Hi all,
this weekend I spent a lot of time playing FFXIV alongside some mates.
Most of it was spent solo as I levelled up to do some Dungeons as you CANNOT progress the main story line without PASSING the Dungeons.
So first thing NOT to do is don't gate Main Mission content via Raids/Dungeons/TF/etc.
If you don't want to or don't like doing Dungeons then you a cant progress very far with the story line.
Seconds thing is don't make the game based where if 1 character in a team dies the entire Dungeon is a 99% GUARANTEED failure.
In the last Dungeon we tried (level 30 dungeon) I was the Tank. But Im also a noob in that game. Luckily one of my mates plays a lot and raids most nights so I have him talking me through what I had to do while he was the healer (see point 3 below on that topic). But I stuff up and die. 1 hit and Im dead with NO WAY IN HELLS butthole for the other 3 people to win so its an automatic wipe.
In CoH when Tanks did die the team could still survive. Brutes could Tank, Scrappers could Tank, Defenders (some) could Tank, almost anything could Tank (Stalker???).
Third issue is the Holy Trinity. My mate spent almost the entire Dungeon (Last Boss Fight) healing my Tank. I was using all my mitigation powers correctly but without a dedicated Healer I was nothing but a punching bag. I couldn't take any more than 3 hits from the final boss before being almost dead. HOW IN HELL am I considered a TANK if I MUST HAVE A POCKET HEALER!?!?!?!?! How often did my Tanks need someone using a Healing power on me? Almost never. Or how often did I have to use a Green Insp? Bugger all.
And then there is the Team Size. 4 people. Want to start a Dungeon you MUST have: 1x Tank, 1x Healer, 2x DPS.
Don't have a Healer then you cant start the Dungeon. Why - see 3 above as a Tank cant Tank without a healer.
In CoH you could run anything with any combination of roles. 8 Tanks - sure. 8 Defenders - go for it. 8 MM - enjoy the chaos.
Attitude. I ran 4 Dungeons with my mates and on the final we failed 4 times. The 4th member of the Team (random person) just quit. No communication at all. Apparently this is normal where if you don't know what your doing and cant do it well expect to get dropped from a team or have the team quit around you. Sorry but how am I expected to know about this particular dungeon unless I play through it. I can read as much as I want but until I actually DO it.
Even my mate seemed pissed off even going as far as asking if I could bring a different character so he could Tank it. Wow.
In CoH I never had anyone treat me like that, even when I was struggling on my Controller/Dominators (least favourite AT's). I only got 1 Controller above level 30 and that stalled soon after. But even then no Team quit because I couldn't use my controls correctly. Instead I got tips/suggestions/feedback. You know - help to be a better player.
You have to do almost EVERYTHING perfectly in a Dungeon. 1 mistake can mean a team wipe. Ohhh sh!t I used my Stun power too soon and its recharge wont be over in time. Ohhh well there goes the team.
Some will say that CoH was an easier game. That these others games are 'more serious' or 'more hardcore'. That's fine I like my more casual and friendly games where if I make a mistake people don't rage quit or treat me like I have the brain power of an ant.
/rant
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
AMEN TO THAT !!!! I played WoW for years and know what you mean COH was way ahead of its time and so many of us here want City of Titans to be the best super game to date. I know it's hard for all of us to be patient and it's going to be a long 2 years but I'm sure the design team are trying to produce a great game.
I double that Amen. Face it if any other game really had it right we wouldn't be here. We don't want the Holy Trinity we want the Mix and Match mayhem of a 8 Man team.
-------------------------------------------
Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
This conflates the existence of the holy trinity and the class design necessary to make it work.
The tank in the holy trinity is not meant to be able to face the boss without support. That's the whole point of the holy trinity model. The role of the tank in the holy trinity is to be able to survive those three or four hits so that the tank, and/or the healer, can make mistakes without immediately failing the fight. (Although, as cybermitheral pointed out, all bets can be off in the more difficult raids.) If such group content could be successfully completed without a tank and/or healer and/or DPS, it would not be the holy trinity.
I admit that it's a peeve when people say they don't like the holy trinity and then nitpick how it works.
I was always irritated when a mission arc suddenly drop a 2+ or 3+ mission on me. Slapping a dungeon down in the path of progressing the main story is something I think no western developer would do, any longer (I can't recall if they ever did). Since this is Final Fantasy I am not particularly surprised that they would try this, or even think it is a good idea. Different culture, different mindset, etc.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
/qft
I want any combination of ATs to be able to complete an Mision, Task Force or whatever. Evidently some may be able to do it easier than others but part of the fun with CoH was being able to mix and match the 8 man teams.
Ahh.. you want your GPS to have a few Alternate Routes? ;D
Oh yes, this kind of thing really annoys me. It may make for a dramatic story, but it doesn't take the player's circumstances into account. If you suddenly have to find more people to continue what you were doing, it could actually halt play -- for example, if you are playing at an hour when hardly anyone is on. The only Western MMO I can think of that does something like this is SWTOR. If memory serves, there were a couple endgame-type arcs on Hoth or Ilum (one of the iceballs) that let you proceed solo till the last mission and then suddenly the next mission to finish the story was team-only. I never did get to complete any of those arcs.
Spurn all ye kindle.
*Chants* PUG, PUG, PUG, PUG
-------------------------------------------
Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Sure - but I prefer my pick up groups to be with people who genuinely want to do pickup groups, not those bitterly, angrily forced by the game into finding a group to use and discard like NC Soft does with innovative popular MMO's.
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
In GW2 the final mission in the main story arc is also the final dungeon. Interestingly, of the dungeons it is probably the easiest to complete, I don't know if that was meant to make up for the inconvenience or not. As annoying as it was just sitting there till I got my friends together to tackle it, at least it had a good pay off finishing the main story and the side story from the previous dungeons.
-----------------------------------------
I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
+1 to all y'all. These are some of the things that have kept me from getting into any other game the way I got into CoH.
I hope the devs are really paying attention to the most recent few threads about teaming, missions and what we loved about CoH in these game design areas. They really get to the heart of things. Almost noone is disagreeing!
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I like how Wildstar is doing their instanced content (Adventures, Ship hand mission, Dungeons and Raids). They form a *side* story alongside the main story/zone arc that you run through. They however DO NOT wrap up (as far as I can tell) any major (or even minor) story arcs in the zone.
They are effectively their own self contained world. They add more to the lore of the area rather than "Here is a long story arc, you *have* to do this now to progress".
Tanks were a little OP in CoH anyway. Being able to pull an entire map of non-grays and survive indefinitely until you kill them all [i]with no support[/i] is definitely a flawed design.
Congrats to people who figured out those builds but yeesh.
An NPC group should be a minor challenge. If some wanderers come into it during, an exciting challenge. If you pull a second or third group by accident, enjoy!
[b]Having said that[/b], heroes should be more powerful than things they fight, compared to other games, with the challenge being sheer numbers or better AI.
Not six against one, but one against 2 or 3, and six against 8-12 with CC (controller or tank) a necessity.
__________________
[IMG]http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/a72b7fba-8da2-4ac8-8e18-0f8453f7d3ee_zpscc5b27b5.jpg[/IMG]
The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
I have to disagree on that one. I understand your position from a gaming perspective, but from a Superhero perspective, things are different.
Substantially.
Almost ANY superhero--from street-level heroes like Daredevil to the ultraheavyweights like Superman--regularly swim through mobs of bad guys. Daredevil swims through mobs of Ninjas (and for him at his low power level, Ninjas would be non-greys) and Superman swims through hordes of almost anything except Gods.
Actually, vastly multiple opponents is a core part of the Superhero genre. Movies, comic books, you name it. Actually, they do it almost every single comic issue and in every movie. And I have to say I miss swimming through mobs of significant foes. That's what I miss when I play other games. Superheroes ARE OP.
AND this does not in any way preclude challenge. A boss sends waves of minions and lieutenants at me, and my having to really play well to survive--that's a challenge. It's not less of a challenge because the number of opponents is higher, it's just more EPIC.
And epic is a big part of what I miss. I want to face an army alone. Or be on a team of 8 that faces all of the legions of Hell.
Now, when we actually get to Satan himself, well, it'll take all 8 of us plus some heart a little luck.
THAT'S comic books. And THAT'S epic.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Hey OP... learn to play... just kidding. Your comment about one mistake equals a team wipe really hit home with me. Talk about the opposite of fun. That should be the definition of guilt. I've done a couple of "counterproductive" things in Incarnate Trials (you sometimes had to work at it in CoH but I managed). The PUGs I was with at the time were actually pretty cool about it. Maybe because my apologies were sincere. But I think it was more of a tribute to the game and the community. We need to retain that at all cost.
See the thing with coh was that even if you caused a wipe there was very little cost involved and rezing was fairly easy with defender rezs, wakeys or, worst case a visit to the hospital. With travel powers the whole team would be back at the point of wipe within 5 minutes tops.
Most mmos seem to severely limit the frequency of rezs which really slows down the playing of the game. Coh never did.
Really it was also CoH itself. The players saw death as no big deal, a team wipe just meant grab some inspirations do that quick level up for those that got it, and try again. Debt was there yea but it wasn't a serious problem when you die. Heck I knew people that strove for Permanent debt so they wouldn't level to fast. This led to the CoH mentality of "Death is just a speed bump on the road to 50." so the players learned to shrug it off and try again.
Other games not so much the punishment much harsher and dying at the wrong time could cost the whole dungeon. So criticism of those that make mistakes became the rule.
Edit to add ... I got Ninjaed! Venture posted when I was writing this. Oh well.
-------------------------------------------
Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Good point about team wipes. In my experience -- aside from the rare case where we had a whole bunch in a row (like trying to take on Reichsmann when he was still bugged) -- a team wipe in CoX usually resulted in more self-deprecating laughter than anger. To me, that means the game was doing something right.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Great minds dude!
I remember hitting the debt cap numerous times, and like you said, debt just wasn't really a concern.
To be fair, before they introduced the "No XP Gain" option and Oroborus, you had to basically be faceplanting on a *very* regular basis if you wanted to do as much content as possible. The fact that you could *very easily* out level contacts without realising it, which could then possibly mean that street sweeping was the only way to level up, made the players not really worry about the debt.
Oh, and you got badges for clearing debt as well... so that was an incentive to die on a regular basis as well.
For me? I was never really annoyed with debt in CoX, but then again... Dying in WoW/Wildstar/Guild Wars 2/other MMO's with repair costs and gear never bothered me either.
The *ONLY* game that I felt "threatened" by dying in the game was Eve Online, but that was because getting podded in the game without having an up to date clone could quite easily mean that you lost the *past month* of skill learning... which could mean that you might not even be able to use ships or their fittings (all depends as to what skill you lost).
But then again, in Eve Online, just by paying attention to your clone level and keeping it up to date kept the skill point loss at bay... it didn't help with implant loss though..
Which explains why one of the "rules" of Eve Online is "Never fly what you cannot afford to replace... "
I agree with every point made in the original post, in that he basically says no one archtype should be a total requirement. Not even close to that. In city of heroes you didn't need any one role for anything. But likewise though, the 2 or 3 at a time rule is a typical mmorpg fantasy world issue. In city of heroes you could easily with a brute or scrapper or tanker even fight a good deal more enemies at a time and do decently. If you wanted to do things efficiently and whatnot thats when you wanted a team and even then healers were not required for everything. In fact healers were a very trivial role that generally contributed *drum roll* nothing to a true, solid team.
Thing was city of heroes buffs/debuffs/crowd control were all designed so any team combination could work, and likewise designed to encourage non trinity play by simultaniously being far more powerful then healing because *another drum roll* healing was very weak by itself. You weren't supposed to rely entirely on healing.
The game was designed around preventing damage and every archtype did that in some way or another. If you didn't mitigate damage you got curb-stomped, but if you used your powers to mitigate damage you'd do well. It was just up to the player to figure out how. Even empathy had damage mitigation within it's powerset that wasn't about healing(fortitude), and defenders had a secondary blast set. Any defender who forgot to take blasts and then rolled empathy but never used fortitude was a very, very bad defender who just as well have been a sadist who enjoyed seeing everyone's health bars plummet so they could play whack a mole.
Tankers could mitigate alot of damage. Scrappers couldn't mitigate as much directly but destroyed mobs faster, so fights ended faster as dead mobs couldn't do damage. Brutes were similar to scrappers, though slightly more tanky. Defenders and corruptors reduced damage by using buffs/debuffs and some soft crowd control. Controllers and dominators were supposed to prevent damage by preventing mobs from attacking, controllers could buff allies/debuff mobs to, so they could protect the team even better but had the lowest damage.
Masterminds had buffs/debuffs/soft crowd control to keep their pets alive so they could mop the floor with mobs through high damage, killing mobs very fast to prevent damage. Blasters were as simple as it gets by simply blowing away the mobs.
EVERYTHING was about damage mitigation. And damage mitigation could allow people to take on a lot more enemies at a time as befit a super hero game. Bottom line, it was a super hero game, not a fantasy mmorpg where your just a weak minion, but a super hero game where you were someone who made a real difference by yourself, and could back up people far more and with far more variety than typical fantasy mmorpgs.
A note though; Early game in city of heroes you didn't want to take on huge numbers, as your character was inexperienced. You earned your becoming powerful. Even then, city of heroes had an agro cap and an AoE cap for a reason, was to ensure people experimented with a variety of things. It wasn't there to force a trinity down anyones throats(in fact, the trinity was a good way to get a team wipe in city of heroes, as all your damage mitigation was on the tanker, and often trinity teams had very bad blasters and no other damage mitigation so they couldn't even fight anything higher then even con council).
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
I don't want my Stalwart to sh!t himself while taking on 3 white-con bad guys at mid level. I want my Stalwart to look at those 3 and say "OK no big deal" and go to town. It wont be a cake-walk, I should be taking some damage but I shouldn't be under 25% HP at the end either during normal combat. My SD/BA Tank at level 25 (mid level) took on 5+ white enemies with ease (no IO's). Sure I got hit and it took me a while to kill them but I was never in real danger of dying unless I did something stupid or the enemies were Psi or Elec based (had some End issues around level 25-30 I remember than VERY clearly but that was build issues).
At low levels (first 10 say) then yes we are all squishy and taking on 5 at once is asking for a world of pain, but at mid level (FFXIX max level is 50 so at level 30-31 I was over mid way) I shouldn't be worried.
Now obviously FFXIV is not CoH/CoT and they are different game styles. As much as this post was a rant I also wanted it to be reasons WHY I personally (and ymmv) don't like that style of gameplay, both from a 'Content is gated through dungeons' and 'why Holy Trinity games annoy me'.
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
Sadly, you can't control player attitude. I feel for the OP since I was often the guy who wanted to run a TF but there were no empty slots to be had. I would try to form my own team and I would let the players know ahead of time that I was new to leading. I would ask if anyone else wanted to lead but I would step up if nobody else wanted to. It's called learning and if the players can't deal with it then it's on them...not on you.
I agree with what you said regarding team mix as well and I've seen that repeated a lot across these boards. Very few players seem to want a 'magic mix' of 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 controllers and 4 DPS or whatever. One of the best parts of CoH was the ability to blend stuff together.
In the end it's all about the fun.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
/qft
and i want to be facing hordes of villains, thats what made me feel super (though seeing a stone/stone tank agro every mob on the final crystal titan room in the eden trial was possibly a bit ott...
was bloody good fun though!
A large part of the difference between CoH and other games is how boss encounters work. In many games, the encounter starts, and if you kill some of the supporting cast and take 2/3 of the hits off the boss then wipe, you restart from the beginning, in CoH you didn't for most enciounters which meant you could wipe, get up and start from where you'd got to with the boss having regenned a bit, but his supporting cast didn't all reappear. This meant that there were VERY few things you couldn't get through with sheer persistence.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
This just reminded me of a night way, way back, running Frostfire. Started with eight and after a couple of wipes ended up with a team of three, a scrapper and two blasters. It was getting late and we couldn't find anyone to join us. We just kept pressing on even though we weren't getting much xp due to the mounting debt.. Took over two and a half hours but we finally finished. Had a real sense of accomplishment.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."