I was wondering... today we some some great stream of combat etc. and it occurred to me: will there be a knockback effect/strategy whereby we can choose to knock a mob over the side for death/glory and by the same token, be knocked over the side to our deaths? My own personal hopes are yes to both.
If you could knonk over a mob to its death i'd say you lose all exp and loot rights to that mob for it would be too easy to clear certain mobs especially in the zone that we saw today and even than i wouldn't want to do it just becuase it trivializes the whole point of having all of them mobs in there to begin with, but they did say that knockdowns and knockbacks and such are going to be things certain mobs get ad also more than i have mentioned like the range fighters will seek cover and such, so yes i can say we might have to be careful of where WE position ourselves but us doing it to the npc just sounds like something everyone would abuse just so they can get in further into the zone.
Great in theory until it becomes the norm for any NPC in an area that can be knocked off. This happened in Neverwinter, everyone wanted Control Wizards early on and excluded other classes because they could almost insta kill dungeon bosses by knocking them off.
It does sound like a cool idea but I agree with the people saying it could be abused. It would be good if you could knockback an NPC and use that to stun or interrupt their casting though. It would mean you'd have one more tool in your arsenal to take on casters and other annoying mobs. Of course there should be some mobs that are immune to things like that to try and stop everything being made easy by it.
I'd like to see a return to mobs summoning you. That worked really well in EQ and made it much harder to solo certain kinds of mob.
Reht said:Great in theory until it becomes the norm for any NPC in an area that can be knocked off. This happened in Neverwinter, everyone wanted Control Wizards early on and excluded other classes because they could almost insta kill dungeon bosses by knocking them off.
I think it's a fair assumption that bosses wouldn't be able to be knocked back. Also, I agree that you should lose the XP and loot if you kill by pushing over a ledge. That would make players think twice whether to take the easy way out. Other incentives would be missing out on backstabs/other advantages of standing behind the enemy, as it would have to be pinned against the ledge for the knockback to work.
I think it would be ok to have the possibility to knock mobs off and let them die to fall damage, IF AND ONLY IF loot and xp are lost. It kinda balances it, and I'd rather consider this an emergent gameplay strategy rather than an abusive game mechanics exploit, because there is a loss in counterpart to the benefits.
Of course, it would require boss/miniboss to be immune (or highly resistant) to this type of "environmental crowd control effects" (knockup/knockback/grab), because you don't want, while fighting a boss, that someone outside the group kill it this way to deny boss loot from you. That would be a huge griefing abuse.
There will absolutely be more effects in game like knockback etc. what you see as of now is basic tanka nd spank with some hindering effects but it is still early days and something we will be tweaking a lot as we move towards testing, plus we don't want to show off all of our cool abilities on mobs so you guys can log them and know the strats lol ;)
@Kilsin
Awesome, I love going into an encounter blind and figuring things out with the group.
Just a suggestion, since Boss mods and BDM timers will not be allowed, an eggclock seems like the best approach for learning the timers of the abilities of spells of Boss NPC.
It would be nice if the bosses instead of casting spell/ability X after 37 seconds of the begging of the fight. They chose spell/ability X,Y or Z after 30-50 seconds of the beggining of the fight.
Something like this would encourage paying attention to the fight (or to the shout caller of the group), and make Boss encounters slighly different every time you did them.
jpedrote said:@Kilsin
Awesome, I love going into an encounter blind and figuring things out with the group.
Just a suggestion, since Boss mods and BDM timers will not be allowed, an eggclock seems like the best approach for learning the timers of the abilities of spells of Boss NPC.
It would be nice if the bosses instead of casting spell/ability X after 37 seconds of the begging of the fight. They chose spell/ability X,Y or Z after 30-50 seconds of the beggining of the fight.
Something like this would encourage paying attention to the fight (or to the shout caller of the group), and make Boss encounters slighly different every time you did them.
We already have measures for this, we have some very experienced raiders on the team and know our stuff when it comes to strats and timers, so I wouldn't worry to much ;)
On the other hand, let's say you DO keep the loot rights to a mob you knocked off the top floor...
... now you gotta get down there and loot it. You probably don't even know what's down there. When you DO manage to get all the way back down to loot it - and IF the mobs down there don't kill you, all you gotta do now is get back to your camp. Way. back. up. there.....