I would love to see VR place a bigger emphasis on raiding in Pantheon. If only 10-15% of the player base participated in raiding in games of the past, to me, that sounds like an opportunity. I'm not saying that VR should change their vision -- I'm perfectly fine with the majority of the game being focused on grouping endeavors. Rather than settling on the idea that maybe only 10-15% of players plan on raiding in Pantheon, why couldn't we try to bump that number up? When I read "The Pantheon Difference" I see it as VR's way of evolving the MMO genre. Raiding has always been an important fixture in the grand scheme of MMO gameplay and I think there is a world of opportunity when it comes to how it could be pulled off in Pantheon.
This is only my opinion, of course, but with there already being a huge emphasis on intensely social gameplay, I think raiding could be another area where Pantheon can blow away the competition. Imagine if VR were able to get 25% of the community interested in raiding, wouldn't that be considered a huge success? For me, it starts with accessibility. One major issue that prevented players from raiding in games of the past was the time commitment. There is no getting around that, really, but there are still ways to make the tried and true systems from EQ and Vanguard more accessible to the community at large.
I would like to share a few ideas:
Hyper / Ghost Concept
When it comes to competitive raiding, contested content has generally dropped the best loot in the game. It's the apex of risk vs reward because these epic bosses have traditionally offered the most challenging gameplay possible and have long respawn timers. The major issue with this, of course, is that it's hard to justify spending a ton of time designing an encounter that only a small fraction of the population will ever get to experience.
I imagine if this content were more accessible, it would be easier to justify the time spent designing it. Accessibility is a slippery slope, though, as long respawns have been enforced as a way to preserve the value/exclusivity of the loot that these epic encounters drop. Let's assume that raid content is designed with a tiered approach, though. When an epic boss spawns, they are considered the "Hyper Version" (or "HV" for future reference) -- their difficulty is scaled to the max, they drop the best loot, and they have a longer respawn after being killed ... somewhere between 3-5 days. This accomodates the guilds involved in the competitive raiding scene, but what about the rest of the population?
Say hello to the "Ghost Version" (or "GV" for future reference) -- this is something that was done in Vanguard. After an HV raid boss dies, two very important triggers take place. The first is the HV respawn trigger whereas the countdown begins for the 3-5 day respawn window. The second is the GV trigger whereas the raid boss would respawn as a toned down version of the same boss, but with a much shorter respawn timer, perhaps somewhere between 2-4 hours. This is all for the sake of accessibility. There was a lot of time spent designing the encounter so it makes sense to make it as accessible as possible to the community at large.
There are some pretty important distinctions between HV and GV, as I'll outline below:
Hyper Version
Extremely challenging encounter that requires a full, well balanced raid. Each member of the raid should have significant power progression on their character in the form of resists, spell mastery, gear, acclimation, etc. Conquering these beasts should require a great deal of coordination and precision.
Drops -- Can drop 3-5 items, all of them exclusive to the HV loot table.
Respawn -- 3-5 days.
Lockout -- No lockout as the mob already has a long respawn window.
Ghost Version
Same encounter, but toned down a bit. It should still be pretty challenging and have the same resist/spell mastery/gear/acclimation requirements as the HV version, but to a lesser degree. The point of having the GV is to make the encounter as a whole more accessible to the population. It's respawn is much faster, but this version has a lockout to prevent over-farming. It drops great loot and can provide invaluable experience to those who fight it so that when the HV spawns, they have a better understanding of how the base mechanics work and can try to compete for the HV kill.
Drops -- Can drop 3-5 items, with a chance of one item maximum coming from the HV loot table.
Respawn -- 2-4 hours.
Lockout -- 3-5 days, same as the respawn of the HV.
Again, the purpose behind the idea of using the hyper/ghost concept is to maximize efficiency as it pertains to how many people get to enjoy any/all raid content that is developed. Competitive raiding guilds get to enjoy the thrills associated with contested content (HV) -- and everybody else gets to enjoy the time/effort that went into designing the encounter/mechanics with the more accessible ghost version. No time is wasted on designing an encounter that is limited to a small fraction of the community.
Server Impact
What if killing raid bosses had an impact on the world our characters live in? Rather than being limited to shuffling more loot into the world, why couldn't downing a pesky dragon have a noticeable impact on the immediate area nearby? Loot acquisition will always be important as it plays a vital role in power progression for our characters, but wouldn't it be cool if the impact of downing these beasts could actually make a difference in how various NPC's interact with you / each other in the world?
Opportunistic Tradesmen
When an HV raid boss is killed, opportunistic tradesmen seek to grow their fortunes by setting up shop in an area that was otherwise too dangerous while the raid boss was roaming around. These merchants could sell unique crafting components or other desirable goodies that are only accessible while the HV bosses are dead. Other merchants such as repair vendors, ammo vendors, or food/drink vendors could also sell their wares in convenient locations now that the territory is less hostile.
Kings Reach Extended
What if, every time a raid boss is killed in a certain area, there is a sense of "server progression" that takes place in the background? Perhaps there are Kings or Tribal Leaders that are looking to expand their territory and with every HV boss that is vanquished, they get one step closer. Maybe this could turn into a new tavern, inne, or outpost. Perhaps a shortcut is eventually opened up (a bridge built, tunnel excavated, etc) or elements of the faction system are adjusted. After expanding their territory, Tribe X now views kobolds as a pest to their operations, and killing them now grants faction with that tribe whereas before, they didn't.
Perhaps these contested raid bosses drop some sort of building material (rare ore, metal, wood) that is highly sought after by local authorities who are trying to build a teleportation spire in the area. Let's say it requires 100 of these items to build the spire -- the guild who turns in the most can have a monument built in their name, or perhaps they could name the spire itself?
Intensely Social
After a guild kills an obnoxious hill giant known for pillaging fields and slaughtering cattle, word starts to spread of their good deed. Local citizens in a nearby town are more amicable and promote the reputation of the guild who came to save the day. Perhaps the taverns/innes offer a temporary discount to any/all patrons in the area, but their text dialogue now includes a shout out for the guild who killed the hill giant. "Thanks to Guild X, we were able to enjoy a full harvest this month. Please enjoy a 10% discount on our wares."
Likewise, perhaps the king in the area is willing to temporarily reduce certain fees. Whether it's sales tax, property tax, broker fees, passage fees, etc ... perhaps there can be a mildly noticeable decrease to various fees in an area after certain contested raid bosses are killed. The king could put up message boards to announce such an event "Due to Guild X vanquishing Big Bad Red Dragon, we've had many more visitors and our mercantile district is thriving. We are temporarily reducing taxes/fees until further notice."
Coliseum
Doubling down on accessibility, what if, after any guilds kills a certain HV encounter, gnome scientists are able to extract samples and reproduce mechanical versions of the same encounter and allow challengers to do battle with them in their arena, for sport? They wouldn't drop the same loot of course ... but perhaps challengers would be willing to pay a fee to test these hyper versions in a neutral, more accessible location? Killing them could perhaps reward some sort of faction or token that could be exchanged with coliseum vendors to provide some sort of reward. This could be scaled to whatever feels appropriate ... but the point is to make the encounter accessible. Allow guilds to challenge themselves by doing battle with these mechanical constructs. Perhaps there could a leaderboard system of sorts that track various efficiency metrics such as time, death tally, DPS measurables by archetype, etc?
These are just a few ideas on how raiding can evolve in Pantheon. We can take the tried and true methods of the past, but reshape them in a way that make them more accessible and desirable. I firmly believe that there is a prime opportunity to capture the "raid audience" from the MMO genre and lure them to Pantheon. Most of the issues that have plagued the MMO genre over the years really come down to the following variables: "Hardcore vs Casual" / "Forced vs Optional" / "Fun vs Tedious" -- I think an ideal raiding system would include gameplay aspects that could include both hardcore and casual, be truly optional, and reinforce the idea of having fun with friends.
If you have an idea that you would like to share regarding how raiding can evolve to the next level, please feel free to share. If you would like to critique any of the ideas I have shared, that's fine too. Please just keep in mind that this is just a fun idea I am tossing around ... I have zero expectation of anything being adopted by VR. This is for the sake of discussion only ... I am genuinely interested in learning how many people there are out there who might consider getting into raiding if it were more fun and accessible. Pantheon is going to be an intensely social game and for me, coordinating large scale raiding endeavors exemplifies the grandest of stages in teamwork, communication, and sharing the thrill of victory with your comrades.
I like that your idea involves keeping these raid targets open world and contested. I don't have a problem with ghost versions that offer lesser challenge and loot on a shorter timeline. I don't think it lessens the accomplishment for hardcore guilds beating the HV version in any way. Everyone will know the difference in difficulty and loot.
@Rallyd
Accessibility also promotes the idea of more than 10-15% of the population having an interest in it. The HV mobs would still be contested and restricted the same as they have always been. I don't think it's fair to compare instanced raiding in WoW to any kind of raiding that occurs in an open world. Instances were a way to create artificial accessibility in the past but it came at the cost of isolating our characters from the rest of the world and destroyed social immersion. APW has been highly regarded as one of the best raid zones of all time, in any game. Isle of Dread from EQOA and Sky from FFXI are also fan favorites. Open world raiding is a ton of fun but there should be plenty of it to choose from, the same as with group oriented dungeons.
As far as I know, "variety" is a key element that VR has planned when it comes to deal with over crowding. I would love to see a variety when it comes to raiding as well but if raid bosses can only satisfy a single raid group once or twice per week, I imagine it being very difficult to justify the time/cost/effort it takes to design the encounters. Efficiency is key, especially when you consider that VR has a small team. I want all of their hard work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and that obviously starts with making it accessible. Being accessible and being easy are two totally different things ... I think it would be great if the raid scene could also accomodate folks who can't commit ungodly amounts of time to camping contested content with long respawn timers.
Like Rallyd, I see a correlation here with WoW's teired structure. I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids. While on the surface neither really seems like such a bad idea, the reality is that it really cheapens the experience to a point that it's just a passing moment to get gear that people more or less blow thru and forget about.
Also, I dont think that the accessibility of raids and the percentage of people that engage in them has as much to do with how often the mobs spawns. Rather it's more a combination of a couple of other factors. First, people dont want to be told they have to be online on a particular night, at a particular time, and you must be at this place with these people to do this thing. That and they cant or wont dedicate what is normally at least a couple of hours to one task, much of which ends up being a lot of hurry up and wait.
I have no issues with raiding as it's been done in the past in EQ or Vanguard or a few other games. I'm past the time in my life that I'll participate in it, but I support it existing to a limited degree. But if you're going to streamline the raid experience so that it's accessible and appealing to people that really are only interested in grouping, then why make it a raid? Just make it more group content that more of the server's population will consume.
I really like these concepts. My thoughts on them:
-I think that once the HV of a mob is defeated said guild should be locked out from doing the GV
-I don't think that any items from the HV loot table should make their way into the GV loot table. Keep it exclusive!!
-I like the server impact ideas, however I think only very few should permanently change the world. I think it would be cool, however, if some raid bosses would have temporary impacts like those you described that got rolled back once the boss respawns. My only concern here is that if a particular raid boss that has that effect is on farm status across multiple guilds, then the world would become artificially changed as it would always be in the "raid boss is down so world is changed" state. What if people liked/needed the world to be how it was when the raid boss was still alive, and they can't get this because that particular target is always dead.
The other thing VR would have to keep track of somehow is the members of the particular guild at the time of the downing of the boss. This would prevent guilds from selling guild invites for discounted goods/special items etc. For instance, if a special armor costs 10,000 Platinum normally, but the discount for being in the guild that defeats big red dragon is 10% on that item, bringing the price down to 9000 Platinum, the guild could sell invites for 500 Platinum and buy the item for 9000 Platinum then leave that guild. Keeping tabs on the current members of a guild would prevent this. I foresee other types of abuse that could occur with this system such as alts in the guild etc. It would be cool if they could even design some sort of system that would only benefit only the members of a guild that were actually in the raiding party.
- These concepts would mean A LOT more work for the VR team. They would have to create the HV, GV, and Arena versions of the encounters. This could take away from development on newer content. I'm sure VR can find a way to handle this however!
@oneADseven
I asked something similar to Kilsin (don't remember the post), his reponse about the same encounter having varying difficulties was a no, there will be one difficulty and that's it, but they'll create content for all types of players.
edit: found the post, https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5495/optional-hardmode-encounters first comment by Kilsin.
Feyshtey said:I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids. While on the surface neither really seems like such a bad idea, the reality is that it really cheapens the experience to a point that it's just a passing moment to get gear that people more or less blow thru and forget about.
I didn't see anything mentioned that had any sort of similarity with the Looking for Raid tool. I know that VR has said they will not have something like this in the game at alll.
kekeplayer said:Feyshtey said:I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids. While on the surface neither really seems like such a bad idea, the reality is that it really cheapens the experience to a point that it's just a passing moment to get gear that people more or less blow thru and forget about.
I didn't see anything mentioned that had any sort of similarity with the Looking for Raid tool. I know that VR has said they will not have something like this in the game at alll.
Yeah, I really blew that part of my response. I was editing and munged a couple of thoughts togther :)
What I was trying to get to was that the notion of streamlining raids in order to make them more accessible tends to lead to things like the LFR tools, and content that people queue for, jump into, and blow thru.
Rallyd said:Sounds like WoW tier raiding to me, mythic/heroic/normal... and I hated that system and still hate it. accesibility only serves to devalue the accomplishment itself. If everyone could be a millionaire then being a millionaire wouldn't mean anything, you'd just be poor.
Yeah and EQ2 had this Hardmode and Normal mode raids, its actually the lazy way of making more content by tweaking the damage values. Also it makes the content borning as your redoing the same fight over and over again.
I get it, but don't agree with the push to make end-game raid centered. We've had 15+ years of that now. The "HV" version would likely be the only worthwhile version by any stretch, as most of the reason people don't raid is what Feyshtey said and having to get everyone together to raid twice a week for a chance you get maybe 1 HV version item would just become a total drag. Difficulty accounts for a rather limited amount of people not raiding, it is much more a time/accessability thing.
Not a fan of lesser versions spawning. You want to keep the best raid stuff locked down to the hardcore raiders, so a fraction of the 10-15%...how is that supposed to get more people interested? Why can't raid mobs just respawn in their normal/only form every 2-4 hours with lockouts? If the content itself is challenging enough then that is good enough to be the barrier between the "elite" and "casual" so everyone doesn't have them.
Zeem said:Rallyd said:Sounds like WoW tier raiding to me, mythic/heroic/normal... and I hated that system and still hate it. accesibility only serves to devalue the accomplishment itself. If everyone could be a millionaire then being a millionaire wouldn't mean anything, you'd just be poor.
Yeah and EQ2 had this Hardmode and Normal mode raids, its actually the lazy way of making more content by tweaking the damage values. Also it makes the content borning as your redoing the same fight over and over again.
I agree that having tiered modes is no substitute for actual new content. I'm not following your logic though as to how having tiered encounters makes fights boring or makes you have to do the encounters over and over again?
Feyshtey said:Like Rallyd, I see a correlation here with WoW's teired structure. I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids. While on the surface neither really seems like such a bad idea, the reality is that it really cheapens the experience to a point that it's just a passing moment to get gear that people more or less blow thru and forget about.
Also, I dont think that the accessibility of raids and the percentage of people that engage in them has as much to do with how often the mobs spawns. Rather it's more a combination of a couple of other factors. First, people dont want to be told they have to be online on a particular night, at a particular time, and you must be at this place with these people to do this thing. That and they cant or wont dedicate what is normally at least a couple of hours to one task, much of which ends up being a lot of hurry up and wait.
I have no issues with raiding as it's been done in the past in EQ or Vanguard or a few other games. I'm past the time in my life that I'll participate in it, but I support it existing to a limited degree. But if you're going to streamline the raid experience so that it's accessible and appealing to people that really are only interested in grouping, then why make it a raid? Just make it more group content that more of the server's population will consume.
"I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids."
In what way does any part of my idea have a similarity to "Looking For Raids" tools? The idea behind making content more accessible has nothing to do with making it easier to form raids or dumping people together.
"Also, I dont think that the accessibility of raids and the percentage of people that engage in them has as much to do with how often the mobs spawns."
I never implied it was the ultimate factor, but it is at the very least, a factor. If a mob only spawns once every 3-5 days, that has a direct impact on the percentage of people that can engage it.
"But if you're going to streamline the raid experience so that it's accessible and appealing to people that really are only interested in grouping, then why make it a raid? Just make it more group content that more of the server's population will consume."
Not looking to streamline the raid experience. Raiding as a whole would be similar to what we have experienced in the past, but with some modifications to make it more accessible to a portion of the community without removing the challenging/competitive aspect that hardcore guilds crave. I never said that I wanted the raid experience to be accessible and appealing to people that only have an interest in grouping. The idea is to make it accessible/appealing to people who have an interest in raiding, but who might not be able to commit to long camping sessions or 3 AM wake up calls. That's the major issue with purely contested content. If you can't be at the right place at the right time, you have very little chance of ever experiencing that content. Beyond the hyper/ghost concept, there were plenty of other ideas shared that could provide some interesting fun/flavor to the raid scene.
kekeplayer said:Zeem said:Rallyd said:Sounds like WoW tier raiding to me, mythic/heroic/normal... and I hated that system and still hate it. accesibility only serves to devalue the accomplishment itself. If everyone could be a millionaire then being a millionaire wouldn't mean anything, you'd just be poor.
Yeah and EQ2 had this Hardmode and Normal mode raids, its actually the lazy way of making more content by tweaking the damage values. Also it makes the content borning as your redoing the same fight over and over again.
I agree that having tiered modes is no substitute for actual new content. I'm not following your logic though as to how having tiered encounters makes fights boring or makes you have to do the encounters over and over again?
Because you end up doing the easy mode in order to get gear (at the expense of dungeons, usually), and then come back again later to do hard more to get the "real" gear.
oneADseven said:
Accessibility also promotes the idea of more than 10-15% of the population having an interest in it. The HV mobs would still be contested and restricted the same as they have always been. I don't think it's fair to compare instanced raiding in WoW to any kind of raiding that occurs in an open world. Instances were a way to create artificial accessibility in the past but it came at the cost of isolating our characters from the rest of the world and destroyed social immersion. APW has been highly regarded as one of the best raid zones of all time, in any game. Isle of Dread from EQOA and Sky from FFXI are also fan favorites. Open world raiding is a ton of fun but there should be plenty of it to choose from, the same as with group oriented dungeons.
As far as I know, "variety" is a key element that VR has planned when it comes to deal with over crowding. I would love to see a variety when it comes to raiding as well but if raid bosses can only satisfy a single raid group once or twice per week, I imagine it being very difficult to justify the time/cost/effort it takes to design the encounters. Efficiency is key, especially when you consider that VR has a small team. I want all of their hard work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible and that obviously starts with making it accessible. Being accessible and being easy are two totally different things ... I think it would be great if the raid scene could also accomodate folks who can't commit ungodly amounts of time to camping contested content with long respawn timers.
It can, if VR has a tier raid design, eventually the top end of raiders/guilds will have nothing to gain from old tiers, that's when the more casual raiders can come in a go at it.
If not for the gear for the challange, since VR already said that not all of the best gear will be in raids. This is also a really good oportunity for making really challenging Boss encounters at release.
(when i say tiers I'm refering to wow tiers, like tier 12,13,14 etc. basically different dungeons that offer better rewards, pretty much how EQ expansion add new raids.)
oneADseven said:"I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids."
In what way does any part of my idea have a similarity to "Looking For Raids" tools? The idea behind making content more accessible has nothing to do with making it easier to form raids or dumping people together.
"Also, I dont think that the accessibility of raids and the percentage of people that engage in them has as much to do with how often the mobs spawns."
I never implied it was the ultimate factor, but it is at the very least, a factor. If a mob only spawns once every 3-5 days, that has a direct impact on the percentage of people that can engage it.
"But if you're going to streamline the raid experience so that it's accessible and appealing to people that really are only interested in grouping, then why make it a raid? Just make it more group content that more of the server's population will consume."
Not looking to streamline the raid experience. Raiding as a whole would be similar to what we have experienced in the past, but with some modifications to make it more accessible to a portion of the community without removing the challenging/competitive aspect that hardcore guilds crave. I never said that I wanted the raid experience to be accessible and appealing to people that only have an interest in grouping. The idea is to make it accessible/appealing to people who have an interest in raiding, but who might not be able to commit to long camping sessions or 3 AM wake up calls. That's the major issue with purely contested content. If you can't be at the right place at the right time, you have very little chance of ever experiencing that content. Beyond the hyper/ghost concept, there were plenty of other ideas shared that could provide some interesting fun/flavor to the raid scene.
I addressed my mis-statement about similarities to LFR in another post, probably while you were typing :)
I agree, it's not the only factor. But I would contest that it's a small factor. There are limited people that want to be prepared to raid to begin with, regardless of the timing of it.
Increasing accessibility by my estimation would require that you make the mobs available, make the encounter take less time, and make it possible to get a raid sized group together quickly and organize them at a place for the encounter. That is by any reasonable definition streamlining.
I am someone who enjoys raiding quite a bit in most games. The fun of raiding to me is teaming with friends and guildmates to beat a tough encounter together and reap whatever rewards from that. What is less fun to me is to compete for the opportunitty to kill such creatures. The challenge should be in the difficulty of the encounter, not competing against other players for the chance to complete that encounter in my opinion, at least on pve servers. I thought vanguard's lockouts were pretty good, I am against different tiers of difficulty of the same encounter though.
As a side note to what oneADseven was saying about favorite raids, yeah I agree APW was one of my favorite. I thought that plane of sky on EQOA or even Solusek were a bit more fun overall than isle of dread. I got bad memories of terror and megaladon though.
Sunmistress said:Did you consider perhaps the reason folks don't raid is because they do not care to?
EZmode will devalue other content imho.
Not once did I ever mention anything being "EZmode" -- in fact, I specifically said the ghost version "should still be pretty challenging."
kekeplayer said:I really like these concepts. My thoughts on them:
-I think that once the HV of a mob is defeated said guild should be locked out from doing the GV
-I don't think that any items from the HV loot table should make their way into the GV loot table. Keep it exclusive!!
-I like the server impact ideas, however I think only very few should permanently change the world. I think it would be cool, however, if some raid bosses would have temporary impacts like those you described that got rolled back once the boss respawns. My only concern here is that if a particular raid boss that has that effect is on farm status across multiple guilds, then the world would become artificially changed as it would always be in the "raid boss is down so world is changed" state. What if people liked/needed the world to be how it was when the raid boss was still alive, and they can't get this because that particular target is always dead.
The other thing VR would have to keep track of somehow is the members of the particular guild at the time of the downing of the boss. This would prevent guilds from selling guild invites for discounted goods/special items etc. For instance, if a special armor costs 10,000 Platinum normally, but the discount for being in the guild that defeats big red dragon is 10% on that item, bringing the price down to 9000 Platinum, the guild could sell invites for 500 Platinum and buy the item for 9000 Platinum then leave that guild. Keeping tabs on the current members of a guild would prevent this. I foresee other types of abuse that could occur with this system such as alts in the guild etc. It would be cool if they could even design some sort of system that would only benefit only the members of a guild that were actually in the raiding party.
- These concepts would mean A LOT more work for the VR team. They would have to create the HV, GV, and Arena versions of the encounters. This could take away from development on newer content. I'm sure VR can find a way to handle this however!
As far as the discount idea goes, that wasn't supposed to be exclusive to the guild that killed the raid boss. I figured it would affect all characters in the area. As far as the world being changed while raid bosses are killed, the example provided were just some rough ideas. The core idea is there though ... if there is a big bad dragon roaming around in an area, it makes sense, lore-wise, that killing it should have some sort of impact. If killing 10 gnolls makes a friendly farmer happy, killing the gnoll king should make the friendly king happy. Rather than there just being quest rewards, the impact could be felt in the NPC community and affect how they interact with our characters.
kellindil said:VR has said time and time again. Raiding will not be the focus of Pantheon. Raids will exist, but raid content will be the minority of content.
I believe they have said the game will be 90% group content, with the other 10% split between solo and raid content.
To quote my original post: "I'm not saying that VR should change their vision -- I'm perfectly fine with the majority of the game being focused on grouping endeavors."
As a side note, VR also said that de-leveling wouldn't be possible, but lo and behold ... it was just mentioned in the last stream that de-leveling is something that will likely be tested. I am not asking for raiding to be the primary focus of Pantheon. I am asking for VR to consider raiding as an aspect of gameplay that can be evolved, similar to what they are doing with resists (acclimation), progeny (remort), spell mastery (living codex), AI (NPC dispositions), perception, etc. Is raiding not worthy enough to be considered a part of "The Pantheon Difference" -- that is the question.
Also, please keep in mind that I have not asked for raiding to take up a bigger percentage of gameplay. The ideas I have shared were to promote maximum efficiency. My thought process is simple. If VR committed to designing 15 raid encounters where 5 were extremely hard, 5 were very hard, and 5 were hard -- that's 15 unique encounters where each tier of difficulty has 5 encounters unique to the tier. What if, instead, VR designed 10 encounters that had both extremely hard / very hard challenge levels, and 5 encounters that had very hard / hard challenge levels? It's still the same 15 unique encounters but with multiple difficulty settings that can accommodate more players. It's taking the same content and recycling it to a certain degree to ensure that we have enough variety in the raid scene to keep ourselves busy. I understand some people don't care to raid and that's all fine and dandy ... plenty do ... so please understand that this is just an attempt to reinforce how important whatever limited amount of raid content we get is to us. We want to enjoy as much content as possible.
Feyshtey said:oneADseven said:"I also see similarities to the Looking For Raid tools that dumped people into raids."
In what way does any part of my idea have a similarity to "Looking For Raids" tools? The idea behind making content more accessible has nothing to do with making it easier to form raids or dumping people together.
"Also, I dont think that the accessibility of raids and the percentage of people that engage in them has as much to do with how often the mobs spawns."
I never implied it was the ultimate factor, but it is at the very least, a factor. If a mob only spawns once every 3-5 days, that has a direct impact on the percentage of people that can engage it.
"But if you're going to streamline the raid experience so that it's accessible and appealing to people that really are only interested in grouping, then why make it a raid? Just make it more group content that more of the server's population will consume."
Not looking to streamline the raid experience. Raiding as a whole would be similar to what we have experienced in the past, but with some modifications to make it more accessible to a portion of the community without removing the challenging/competitive aspect that hardcore guilds crave. I never said that I wanted the raid experience to be accessible and appealing to people that only have an interest in grouping. The idea is to make it accessible/appealing to people who have an interest in raiding, but who might not be able to commit to long camping sessions or 3 AM wake up calls. That's the major issue with purely contested content. If you can't be at the right place at the right time, you have very little chance of ever experiencing that content. Beyond the hyper/ghost concept, there were plenty of other ideas shared that could provide some interesting fun/flavor to the raid scene.
I addressed my mis-statement about similarities to LFR in another post, probably while you were typing :)
I agree, it's not the only factor. But I would contest that it's a small factor. There are limited people that want to be prepared to raid to begin with, regardless of the timing of it.
Increasing accessibility by my estimation would require that you make the mobs available, make the encounter take less time, and make it possible to get a raid sized group together quickly and organize them at a place for the encounter. That is by any reasonable definition streamlining.
In my examples, the only way making it "more accessible" was ever touched on was regarding the hyper/ghost concept where each unique encounter would be available to more players. I never mentioned the encounters taking less time or anything to do with getting a raid sized group together more quickly or have it at a place that is more convenient to gather. Not looking to streamline anything. Again, for the sake of clarity, the idea is to be as efficient as possible with all content that is created. I don't think it should be a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul (Peter being extremely challenging content while Paul is just plain ol' challenging.) There should be a diverse, variegated assortment of raid content for guilds to play through and having multiple difficulty settings is just a way to make the most out of every unique encounter that is designed. In the future, let's say a new raid boss is implemented in a patch. Should it be a matter of choosing whether or not that mob is extremely difficult or very difficult, thus limiting the amount of players that can experience it? Why not provide both options for maximum effect and allow more people to enjoy the content that the development team worked so hard to create?
oneADseven said:Sunmistress said:Did you consider perhaps the reason folks don't raid is because they do not care to?
EZmode will devalue other content imho.
Not once did I ever mention anything being "EZmode" -- in fact, I specifically said the ghost version "should still be pretty challenging."
I don't think you are really addressing the fact that raiding is available/accessible in other games and there is a reason the majority of a player base does not participate.
I understand what 1AD7 is trying to say and to a point it actually makes sense, and it doesn't cause streamlining it has it to where if you are in a casual raiding guild it gives you the chance to doing some raiding on given nights to have set to raid, it doesn't force anyone to do anything if you don't want to raid than this whole topic has nothing to do with you honestly, im not saying your opinion doesn't count but if you decide that you dont want to raid than how would the raid timers even matter? And if Kilsin said that there sin't going to be 2 different versions than simply make it the orginal target with a fast respawn timer and lockouts so please everyone, this your limit poop socking, aggressive behavior toward each other, locking down targets from casual raiders, and everything else that could be seen as negative, and you can limit the gear they drop by putting certain items he drops into teirs by common, rare, very rare so lets say their loot tables are like vulaks in NToV which is maybe a lil more than 20 items, 15 of them being common with a 85% chance to drop with no dups, rare is 13% chance with no dubs, and very rare 2% chance of dropping.