Resurrection is the reason why all boss fights are easy.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Aetrion, Aug 14, 2018.

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  1. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    Fighting the Aether dragons in the role of a healer made me realize something that is fundamentally broken about this game: You can resurrect people over and over in the middle of the fight, and that makes it so there effectively is no real reason to be good at healing.

    I play as a specialized life mage, and I started to realize one thing: My healing numbers didn't actually matter. The fact that life spec cut the cast time on my rez in half mattered. When that dragon decides to triple fireball someone into the ground there is nothing I can do to heal them. When it crits someone for 800 damage when they have 700 health there is nothing I can do to heal them. However, I can resurrect them over and over and over. So can everyone else in my group, it just takes them slightly longer to cast it.

    So effectively, there are only two ways you ever lose to a boss: It causes a total party wipe so quickly that nobody has time to resurrect people, or you simply don't have enough DPS to overcome its regeneration. You will never fail to beat a boss because you didn't have enough healing, which means tanks and healers in the classic MMORPG sense aren't really a thing in this game. You don't need healers who produce high healing numbers, you just need enough resurrections to keep the group going, and you don't need people who's hitpoints are tough to take away as a healing multiplier either because of that.

    This is a real issue with the game, because it eliminates a lot of dimensions to boss fights. They could add a boss who does 100,000 damage with every hit and it wouldn't be any more difficult than a boss who does 1,000 damage with every hit, nor would it become impossible to defeat. With Aether dragons we're already past the point where any player can actually survive a determined attack by the boss and receive healing, but we're still happily farming them. The only place the devs have to go to make fights harder is to either give the boss higher regeneration, which requires more DPS to kill it, or make it kill people faster, andin larger numbers, to wipe the whole raid. Either way, the scaling is fundamentally broken because of infinite resurrections in the middle of a fight. Resurrection doesn't even have to be on your combat bar for this to work!

    Suggestion to fix this: Don't put bosses in the game that instakill people unless it's a mechanical kill that is meant to be countered or avoided instead of healed through. Dial the health pool, healing, and damage in so that it really is a battle of damage vs. healing, modified by how hard it is to destroy each hitpoint. People need to still be alive after taking a hit to be healed. Alternatively make it so that when someone goes down their HP goes negative, and if they are healed to above zero within a couple second grace period they don't actually die. Then add a debuff that renders people unable to fight effectively that bosses apply when they kill someone. Maybe make it a stacking debuff that doesn't affect you until you have 10 of them stacked up, so that way you can do easier bosses that only apply 2 or 3 when you go down, giving you a few resurrections before you're out but then a really hard boss might instantly hit you with a 10 stack.

    With those changes boss fights could actually start to become challenging and fully explore all the dimensions of the system, instead of basically hinging purely on DPS, because resurrections turn all healing into a binary affair of just putting the people who went down back up.
     
  2. Feeyo

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    Good post right here (Actually above mine ;)). +1
     
  3. TheBalance

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    Seems like a failure of basic game design. Clearly there was no thought given to trivializing content through zerging/phoenixing players through it. I'm sure there's another, but I really can't recall another MMORPG that allows constant resurrection in combat without HEAVY penalties (making it not a valid option to progress). The overwhelming majority that come to mind disallow mid-combat resurrection entirely, or put it behind a single-use cooldown.

    Outstandingly put OP, this is a problem that has needed attention for years.
     
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  4. Xeng

    Xeng Avatar

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    The fireball from the Aether Dragons you were talking about is a mechanical kill which can be countered in several ways.
     
  5. Duke Gréagóir

    Duke Gréagóir Legend of the Hearth

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    Now I need the ability to self ressurect so I can kill the dragon by myself. ;). Hehe
     
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  6. Stundorn

    Stundorn Avatar

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    There is no "class" system or any dynamic group content.
    It's only about hit harder, have more HP or Armor skills and resistancies.
    If players can solo everyrhing including UT, this is evidence for no interdependencies within players.
    It's because of the progress design and no caps or limitations at all.
     
  7. Turk Key

    Turk Key Avatar

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    Great analysis. +10.
     
  8. Humbert_Humbert

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    Still need skill cap.
     
  9. Nelzie

    Nelzie Avatar

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    Nah man, this is a canard to put away.

    Specialization has already changed the game, some. It can change the game more and they can create more specific reasons, with the fixes recommended above to create roles within a group. The way the system is setup now, a group of six can really work up good sets of gear and decks to fit into traditional roles and have to use tactics to properly beat bosses.

    Some bosses might need a couple of mages specialized in different schools working together to kick off spells in order, like a Fire and Ice mage.... The Fire Mage might have to hit a boss with a fire spell, which causes the boss to "overheat" making it open up a "cooling port" that gives the ice mage AND archers something to hit, with the ice damage being significantly higher.

    There's SO much that can be done with this system without making it impossible to build a proper "raid team" because everyone is stuck in tightly packed roles with no easy way of changing anything.

    The ship you won't let go of is sooooo far gone. Just figure out suggestions that will force roles onto players/groups for dungeons and boss fights. That's the beauty of what we have, it just doesn't have everything in place to push people into taking specific roles very deeply right now.
     
  10. Nelzie

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    No.
     
  11. GMDavros

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    I like those ideas Nelzie. Creative thinking. Easily implemented. Leverages existing systems instead of forcing the devs into constantly creating new. Significant bang for the existing buck. Bravo.

    Fenris
     
  12. Nelzie

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    ...oh and the reason I say it could be hard to build raid teams with level caps is...

    What if you need certain sets of skills and... there won't be anyone online with those skills for three days and by then, you won't be able play the game?

    I mean, holy hell would that be extremely annoying AND kill the game. This game isn't World of Warcraft or some other insanely populated game where you can pick your choice of 700 to 1000 different players of each class for your pickup or planned Raid Team. Stop trying to make it into that, because that will kill the heck out of this game.

    Seriously, if it takes an hour to build a raid team in this game already and it can take another 45 minutes to an hour to get into and finish the raid... that's already far at the edge of my available play time. Hobbling it so that it can take 4 hours to build a raid team and because the team can't dynamically adjust to the threat it now takes 2 hours to do the raid?

    Who the heck actually has 6 hours to sit down and play this game? I have beer to brew, a child to raise, weights to go lift, cars to care for, a house to clean, a full time executive position at my workplace... The idea of pushing caps and forcing people into roles, when you can just do that to your own character, is just the most asinine thing I can imagine being done to this game.

    Please stop trying to make this game into a poo pile.
     
  13. Gix

    Gix Avatar

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    I’d argue that healing has always trivialized content it’s just that, in this game, everybody can do it. It’s one of the reasons why Necromancy is so powerful.

    Another thing is that there’s not enough practical crowd control abilities in the game as an alternative to healing. You can mesmerize or you can root melee enemies. If you’re not healing, you’re DPSing so encounters are stale from the strategy/tactics side of things.

    The original Guild Wars has good solutions to what you’re specifically describing:
    • Some healers needed to be set up to prevent damage instead of healing through damage; preventing large bursts of incoming damage to be too deadly.
    • Each death gave the player a 15% health and mana penalty (capping at 60%). Everything else is as effective as it was before; you simply have less health and mana to work with. The penalty is reduced in increments as you kill more and more creatures. The penalty is removed when the group zones out of the instance.
    This was true for both PvE and PvP.

    The only thing we’d need to modify from the items listed above is how the penalty is applied and removed. Due to the structure of the game, zoning out would be too easy and just be inconviennent... so
    • make it so that it’s removed when zoning into towns...
    • and the penalty is applied ONLY when a player gets resurrected by another player (Ankhs don’t give penalties since there are none in boss rooms).
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2018
  14. Nelzie

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    This are some REALLY great ideas AND they aren't seemingly difficult to conceive of the logic for.
     
  15. mystarr

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    I disagree with the OP. If you have a tank and an off tank (using valiant warden on the main tank) then the tank(s) can survive hits of 1,000+.

    Healing the tank and the off tank is also VERY important. In our groups, if the tank or off tank go down then things can go south very quickly. Everyone in the group is vulnerable to one shot hit/kills until we get aggro reestablished on a tank/off tank valiant warden combo.

    Sure res speed is important if the cart flies off the wheels, but if you have good/fast heals and a viable tanking strat you will never need to res.
     
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2018
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  16. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    Tell that to players that lose 500k xp on death.
     
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  17. Gix

    Gix Avatar

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    True but that doesn't make the fights any harder nor does that encourage the healer to be better. The healer doesn't have any tools to prevent the damage, so he'll just wait until the dude's dead and resurrect him quickly as it's more practical for him as a healer.
     
  18. Humbert_Humbert

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    You're right. This is working great.
     
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  19. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    This is entirely false. If your teammate die the dragon will go after you. If you heal too much you will also get aggro. If you are so fast that you can res people before the dragon turn on you then i bow down to you oh my lord ;) But i never saw this happen in 2 years.
     
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  20. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Oh and the reason why all boss are easy is because they have a straight forward mechanic. Even with that 25% health enrage which doesnt seem to change anything, its always the same movement you gotta do to kill them. It become pretty easy after doing it a couple time. But it doesnt really matter anyway, all boss drop crap. Some quest items are better than all 70+ artifacts. And they take 5 minute to complete.
     
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