A little background about myself: I’ve been a competitive Magic the Gathering player for years with a focus on limited. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what design principles make recent MTG limited sets more fun relative to older sets. The goal of this post is to argue for the integration of some of these design principles into class design in Pantheon.
"What is limited magic?"
Limited magic is where players build decks based off of a random pool of cards they are given. In sealed for example, the player opens 6 packs of 15 cards each (90 cards total) and needs to build a 40 card deck from these 90 cards. In recent years limited magic has dramatically improved in terms of game design. Sets are consistently incredibly fun to play, no two decks play exactly the same and there is a huge space of viable decks that can be built from a given set of 90 cards.
"Why integrate design principles from MTG limited into Pantheon?"
There are striking similarities between building an MTG sealed pool and choosing which skills to run in the Pantheon LAS. In sealed magic, you need to build a 40 card deck from a given random pool of 90 cards. In a Pantheon 6 player group with 8 action slots per player, the group needs to choose a set of 6 * 8 = 48 skills from their collective pool of abilities. Given that each player will have access to different sets of skills, the collective pool of abilities will be sufficiently random from group to group, similar to the randomness in an MTG sealed pool. One of Pantheon’s tenets is for the LAS to have meaning: the skills players choose should be motivated by the environment they are in as well as the group they are paired with. Modern MTG sets are carefully designed in a way that cards play very differently based on the other cards they are paired with. By integrating some of these design principles, the skills players choose and LAS can have more meaning particularly in context with the group makeup.
"How has magic limited evolved over 20 years, and why is modern limited widely considered more fun than older sets?"
Simple Answer: Synergy. Modern sets are highly synergistic making the process of deck building much more nuanced and interesting. The power level of synergistic cards varies based on the amount of synergies they are paired with in a deck. For example, a card which says “When you play an artifact, draw a card” is going to be weak in a deck with 2 artifacts and very strong in a deck with 20 artifacts. When cards are highly synergistic, context matters giving increased variety of gameplay.
Older sets, on the other hand, are way less synergistic relative to modern sets. As a result, deck building becomes formulaic and dull. Context with other cards does not matter at all. Instead, raw power level is all that matters. When building a limited deck in a non synergistic set, one can simply order the 90 cards based off of power level in isolation and pick the most powerful cards that fits within 2 mana colors
To get an understanding of just how packed with synergies modern MTG sets are, consider Figure 1 (bottom of post) showing a recent 40 card deck I drafted. To indicate synergies between cards, I’ve drawn a line between every pair of cards that synergize well with each other. In a 40 card deck with 17 lands and 23 spells, there are 253 pairs of spells total (23 choose 2). Of those 253 possible pairs, a whopping 158 of them are synergistic—meaning there are 158 lines drawn in Figure 1!! (Note many lines are hidden by the fact that some cards appear in multiple copies). Literally every card in this deck has at least one other card that synergizes with it in some way. Not only are there 158 synergy pairs, but the deck spans three archetypes: [Artifacts + Enchantments Matter], [Ninjas] and a little bit of [Sacrifice]. The ability to pack multiple archetypes in a single deck is enabled primarily from cards that synergize in multiple archetypes. One example are cards which are both ninjas and enchantments. Another example is [[Searchlight Companion]] which has synergies in all 3 archetypes.
"Pantheon devs have already stated they plan on adding synergies between different classes, so why are you posting this?"
I want to contrast MTG style synergistic archetypes with one off synergies between individual class skills. An example of a one off synergy might be a Shaman reducing fire resistance to increase the DPS of a wizard fire ability, this is great but that’s just one synergy pair compared to the 158 synergy pairs that exist in Figure 1. Synergies become a full archetype when a large fraction of spells in a deck (or Pantheon group) work towards a common gameplan. In a full Pantheon group there are 48 LAS skill slots, which give rise to 48 * 47 / 2 = 1128 pairs of skills. If just 10% of these pairs synergize that would mean 100+ skill pair synergies in a given group. An example archetype could be when the entire group’s DPS and CC centers around fire damage. Example spells meeting this goal could be:
Shaman fire resistance debuff.
Wizard fire dmg spells
Enchanter buff making melee damage count as fire damage.
Cleric mob debuff which reads “for 30 seconds, everytime a mob is dealt fire damage heal the ally which dealt said damage”
Summoner fire elemental pet
Enchanter buff: “When target ally deals fire damage, they gain X mana”.
Shaman slow: “When target mob is dealt fire damage, decrease its attack speed by 1% for 5 seconds, stacks up to 30 times”.
Rogue fire based poison damage
Any spell starting with “when target mob is dealt fire damage something good happens”...
The point is, with group synergy archetypes, the entire group plans together what their focus wants to be. Maybe there are fire dmg focused groups, or groups built around the knockdown status, or groups that are some combination of both fire and knockdown (a wizard meteor spell may synergize with both archetypes).
When the game is designed in this way, skill strength is largely determined by the skill selection of your allies, thus enriching group centric play. Designed well, the notion of “meta builds” goes away. There won’t be a best warrior build, because the best warrior build is going to depend on the skills brought by the other 5 members of a group. Every new 6 man group starts with a planning phase, what dmg/cc archetypes are we going to build towards, how do we maximize our potential within this archetype? Oh the monk has a sweet weapon that synergizes with fire damage and the warrior is built around the knockdown status? Lucky for us the wizard can cast meteor which synergizes with both. With highly synergistic skill sets involving multiple possible archetype, every group experience feels different. Your class skills will feel different based on what your allies are doing. The game remains fresh for years and players can forever enjoy discovering interesting new interactions between different class synergies.
This ended up being a long post but I hope I portrayed my vision clearly :). Thoughts?
Everquest had this synergy to a degree.
Tanks didn bring much utility beside being able to hold aggro and tank and maybe pull depending on Tank type.
Healers depending on type could either heal super well and have some buffs to increase overall party perfomance by a little or lean more towards being able to buff, debuff more and heal not as good.
Dps classes did mostly just dps and sometimes pull.
Controll classes did often bring good party buffs in form of stat buffs mana regen haste and so on and being able to controll enemies.
I liked the synergies alot it was my only Mmorpg that i player for 7 years + and i hope we one day see another group centric mmo again instead of a solo / themepark based / dps based / mostly non or very low synergy based mmos like today.
But i think you cant make the synergies too overwpowered or stacking at infinitum or it breaks game balance.
In Eq i would say the the groups could about triple the perfomance based on classes they had. Thats a guess but it felt very nice when you had the right combinations and could rack in the xps. Something i miss in todays Mmos and often wish it would have been even more synergistic. Like Tanks n different Dps had more they could add. To me Shaman Enchanter Bard had most buffs debuffs in game so thoose did interest me alot.
I get what you mean re. synergies being more interesting than raw power and agree.
A card deck build game is of course somewhat different to a multi-member group game each with different but interdependant LAS of skills, but, yeah, the Pantheon group synergies will add a very nice level of interest, meaning and satisfaction when you get it right.
I'm no MTG expert (I played some when it first came out) but I have some feelings of caution encouraging too much synergy, though, as, though older decks might have been less interesting, it sounds like the modern game might have gone too far the other way where synergies could make the function of the cards themselves almost immaterial?
Also the average player has no hope of keeping track of too many synergies and would feel like they are gimped if that level of synergy is 'expected' by the game and feel excluded if other players expect them to handle it all.
I've nothing against complexity at all, in fact it is fundamental to what I love about MMORPGs and sets them apart and above other genres, but if those complexities are too emphasised and/or too vital, the game will end up a small elite only club.
I high skill ceiling is a good thing, but not if it sets skilled players *too* far above the average.
I'm reminded of Path of Exile, which has an excellent, though daunting, skill tree (more like a matrix!) and many skills and many ways to slter those skills such that the average player has little hope of understanding it all, never mind making the best of it (or even not gimping themselves). That in itself is not a problem, until the developers atart to cater only to those elite players that can cope with all that complexity. I'm a gaming geek compared to most and got fed up with the level of expertease expected by PoE. My dad enjoyed the 'base campaign' but got to a certain point and could not progress because he was flummoxed by the synergistic systems and had no hope of overcoming his limitations.
TL;DR: I look forward to Pantheon being synergistic and complex, but hope, in order to enjoy the vast majority of the game, it doesn't *require* the kind of depth of understanding that a competitive-level player has.
Also, in competitive gaming, it's not bad if a high skill ceiling has a great effect, since players should be matched against similarly skilled players. In a PvE game, if the skill ceiling makes too great a difference to performance it will mean either 'difficult' content, balanced for 'the skilled', is beyond the majority of players or if 'difficult' content is balanced for the average player, it's way too easy for skilled players.
It's difficult to balance, I'm sure. I'm not saying high end raids should be doable by unskilled players, I'm just saying complex synergistic play should be 'a bonus' to skilled players, not an expected thing for everyone.
Implemented in part it might be an option in an endless dungeon mechanic where you get x random class skills assigned to you at the start and you can unlock additional skill slots and add/remove skills as you progress, that might work. Maybe as a raid mechanic you could have the scenario where your action bar is swapped out and unique abilities per class are used instead and the combat switched to synergies instead of direct attacks.
Implementing the idea wholly is probably too big a change for Pantheon as the work for the development team to make such a shift in combat and balance would be too much, they arent a huge team after all and they have to pick their battles carefully. It does also raise concerns for our average user Joe as they would have to know the ins and outs (possibly in fine detail) of every ability of every class in their party to synergise properly which most people going about their daily lives just dont have time for. This is made even worse for our friend Joe as combat would be built around a "well functioning" party of synergised classes and partying with poor old Joe who despite their best efforts just doesn't get it is going to work out badly for everyone, including Joe.
It is an interesting idea and a game I would be interesting in playing if anyone was up to the task of actually making it but IMO that game would need to be built from the ground up to be like that and marketed as that style of game, neither of which is true for Pantheon.
Focusing on the macro level rather than on the details - it strikes me that the more specific synergies there are the more group leaders will want only specific blends of classes. As in "Forming group for Kobold Queen Caverns. Must have one lightning druid, one cold spell mage, one pet spec ranger, one sneak specialized thief and one HoT cleric". Do we want that or do we want most roles able to find spots in most groups?
Don't jump on the class and specialization names I picked at random they were intended to have nothing to do with actual Pantheon classes.
So I agree with a lot of what's being said that Pantheon can't realistically fully mimic the 100's of synergies that occur in typical MTG deck. However, the proposal is to draw some inspriration from MTG, not fully copy.
One concept devs could draw (with modifications) from MTG deck design is the notion of "column A vs column B synergies". An example is column A cards which are all of the form "When you play an artifact something good happens", whereas column B cards are artifacts. In terms of the Figure 1 synergy graph, all edges connect column A cards with column B cards for a total of num_A * num_B edges. Column A cards don't synergize with each other and column B cards don't synergize with each other, but the power level of column A cards grows with the number of column B cards.
In Pantheon a potential "column A vs column B" synergy could be column A spells of the form "When an ally deals fire damage something good happens" while column B spells are fire damage spells. The cleric spell I proposed reads "For 30 seconds, everytime an ally deals fire damage to target mob, they are healed for X life". Now, I claim that as specified, the existence of this cleric spell will be detrimental to Pantheon group balance. Why? Because the spell is maximized when the entire group deals fire damage. This is a problem because it leads to optimal group compositions as being 100% towards a single archetype (in this case fire based damage). Players which haven't specialized towards fire damage won't be invited to the group and thats a problem because we'd like to allow for random groups of 6 players to both enjoy interesting synergies while feeling like they are competitive with other groups.
So what's the solution? Simply apply diminishing returns to your column A payoffs. Change the cleric spell to "For 30 seconds, everytime an ally deals fire damage to target mob, they are healed for X life. Spell fades once it's healed for 300 total life". It's all a matter of balance. I'd argue that if devs target balance at optimal groups being evenly split between say 4 archetypes, a random set of 6 players can find a good set of archetypes that work for them and feel competitive. It will require column A style payoffs giving diminshing returns to avoid the problem of hyper focused groups, but this doesn't mean that we can't have any form of "column A column B" synergies within Pantheon.
off topic but related to Mt:G. I have a deck. I modelled it off the winning deck I fashioned playing the Microprose game that used to be out on disc that was pretty good and now, cant be found-anywhere. Im not sure how well it holds up. Mt:g started to look like a money sink to me when tempest came out. To the OP's point, sort of, to make things interesting I asked my friends if we could trade un-opened booster packs from the box we went in on. They didn't "get" it. I was thinking, after we split the box, we could then trade un-opened packs (one for one) relying on some sort of ethereal feel. I mean, you shuffle cards right? Faro shuffle? or riffle shuffle? just cut? where's the mix, where's the...influence of chance and luck?
but yeah, I would like to see that concept as a- sealed group event maybe? the group enters into a chamber and has to take off their clothes and weapons and is forced to forget- random?- skills and or spells and has to manage on what they have with some armor and weapons provided by the host. A random thing could be the uber item of uberness for one class that is like a high end item that is now useable by the current level character in the event so everyone can say ooh and ahh and afterwards say I wish I could take it out of the event. Shoot thats almost like a monster mission, but monster missions end up sucking.
Synergies can be very fun and engaging or be a frustrating, cumbersome memorization requirement, depending upon how it's done.
How to do it right:
disposalist said:Also, in competitive gaming, it's not bad if a high skill ceiling has a great effect, since players should be matched against similarly skilled players. In a PvE game, if the skill ceiling makes too great a difference to performance it will mean either 'difficult' content, balanced for 'the skilled', is beyond the majority of players or if 'difficult' content is balanced for the average player, it's way too easy for skilled players.
Absolutely.
LOTRO has a system that uses group events. I don't remember ever being in a group that coordinated the results, it was just click whatever you could when it popped up. Having a system that's tacked on without any real tutorial / explanation, in a game that is only partially based on grouping made it just too convoluted to care. It also depends upon content difficulty. Most group encounters in LOTRO are over so fast, and the group moves on, little need to plan ahead. I'm hoping the slower combat in Pantheon will make cooperation and communication far more important.
Silvermink said:LOTRO has a system that uses group events. I don't remember ever being in a group that coordinated the results, it was just click whatever you could when it popped up. Having a system that's tacked on without any real tutorial / explanation, in a game that is only partially based on grouping made it just too convoluted to care. It also depends upon content difficulty. Most group encounters in LOTRO are over so fast, and the group moves on, little need to plan ahead. I'm hoping the slower combat in Pantheon will make cooperation and communication far more important.
I liked that Lotro system (called heroic opportunities? Or was that EQ2?...), but, yeah, no one used it because you almost never had to group up, so no one knew much how it worked. Also, the pace of combat was not slow and as players got more 'modern' there was less and less tolerence of anything that slowed down combat in the slightest (which the heroic event did, momentarily).
The devs never bothered to improve it and the game got more and more solo-centric and fast paced so...
As much as I think it was inovative and had good potential, the Lotro system was a bit 'gamey' - like a pop-up minigame.
VR is thankfully making a less 'gamey' system, though, with States and inter-class dependencies and whatnot that will be (and feel like) an organic part of the game world.
To add to what disposalist said (and the EQ2 version was called heroic opportunities I am pretty sure) the LOTRO system let you click on icons that popped up and the group could get extra damage, extra healing, extra power or various other things depending on the comnination of icons that were clicked. It used to actually help win difficult fights. Essentially useless today. As with many things in LOTRO it scales imperfectly - or not at all. An extra 100 points of damage mattered more when a mob had 1,000 hit points (called morale in LOTRO) than when it has 50,000.
Hey Kamlor, thank you for the post and the detailed explanation. I've never played MTG so it really helped.
I love the synergy idea. I know a few games have pulled it off. Guild Wars 2 with their fields affecting specific skills, Vanguards debuff system that reacted with certain abilities, etc.
I'd honestly be disappointed if Pantheon didn't have a synergy system although my guess is that status applications are exactly for that. I think it would have to be a little more broad or diverse to not pigeonhole group compositions or class builds. In your examples, instead of fire has x,y,z effects, it could be fire and nature or go even broader with simply ranged magic, melee, etc. for some synergies.
I agree with the diminishing returns being necessary as well. Whether it's limit by a cap (300 healing or 400 damage done) or by number of uses (next 3 melee attacks within 20 seconds). If this is balanced well, it would lead to more people wanting to group for what they bring to their groupmates in addition to all the other benefits of having a group.
I think it'd be even cooler if every class had several synergies connected to some of the most common use abilities in their kit, but synergies focused on buffing other classes. Meaning it would be hard to self-trigger synergies unless you had unique items/gear.
Ex. A shaman has a fire/nature direct damage buff. Can only self-trigger with a rare flaming spear. Or an enchanter's crowd crontrol lasts 20% longer if enemy has chilled status from wizard, but then finds an icebox clicky with a long CD that applies chilled status.