Goblin Squad Member
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I would think that a Tank will be useful in this game as well. Though, more like Drakhan said, it wont be the standard MMO style.
I also think it will be skill and equipment based. So if you skill up your HP (or whatever) and skill up for heavy armor, and take the best armor and equipment that gives you more HP and defense, then you will be considered a tank.
I dont think it will be tank or damage. At least not at higher xp. In the beginning it will be based on the skills you train, and armor you wear. Once you reach a higher xp, then I think you can be both just fine.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Past what I said above, I dont know more information to share. Some of the other guys may be able to point you in the right direction.
I dont think you will be able to sacrifice damage for tank, other then the equipment you choose. (and skills at low xp)
Well you can in the PnP Pathfinder and oldschool D&D. There are a number of defensive fighting strategies that let you fight defensively and hit for less damage but gain a dodge bonus or some other defensive benefit and quite a few others that let you hit for big damage with a loss to defense.
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Goblin Squad Member
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"Tanking" as in low-dps + extreme survivability should be easily done.
"Tanking" as in holding aggro (from pve mobs) will not be so easy.
In Pathfinder RPG, a sword and board defensive fighter is typically the foe you charge past and plan to come back to after killing the casters. Fighters aiming for battlefield control ("aggro management") often go for reach weapons rather than sword and board.
The sword and board juggernaut is the perfect tank only in narrow tunnels, but is also excellent for leading assaults and soaking up opportunity attacks and missile fire, holding the breach or capturing halls.
GW certainly seem to be be working on mechanisms like the Opportunity system that should help fighters 'lock' their targets in melee, but the typical MMO picture of 5 mobs all focusing on the most armored target I think has to go.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Xeen Indeed, they generally add a set small amount of AC bonus so they are clearly more useful to a low AC character like a rogue/arcanist and less benefit to a heavily armored fighter/cleric type. In many cases the heavy armored guy is far better off doing as much damage as possible to kill the enemy damage dealers as fast as possible.
I was merely pointing out the ability to trade damage for AC and visa versa on the fly does exist :D
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Goblin Squad Member
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GW certainly seem to be be working on mechanisms like the Opportunity system that should help fighters 'lock' their targets in melee, but the typical MMO picture of 5 mobs all focusing on the most armored target I think has to go.
I agree with this.
And dont misunderstand, I play a tank or healer on SWTOR...
Damn... I played that game when it first came out, then left after 1 month of boredom. Recently a friend talked me into playing it again after we quit Eve. Im almost at boredom again after another month.
I played Eve for about 7 years, I hope this game holds me that long.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@morewardogs, these posts may be relevant:
There's very good argument to be made that the problem with the Trinity is the Tank. And the Tank works because of Hate. Hate was an interesting mechanic, but by metagaming it the Tank became possible, and once the Tank became possible, the Trinity was the only rational outcome.
WoW has gone down a rabbit hole of feedback due to the Tank from which they cannot easily extract themselves. But Pathfinder Online does not have to follow them.
We're going to focus design effort on the Hate mechanic and on other ways that PvE content interacts with players with an eye towards avoiding a feedback loop that would trap us in the Trinity.
RyanD
The Tank problem is emergent. It's not just Taunt. It's over-development of the armor bonus too. The Tank becomes so grossly over-armored that if you don't build encounters to challenge him, he'll just slaughter everything with impunity. So after a few rounds of power inflation the Devs either are locked in to the Tank, they are forced to gimp the expensive and time intensive gear, or make the other classes equal to the Tank's defense (effectively a nerf). The only solution is to vigilantly stop the feedback loop every time it starts (I.e. you piss off the handful of advanced theory crafters for the benefit of the rest of the community).
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Goblin Squad Member
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@morewardogs, these posts may be relevant:
There's very good argument to be made that the problem with the Trinity is the Tank. And the Tank works because of Hate. Hate was an interesting mechanic, but by metagaming it the Tank became possible, and once the Tank became possible, the Trinity was the only rational outcome.
WoW has gone down a rabbit hole of feedback due to the Tank from which they cannot easily extract themselves. But Pathfinder Online does not have to follow them.
We're going to focus design effort on the Hate mechanic and on other ways that PvE content interacts with players with an eye towards avoiding a feedback loop that would trap us in the Trinity.
RyanD
The Tank problem is emergent. It's not just Taunt. It's over-development of the armor bonus too. The Tank becomes so grossly over-armored that if you don't build encounters to challenge him, he'll just slaughter everything with impunity. So after a few rounds of power inflation the Devs either are locked in to the Tank, they are forced to gimp the expensive and time intensive gear, or make the other classes equal to the Tank's defense (effectively a nerf). The only solution is to vigilantly stop the feedback loop every time it starts (I.e. you piss off the handful of advanced theory crafters for the benefit of the rest of the community).
Thanks Nihimon. I hadn't seen those posts before. Very interesting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This administration cannot afford to keep buying Nihimon larger and larger hats every time you compliment him.
It's funny... I literally have never been able to buy a hat big enough to fit my head. My wife bought me a cowboy hat on a trip to Mexico - the largest they had - and it looks ridiculous on me. When I played football in 7th grade, they had to special order my helmet.
You can get a feel for the extent of my problem when you look at this chart with the knowledge that my hat size is 8 1/4.
I think that in one of the blogs they talk about how heavy armor will be the most effective against physical damage, but the least against magical damage. Cloth will be the opposite. Light and medium will be in between. It will be easy to be super tanky against either... and very difficult to be tanky against both.
That's my understanding, at least.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Inevitably, people will become 'adept' at specific roles, if only for familiarity.
'Tanking' might be nothing more than delaying tactics by one or more characters while the 'DPS' ready their MacGuffinite Abilities for a salvo.
A Fighter might tank by tripping, disarming and generally being the most obvious threat on the battlefield, because that seven foot giant wielding a flail bigger than your mother charging at you is a helluva lot scarier than the skinny little emo guy in the black dress standing behind him, right?
A Rogue might tank by being very agile on the battlefield, running all over the place and piling poisons and dirty tricks on the enemy while running their mouth, aka 'Doing a Deadpool'.
A Wizard might tank by summoning a small army of Earth Elementals and reading "Drow Girls gone Good" as his legion pulverizes the enemy.
A Cleric might do the same as a Fighter or a Wizard, and has the benefits of being the sole class with healing abilities at this stage.
For example, let's say I build a Fighter who is adept at using the Dire Flail, has mastered Tripping, Disarming and Dragging maneuvers and runs around in Mithril Full-Plate with Boots that increase my land speed.
I can 'tank' by forcing the enemy to expend their actions trying to stand back up, recovering their weapons and forcing the enemy out of flanking maneuvers/forcing them into a position for my allies to flank'n'spank.
That said, I am REALLY looking forwards to how Goblinworks is going to break gamers out of the 'Holy Trinity' mindset. I can't wait, you've blown my mind thus far, I can't wait to see what comes next!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think several of the mechanics from the P&P can work in making more heavily armored characters viable in a PVP centric game such as PFO.
Concentration, attacks of opportunity etc.
In most games if you are in PVP shooting at someone, say the enemy healer, and the tank starts attacking you, you can run around while still throwing your damage at your primary target. Especially if you are getting healed. Attacking a high health, high armor, moderate damage target just isn't a wise use of time until the glass cannons and healers are dealt with. Sure you may lose some channeled abilities but that's cool.
Now lets try this scenario. You are sitting there shooting ranged attacks at your primary target. A full plate wearing fighter starts attacking you in melee. Now all of a sudden whenever you shoot your bow/cast a spell at a target outside your melee range you have a high chance of failing, and he gets an attack of opportunity. If you just turn away and run instead of using a short range teleport or disengage (5-foot step) ability, he gets more free attacks. How high value of a target is he now? How valuable is it for your team's melee to keep him off you?
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Goblin Squad Member
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It is the need to concentrate and the AoO in melee that will hopefully set PFO apart from many other MMOs where spellcasters are just another way to create the same damage effects as everyone else (also in D&D4.0, but I shouldn't mention them).
Being a soloing spellcaster, cleric or druid aside, is going to be tough. Summoning a melee-capable companion might be the best answer, whether it be an elemental, undead, or demonic warrior. There's always the good old Monster Summoning, of course, but using a spell slot to summon a sparkling dog for a round never seemed a good trade to me at 1st level.
More reason for spellcasters to learn how to use a decent weapon, I think.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well with PFO not likely to follow the trinity, we can come to 2 conclusions. I again fall back to eve since its what I know...
1) The NPC's will target the first guy to aggro them, and stay on target till complete. Which is done in missions and complexes in Eve, one guy goes in and starts them off and is setup as the tank. Others remote repair him and do the main dps.
2) The NPC's will rotate targets and choose semi-based on "threat." And since they are trying to avoid the trinity. Threat will be a flat base not a build up, the enemy will gets its que to rotate targets, and pick something at random with threat. The enemy group may focus targets and it may not.
In #2, in eve we setup universal. Everyone had enough tank to survive the volley damage long enough for everyone else to start remote repairing them. There were logistics ships as well (effectively clerics) and these were targeted by the NPC's and needed remote reps too. Im not completely sure how the threat was calculated in this one, I didnt grind NPC's much by the time this was added to the game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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EVE very recently gave most PVE enemies the ability to change targets. They're not supposed to be as good at it as Sleepers, but I'm already seeing my drones take significantly more damage.
I think Hate itself isn't always the problem Sometimes the Trinity emerges when Hate management becomes routine and reliable. If the Fighter can occasionally Taunt, but he can't keep an entire group of enemies focused on him until they're all dead, then limited Hate management might not be so bad.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've seen other games manage Hate/Aggro with NPCs by adding a specific metric to certain classes or types of characters. For example, undead might have an added hate metric for Clerics or those that use turning. Warrior type NPCs might have it for Mage types, etc etc
The 'tank' might initiate the fight, but unless he deals a lot of in your face damage or has some other lockdown skill, the NPC might just target someone else that they 'hate' within the vicinity.
This worked quite well when done properly, and is rather amusing when a mages drops an AoE on a heap of NPCs that have extra 'hate' towards spellcasters or fire or the like :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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This administration cannot afford to keep buying Nihimon larger and larger hats every time you compliment him.It's funny... I literally have never been able to buy a hat big enough to fit my head. My wife bought me a cowboy hat on a trip to Mexico - the largest they had - and it looks ridiculous on me. When I played football in 7th grade, they had to special order my helmet.
You can get a feel for the extent of my problem when you look at this chart with the knowledge that my hat size is 8 1/4.
Hmm..errr...ahhh. Well that does explain some things. =P
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Goblin Squad Member
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EVE very recently gave most PVE enemies the ability to change targets. They're not supposed to be as good at it as Sleepers, but I'm already seeing my drones take significantly more damage.
I think that change in EVE was more to counter AFK Drone mission boats.
Its already being metagamed though, mini-slowcats with sentries (like the new Domi and Geddon) are showing up more as mission boats and things like target painters are being fitted to draw aggro away from the Drones. People are also running bulk T1 hobs and warriors using them as ammo.
Whatever Devs do, someone will find a way around it.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Hate/aggro is sort of a weird concept for a game and I could just as well see a game without such a concept. Instead have enemies that have different tactics. One enemy will attack the first thing it sees until the target is dead. Then another enemy would always attack whoever is doing the most damage to it. Yet another may attack whoever is currently doing the most healing in the vicinity. Then groups would have to set their tactics to meet the threat. For more complex encounters the enemy can switch between different attack priorities. Even though I play tanks, the concept of a pve only effect to make the enemy attack you can cause a rift between pve and pvp. I can find the best way to make a high survivablity/low damage character work in a game even without such a mechanic put in place.
The number that each of those AIs use to determine who attacked first, who is doing the most damage, or who is doing the most healing IS the hate/aggro concept. You can abstract it a little bit at the cost of running expensive server-side AI, but it still comes out as a number.
What I WOULD like to see is a mechanic where how 'squishy' a target was also factored into the AI, and the control techniques were also incorporated. The easy version (+aggro for being squishy, +aggro for doing damage, +aggro for being in a position such that ignoring you grants opportunity, &tc) is pretty convincing in the first couple of iterations, but eventually it falls to analysis just like every other AI simple enough to be reverse-engineered.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Go tanky enough and you'll probably be slow, allowing ranged attackers to keep plinking away while staying out of melee range. Also, having the best quality crafted armour would probably be very expensive to thread, so you're sacrificing a lot of ability to recover from a death for a little extra protection that may or may not save you from any particular opponent.
On the flipside, those who dress down all the time so they can thread everything they use will probably become the red-shirted cannon fodder they've made themselves to be.
To create different kinds of AI to different kinds of monsters in depth is important. Some monsters could react to player gear and different kinds of damage should be taken into account.
Yes! I 100% agree with this! The fact that all monster AI's react identically(except for bosses and their minions, mostly) is one of the most annoying things about MMO's. I know other games have programmed the AI to be more difficult and gotten negative feedback because of this... my answer to that is this:
SCREW THAT!
I want a game that people can't make bots to farm in, because the AI is not 100% predictable. Make different races of mobs use different AI's. With in those races, make different 'classes' i.e warriors, scouts, wizards, clerics, etc. ALL use different AI's. This is the minimum that needs to be done.
Even better, make it unpredicatble! Have 20 or 30 different AI reactions to attackers or invaders, and then RANDOMIZE them(maybe not with bosses - you can limit that to a few so that you don't get a boss doing non-badass boss stuff) so there's no way to tell how they'll react. Maybe not for all critters, since berserker orc warriors probably shouldn't be terribly tactical, or run away in fear after being hit, but make it unpredictable!
The AI doesn't have to be genius level, but at least don't make it so dumb that people can pull mobs one at a time from a pack in plain view of the others, kill them and continue doing so until they're all dead!
'Hey Bob, those humans over there are killing Fred!'
'Ah, it ain't important Joe, they ain't doin' nuthin ta us!'
'Now they're killing Jim!'
'Quit bugging me, Joe! I need to stand here and stare at that wall!'
Party then pulls Bob.
"Joe! Help! JOE! They're killing me!'
'Sorry, Fred. I gotta just stand here and stare at the wall remember? Though maybe I'll find another wall to stare at. Later!'
This should NEVER happen in PFO. Please make it so it doesn't!
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Goblin Squad Member
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To create different kinds of AI to different kinds of monsters in depth is important. Some monsters could react to player gear and different kinds of damage should be taken into account.
You realize this isn't a WoW clone, right?
Party then pulls Bob.
"Joe! Help! JOE! They're killing me!'
'Sorry, Fred. I gotta just stand here and stare at the wall remember?
And it certainly isn't an EQ1 clone.
Most of the challenging content will come from other players. PFO has more in common with Eve, except the team isn't entirely hands-off and willing to let the community race to the bottom of the cesspool. Or for fantasy, it might be more like pre-facet UO, but with some rules to keep it from devolving into complete 'Lord of the Flies' insanity.
There will be monsters and such (occasionally played by devs and alpha-pledgers) but they're mostly mobile environmental hazards, not the main point of the game. Conflict with other players needn't be violent all the time, either.
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Goblin Squad Member
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While I agree with your sentiments, Keovar, I think NPC AI is still important. I really want to see a rampaging horde of sprites burn a small settlement to the ground because they all had varied and interesting AI and the players were no quick enough to respond and/or figure out what was going on.
Tanks rushing to the front and being ignored as the hordes skirted around them and overran the spellcasters, then proceeding to torch key buildings and going after healers before finally hitting the warriors with a barrage of missile fire.
While not the key focus of the game, it does sound awesome and I am hopeful!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Effectively if harvesting etc is is the equivalent of farming mobs, then that triggers mob spawns, then those mobs need to be variable types of damage they can do on tanks or bots and have variety of AI, then those key things:
1/ Unpredictable Mob Type (Type of Threat) eg alignment, AI aggro/hate
2/ Variable Damage Type (eg magical and physical etc)
3/ Variable numbers spawn (no picking off mobs)
4/ Usually requires a coordinated party, given the preceding
All these things I think help resolve tanks and bots?
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Goblin Squad Member
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We might end up with
Small Predator AI. (used for small-to-medium Animal-type hostile entities)
Large Predator AI. (used for medium-to-huge Animal-type hostile entities)
Bandit AI. (Used for Bandits, Bugbears, Orcs and the like)
Soldier AI. (Used for NPC Soldiers, Orcs, Hobgoblins, and the like)
Lesser Magic Creature AI. (Used for 'weaker' Magical Creatures)
Greater Magical Creature AI. (USed for 'strong' Magical Creatures and Elementals)
Dragon AI. (Obviously for the big threats, Pseudo-Dragons and the like should be handled by the Magic Creature AIs.)
Lesser Undead AI. (Skeletons, Zombies, Ghouls)
Greater Undead AI. (Vampires, Liches, Ghosts)
Mind you, that's at least 9 different A.I.s with perhaps 20 or so possible actions they can take ... that's gonna take some processing power from goblinworks ...
That said, I would love to see your Race, 'Class' and Alignment have realistic impact on the world around you. An (in)famous Necromancer PC might be able to waltz right into the Vampire's Lair, sit down, shoot the breeze ... but the Paladin? Oh hell no.
Dragons are obviously going to go for the Wizards and the Fighters. Undead are going to focus on the person with the brightest 'glow' of Divine Power, either to fight or flee from. Bandits are going to go after the person with the most wealth on their person. Animals will just try to eat whoever looks weak, old or sickly.
To create different kinds of AI to different kinds of monsters in depth is important. Some monsters could react to player gear and different kinds of damage should be taken into account.You realize this isn't a WoW clone, right?
Party then pulls Bob.
"Joe! Help! JOE! They're killing me!'
'Sorry, Fred. I gotta just stand here and stare at the wall remember?And it certainly isn't an EQ1 clone.
Most of the challenging content will come from other players. PFO has more in common with Eve, except the team isn't entirely hands-off and willing to let the community race to the bottom of the cesspool. Or for fantasy, it might be more like pre-facet UO, but with some rules to keep it from devolving into complete 'Lord of the Flies' insanity.
There will be monsters and such (occasionally played by devs and alpha-pledgers) but they're mostly mobile environmental hazards, not the main point of the game. Conflict with other players needn't be violent all the time, either.
I think you are drastically understating(or underestimating, at least) how important NPC critters will be to the game. In several of the blogs, we've been told that NPC monsters will be a major source of raw materials for use in crafting. Not the only one, certainly, but my understanding was that we'd get things from NPC monsters that couldn't be harvested. Making an undead bane sword? You need stuff from various undead critters to make it... and so on.
So yeah, NPC AI is important.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I honestly believe we will see all of that. Different AI for each monster type, and even different AI for bosses and their direct minions.
I dont think we will see all of that in the beginning. It will take some time. Maybe by the time of OE we can expect those things but probably not EE.
I still cant wait, lets start EE NOW!!!
lol