It's time to end scripted combat

Veteran MMO players, think back to your best mmo memories. For most of my friends, and myself, these are times we overcame stupid odds, pulled together, and managed a win. Something in the typical course of the fight went awry and we changed thigns up and pulled together.

My favorite memory from XI was monk-tanking charybdis at 75, because our ninja pug tank was just awful. He was dead so fast. I had an appreciation before the counterstance bandwagon for monk tanking and the potency of that ability so I tanked charby from about 90% to 0.

(XI) The first God I tanked was Byakko, and I was pld/nin. First day, first time, ninja co-tank popped Byakko without shadows and we was dead before the fight started, literally. I tanked that cat, solo, from about 100 to 40% before the Ninja was unweak and had sufficient hate to tank again. After the fight, my best friend sends me a tell, "dude, ur the best pld I've ever seen".
Note: I know now where Byakko ranked then in the scheme of things, but at that time he was the biggest baddest thing I'd ever tanked and this was quite a rewarding feeling.

For WoW players, I once saw a DK solo the last 5% of Heroic Rotface with some intense kiting and perfect use of cooldowns.

Now think about why you quit MMOs, or why you get the feeling like you might quit
Staleness, most of the time. You get in there, you win the fight the first time, and that's epic.

You go back again, and maybe it's fun the second and fifth time, but you realize at some point that if you could macro movement, you could probably macro your entire role in the fight. If you really thought about it, you could macro your entire gameplay through an instance.

We look to developers to give us new things, that we'll push through in two weeks, rather than the four months they erroneously wanted it to last. Two weeks, a month, later, we're bored, and then we're left to sit on our hands for a month or four.

In the great latency debate, people's answer has just been to memorize the fights. For Titan, there are charts on exactly what he'll do and when he'll do it I've read on these forums people talking about memorizing Ifrit, at this time, and Ifrit is easy. Depending on the permitted scope of addons, we may get a "Deadly-Boss Mods" clone (DBM from World of Warcraft) where the addon knows by percentage of boss health, or time into the fight, just exactly when the boss will do something.

Landslide Incoming! Be ready to move.

Stomp! Gather together!

But instead, imagine that fights could be framed so that Titan had a "job", like our player jobs. All of his abilities shared a long global cooldown, let's say 5 seconds, and each was on it's own cooldown. His GCD wouldn't let him use any literally back to back, and the individual cooldowns wouldn't let RNG favor you greatly or hinder you badly.

Moves could still be unlocked, made available at certain health percentages, or time elapsed into the fight, but the boss could be unrestrained, could be allowed to do what he wants to do, largely when he wants to do it.

This is why I scoff at the notion of memorizing the order of mechanics, and scratch my head at the embrace of DBM. Instead, join us in letting SE know that latency issues, prioritizing of prompt display of red, fire, and other "bad-zones", and other such things need to be fixed now.

Just like an episode of your favorite show, you love it the first time, might watch it twice more (Breaking Bad's series finale), but each time the jokes become less funny. Each time, perfect stunning or dancing around the boss perfectly becomes less enjoyable.

If an mmo could do this, it could move away from scripted combat and we could largely start seeing more randomized gameplay. Don't worry, developers can and should still make sure certain fight-defining abilities happen at certain points, like Titan's heart-phase.

One of my favorite fights in this game is the last boss of Qarn and the reason for that is because the fight is closer to randomness than most fights I've fought in any game. I know the bricks and totems come out at set intervals but the totems target who they want, even if they all chose to target the same person, at the same time, or staggered a bit.

Edit: Abilities can even share cooldowns, so that Mountain Buster and Stomp couldn't be used back to back, so that the mages didn't have to choose between medica and the tank. I've played many games where abilities shared cooldowns.

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Originally Posted by Vantwan

And be at the complete mercy of RNG? No thanks.

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First, it's not complete mercy, it's just that you can't snore through the fight. Scripted combat is why PVPers are regarded as being more skilled than PVEers.

Random generated content is chaotic, and unbalanced. It will result in many cheap unavoidable deaths, and will make people rage at bad design, and rightfully so.

Its like saying put your own abilities on a /cast random macro, and tell people to enjoy the game.

Scripted combat... well if SE remove the instant gib abilities, I say yes.

Can't imagine Titan stomping 10 times in a row and mountain buster 3 times in a row at the beginning of last phase.

It can badly be done that way, yes, but it doesn't have to be.

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Originally Posted by HumsterMKX

Scripted combat... well if SE remove the instant gib abilities, I say yes.

Can't imagine Titan stomping 10 times in a row and mountain buster 3 times in a row at the beginning of last phase.

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The math on this isn't perfect but imagine that stomp had a 30s cooldown, on top of the 5s gcd, so that he could never stomp back to back. The RNG would Stomp, choose stomp again, realize it's on cooldown, and move on.

And yeah, Gib abilities would need special placement.

Also, I added to my OP: Abilities could even share cooldowns. Titan using Mountain buster, reset the cooldown, or partial cooldown of stomp if two abilities were so necessary, but a GCD should keep people safe from RNG in most instances. lol, literally instances.

And be at the complete mercy of RNG? No thanks.

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Originally Posted by Azazela

Random generated content is chaotic, and unbalanced. It will result in many cheap unavoidable deaths, and will make people rage at bad design, and rightfully so.

Its like saying put your own abilities on a /cast random macro, and tell people to enjoy the game.

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Both extremes are terrible design decisions. You're right, completely random abilities would be incredible hard(or easy depending on your luck), but completely static rotations will just get boring after the nth time.

There has to be at least SOME element of randomness to significant parts of fights(gaols are a joke). Maybe not insta-death or RockBusters/Stomps, but something else in order to prevent the fight from being TOO easy.

I really hope the upcoming Extreme modes will tackle this issue, leaving static rotations for "Hard Mode" content.

I have ideas myself for procedurally generated attack zones/attack patterns based on player locations and movement, so that it leaves a way to survive, that way just might not be easy.

Turn 5 is already RNG feast..no FC will tell ya Turn 5 is an enjoyable fight. Matter of fact it is in my top 10 of the worst encounters in any mmo because of RNG.

I'd say that kind of difficulty should exist, but beyond the progression of gear, and should award some special titles or achievements or mounts to show off. This way mediocre players would not feel gimped by the difficulty of these bosses and hardcore players can showoff their titles.

Sort of like WoW (Yeah, yeah, yeah it's WoW again. But admit it, WoW is currently the most babysitting MMO for noobs and casuals, but STILL give hardcores something to enjoy.) WoW had something like that. It's sort of meaningless to list examples though, coz if you played it you know, if you haven't played it you won't know. Anyway for those that haven't played it, and are interested to know, there are fights that are just too random, you always don't get the chance, and killing the boss all depends on how well your team grasps the opportunity that happens once in ten fights. A good example will be "Sinestra", you can just search it on YouTube.