I never played Everquest or Vanguard so I have no idea how boss encounter were tuned(difficulty) in those games, and I would like to know how difficult or tightly tuned encounters might be in pantheon.
My only point of reference for mmo raiding is WoW HC raiding (before mythic was implemented) and mythic raiding, I did both to a relatively high standard (around world 100) before I quit.
For those who are familiar with high end content in wow, especially raid bosses, will know that it’s insanely well-tuned in terms of all the thing you need to down the encounter, the dpsers need to squeeze every bit of dmg, tanks screwing up is the end, the heals need to be on point, and room for error is terms of messing up mechanics is basically non-existent.
So I’m asking the veterans of other games that are similar to Pantheon (mainly EQ and VG) what type of difficulty tuning will the boss encounter most likely have in Pantheon.
Tuned – difficulty adjustment. (Don’t know if this word is used in other mmos)
Depends what expansion, depends what era, there are a plethora of factors involved here that make this a very hard question to answer. I'll bite though.
Everyone that I know considers Velious to be the epitomy of Everquest, the time when it was the best version of Everquest that ever existed. So I'll use that for reference.
Raid bosses in Velious required between 20 (very low end, high geared high skilled players) to 100 players, every boss was unique, no area of the game was tuned as such that you were meant to do it with a set amount of people. For instance, you had King Tormax, Statue of Rallos Zek, Derakor the Vindicator, and Avatar of War all in the same zone, in similar areas. However, on launch, before people acquired the gear from said bosses, Vindi could be killed with approximately 30-40, statue while Tormax took 50, and avatar could not be killed until tanks were fully expansion geared and 100+ players were present.
None of this was hardcoded in any way, it was just what players found to be the case. Most servers did not kill Avatar of war before the next expansion released, this of course would be heresy in today's MMO world and players would cry foul.
Alot of the difficulty of Everquest was differant than that of modern MMO's, modern MMO's you just pull the boss press your keys in the right order and dodge stuff and you win.. not the case with Everquest. Most of the difficulty was in splitting raid bosses away from trash mobs to get a "clean pull", then from there maintaining aggro on the tank for long enough to establish the complete heal chain. Once that all worked out (this took 90% of the time it takes to kill the boss) then you would rush to dps the boss before healers ran out of mana, while jousting AOE's and mechanics the same as you would in WOW.
Alot of us older EQ gamers when asked about the difficulty of EQ raiding usually respond with this, it wasn't as hard as WoW mythic raiding as far as personal responsibility, maintaining dps thresholds etc. But the pre-pull and post-kill preparation that was required is all but gone in today's MMO gaming. It was a readiness thing, and having leadership who could "carry" the rest of the people who weren't as knowledgable. Leaders really stood out in Everquest, many powers greater than any MMO since.
@Rallyd
Insightful reply, thanks :)
I'm up for any type of difficulty, as long as it's challenging, Brad as confirmed that bosses will not be zergable, they will flee or call for reinforcements if too many players attack them, but I listened somewhere that varying raid sizes will be a thing, which is good.
I like the idea of slitting trash from the boss to get a clean pull, or progressing through a zone to get to fight the boss, but it would be amazing if at the end of a hard zone there was something more than a tank and spank or berserk time. Something like a Wow encounter in terms of dps/mechanics/heals tuning, that would make the leadership still very important to get there, but when you finally get to engage the boss, it wouldn’t be just a tank and spank, it would be a challenge, and killing the boss in few tries would mean a lot more because of how difficult it is to even get to the boss
I am just hoping that the encounters are far less like WoW or FFXIV. I really feel like the industry went in the wrong direction where everything is far more just learning a dance, each role learns where they need to be during x phase and push their buttons accordingly. It all feels very...unexciting and over done. You learn the encounter then check it off the list, quickly moving into farm status. I really hope there is something better out there, something that can keep people on their toes instead of planned phases and rotations.
I'd just like to see a return to rpg roots, where prep before fights becomes as important as actually fighting. Like, if you fight a dragon it generally has a wing buffet, breath attack, frontal and back swipes right? Why aren't additional layers in the form of things like: if the dragon guards a volcano and thus the climate is boiling hot, the gear you bring should reflect that fact and thus prepping with the right gear is as important and is itself a form of progression. Simlarly, if the dragon has various resistances to piercing and fire (for example), this should reflect in your prep by changing your weapon and spell loadouts. Further, let's say the dragon (using the AI behaviors discussed in the tenets) can sometimes spawn with a disposition that makes its breath proc poison, thus perhaps you need to scout this particular dragon just in case you need to hot swap some stuff to be able to cure it. Finally, perhaps certain environmental factors beyond climate might present challenges. Perhaps the volcano is active and thus lava flows naturally change the battlefield depending on when and where you engage, or perhaps the dragon can spawn in a cave away from the ambient light of the magma, meaning you need to make sure you have the right kind of lighting gear (torches/lanterns/lightsources) to be able to see what you're doing.
As long as the game becomes about farming subsets of monsters at any given time for long windows of time (like, for example, a typical experience party), you don't need too many gear sets at any time, but you do need to be prepared and do research. I think such a system is what they're aiming for, or at least I hope so.
I'm all about the prep and everything. I don't care how difficult they are beyond that.
To clarify - I hope its hard, but not too hard that you need to lose sleep over it.
Iksar said:I am just hoping that the encounters are far less like WoW or FFXIV. I really feel like the industry went in the wrong direction where everything is far more just learning a dance, each role learns where they need to be during x phase and push their buttons accordingly. It all feels very...unexciting and over done. You learn the encounter then check it off the list, quickly moving into farm status. I really hope there is something better out there, something that can keep people on their toes instead of planned phases and rotations.
oneADseven said: I don't mind seeing interesting mechanics sprinkled in but I hated raiding in ffxiv. It was just a game of glorified dance dance revolution mixed with whackamole.
You got my post wrong, I don’t want to see fights like wow in terms of the mechanics and dodging stuff, I was using wow as a reference for the tuning aspect, if you raided (old) HC or mythic you’ll know that some fights are insanely well tuned when it comes to the gear requirements, dps, and heal, and the room for mistake is 0, because 1 less players alive will make it almost impossible to kill the boss.
I want to see some interesting mechanincs, like adds and some aoe abilities, but nothing even close to wow, where you’re constantly moving, you should plan you position prior to the things even happening.
edit: also with no addons and boss timers, simple mechanics will become way more interesting and challenging.
Most of this appears to be from the perspective of EQ vs WoW mechanics. While I played EverQuest from Beta IV up until WoW released, and that until TBC released, I, personally, was a huge fan of a lot of the Vanguard raid encounters.
Ex: Fengrot Foulbreath. Spawns multiple adds during fight, 1-shot kill smash on target that was avoidable/blockable by a small number of skills (I like this sort of ability, I **HATE HATE HATE** the Death Touch mechanic, as used in EQ on targets like certain mobs in Plane of Sky, original CT in Fear, etc), said skills being on a longer cooldown than the attack itself, so rotating tanks was a necessity, re-casts self heal that must be dispelled. Combine the adds that spawned out in the swamp in the middle of the trees making targeting an absolute PITA, his adds' AE's creating positioning and placement woes abound, it was a ton of fun to figure out the nuances, and work around your available class mix to offset the mechanics.
Now, I'm not saying I want ALL raid encounters to be this detailed, as I think it's important to have entry and mid-level raid targets so that guilds and groups of varying skill levels have content available to them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of tank-and-spank encounters, IMO. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every guild, or raid group, will not have a decade+ of experience from previous game(s) to draw from. This was, at time of release, among the higher difficulty encounters, but it's a prime example of how I envision top-end raid encounters; a solid mixture of crowd control, utility, tank and healing coordination and raw damage.
We need to get back to oldschool when it comes to encounter mechanics. It's perfectly fine to mix in some positioning elements so that we don't die, but I don't want the entire raid sequence to be played out like that. If those kind of dance dance revolution whack a mole mechanics are going to be in the game, use them sparingly. They would be a nice change of pace. But the ROOT of raiding should be based off of raid composition, gear checks, resist checks, stat checks, well timed buffs/debuffs, encounter control, having off tanks, a main assist, clutch rezzes, etc. There are so many fun ways to build an encounter where we are forced to dig deep into our toolkit ... that's what I want to see. And as someone else mentioned, please, no add-ons. I remember the first time I raided in WoW on my wifes account and I had huge blinking messages going off on my screen telling me what to do. What a joke! Tone the dance mechanics down and those type of add-ons won't be necessary. When I ran raids, I had a dedicated AE caller. They were SO important to the raid. That type of role doesen't exist in todays MMO's because there are 3'rd party add ons that do all the work for you ... and honestly, the way the raids are designed, they are almost required. So tone down the dancing and bring back the importance of having a raid leader, main assist, AE caller, etc.
Blinkor said:Most of this appears to be from the perspective of EQ vs WoW mechanics. While I played EverQuest from Beta IV up until WoW released, and that until TBC released, I, personally, was a huge fan of a lot of the Vanguard raid encounters.
Ex: Fengrot Foulbreath. Spawns multiple adds during fight, 1-shot kill smash on target that was avoidable/blockable by a small number of skills (I like this sort of ability, I **HATE HATE HATE** the Death Touch mechanic, as used in EQ on targets like certain mobs in Plane of Sky, original CT in Fear, etc), said skills being on a longer cooldown than the attack itself, so rotating tanks was a necessity, re-casts self heal that must be dispelled. Combine the adds that spawned out in the swamp in the middle of the trees making targeting an absolute PITA, his adds' AE's creating positioning and placement woes abound, it was a ton of fun to figure out the nuances, and work around your available class mix to offset the mechanics.
Now, I'm not saying I want ALL raid encounters to be this detailed, as I think it's important to have entry and mid-level raid targets so that guilds and groups of varying skill levels have content available to them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of tank-and-spank encounters, IMO. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every guild, or raid group, will not have a decade+ of experience from previous game(s) to draw from. This was, at time of release, among the higher difficulty encounters, but it's a prime example of how I envision top-end raid encounters; a solid mixture of crowd control, utility, tank and healing coordination and raw damage.
I'm not sure if you ever fought The Matron in EQ2, but that encounter was a BEAST. She hit extremely hard, spawned adds, had multiple AE's that would destroy squishies ... and also a teleport ability. The zone was pretty big and she would randomly teleport you somewhere else in zone. I remember our templar being teleported right on top of a named mob ... and they died. When we finally ended up getting the kill on Matron, we had multiple groups outside of our raid that focused on killing all the trash in the zone. That way, when people got teleported, they wouldn't get insta-destroyed by a named group mob or be slowed to hell on their journey back to the raid. This was great for the sense of community on our server too. We had an alliance with some of the more casual guilds and while they weren't necessarily geared enough to fill a slot in the 24 man raid, they were able to contribute by clearing trash in the zone. We wouldn't have killed her that first time if we didn't have help from other people outside of our guild. It was a great way to bring people together to work toward a common goal ... the casual folks didn't care about getting loot. They just wanted to see the biggest baddest boss in the game finally die ... and them being able to contribute toward it happening was a really great feeling for all of us.
Now, I'm not saying I want ALL raid encounters to be this detailed, as I think it's important to have entry and mid-level raid targets so that guilds and groups of varying skill levels have content available to them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of tank-and-spank encounters, IMO. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every guild, or raid group, will not have a decade+ of experience from previous game(s) to draw from. This was, at time of release, among the higher difficulty encounters, but it's a prime example of how I envision top-end raid encounters; a solid mixture of crowd control, utility, tank and healing coordination and raw damage.
I'm not saying I want ALL raid encounters to be this detailed; I really, truly, don't. I DO want the biggest of the baddies to be difficult. I DON'T want there to be big, flashing letters on my screen telling me when to run away, a la some of the stuff in Molten Core in WoW; that, combined with their complete bastardization of itemization (that's for a different discussion) going into TBC is why I quit. However, there's absolutely nothing wrong with figuring out a pattern, or sequence, and communicating with your raid, which is how we beat the previously mentioned Fengrot encounter.
And, as an aside, I'm a big fan of partnerships/alliances between smaller guilds defeating content; there were 3 guilds in the alliance of ours that completed APW, and defeated Fengrot, and most of the other raid content in Vanguard before we all got discouraged with the lack of support & creation of content and moved on.
In my opinion, there needs to be multiple levels of difficulty for raid content. While the top-end guilds will likely control it all to begin with, as long as the top-end stuff requires time (I wouldn't be opposed, honestly, to a few targets that only show up randomly every couple of days, then disappears after a few hours, whether killed or not; perhaps in a number of potential zones, with a world-wide emote/message to denote arrival. Potentially a specific weather pattern, or world event earlier in the day it's due to suggest it's coming, etc. If the areas of potential spawn are far enough out of the way, it would likely free up the lower tier content while the top-end guys waited anxiously for a shot at the big bad(s)), wealth (reagents, consumables, etc) and effort (a number of different mechanics to overcome besides a simple tank-and-spank, gear check or ae-avoidance) to complete, those low and middle tier encounters will be available to smaller guilds, and alliances, while the bleeding edge folks are cutting themselves over and over learning the hardest of encounters.
Chel'Drak was another really well designed encounter. It was a chinese turtle dragon of sorts that had very powerful AE's and a frontal pushback. The positioning of Chel'Drak was vital. We had to tank her with our back against the wall so that when it pushed us back, we wouldn't move too far to the left or right. If you got knocked too far to the side, Chel'Drak would reposition and the entire raid would end up getting hit by her other attacks. On top of that, she would randomly spawn "archetype" adds that could only be DPS'd by player characters of the same archetype. The healer archetype adds were the most difficult to overcome because naturally ... healers aren't the highest DPS. So our healers had to spec/gear accordingly to be able to push out enough burst DPS when it was needed. We used 2 furies for our first Chel'Drak kill because they had the best DPS of all healers at the time. That encounter was so much fun ... preparation, positioning, well timed buffs/debuffs, archetype specific adds ... it was a blast. I do remember a kill or two where Chel'Drak would die and the chest would be in the wall. I remember our entire raid sitting in the zone for 20 hours before a GM was able to log in and pull the chest out for us.
That's what I want to see though ... a blend of encounter mechanics. Make survivability important. And when I say survivability, I don't mean the bosses having 5 different abilities where the entire raid needs to huddle up to the same spot to prevent death. I want to see abilities from the bosses that are going to wipe people if they don't time their spells correctly. A well timed fear immunity for the group, in my opinion, is much more interesting than a well timed "group go here to not get hit by fear." Both have their place but the fights are so much more interesting when things like that are faciliated by the healers and control characters. Rather than having "stand here to not get hit by this" it should be "we're going to get hit by this ability no matter what, healers make sure your groups are topped off, and tanks use your abilities that can temporarily boost your groups HP/defenses when it hits us." Does anybody else feel the same way? Like I said, I'm fine with there being abilities like that in the game but they shouldn't ALL be like that. Let us use our kits to mitigate burst damage rather than forcing us to avoid them altogether. Gear/Resists/Stats/Spells are all much more important with that style of combat is used ... instead of working to master the "perfect dance sequence" let us master the timing of our abilities. Dancing is fine when used sparingly but I don't want it to become the most important aspect of every encounter.
I think alot of this is going to be based on how it is implemented in the game and specific encounter.
I think there needs to be some sort of "awareness" check in top end encountes in comparison to a stand here , so you do not get hit by the red circle of doom. If that is what you are implying?
I think the best raid encounter, I have ever seen is Akylios from Rift.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=662OoYUvgwE
Not only was it a survivability fight , dps check but also required you to be self aware of the area around you.
Take for example , in this encounter there are tidle waves that come in from the sides of the map. If you are just focused on pew pew , or heals it was easy to get hit by a wave. The waves had to two functions , either you got hit by a knockback + damage or if in a bad location knocked off the platform.. if knocked off you are useless for the rest of the fight, crippling the raid force.
The point being is it required more then just stats to accomplish.
Also with that being said , the encounter required a mixture of classes. There where multiple adds that spawned in various locations this lead to requiring multiple tanks , multiple healers to keep said tanks up , various dps classes that can perform aoe and ones that shine with single target.
I hope this is what you mean by a blend of encounter mechanics ?
By the way Chel'Drak was awesome , but not RT x 4 cool :P That is my favorite eq2 raid encounter to date.
jpedrote said:You got my post wrong, I don’t want to see fights like wow in terms of the mechanics and dodging stuff, I was using wow as a reference for the tuning aspect, if you raided (old) HC or mythic you’ll know that some fights are insanely well tuned when it comes to the gear requirements, dps, and heal, and the room for mistake is 0, because 1 less players alive will make it almost impossible to kill the boss.
I want to see some interesting mechanincs, like adds and some aoe abilities, but nothing even close to wow, where you’re constantly moving, you should plan you position prior to the things even happening.
edit: also with no addons and boss timers, simple mechanics will become way more interesting and challenging.
I don't think I got it wrong, what I am saying is that level of fine tuned difficulty/encounter is only possible when the variables are largely controlled. They design the encounters figuring groups will be composed of x DPS, x tanks, x healers. Then they design the bosses to run on the rails they set out, because this kind of encounter only works on rails. So you learn the "dance" of the fight and where to be during what phase, when to pop cooldowns, what attack is next on the bosses list.
I'd prefer raid mobs have a list of abilities they can use at random (with unknown cooldown times) on top of different phases unlocking some extra abilities to be aware of.
oneADseven, you're arguing against yourself, and it's blowing my f'ing mind. ;) In one post, you stated:
We need to get back to oldschool when it comes to encounter mechanics. It's perfectly fine to mix in some positioning elements so that we don't die, but I don't want the entire raid sequence to be played out like that. If those kind of dance dance revolution whack a mole mechanics are going to be in the game, use them sparingly.
Then you went here:
That's what I want to see though ... a blend of encounter mechanics. Make survivability important. And when I say survivability, I don't mean the bosses having 5 different abilities where the entire raid needs to huddle up to the same spot to prevent death. I want to see abilities from the bosses that are going to wipe people if they don't time their spells correctly.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on oldschool encounter mechanics, unless our definitions of oldschool differ that much -- I started "raiding" back in '99-'00, if your introductions to raiding were much later than '03, that's where the disconnect is, I guess.
There ***HAS*** to be a mixture of low/mid level stuff. Everything can't be completely unforgiving. There also ***HAS*** to be enough top-end content to occupy the bleeding edge guilds so that the low/mid tier stuff is available to the less hardcore guilds/alliances. The mechanics they use to achieve this could vary from reduced max damage, number of attacks per round, power or frequency of AE damage, to much more complex stuff, as you and I have both brought up from previous games.
Iksar said:I don't think I got it wrong, what I am saying is that level of fine tuned difficulty/encounter is only possible when the variables are largely controlled. They design the encounters figuring groups will be composed of x DPS, x tanks, x healers. Then they design the bosses to run on the rails they set out, because this kind of encounter only works on rails. So you learn the "dance" of the fight and where to be during what phase, when to pop cooldowns, what attack is next on the bosses list.
I'd prefer raid mobs have a list of abilities they can use at random (with unknown cooldown times) on top of different phases unlocking some extra abilities to be aware of.
As I thought you got it wrong, I’m not referring to boss fights with set mechanics that originate a “dance”, what I was asking was how hard were encounter (EQ and VG) compared to wow in terms of dps/healing requirements to kill the boss.
Mechanics have nothing to do with what I’m talking about, some bosses in wow have the most simple mechanics ever, take garajal spirit binder, the boss does high aoe raid damage, hits the tanks really hard, and spawn some static adds that cast shadow bolts at the raid, but the fight has a soft enrage (too many adds and the raids dies of dmg) and a hard enrage, the boss one hits the tanks. It’s a simple fight, but it’s well tuned so it’s a hard fight. There’s no “dance” in this fight, you either are capable of killing the boss or you get overwhelmed and wipe.
That’s the type of tuning I’m talking about, soft enrages, like being overwhelmed by adds (or something else) and wiping, and all the regular things that make an encounter hard, like dps checks and gear checks.
An encounter doesn’t need to be on rails to have an insane difficulty, a simple soft enrage will make it extremely hard, even if it’s a simplistic encounter.
I do agree with what you said on the hidden cooldowns of abilities, which makes it so it’s impossible to predict what the bosses’ next move is so you need to be focussed on the fight, and ready to react to any of the many abilities he might use. That will keep farm raids interesting.
But what I’m trying to say is, I would like to see some High-end encounter that are really well tuned in terms of difficulty.
In the latest expansions of EQ1, many, if not all, of the boss encounters were not as simple as getting rid of trash, positioning the boss, a tank and CH a rotation. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time this was the case? (Xegony anyone?)
Many of the encounters of the last several expansions are just as you described as the mythic encounters in WoW. No room for mistake. Only the very few top guilds have the ability, the discipline and the gear to plow through that. The majority of players and guilds will either never see that end-game or see it many expansions after.
So, imo, if VR implements more of that type of end-game encounter (or harder) the better.
While it certainly was thrilling to have a server firsts, or indeed server-wide firsts, believe it or not, for me it became boring and I yearned for the days that it took weeks, sometimes months of trying to overcome an encounter. The sense of accomplishment of the latter was much more real than the expectation of the former.
Blinkor said:
oneADseven, you're arguing against yourself, and it's blowing my f'ing mind. ;) In one post, you stated:
We need to get back to oldschool when it comes to encounter mechanics. It's perfectly fine to mix in some positioning elements so that we don't die, but I don't want the entire raid sequence to be played out like that. If those kind of dance dance revolution whack a mole mechanics are going to be in the game, use them sparingly.
Then you went here:
That's what I want to see though ... a blend of encounter mechanics. Make survivability important. And when I say survivability, I don't mean the bosses having 5 different abilities where the entire raid needs to huddle up to the same spot to prevent death. I want to see abilities from the bosses that are going to wipe people if they don't time their spells correctly.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on oldschool encounter mechanics, unless our definitions of oldschool differ that much -- I started "raiding" back in '99-'00, if your introductions to raiding were much later than '03, that's where the disconnect is, I guess.
There ***HAS*** to be a mixture of low/mid level stuff. Everything can't be completely unforgiving. There also ***HAS*** to be enough top-end content to occupy the bleeding edge guilds so that the low/mid tier stuff is available to the less hardcore guilds/alliances. The mechanics they use to achieve this could vary from reduced max damage, number of attacks per round, power or frequency of AE damage, to much more complex stuff, as you and I have both brought up from previous games.
I'm not arguing against myself man. I was saying that it's okay to have "don't stand here or die" mechanics, but use them sparingly. I would rather see "you can't avoid this AE, you have to use your temp buffs to survive it" type mechanics as the norm. By the way, I started playing with EQOA/FFXI on the PS2 before I ever owned a computer. Not quite as oldschool as EQ, but still pretty oldschool I think.
"And when I say survivability, I don't mean the bosses having 5 different abilities where the entire raid needs to huddle up to the same spot to prevent death. I want to see abilities from the bosses that are going to wipe people if they don't time their spells correctly." Emphasis on highlight ... I would like to see a "blend" of these mechanics. Does that make more sense? FFXIV raids are focused on the former, not the latter, and that's what I don't want to see. The "avoid attack by standing here" or die concept just isn't that appealing to me, personally. Maybe other people like that ... and that's fine. Personally, I would prefer EQ2 style raids. You might find those sort of mechanics from time to time but it wasn't 2-3 of them on every single raid fight in the game like FFXIV. EQ2 required perfect execution of temporary buffs to fight through encounter mechanics rather than forcing players to avoid them altogether by playing dance dance revolution.
I agree that a rich end-game would be very important for the success of the game. The more content the better. If VR needs extra time to push out raid content, consider a tiered approach and save the harder tiers for after the game is launched. We shouldn't be able to beat the hardest tiers without gearing up from the lower tiers for awhile anyway ... and that could give them the extra time they need to work on the hardest content. I know that Pantheon isn't going to be focused on "end game raiding" but I know it will make a huge difference for me and all of the people I plan on playing with. I'm sure we are in the minority but if we run out of stuff to do a month or 2 after we start playing we'll all be very sad pandas. Progeny system could be another useful tool with giving us replay value to go through the older content but if that's the route they wanna go where using progeny is just stalling us from end game, make it meaningful. A lot of people have issues with progeny being "required" but I personally do not. I would love to see content that's so hard that having a 3rd or 4th generation character could be a big difference maker. Here are the 3 most important things to me:
1) Challenging content throughout all tiers of the game, starting at the very beginning of the game
2) Long progression window. The more ways I can improve my character, the better. I want there to be many different levels of prestige or power depending on how vested players are in their characters. This is the opposite of WoW, where 90% of the end-game population is geared exactly the same throughout the entire expansion because of "valor points." I understand I am the minority but I would love an almost never-ending progression window. Every minute spent in the game would feel more rewarding.
3) Replay value. This is directly tied into #1 and #2 ... when I replay through different areas of the game, I want them to still be challenging, and also provide ways to continue progressing my character. I don't want to "beat" a zone and then have no reason to go back. I made a post in the "achievement" thread (see here: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1656/achievements/view/page/3 ;)on how the achievement system could actually be used as a form of AA. I think it would a great way to add to the replay value of the game while also providing incremental upgrades to our character over time, and through non-linear gameplay.