Ainadak said:What I'm asking is a fundamental question of MMO design - why does damage taken not take into account the number or variety of damage sources (at least in all the MMOs that I've played)?
If you as a player are using an ability that affects others, there are a vast array of options that take into account the scale of what is occuring. If you are focusing on a single target, then you generally do so with a good output for your cost (strong damage/heals/cc per mana/cast time). If you are focusing on multiple targets (cone attacks, player based area of effect, chaining spells, etc.) then you have relatively reduced output, which often yields increased total output if you hit enough targets. This is basic assumed stuff probably from early tabletop D&D days that builds into the game a notion that the scale of what you're doing is important. Even aoe-only games take this into account with scaling the size of the aoe. It allows for interesting MMO gameplay where you can choose to focus down or spread out effects depending on the encounter and situation.
Yet, there seems to be no notion of scaling for damage taken. If you are mitigating the damage taken by one swordsman, then in most games you are exactly as efficient in that task as you would be in mitigating the damage taken by two swordsmen. Not only does this conflict with realism (completely respect that many don't like realism guiding design choices), but it seems to lock out a gameplay design path that could run very deep. Magicians on the other hand may be a different story depending on how mitigation of magic damage is explained. Could damage mitigation be balanced such that tanking two swordsmen was less efficient than tanking just one? You might be able to balance around attacks taken per second, number of active targets who have damaged you in the last x seconds, scale mitigation based on damage taken over the last x seconds, just as a few top level thoughts.
Without scaling of damage taken by number/variety of sources what we generally end up with in MMOs is a standard group composition formula. "Bring the fewest number of tanks that you can and bring just enough healers to keep them up" is what I'm talking about. The classic twist to this comes through the use of damage sharing (shared cleave/aoe type) from the boss, but generally speaking you only bring enough tanks that you don't die to that specific effect and any additional tanks is wasteful.
Nothing that I'm talking about will break the paradigm of "bring enough defense to not die, then the rest goes to offense", but it might add some variety within what defense can be brought. If damage mitigation scaled then maybe you would see groups being able to bring multiple tanks and actually gain a real benefit from it. Two offtanks would take less damage overall than one offtank and maybe open up more varied group compositions. Maybe two tanks swapping aggro on a boss would take less damage overall than a single tank would. A 6 man group with more than one tank might actually not be completely terrible. You could extend this into tank build variety or equipment variety - some tanks built to avoid damage from few targets or many targets at once.
Given the comments Kilsin has made about design suggestions I have no illusions that there's much of a chance something like this would make be able to make it into the game even if it was thought to be a good idea. Despite that, I would like to know if you forum folks have thoughts on this? Has this been done before? Would it work? Would you like to see something like this? What benefits/issues would you foresee with it?
I think it's a smart, thoughtful idea that leads into the weeds. Overal game difficulty can be scaled in many ways.