Fostering Skillful Play

[saevel]

He's talking about creating battles that actually involved strategy and mechanics. Anyone who's played other MMO's knows that battles should have a variety of things happening requiring team work and precision application of strategy's. Not super buffing a handful of DD's and throwing them at a monster while keeping them alive (somehow).

The reason we've been using the "throw more DD's at it" is that is the only current strategy that works. Battles have a time limit, but don't be fooled the fight we be over LONG before that time limit expires. The NM's can devastate an entire alliance so fast that your only option is to hit it with max DPS in the hope of overpowering it's AI (I'll go into this in a minute). The longer the NM is alive and engaged the longer it's AI has to run through it's various methods of killing you and the higher your chance of a failure are. Many of these fights are non-recoverable due to the NM regaining it's HP (that seriously needs to stop for BC or other restricted entry fights), once people start dieing it quickly turns into a cluster f*ck and a wipe. With alliance wide hate and super powerful moves of death, recovery is a very slim option.

Now onto the monsters AI, monsters decisions to use TP moves depends on two things. First being it's current TP, over 25% HP (30~50% on some NMs) it will only use it when it's @300, under 25% HP it'll use it @100TP. Second is an actual script timer, the AI won't use a move within a certain time of already using one. Zering gives an NM so much TP that it hits 300 within seconds but due to it's timer it won't use TP moves as fast as it accumulates TP. This has the effect of reducing total TP spam vs damage dealt (get one move per 400~600TP fed to the NM rather then one per 300).

To get out of all this BS SE needs several changes.

Foremost is fixing enmity such that a tank can actually tank during a max DPS rush. Don't kid yourself if it's not possible for a tank to hold hate when a DD is going nuts, then we'll be falling back to the zerg strategy. The longer a monster is alive the higher your chance of death, thus it's in your best interests to kill it ASAP. This is why fixing enmity such that damage output doesn't create insane amounts is important, tanks by definition can not create as much damage as a melee and restricting your "hate" to the max damage of a PLD is a fail strategy.

Second is fixing the super AoE wipe everyone moves, AoE's need to be severely restricted. SE has gotten entirely too comfortable with making everything aoe. Circular AoE ensures that no matter if your tanking or not, everyone gets hit with the sh!tty move. Why even bring a *tank* if everyone's going to be hit with the move anyway, just bring another DPS, your healing the same amount (Curaga spam). Monster attacks should be devastating but only devastating to the target (assuming fixed enmity) with a small cone effect to anyone standing next to them. Or they could use a small 5 ~ 7 foot circular range on the *target* not the NM. These things force people to consider positioning. Finally, no more AoE super dispelling moves or sudden hate reset moves. AoE dispelling spam just moves fights towards PD / Embrava zergs as buffs are critical to keeping people alive and functioning. Single target multi-dispel is fine, or even a small conal / target-circle one, but massive 20 foot super dispells just screw with people without adding any strategy at all. Sudden Hate reset moves just make tanking impossible and your back to DD spammage (can't reset hate on all the DDs).

[Yinnyth]

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Foremost is fixing enmity such that a tank can actually tank during a max DPS rush. Don't kid yourself if it's not possible for a tank to hold hate when a DD is going nuts, then we'll be falling back to the zerg strategy.

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Second is fixing the super AoE wipe everyone moves, AoE's need to be severely restricted. SE has gotten entirely too comfortable with making everything aoe.

I agree to some degree with everything you've raised in your post. I do take 2 exceptions though:

Tanking: It is my opinion that tanks should not be able to hold hate off DDs who are going balls to the wall with their damage. If a tank can hold hate off all the DDs while they're doing a primevil brew zerg, then the only portion of the strategy of battles becomes "keep the tank alive" because no one else will be getting damaged, so you just ignore them and let them do their thing. Tanks need to be able to hold hate a lot better than they currently do cetainly, but it should only be enough to hold hate off an average DD going at 75% power.

DDs going at full power needs to be a calculated risk. Enmity gear needs to mean something. Enmity reducing abilities need to mean something. If tanks are always 100% effective, we lose all of these aspects from gameplay.

AoE: AoEs provide the battle with other strategic aspects which should not be removed. Some AoEs are complete BS (Hi, ADL's 4x-instant-use dynamic implosion which has 30' range, does 300-500 damage each, and inflicts terror for over 30 seconds), and those should be changed. But AoEs should not be removed from the game completely.

We need high-power AoEs with a long wind-up so tactical stunning or running for your life is required. We need low-powered AoEs so healing more than just 1 person is sometimes needed. We need short ranged AoEs so people who pay attention can outrange them. We need long-range AoEs which don't hit anything within 5' of the enemy itself so even the healers get put at minor risk. We need conal AoEs so you have to be careful where you stand.

We need a variety of AoEs to force us to think about how we approach a battle. Right now, most AoE attacks are either so weak they can be almost completely ignored or so powerful that they just end any attempt at killing the enemy, and there's nothing you can do about it besides putting up PD. More thought needs to go into how a boss' attacks are programmed instead of using the approach of "I want this enemy to be harder than other enemies so his AoE will be larger, do more damage, and inflict worse status effects!"