extremely difficult, if not impossible" and cited an active combat system as the solution. When I think of active-combat, it's not what we see today, or what most people categorize it to be. It's not about having high APM. I'm not so worried about having "nimble fingers" as much as an "attentive mind" -- if the preparation phase of combat is emphasized too much then we run into a situation that is ideal for multi-boxing. FFXI was the golden standard in terms of what I would like to see in Pantheon. Slow combat, big focus on resource management, cooldown management, coordinating abilities with other players, and a huge emphasis on macro-play over micro-play.
It wasn't about stringing together the perfect sequence of abilities and spamming it non-stop as part of a rotation. Less was more. It was about paying attention to everything going on around you ... what NPC's were nearby, what they were doing, what your allies were doing, and using all of that information to make an informed decision on how you should respond. FFXI had a snail-like pace and it really needed to. There were so many important things going on that the game had to slow down a bit so that people could pay attention to those details. It really truly mattered when certain abilities were used because it created windows of opportunity. So again, the main distinction I want to point out is ... when I say I want active combat, particularly in the vein of what was described in that FAQ excerpt ... it's not about having nimble fingers ... it's about requiring an alert mind that is capable of assessing a dynamic landscape and making on-the-spot decisions that can be the difference between victory and defeat.
To be clear, this is the part I am concerned about:
"Some games tune and measure difficulty in terms of actions per minute (APM) or rapid pattern recognition and response. They are challenging because combat requires the player to respond on cue to exact patterns or to fire off a rapid sequence of keystrokes in a short timeframe with little margin for error."
That is exactly what I want to see. I want to see tense situations where I recognize a pattern of various behaviors/abilities being used, in real-time, and then reactively play around that. I want there to be little margin for error. I think it's a mistake to emphasize the preparation phase too much because that makes a strategy guide or video 10x more powerful. If knowledge is truly half the battle then we're all a hyperlink away from being halfway to victory. I am a huge fan of strategic depth and I think a lot of that can be facilitated through other aspects of play. FFXI didn't need an LAS that limited players to 10 abilities. Instead, every ability in the game carried a lot of weight. You didn't have to proactively plan which ability you were going to use in an upcoming fight ... you always had access to it. It was very much like what Disposalist/Kittik described earlier. 2-3 bars, even at max level. Having access to more abilities added to the idea of strategic depth and knowledge ... but in an active way, and active is a good thing when it comes to requiring real players to beat content. Adding an extra bar or two of abilities doesn't necessarily mean that the APM is going to go up in a huge way. It just adds depth, and breadth, to the decision making process for players. More emphasis on managing when/how I use my cooldowns, and when/how I use my combat resources, than which ones I will be using ahead of time.
10.4 Will multi-boxing be allowed in Pantheon?
Our reaction to multi-boxing is to try something first before we even entertain the idea of artificially restricting it. We want to make combat, especially mid and higher level combat, so tactically intense, with so much going on, so much to do, so much to counter, so many companions to keep alive and the timing of many abilities crucial, that multi-boxing is extremely difficult if not impossible and likely far inferior to having an actual real person in your group.
That is what I wanted to see in Pantheon. If you compare that with the more recent quote where "rapid pattern recognition and response" and "combat that requires players to respond on cue to exact patterns" and "little margin for error" are characterized as things that Pantheon will be emphasizing less, in favor of knowledge/preparation, I find that really disappointing. To me that suggests that they have abandoned that mindset and instead of trying to cultivate a style of play that makes multi-boxing extremely difficult, if not impossible, they will be enabling it.
oneADseven. Thanks. I think we want the same thing almost to the word - but we are interpreting something differently. So this is a semantics issue, which can be ignored, not a difference in how we want gameplay to work - which goes to the heart of what should not be ignored on development forums.
((They are challenging because combat requires the player to respond on cue to exact patterns or to fire off a rapid sequence of keystrokes in a short timeframe with little margin for error."))
I read this as meaning action-combat in the sense used by Neverwinter and other MMOs that claim to be action combat games. You see a circle on the ground. If you start running within 1/3 of a second you live. If you start running after half a second you die. You see the boss lower her shoulders. You cast an interrupt within 1/3 of a second you live. You cast it after 1/2 of a second the group wipes. This is entirely antithical to what I want to see in Pantheon. I believe I can fairly say that it is *also* antithical to the "snail-like* pace you describe in FFXI. It sounds as if we both want enough time to actually think while fighting, not have the result depend over and over on whether the fingers moved within 1/3 of a second or half a second.
I am going to semi-disagree with oneADseven and Dorotea here. I do not think that positional requirements (telegraphs, etc) are inherently bad - in moderation.
I would rather see combat in Pantheon require focus and attention to ALL aspects, including positioning. Meaning, every player should be forced to pay attention to where they are standing, both from a defensive (avoiding damage) and an offensive (doing damage or using abilities) perspective.
Whether or not the game uses actual ground telegraphs to communicate this is immaterial. But there should be things like frontal cleaves, splash AoEs, line-of-sight abilities, and so on, where you have to MOVE your character to avoid or mitigate them. Likewise, there should be abilities that require you to be behind the target, or flanking it, or even in front of it.
Take the humble shield, as an example. Shields presumably confer some ability to block melee attacks made against you - as long as the opponent is in front of you. If you're standing with your back to an enemy, that shield is really not doing you much good. Unless you somehow have it strapped to your back, then it's not helping you with anything in front of you.
We like to argue about labels like "action combat" and "modern games" but the concepts they leverage are not inherently bad - it's just the implementation where those concepts got overused, that we didn't like.
I think what we need in Pantheon's combat is a fusion of ability stimulus/response (the mob is casting, I need to interrupt) as well as positional stimulus/response (the mob is winding up for its frontal cleave, I need to get out of the way). You can add in additional concepts like Wildstar's idea of interrupt armor or FFXIV's animation telegraphs (no circle on the ground, but you see that dragon rearing back to do something) to make combat engaging or challenging in terms of what the player is doing without requiring "button mashing".
I will also submit to you that some games are MUCH worse about button mashing than others :) I love most of SWG to death, for example, but combat there was ALL about mashing the buttons you had. Even in EQ, we learned to simply spam kick and taunt every time they were up, and save bash for when we needed to interrupt a cast.
Anyway, if we want combat in Pantheon to be challenging it cannot simply be a numbers game, no matter how brutally those numbers are tuned. And as much as we all want abilities to be tactically meaningful, there needs to be more to it than simply requiring them to use X at the right time if we want to prevent rotation-based play and have players actually thinking while they're in combat. Defensive and Offensive positioning is the obvious third aspect here, and it has the advantage of also being the aspect that is most impacted by the environment. I mean, it's a lot harder to flank an opponent when you're fighting next to a boiling pool of lava, or at the edge of a cliff on a windy day. Right?
Nephele - if you were trying to disagree with me you failed - badly. I suspect oneADseven will say the same. Of course combat needs to reflect position with respect to the enemy, position with respect to battlefield obstacles, proper use of your equipment so that with a shield you may try very hard to block and without one you try to dodge, paying close attention to enemy movements and actions so that when the dragon rears up and screams "Die ...NOW" maybe this isn't the time to save any interrupts for some future use, etc.
Position surely will be more important for some classes and encounters than others. If fighting an acid breathing dragon any good tank will surely do her best to keep the dragon facing away from most of the group. If fighting an enemy whose powerful attack is a tail whip the opposite being manifestly true. Many attacks will work better from the side or rear of the enemy. The classic woe of the rogue cursing how ugly the enemy is - "You accursed foe - how can I backstab when I can't tell your face from your arse?"
My point is almost entirely a matter of emphasis.
A large glowing circle on the ground does *not* reward or encourage paying attention to battlefield actions. It is rather hard to miss, so little attention at all must be paid to what the enemy is doing. So the dislike of glowing circles on the ground which most of us share is consistent with everything you say.
The emphasis to which I refer is nothing more nor less than timing. If reacting within 1/3 of a second saves me and reacting within 1/2 of a second means a wipe - how fast I move the icon and click is *far* more important than whether I recognize what the enemy is doing as dangerous, and whether I know the precise right thing to do to counter it. I may know my abilities as well as anyone in the game knows theirs, yet I am still going to die while the 17 year-old with perfect vision and quick reflexes will live.
So it is the *pace* of combat that I consider critical not its complexity. I don't want it dumbed down at all.