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On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise.
I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group.
Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol.
Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss.
We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is.
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What do you mean by maxing exactly ? The disciplines they talked about sound more like the SWG character development system (think of everyone starting the same but having 40 skill trees to choose from with a total cap) than the UO to be honest (UO had the skill lose when you died or decay aswell to work on this).
There was definitly a holy trinity, some classes couldn't really solo/duo efficiently if they weren't on a group. I was a necro tho. Oh Veksar... why did i love you so much.
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The holy trinity thing was blown way out of proportion. The whole concept of we can't do anything without a tank, a healer, and a dps class. If you knew how to play well and think outside the box you could do all sorts of crazy crap and make it work. Maybe you couldn't solo a rogue or quad kite with a cleric but it was mostly a crutch or stale way of thinking IMO. If you have this thought in your head that "we don't have X class, oh well, looks like I'm doing nothing" then you'll never actually accomplish anything. Especially when you consider the buff system of EQ1 which I always loved and helped contribute to a better community. People would throw out buffs to help other people and certain buffs could take a mundane class and make them pretty insane. Granted it wasn't permanent but the buffs on the whole lasted so long in EQ1 that you could get some shit done in that time. I dunno, instead of the "we can't do this" mindset that the holy trinity mindset brought on it should have made more people think "how can we make this work?" Though I understand the harshness with level loss and corpse runs may have made the average player not want to take risks, but that's how you push the envelope and discover the true potential of players and classes.
By maxing I mean the fact that theres no classes, you can mix and match skills and theres no "level cap" so if you wanted to, in theory you could acquire every single skill in the game effectively maxing out your character. There's nothing else for you to get even though your character doesn't have a level per se.
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On August 03 2013 10:58 OuchyDathurts wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise. I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group. Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol. Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss. We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is.
This is true for later content, mostly. And for raids, which are an entirely different animal. And yeah, some of the classes didn't need to exist. The Beastlord is a perfect example. High-end Shamans mattered because they had relevant slows, stat buffs that went over the cap, and Haste that went over the cap. Monks mattered because they did non-trivial DPS and could pull (the tankiness went completely out the window immediately after you left. Unless you were hugely overgeared and facing trivial content, Monks and Rangers stopped being able to tank for balls). Beastmasters did shit for damage, couldn't pull and had one relevant buff, which was a medium duration mana regen buff that stacked with the Clarity lines. Whoo. Hoo. They became a MGB-bot because they didn't fill a useful niche. Meanwhile, Berserkers were actually one of the more in-demand classes when I quit after HoT, because they were interchangable with Rogues and Rangers as the best sustained DPS classes in the high end raid/group game, a bit behind, but competitive and with a lot of useful group buffs. Realistically, most of the EQ class problems had to do with pet AI and raid interactions. It's not a coincidence that Necros, Beastlords and Mages weren't as good in those settings. When a third of the class is tied up in an unusable feature... well... Druids were the other class that really got the ouch, but they had useful buffs and could backup-heal in a pinch. Their problem is that they didn't do anything well. They didn't heal like a Cleric (or Shaman, really), couldn't slow, had no CC and had subpar nukes. It's a cool concept, but at some point they needed to get something that mattered. The jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none schtick doesn't work in the game EQ1 became.
I too am highly sceptical of this approach to classes. It can be done correctly, but... I don't know. Maybe everyone's an Adventurer at level 1 and can take any skill. At level 10 you become an Archetype - Fighter, Specialist, Spellcaster - and have access to more specialized skills, with all the points you spent on skills outside that archetype being refunded (or maybe they just no longer progress). So if I spend 5 points learning two-handed slashing and 5 learning Alteration, when I decide to become a Spellcaster, I get my 5 points on 2HS back to spend on stuff in my discipline. At level 15 you become a Class - Warrior, Ranger, Rogue etc etc etc - where you have a highly specific skill tree including unique skills. That way it's an organic process and people have time to figure out what they want and what they like. Include a retraining option all the way back to Archetype, keeping in mind that regearing a character is hard, expensive and a super pain in the hole.
Damnit it's scary how much I still love this game.
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On August 03 2013 11:34 OuchyDathurts wrote:
By maxing I mean the fact that theres no classes, you can mix and match skills and theres no "level cap" so if you wanted to, in theory you could acquire every single skill in the game effectively maxing out your character. There's nothing else for you to get even though your character doesn't have a level per se.
That's just a bad system, and i don't know any example of this. Maybe darkfall ? Dunno, i didn't really played that game, but others i had played with no class system always had caps or mechanichs to stop you from maxing out. Caps is the easier imho, and as i said before, the disciplines sounded way more as the SWG system, which was cap restricted (as i said before, like if everybody had the same 40 skill trees for example and a bunch of points to spents with a cap, which they learned using the proficiencies required by the proffessions, like pistoleer you had to be killing with a pistol, etc).
If you can be everything there is no personalization, i can agree with that. But it's not like that's an actual problem if you handle it correctly, which is fairly easy to do and intuitive enough to figure it out by yourself.
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On August 03 2013 11:42 LuckoftheIrish wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 10:58 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise. I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group. Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol. Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss. We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is. This is true for later content, mostly. And for raids, which are an entirely different animal. And yeah, some of the classes didn't need to exist. The Beastlord is a perfect example. High-end Shamans mattered because they had relevant slows, stat buffs that went over the cap, and Haste that went over the cap. Monks mattered because they did non-trivial DPS and could pull (the tankiness went completely out the window immediately after you left. Unless you were hugely overgeared and facing trivial content, Monks and Rangers stopped being able to tank for balls). Beastmasters did shit for damage, couldn't pull and had one relevant buff, which was a medium duration mana regen buff that stacked with the Clarity lines. Whoo. Hoo. They became a MGB-bot because they didn't fill a useful niche. Meanwhile, Berserkers were actually one of the more in-demand classes when I quit after HoT, because they were interchangable with Rogues and Rangers as the best sustained DPS classes in the high end raid/group game, a bit behind, but competitive and with a lot of useful group buffs. Realistically, most of the EQ class problems had to do with pet AI and raid interactions. It's not a coincidence that Necros, Beastlords and Mages weren't as good in those settings. When a third of the class is tied up in an unusable feature... well... Druids were the other class that really got the ouch, but they had useful buffs and could backup-heal in a pinch. Their problem is that they didn't do anything well. They didn't heal like a Cleric (or Shaman, really), couldn't slow, had no CC and had subpar nukes. It's a cool concept, but at some point they needed to get something that mattered. The jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none schtick doesn't work in the game EQ1 became. I too am highly sceptical of this approach to classes. It can be done correctly, but... I don't know. Maybe everyone's an Adventurer at level 1 and can take any skill. At level 10 you become an Archetype - Fighter, Specialist, Spellcaster - and have access to more specialized skills, with all the points you spent on skills outside that archetype being refunded (or maybe they just no longer progress). So if I spend 5 points learning two-handed slashing and 5 learning Alteration, when I decide to become a Spellcaster, I get my 5 points on 2HS back to spend on stuff in my discipline. At level 15 you become a Class - Warrior, Ranger, Rogue etc etc etc - where you have a highly specific skill tree including unique skills. That way it's an organic process and people have time to figure out what they want and what they like. Include a retraining option all the way back to Archetype, keeping in mind that regearing a character is hard, expensive and a super pain in the hole. Damnit it's scary how much I still love this game.
I miss the game but I know I'm looking back like 14 years with some rose colored glasses. EQ1 was lightning in a bottle for me, tbh I've been chasing it ever since. While I still have all the memories of the awesome shit I was part of, the people I spent time with, the awful wipes or training I don't think I'll ever have that again unfortunately. Someone I know has an emulated server I tried like 6 months ago but I just couldn't do it lol. Too much time, too much chasing the dragon, and it looks like Doom for christ sake lol.
We were duoing when rangers were the joke of EQ, part half assed druid part super half assed warrior? Ranger down! But they really weren't as bad as people thought. Yeah it helped once we got end game geared out but this was when people didn't think these classes were very good. Turns out they were all wrong, but if people don't try to work around the holy trinity they'll never know anything.
Pet classes have always been a double edged sword. Their pets are either a complete liability and worthless, or the devs make their pets absolutely fucking nuts to compensate. Generally they're great solo but lose their viability in groups, which IMO is good design. The same thing was the case in DAoC, necromancers complete PvE beasts, could solo the world very easily and they sucked ass in RvR. Infiltrators, a complete nightmare to solo PvE but they exploded people in RvR so you sort of had to pick your poison. Want a necro to solo? You'll be amazing at soloing, but you're going to pay the price in group usefulness. Personally I've never been huge on entrusting a large portion of my class viability to an AI controlled pet though, too sketchy.
That class system you lay out sounds interesting, but it also sort of takes away the freeform character thing if you narrow things. Unless it just gives you suggestions, you seem to be making a cleric like class, these skills are what you might want to look at. But it never puts you in a box.
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On August 03 2013 12:01 Godwrath wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 11:34 OuchyDathurts wrote:
By maxing I mean the fact that theres no classes, you can mix and match skills and theres no "level cap" so if you wanted to, in theory you could acquire every single skill in the game effectively maxing out your character. There's nothing else for you to get even though your character doesn't have a level per se. That's just a bad system, and i don't know any example of this. Maybe darkfall ? Dunno, i didn't really played that game, but others i had played with no class system always had caps or mechanichs to stop you from maxing out. Caps is the easier imho, and as i said before, the disciplines sounded way more as the SWG system, which was cap restricted. If you can be everything there is no personalization, i can agree with that. But it's not like that's an actual problem if you handle it correctly, which is fairly easy to do and intuitive enough to figure it out by yourself.
Like I said, we'll see how it all pans out. But this open ended sounding system sounds to me like there would be the ability to grab everything provided you put in enough time and effort. SWG was so long ago I remember almost nothing of it, other than I was in beta and it was probably the worst beta I've ever been in lol. If they're saying I can play for years and then my buddy starts playing and I'll want to play with him because we can do the same content and I can get skills I may have skipped over. I don't see how its possible I skipped over any skills that matter at all to me unless I can have everything. If it mattered I'd have done the content to get the skill already, the only other option is I can have everything and these skills are pretty much garbage to me but I may as well get them since my friend wants to play.
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They said open ended that you could be a backstabbing warrior, or a mix of a rogue caster. They didn't say a backstabbing rogue caster healer necromancer mesmerizer. Of course we are drawing conclussions with little information, but i don't find hard to figure out how that kind of system can (and has) work. You could be right, and they just go braindead about it, but since it is not something new i doubt (and hope also) they will.
What do you exactly mean by geting skills you skipped over ? Why wouldn't they matter ? I believe you are thinking too much on everyone being the same, which is not how it works.
Let's make up an example. Let's say each discipline has 3 skills (this could be passives, abilities etc) on 2 skill trees each one (skill trees normally for what they represent, like weapon, armor type, whatever) and a final one that you can buy if you complete both skill trees. Each skill costs 1 point, except the final skill which costs 3. The maximum amount of points you can ever achieve is 15 (cap).
For example i want to build a plate armor backstabbing character.
I look up the daggers tree, and i decide to spend the 12 points on it, maxing it out.
I want to make him a bit tanky so i look up the discipline plate armor and i spend the rest of the points there to be more effective while using it.
How you acquire those points, on those kinds of games were normally receiving experience by using those. For example, to get the plate armor proficiency (which would make you more efficient at using plate, like reducing weight debuffs, evasion, speed, or even giving buffs, etc) you would have to wear while doing the killing, and same for the daggers.
If we go back to your example, and you already are a capped character, there is absolutely no point on training skills, except if you are planning to reroll because now you want to be a 2handed plate armor dude. So you start grinding with your friend using a 2handed weapon, that you are not proficient at all with, while removing dagger skills as you gather enough experience to buy the 2handed skills to replace them.
Edit - Oh, i found this, which i think will do it more understandable. A preCU SWG character calculator. You first choose a starting proffession, which would unlock at certain skills other advanced proffessions.
http://www.swgcharacterbuilder.com/swg-cb.php?prof_id=2
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On August 03 2013 12:03 OuchyDathurts wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 11:42 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:58 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise. I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group. Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol. Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss. We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is. This is true for later content, mostly. And for raids, which are an entirely different animal. And yeah, some of the classes didn't need to exist. The Beastlord is a perfect example. High-end Shamans mattered because they had relevant slows, stat buffs that went over the cap, and Haste that went over the cap. Monks mattered because they did non-trivial DPS and could pull (the tankiness went completely out the window immediately after you left. Unless you were hugely overgeared and facing trivial content, Monks and Rangers stopped being able to tank for balls). Beastmasters did shit for damage, couldn't pull and had one relevant buff, which was a medium duration mana regen buff that stacked with the Clarity lines. Whoo. Hoo. They became a MGB-bot because they didn't fill a useful niche. Meanwhile, Berserkers were actually one of the more in-demand classes when I quit after HoT, because they were interchangable with Rogues and Rangers as the best sustained DPS classes in the high end raid/group game, a bit behind, but competitive and with a lot of useful group buffs. Realistically, most of the EQ class problems had to do with pet AI and raid interactions. It's not a coincidence that Necros, Beastlords and Mages weren't as good in those settings. When a third of the class is tied up in an unusable feature... well... Druids were the other class that really got the ouch, but they had useful buffs and could backup-heal in a pinch. Their problem is that they didn't do anything well. They didn't heal like a Cleric (or Shaman, really), couldn't slow, had no CC and had subpar nukes. It's a cool concept, but at some point they needed to get something that mattered. The jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none schtick doesn't work in the game EQ1 became. I too am highly sceptical of this approach to classes. It can be done correctly, but... I don't know. Maybe everyone's an Adventurer at level 1 and can take any skill. At level 10 you become an Archetype - Fighter, Specialist, Spellcaster - and have access to more specialized skills, with all the points you spent on skills outside that archetype being refunded (or maybe they just no longer progress). So if I spend 5 points learning two-handed slashing and 5 learning Alteration, when I decide to become a Spellcaster, I get my 5 points on 2HS back to spend on stuff in my discipline. At level 15 you become a Class - Warrior, Ranger, Rogue etc etc etc - where you have a highly specific skill tree including unique skills. That way it's an organic process and people have time to figure out what they want and what they like. Include a retraining option all the way back to Archetype, keeping in mind that regearing a character is hard, expensive and a super pain in the hole. Damnit it's scary how much I still love this game. We were duoing when rangers were the joke of EQ, part half assed druid part super half assed warrior? Ranger down! But they really weren't as bad as people thought. Yeah it helped once we got end game geared out but this was when people didn't think these classes were very good. Turns out they were all wrong, but if people don't try to work around the holy trinity they'll never know anything.
Just specifically about this point, Rangers were complete ass for a long time. It basically took the introduction of AAs to make the class not worthless. Once EQ and AM were picked up, Rangers actually did almost entirely risk-free DPS in group and raid settings that was well in excess of anyone else's. It's a shame it stagnated afterwards.
I don't know. I don't really want entirely free-form characters, because I want high-end content that's intended for optimized characters, parties and raids. If that exists, then someone's going to end up pissed off that their backstabbing platemail-wearing caster isn't as good as a focused tank or focused healer or focused DPS class. Better to keep things pure, IMO.
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That depends on the stance of the devs in regards to high end more than the system to be honest. Either the make it easier to accomodate casuals, work on infinite balance patches (stupid) or say well fuck off, which kinda was EQ stance on class balance aswell for raids.
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If they make it easier to accommodate casuals, they're shooting themselves in the foot w/r/t their existing player base, many of whom play only for the high-end raids. The EQ1 team relies on them pretty extensively for testing and tuning. And class balance isn't bad, really. There are four classes that are in poor states, and three of them it's because of mechanics. Generally balance is bad immediately after an expansion, then things get tuned more and brought back into line.
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On August 03 2013 13:01 LuckoftheIrish wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 12:03 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 11:42 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:58 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise. I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group. Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol. Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss. We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is. This is true for later content, mostly. And for raids, which are an entirely different animal. And yeah, some of the classes didn't need to exist. The Beastlord is a perfect example. High-end Shamans mattered because they had relevant slows, stat buffs that went over the cap, and Haste that went over the cap. Monks mattered because they did non-trivial DPS and could pull (the tankiness went completely out the window immediately after you left. Unless you were hugely overgeared and facing trivial content, Monks and Rangers stopped being able to tank for balls). Beastmasters did shit for damage, couldn't pull and had one relevant buff, which was a medium duration mana regen buff that stacked with the Clarity lines. Whoo. Hoo. They became a MGB-bot because they didn't fill a useful niche. Meanwhile, Berserkers were actually one of the more in-demand classes when I quit after HoT, because they were interchangable with Rogues and Rangers as the best sustained DPS classes in the high end raid/group game, a bit behind, but competitive and with a lot of useful group buffs. Realistically, most of the EQ class problems had to do with pet AI and raid interactions. It's not a coincidence that Necros, Beastlords and Mages weren't as good in those settings. When a third of the class is tied up in an unusable feature... well... Druids were the other class that really got the ouch, but they had useful buffs and could backup-heal in a pinch. Their problem is that they didn't do anything well. They didn't heal like a Cleric (or Shaman, really), couldn't slow, had no CC and had subpar nukes. It's a cool concept, but at some point they needed to get something that mattered. The jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none schtick doesn't work in the game EQ1 became. I too am highly sceptical of this approach to classes. It can be done correctly, but... I don't know. Maybe everyone's an Adventurer at level 1 and can take any skill. At level 10 you become an Archetype - Fighter, Specialist, Spellcaster - and have access to more specialized skills, with all the points you spent on skills outside that archetype being refunded (or maybe they just no longer progress). So if I spend 5 points learning two-handed slashing and 5 learning Alteration, when I decide to become a Spellcaster, I get my 5 points on 2HS back to spend on stuff in my discipline. At level 15 you become a Class - Warrior, Ranger, Rogue etc etc etc - where you have a highly specific skill tree including unique skills. That way it's an organic process and people have time to figure out what they want and what they like. Include a retraining option all the way back to Archetype, keeping in mind that regearing a character is hard, expensive and a super pain in the hole. Damnit it's scary how much I still love this game. We were duoing when rangers were the joke of EQ, part half assed druid part super half assed warrior? Ranger down! But they really weren't as bad as people thought. Yeah it helped once we got end game geared out but this was when people didn't think these classes were very good. Turns out they were all wrong, but if people don't try to work around the holy trinity they'll never know anything. Just specifically about this point, Rangers were complete ass for a long time. It basically took the introduction of AAs to make the class not worthless. Once EQ and AM were picked up, Rangers actually did almost entirely risk-free DPS in group and raid settings that was well in excess of anyone else's. It's a shame it stagnated afterwards. I don't know. I don't really want entirely free-form characters, because I want high-end content that's intended for optimized characters, parties and raids. If that exists, then someone's going to end up pissed off that their backstabbing platemail-wearing caster isn't as good as a focused tank or focused healer or focused DPS class. Better to keep things pure, IMO.
I can't think of a MMORPG that with a no-class system that made anyone as versatile and redundant as that, but let's say that happens: what if that person wants to go into high level raids? Simple, he gets equipment and skills that makes him viable: an actual tank, a healer, or some DPS class, because the system let's him, assuming he has done enough training in his skills and whatnot, otherwise people just won't invite him. What if he wants to travel around the world, going on quests and adventures, fighting evil as a magical swordsman assassin? Well, go ahead! It's a MMORPG!
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Sweden5554 Posts
So I'm just gonna list my own thoughts about the details of the game so far.
Music I can't imagine that they can remotely mess this up. EQ2 score was pretty great and if they aren't sparing the costs for the score they'll get high quality stuff.
Character Design The people in twitch chat were calling it disney, I think you do need the high contrast larger than life kind of character design both when it comes to faces and when it comes to clothing. These are tiny figures on your screen, like 6" at most.
Movement I really like that the character animation is dependent on how you move in the terrain. Hopefully they'll dare to make it slower to walk uphill than down hill. And if you're running straight into a wall your character doesn't have the animation for running at full speed while moving slower than a snail. This is lazy game design and I don't know why we've all let the companies doing AAA titles to get away with it for so long.
Combat The fighting seemed to be very action oriented, but that could be because there was no UI to show us how much or how little they had to do. Speaking of which. I really hope they let people mod the UIs for EQN they can't make one interface that will be the best kind of interface for any kind of player and playstyle.
World Design World design looks good. Or well the 3 terrain types they showed at least.
Destructibility I love that this game is built out of voxels! It's something I've been wanting since long before minecraft came around. I just hope the auto world repair is done in a fun way as much as possible rather than it just coming back to life. (why not have a quest for aspiring carpenters to go and repair the ruins that some adventurers had some fun in?) And this still means that in some respects the world will not grow organically. Paths will not be formed in woods where people walk often. These wont turn into roads if very well travelled and villages won't appear close to the crossings of them. Woods won't grow if no one cuts them down, and woods won't disappear if too many of the trees are cut down without replanting. This is something I would really like to see. Cause it would be awesome.
AI mobs/procedurally generated quests This to me is one of the bigger things I've always wanted in an MMO. A non static world and NPCs that aren't just always going to give you the same quest over and over and over again. And having both friends and foes remember who you are will help more with the immersion of the game. If they take this to the extreme then it could mean you'll have bards singing songs about you in taverns across the land if you've done something really awesome.
Class system So little was talked about when it comes to the characters and classes etc, but I imagine that this will be an interesting thing for late game, to level up the complimentary classes so you can create a very customized character which suits your needs. I can of course see the downsides with this too, but it's mostly a wait and see (and try it out) kind of thing.
Rallying Calls I guess these are too important to be completely procedurally created, it's a shame that this will kinda still mean that the servers won't look that different after a while. Would be even more awesome if the different shards started to have very different worlds. Still they sound awesome. Too bad they don't seem to go with a faction system where you can try and undermine the other factions rallying call quests.
Landmark This is something I'll probably play a lot. It's like a good version of minecraft. Will be fun to build epic palaces and towns with my friends.
I'm hoping they'll stream some more content from the different panels they mentioned, not that I've seen any schedule for the event but oh well.
On August 03 2013 13:25 NapkinBox wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2013 13:01 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 12:03 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 11:42 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:58 OuchyDathurts wrote:On August 03 2013 10:41 LuckoftheIrish wrote:On August 03 2013 10:10 OuchyDathurts wrote:
I skimmed over some stuff, nothing really jumped out at me and made me wish this game was out immediately because I can't wait. I played EQ1 at launch, first MMO, loved the shit out of it best PvE experience by miles, the people who played were a different breed than your MMO players now, it was a total blast.
The sandbox game I couldn't possibly care less about, I won't touch it, not my bag but it sounds like a cute idea on paper for some people.
As far as EQN is concerned I don't understand the no classes system. I mean in theory "yay anyone can do anything!" but in practice I see it being a clusterfuck. Systems like this always end up in cookie cutter builds at the end of the day anyway. Your ability to make your character completely worthless with some unwise decisions is going to annoy people. You either tough it out with your trash character until you get enough skill points to get them back on track or you reroll and hope you don't screw up again. Then at the end of the day with unlimited skill points or whatever you want to call them characters in the end are going to be homogeneous. Everyone has every skill, everyone is the same, these are the best builds run them or you're an idiot. Add that with the fact they said there's like 40 classes worth of disciplines and you've got a recipe for disaster. You think you're adding flexibility but you're really not. If EQ2 should have taught them anything it should have been that having 24 classes is COMPLETELY impossible to ever balance in your wildest dreams. You literally can never make 24 classes all relevant and viable in a game without watering things down or stepping on toes. Especially in a genre like MMO where people are going to be min/maxing, "yeah, these 6 classes are sick, the rest are shit, we don't want you, reroll" lol. I honestly think that, more than anything else, this is a function of the game getting completely beyond their concept in the last eight years. In any old-world group content, you can pretty much throw six characters together, and as long as you've got some sort of healer, some sort of CC and some sort of plate tank plus some DPS, you can get shit done. The most smoothly-functioning groups I ever had had Rangers and Necros handling CC, because they were good at it. The must-have-Warrior-Shaman-Cleric-Ench-Rog-Monk stuff didn't come until much later in the game, when content became BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_1 and then later BIG PILE OF NUMBERS!_2. Up through, say, LDoN, nearly anything worked assuming people could play. As for classes more generally... Let's assume you streamlined the EQ1 classes to Priest, Mage, Tank and... I dunno, Stabby Guy. What'll happen is that by the time the endgame gets discovered, 44% of Priests will have become EQ1 Clerics, 44% will have become EQ1 Shamans, and 2% will be EQ1 Druids, because they're idiots. Tanks will be basically EQ1 Warriors with maybe some Shadow Knight stuff. Mages will almost certainly be split between Wizards and Enchanters because pets are more trouble than they're worth. There'll be some Necros for people who want to solo, I guess, and to act as mana batteries on raids. The Stabby Guys will be split between Rogues, Rangers and Monks because all three of those classes are relevant during high-end content. There'll be one Beastmaster per guild to cast some class-specific buffs. I guess there'll be some Berserkers and Bards too. But by its very design, a game like Everquest lends itself to minmaxing to an extreme degree. There are scads of content that isn't reachable otherwise. I quit right before PoP since the game was getting too casual for my liking. To me the holy trinity never existed though, I mean I'd obviously get the cleric and chanter buffs but I was a shaman which was broke as hell but people didn't realize it, and my neighbor IRL was a ranger which together made a pretty disgusting duo so we'd just duo everything. Things we "weren't supposed" to be able to do without a full group. Monk + Shaman was the dumbest duo possible, it was so sick, two strongest classes in the game and then SOE decided hmm, lets take the 2 strongest classes and put them together with a pet and make a beastmaster! lol. The only thing you missed out on was snare but if you had the spear from Veeshan's Peak on the shaman you could just proc it. And yeah the classes without mez were generally the best CCers because they've spent their whole life in game having to ghetto mez with root or fear without breaking it so you get really good at being on your toes lol. Even with only the classes EQ1 had there were still classes that really didn't need to exist outside of having a buff you might want. You had a few tanks because every boss had a million adds, but 3 should be more than enough for most situations, clerics obviously made the world go round with CH rotations, 1 or 2 shamans max, 1 to 3 monks for pulling, 1 ranger for weaponshield pulls and snaring, 1-3 enchanters maybe for CC but odds are the CC was pointless so just give my clarity bitch, druids no one needed really, you might have 1 mage and 1 necro for mana rods but it wasn't necessary at all, then just bring the deeps. Even with the fairly limited classes of EQ1 compared to EQ2 you had some stuff that just wasn't necessary at all, assuming you weren't running a zerg guild full of idiots where you just needed warm bodies to hurl themselves at a boss. We'll see how this all pans out but I'm super fucking skeptical this won't be a train wreck that turns into characters being useless because they took a wrong turn in a skill build or the same cookie cutter crap that every game is. This is true for later content, mostly. And for raids, which are an entirely different animal. And yeah, some of the classes didn't need to exist. The Beastlord is a perfect example. High-end Shamans mattered because they had relevant slows, stat buffs that went over the cap, and Haste that went over the cap. Monks mattered because they did non-trivial DPS and could pull (the tankiness went completely out the window immediately after you left. Unless you were hugely overgeared and facing trivial content, Monks and Rangers stopped being able to tank for balls). Beastmasters did shit for damage, couldn't pull and had one relevant buff, which was a medium duration mana regen buff that stacked with the Clarity lines. Whoo. Hoo. They became a MGB-bot because they didn't fill a useful niche. Meanwhile, Berserkers were actually one of the more in-demand classes when I quit after HoT, because they were interchangable with Rogues and Rangers as the best sustained DPS classes in the high end raid/group game, a bit behind, but competitive and with a lot of useful group buffs. Realistically, most of the EQ class problems had to do with pet AI and raid interactions. It's not a coincidence that Necros, Beastlords and Mages weren't as good in those settings. When a third of the class is tied up in an unusable feature... well... Druids were the other class that really got the ouch, but they had useful buffs and could backup-heal in a pinch. Their problem is that they didn't do anything well. They didn't heal like a Cleric (or Shaman, really), couldn't slow, had no CC and had subpar nukes. It's a cool concept, but at some point they needed to get something that mattered. The jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none schtick doesn't work in the game EQ1 became. I too am highly sceptical of this approach to classes. It can be done correctly, but... I don't know. Maybe everyone's an Adventurer at level 1 and can take any skill. At level 10 you become an Archetype - Fighter, Specialist, Spellcaster - and have access to more specialized skills, with all the points you spent on skills outside that archetype being refunded (or maybe they just no longer progress). So if I spend 5 points learning two-handed slashing and 5 learning Alteration, when I decide to become a Spellcaster, I get my 5 points on 2HS back to spend on stuff in my discipline. At level 15 you become a Class - Warrior, Ranger, Rogue etc etc etc - where you have a highly specific skill tree including unique skills. That way it's an organic process and people have time to figure out what they want and what they like. Include a retraining option all the way back to Archetype, keeping in mind that regearing a character is hard, expensive and a super pain in the hole. Damnit it's scary how much I still love this game. We were duoing when rangers were the joke of EQ, part half assed druid part super half assed warrior? Ranger down! But they really weren't as bad as people thought. Yeah it helped once we got end game geared out but this was when people didn't think these classes were very good. Turns out they were all wrong, but if people don't try to work around the holy trinity they'll never know anything. Just specifically about this point, Rangers were complete ass for a long time. It basically took the introduction of AAs to make the class not worthless. Once EQ and AM were picked up, Rangers actually did almost entirely risk-free DPS in group and raid settings that was well in excess of anyone else's. It's a shame it stagnated afterwards. I don't know. I don't really want entirely free-form characters, because I want high-end content that's intended for optimized characters, parties and raids. If that exists, then someone's going to end up pissed off that their backstabbing platemail-wearing caster isn't as good as a focused tank or focused healer or focused DPS class. Better to keep things pure, IMO. I can't think of a MMORPG that with a no-class system that made anyone as versatile and redundant as that, but let's say that happens: what if that person wants to go into high level raids? Simple, he gets equipment and skills that makes him viable: an actual tank, a healer, or some DPS class, because the system let's him, assuming he has done enough training in his skills and whatnot, otherwise people just won't invite him. What if he wants to travel around the world, going on quests and adventures, fighting evil as a magical swordsman assassin? Well, go ahead! It's a MMORPG!
Yeah I agree I don't think the issue will ever be that people can't join raids with any kind of multiclass, that is a given. Or let me rephrase that, there are a lot of stupid people that will complain about this specific thing. I mean players with crappy gear that hasn't read a class guide with item list have been around for all the years I've played. However that doesn't mean they should make the game based on the lowest common denominator. There are other games that caters to the lesser of us. And I as a player am completely fine with that. But also you will most likely get to make it so you can have a solo build, a group build, and a raid build. At least I hope they keep that from EQ2. That will make it so you can get people who do play in more novel ways to actually think about how to best help the raid as a whole.
I think it's a bit wrong to talk about a holy trinity in the EQ games. it's more like 6 roles, and some classes fill multiple. There's Tanking, Healing /Warding, Buffing, Debuffing, Controlling, and DPS. The multiclass system's breaking point is if they make the game so that characters will be more efficient at doing a task in a raid if they concentrate heavily on one of them. Or if they'll try to make it so that the best DPS group is one where everyone can buff/debuff, do some healing/warding and of course dps. This rather than the EQ2 optimal DPS group consisting of 3 dps (of the same type, melee or magic), 2 buffers and 1 healer/warder to optimize the group output of DPS.
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The game itself doesn't matter anymore as long as they keep destroying any incentive to play with pay to win cash shops and such bs, and this is especially relevant for SOE.
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On August 03 2013 16:02 Aggnog wrote:
The game itself doesn't matter anymore as long as they keep destroying any incentive to play with pay to win cash shops and such bs, and this is especially relevant for SOE.
Relevant for SOE? Cash shops, microtransactions, 'pay2win'; all apply to nearly every MMO out there.
It's become the industry standard, SOE are not the only ones guilty of this; don't pretend otherwise.
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Very awkward press conference.
Having said that, I loved the original EQ and this game looks like it has A LOT of potential. My concern is that there is so many new things that they individually don't get the polish they deserve. Also, i'm apprehensive (a word I learned as a kid playing the first EQ lol) about some of the mechanics working in a MMO environment. Specifically the emergent AI and destructibility.
Rallying calls were the weakest part to me. First off, 2-3 months estimated time to complete means they'll be done in the first week. Second, it seems really pointless to call it permanent change when it's inevitable and without choice. If it's going to happen anyways, even if it takes my server a little longer to complete, it seems more like just another planned event rather than something game changing. He didn't mention this, but I really hope you can FAIL these rallying calls if you don't complete them after X amount of time, otherwise meh. Also, I'm apprehensive (there it is again) about hyping up 1 time events as positive for players joining later. If I join the game late and I ask my friend who joined at launch what happened and he explains all this cool shit like in the press conference I think i'd be pissed more than anything knowing I don't get to experience any of that, unless they start recycling things at which point it isn't very permanent.
I can see myself playing this game and will follow it very closely.
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On August 03 2013 19:08 On_Slaught wrote:
Very awkward press conference.
Having said that, I loved the original EQ and this game looks like it has A LOT of potential. My concern is that there is so many new things that they individually don't get the polish they deserve. Also, i'm apprehensive (a word I learned as a kid playing the first EQ lol) about some of the mechanics working in a MMO environment. Specifically the emergent AI and destructibility.
Rallying calls were the weakest part to me. First off, 2-3 months estimated time to complete means they'll be done in the first week. Second, it seems really pointless to call it permanent change when it's inevitable and without choice. If it's going to happen anyways, even if it takes my server a little longer to complete, it seems more like just another planned event rather than something game changing. He didn't mention this, but I really hope you can FAIL these rallying calls if you don't complete them after X amount of time, otherwise meh. Also, I'm apprehensive (there it is again) about hyping up 1 time events as positive for players joining later. If I join the game late and I ask my friend who joined at launch what happened and he explains all this cool shit like in the press conference I think i'd be pissed more than anything knowing I don't get to experience any of that, unless they start recycling things at which point it isn't very permanent.
I can see myself playing this game and will follow it very closely.
Yeah that was also my biggest concern when he was talking about it. Because I don't really see any point in me helping if it's un-failable since it gets done anyways.
I'm hoping that they will allow guilds to build their own city's/castles in an instance based mode that other guilds can raid. Since PvP is a major deal breaker for me in any MMO. Would work out great with EverQuest Next: Landmark.
I've never played EverQuest so I don't really know what to expect. I had the game as a kid but the store clerk failed to tell my parents it required internet which we didn't have at the time.
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Never played EQ, but ive been looking out for the next 'big mmo' for awhile now. A lot of mmo's have good elements, but they are always missing something, you know? I really like this mix of an mmo + minecraft, or a lego-mmo I like to call it. I'm sure many people used to play with legos when they were young, and I always wondered how an mmo would look when you had that 'you can build everything' element in them. I feel like this could be something that defines the next generation of mmo's. Just look at how much succes minecraft has.
Some of the problems I see with it is that the expected graphics quality is too high. For people who have been playing video games for awhile now, im sure you all know what I mean. Remember the days when people were happy with just a few pixels on the screen? I even remember some of my friends refusing to play BW, just because the graphics sucked.
In a game such as minecraft, and a game attempting to adopt the lego-way, I feel like they will need to cut down on graphics a little bit, to allow for that freedom. In the showcase, there was a lot of dust effects, probably to hide the fact that rocks being broken down isnt all that 'pretty'. But I feel, to make the next big game, you dont need 'pretty', you need a good core gameplay, that allows for freedom. Graphical improvement will come over the years. If you want a lot of people to play your game for a long time, you dont need to make everything look as beautiful as possible, because they'll only see it once and then move on. Instead, make your game something people enjoy playing instead of enjoy looking at.
As far as classes go, won't there always be some kind of 'optimal' way to play things? For me, it's not so much the class that I play that matters, but the mechanics behind it. As long as it 'feels' fun, I dont mind playing whatever. It was one of the things that really attracted me to WoW. I had a lot of fun healing with mouseover macros, and that was basically what hooked me for a long time.
In the end, you can only know when you actually play it. GW2 had a lot of innovative ideas aswell, but I didnt like the game at all.
Really curious how EQN will turn out. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
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On August 03 2013 19:08 On_Slaught wrote:
Very awkward press conference.
Having said that, I loved the original EQ and this game looks like it has A LOT of potential. My concern is that there is so many new things that they individually don't get the polish they deserve. Also, i'm apprehensive (a word I learned as a kid playing the first EQ lol) about some of the mechanics working in a MMO environment. Specifically the emergent AI and destructibility.
Rallying calls were the weakest part to me. First off, 2-3 months estimated time to complete means they'll be done in the first week. Second, it seems really pointless to call it permanent change when it's inevitable and without choice. If it's going to happen anyways, even if it takes my server a little longer to complete, it seems more like just another planned event rather than something game changing. He didn't mention this, but I really hope you can FAIL these rallying calls if you don't complete them after X amount of time, otherwise meh. Also, I'm apprehensive (there it is again) about hyping up 1 time events as positive for players joining later. If I join the game late and I ask my friend who joined at launch what happened and he explains all this cool shit like in the press conference I think i'd be pissed more than anything knowing I don't get to experience any of that, unless they start recycling things at which point it isn't very permanent.
I can see myself playing this game and will follow it very closely.
Runescape 3 is currently having a large 'world changing' event that probably similar to what the Rallying calls are (atleast, I kinda hope). How Jagex is handling it is cutting these event into 'pieces'. For example, right now everyone is just gathering resources of magical energy for the god that they are following (only two, so far) and after awhile Jagex will continue on with the event and what happens next is determined on how the players performed. It's only the beginning, so it's just starting out very simple, but it's the players deciding how the game will be in the future.
So, I don't think you're going to outright fail the Rallying calls, but you're deciding the outcome with your decisions and actions. I guess it's still counts as a whole planned event, but it still feels like you're actions mean something, making history.
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Kind of surprised none of the new information from today or last nights panel's made it into this thread. Most of the questions and concerns raised here were explained in more detail in them, I'm not really sure how much TL police's linking to other websites, so hopefully no one gets mad at me.
http://www.eqnexus.com/ has some summary's posted up from the panels, they are pretty brief, but explain some things.
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EPT
