Live Dungeon! - Vol. 5 Ch. 25 - The Chaotic Information Session

[unk0damnation]

So the fix for the absence of remote heal is simply "you must believe"? I was hoping for something more elaborate but oh well... maybe next chapter will add something more convincing.

 

[Nk9bjP4A]

please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well please treat me well

 

[SunSun]

@alidan

hilarious description

I never got into MMOs after iRO save for Mabinogi but I could not help dying from the analogy you wrote.

 

[alidan]

@SunSun there were two moments in the game that broke me.

1) I was one of the top geared players at the time, as in you could not get better gear then me group wise and you had to be raid geared to be better, but even then, there were only 3 people server wide that were better geared then me. this is on top of I was at the time one of the best melee dps classes you could ask for. I spent 3 hours looking for group... that was my eff this moment.

a few expansion later they added mercenaries to the game, and this allowed me to come back as a solo player.

2) when I came back to the game, I started a class that could solo, because god knows I will never be able to guarantee a group. I played that character up to 85, that was 5 before cap at the time, and I found a better class to play, I played that up and started doing current content... I had a group of 4 people and 2 mercs, and they were there mostly so I wouldn't get board. yea... turns out I was more or less the only person in the group doing anything and everyone else was worthless, and this was my second eff it moment.

I don't play the game without my friend as tank for a reason, casual are worthless and mmo's were not made for solo play, while it can be fun to solo, the grind they have in these games can be soul crushing on your own.

him as a tank... he was so good at what he did he effectively broke the game. there was an end game zone, you had about 100k hp at the high end at this time, the enemies inside would hit 4 times in 1 round for 25k to 30k. He decided to take me to the zone, and told me watch this, then then proceeds to pull 430 mobs and get in the corner, the zone at this point is 100% broken for playing, monsters are rubberbanding to hell and back and what should have taken 1 minute of running to him was more around 5 minutes. he proceeds to face tank everything and kill it with no support because at this point, his abilities stacked so well they allowed him near invulnerability if a mob didn't get behind him.

yea, I refuse to play the game without him because you cant get a better tank unless you know a 'living legend'

 

[Xeredge]

God, his team of less than 5 people defeated the fire dragon or w/e and they still look down on him, wtf is with these shit for brains people?

 

[Ragu_Jostar]

Ungrateful lil fox bitch

 

[Kainutrash]

I love how tsutomu has no fucking time for brats

 

[b4nji]

YOOOOO THAT GUY WAS HARD AS SHIITTTTTTTT. DID YOU SEE??? HE HAD HIS FUCKING ARM BROKEN OFF AND HE DIDN'T FLINCHHHHH.

 

[The5thSeraph]

Ugh. Really hating Tsutomu getting so smug over his primitive 3-role system just because the existing system in this world is something even stupider.
Did he SERIOUSLY play through the game before with 2 tanks, 2 healers and only 1 damage dealer? A team that defensively imbalanced would take forever to achieve anything. It is complete trash-tier. What good is surviving everything if it takes you orders of magnitude longer to kill everything? People aren't just machines that can go on forever.
Ideally, you'd at least need team-members to be capable of both AoE damage and Spike damage.
And while additional battlefield-control shouldn't be necessary against weak enemies, going up against tough bosses without a Hexer or Interrupter is just making life difficult for yourself. Debuffs on the enemy stack with Buffs on allies, and Interrupts take pressure off the entire party to an extent that a mere tank can't.
And there is no need to separate heals and buffs. I can't think of a single system where there was any point to having a party member exclusively dedicated to buffs, as they don't need as much maintenance as debuffs do.


@alidan

mmo's were not made for solo play, while it can be fun to solo, the grind they have in these games can be soul crushing on your own.

Mmm'hmm. That describes my entire time in Guild Wars and most of my time in Mabinogi.
In Guild Wars I completely gave up on forming groups after a while. It was next to impossible even to pick up trash randoms, let alone anyone of worth.
Mabinogi wasn't so completely soul-crushing, but I still ended up having to solo most things as I had literally no friends in the game, and could only occasionally get what I wanted by tagging along with other parties that had extra slots.

Funnily enough, my complete "fuck this" moment in Guild Wars was when I was nearly at the 3rd tier of the Survivor title with my Mesmer in Guild Wars, and I opted to help some newbie with one of the quests for some extra experience... and they were so utterly awful they kited multiple mobs of enemies into me and got my survivor killed (and Mesmers were notoriously the most squishy class in the game, which is why I was doing it), completely ruining her in the process. When I expressed my disappointment, they just laughed at me. They laughed at me for getting weeks of work ruined trying to help them. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

 

[alidan]

@The5thSeraph
oof, that sucks

as for the first part, it really depends on what the game is or had in it. there were points where we had to have a second tank along because it was easier to have someone tank a 3rd or 4th mob then it was to find someone who could reliably crowd control, and on the healer side, there is usually a main healer and then a spot healer, at least that's how we set the group up. we have 1 tank, i'm usually the dps, and he boxes a second character, right now its a healer, then we dump out 3 mercs, 1 dps and usually 2 healers as my pet can somewhat tank as good/better (situation depending, still better to have a real tank) then he can so long as he has heals, so the mercs usually pick up the pet healing and group heals when we get an aoe hit. I dps so hard I can effectively make up 2-3 players worth of dps on my own. This is a manga, so I honestly doubt that stun/root style cc would be interesting to read

 

[The5thSeraph]

@alidan
I've seen people just throw "dps" around like a role a few times around here. But I'm guessing it is a bit different to what I'm used to.
I mean I picked up the role terms from Guild Wars mostly. I was pure PvE but most of it came from group PvP, and to be fair the enemies in Guild Wars all have classes and roles too.
Still, in more conventional pure PvE MMOs, does "dps" just become a catch-all term for all damage-dealers? Is that why the guy in this manga never acknowledges the different damage types?
I mean are Spikers and Nukers not a thing in other MMOs? I got the impression that Interrupts were a rather distinctive thing to Guild Wars, but the debuff / hexer role is definitely more universal since I've seen it in other more general RPGs.

 

[alidan]

@The5thSeraph
there are generally 3 class types
tank, healer, dps
as these are really the 3 main things you need to be able to kill an enemy
as a tank, if you cant live to the next heal and you can't generate hate to keep mobs attacking you, you are not a tank
if you can't keep the tank alive while not dying yourself you are not a healer
and if you cant do more dps then the tank or healers passive dps you are not a dps.

how someone tanks, mitigation, avoiding enemies, or blocking doesn't matter it's a tank
how you heal, burst all in one, heal over time, proximity heal ect, if you don't heal when they need to be heald, you aren't a healer
and dmg though melee, dmg though build dmg spells, damage over time thought stacking, area damage, what type/how it's dealt rarely matters

from these three roles you have a secondary role that is utility, because of how important the 3 roles are, utility in an mmo generally gets added to these roles rather than being their own class that can't do anything but. you have classes that can buff players, but these are generally also classes that can heal or dps, this is just a side benefit. you have classes that can crowd control, either aoe stuns, roots, fears (make mobs run away), or snares (make mob run slower), or each of those prior methods but on single target. the few times a utility class in my experience has ever been kept utility only they had to make them so needed content was balanced around having them or over time they ended up giving them the role of dps too, because when killing a mob, as long as the tank can tank, the dps can dps, and the healer can heal, there is no need for utility so why not stack more dps or be damn sure you can take it with a second healer?

more or less, in mmos, unless they specifically code events/encounters to screw with this set up, once you have tank and heals covered you stack endless dps because that means you now have to heal less and tank less if the mob is dead faster.

 

[The5thSeraph]

@alidan
I don't really know about that. Like it is inconsistently specific and unspecific. Unspecific in the way you describe "dps" because there are many forms of damage-dealing. Overly specific in the "tank" role because it is just one form of battlefield control, which there are also many of (some being more prevalent in some sorts of games than others).
It doesn't feel like the terms are in any way compatible. Like if you specify "tank" as a role, then you ought to specify the damage specialisation too. If you don't specify the specialisation, then "tank" is just a subtype of control / mitigation.
But maybe that is just because I've only played two MMOs, one where damage roles were much more specific than just "dps" and the other where "tanks" didn't work at all (and dedicated healers were rare, and not as effective as you'd think). Besides that I've played other online multiplayer games that are ostensibly similar, but not "mass" multiplayer. Stuff like Phantasy Star Online (no tanks there either, and everyone except CAST types can heal to some extent, though specialists exist). Plus of course Monster Hunter, but that is even more different.

 

[alidan]

@The5thSeraph
Unless the game specifically makes melee or magic not effect an enemy, then how damage is dealt doesn't matter you are doing damage.
here lets take this as an example
one class does dmg over time, one class does up front spell damage, and one class does melee
If the mob doesn't resist magic, it doesn't resist melee, there is no weakness then all damage is the same, at the end of the day, its numbers going down

with tank, the only defining feature of a tank is the ability to hold aggro and live, if you cant do this, then you are not a tank, even a horrible tank, worst in the game, as long as it does this, is a tank.

now later on you said phantasy star or monster hunter... those aren't mmos, they may call themselves that, but I wouldn't call diablo an mmo either
when you go into mmo, there is one defining characteristic, and that is a large scale fight, as in you have more then lets say 12 people killing one monster. with an open contested area that could have hundreds of players, (east commonlands was the hub zone in everquest for example that everyone idled and sold crap in)

in my mmo of choice, everquest, we use to have open world raids, where you could bring as many people as you wanted, then we moved to instanced, which limited it to 72 players, and later on due to player counts going down they balanced raids around 54, and from here they balanced many raids to have lower player requirements but also more mechanics that would screw over the raid if not followed.

now in a raid, there are several ways they screw with players to make things harder than need be

a balanced fight, you have to fight 2+ enemies at the same time, keeping hp within a certain range, everquest its typically 5%, there may be a hard fail mechanic, fights over, or there may be a power up 'you did a wrong' that most guilds, if given the choice to balance or burn, they choose burn because its less of a pain in the ass.
you have hard scripting, this forces the players to follow a hard guide on what to do, and if failure happens, it's usually event over. these are the worst, because raids rarely have every player actually being good, there was a guild that would take new members to an old raid zone, something where you could solo the entire event, but the scripting made it impossible to do unless you follow it, it was their way to weed out incompetence
you have the raid spawning very high dps enemies or very high health enemies, these need to be rooted off, or they need to be stunned (everquest there is a mesmerize effect that is 1-5 minutes long stun that breaks when touched) because these either hit WAY to hard, or just have so much hp its not worth dealing with them, that said, many times they will be immune from root or stuns, so you now need to agro them, and run them around, more or less allowing the dps and tanks to do their job
you also have gear checks, these are events where if given time, you could brute force the event, but you dont have time. these come in the form of a large hp pool enemy that hits stupidly hard, and effectively kills tanks outright, without a mitigation skill going, you will die, problem is these skills are on long cooldowns, so you have to pass it off to another tank, BUT, if you have high enough gear, you can handle it with lesser skills, so this requires a pool of tanks that can mitigate it, which lets be honest, perfect pass offs and the like wont happen, so you now have to have good enough gear to deal with the enemy, they can also have large dmg aoe's. IO know there are a few in everquest that nearly out right kill people, but aoe heals are easily able to handle it, so its a gear check just to make sure you survive the event, or another type where the mob has stupidly large amounts of hp and you have to kill them in a set time, this being a dps check. these events are usually easy, but require a bare minimum skill amount along with weapons,

these are the various ways they screw with players, utility is just there to make dps dps, tanks tank, and healers heal better/easier/at all.

that's why it all comes down to a tank, a healer, and dps.

now in phantasy star or monster hunter, as many encounters are geared around 1-4 players, they can have various hard locks because, take an mmo foe example, they cant hard lock raid mobs because you now just made half a guild useless and are effectively hard gating content for their class, in a game where you can realistically spend over a year of real time building up said character. phantasy star, the one I have more time with and like, you can get to the harder areas in I believe about 60~ hours, so its not unreasonable to say play a different class.

 

[The5thSeraph]

@alidan

Unless the game specifically makes melee or magic not effect an enemy, then how damage is dealt doesn't matter you are doing damage.
here lets take this as an example
one class does dmg over time, one class does up front spell damage, and one class does melee
If the mob doesn't resist magic, it doesn't resist melee, there is no weakness then all damage is the same, at the end of the day, its numbers going down

Of course it matters.
There are three basic divisions I can think of in how damage is dealt:
AoE, Spike and Consistent.
Black Mage types are usually Nukers, capable of doing large damage over a wide area to many enemies. The more targets are clustered together, the more effective they are.
Assassin types are typically Spikers, generally crit-focused and capable of doing large amounts of damage in small bursts. The whole purpose of this is to swoop in, take down a single target rapidly without giving them the opportunity to heal themselves nor defend, then get back out (because spike damage tends to draw aggro quickly). That is why they're generally tasked with eliminating enemy healers.
And then most other stuff falls into the Consistent damage field, which seems to be what you've been describing. Just guys attacking away and doing damage consistently.
Obviously if the enemy don't have healers of their own, then Spikers probably aren't necessary. Just as when there are only single enemies, Nukers aren't as effective. But each under their specific conditions are much more effective than ordinary, consistent damage dealers.

now later on you said phantasy star or monster hunter... those aren't mmos, they may call themselves that, but I wouldn't call diablo an mmo either

Yeah. I know. I said they weren't. BUT they're online co-operative games I've played which, to some extent, have roles. PSO more than MH. So I mentioned them all the same.

when you go into mmo, there is one defining characteristic, and that is a large scale fight, as in you have more then lets say 12 people killing one monster. with an open contested area that could have hundreds of player

I wouldn't say that is a particularly defining characteristic. I wouldn't even say it is particularly important.
Only one of the two MMOs I played had that and it was a rare occurrence that wasn't generally worth participating in (because only the top 10 or 20 people actually got anything worthwhile from it, no matter how many fought it, and it usually involved considerable damage to equipment for basically no gain). Even getting more than 8 people into the same dungeon together was more of an exploit than an intended feature (to access dungeon instances in Mabinogi, you were typically supposed to drop a ticket on a shrine, but you could also generate dungeons by dropping random objects, and if another group dropped the same random object as you, they'd access the same instance... though it was mostly done to allow large teams to tackle higher-level content at below recommended level).
So yeah, while Mabinogi had field-bosses that match what you describe, I mostly avoided them. They weren't relevant to any of the quests of the game and were just there as an extra ultra-challenge for large groups if they felt like it. And nobody would be tanking there (one does not simply "tank" a Mabinogi field-boss), though usually there would be a few dedicated people going around and resurrecting the dead outside the range of the FB's huge, sweeping attacks.