Goblin Squad Member
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Keovar said in the post that you originally quoted from that the save or suck spells should be reworked into other forms of crowd control, specifically not locking a person down with a stun but reducing their action pool through stamina damage and stamina regen damage.
The "sticks and rocks", in context, was saying that PFO should have lots of magic, because Golarion and Pathfinder have a lot of magic. He's saying, yes the game could be an Open World Sandbox MMO (like Rust is, kind of) without magic, but it wouldn't be Golarion. It wasn't (at least the way I read it) characterizing Jiminy as fighting with sticks and rocks, but saying that these spells should be reworked rather than removed entirely by providing an example of a similar game without magic. Hopefully this can put an end to the totally unneeded back and forth. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not opposed to any of those things though I prefer slowdowns to roots.
Just to point out, that there are both magical and non-magic ways to perform roots in the the TT and slows.
For roots you have the Entangle and Web spells, and there are also Tanglefoot bags, Nets, and Bolas.
For slows you have Slow, and more broadly Caltrops and various terrain altering spells.
The rooting abilities tend to be more common than abilities that cause slows. Actually, Stuns and Paralysis are more common than both, but this is something I expect to see change for a MMO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As far as the rest of the argument I actually read the stamina part but he also said movement should be tied to stamina and normal stamina regen should sustain movement. So that could leave your opponent with nothing but unspecified free actions if you use an ability that drains them and applies a regen debuff.
My questions would be this:
- How easy should it be to get stam drain abilities?
- How fast/effectively can they shut an opponent down, especially in group combat?
- Will there be a way to lessen their effect on you, such as raising your will save?
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I figure at a rough estimate one character going all-out stamina drain should reduce an opponent with roughly equal training and quality of equipment by about 30-50%; and each additional character by a smaller iterative amount (asymptotically approaching some maximum, possibly all stamina)
Likewise with all other effects that apply a debuff- multiple stacks should be better than a single stack, but less than linearly.
The save-or-lose spells from the PnP (e.g. Sleep, command, create pit) need not be implemented at all, and should at least not be as powerful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Many of the issues brought up here were discussed in the TS Discussion of Saturday, November 16th.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is a needlessly aggressive and dismissive misrepresentation of the opposing point of view.Not really. If it does anything other than render you entirely helpless but still open to damage it's not a stun.
I gave you your line back because you were wrong to read aggression into what I said. I do find it frustrating that at every turn it seems someone is advocating for the hobbling of magic, but I'm not angry with Jiminy or anything.
I was reinforcing the fact that magic is the core trope which defines the fantasy genre. Take out the magic and what you have left is a relatively-primitive survival game. Looking at Pathfinder specifically, the core & base & alternate classes produced by Paizo so far, we've got only 27% which are non-magical (lacking spells or other [Su] abilities).
As to terminology, unless we're going to set up some kind of glossary that everyone here will agree on (try herding cats), I wouldn't expect that everyone will use the terms in precisely the same way because not everyone has the same previous play experience. To me, 'stun' sounds similar to 'daze': being groggy and less coordinated, but not paralysed.
But what do stun, daze, root, trip, disarm, hold, grapple, slow, snare, etc. all have in common? They take away some ability to act. That's the core of the issue; how much should one player be allowed to prevent another from acting? Kill them and their choices are reduced to respawn or wait, but everything else on the list interferes with their actions to a lesser degree. If you look at stamina as the measure of action economy, then a physical conflict is a matter of spending your own actions to interfere with the actions of a target, and you're comparing what the attacker spends vs. what the target loses. If you spend more inflicting the effect than what the effect inflicts on the target, there's no value in doing anything but damage, but if the attacker's expenditure is trivial and the target's loss is too great, then the game becomes about who shoots first.
Grappling is one of the least-used manoeuvres in tabletop because it's more complex than many players want to bother with, and so many are glory-hounds. They want to be the one doing the damage rather than the one holding a target while a buddy delivers the beating. It's also one of the last things I'd expect to see in PFO, but that's because of the animations. Still, consider what it does. If the attacker can establish a grapple, they're expending almost their entire ability to act in order to reduce the target's ability to act by a similar degree. Why shouldn't a hold person spell (easier for clerics than wizards) be treated as a mental grapple? If the caster has to maintain the hold and can't cast other things or do much else requiring stamina, then it's effective to keep a target from fleeing or harming you, but not really a way to win a 1-on-1 fight. Just like with typical grapples, you have chances to break free, depending on mental stats & skills rather than physical ones.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, there's something else I think we've not discussed.
Saving throws.
Players focusing on PvP might be able to tailor their characters to be extremely resistant to physical and magical stuns, making them either highly unlikely to 'stick', or have a much reduced period of effectiveness.
Suddenly, Stunning is what you do on Crafters and Gatherers to ensure they stick around for your Stand And Deliver action.
Slowing, freezing your target in place and all that other jazz is, to my mind, relatively benign, because it's an action you're taking that's not outright DPS.
What I'm seeing in WoW's PvP now is every mother-pugging trogg-licker is going for the stuns, because the setup in WoW is that bad for PvP it's not funny. Stuns need to be either something that has a very good chance of failing, or something that can't be spammed all the time by hyperactive twelve-year olds. And the idiocy of PvP 'stats', and the heavy reliance upon trinkets to try and beat the Stun-Locks just makes PvP unfun, because the winner is decided by who is lagging least, and who can build their stun up faster.
Stunning physical attacks would naturally be reduced to melee in-your-face attacks or very powerful (and slow) ranged attacks, and likely only effect one or two characters/targets at a time.
Magical stunning/paralyzing attacks could have a far greater range and number of targets, but if casters have a limited amount of spells between resting/recharging phases, that means the wizard that stocks up on Hold and Paralyze spells had better bring some backup, or when those stuns wear off, there is going be a large, pissed off mob of angry players hunting him down to show him how it feels to be powerless ...
Furthermore, perhaps as a hidden 'stat', we could have characters gain a stacking 'resistance' to certain attacks? If we have fought this guy several times in the past few days, and he always goes for a stun-lock combo and then stabs for the heart, the player gains a hidden bonus to resisting the stun, and then the offending player is caught with their pants down when their easy-mode combo fails, and the other player isn't locked down and can retaliate without restraints.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Suddenly, Stunning is what you do on Crafters and Gatherers...
This is one of my problems with stun systems, is that they already abuse those who are already the most vulnerable to attacks. A resilient person may survive a stun such that they are at a disadvantage but not helpless long enough to go from full health to dead. The scenario I am more worried about is that it becomes a dominant strategy to dealing with anyone not wearing heavy armor or fully loaded with HP skill levels.
Stamina Reduction and Slowed Movement would make for excellent MMO crowd controls.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To go back to City of Heroes, I played very, VERY effective Stamina sappers in CoH with Electric Armor. Having a character capable of draining all stamina and stop stamina recovery is actually worse than stun-locking. They both will make you unable to attack, and if stamina is also linked to movement, they will both make you unable to run.
There is a place for stamina drains, but I don't want it to be possible to drain ALL stamina.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To go back to City of Heroes, I played very, VERY effective Stamina sappers in CoH with Electric Armor. Having a character capable of draining all stamina and stop stamina recovery is actually worse than stun-locking. They both will make you unable to attack, and if stamina is also linked to movement, they will both make you unable to run.
There is a place for stamina drains, but I don't want it to be possible to drain ALL stamina.
I would favor a % of stamina. A one shot spell like Hold Person may have a base Stamina Impact of 25% of current stamina, stamina regen reduced by 25% for X seconds. If two wizards hit you, it would be 25% and then 25% from that, such that you would be down 43.75% on both. This builds diminishing returns right into the formula. Physical attacks that do not have refresh limits would have a lower impact such as 10%. The exact numbers are subject to how much can actually be done with small portions of the stamina bar. The end goal is that a stunned user has a smaller resource pool and should have to decide between using small, cheap hits to keep a constant flow going or burn all of his stamina on a bigger hit but then have to wait for the stamina refresh and is unable to rely upon their normal optimize ability rotation.
I would favor movement being separate from stamina. Though including it would be good for getting rid of the plague that is circle strafing - or at least make it a more meaningful decision. So I could see advantages of connecting them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think something that's equally important to consider when discussing crowd control is getting out of it. I think it was some time back, but I believe it was said somewhere that characters should have a reasonable expectation of being able to escape a fight they're trying to run from. That is, crowd control won't be so prevalent and/or powerful that escaping a fight is impossible (it might become extremely unlikely with the right set of circumstances, though, depending on starting distances, builds of both sides, etc.).
I personally think slows would be much more powerful than short duration stuns for this game, because most fights won't be fair and a slow gives the advantaged side easy pickings when chasing down the others.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As far as circle strafing goes, just use the same system for facing that the table-top uses: None! "Flanking" can just be an effect of multiple hostiles within five feet of you.
That would help with offensive circle strafing, but not defensive circle strafing. If you can't be targeted by front facing attacks when you are out of the field of view of the other guy, then there is still a reason to run in circles like an idiot.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As far as circle strafing goes, just use the same system for facing that the table-top uses: None! "Flanking" can just be an effect of multiple hostiles within five feet of you.
Programatically more complex in a real time game, but I would totally get behind this mechanic. The simple version is proximity, the more complex version is on opposing sides.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As far as circle strafing goes, just use the same system for facing that the table-top uses: None! "Flanking" can just be an effect of multiple hostiles within five feet of you.That would help with offensive circle strafing, but not defensive circle strafing. If you can't be targeted by front facing attacks when you are out of the field of view of the other guy, then there is still a reason to run in circles like an idiot.
Nope, you're missing the point. There is no facing. "Front Facing Attacks" don't exist because there is no mechanical facing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nope, you're missing the point. There is no facing. "Front Facing Attacks" don't exist because there is no mechanical facing.As far as circle strafing goes, just use the same system for facing that the table-top uses: None! "Flanking" can just be an effect of multiple hostiles within five feet of you.That would help with offensive circle strafing, but not defensive circle strafing. If you can't be targeted by front facing attacks when you are out of the field of view of the other guy, then there is still a reason to run in circles like an idiot.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I mean you can't see the person attacking you, so you can't target them. Even with Tab Targeting you have to see your opponent to target them. The lack of facing means that if they are targeted, the attack will still go off (Even if it's ridiculous for you to swing a sword in front of you and hit the person behind you), but only if you were able to target them before they started running around you like a hedgehog on amphetamines.
I want there to be a solid mechanical reason to have NEVER be a good idea to circle-strafe and bunny hop.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nope, you're missing the point. There is no facing. "Front Facing Attacks" don't exist because there is no mechanical facing.As far as circle strafing goes, just use the same system for facing that the table-top uses: None! "Flanking" can just be an effect of multiple hostiles within five feet of you.That would help with offensive circle strafing, but not defensive circle strafing. If you can't be targeted by front facing attacks when you are out of the field of view of the other guy, then there is still a reason to run in circles like an idiot.Perhaps I wasn't clear. I mean you can't see the person attacking you, so you can't target them. Even with Tab Targeting you have to see your opponent to target them. The lack of facing means that if they are targeted, the attack will still go off (Even if it's ridiculous for you to swing a sword in front of you and hit the person behind you), but only if you were able to target them before they started running around you like a hedgehog on amphetamines.
I want there to be a solid mechanical reason to have NEVER be a good idea to circle-strafe and bunny hop.
Tab-target could go by proximity (near to far) instead of facing direction. The other thought is you may need to face them once to target them, and then so long as you keep them targetted you can hit them if they stay in distance range. Auto-rotating the offensive player for their strike would effectively correct for the circle-strafing. I know Guild Wars 2 does this in PvE, but haven't played the PvP aspect to know if or how well it carries over.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Archer firing at 1:44 and 2:38. It appears that the archer faces the target when moving.
I wouldn't put too much mechanical stock into the milestone video quite yet. They may have rudimentary systems as placeholders or for demos and shows. Though it may well be their plan.
Then I got to thinking... man, that ESO game has very little chance of being a good port. Archery in Oblivion and Skyrim are fun, but I couldn't imagine it in an MMO. Let us stay far, far away from having to manually aim our weapons and projectiles!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Suddenly, Stunning is what you do on Crafters and Gatherers...This is one of my problems with stun systems, is that they already abuse those who are already the most vulnerable to attacks. A resilient person may survive a stun such that they are at a disadvantage but not helpless long enough to go from full health to dead. The scenario I am more worried about is that it becomes a dominant strategy to dealing with anyone not wearing heavy armor or fully loaded with HP skill levels.
Stamina Reduction and Slowed Movement would make for excellent MMO crowd controls.
Crafters (ex. smith) are probably working in town and resource processors (ex. smelter) are probably working in a POI site near but not inside a settlement. The resource collectors (ex. miner) would be working farthest out. The farther out your work is, the more likely you are to get jumped by escalations & hostile players, so the more you need guards in the area.
Even if you wander off on your own, which is worse, stun & extort or kill & loot?
~
Movement costing stamina not only makes circle-strafing a tradeoff instead of a freebie, it does the same for the hyper-hopping 'tactic' and for the sprinting-at-all-times thing.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Archery in Oblivion and Skyrim are fun...
I can't imagine any possible way for ESO to allow me to play the sneaky sniper I've been running in multiple play-throughs of the last three Elder Scrolls games. No player would ever accept being hit at the long ranges I use in single-player, and thus it's not likely those ranges'll be supported in PVE; at short range, there's no way stealth can be allowed to be so effective, either.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As a former shaman from vanilla WoW (the only class that had no defense or counter to stuns) I don't like stuns & stun-locks.
Since PFO is not class based, but rather trained skills based if stuns aren't gimped to near uselessness EVERYONE will have them and train them (flavor of the month ya'll) which I personally think would be a negative.
Given that GW is looking to charge a hefty subscription, do you all really want to put people who lose everything but a few threaded items every time they die in a position of feeling that the only way to "win" is to not play the game, which more often then not is what stuns and stunlocks do?
I don't.
I'd actually like the game to make it out of EE without bankrupting GW & paizo.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Well, there's something else I think we've not discussed.
Saving throws.
Players focusing on PvP might be able to tailor their characters to be extremely resistant to physical and magical stuns, making them either highly unlikely to 'stick', or have a much reduced period of effectiveness.
I'm happy a player could tailor their character to be more resistant to stuns etc (a tank), but not via a saving throw system.
Many months ago (a year maybe?) there was a discussion around picking pockets. The upshot was that the community did not want to see an engagement decided purely by a passive actions, that is a perception check vs sleight of hand. The same could be said of a stun type spell (hold person, time stop etc...). Combat should not boil down to "a save was failed, you're stunned and thus get pulverized".
This was one of the reasoning behind my advocating a stamina drain type system, coupled with max stamina drain. You need the max setting, otherwise you will get teams of four casters each hitting a character with hold person and completely disabling them, and the fifth man hitting them with a greatsword until victory is obtained.
Something like each stun spell drains 25% of stamina, up to a maximum of 50% of the character total.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This was one of the reasoning behind my advocating a stamina drain type system, coupled with max stamina drain. You need the max setting, otherwise you will get teams of four casters each hitting a character with hold person and completely disabling them, and the fifth man hitting them with a greatsword until victory is obtained.
Do you expect to be winning a lot of 5-on-1 fights?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Nope. But I want to be able to have a chance to escape them.
In addition, having a meta party build of X number of character type Y = stun lock, makes for a limited party build. Thus, limit the ability to achieve a stun lock.
Bad odds are bad odds.
Two rogues is an easier combo to throw together than four clerics & a fighter. When one is targeted, the other inflicts a lot of sneak attack debuffs, some of which will likely limit the target's ability to escape.|
Goblin Squad Member
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Many months ago (a year maybe?) there was a discussion around picking pockets. The upshot was that the community did not want to see an engagement decided purely by a passive actions...
I remember that discussion. Updating my recommendation there in the context of Hold Person, I really like the idea of some kind of active tug-of-war that allows both the caster and the victim to use trained abilities to either strengthen or weaken the hold. Victims who are adept at actively resisting stuns would make the caster's job more difficult, reducing his ability to lock down multiple characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Many months ago (a year maybe?) there was a discussion around picking pockets. The upshot was that the community did not want to see an engagement decided purely by a passive actions...I remember that discussion. Updating my recommendation there in the context of Hold Person, I really like the idea of some kind of active tug-of-war that allows both the caster and the victim to use trained abilities to either strengthen or weaken the hold. Victims who are adept at actively resisting stuns would make the caster's job more difficult, reducing his ability to lock down multiple characters.
I always imagined Saving Throws would be more like alternative forms of defense. Not a hit or miss, but a how effective.
A base 25% stun spell against a high saving throw may only affect 5% of the target's stamina or less.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I dont mind stuns. They can be very useful.
I dont think a class should be able to stunlock by themselves without sacrificing other things. for example if you have a character built to stunlock then your damage should be very low, your ability to defend should be low, and your ability to escape should be low.
So basically if they are alone they are just CCing one character rather then killing them. In order for them to effectively kill another character they need to have a teammate. I dont think a character should be able to stunlock and deal a lot of damage/burst.
I also dont mind if a group of people (4-5) are able to keep another character stunlocked by chaining their stuns, this takes coordination and teamwork to do so im ok with it.
However I dont think that those types of things should be the predominate type of skill used for CC. i would love to see setup characters who sole job is to knockdown/stun/slow and add keywords on enemies so that the DPS folks dont have to waste ability slots on setups but straight damage.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldn't like a single person to be anywhere near being able to indefinitely stunlock someone, regardless of how low their damage is. A low damage but continuous stunlock just means the defender leaves the keyboard for 15 minutes while their health is painstakingly whittled away, which would be even worse than a stunlock where you die quickly, in my opinion.
However, I think I'm reversing my previous position and saying I would be okay if you needed 5 people to continuously stun someone. If they have 5 to 1 odds on you, you aren't getting away anyways; if they have 5 to 1 odds and enough coordination to chain their stuns, then there definitely wasn't a chance of you getting away. This is making a lot of assumptions on my part, but I think I'd be okay if there was a possibility to stunlock, as long as it was difficult to pull off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldn't like a single person to be anywhere near being able to indefinitely stunlock someone, regardless of how low their damage is.
I wouldn't mind seeing one character able to stun lock another 80% of the time if that meant their damage was also reduce by 80%.
The only practical way I can see that happening is making multiple stuns take up precious ability slots, and have reduced (or nonexistent) damage.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldn't like a single person to be anywhere near being able to indefinitely stunlock someone, regardless of how low their damage is.I wouldn't mind seeing one character able to stun lock another 80% of the time if that meant their damage was also reduce by 80%.
The only practical way I can see that happening is making multiple stuns take up precious ability slots, and have reduced (or nonexistent) damage.
That scenario, while possibly balanced damagewise (theoretically 100% damage 20% of the time vs 20% damage 100% of the time) is still totally unfair.
Being passive for 80% of a fight makes it less about what choices you make and how good you are and more about how much damage per second the other person does. It becomes more of a onesided DPS race than an involved, twosided, battle.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Being passive for 80% of a fight makes it less about what choices you make and how good you are and more about how much damage per second the other person does.
I agree that would be a terrible outcome.
I really like the idea of some kind of active tug-of-war that allows both the caster and the victim to use trained abilities to either strengthen or weaken the hold.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe 'stuns' are extremely expensive in regards to Stamina/Magical Energy?
This makes them a useful opening if you're part of a group, attacking another group and you want to lock down the opposing Mage or Cleric, but in doing so you're severely restricting your own power for a short while.
Depending upon how the spellcasting works out, ie if we go with slots-per-day/rest period, or if we go through a slow recharge system instead, then Stun, Charm and Sleep spells should, for balance alone, have a long cooldown/recharge period to prevent a spam-storm of CC.
Anyone who has or is playing PvP in WoW can back me up on this, and I keep coming back to WoW as an example because it's the biggest MMO out there at the moment and thus will have the majority of people who can relate, and we can tell you non-WoWers right now all the PvP Scene boils down to is who can bring the most stuns to the arena matches/Battlegrounds and force the other team to expend their trinkets and cooldowns first, and then stunlock and teabag the other team into submission through DPS Burst abilities while they're waiting for their cooldowns to tick over.
Let's not go that route. It's a terrible route.
Either make Stuns/Sleeps/Paralyzing/Other CC a very 'hit and miss' situation, or make them expensive to use, so that we can avoid the World of Stuncraft scenario.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If they choose to implement stuns I would hope they are a negative return investment, i.e. if you can take another player out of the game for 5 seconds you are taken out for at least a few seconds longer making it a tool useful for groups and requiring actual strategy to use.
Do you take yourself out of action to lock up there healer for a bit, or do you just dps and try to burn them down?
I don't want to see stuns turn into a 1 on 1 must have ability so whoever gets the first stun in wins.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I don't want to see stuns turn into a 1 on 1 must have ability so whoever gets the first stun in wins.
I'm less concerned about 1 vs 1 than group fights. Generally the abilities that break stuns are not sufficient to stop a focused effort to stunlock you. It allows any group with a sufficient number of characters with stuns to pick any opponent they want and shut them down entirely until they die.
I tend to disfavor any abilities which allow a zerg to pull an "I win" card against an opponents who might be able to beat them otherwise. Non-conditional stuns are such an ability when referring to stuns in the traditional sense. Conditional stuns are the opposite. They grant the advantage to the more skilled opponent.