Originally posted by Knytta But Axehilt if you raise the difficulty level (an matching xp of course nowadays) to situations where you occasionally HAVE to split a pull to survive the game would again reach some of the complexity that so many miss. Personally I do not think that the "pull everything and AOE" is good or even very fun. Another solution would of course be to bring back the need for crowd control in a dungeon setting, that is sometimes bad as it usually requires certain classes.
Many forms of game depth exist. The "puller" role enables only one of those forms, but carries the heavy burden of the problems I mentioned (a) ruins game pacing, and (b) the depth is only experienced by one party member, not everyone.
Challenging encounters should continue to exist, and when your gear doesn't outstrip a dungeon the encounters are far more than "pull everything and AOE", and involve things like avoiding fires, interrupting abilities, dragging mobs away from other mobs, dispelling, and far more other things than I could list here. The advantage being that this depth (a) doesn't ruin game pacing, and (b) is experienced by everyone, not just a single puller.
Strong crowd control makes for shallow gameplay. "CC everything and singletarget" is very nearly as shallow as "pull everything and AOE". Fighting one mob at a time is not only boring, but dramatically limits the depth of fights because mobs can't interact with each other in interesting ways (mobs which use PBAOE shields, or heals, or who deal low damage for a few seconds before switching to a high-damage AOE.) I want the mobs to feel like a meaty fight, and when I CC everything and singletarget them all it always felt like a joke.
Weak crowd control is the only thing which retains game depth, like how a rogue deciding to stunlock something dramatically reduces his damage output to do so. If your only CC options are things like brief-and-rare stuns, spell interrupts, and knock-backs, then the fight is allowed to remain deep. It's when you're able to control the enemy too strongly that things become over-simplistic and shallow.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Knytta But Axehilt if you raise the difficulty level (an matching xp of course nowadays) to situations where you occasionally HAVE to split a pull to survive the game would again reach some of the complexity that so many miss. Personally I do not think that the "pull everything and AOE" is good or even very fun. Another solution would of course be to bring back the need for crowd control in a dungeon setting, that is sometimes bad as it usually requires certain classes.
Many forms of game depth exist. The "puller" role enables only one of those forms, but carries the heavy burden of the problems I mentioned (a) ruins game pacing, and (b) the depth is only experienced by one party member, not everyone.
Challenging encounters should continue to exist, and when your gear doesn't outstrip a dungeon the encounters are far more than "pull everything and AOE", and involve things like avoiding fires, interrupting abilities, dragging mobs away from other mobs, dispelling, and far more other things than I could list here. The advantage being that this depth (a) doesn't ruin game pacing, and (b) is experienced by everyone, not just a single puller.
Strong crowd control makes for shallow gameplay. "CC everything and singletarget" is very nearly as shallow as "pull everything and AOE". Fighting one mob at a time is not only boring, but dramatically limits the depth of fights because mobs can't interact with each other in interesting ways (mobs which use PBAOE shields, or heals, or who deal low damage for a few seconds before switching to a high-damage AOE.) I want the mobs to feel like a meaty fight, and when I CC everything and singletarget them all it always felt like a joke.
Weak crowd control is the only thing which retains game depth, like how a rogue deciding to stunlock something dramatically reduces his damage output to do so. If your only CC options are things like brief-and-rare stuns, spell interrupts, and knock-backs, then the fight is allowed to remain deep. It's when you're able to control the enemy too strongly that things become over-simplistic and shallow.
CC makes everything easy. Lol, never played an enchanter I see. The work the enchanter had to keep mobs mezzed and the brilliant enchanters who would mezz one, charm another mob and use it to kill his friend, then kill the mezzed target and the last thing was to kill the enchanted boss. It sounds really easy, but now you have to remember no ingame timers with random time outs on mezzez and charms.
And dps at the same time of course. A good enchanter and puller really added a lot to groups. You could kill faster, keep killing faster and not fear deaths as often as you otherwise would. Strong CC makes everything easy, lol, until PoP AA's there was no strong CC. Emergency CC's that were aoe's but also overwrote the other CC, so after the AOE CC, I think it was 8 seconds, expired, the mob would charge the enchanter who had to have a long cast time CC ready.
Yes in oldschool EQ the mezzer and the puller had a lot to do. The bard playing 4 songs one of which was the mezz and everything perfect, the necro or monk pulling and making sure enough mobs would make it to the group, sometimes assisted by a rogue who could look around the corner and help with targetting. Rogues pulling. Yes only 1 or 2 classes that were busy with adds, but everyone was also so busy with pressing a few buttons and making sure they did the dance right on the back for max dps, who made sure the debuffs stayed on the mob, who managed the health of the tank, who kept all targets active and mezzed on the tank, etc etc etc. It was all a well oiled engine when it worked and a trainwrack when it ran out of control.
Adding CC and Pulls don't ruin or make games easier, they add a new layer of difficulty for a few classes to enjoy. If you don't enjoy those jobs, don't play the classes that have those jobs, but it does make the game a lot more fun.
Adding CC and Pulls don't ruin or make games easier, they add a new layer of difficulty for a few classes to enjoy. If you don't enjoy those jobs, don't play the classes that have those jobs, but it does make the game a lot more fun.
The problem is that if you have more mandatory jobs, and if you don't enough players to fill them, groups are difficult to form.
There are still some pulling and CC, but the jobs are no longer done by a specialist. The tank has to pull, and some DPS have to cc.
i remember my early days in eq weaving my way down dangerous corridors to bring mobs back to the group, or feign death pulling if i was on as a monk at the time. it seems like somewhere after daoc the system just vanished..
Well, the system is kinda silly since mobs really should call for eachother to help out.
Then again, they didn't actually replace it with smarter AI, just easier to kill mobs that are chained so I wouldn't call the current system an "improvement".
Smarter mobs with the possibility for example assassins to take them out one by one with stealth and tactics would make things more interesting than either system.
I will say that I loved being the puller in FFXI, or rather I couldn't stand not being the puller/having to deal with a bad puller. But then when I played WoW after I was done with FFXI, I definitely thought *crawling through* dungeons with my party mates was infinitely more fun than having everyone sit still in one area for hours while one person slowly brought back 1 mob at a time to fight. I will say though, the glory days of WoW dungeons/raids also incorporated difficult "pulls" as well. It was a happy middle ground.
CC makes everything easy. Lol, never played an enchanter I see. The work the enchanter had to keep mobs mezzed and the brilliant enchanters who would mezz one, charm another mob and use it to kill his friend, then kill the mezzed target and the last thing was to kill the enchanted boss. It sounds really easy, but now you have to remember no ingame timers with random time outs on mezzez and charms.
And dps at the same time of course. A good enchanter and puller really added a lot to groups. You could kill faster, keep killing faster and not fear deaths as often as you otherwise would. Strong CC makes everything easy, lol, until PoP AA's there was no strong CC. Emergency CC's that were aoe's but also overwrote the other CC, so after the AOE CC, I think it was 8 seconds, expired, the mob would charge the enchanter who had to have a long cast time CC ready.
Yes in oldschool EQ the mezzer and the puller had a lot to do. The bard playing 4 songs one of which was the mezz and everything perfect, the necro or monk pulling and making sure enough mobs would make it to the group, sometimes assisted by a rogue who could look around the corner and help with targetting. Rogues pulling. Yes only 1 or 2 classes that were busy with adds, but everyone was also so busy with pressing a few buttons and making sure they did the dance right on the back for max dps, who made sure the debuffs stayed on the mob, who managed the health of the tank, who kept all targets active and mezzed on the tank, etc etc etc. It was all a well oiled engine when it worked and a trainwrack when it ran out of control.
Adding CC and Pulls don't ruin or make games easier, they add a new layer of difficulty for a few classes to enjoy. If you don't enjoy those jobs, don't play the classes that have those jobs, but it does make the game a lot more fun.
Nobody said the role of CC'ing can't involve a deep rotation. I didn't play EQ1, but CoH's Controller class had a fairly average rotation quality (enough to understand that some game could do it right, even if Controllers themselves were merely average.)
The problem is that the act of CC'ing, when it surpasses a certain number of mobs, completely disables those encounters.
Depth comes from both yourself (personal rotation), your group (things like heals, and things like team combos), and the encounter (the mobs' rotations.)
If lots of CC exists (like if more than half the mobs can be disabled during a fight) then the third vector for game depth is almost completely shut down and mobs can't interact with each other in interesting ways.
Perhaps this wasn't clear in EQ1 because if it was anything like the ~10 pre-WOW MMORPGs I played, its monsters had shit for ability design. But nowadays MMORPGs are a weave of puzzles: your personal rotation is a puzzle, your interactions with the group are a puzzle, mob threat is a puzzle, and mob abilities are a puzzle. While each is pretty simple individually, the intersection of all these simple puzzles is where deep gameplay forms.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I used to be the main puller in EQ... as a Ranger, not that I had much choice. The Ranger had okay DPS, but nowhere close as other classes, so to make myself useful I became the main puller, I even drew maps with the spawning positions of mobs and had a stop watch for the spawning times. Worse were the mobs that would snare you as you came running back with the "goods". Once I maxed that Ranger to 60 and got my epics, I never touched him again and played tanks ever since. Fun and challenging, yes, but way too stressful.
Originally posted by Arakazi I used to be the main puller in EQ... as a Ranger, not that I had much choice. The Ranger had okay DPS, but nowhere close as other classes, so to make myself useful I became the main puller, I even drew maps with the spawning positions of mobs and had a stop watch for the spawning times. Worse were the mobs that would snare you as you came running back with the "goods". Once I maxed that Ranger to 60 and got my epics, I never touched him again and played tanks ever since. Fun and challenging, yes, but way too stressful.
IDK what you did with your Ranger...but mine had some damn good DPS. Could solo well and damage well in groups.
Originally posted by Arakazi I used to be the main puller in EQ... as a Ranger, not that I had much choice. The Ranger had okay DPS, but nowhere close as other classes, so to make myself useful I became the main puller, I even drew maps with the spawning positions of mobs and had a stop watch for the spawning times. Worse were the mobs that would snare you as you came running back with the "goods". Once I maxed that Ranger to 60 and got my epics, I never touched him again and played tanks ever since. Fun and challenging, yes, but way too stressful.
IDK what you did with your Ranger...but mine had some damn good DPS. Could solo well and damage well in groups.
Depends on the expansion of the time, really. There were times when a patch came out and the DPS was abysmal, I logged of one night and I was doing great, sitting with the group laughing at the rogue who feigned death in the middle of a cluster of mobs. A week late, come expansion day I was the one pulling while everyone was laughing at the Ranger class calling them the poor mans paladin and the paper tank.
I hate you chrome/mmorpg.com, I just wrong a page long post about the evolution of the game and why pullers are no longer necessary and hitting backspace made my browser go back instead of deleting....
Well I guess I will stick with the short version... the games evolved from "camping" to "dungeon crawling" to "dungeon running" all through the increases in mana regen for casters in an effort to reduce downtime. I'm not saying less or more downtime is better, just that the developers saw downtime as a negative and aimed to remove it. There are lots of games concepts which are no longer relevant due to the removal of downtime. Actually talking to people being another thing that was lost...
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
I hate you chrome/mmorpg.com, I just wrong a page long post about the evolution of the game and why pullers are no longer necessary and hitting backspace made my browser go back instead of deleting....
Well I guess I will stick with the short version... the games evolved from "camping" to "dungeon crawling" to "dungeon running" all through the increases in mana regen for casters in an effort to reduce downtime. I'm not saying less or more downtime is better, just that the developers saw downtime as a negative and aimed to remove it. There are lots of games concepts which are no longer relevant due to the removal of downtime. Actually talking to people being another thing that was lost...
True.. There were a lot of mechanics built into the game that were more strategic or inconvenient to a growing playerbase.. That growing sections was the arcade type players, that just want to hack and slash, nothing more.. They couldn't be bothered with mana regeneration, traveling, teamwork chatting, food and drink issues, weight allowance issues, so for the sake of $$$ sacrifices had to be made.. Even combat itself wasn't fast enough.. Leveling wasn't fast enough..
The roll of "puller" wasn't created by the devs for depth. It was a strategy developed by EQ players to maximize the mana regen of the healer. In order to regen mana you had to meditate, in order to meditate you had to sit. You can't move from room to room while sitting so the optimal strategy was to park the healer in a central loaction, have the group set up around the healer, and send one player to pull mobs to the group. If you had a slow group the puller would help dps for part of the fight before starting the next pull. If you have a fast group the puller would start the next pull immediately. A good puller in a balanced group could maintain a pace that alllowed the dps 100% uptime and kept the healer's mana above 80% for emergency casting. The removal of sit-to-med meant that pulling was no longer required for max efficiency and players abandoned it.
Originally posted by negilum The roll of "puller" wasn't created by the devs for depth. It was a strategy developed by EQ players to maximize the mana regen of the healer. In order to regen mana you had to meditate, in order to meditate you had to sit. You can't move from room to room while sitting so the optimal strategy was to park the healer in a central loaction, have the group set up around the healer, and send one player to pull mobs to the group. If you had a slow group the puller would help dps for part of the fight before starting the next pull. If you have a fast group the puller would start the next pull immediately. A good puller in a balanced group could maintain a pace that alllowed the dps 100% uptime and kept the healer's mana above 80% for emergency casting. The removal of sit-to-med meant that pulling was no longer required for max efficiency and players abandoned it.
Very true.. Plus add in that devs no longer designed games with roaming mobs that don't lose agro, it was no longer an issue to worry about adds for the most part.. Camping and pulling allowed groups to not only maximize mana effectively, but provided a safe cleared location.. I guess it's all about speed and getting somewhere fast.. Not sure why tho.. Cuz the only thing waiting for you at the finish line is one big hamster wheel.. lol
We still use that when trying to tackle a dungeon with less players then advised. Especially to peel off mob patrols from larger groups. It is a fun way to do dungeons with only a few.
i remember my early days in eq weaving my way down dangerous corridors to bring mobs back to the group, or feign death pulling if i was on as a monk at the time. it seems like somewhere after daoc the system just vanished..
Because it is not popular?
Now the tank pulls. If you have a puller specific role, what is he/she going to do during the fight? Not many people want to be sideline in the "main event".
Pulling is not all gone, just that there is no more puller that only pulls and does nothing else.
That is called ROLE PLAYING... each and everyone in your party has a role to perform.
Wizard didn't attach mobs while the tank is tanking, they sat invis building mana until the mobs was 49% then stood up and started to unload... that was their role.
A Monks job was to craftily bring mobs to the group (in those such situations). A good monk, or wizard made all the difference... in how they played their role.
Narius, you bought your EQ char, so you'll never know EQ pre POP.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
The thing that made EQ fun was that people actually had to perform their roles well at times:
If the puller brought several mobs the group could wipe
If the tank screwed up and hit a mezzed mob the group could wipe
If the healer wasnt paying attnetion or healed the wrong person group could wipe
If the CC got resists the group could wipe
If DPS targetted the wrong mob the group could wipe
What made the game tough but fun was that things could happen and there were ramifications for it.....Dying in classic EQ was not fun.....Rezzes took time and you had to have a cleric or pally to do it......
Wizard didn't attach mobs while the tank is tanking, they sat invis building mana until the mobs was 49% then stood up and started to unload... that was their role.
Forget pulling mechanics, what happened to DPS which actually had to hold back. Button mashing is more enjoyable I guess?
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Wizard didn't attach mobs while the tank is tanking, they sat invis building mana until the mobs was 49% then stood up and started to unload... that was their role.
Forget pulling mechanics, what happened to DPS which actually had to hold back. Button mashing is more enjoyable I guess?
Have you not noticed the cry for more and more action combat MMO's? Yeah, they do want to button mash, constantly. They don't want to wait for you to pull, they want to backflip lightning bolt their way through everything.
i remember my early days in eq weaving my way down dangerous corridors to bring mobs back to the group, or feign death pulling if i was on as a monk at the time. it seems like somewhere after daoc the system just vanished..
Many of the devs who made EQ and DAoC went on to make the next generation of MMOs, building on what they learned and leaving the bad ideas behind.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Smarter mobs with the possibility for example assassins to take them out one by one with stealth and tactics would make things more interesting than either system.
And that is why i play SP stealth games. However, i don't see a need for them to be MMOs .. online MP may be .. but there is no reason to have lots of other players for stealth.
Originally posted by negilum The roll of "puller" wasn't created by the devs for depth. It was a strategy developed by EQ players to maximize the mana regen of the healer. In order to regen mana you had to meditate, in order to meditate you had to sit. You can't move from room to room while sitting so the optimal strategy was to park the healer in a central loaction, have the group set up around the healer, and send one player to pull mobs to the group. If you had a slow group the puller would help dps for part of the fight before starting the next pull. If you have a fast group the puller would start the next pull immediately. A good puller in a balanced group could maintain a pace that alllowed the dps 100% uptime and kept the healer's mana above 80% for emergency casting. The removal of sit-to-med meant that pulling was no longer required for max efficiency and players abandoned it.
This is the main reason right here. When MMOs severely limited downtime pulling to a group became unneeded. When half of your group had to sit 50% of the time to regen their mana it was easier to root the group in one place and bring the mobs to the group. With virtually no down time this tactic became unnecessary as the group became a lot more mobile and therefore could just move from mob group to mob group with the tank who is now the "puller" as they will approach the mobs and agro them while the rest of the group moves in to help.
I used to pull mobs in EQ for groups with my DE Shadow Knight. He had some dots and slow spells that could be used for crowd control somewhat as well. I have also used my skelly to pull as well as he could run in, smack a mob in a large group and then I could dispel him so we would only get the mob he whacked and not the group wipe that would have happened if I had of pulled the whole group. Pulling was almost an art form as you were the one who could ruin everyone's day with one bad pull. It was probably the most challenging group "job" as mistakes were very unforgiving. I do miss pulling for a group a lot but I'm afraid those days may be gone forever as long as the instant gratification crowd is defining how MMOs are made.
Comments
Many forms of game depth exist. The "puller" role enables only one of those forms, but carries the heavy burden of the problems I mentioned (a) ruins game pacing, and (b) the depth is only experienced by one party member, not everyone.
Challenging encounters should continue to exist, and when your gear doesn't outstrip a dungeon the encounters are far more than "pull everything and AOE", and involve things like avoiding fires, interrupting abilities, dragging mobs away from other mobs, dispelling, and far more other things than I could list here. The advantage being that this depth (a) doesn't ruin game pacing, and (b) is experienced by everyone, not just a single puller.
Strong crowd control makes for shallow gameplay. "CC everything and singletarget" is very nearly as shallow as "pull everything and AOE". Fighting one mob at a time is not only boring, but dramatically limits the depth of fights because mobs can't interact with each other in interesting ways (mobs which use PBAOE shields, or heals, or who deal low damage for a few seconds before switching to a high-damage AOE.) I want the mobs to feel like a meaty fight, and when I CC everything and singletarget them all it always felt like a joke.
Weak crowd control is the only thing which retains game depth, like how a rogue deciding to stunlock something dramatically reduces his damage output to do so. If your only CC options are things like brief-and-rare stuns, spell interrupts, and knock-backs, then the fight is allowed to remain deep. It's when you're able to control the enemy too strongly that things become over-simplistic and shallow.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
CC makes everything easy. Lol, never played an enchanter I see. The work the enchanter had to keep mobs mezzed and the brilliant enchanters who would mezz one, charm another mob and use it to kill his friend, then kill the mezzed target and the last thing was to kill the enchanted boss. It sounds really easy, but now you have to remember no ingame timers with random time outs on mezzez and charms.
And dps at the same time of course. A good enchanter and puller really added a lot to groups. You could kill faster, keep killing faster and not fear deaths as often as you otherwise would. Strong CC makes everything easy, lol, until PoP AA's there was no strong CC. Emergency CC's that were aoe's but also overwrote the other CC, so after the AOE CC, I think it was 8 seconds, expired, the mob would charge the enchanter who had to have a long cast time CC ready.
Yes in oldschool EQ the mezzer and the puller had a lot to do. The bard playing 4 songs one of which was the mezz and everything perfect, the necro or monk pulling and making sure enough mobs would make it to the group, sometimes assisted by a rogue who could look around the corner and help with targetting. Rogues pulling. Yes only 1 or 2 classes that were busy with adds, but everyone was also so busy with pressing a few buttons and making sure they did the dance right on the back for max dps, who made sure the debuffs stayed on the mob, who managed the health of the tank, who kept all targets active and mezzed on the tank, etc etc etc. It was all a well oiled engine when it worked and a trainwrack when it ran out of control.
Adding CC and Pulls don't ruin or make games easier, they add a new layer of difficulty for a few classes to enjoy. If you don't enjoy those jobs, don't play the classes that have those jobs, but it does make the game a lot more fun.
The problem is that if you have more mandatory jobs, and if you don't enough players to fill them, groups are difficult to form.
There are still some pulling and CC, but the jobs are no longer done by a specialist. The tank has to pull, and some DPS have to cc.
Well, the system is kinda silly since mobs really should call for eachother to help out.
Then again, they didn't actually replace it with smarter AI, just easier to kill mobs that are chained so I wouldn't call the current system an "improvement".
Smarter mobs with the possibility for example assassins to take them out one by one with stealth and tactics would make things more interesting than either system.
Nobody said the role of CC'ing can't involve a deep rotation. I didn't play EQ1, but CoH's Controller class had a fairly average rotation quality (enough to understand that some game could do it right, even if Controllers themselves were merely average.)
The problem is that the act of CC'ing, when it surpasses a certain number of mobs, completely disables those encounters.
Depth comes from both yourself (personal rotation), your group (things like heals, and things like team combos), and the encounter (the mobs' rotations.)
If lots of CC exists (like if more than half the mobs can be disabled during a fight) then the third vector for game depth is almost completely shut down and mobs can't interact with each other in interesting ways.
Perhaps this wasn't clear in EQ1 because if it was anything like the ~10 pre-WOW MMORPGs I played, its monsters had shit for ability design. But nowadays MMORPGs are a weave of puzzles: your personal rotation is a puzzle, your interactions with the group are a puzzle, mob threat is a puzzle, and mob abilities are a puzzle. While each is pretty simple individually, the intersection of all these simple puzzles is where deep gameplay forms.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
IDK what you did with your Ranger...but mine had some damn good DPS. Could solo well and damage well in groups.
Depends on the expansion of the time, really. There were times when a patch came out and the DPS was abysmal, I logged of one night and I was doing great, sitting with the group laughing at the rogue who feigned death in the middle of a cluster of mobs. A week late, come expansion day I was the one pulling while everyone was laughing at the Ranger class calling them the poor mans paladin and the paper tank.
I hate you chrome/mmorpg.com, I just wrong a page long post about the evolution of the game and why pullers are no longer necessary and hitting backspace made my browser go back instead of deleting....
Well I guess I will stick with the short version... the games evolved from "camping" to "dungeon crawling" to "dungeon running" all through the increases in mana regen for casters in an effort to reduce downtime. I'm not saying less or more downtime is better, just that the developers saw downtime as a negative and aimed to remove it. There are lots of games concepts which are no longer relevant due to the removal of downtime. Actually talking to people being another thing that was lost...
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
True.. There were a lot of mechanics built into the game that were more strategic or inconvenient to a growing playerbase.. That growing sections was the arcade type players, that just want to hack and slash, nothing more.. They couldn't be bothered with mana regeneration, traveling, teamwork chatting, food and drink issues, weight allowance issues, so for the sake of $$$ sacrifices had to be made.. Even combat itself wasn't fast enough.. Leveling wasn't fast enough..
Very true.. Plus add in that devs no longer designed games with roaming mobs that don't lose agro, it was no longer an issue to worry about adds for the most part.. Camping and pulling allowed groups to not only maximize mana effectively, but provided a safe cleared location.. I guess it's all about speed and getting somewhere fast.. Not sure why tho.. Cuz the only thing waiting for you at the finish line is one big hamster wheel.. lol
That is called ROLE PLAYING... each and everyone in your party has a role to perform.
Wizard didn't attach mobs while the tank is tanking, they sat invis building mana until the mobs was 49% then stood up and started to unload... that was their role.
A Monks job was to craftily bring mobs to the group (in those such situations). A good monk, or wizard made all the difference... in how they played their role.
Narius, you bought your EQ char, so you'll never know EQ pre POP.
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
The thing that made EQ fun was that people actually had to perform their roles well at times:
If the puller brought several mobs the group could wipe
If the tank screwed up and hit a mezzed mob the group could wipe
If the healer wasnt paying attnetion or healed the wrong person group could wipe
If the CC got resists the group could wipe
If DPS targetted the wrong mob the group could wipe
What made the game tough but fun was that things could happen and there were ramifications for it.....Dying in classic EQ was not fun.....Rezzes took time and you had to have a cleric or pally to do it......
Forget pulling mechanics, what happened to DPS which actually had to hold back. Button mashing is more enjoyable I guess?
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
Have you not noticed the cry for more and more action combat MMO's? Yeah, they do want to button mash, constantly. They don't want to wait for you to pull, they want to backflip lightning bolt their way through everything.
Many of the devs who made EQ and DAoC went on to make the next generation of MMOs, building on what they learned and leaving the bad ideas behind.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
And that is why i play SP stealth games. However, i don't see a need for them to be MMOs .. online MP may be .. but there is no reason to have lots of other players for stealth.
This is the main reason right here. When MMOs severely limited downtime pulling to a group became unneeded. When half of your group had to sit 50% of the time to regen their mana it was easier to root the group in one place and bring the mobs to the group. With virtually no down time this tactic became unnecessary as the group became a lot more mobile and therefore could just move from mob group to mob group with the tank who is now the "puller" as they will approach the mobs and agro them while the rest of the group moves in to help.
I used to pull mobs in EQ for groups with my DE Shadow Knight. He had some dots and slow spells that could be used for crowd control somewhat as well. I have also used my skelly to pull as well as he could run in, smack a mob in a large group and then I could dispel him so we would only get the mob he whacked and not the group wipe that would have happened if I had of pulled the whole group. Pulling was almost an art form as you were the one who could ruin everyone's day with one bad pull. It was probably the most challenging group "job" as mistakes were very unforgiving. I do miss pulling for a group a lot but I'm afraid those days may be gone forever as long as the instant gratification crowd is defining how MMOs are made.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}