Hmm, was just browsing the forums because F2P was being patched in and saw this.
The Elin thing wasn't for a smaller hitbox, most BAM attacks cover a large area and the tiny differences between race hitboxes really don't seem to matter. The point was that their animations for attacks which move forwards, eg Rising Fury, first combo attack move them much further forwards than other classes, in order to compensate for the shorter reach.
I haven't played the game since the Warrior changes, but i assume that is now a relic from a time when you had no block button and a dodge cooldown. I used to avoid attacks in all content by using abilities to move me out of the way, but presumably this is now unnecessary as you can just block or dodge everything.
I hear Torrent of Blows is a pretty good DPS skill to use against Priests in PvP.
I'm also interested in how many people with double stun duration earrings you encounter, when killing level 58s in sub-Argon gear and PvE spec/crystals who are currently engaged in killing quest mobs.
However, random is random, and you can always miss the number you want 100's of times in a row. Or you can get it 100's of times in a row.
Random is random.
Someone needs to go back to school.
Dammit Gallus, i know you're an NCSoft viral marketing drone paid to ejaculate advertising slogans all over other people's boards, but why do you also have to agree with me on various elements of game design?
Stop talking sense Gallus, you're making me feel conflicted.
I'm an adrenaline junkie and risk taker at heart and I love not knowing the outcome of an event. I was an Airborne Paratrooper in the US Army. We jumped out of planes all the time and you just never know what to expect. You may just get a bad parachute and need to pull your reserve or you may have to land in a bad spot.
Enchanting is like that for me.
10 out of 10, laughed my arse off, also made me reply. Jolly good show old chap.
"it's a question of using your class effectively" = pride, chest pounding.
I'm sorry but i'm not going to allow you to redefine English words just because you're not a native speaker. If you didn't understand my post you could have tried Google translate, as i'm sure even that is capable of translating the word Pride correctly for you.
If the most effective and stable method of tanking is to hold up your shield and peak out when it's safe, then how can you call that a bad lancer?
Because that is not the most effective and stable method of tanking, it's just sufficient to scrape by on the content you are currently running, and simple enough that even you aren't likely to balls it up.
You could split the tank's role into a few different aims,
- Mitigate as much damage as possible
- Keep the boss as stable as possible
- Generate as much threat as possible
- Deal as much damage as possible
- Interupt as many key abilities as possible
Playing your class well, or 'effectively', would mean performing as well as possible in all of those areas. If Esmoire aggressively pummels the [filtered] out of the boss while spending no more time in block than is required, and as a result generates optimal threat, allowing him to tank for groups who are very well geared without them holding back, and assists in the kill via greater damage output, and he does this while mitigating a more than comfortable amount of damage and holding the boss still... Then he is doing a better job of tanking than you are doing from behind your shield. That doesn't make him prideful - it makes him a more effective lancer than you.
You are extolling the virtues of being inefficient and wasteful, and scraping by without attempting to improve your play. You are doing nothing, when you could be dealing more damage and generating more threat. As a result, you will be unable to hold threat in situations where Esmoire is comfortable, you will fail DPS checks in situations where Esmoire doesn't, you will be hiding behind your shield in situations where Esmoire can attempt interupts and prevent boss movement, increasing group DPS. That is why you are a bad Lancer, and your insistance that you are performing well enough to get by despite your inadequacies doesn't change that.
I hear gold farming bots also do well enough to get by, but i've never heard a bot call anyone Prideful for actually taking control and playing their class.
Want to know why i'm using Esmoire as an example instead of myself? Because i'm not a Lancer, i'm a Warrior tank. We have never had the option of holding right mouse and hoping for the best. My class has been required from the beginning to see and react to specific boss attacks with the correct responses, that means learning the timing of individual attacks so that i can dodge through them. I have had to do this from day one, and that's why when i get a block button, i'm already set to make much better use of it than you do.
Pleasantries over then, i'll add something more specific to the discussion. The way i think enchanting was envisioned to work, and why it clearly didn't.
First off, remember that the version of the game we are playing right now is a chop shop cluster[filtered] wedged between 2 real content tiers which was never intended to exist, and so most of the ideas for end game that might have made sense in the intended state of the game just fail miserably when encountered in the current Western version.
This could have been resolved sooner if the people responsible for designing those systems had been called to make simple adjustments to drop tables and redesign the end game to work in it's current state - except they clearly weren't. I suspect EME were instead responsible for much of this current mess, because they were put in the position of throwing an end game together from a big bucket of available resources, without really understanding how the jigsaw fits.
Half of our current content is a remnant from the original KR game back when level 58 was the cap. The end game at level 58 will have looked something like this:
Level 58 Progression
- Hit 58, get quest golds
- Run LoT and ET normal for T11 enigmatics, collect Dark Matter and badges along the way
- Enchant T11 enigmatics to +6 if you're skilled, or higher if you're not
- Use badges to buy gear that's specifically designed to help you clear harder modes and then enchant that if you really suck
- Run LoT and ET hard mode for T12 enigmatics, collecting greater quantities of Dark Matter along the way
- Enchant T12 enigmatics to +6 if you're skilled, or higher if you're not
- Use enchanted T12s and large stash of Dark Matter / badge gear to kill lv58 Kelsaik, aquire gear from Kelsaik which is the best equipment in the game
- Enchant Kelsaik special loot as high as you like for bragging rights untill the next expansion.
Note that the drop rate on that enigmatic gear was high, as i understand it you were likely to get 1 piece for each run. Note also that the end game pushes you towards Kelsaik by giving you plenty of Dark Matter which can only be used on Kelsaik tries, badges which can only be used to buy Kelsaik resistance gear, and with a carrot of having the best gear in the game drop only from Kelsaik.
Since there is a clear advantage to stepping up into each higher tier, and it's easy enough to get T12 enigmatics once you can clear the higher tier due to the drop rate, the game discourages you from enchanting any equipment any higher than you need to untill you've killed everything in the game. Which makes perfect sense, because enchanting above +6 is bloody painful. The ability to enchant lower tier equipment to +9 can be thought of only as a safety net to ensure that low-skilled players can still eventually move up to higher content if they're unable to kill it in +6.
Now here's what our current model looks like:
Western TERA progression
- Hit 60, get quest golds
- Run Fane and nothing else, because you can't clear the Balder's DPS check yet and LoT/ET HM are horrible dungeons that nobody wants to go to. Hope for BoP fodder drops because they're an upgrade.
- Don't get your T12 enigmatic gear because it has such a low drop rate, eventually buy the equipment off the broker from someone else who had better luck with drops. Clear BT, watch as it doesn't drop anything.
- Enchant T12 enigmatics to +6, or higher if you're unskilled
- Run HM Fane and possibly HM Balders. No enigmatics drop. Bank the crafitng materials just in case.
- Enchant your T12 engimatics to +9 because you don't have any T13 enigmatics to enchant yet and you're getting bored of making no progress. Burn excessive amounts of gold on a slot machine.
- Eventually craft TG gear because you've actually farmed enough materials for it before ever seeing your gear drop off bosses, you have now effectively skipped a tier and gone straight to the ultimate scrub safety net by crafting the Bear Farmer Set.
- Never run Kelsaik because nobody has any Dark Matter due to it not dropping in any of your progression dungeons, and Kelsaik doesn't drop any unique loot other than a Zebra so people can't be bothered
- Instead of Kelsaik, go back and clear normal LoT repeatedly in your crafted T13 because it's the only efficient way to get masterwork scrolls.
- Farm bears in a field inbetween dungeons to make money to spend on enchanting dust to throw at your gear.
- Finally after several months of stagnant content, EME adds unique BoP loot to Kelsaik that's interesting enough to ignite a desire to kill it. Dark Matter prices spike to 300g, people start running Kelsaik
- Realise that with masterworked TG gear you're actually overgeared for Kelsaik and the fight is a complete pushover, dissapointment as the last stage of content was brought in so late in the day that you have lost out on the thrill of struggling and barely overcoming it.
TLDR bit: Enchanting should only have ever been a stepping stone with a built in buffer for less skilled players. You shouldn't have ever felt the need to enchant T12 engimatics to +9, because by that point it should have been feasable for you to aquire T13 by actually running the T13 dungeons and seeing the gear drop. The standard dungeons should have formed a path to Kelsaik, providing players with the items they need for it, and Kelsaik should have been attractive enough that people wanted to kill it.
By screwing up drop rates and special items like Dark Matter, and by removing the unique Kelsaik loot untill the very end of the current content life, EME left players with little to do other than sit on their gear and keep trying to enchant it out of boredom. This is by no means the only issue with Western TERA's end game, but if you're going to use a [filtered] system like this for progression, the least you could do is make sure the supporting pieces of that system function in some way so that it actually works in the way it's intended to.
This tier was a goddamn travesty, lets hope the next one doesn't go the same way.
Fluffymchugglepants on 08/13/2012, 12:32 PM - view
maybe the dev's will be wiser than Blizzard, and fix their product.
If the BHS guys responsible for designing progression systems in TERA had one tenth of the talent of the equivalent Blizzard team, this game would be in a far better state. When you're a bit more mature you might realise that your revelation about WoW's expansions actually advancing the genre with each release didn't cease to be true just because you unsubscribed.
The mythical WoW expansion that was a terrible failure, which exists only in the minds of forum warriors (hint: it's always the expansion after your friends stopped playing), does not need to be pummelled just so that you can justify to yourself your decision to play another game. The world will not explode just because you recognised their success and talent.
Blizzard have dominated, and dominated is putting it lightly, they have held the MMO market by the balls and flogged it for the past 8 years and they are still riding it like a mule and shouting Yeehaa at this very moment. They didn't get into this position just because they were lucky, or just because people think Orcs are neato. Any MMO developer in any region that isn't taking a good hard look at what Blizzard are doing and trying to learn something from them is doing it [filtered] wrong.
You and your little social circle may have ceased to participate in that world, but that doesn't mean any of it has diminished. And if Blizzard were to ever wedge this type of combat system onto their finely honed end game progression path and add a splash of world PvP content, then i couldn't imagine a reason for anyone to even look at another MMO. So let's not beat around the bush - This is the West, you're here because this game has the best underlying combat design of any MMO to date, or you're here because you like looking at panties, but nobody should be here because they enjoy repeating trivial [filtered] for 12 hours a day to farm money to press buttons on a slot machine to make your numbers bigger.
And if anyone is here for that you might be better off heading over to Facebook, because Zynga has exactly what you need.
And then you have variables, like slow effects will help/hurt the internal clock, when you're micromanaging that bar. A slow attack, you can't drop block, because that 1s CD can kill you when the slow-mode hit finally comes, but you waste about 2-3 more times receiving the block, wasting the gauge.
And then there are times you have to ration a boss, (like bt boss, etc) so you're stuck having to turtle, until the pt is ready to burn. No healer times, dead member times, etc.
It's clear from your posts that your concern comes from your complete inability to tank properly. You appear to have been coddled for too long by the overly-forgiving current system that allows Lancers to tank semi-effectively without even knowing any boss tells or how to play their class properly.
The example you are using of having to wait for slow attacks reveals your problem quite well - you aren't reading and responding to boss attacks at all, you're just holding block when you're worried about being hit. With the exception of Kornus (who has consistant timing instead), all end game boss attacks are intended to be seen and defended on reaction, they are slow enough for you to see them coming, recognise the attack and respond accordingly. You should never find yourself in a situation where you're sat holding block waiting for a long boss attack animation, because you should have recognised the attack as a long one before you pressed block and adjusted your timing accordingly.
Ideally, the stamina system would have strongly encouraged this behaviour and pushed people to learn their role properly, including how to read and react to boss tells and squeeze the most out of their class mechanics. However it looks like the huge stamina pool and high regen on glpyhed skills will allow people to carry on hiding behind the shield all fight without ever stepping up to really learn one of the most interesting parts of TERA's combat system. That's a real shame.
Tanking properly has nothing to do with pride, it's a question of using your class effectively. Learning to read bosses properly allows you more uptime to deal damage and build threat, which allows your group to pull more dps. Your reluctance to do this simply means that the game has not pressured you enough to perform better. Perhaps the new content will fix that.
Lanie on 08/08/2012, 06:02 PM
Personally, I'm an altoholic. The more a game makes having alts a pain in the arse the less likely I am to continue playing.
WoW is just now coming on board with shared achievements, vanity items, and a boost to gear purchasing currency for alts.
There's something else WoW does that's more subtle but incredibly important for alts and the 'other fluff' you mention in your post. One of those really well designed systems that it never gets credit for but is a big part of its success.
Character power is the be-all-end-all of carrots on a stick for MMO players. Making your numbers bigger, making your avatar stronger is the main addictive draw that makes people play MMOs for obsessive amounts of time. It taps some compulsive need in a way that's similar to freemium facebook games designed to hook people and make them part with cash.
If you allow people to do an activity that increases their character power in an MMO, many people will grind that activity continually, for hours at a time without breaks. Over and over untill they either run out of things to make their character stronger with, or get sick and tired of doing the same thing repeatedly, burn out and quit.
There are loads of people who approach MMOs in this way, maybe not to such an extreme level, but if you've ever felt uncomfortable with hanging around too long in a zone while levelling, or going off and doing something that isn't making you much experience because you aren't being efficient, then you're afflicted by the same compulsion. It's an aspect of this genre that developers rely on to retain customers, so it's natural that the game design should account for it. What WoW does better than any other game on the market is it manages that compulsion and prevents people burning themselves out or exausting the available content.
In TERA you can, if you're so inclined, spend every single moment in game trying to increase your character power. Since you effectively buy character power with money, and you can grind money at all times by going into a field and killing bears. There are no restrictions on the amount of bears you can kill, and fairly minimal restrictions on the dungeons you can run, so people compelled to power up their character have something they 'should' be doing at all times. WoW however, very intentionally does not allow that. In WoW you are able to level quickly, and quite easily achieve entry-level character power through doing anything you like, but once you hit that welfare tier of power that everyone quickly reaches, things change.
WoW only ever allows you to spend a limited amount of time per day progressing your character beyond welfare tier. Progression past that point is controlled through raid locks, dungeon cooldowns, daily quests for rep, PvP ladder/point systems with daily caps, and a BoP system that does not allow you to buy any equipment stronger than welfare tier. You can't clear raid instances more than once per week even if you wanted to. You can kill bears in fields all day but while there are things you can do with the money, none of it makes your character stronger. The amount of time the game allows you to spend on powering your character up is achievable on a casual playing schedule, and everyone playing longer than that is deliberately prevented from doing anything that makes them stronger.
This creates something special that doesn't exist in TERA. For the players who have an addiction to powering up their character, WoW's restricted progression creates the concept of free time. Suddenly everyone who would otherwise feel compelled to grind bears in a field for cash finds themselves free of that commitment. What WoW does next is, it gives you loads of other things to do. A wide variety of little mini games and quirky silly things to pass the time, none of which have any impact on the power level of your character. You can fish and cook, and collect achievements, vanity items, pets toys mounts and tabards, grind rep with obscure factions for hats, you can run dungeons or BGs for fun if you so wish, or explore the map with associated vanity titles.
Most of this is silly fluff, but it's silly fluff that some people enjoy, and which TERA doesn't have. Even if TERA had this type of content, many people would never experience it because TERA's progression system effectively penalises you for any time spent not killing bears. If you go wandering around looking at the scenery then you're not making use of your dungeon cooldowns and you're losing out on bear-time. By restricting power progression WoW prevents people from burning themselves out and encourages them to explore the rest of their rich content - that includes creating alts. The restrictions that prevent people from running a raid dungeon over and over again give those obsessive players the freedom to do whatever they want to do with the rest of their online time, without feeling like they are falling behind and should be powering up.
This is not simply a cheap way of stretching content out, like the enchanting or RNG systems in TERA, it's a system that is designed to keep people playing for longer by encouraging them to try as many different things in the game as possible and avoid people becoming bored. The lack of these restrictions in TERA is something i have anecdotes about - as i've been guilded with several very obsessive players who very quickly burnt themselves out and quit the game. These are people with no jobs who went for prime titles on launch, and who were crafting TG gear when most people were still trying for rebirth drops. The game allowed them to run a gruelling schedule of Dungeon A, B and C, followed by 2 hours of bears in a field, and then Dungeon A, B and C again. And so they did it, because that was the way to make their character stronger, and they felt compelled to do as such. Over and over without breaks, and then they quit the game.
It's stupid to blame the players for this, because you want these people to subscribe and play your game - the game has to be designed in a way that retains these players, and sometimes the best way to do that is to restrict how they can spend their time, for their own good.
There's a simple reason for this seeming contradiction among MMO players, and why they'll often do things simply for the challenge in single-player games but not in MMOs.
Quickload button.
That's basically all it is. In MMOs, if you fail, there is a penalty for failure. In TERA, that penalty for failure is very, very steep.
The topic of designing challenges is a pretty interesting one, i think you're on the right track with your explanation - however it's not broad enough. Rather than simply the penalty for failure, i would put the problem in the OPs post down to a lack of recognition and reward from the game.
There are an unlimited number of things you could decide to do to make content more challenging, many of them do not come with any penalties other than time, however unless there is some recognition or reward to be gained from doing it, most people are not interested. Running content with no crystals in is challenging and comes with no additional penalty on death, but all you get for doing that is slower character progression in a game that pushes you to grind towards improving your character 24/7.
Even in a game with no persistant world or character power ladder, most people will not invent arbitrary challenges for themselves, they need the game to do that for them and incentivize those challenges within the context of the game. I believe that holds true for console games with no character progress as well, although it is even more of an issue in MMOs where any time spent not progressing your character could be seen as a penalty. You might be the first person to ever complete dungeon X in cosmetic gear with an upside down trackball while drinking shots after every boss, but your achievement isn't counted anywhere, and nobody else has ever tried and failed at such a thing so you don't have any bragging rights.
Death penalties in MMOs are sometimes heralded as a key to immersion in the game world, via fear of death, but i see harsh penalties as destructive when it comes to end game progression. You are essentially penalising people for attempting anything that might result in them dying, and if they aren't fighting anything that could potentially kill them then your game design is boring people to death. If you want to have content that is genuinely difficult to clear and that people can feel proud of completing, then it has to be able to kill people repeatedly. You should expect to wipe over and over on anything that's worth describing as 'hard' untill you finally clear it.
If you're expected to die, and dying means you didn't complete the encounter, why does there need to be an additional penalty for it?
TERA example: Kelsaik currently requires Dark Matter just to attempt, Dark Matter drops once per ET normal run, 1 between 5 people. ET normal is not only a bloody terrible annoying dungeon that nobody wants to run, it is also trivial lv58 content that nobody who's geared for Kelsaik should ever be going near. It does not drop anywhere else, and it's broker price on servers with advanced progression ranges from 200-500g. You need 3-4 per attempt on Kelsaik, plus full consumables and crystal bind or spare crystals for each wipe. Up untill this most recent patch, Kelsaik dropped nothing that couldn't be aquired by farming bears in a field for several hours and buying it with cash.
Kelsaik should have been the exciting challenging end game encounter that everyone was trying to get down, wiping over and over as they learnt it and improved at the fight untill they finally cleared it and felt really bloody happy as a result. Instead nobody is even trying it, because trying it is too expensive. The game design instead encourages people to farm money by doing trivial [filtered] that they could never die to, over and over again without ever challenging themselves.
It doesn't have to work like this, and for this type of end game progression model you really should be looking at the design of WoW's game systems, as Blizzard know what they're bloody well doing.