I joined at an Alpha level, sort of thinking that there would be a server to test on, but I have yet to see it up. I wonder if they’re through with that.
That roughly explains it, with an addition that veteran will have a number of things “on 110%”(105%?,120%?). Say, if your resisatances,parry chance,hit,crit,dodge,armor,stamina etc. are all on +15%, you can effectively double or tripple yourself over time - it will take years tho.
Years ago, when asked to roughly explain what degree of horizontal progression he is aiming for, Mark said something like (paraphrasing, but the numbers are exact): “Three total newbs should have fair chance against well trained veteran”.
This, a thousand times this. Running Emain at Skald (or Bard, or whatever) speed in an 8-man, looking for another group to spam your melee train macros on, was not fun for me at all.
At launch, I played a mid healer. Mid healers at launch, and for about the first 6 months of the game, had an AOE stun that had a shorter cooldown than it did effect…now I’m sure you can probably figure out why that’s a bad idea in a PvP game, but for some reason, Mythic couldn’t. I spent the first 6 months of that game absolutely face rolling in a 5 person crew, that routinely won 5 vs 20+ fights. The AOE was also huge, you could keep entire groups perma stunned, while your melee train just rolled over the called out targets one by one.
DaoC was a wildly unbalanced game, right up until the end. Hib chanters with perma snare, the alb dot class that could solo a raid force from inside a keep…was fun if you weren’t on the wrong end of it.
Kickstarting an MMO seems risky, even if they meet all their goals.
Heh, true enough, but my only real end-game character was a Levislam Reaver melee type.
And people complained about it so it’s not like Mythic didn’t know. What was their reasoning for not doing anything about it? I remember bards or whatever they were called were a problem too.
Defending keeps with a Hib pbae chanter (in a good group) was so much fun. I remember unbelievable lag from all the corpses.
This is why my confidence in them figuring things out is very low. This was an obvious problem, even on paper. Anyone with any experience at all in PvP would look at that skill and just laugh, and never implement it. They not only implemented it, the kept it in game for months, and never really fully nerfed it enough.
I just see obvious problems with this concept, and don’t see them addressing those problems. I will actually bow out of this thread, as I don’t want to be Debby Downer. There’s nothing worse than someone constantly pissing in your cheerios when you are excited about a new game. I had plenty of fun in DAOC, and this game may prove to be great, I’ll certainly give it a look when its out.
One more flashback from DAOC. Runemasters (mid), had rune that made you invulnerable 1 second out of every 6, and it would just cycle around. Towards the end of my time in DAOC, I managed to get a party of 6 runemasters together, and coordinate our start times on that buff enough so that the group was more or less invulnerable full time. There were a few gaps due to lag etc, and once in a while some damage would get through, but it was probably 80% effective. So much silly stuff in that game, still fun though.
Yeah, there were some odd choices in the game as I recall. I remember the dungeons were not itemized for months and months.
I think it’s even worse now for games because every exploit and angle will be up on Youtube within a month or two, if not sooner. You’d have parties of six runemasters running around invulnerable within a few weeks.
But not PVE. That’s always the problem in these games, in the past.
Design-wise, the Healer was interesting because he had absolutely no offense at all. He didn’t have a single attack skill, let alone an offensive tree to spec into. He was pure support, either buffing, healing, or CC.
Yes, it was a mistake to design him that way from a RvR perspective, but DAOC was not just a RVR game. They were competing with EverQuest on the PVE side as well, and CC was a very key role in these games back then. It wasnt the Holy Trinity, it was tank, heal, dps, and CC.
You just can’t juggle a PVE game with a PVP game like that. Having both allows you to appeal to a wider audience and get more subs, but there are just constant balance problems like that.
I’m not saying that some skepticism isn’t warranted, but Mythic weren’t completely bumbling idiots either. And the whole point of making a game strictly RVR game, despite the much smaller audience, is specifically because they don’t have to juggle both and make compromises in design.
I get the skepticism, I really do, but sometimes gamers are relentlessly negative. I mean maybe we could wait until all the class abilities are announced or people are playtesting in beta before proclaiming everything is d0med (just like PC gaming, like Qt3 insisted telling me was the obvious case for years. Woops, guess y’all didn’t need to be relentlessly negative about the future of that either! :)).
Oh my yes. My best memory from Nimue was me and one other chanter, just the two of us, defending a keep at a choke point on stairs. Attacking (which was rather large) force managed to break just as our side hit theim from behind. It was glorious. Especially since I was only 30ish and still spamming chat with kill messages :-) And the lag, too, yes the lag…
Healers were AMAZING in RVR though. Stun/Mez/Root/Alacrity, game over.
My favorite class ever was the pre-realm ability nerfed Friar. Even post-nerf, as a solo toon, Friars were absurd. I’d duel anyone who was like “A friar? Duel? Really? Ha” And then they’d experience stacking abilities to speed attacks and proc self heals. I used to stroll into Trials of Atlantis encounters and solo Purple bosses and piss people right off.
One of our favorite tricks when running realms as albs was to have my friar go strolling solo through Emain Macha, looking for all the world like a cleric or caster…and then some dumbass stealthers would try to gank and I’d just fight back knocking them around and a couple of buddies on their own stealthers would jump in and help finish things off.
IMO, one of the smartest design decisions in DAoC was allowing relics to level up on PVE killing as long as you did PVE in RvR zones. That created a sort of Masai plateau dynamic, where it was worth it for solos or single small groups to be grinding PVE camps to level up that elite gear…but also then created a decent hunting ground for small roaming groups, too…and the roaming groups of ganking predators by no means won every fight. It was really only about a 12-18 month period of time, but it was about as much fun as I’ve ever had in a video game, hitting, running, winning enough for it to be totally gratifying and losing just enough that it felt challenging.
Indeed. My favorite MMOs are those where you have integrated PvE and PvP, like much of EQII on the PvP servers before they screwed it all up with Exiles. And what you describe was pretty darn cool.
Sadly, the rest of DAOC’s PvE was pretty meh, with lots and lots of standing in specific places in specific areas for hours on end grinding out experience.
I’m not sceptical about this or that particular skill, I am skeptical about their ability to see obvious problems, that are obvious even on paper before having to implement them. To me, they have a long history of this.
The skill thing was sort of an example of how they tend to miss big, obvious things. That to me, transfers into the actual problem for this game, and that’s balancing player progression, and player getting stomped on by the players progressing.
Time will tell, we’ll see, etc. Like I said, just calling out what to me is a glaringly obvious problem, and one that exacerbates over time. I could be completely wrong, here’s hoping!
I only met Jacobs maybe once or twice, but I can say this: he’s intense, and if he sets his mind to something, he’ll make it happen or (metaphorically) die trying.
He also had nice chocolates on his desk IIRC.
…or, his game won’t come off to match his vision and he won’t know how to fix his mistakes and it’ll death spiral. Like DAOC and Warhammer Online.
Well, that’s the “metaphorical” die trying :)
To be fair, Mythic at one point was doing a game called Imperator I think, about, I kid you not, space Romans vs. space Mayans or something similar. I still have a hat from the PR campaign. They finally ditched it when someone (mirabile dieu!) figured out that, yeah, a cooperative/competitive PvP-ish but not quite MMO game based on wonky mythologies no one cared about was not a good idea. So, there is some track record of backing off before the “hold my beer” moment.
After promising so much and delivering so little with Warhammer Online, I’m not trusting Mark Jacobs again. DAOC2 may turn out great but for me it’s “fooled me once…”.
I enjoyed warhammer online a lot during the early levels, but the RvR devolved into gaming the system and mobs of death rather than fun. I loved the class design and variation, and the skirmish modes were top notch fun.
I’ve backed camelot unchained and have high hopes, as, like trig, the DAOC couple of years has been the high point of my gaming life so far.