Too much dancing

The problem with Chess in an MMO setting is that we aren't the players. We're the pieces. Chess is a great game, but I'd imagine it's pretty boring from the perspective of a pawn. Just like those older MMOs were fun for raid leaders and certain roles, but deadly boring for others. Ragnarok Online's PvP had incredible strategic depth and required coordination not only across a party, but among the entire alliance of sometimes 200 or so people, factoring in fights for control across 20 different castles. But sometimes I would play Gypsy and spend the entire two hours literally hitting one button.

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Did you catch the part where Wizards wait until the boss is at 20% to nuke? No, you don't get to test your Halo or CoD PvP reflexes... you get to be part of a team in a very strategic role... and if you're selfish everyone dies.

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I'm sorry, but sitting around doing nothing for 80% of the fight is maybe a "strategic role", but it's also incredibly boring.

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Originally Posted by Simaril

I want to play chess

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Gear checks aren't playing chess, they're the sign in front of a ferris wheel that says "You must be this tall to ride". I don't really see where the strategy is in wait until 50% then nuke it until it's dead. Honestly what you are describing sounds more like a FATE than anything else.

I'm curious but what were those Wizards doing from 100-20% HP? Were they AFK?

Moving around at least requires personal awareness, knowledge of the bosses rotation, and properly timing skills to avoid having to interrupt a channel to avoid AoEs. Standing still and repeating your Max DPS skill rotation is mind numbing.

My only issue with dodging in this game is that Titan is extremely unforgiving. EX is almost entirely 1-shot moves and Weight of the Land is forced to be a 1-shot due to fight mechanics. If you are still learning the fight typically any deaths at all is probably grounds to just wipe and restart, which isn't very fun at all and a design philosophy that they hopefully will stay away from in the future.

Pretty much every other boss in the game doesn't really overuse dodging or depend on it for difficulty, IMO, so I have fun on most bosses.

There's a whole other significant shift away from the social, sit back and relax games of the past towards the socially devoid duty finder fps/square dance.

I actually went on a vacation with my guild,... now you can just use DF, and don't even need to chat/talk.


Some of the 'advancements' of games have changed the experience... I'm not saying it's all bad, but it's come with tradeoffs. And right now it seems like too much of the focus has shifted towards dancing... because pretty much every other chalange that ever existed has been 'improved' so that it's no longer a challange.

Waiting for spawn timers was not fun, spending hours looking for a party was not fun, fighting world bosses and dealing with trolls or competing guilds was not fun... but all of those things introduced real challanges and obstacles that were incredibly rewarding to overcome. And meanwhile boss mechanics were interesting and challanging in entirely different ways than "move out of the red circle."

I don't want to go back 15 years, I'm just not that impressed with an overused and uninspired mechanic.

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Originally Posted by Sibyll

Gear checks aren't playing chess, they're the sign in front of a ferris wheel that says "You must be this tall to ride".

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I had a full set of ilv70 crafted gear before I went to a lv 50 instance... so I trivialized any gearcheck in:

Castrum Meridanum
Praetorium
Ifrit HM
Wanderer's Palace
Amdapor Keep
Garuda HM
Copperbell HM
Haukke HM
Pharos Sirius

None of those offer anything above ilv70, so there's no need to do them for progression.

These offer some gear upgrades, but again barely offer a gearcheck at all:
King Mog was quite easy in ilv 70
Titan... ok now you need 3,200 hps - so ilv 70 + a few materia
Ultima
Crystal Tower


So "progression" is not based on gear to that point, instead it's how good you are at dancing. Is that really what you expect from an MMO?

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Originally Posted by Simaril

I had a full set of ilv70 crafted gear before I went to a lv 50 instance

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So you had gear well beyond what most level 50s have and then complain you're too geared for the intro level 50 content.

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Originally Posted by Simaril

I had a full set of ilv70 crafted gear before I went to a lv 50 instance... so I trivialized any gearcheck...

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At gear levels appropriate to the instance (with the exception of Castrum and Praetorium) each of those instances is challenging in it's own way due to DPS checks (Ifrit HM, Garuda HM, Haukke Manor, and AK) or simple mechanics. Are you really surprised that you found these instances to be devoid of challenge when you walked into them in gear 20 levels above the requirement for them?

Thornmarch is a DPS check. Titan is a DPS Race and healer check. Ultima is a DPS Race and tank swap. Crystal Tower is a zerg/trollfest.

Also what are the challenges and obstacles being overcome by waiting for spawn timers? Patience and boredom?

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Originally Posted by Sibyll

I'm curious but what were those Wizards doing from 100-20% HP? Were they AFK?

Moving around at least requires personal awareness, knowledge of the bosses rotation, and properly timing skills to avoid having to interrupt a channel to avoid AoEs. Standing still and repeating your Max DPS skill rotation is mind numbing.

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Technically, wizards did so much instant damage that you could peel aggro off the tank in 2-3 spells. Doesn't mean you did nothing else during the fight. Mana was very hard to re-acquire, meditating took forever and clarity (enchanter buff) was crack as it just barely gave you the illusion of having actual mana regen.

Vox and Nagafen were hard fights at the start of EQ, but you have to take into account that these bosses are there in the open world, where all their dungeon shit spawns and can overwhelm a raid at any time. Placement was key, otherwise, you had teams that would handle add-aggro management in your raid until they were called in to burn a boss down.

This whole "Boss can't be affected by X spell" is new in MMOs and a tad dumbed down to what Magic should be. High resist yeah such, poor sticking of spell over recast sure, high aggro on CC spell attempt sure, but outright immunity? It's not like you're some super god being that lives outside the rules of reality (there I could understand).

Nothing was as fun and risky, as having 1 enchanter mind control some super mob, to tank the boss, and running the risk of having the spell break on each hit. Or a bard, snare kiting shit for hours. I don't know the immersion was better.

Seems that immersion is something games are trying to coin with graphics and such lately, which isn't really doing it on the long run I find. Too little to lose on death, not enough risk and too much reward. It's also to note that society and the median for player base is older now, and the game selecting wider;the time that can be alloted per games is much less than previous. This is why you find high reward on low risk to be selling better, thus flooding the gaming market.

A game producer wants money. Has to cater to the widest fan-base possible to get the most gains, or have some F2P system where they can catch a few "cash whales" that'll sink 70K a year into the game.

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Originally Posted by Simaril

So the first 12 or so instances at level 50 (and all the one's prior to 50) should have trivial or no gear checks???

Also... this (from wikipedia):

A square dance is a dance for four couples (eight dancers) arranged in a square, with one couple on each side, facing the middle of the square {sounds like the begining of a boss strategy doesn't it?}. In most American forms of square dance, the dancers are prompted or cued through a sequence of steps (square dance choreography) by a caller to the beat (and, in some traditions, the phrasing) of music. The caller may be one of the dancers or musicians, but nowadays is more likely to be on stage, giving full attention to directing the dancers.

Would you have purchased a square dance MMO? Final Square Dance Fantasy anyone? Is that what we're actually playing?

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Wow you had to wiki this to reference square dance? I feel old... we had square dancing as part of gym class in elementary school.

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Originally Posted by Tarta

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It's a different time. I admittedly did not play the older MMOs, but my guess would be that things like class strategy, boss mechanics and clever tricks were spread more so by word of mouth than by watching a youtube video of the top guilds doing the encounter. This really removes the fun of struggling through the encounter and learning as a group.

What you are saying about games leaning more towards graphics is something you could say about every genre today. I look at the Elder Scrolls series from Morrowind to Skyrim and I see a series that gets more and more graphically and physically impressive while they continue to flush mechanics, complexity and depth down the toilet, but I digress.

I think one of the major culprits of the high reward for low risk has been the introduction of "token" gear. It's just a bit more satisfying to finally get a drop than to meet the ETA on your next piece of token gear, except of course when the drop you are farming is gating you from progressing content.