So, I'm reading the new FAQ(looks great by the way) and in the part talking about multiboxing there's mention that we will be "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"
Now, all I'm seeing in my head is the whackamole approach from EQ2 where I had something akin to 10 10 slot hotbars open, and basically, during fighting, all i saw was the stupidly large amount of buttons i was staring at waiting for one to pop up so i could knock it down again.
Please tell me this isn't what you meant! Givve us something more like EQ1 originally had, with the 8 spell/ability gems(casting from the number row was awesome) and one set of 6 hotkeys. No, I'm not asking for exactly that, but PLEASE don't go the other side and overload us with crap to do in some "Actions Per Minute make you better!" idea of gameplay.
Edited causse I hit my laptop keyboard too hard and it double shots letters on regular basis :P
I'm also curious to see how Pantheon deals with this. It's a tricky subject, no doubt about it. Too many 'equipable' skills and we get what you described. Too few and we get other problems. Let me tell you about my experience in ESO as a DD, which was the role I played as the most even though I also tanked and healed.
In that game you can equip 5 skills and 1 'ultimate' skill (a stronger skill that has a resource build-up so it can't be spammed) on your bar. You can equip 2 sets of weapons, for a total of 2 skill bars when you swap them. That's a total of 10 skills and 2 ultimates, period (the only exception was a sorcerer-class ultimate that swapped you into a third skill bar, but only when the ultimate was up, so I'm not counting it). Skills can be class-based (only usable by that class), weapon-based (only usable with the appropriate weapon equipped); or guild-based (available to anyone, provided they've progressed far enough in the mages/fighters guild).
So again, you get to choose 10 skills and 2 ultimates. That might sound reasonable until you consider that:
a) Your choice of weapons determines which weapon skills you can use. At most you can equip 2 different weapon types; if you want to use the same weapon type on both bars, you'll be limited to 1 pool of weapon skills.
b) Certain skills provide a passive buff only when they are on your active bar. If you want/need a certain buff to be up all the time, you need to put that skill on both bars. Also, in the case of sorcerers in particular, switching bars while a summoned pet is up will dismiss it, so if you want pets you also need to use 2 skill slots, one for each bar, for each pet you want to use. As a sorcerer, you basically need to have one of those passive buffs because it boosts your magicka pool considerably and sorcerer sustainability is tricky enough as it is. With only 8 skill slots left, nobody at end-game bothers wasting 2 or 4 additional slots with pets. So no pets at all at end-game.
c) Min-maxing is a thing. The hardest content in ESO has multiple 'DPS checks' where if your group doesn't pull really good numbers - not average, not reasonable, all the DDs have to do really high damage - the whole group will wipe. This means that you need to have the good skills on your bars, diversity be damned, because not all skills perform equally well. Also, group utility is a distant afterthought. First and foremost you have to think about your DPS. Faced with a choice between a harder-hitting skill and one that stuns a mob? Firepower is the obvious choice 99% of the time.
The result is that at end-game all sorcerers pretty much use the same 1 or 2 item sets and share something like 8 or 9 skills on their bars. These are the so-called 'cookie cutter' builds. They're that way and you can't really change much without gimping yourself. Most skills in the game go unused because they're useless when compared to those in the cookie-cutter build. Now, I haven't played ESO for 6 months and things might have changed a bit, but from early access to when I stopped playing this is how it was.
Apologies for the long post, but to sum it up, the fewer skills available, the more they need to be balanced among them and the more care needs to be put into combat design. If not, some skills will be on everybody's bars while others won't see any use at all. This doesn't just make for boring builds, it's a waste of the developers' time spent designing/balancing unused skills.
You can easily Prevent this, when it comes to the "casters" you can make the huge hitting spells cuase ton of aggro so the spacing in between them being casted is extremely long and probably not the wisest thing to use on long fights due to how much "hate" you gain from them. Another thing you can do is if your talking raid targets is make it to where they are immune to 2 types of elements either it me magic/fire, fire/poison, cold/disease, it doesnt matter it would cuase most classes to change there spell list becuase if they cast the wrong spell and they are immune to it than they cuased a ton of hate and did 0 damage. Another thing you can do also for the casters is make the "hard to resist spells" if hey have them is to make them be extremely mana ineffient so they can't just go back on them and expect to do decent damage. Now for the Melee dps, make it to where some targets cant bleed, cant get behind them, isn't effective against punches, takes midigated piercing or slashing or blunt damage, theres all kinds of way you switch what you are using either it be melee or caster you just have to think about it. And, if i remember correctly i believe they said there only 10 skills you can have up at one time on your hotbar i could be wrogn though.
LordMindParadox said:So, I'm reading the new FAQ(looks great by the way) and in the part talking about multiboxing there's mention that we will be "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"
Now, all I'm seeing in my head is the whackamole approach from EQ2 where I had something akin to 10 10 slot hotbars open, and basically, during fighting, all i saw was the stupidly large amount of buttons i was staring at waiting for one to pop up so i could knock it down again.
Please tell me this isn't what you meant! Givve us something more like EQ1 originally had, with the 8 spell/ability gems(casting from the number row was awesome) and one set of 6 hotkeys. No, I'm not asking for exactly that, but PLEASE don't go the other side and overload us with crap to do in some "Actions Per Minute make you better!" idea of gameplay.
Edited causse I hit my laptop keyboard too hard and it double shots letters on regular basis :P
If you had watched any of the streams, you would have seen the interface. That would answer your question.
A good way to handle this is to give tanks 2 main tasks, generate threat/aggro and use active mitigation skills to prevent some damage.
Tanks should have a few basic abilities to generate threat/aggro, maybe 2-3 abilites that they need to use on a regular basis to maintain aggro on a mob, they can also have more abilites for special "niche ocasions", but these "extra niche abilities" are not as effective as the 2-3 main ones that allow the tank to maintain threat/aggro, so the "extra niche abilities" are only used rarely, thus avoiding the watch the cooldownbars gameplay.
Now onto the active mitigation part, for me this is a really important part of tanking, it makes tanking more than a simple use the skills and keep the threat/aggro, it gives depth and encourages paying attention to what the mobs are doing.
For those that don't know there are 2 types of mitigation, passive and active, passive mitigation is as the name says passive, it's present through the entirety of the combat and it comes from stats like AC/armour, dodge, parry, block, etc.
Active mitigation on the other hand is skill that the tank uses to increase their mitigation for a short period of time, normaly these skills reduce damage tanken by a percentage, or increase some mitigation stat like AC or parry/block chance, also reducing damage taken. These type of skills add a lot of depth to tanking and allow a good tank to take advantage of them by using them in the right situation and moment (not related to reaction time).
Active mitigation is a fun element of tanking and I would love to see it incorporated in Pantheon, but the balancing needs to be done right, active mitigation can't replace normal passive mitigation, and it cannot replace a healer. Active mitigation is suposed to be an extra tool that tanks use to reduce damage taken, and it allows tanks to contribute somewhat to their survival in battle, but as I said before it should never overtake the job of a healer.
Two things I don't want. One is 10 hotbars full of abilities most of which are rarely needed but when they are needed they are needed badly.
The other is combat of the Neverwinter or FFXIV type (I know they didn't exactly invent it) where you have to constantly run around frantically to survive any boss fight and often have to stand on exactly the right pixel at the right time or you die regardless of gear or skill.
Some of us have really good reflexes and vision and connections. But some of us don't and EQ (time to invoke the holy spirit underlying Pantheon) didn't focus on action combat.
Ideally some classes will add more when played ...frenetically and positionally ...and some won't require this so that players can pick the class best suited to their styles, physical abilities and computer connection.
Ideally NO boss fight will be like many FFXIV bosses where it is more about being on the right pixel at the right time and less about gear or ability to play one's class. Gods I hate FFXIV dungeons at high levels!!!!
This has been addressed before, I believe in the most recent stream. You will have a maximum amount pre-set of skills allowed. In other terms, you need to choose your "loadout". You can't have every single spell/ability mapped to a hot bar for immediate access.
How you go about changing the set, whether it will be allowed in combat or not, I'm not sure.
dorotea said:The other is combat of the Neverwinter or FFXIV type (I know they didn't exactly invent it) where you have to constantly run around frantically to survive any boss fight and often have to stand on exactly the right pixel at the right time or you die regardless of gear or skill.
Ideally NO boss fight will be like many FFXIV bosses where it is more about being on the right pixel at the right time and less about gear or ability to play one's class. Gods I hate FFXIV dungeons at high levels!!!!
Actually FFXIV raiding was very much about your gear and ability to play your class in a very specific way. Dungeons were always a pushover but the high end stuff was always brutal. The problem was how stupidly tuned they were to your ability to press your classes skills in the exact right order while moving all around a field, one move pressed out of order or even a second too late often resulted in a massive loss of DPS. Even being 5 item levels behind another person of your class often meant you were doing 1-200 or so less DPS.
Basically it sucked.
Beefcake said:If you had watched any of the streams, you would have seen the interface. That would answer your question.
And if you had provided a link to said streams(assuming I didn't miss them utterly due to them being live) I could have watched them. Instead you chose to be a snarky and unhelpful "person".
dorotea said:Two things I don't want. One is 10 hotbars full of abilities most of which are rarely needed but when they are needed they are needed badly.
The other is combat of the Neverwinter or FFXIV type (I know they didn't exactly invent it) where you have to constantly run around frantically to survive any boss fight and often have to stand on exactly the right pixel at the right time or you die regardless of gear or skill.
Some of us have really good reflexes and vision and connections. But some of us don't and EQ (time to invoke the holy spirit underlying Pantheon) didn't focus on action combat.
Hate to say it but if you considered a single thing in FFXIV hard, you maybe looking into the wrong games. The raiding there was not hard at all even on savage difficulty. You learned a script and followed it. Hell I could call what was going to happen for most of the original coil 3-5 seconds before it actually did which made all of it face roll. The only thing that made any of it 'difficult' was their **** system that required the client to send pings to the server in order to process your location resulting in many people hit by things they weren't even standing in.
They have already said there won't be a lot of button bloat. You will have to pick and choose what abilities you use at any given time.
LordMindParadox said:Beefcake said:If you had watched any of the streams, you would have seen the interface. That would answer your question.
And if you had provided a link to said streams(assuming I didn't miss them utterly due to them being live) I could have watched them. Instead you chose to be a snarky and unhelpful "person".
http://www.pantheonmmo.com/media/video/
It's in the media section of the forums ...
@Enitzu
I wouldnt say this game isnt for him though. And I seriously doubt we would see gameplay for bosses and raids look anything like the super choreographed fights of FFXIV. But I do agree it wasnt hard........... just not very fun or creative.............soul-sucking in process and execution really. Then you have games like Wild Star that take that "winning" formula and punch it up.
But for the purposes of situational planning we will have limited hotbars. How limited is yet to be seen. You can see what they are currently in streams, but Im sure the devs have said this is something to be fine tuned in testing. So could be 8 might be 14? Give feedback durring testing.
LordMindParadox said:Beefcake said:If you had watched any of the streams, you would have seen the interface. That would answer your question.
And if you had provided a link to said streams(assuming I didn't miss them utterly due to them being live) I could have watched them. Instead you chose to be a snarky and unhelpful "person".
Just shocked that someone following this game has not watched them.
dorotea said:The other is combat of the Neverwinter or FFXIV type (I know they didn't exactly invent it) where you have to constantly run around frantically to survive any boss fight and often have to stand on exactly the right pixel at the right time or you die regardless of gear or skill.
Ideally NO boss fight will be like many FFXIV bosses where it is more about being on the right pixel at the right time and less about gear or ability to play one's class. Gods I hate FFXIV dungeons at high levels!!!!
Iksar said:The problem was how stupidly tuned they were to your ability to press your classes skills in the exact right order while moving all around a field, one move pressed out of order or even a second too late often resulted in a massive loss of DPS. Even being 5 item levels behind another person of your class often meant you were doing 1-200 or so less DPS.
I, for one, would like to see something between these positions. I lack the experience with EQ and FF, so I'll keep using ESO as my yardstick. In ESO a number of factors combined to make combat, and DPS in particular, a pretty arcane art known to few and mastered by fewer still. I would point out two:
- Skill weaving/animation cancelling. This was an unintended mechanic, tied to the fact that there were no "skill cooldowns" as such and no global cooldown after using a skill. Certain attack animations could be cancelled but the attack would still go off - only the animation would be cut short. So for instance, you could use a light attack from your weapon, and as soon as it "registered" you could immediately use another skill, "weaving" it into your light attack animation. You could cancel animations in other ways, such as by blocking. Because each skill and their animations were different, each rotation required a lot of practice to get the timing right (or, rumours said, you could use macros). I have to say it did make combat very enjoying for me once I learned to do it. But because most good players were using it effectively, it became essentially a requirement for end-game content. If you didn't animation cancel, you wouldn't pull the DPS needed, simple as that. But because it was always considered "unintended" (but not an exploit) by the developers, more casual players didn't even have a clue what this was.
- Complex, unbalanced itemization and skills. You had your racial bonuses, your class bonuses, your item and item set bonuses... All of these would synergize better with certain skills but not others. And the lack of balance among various item sets meant that there were always no more than half a dozen that were "de facto" standards for most DPS players, regardless of class. This contributed to what I mentioned earlier as "cookie-cutter" builds, which would maximize the potential for a given class and role.
So I don't advocate for these aspects of ESO combat. They made end-game harder than necessary by all but requiring that you use unintended mechanics, and boring to a certain extent due to the lack of build diversity.
But one thing I do think they got right, namely many boss fight mechanics. Bosses weren't just large trash mobs. They were (mostly) tankable, but would do certain attacks that would require other players to block or move out of the way. They would spawn adds that needed to be managed in a particular way, curse random players who then needed to debuff themselves; they would summon mini-bosses that needed to be off-tanked; etc.
This is something I'd like to see. Tanks facing the boss away from the group so their normal attacks won't hit other people; attacks that bypass aggro, such as large AoE attacks that force players to be aware of their position, move to avoid damage, or mitigate their damage taken; using the environment to make fights more dynamic (this isn't from ESO, but imagine pulling the boss to a specific position so a player can fire a siege weapon on them). At least in boss fights, it should come down to more than just the skills you use. Otherwise, as I said, bosses will be just glorified mobs.
they also said that there'll be sufficient downtime for socializing. if that's the case then there'll be also enough time for boxing. for me things don't quite add up anyways. i guess we'll just have to see. some more skills than EQ1 would be nice, but i don't need it to turn into a hack and slash orgy.
letsdance said:they also said that there'll be sufficient downtime for socializing. if that's the case then there'll be also enough time for boxing. for me things don't quite add up anyways. i guess we'll just have to see. some more skills than EQ1 would be nice, but i don't need it to turn into a hack and slash orgy.
Not necessarily correct, they want downtime between pulls, during the fight all members of the group need to be active and doing their job, in the FAQ says that mid to high level combat will be so tactically intense and engaging that multiboxing will not be a viable option for hard content.
OP you made a very good point about this,
It will resort to the need to mash combos via third party after awhile, macros in game. Whichever people use. Autokey comes to mind for some, and Logitech keyboard for others.
All classes have this issue, from reading that. So in the end your sitting back trying to focus, but all you have to do is hit key 1 and it does 10 combos, to parse.
I dont want that either, honestly.
But we will see, what it is like.
I remember the day still when i played a necro in Seb, we had no healer, so the necro was the primary healer... believe it or not i never lost one player from our group. Seb had trains, in the back rooms and we survived. It was major effort to do this, and in the end everyone was happy with my performance.
jpedrote said:letsdance said:they also said that there'll be sufficient downtime for socializing. if that's the case then there'll be also enough time for boxing. for me things don't quite add up anyways. i guess we'll just have to see. some more skills than EQ1 would be nice, but i don't need it to turn into a hack and slash orgy.
Not necessarily correct, they want downtime between pulls, during the fight all members of the group need to be active and doing their job, in the FAQ says that mid to high level combat will be so tactically intense and engaging that multiboxing will not be a viable option for hard content.
if there is downtime between pulls, that gives me time to box as well. but in reality there won't be downtime between pulls. because we will learn to avoid it, just like in EQ.
LordMindParadox said:So, I'm reading the new FAQ
Now, all I'm seeing in my head is the whackamole approach from EQ2 where I had something akin to 10 10 slot hotbars open, and basically, during fighting, all i saw was the stupidly large amount of buttons i was staring at waiting for one to pop up so i could knock it down again.
Please tell me this isn't what you meant! Givve us something more like EQ1 originally had, with the 8 spell/ability gems(casting from the number row was awesome) and one set of 6 hotkeys.
In the FAQ
2.2 Will there be a limitation to the number of abilities we can use at a given time?
You may be limited to a subset of your abilities for the next encounter, causing you to have to intelligently plan ahead and memorize the spells most effective against the upcoming enemy. Likewise, you'll want to memorize spells that counter the upcoming mob’s abilities. Lastly, you may have some abilities that work synergistically with others in your group. But the key point here is that these tactical decisions can be made right before the actual encounter. Then, say you move on deeper into the dungeon and are about to confront a different boss with different abilities and a different disposition, it may make tactical sense to prep different abilities. So yes, you are limited to that extent (you cannot simply use any of your 80+ abilities whenever you wish) because planning for the battle ahead and doing so effectively is key to Pantheon. The exact number of spells, abilities, feats and actions one can prep is TBD and won’t likely be finalized until Beta. What’s depicted in screenshots showing the UI is not final.
LordMindParadox said: @NoobieDoo thanks, and that kind of answers the questions about buttons, but if we are also say, dodging/having to move around, among other things, that too can get ridoculous quickly. Not to mention the poss9bility of a "pet bar". I'll definitely check out the live streams, but I haven't been paying too much attention because at this point in a games development, they could quite literally redes9gn the combat system from the ground up. Not to mention "Live Update 13" (sorry for the horror flashback eq2 players just got) when a combat s6stem was almost completely changed after release :P typos are entirely the fault of my phone, and NOT my fat thumbs :)
You don't have to worry about Pantheon being a twitchy game. In general, watching the streams and reading the FAQ will fill you in on your concerns. Development is actually probably a little further along than you think. We're at least at a point where it's nearly impossible that they'd drastically change the fundamentals:
From the FAQ: (13.1.1) "We realize that some MMOs have used a more ‘action’ oriented combat system, where you click on different buttons to attack, swing your sword, dodge, etc. With Pantheon, combat will still be action-packed and require close attention, using tactics, as well as reacting to what mobs and other players may be doing. In fact, so much will be going on that you will not want to have to worry about whether you are swinging your sword or not -- you will be casting spells, assuming stances, countering or deflecting your opponent’s moves and spells, and more. Additionally, while you can either click directly on a mob or simply use the tab key to change targets, there will also be a subset of spells where you can target the ground (for example, some area-of-effect spells)."
(13.1.2) "The player will have enough time to react to what the NPC is doing (counterspell, deflect, move out of the way, etc.). Combat is more involved and the player will need to pay attention, but it is not ‘twitch’ in the way a first-person shooter is."
@LordMindParadox
I also don't want twitchy combat, and I agree with the above posters who laid out some good info, but I'll add a few more pieces of info to flesh out that I don't think you have anything to fear :).
Also from the FAQ:
1.3 Will there be a lot of downtime while playing Pantheon?
This is also a tricky question to answer because ‘too much’ downtime is subjective. We feel our target audience does enjoy some downtime, whether it’s to take a bio break or to do some socializing. But we also feel situations with too much downtime or repetition can be boring, even for our specific audience, and we will endeavor to avoid it.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
And from Aradune's AMA on Reddit back in 08/2016:
On a question regarding the EQ Grind and play sessions.
[–]AraduneMitharaPantheon: Rise of the Fallen[S]
"There's no easy answer here. Keeping players interested and playing a long time, whether in one session or spread out over days, involves creating compelling gameplay. Player rewards and leveling and earning new abilities and acquiring more powerful items at a reasonable rate is one way to make your game sticky. Add in that grouping with others will be encouraged and rewarded and that people will be making new friends in-game and you have a situation where your friends need you to log in with them or order advance -- and most people who want to be part of a team, a team player, respond well to this pressure. As for Pantheon not being as hard core as EQ, I don't think I said that. I said it wouldn't be as grindy, and the type of grind I was referring to involved tedious repetition. But that doesn't mean Pantheon won't be difficult, or involved, or require time invested in order to advance -- in fact, virtually all MUDs and MMOs are built around time invested as the primary advancement mechanism."
_____________________________________________________________________________
So, couple the FAQ and AMA, and I think resource management/downtime will be a thing again; although, perhaps not as much as first gen MMOs - so, even if you had a larger ability set, you would still need to weigh the options each fight and not burn through your resources in a twitch type combat and be able to fast regen post combat and repeat.
Link to entire AMA - some good info in there as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/4y7sd0/i_am_brad_aradune_mcquaid_cco_for_pantheon_rise/#bottom-comments
jpedrote said:letsdance said:they also said that there'll be sufficient downtime for socializing. if that's the case then there'll be also enough time for boxing. for me things don't quite add up anyways. i guess we'll just have to see. some more skills than EQ1 would be nice, but i don't need it to turn into a hack and slash orgy.
Not necessarily correct, they want downtime between pulls, during the fight all members of the group need to be active and doing their job, in the FAQ says that mid to high level combat will be so tactically intense and engaging that multiboxing will not be a viable option for hard content.
This is correct, granted a very gifted oxer might be able to pull it off but a normal, average player might want to reconsider, either way it's a MMORPG not a single player game so boxing to me is just not fun if you don't grp with others and have a good conversation with them, its what makes most of the game actually fun, which is the whole point of the game.
>Actually FFXIV raiding was very much about your gear and ability to play your class in a very specific way. Dungeons were always a pushover<
Spouse and I emphatically disagree with you on this - let's leave it at that. To both of us higher end *dungeons* were a horror because they focused on unforgiving mechanics rather than ability to play one's class and work in a group. Dungeons *not* raids and even below maximum level. Move from point A to point B to point C in the correct order at the correct time or you died, or your group wiped.
Whether you are correct or we are doesn't really matter. What matters is that Pantheon dungeons not be insanely mechanic-driven. The focus should be on killing the boss and any adds while avoiding their attacks - not moving frenetically around since 4 times during the fight if you weren't in a certain spot you died - NOT from any attack of the boss or the adds simply because of the programmed mechanics of the fight. Or things like DPS tests so beloved in FFXIV - even if the boss was going down, if group DPS didn't hit a certain amount on whatever parse the game looked to suddenly a wave of death emanated from the boss and you were all dead. Please VR at least in dungeons avoid these accursed mechanics and let the party and the mobs duke it out without artificial "you lose and are all dead" mechanisms unrelated to whether the group or the mobs are winning.