Was watching the cohh stream from last year and noticed that the cryptlings have an AoE cone effect that would have hit other cryptlings if the game allowed it. See https://youtu.be/ucyu2Ib81Co?t=4690 around 1:18:15 for a specific example. I think there would be a lot of interesting implications if these mob AoE cone effects could damage other mobs:
1. It has the potential to break mezzes thus making mob positioning more important and nuanced.
2. Cryptlings which get powered up by fire damage might power themselves up naturally in the course of a fight.
3. Savy groups might even devise strategies to increase dps via clever mob positioning and inter mob damage.
It's a small subtle change that has the potential to make the game more interesting strategically, seems in line with Pantheon's core tenants. What do you think?
I agree that friendly fire between players would not work well, but I see no reason why rules for mobs and players need to be exactly the same. It should be a question of whether or not it makes the game more interesting.
Would this not just allow Monk players to gather up the entire zone worth of enemies and train them over to the big raid dragon who will do a massive breath effect, killing all the enemies for you, then FD and let the Dragon reset. Then it's the old "Can I loot all the mobs before the corpses fade" game.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Would this not just allow Monk players to gather up the entire zone worth of enemies and train them over to the big raid dragon who will do a massive breath effect, killing all the enemies for you, then FD and let the Dragon reset. Then it's the old "Can I loot all the mobs before the corpses fade" game.
Yes I think a Mobs AOE should effect other Mobs.
Yes I also think Player AOE should effect other players.
I never did like games taking the easy way out and just blanket "AoE does not effect players" wala problem solved, to me this was an after thought hack to solve a problem that wasn't forseen. (ok, understandable)
It's mentioned previously "I don't see that ending well for melee." and agreed this SHOULD be considered but in more of an organic way. The Wizard has an AoE Rain spell, the Wizard should also be granted a Fire resist spell than can mitigate the AoE damage for the Melee classes, It would be the Wizards resposability to load this on his LAS Bar the same time as his Rain spell then keep the buff up on the Melee, It would be the ranged's resposability to stay the hell out of the Rain spell.
The balancing would have to come into play to make it worth going through all this to use the AoE Rain or it would just never get used.
Sorry but IMHO the blanket "AoE does not effect players (or to make it fair Mob AoE dosn't effect Mob's) was a cop out, easy way out. I think MMORPG's (VR!) could/should have done better.
How MMORPG's should have evolved
Kamlor said:GoofyWarriorGuy said:Would this not just allow Monk players to gather up the entire zone worth of enemies and train them over to the big raid dragon who will do a massive breath effect, killing all the enemies for you, then FD and let the Dragon reset. Then it's the old "Can I loot all the mobs before the corpses fade" game.
Isn't this an issue for player based AoE already? What's to stop a team of wizards with a monk doing this themselves?
Most likely because even a full group of Wizards using AoE will not instantly kill enemies that are at a level that will give you experience. And since Wizards are squishy with low armor, this would mean a bunch of angry enemies ready to eat your Wizards 1 by 1.
I do understand that in EverQuest AoE experience groups were a thing. This was because Enchanters had 3 AoE stuns that they could put on their Casting bar. With 2 enchanters each spamming 3 AoE stuns you could keep massive groups of enemies stun locked long enough for Wizards and Mages to AoE burn these enemies down. It was still risky though because Stuns could be resisted, and if you got unlucky and several enemies resisted at the same time, the Enchanters could get insta killed and the whole group would then get toasted.
The Pantheon Dev's have lots of MMO experience and will likely balance things in such a way that these kinds of Massive pulls can't just be easily AoE'd down. I'm not saying they will prevent AoE groups entirely, but they will likely be greatly limited in how many enemies they can safely handle at once.
Kamlor said: I agree that friendly fire between players would not work well, but I see no reason why rules for mobs and players need to be exactly the same. It should be a question of whether or not it makes the game more interesting.
The primary reason for it is that it already is coded into the game, to some degree at least.
VR told us long ago that some % of the mobs would be classes that players are, and those mobs will have and use some subset of the abilities that players use.
My personal opinion is that it would greatly handicap the NPCs (and thus the Devs who code them) to have NPC friendly fire doing damage to them, while players don't have to deal with that extra layer of concern. At least, until game AI becomes actually smarter than the players in the game :)
Kamlor said: It's a small subtle change that has the potential to make the game more interesting strategically, seems in line with Pantheon's core tenants. What do you think?
I disagree with you on this part. While the principle may be 'subtle', I believe adding this would be a fairly large change to the strategy and thus the coding of the AI. And would make a significantly different game for the players. While I don't think it would necessarily be a worse game, it would certainly be different.
And like a large % of people who have been waiting for the game for years now, I don't actually endorse making a serious change in the game this late in the process. I'm already retired, and I really DO want to play Pantheon before I get too old to keep up :)
Jothany said:My personal opinion is that it would greatly handicap the NPCs (and thus the Devs who code them) to have NPC friendly fire doing damage to them, while players don't have to deal with that extra layer of concern. At least, until game AI becomes actually smarter than the players in the game :)
Based on the stream I linked I think mob friendly fire would have made the game more challenging for the players. For the majority of the fights, the enchanter had all adds quickly on lockdown and mobs were taken down one by one. So if mob friendly fire ever actually occured, chances are it'd break a mez rather than benefit the players in any way.
Kamlor said:Jothany said:My personal opinion is that it would greatly handicap the NPCs (and thus the Devs who code them) to have NPC friendly fire doing damage to them, while players don't have to deal with that extra layer of concern. At least, until game AI becomes actually smarter than the players in the game :)
Based on the stream I linked I think mob friendly fire would have made the game more challenging for the players. For the majority of the fights, the enchanter had all adds quickly on lockdown and mobs were taken down one by one. So if mob friendly fire ever actually occured, chances are it'd break a mez rather than benefit the players in any way.
Thats a cool angle to consider, id hope that some/most npc's are coded to attempt to remove mez from allies with some ability, be it straight up damage or dispell
I think this is definitely one of those "whatever makes sense for the game mechanic" issues rather than attempting any particular level of realism.
Positioning in combat is likely to be somewhat important, but this isn't action combat, and it isn't supposed to be realistically representative of what 'real' combatants would be doing.
As for abusing it by training a zone into a dragon, wouldn't the dragon get the XP? I suppose in general, if friendly fire were a thing, there would be a risk of the monsters out-damaging the groups and 'kill-stealing' the XP. No loot for the players either.
As for mezzes, there already are monsters that intentionally break mezzes, I believe...
And as for the extent of the change, I think it would be major, no? For monsters or players, line-of-sight and area-of-effect effects would be extremely dangerous for all non-ranged combatants.
Please, no friendly fire. It just opens a new can of worms to deal with.
Note, I'm pitching mob vs mob friendly fire only, not player vs player. The only game I can think of where this occurs is the Doom series, and it leads to some interesting emergent gameplay on the player side. However, in an MMO it's hard to predict what all the implications are for this change. For those saying definitely no, what is your basis for your no vote? Have you tried a game with this in place? Is there a concrete scenario you can think of where this detracts from gameplay?
My argument for it links to a specific place in the youtube video where mob on mob friendly fire had the chance to break a mez, which is something players want mobs to do anyway. Maybe the devs try it internally and it becomes too chaotic, or maybe there is a way for players to abuse it. However, if in their internal tests something like this adds to strategic depth I hope others would be willing to try it with an open mind.
Kamlor said:It's a small subtle change that has the potential to make the game more interesting strategically, seems in line with Pantheon's core tenants. What do you think?
While I admire your creative thinking here, I have to disagree that the change would be small. I can easily imagine how a system that allows friendly fire could change combat to such a degree that maneuvering to take advantage of enemy FF (while possibly also simultaneously avoiding player FF) overwhelms other aspects of combat, which would make it feel far less organic in my opinion.
The usual implied "cop out" in mmos or team based games is that people/monsters on the same team are immune to each other's attacks because they're on the same team and don't want to hurt each other. And while this isn't terribly realistic, I understand why it's done, because making FF possible in combat would generally be such a big mechanic that combat would virtually have to be designed around it. In a game like Pantheon, where there are so many layers of strategy in combat already, I feel like having FF would actually take away from the deeper strategy that they want players to be focusing on. Of course, the devs have the final say in that, but that's how my brain sees it.
"Friendly Fire between players" is called PvP :)
This made playing the EQ wizard on a PvP server incredibly less effective in group/raid content...
But I like where your head is at - that would be a cool feature.
Add: Perhaps it would be better suited for melee "cleave" or "whirlwind" type of attacks that other melee players could circumvent through positioning (more easily avoiding player allies) while a tank could capitalize on positioning enemies to hit their allies. But player spell AoE's would likely target all of the melee (including the tank).
While I really want positioning to matter, I don't want this. If it's not enabled for players, it doesn't make sense to be enabled for mobs. Inconsistent rules make the world feel less real. And enabling this opens up way too much potential for exploits and cheezing.
I am not a fan of something like this for mobs. Undoubtedly this would be exploited in some fashion by players. Another is the existence of varied mob types where this being active would (I imagine) hamper design, such as the ambient mobs that show up like the small spiders in Halnir - glass cannon mobs that do a lot of damage but have low hp. If they end up just killing each other or having other normal mobs wipe them out that sucks.
Could be fun on a boss fight gimmick where you have to use the boss' AOE to kill off adds or something, but overall I wouldn't want this in normal gameplay. Most likely, like others said, it would also mean we could open up friendly fire which I wouldn't want to worry about. I also didn't like in EQ when I played around with a wiz/mage was the fact that if you were too close you would get hit with your own rain spell eating a charge that was meant for an enemy. Hopefully that doesn't make it in either.
Love the attention this thread is getting! The main pushback is that this will be too easy to exploit. I certainly agree that this opens up potential for exploitation, but I want to push back on dismissing an idea simply because it has the potential for exploitation---any game design decision that encourages player creativity is going to risk player exploitation. The devs have stated that they want to create a game that allows for interesting and unexpected emergent player behavior. This requires finding the right balance with combat systems are flexible enough for interesting emergent gameplay while being constrained in a way to avoid game breaking exploits.
This all being said, imo the most compelling potential exploit presented so far is from Iksar regarding ambient mobs. Would it be a bad thing though if players found clever ways to position ambient mobs in battle to increase their dps? It seems challenging to do so in a way that is game breaking, I think what's more likely is you get one or two nukes out of an ambient mob increasing group DPS by 10-20%. If savy groups find a way to do that, then awesome! Our game allows creative player behavior that we didn't anticipate, that in general should be a design goal.
I will ignore the inconsistancy of allowing mobs "friendly fire" to damage mobs but not allowing players "friendly fire" to damage players. With just two notes - it clearly *is* inconsistant and Darch is entirely right about player friendly fire being called pvp. So ignoring this, why my "no" vote?
1. More scope for players to grief each other. Training is bad enough when the consequence is one player deliberately getting another player killed on a pve server. Which I don't think should be allowed. But if a player can train or otherwise drag aoe mobs over to kill the mobs a group is camping that adds to the ability to grief. It is hard to get xp or loot when the mobs kill each other before *you* can kill them. And if a mob kills a placeholder and the boss spawns at a bad time that alone can wipe a group.
2. Even apart from griefing. Player xp and loot may be dramatically reduced in any area with aoe mobs. Simply because they *will* kill other mobs and perhaps in rather large numbers. Leaving much less xp and loot for the players, assuming that we do not get rewarded for mobs killing each other.
3. Now let us assume that the same rules apply to boss fights, including raids. Do you want to clear the way to a major boss, win a tough boss fight, and get no loot or experience because under whatever kill-credit rules apply her trash mob spawns in the aggregate did more damage to her than you did? Or delivered the killing blow.
Kamlor said:Note, I'm pitching mob vs mob friendly fire only, not player vs player. The only game I can think of where this occurs is the Doom series, and it leads to some interesting emergent gameplay on the player side. However, in an MMO it's hard to predict what all the implications are for this change. For those saying definitely no, what is your basis for your no vote? Have you tried a game with this in place? Is there a concrete scenario you can think of where this detracts from gameplay?
My argument for it links to a specific place in the youtube video where mob on mob friendly fire had the chance to break a mez, which is something players want mobs to do anyway. Maybe the devs try it internally and it becomes too chaotic, or maybe there is a way for players to abuse it. However, if in their internal tests something like this adds to strategic depth I hope others would be willing to try it with an open mind.
The reason I link friendly fire for mobs to also be for players is because I recall someone in VR mentioning that mob abilities will be based on player classes. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong there. Going based off the assumption that the classes will be shared or at least similar, then if their Fire Explosion spell hits friendlies that means ours would as well.
Similarly, if the way we avoid taking friendly fire would be by casting a resistance spell then that means they would also have access to a resistance spell for their friendlies. I think this would be a terrible solution since the only purpose of that spell would be to cast another spell. This would be a non-issue for non-LAS games, but poor design (in my opinion) in a game where each ability slot is crucial to a playstyle.
If the purpose of adding friendly fire, whether players also get it or not, is to increase tactical strategy like breaking mez, then I believe mobs should handle it in the same way we do. Have mobs that can and regularly do dispell it. We've already been told some mobs will try to interrupt heals just like we would. This would increase the tactical complexity of fights exponentially more than adding friendly fire.
I'm not against it because of exploitations. I think players will find something to exploit no matter what the devs implement in the game. I simply don't see how it adds value in a way that other systems wouldn't do better without the potential drawbacks others have pointed out, including the potential reduction of loot and xp.