11/10/15 Newsletter

Amsai

Good read with some interesting updates.


https://www.pantheonmmo.com/news/blog/


Based on descriptions of the Living Codex. I can see the beginings of the atmospheres positive and negative effects on spells/abilities. It also shows that at least a passive combo system in the form of synergies is in place for multi-class combos. And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? If this is true then it suggests both situational gear and situational spells/abilities are part of the plan. Thoughts?

Sinist

I like what I see so far. It always bugged me that the idea of group synergy was always thrown to the side over the years. Some games attempted to work with it (EQ2, LoTRO) in very basic fashions, but I always thought there should be more depth and class specific involvement. It is good to see they are working to that end.

Charlie.Cheswick

Yummy.

Gyva02

Gotta  a real MMORPG!  

Let's stir that pot a little bit   

Amathe

The Danger Room looked a lot like Sanctus Seru. 

Felwit

I like the limit of 10 abilities memorized at a time, so you need to plan what you think you will need based on the targets and possibly group composition. It can still use clarification of whether you can swap out abilities mid-combat and will have memorization saved sets. Those help lower the drawback of only having 10 abilities at a time.

The "Prime Scrolls" information gives me initial pause, as it seems easy to screw up. Will they also be class-specific? If not, how will the game prevent cross-class contamination by those abilities?

Amsai

Most will be class specific from what I understand. And all will have a mana color tied to them which is also tied to the class. So even if a healer grabs a nuke spell they would probably have to gimp themselves significantly in order to chase that one spell. So you will be able to do that to a minor degree but it would be limited and lacking in qaulity.

Raidan_EQ

Felwit said:

The "Prime Scrolls" information gives me initial pause, as it seems easy to screw up. Will they also be class-specific? If not, how will the game prevent cross-class contamination by those abilities?

This was a fear a lot of us had when they first discussed the multi-colored mana on the official forums.  At this point, there's no information to state one way or another, so I'm taking a wait and see approach.  I'm hoping it doesn't muddle interdependence, and I'm fairly confident the developers want to stress class interdependence, so I'm sure they're taking it into account.

Adamantine

Amsai said:

[...] And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? [...]

Whow.

Well, then I'm out.

I had that sh*** in Guild Wars already and didnt liked it there either.

It basically kills the main reason why I enjoyed the Vanguard combat system so much. In Vanguard, even after playing the Cleric for years, I still found new ways to play him.

Adamantine

Um ... I just cant find this claim theres a 10 ability limit ANYWHERE --- where is it ?!?!?????

In my experience a 8 ability combat system like the one from Guild Wars is extremely, excessively dull. Theres just not that much complexity one can hide in 8 abilities.

OK, unless they make a system like a LotRO Warden out of it, then 4 (1 for cancel) abilities can do a lot of stuff - but basically one simply "dials" the actual ability one wants to use, so the actual number of actually available abilities is much higher.

I cant see a 10 ability system being more interesting than the 8 ability system of GW.

Also I cant see how the class concepts they already talked about could ever be fit into 10 abilities. For example the Warrior is again supposed to be that nasty concept they've been in Vanguard - basically being the bard tank. That means again a ***load of abilities that are temporary group buffs on a short recast timer. With 10 abilities, how would that ever work ?

Dullahan

It works by removing that spammy combat that Vanguard had.

They've said for a long time they plan to limit the number of abilities that can be used at one time. You can always stop and put different abilities on your active spell bar, but that isn't always easy in combat. If I recall this was discussed in the round tables earlier this year.

Amsai

Its under the Living Codex link near the bottom of the newsletter.

Aradune

Adamantine said:

Amsai said:

[...] And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? [...]

Whow.

Well, then I'm out.

I had that sh*** in Guild Wars already and didnt liked it there either.

It basically kills the main reason why I enjoyed the Vanguard combat system so much. In Vanguard, even after playing the Cleric for years, I still found new ways to play him.

The idea is that you need to prepare before combat, to have a strategy and plan before just rushing in and engaging a significant mob or important encounter.  Making sure you have the right items equipped, and making sure you have the right spells and abilities memorized, plays into this.  Having access to anything and everything can take away from the need to plan how you and your groupmates are going to defeat the next encounter.  We want to make sure the challenge encountered in combat against a significant opponent involves both preparation before the actual battle and also the decisions you make during the actual battle.  

flizzer

Since i love the limited skills with GW2, I find this a positive.  Original GW was so bloated with all the unnecessary skills. Streamlining it is the way to go.

Wizardry

Sinist said:

I like what I see so far. It always bugged me that the idea of group synergy was always thrown to the side over the years. Some games attempted to work with it (EQ2, LoTRO) in very basic fashions, but I always thought there should be more depth and class specific involvement. It is good to see they are working to that end.

Not trying to derail or sidetrack ,just a serious question,did you ever play FFXI back in the vanilla 1-75 days?

If you did,what was it you liked or did not like because in reality it was VERY similar to EQ1.

However we are talking and i THINK most want more depth in the grouping and i believe FFXI did that,although far from perfect ,i know that,but would be nice to see something along those lines and even better.
However to do that we need to get rid of that Altaholic stigma and gear more towards single encounters as well add in several layers of properties,example Elemental and of course your typical piercing,slashing bla bla bla.

What  i have ALWAYS hoped some game would do is give us more with player>player interaction combos but keep it making sense,nothing too ridiculously unreal.

delete5230

Aradune said:

Adamantine said:

Amsai said:

[...] And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? [...]

Whow.

Well, then I'm out.

I had that sh*** in Guild Wars already and didnt liked it there either.

It basically kills the main reason why I enjoyed the Vanguard combat system so much. In Vanguard, even after playing the Cleric for years, I still found new ways to play him.

The idea is that you need to prepare before combat, to have a strategy and plan before just rushing in and engaging a significant mob or important encounter.  Making sure you have the right items equipped, and making sure you have the right spells and abilities memorized, plays into this.  Having access to anything and everything can take away from the need to plan how you and your groupmates are going to defeat the next encounter.  We want to make sure the challenge encountered in combat against a significant opponent involves both preparation before the actual battle and also the decisions you make during the actual battle.  

I hope group players understand preparation before encounters.

As modern mmos became easer, groups had become used to the run-and-gun approach. I hate that !

Infact I have first hand knowledge of how really bad this had become in an amplified way.

I'm now playing Vanilla World of Warcraft, have been for the last few years.  When ever a new player comes to the server EVEN EXPERIANCED, they have to relearn to slow down.  Fast doesn't work in Vanilla WoW.  The first dungeon, Dead Mines is usually a disaster until someone re-explains how a real dungeon crawl works. 

When I play this game with my real life friends on voice, we take it slow. Its amazing how low of a level we can run instances with good planning.  We take every mob seriously and have lots of fun doing so. We actually finish faster by going slow

Zarriya

Aradune said:

Adamantine said:

Amsai said:

[...] And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? [...]

Whow.

Well, then I'm out.

I had that sh*** in Guild Wars already and didnt liked it there either.

It basically kills the main reason why I enjoyed the Vanguard combat system so much. In Vanguard, even after playing the Cleric for years, I still found new ways to play him.

The idea is that you need to prepare before combat, to have a strategy and plan before just rushing in and engaging a significant mob or important encounter.  Making sure you have the right items equipped, and making sure you have the right spells and abilities memorized, plays into this.  Having access to anything and everything can take away from the need to plan how you and your groupmates are going to defeat the next encounter.  We want to make sure the challenge encountered in combat against a significant opponent involves both preparation before the actual battle and also the decisions you make during the actual battle.  

Even though it is still considered the "old ways" I had to do this when a more recent game,The Secret World,  launched in order to complete their nightmare dungeons.  When it first launched, TSW had nightmare 5-man instances as its endgame content.  In order to tackle this content you needed to talk strategy with your group on who was going to address what issue/mechanic and who was going to equip what abilities. A DPS would willing sacrifice a DPS enhancing ability in order to equip a debuff, purge or other ability because it was about succeeding as a team.  I was a lot of fun and when you succeeded you got a great feeling knowing that it was through cooperation and teamwork.

Adamantine

Aradune said:

Adamantine said:

Amsai said:

[...] And if Im not misinterpreting, spells/abilities limited to 10 on your hotbar at a time? [...]

Whow.

Well, then I'm out.

I had that sh*** in Guild Wars already and didnt liked it there either.

It basically kills the main reason why I enjoyed the Vanguard combat system so much. In Vanguard, even after playing the Cleric for years, I still found new ways to play him.

The idea is that you need to prepare before combat, to have a strategy and plan before just rushing in and engaging a significant mob or important encounter.  Making sure you have the right items equipped, and making sure you have the right spells and abilities memorized, plays into this.  Having access to anything and everything can take away from the need to plan how you and your groupmates are going to defeat the next encounter.  We want to make sure the challenge encountered in combat against a significant opponent involves both preparation before the actual battle and also the decisions you make during the actual battle.  

Well, I dont mind preplanning, but I dont see how a fixed ability limit, especially a low one like only 10 abilities, will ever result in such a complex and interesting combat system as I enjoyed it in Vanguard.

Well I guess I'll have to actually play Pantheon to find out if this system really works for me. I'm not too optimistic though, considering my Guild Wars experience.

By the way, if this is really the case, I would like the ability to configure a couple setups in the UI that I can switch between easily between combats.

delete5230

I agree with adamantine.

I'm not that crazy with only 10 abilities going by my GW2 and ESO experience.  Traditionally, lots of abilities were well thought out in the earlier days and worked out well.  It's another situation where if it's not broken don't fix it.

Lots of " so called " advancements put the industry where it is now ! 

MM037

I believe a few people are confused.  It's not just 10 abilities, just 10 memorized at a time.  In fact I suspect this game will have a lot more variety of abilities than most MMO's, especially spells for the typical caster classes.  Everquest initially had only an 8 spell slot bar, however Everquest has the most spell variety I can think of any MMORPG to date that I have played, because of three reasons.  One, the game went beyond the trinity of class roles and also had pullers, debuffers, and CCers.  Two, the game was patterned more after tabletop rpg's.  And three, the abilities weren't made generic by balancing for PvP.  This in turn caused all the casters to do just as Aradune stated above.

Sinist

delete5230 said:

I agree with adamantine.

I'm not that crazy with only 10 abilities going by my GW2 and ESO experience.  Traditionally, lots of abilities were well thought out in the earlier days and worked out well.  It's another situation where if it's not broken don't fix it.

Lots of " so called " advancements put the industry where it is now ! 

As was mentioned, it isn't only 10 abilities, it is having to choose a given set of abilities that you can have up at any given time. This was more of a thing with the casters in EQ as melee didn't have numerous abilities, but how it would work was that a caster had 8 spell gems of spells they could have memorized at any given time. Now the amount of spells a player had in EQ was vast. For instance, here is a list of Wizard spells:

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spelllist.html?name=&type=wiz&level=1&opt=And+Higher&action=search

Notice how spells are not simply the core ones found in most games? (ie damage/healing). You had tons of utility spells, tons of situational spells. There were crowd control spells to slow movement, to stop movement, to mesmerize, to stun, etc... there were special spells for escaping in combat (succor was aa spell that would port you and your party to the zone entrance, or there were spells that would jump you around in short distances). There were gate spells, shield spells, invis, see invis, etc... the list goes on.

You however only had 8 slots to memorize them and you had to sit down, replace the old, and memorize the new one if you wanted to change them out. The closer the spell was to your level, the longer it took to memorize.

What this did was make you think about your spells. It made you prioritize them as what was important to have up at any give time. It was often time consuming and impractical for a class to use all their buffs all the time, so they created buffing setups with themes for a given situation and would memorize them as needed. The same was done with combat spells and utility spells as you couldn't have every spell up for every situation, so you had to take the time to learn about the mobs in a zone, about the environment and also know your party and their approach to design the proper spell list for a given situation.


The reason for this is because it is a game play element of choice and selection, pros/cons, give/take style of play. Your spells became a strategy card game all on their own, trying to design the best hand for any given situation.

Other games out there that had limited slots would often do this because they had limited abilities (notice the missing utility spells in most games these days) and the entire point was just to focus on simplistic play and repetitive approach. EQs system (as well as Pantheons) will be much deeper requiring you to actually put thought into how you play, how you approach something. That is, choices will have to be made.

It really is a great system if the content is designed properly to attend to it. That is, if the content requires all kinds of varying spells and abilities to overcome it, just spamming a damage or healing spell won't be enough, you will have to pull some tricks out of your sleeve and you will have to plan for such.

Dullahan

As Sinist said, theres a big difference in classes with limited abilities like FFXIV or GW2, and classes with limited active abilities. And really, championing Vanguard combat is strange. You could spam hotkeys with your entire list of abilities on it. The only challenge it held was remembering your 30 odd keybindings.

Sinist

I just want to add so people understand here, the idea of this as a game mechanic is not to inundate you with mundane actions, it is to force you to make decisions on what, where and when to use a given spell.

Having to set down and memorize the abilities doesn't have to be a monotonous chore of mouse clicks, even later on in EQ, they put in the ability to have spell sets that you could load with a single action (though you would still have to sit down and wait for each spell to memorize), so those actions don't need to happen, but... the point of having to select the best spell and deal with the fact that you can't instantly change to something else, that is the game mechanic, the rule that creates the strategy of play.

Amsai

What Sinist and Dullahan said. They said it better than I could have.

Aradune

Sinist said:

It really is a great system if the content is designed properly to attend to it. That is, if the content requires all kinds of varying spells and abilities to overcome it, just spamming a damage or healing spell won't be enough, you will have to pull some tricks out of your sleeve and you will have to plan for such. 

THIS.

Adamantine

MM037 said:

I believe a few people are confused. It's not just 10 abilities, just 10 memorized at a time.

You believe wrong. Thats exactly the same in Guild Wars. You could have hundreds of abilities, but only 8 could be used at any time; to reconfigure you had to go back to town.

So yeah, we understand this absolutely.

MM037 said:

 Everquest initially had only an 8 spell slot bar, however Everquest has the most spell variety I can think of any MMORPG to date that I have played, because of three reasons.

Well the main ability bar of Vanguard hold 12 buttons, but you could switch it around, for a total of 10 bars.

With my characters, Bar 10 was always reserved for crafting, Bar 9 for harvesting, Bar 8 for buffs, Bar 7 for items/utility/special and possibly more buffs, while Bar 1-6 was for battle.

Depending upon your class, Vanguard also required you to work on macros. My Dread Knight had a huge load of macros, basically almost every single button was a macro button, for item useage (doesnt involve global cooldown) and instant abilities without global cooldown.

While my Cleric had almost none, since there wasnt much that could actually be automatized.

Dullahan said:

As Sinist said, theres a big difference in classes with limited abilities like FFXIV or GW2, and classes with limited active abilities. And really, championing Vanguard combat is strange. You could spam hotkeys with your entire list of abilities on it. The only challenge it held was remembering your 30 odd keybindings.

As a strategy, making a single button in Vanguard was only superior to relying purely on autoattack.

In one of my guilds we actually had a fool that actually did that. Fortunately he played Cleric - lowest dps of any class in the game, and downright insignificant in dps in a raidforce - so it didnt matter too much that his dps was far less than optimal. And for the debuffs he wouldnt apply, well I did that for him. So yeah, not much damage done.

My own Cleric soloed a lot so yeah, that crappy strategy wouldnt have worked for me at all, since it would reduce my dps output substantly. Cleric got a lot of HoTs and debuffs that would have to be applied and reapplied in a timed matter, to optimize dps output. Thats especially important if you're a solist Cleric who really doesnt do much damage in the first place and benefits massively from keeping all HoTs active.

On my DK, three attacks would be the core routine of all macros:

1. Slay - only works if health of opponent is low, so ideal to macro for automatic useage whenever applicable
2. Malice - Better endurance to damage ratio, gives flanking damage bonus and exploits a weakness (Chilled), but its on a 15 sec recast timer
3. Vexing Strike - Standard Attack

So that would be repeated over and over. However there was a ton of macros to make, because before that point a lot of stuff could be done before that point, such as using the special ability to raise the DK debuff ASAP.

Studying your abilities in detail was very beneficial in Vanguard.