Harder!

You don't have any tactical tool to dictate the engagement: booo, combat boring, combat hack'n'slash, combat dull.

You have tons of ways to influence the fight besides bringing a larger stick: booo, cc overpowered, root required, combat too complex.

Damned if you do...

 

I'm not sure if you are employing hyperbole here... But it can't. I regularly fight the zombie wave in a control point and spend a good minute to minute and a half in combat mode with no way to purify. It hasn't killed me yet. Granted the Liche wave with the single weak zombie can get kind of messy, but a single zombie poses no immediate threat to a high level adventurer.

 

I'm all for tactical combat. Would love to see truly dynamic, reactive, strategic combat that rewards knowledge, patience, and assessment. I have zero confidence we'll see that in Shroud in 2016, but sure, I'd love to see it.

What I don't understand is the missing global caps on all buffs, procs, crowd control abilities, spells and skills. This is required. It's not optional. Did none of the dev team live through the moss covered twig + haste times, in EQ1? History, you gotta learn from it!

 

Yes I can. Easily. Yes you may.

 

Wouldn't mind a video of that myself...

 

Eq1 is a great example. I think we still have s long way to go with difficulty and strategy within the game...

Would love to have another video from @Chris or maybe anyone over the development of this topic.

 

Im not sure if you understood what I was saying, but Ill try again. Firstly, it isnt random at all, its quite predictable, and kills you at quite a predictable rate. This forces you to rethink your strategy, and prevents more casual, "lather, rinse, repeat," style farming/grinding. It forces you to action when you may not be prepared for it (more like real life combat / even more like PVP combat), and adaptability is the true measure of skill, rather than the typical style of casually out-math'ing the mobs with your level and dps. Its also incredibly easy to deal with - run out of the spawn, heal self while doing so, cast Purify or keep reattempting consuming your potion. As an aside, timelength to consume a potion, if its being interrupted, is a viable argument for the devs. Nerfing the zombie plague to bring back casual play in undead spawns is not.

I disagree, I think its great, and outright hilarious. Also, please re-read my comments about non-linear difficulty. You seem to be arguing in favor of linear, 2-dimensional difficulty with accompanying linear, predictable, and repetative "strategy" (get higher level, click attack button until win). Please also re-read my comments about perceiving the entire encounter before judging this, do not view the Zombie in isolation. You can make 1K-2K quite quickly in a graveyard, at the expense of having to dodge the Zombie Plague.

Secondly, what the heck is a lvl 80 doing fighting a one-skull Zombie in the first place? At that, how the heck is a lvl 80 not yet adapted to simply moving out of spawn, healing, and curing the poison? At level 40, I could 2-shot Zombies - and that is my tactic: immediately divert all attention to Zombie, and kill in 2 hits, then resume whatever else I was attacking; if infected with Zombie Plague, make tactical withdrawl, cure, and come back and finish the job. Its not very hard, basically, just dont stand there and let it kill you. To melee the zombie, run forward and thwack it once, then immediately back up, theyre incredibly slow and shouldnt even be able to hit you back. Then smack it one more time, a third if necessary, but at your level, Im surprised you cant one-shot a one-skull Zombie.

BTW, IRL, a brown recluse or black widow spider can cause you some serious damage, though you can one-shot them, you understand that, right? A copper head snake could possibly kill you if youre far enough away from civilization, but you can one shot them too. So why should video-game world just be this linear progression where nothing below your level is ever even remotely dangerous to you again? Why at level 80, should you be able to kill 25 level-40 things at the same time? I am an experienced competition fighter, with plenty of experience teaching/instructing others in self defense (even internationally), and even I know that multiple untrained combatants could send me to the hospital very quickly, even without weapons. 3 opponents is scary, and again Im referring to idiot street thugs with no formal combat training (I suppose, an IRL "noob" with violent intentions).

So again, I applaud the beginning of what appears to be a break from the linear combat style in games. Just because something is lower level than you, doesnt mean it will be no challenge. You always have to be aware, conscious of your surroundings, conscious of any danger (i.e., spawn) nearby, and ready to adapt to sudden changes.

I think it makes perfect sense. Please re read my post that you quoted. Frustration is your choice, as this most certainly serves a distinct and deliberate purpose beyond making you cranky. Are you also frustrated that you cant solo a dragon? If you prefer the linear style of PVE combat, stick to wolves, kobolds, and bandits (Satyrs are another tricky area - those damned Fauns really throw a wrench in the casual approach).

Read my notes about about how to fight a Zombie without getting any plague (or at least, drastically reduce your chances of getting it). Once I adapted to prioritizing Zombies over all other undead spawn, I stopped getting the plague entirely (again, move faster than they do, theyre slow).

I believe there is a Death Magic lifetap-DOT, though I dont have the game running right now to check. If not, then I agree, there should be one. There are other threads where players are discussing the lack of anti-undead abilities, such as a AD&D style "Turn Undead," and the general ineffectiveness of the Life Magic school. It is being addressed.

There is also a thread somewhere where players have asked for the ability to learn skills from combat with mobs. That too would be a cool mechanic.

Thats odd, as everything I've described is exactly how the undead spawns have gotten far more interesting with R27 (via Zombie Plague). It does serve the purpose of making it less grindy, and engaging you cognitively to adapt to sudden changes in your current plan. Im hoping more mechanics of this nature appear with future releases, and I believe the devs aim to do just that.

 

I was more implying that stealth doesn't work at all once you get the plague because it deals damage over an insanely amount of time (unless you consume a cure potion at every encounter). Stealth completely breaks upon receiving damage (which is usually how MMOs handle stealth). I elaborated on the idea that, maybe in this game, damage shouldn't automatically break stealth.

A fire DoT, sure, you're basically a walking torch and can't really sneak around even if you tried. An ever-long-lasting disease? I'm pretty sure I can still remain hidden. So, no thanks. This kind of stuff can completely negate a character archetype. Imagine, if you will, an enemy that, once it hits you, you're prevented from casting spells for "200 days" or however long the plague lasts.

If one's idea of challenge is to completely block off content for certain archetypes, then I'd like to suggest a bunch of dungeons that are littered with locked doors; that way the Subterfuge tree will have something useful to look forward to in PvE.

However, like you suggests, I do agree that the Zombie Plague offers more interesting game-play rather than merely increasing damage and health values of enemies. I just want Zombie Plague to be looked over.

 

They have addressed how they plan to impact pulling and aggravation of the mobs. My comment goes past that tho.

There needs to be something interesting about combat, if it's not loot or the strategy when fighting the mob, or the number of different mobs in the world.... What is it?

Think of what repeatability is going to look like if it stays like this......

 

More than 3 years ago, I somewhat recall an idea presented to the dev team, on these forums, that was something like: Have an evaluation skill, that when used showed you strengths and weaknesses of the target. Each target, within a species, type, or race, would have a range of weaknesses and strengths, with more challenging and rewarding content having a stronger variety.
Those strength and weaknesses would initially be vague, but with practice (both with the skill and the target type) the player could determine the exact best loadout to fight with to be effective against that target, offensively and defensively. You could even tie reward quantity into such a system. (use the 'best' solution, get the best reward)
The strengths and weaknesses would be things like: bludgeon, slashing, piercing, heat, cold, poison, disease, sun, moon, life, death, stats like str/int/dex, resistances and so on.
In practice, the player would use this assessment skill, get some visual/textual feedback, then prepare for combat using those abilities.
The more challenging "epic" creatures would dynamically adjust these weaknesses and strengths the longer a fight went on.
Custom reactive/dynamic abilties would be presented during combat if a group worked together with unusual, appropriate, or unexpected combo's that would either massively take advantage of a creatures weaknesses, or ignore them entirely, as a carrot for group co-operation.

I think the response from the dev team was: "that's not the game we're making" or "the game lore doesn't support that" or "we're too far along in development to implement that" or "it would make combat too complex" or some other excuse. I don't remember exactly, but the impression I got was a "Ah, G-g-g-go away son, you're botherin' me" (Foghorn Leghorn) kind of response.

C'mon Skyo, you know the 'customers' are all dumb, right? They don't have good ideas, good implementations, experience or wisdom. hehehe. Sorry, that last bit there was sarcasm. I get tired of watching good ideas that don't get even a second glance or discussion. Hubris, it's hard to get rid of...

The point being, there are many ways to improve replayability/repeatability. Maybe next year, Portalarium will pick one?

 

Stratigos, I apologize, still on some pain meds from a surgical testing procedure. I am probably the one not being clear in any way shape or form. The randomness of the plague that I question is the 1 to 1000 damage piece in the description of the effect. I generally dislike RNG anything if I can help it. It just comes down to luck and not skill in the end if everything is RNG based.

I am actually usually out there with my husband fighting things together and I do go back to lower areas just to gather things like corpse wax and nightshade; on top of that revenge and out of my own whimpiness. All that being said, I also believe there is a learning curve for new players that can completely discourage them if it is too random or way too tough. I think things should scale up quickly, but they need to learn the type of game that we have here. I want to see it successful and a good first skull introduction should do that. I am totally with you on more interesting mob technique, but mobs routinely dot, debuff, heal themselves and damage in other games. There is nothing new to the plague mechanic; other than the RNG of damage. As to the the spiders and snakes you are referring to; while yes they can kill you, it won't be quick and it is still fairly unlikely unless you have an allergy or a compromised immune system. What they could do is use it as a mechanic with other mobs though (i.e. the weakness) and then the social mobs could form a tactics based on this. That could make things quite interesting.

Of course the combat system, hopefully, still has a ways to go and it may very well already be on a drawing board that we can't see. I am just adding my personal feedback to my experiences in this game and several others. I have no experience with Ultima (that I can remember anyway) as many of you do, but I do like what I see in big potential to be a really unique game that takes from old and new ideas and actually puts them together in the right way.

 

you guys can bet theres going to be tons of people who "beat the system" and effectively powergame to max level in less than a month

I've made suggestions to help it... but they're not politically correct so its useless to even repeat them

 

Story of my life... I was one of the few sporting the "missing pieces" from UO (eval int, anatomy, forensic evaluation etc...) but indeed we formulated it bad saying that "it goes without saying if you make a Ultima sucessor... so we touched some ego there and it didn't go well.

Since then pretty much all my ideas which aren't really my ideas (cause I was inspired, and mused by UO genius) have gotten that kind of response.

It feels strange to this day because it feels like indeed someone whom I considered a genius who had those ideas for UO (that were never completed the way we tried to communicate it here) is now kind of hated by many devs and many players (in some wierd sub-conscious non-linear way).

Kind of like he represented the "cause" for all the rude pointless mother griefing pks and the guardian's complete win over the storyline.

I really brought that up for questioning, but thats against forum rules so I'm going to self-censor for the rest.

 

I think there are some simple ways to improve difficulty and replayability of the game.

The game is already made up of instance based locations. Make a few of these just for high level groups.

Have the difficult monsters, named mobs and boss mobs present within the instance. My first idea was a difficult maze.

Upon completion have a large amount of rare loot items, crazy experience and adventure level 100 quest items for crafting ect. Level 200 mobs.

Even the basics of this would set the ground work for a game that didn't feel like it could be ripped through easily.

 

I asked, but you didn't answer.

Did you manage to solo the three Ghairmutes?

 

who are you in game I want to watch you hold Vertas, or the Superstition Canyon Solo.

 

Yes he did...ha cant reply due to still being digested...as soon as he gets out at the other end, he'll answer.

 

You could...sit in front of the PC while being blindfolded and have your keybord hidden with your hands strapped behind your back. I think thats the level of difficulty your looking for?

I have the same problem in StarCitizen...its to easy...thats why I use the joystick with my feet while rolling my face over the keyboard.

 

Dragon-sized spider queens that have web, poison, and bite-and-throw attacks?