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Vinestalk posted:I'd love to hear about Blood mages, Chloromancers, and Rift/Vanguard bards as well. I'm planning on doing a big post about EQ bards that, spoiler alert, is going to go really into the loving weeds of a class that was impossible to balance. I loved playing a hard in EQ. PBAE kiting was so stupid and I loved it.
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Oct 20, 2021 05:58
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blatman posted:can someone do a huge sprawling post about blood mages because i think i'd have loved the class and goon rants are far superior to anything i could google Second this request. I'd posted before that I was working and going to school full time so I mostly missed out on Vanguard but my brother talked about how it was the last time anything came close to that EQ magic.
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Oct 21, 2021 15:13
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I'd love to read some posts about interesting or weird MMO classes, either here or in the MMO history thread.
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Oct 21, 2021 15:56
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https://www.pantheonmmo.com/newsletter/_2021/october/ New information on how little work they've done.  This is their process on zones. AKA they've done nothing.
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Oct 22, 2021 03:40
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things are going great  
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Oct 22, 2021 13:52
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I still encounter people who think this is the next big thing lol
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Oct 22, 2021 14:06
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Star Citizen and Pantheon, hottest MMOs of the 2030s.
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Oct 22, 2021 14:41
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FrostyPox posted:I still encounter people who think this is the next big thing lol Yep same, I still come across people in Discords or other websites, that believe this is going to be a huge MMORPG and it will release soon somehow and fulfill all of their MMORPG dreams.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:29
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I said come in! posted:Yep same, I still come across people in Discords or other websites, that believe this is going to be a huge MMORPG and it will release soon somehow and fulfill all of their MMORPG dreams. It's also all over Everquest TLPs, where they've convinced themselves that they will just be playing EQ until Pantheon comes out.
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Oct 22, 2021 15:50
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Frog Act posted:things are going great hmm let's take a quick tally of their overall progress To Do: 11 In Progress: 10 Complete: 2 lol
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Oct 22, 2021 15:56
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Googling to find out what on earth the two things they consider complete are found this fun google result. "What is the release date for Pantheon rise of the fallen? May 13th, 2021"
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Oct 22, 2021 15:59
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as far as i can tell they've come up with classes, pulled some generic abilities from everquest and renamed them, and grayboxed a bunch of zones. it's almost as incompetent as CIG, only with a fraction of the funding.I said come in! posted:Yep same, I still come across people in Discords or other websites, that believe this is going to be a huge MMORPG and it will release soon somehow and fulfill all of their MMORPG dreams. I share this fantasy and it makes me sad that the "Everquest, but modern" thing just isn't going to happen because they've made it clear that even if this game does somehow release, they've already more or less eradicated the things that made it similar to the old school games people are pining for. Honestly I'd be happy with just, like, distinctive racial cities, a large world, some changes to fast travel, and mandatory grouping instead of questing but even that is probably more than they'll accomplish when they crap out a forgettable tab target wow clone
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Oct 22, 2021 16:26
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Frog Act posted:I share this fantasy and it makes me sad that the "Everquest, but modern" thing just isn't going to happen because they've made it clear that even if this game does somehow release, they've already more or less eradicated the things that made it similar to the old school games people are pining for. Honestly I'd be happy with just, like, distinctive racial cities, a large world, some changes to fast travel, and mandatory grouping instead of questing but even that is probably more than they'll accomplish when they crap out a forgettable tab target wow clone This is all I want, too, and it’s sad that it seems impossible. If they could just deliver something that feels like EQ but looks like it was made in the last decade and includes more engaging gameplay for the majority of classes (melee especially), I would happily throw money and time at it.
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Oct 22, 2021 18:29
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Frog Act posted:they've already more or less eradicated the things that made it similar to the old school games people are pining for. Joppa barely even pretends to care about EQ anymore. Pantheon looks more like an ESO/early-mid WoW mix at this point than anything else. They just announced they're adding mob leashing and in-game GPS maps.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:30
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Sachant posted:They just announced they're adding mob leashing and in-game GPS maps. What's with the hate for removing loading screens. You do know that they can just code it so they leash on the zone-line exactly like in EQ if they wanted to whilst still keeping the world feeling like a world rather than a video game. It seems insane to me. There's wanted a nostalgic experience and then there's wanting literal garbage and forced zone loading screens are garbage.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:18
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hobocrunch posted:What's with the hate for removing loading screens. You do know that they can just code it so they leash on the zone-line exactly like in EQ if they wanted to whilst still keeping the world feeling like a world rather than a video game. It seems insane to me. There's wanted a nostalgic experience and then there's wanting literal garbage and forced zone loading screens are garbage. I think the sentiment is that a good number of people have put in a lot of money for a game that will never release and the feature creep only further solidifies that this will never release. They don’t have a huge number of their races rigged which is something you would expect to have been done a long time ago.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:31
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I don't understand the problem with leashing, tbh. It seems more realistic for anything other than, like, a golem or undead critter to eventually give up and go home than to chase you literally until one of you dies. That's assuming "My VERISIMILITUDE" is the reason for the complaints, of course.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:39
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hobocrunch posted:What's with the hate for removing loading screens. You do know that they can just code it so they leash on the zone-line exactly like in EQ if they wanted to whilst still keeping the world feeling like a world rather than a video game. It seems insane to me. There's wanted a nostalgic experience and then there's wanting literal garbage and forced zone loading screens are garbage. It isn't about the loading screens, it's about whether you can do things like quadding, fear kiting, and bard swarming. Leashing means you probably can't, and also makes mobs less dangerous in most situations since you can run from them in any direction rather than specific ones. You can either have EQ's open endedness where the devs leaned into all the weird strategies players found, or the curated and predetermined WoW way of thinking where the devs expect players to approach encounters in a certain way and rule out alternatives that don't fit their intention. Pantheon has steadily slid from the former to the latter since Brad died, and this is just another step in that process. It's more "no fun allowed" thinking.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:42
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Sachant posted:It isn't about the loading screens, it's about whether you can do things like quadding, fear kiting, and bard swarming. Leashing means you probably can't, and also makes mobs less dangerous in most situations since you can run from them in any direction rather than specific ones. Oh hmm. I hadn't played enough EQ to even consider that
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Oct 23, 2021 16:44
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Just make the leashing happen at predefined areas like a zone ezpz
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Oct 23, 2021 22:12
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30.5 Days posted:This is kind of a stupid question, but why does everyone in MMO HMO talk about how it was done dirty and the best MMO ever if they themselves weren't playing it. Did something change from launch that made it worse like with SWG? A combination of McQuaid mismanagement and publisher fuckery because of McQuaid's mismanagement. Vanguard was originally being carried by Microsoft Games Studio, but they got sick of McQuaid loving off and making weird decisions and constant delays. This was the point at which McQuaid was allegedly stealing benzos and painkillers from his employees desks, for reference. Microsoft were originally just going to drop backing outright, but then they decided to recoup some costs and sold the rights off to Sony Online Entertainment for pennies on the dollar. SOE basically bought it so they could can it since they were a direct competitor. They forced the team to release what they had and scramble to hammer out what hit at launch, and then after that it went into back burner mode because SOE assumed they could just move all the talent off to other projects and collect subs from the dedicated fan base. The programming team after launch pretty rapidly got moved off after launch to the point where for most of the games live life cycle the entire patch team was like, literally just one guy.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:10
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Despite the terrible performance and stability of the client, Vanguard was still great. It bled subscribers because the game ran so slow, and the memory leak would almost guarantee to crash you after three hours or so. The game play was fun, and there was a lot of content. Even though Thestra and Qalia were like, half implemented, there was still so much to do.
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Oct 27, 2021 05:54
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Yeah that's the thing, there was so much good stuff about Vanguard. The highs were incredibly high (class design, world design, tradeskills, diplomacy) but the lows were incredibly deep and persistent (bad framerate even on good machines, memory leaks, glacial patch cycle). The game at launch was extremely solo unfriendly almost to the point of old school EQ. That eased up on one of the early patches and got a bit more solo friendly, but rogues and warriors still had a bear of a time. People leaving exacerbated the problem. Turns out when you make a party focused game its hard to do stuff when nobody is around at your level. Edit : I fully believe that had the SOE had the money and patience for it, they probably could have FFXIV-ed it. It was quite honestly a better Everquest 2 than Everquest 2 actually was In terms of atmosphere and game play. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 27, 2021 |
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Oct 27, 2021 17:17
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hobocrunch posted:To be fair kids that listen to Queen and ACDC are better than the ones that listen to [Insert Youtube Trending Music] My god the comments on here, humanity is doomed
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Nov 11, 2021 10:22
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Frog Act posted:as far as i can tell they've come up with classes, pulled some generic abilities from everquest and renamed them, and grayboxed a bunch of zones. it's almost as incompetent as CIG, only with a fraction of the funding. Little unfair. The monk demo they did a while ago was good and nothing like eq monk besides thematic elements
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Nov 26, 2021 14:45
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Tabletops posted:good and nothing like eq Isn't this a contradiction?
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Nov 26, 2021 19:17
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Sachant posted:Isn't this a contradiction? I guess? By nothing like eq I mean it had active ability rotations and combos, reactive active abilities etc. whereas eq1 you basically just auto attacked and spammed your highest damage “active” like flying kick off cooldown. The combat flow was definitely still like eq where it was essentially turn based and slow compared to wow or whatever.
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Nov 26, 2021 23:08
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Tabletops posted:Little unfair. The monk demo they did a while ago was good and nothing like eq monk besides thematic elements I'm not expecting much from the classes but I really wish they'd steer clear from "holding a button to charge up attacks" as this type of ability never ever works for players with high pings- and effectively just works similar to a channeled ability anyhow but with the extra step of having to hold a button down. There's a reason that WoW never did this and I think you'll find it boils down to it being extremely abrasive to anyone playing from another country. Also Hello Joppa- apparently he reads this forum?
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Nov 27, 2021 04:24
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Rotations in general suck. It's pointless button mashing just to create the illusion that you're more engaged in the game.
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Nov 27, 2021 17:58
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As much hell as WoW gets, back in launch I played Warlock and I had a rotation based on what I was fighting. I had rotations for pvp against melee, a rogue specific rotation, one for mages, and then a few for pve. I think rotations are cool and good if they make it varied enough that you don’t just have 1 single ability rotation no matter what you’re fighting, which is what most games implement these days.
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Nov 27, 2021 20:01
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i have twelve hot bars of abilities and i press the same 6 buttons over and over 
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Nov 27, 2021 21:36
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cmdrk posted:i have twelve hot bars of abilities and i press the same 6 buttons over and over EQ2?
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Nov 27, 2021 23:04
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12 hotbars of abilities with 6 hotkeys brimming with abilities actually sounds like current EQ1, my minimalist UI had 8 and I got around that handicap by quickly switching between hotbar pages on my main bar as needed keep in mind most EQ1 classes just jam like a dozen abilities onto one hotkey and smash that key until everything is dead, my EQ1 shadowknight got through 99% of fights by just hitting 3 a lot because that had a bunch of lifetaps on it + some AA abilities that you could fire during the spell cooldown
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Nov 28, 2021 16:12
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Vinestalk posted:I'd love to hear about Blood mages, Chloromancers, and Rift/Vanguard bards as well. I'm planning on doing a big post about EQ bards that, spoiler alert, is going to go really into the loving weeds of a class that was impossible to balance. I loved playing a hard in EQ. A little late responding to this as I've been catching up on lurking this thread. Since no one's jumped on it and I've seen them brought up a few times in the thread, I'll talk a bit about Vanguard's blood mages. For context, I've done raids and endgame grouping as one and I do still remember an unhealthily large amount about the game. The short rundown is that they were a light armor wearing caster and had a few spells that "life tapped" an offensive target and returned the damage (and a bonus amount based on Blood Union) as a heal to the mage's defensive target. They didn't hit as hard as the sorcerer or druid classes (and arguably the psionicist and necromancer if you had a good one of those) but between damage and heals, they generated enough agro as it was. Where most healers relied on a high vitality stat to boost heals and mana regen, blood mages were built more like a caster with intelligence to boost damage and wisdom to boost crits and total mana,. Constitution was also a major stat (arguably more important than wisdom) as it was needed to boost hit points and mitigation since that light armor isn't going to help much when you're often in face punching range or using a pact (see below). There were a couple regular vitality based heals in the repertoire but if you were using those abilities, you either were fighting something where tap heals were not an option or didn't know how to play the class. Gear was pretty much like any other caster as far as stats/attributes/effects/etc., though with some limitations since some caster gear was ONLY for casters and didn't include the blood mage (Sparkles' ring, I'm looking at you). There is a minor tradeoff though in that some healer cloaks/jewellery could be equipped by blood mages, most of which were vit/healer oriented and not that useful but some were significant improvements (the mask from Mercaius is a prime example since it extended casting range and boosted damage rating, but was healer only). When talking about blood mages, the two spells people usually refer to are Entwining Vein, which healed a single target, and Blood Tribute, which was an instant cast crit finisher that group healed. Usually, the finisher was left to timeout unless it was needed to actually heal the group or heal a group member instantly since it was a big agro generator and a waste to just be used for damage. Entwining Vein was the real bread and butter ability for healing but did have a very minor cast time, so not really a quick react heal. Both of these abilities were arcane (lightning) damage types in Vanguard's system, which made them very dangerous when fighting something that absorbed arcane damage. If the opposite of damaging something is absorbing/healing, what do you think the opposite of stealing health from a mob and healing a player is? If you guessed stealing health from the player and healing the mob, you are right. Now when the player is designed to have LESS hit points than the mob and the ability is designed to do damage with that consideration, suddenly that tap heal just became an instant player killer. This was often used to either grief fellow raid/group members or to indicate that the blood mage is not paying any drat attention. This is where those vit heals would have to be used, but they sucked big time and were very mana inefficient. A couple years before shutdown, a third ability got added (obtained through a quickish collect quest) which was a slightly weaker Entwining Vein that did planar damage instead (a newer damage type added in the Pantheon of the Ancients revamp and very little resisted it), which was nice since it allowed the blood mage to still tap heal on arcane resistant/absorbent stuff and had the added bonus of being one of the only abilities that damaged through the stupid "furious" ability a lot of endgame stuff had. Some of the other combat related stuff included the three combat stances, Blood Union, and pacts while most of the remainder were typical DD and DoT's. The three stances were one that boosted spell damage but would do a little bit of damage over time to the blood mage (the primary combat stance), one that boosted mitigation/heal effectiveness/health regen (good when you're in the thick of things or being defensive), and one that was just a neutral/noncombat stance. Blood Union was a status counter that didn't penalize as a debuff but built up over time on an offensive target in combat as long as you stay targeted on them. Some abilities (like I mentioned above) would get damage/heal boosts the higher the union, plus the union points could be spent on certain damage abilities so it also functioned as another resource pool. Pacts were like a player to player bond that shared hit point pools between the blood mage and a single player or between the whole group a blood mage was in. This was important for some really hard hitting targets (e.g. Sparkles) so that the tank didn't die in one hit but instead the damage would get shared to those in the pact (this is where the extra con and hp for the blood mage help, otherwise you die, the tank dies, everybody dies). Outside of regular class buffs, the blood mage also had unique symbiote buffs that could be cast on individual players. This is one of the big complaints many blood mages had with the class because of how tedious it got farming components and doling out each symbiote one at a time in groups/raids. The components had to be farmed in combat using a specific harvesting ability and the component you got was based on the blood mage DoT/debuff active on the target. And you couldn't cast a bunch of them and get a bunch of components in one go. You only got ONE component at a time and the harvesting ability had a cool down too, which meant recasting both the DoT/debuff and the harvesting spell a LOT. Trying to farm during group/raid was a bit distracting, and solo harvesting meant you had to find the right target to farm from since a strong mob could beat your rear end or a weak mob could die before you got much. Alternatively, a psionicist could chain mez a mob that could then be harvested, but it wasn't very fun for the psionicist just standing around spamming mez. Once the components were collected, there were many different kinds of symbiotes that could be assembled. I don't remember them all, but some were one that gave bonus armor class, one that gave a temporary heal ability (meaning a bard could actually cast a little heal, for example). and one that granted levitation. However, there were only two that were really worth anything: frenzied and quickening. Quickening gave a temporary ability called Quickening Jolt which was an instant cast 5 or 10 second long big damage buff (HUGE for the burst DPSers) with a 5 minute cool down. Frenzied was a flat damage bonus for all abilities (not a percentage boost like most bonuses) so it boosted the damage of weapons/abilities in the calculation itself, making a sword that was 98-110 now be 108=120 in the damage formula (I don't remember the exact number bonuses frenzied gave, but that's basically what it did). The problem with the symbiotes was they had to be given out one at a time: target a player, cast the symbiote, target the next player, cast a symbiote, etc. And everyone wanted something based on their class/play style and the fight, so the blood mage would sit for like 10-15 minutes handing them out, getting messages/requests, and making sure they had enough symbiotes/components (and there was always that one jackass that was AFK and came back asking for a symbiote after last call). This was a major burnout factor for a lot of blood mages. On a personal note, these didn't bother me much since I had an NPC I could easily farm/stockpile components and since I didn't have to worry about running out, I just gave everyone the symbiote I thought they'd want unless they told me otherwise. The last cool thing about the blood mage to mention are the benefits from the epics obtained in Pantheon of the Ancients. The primary epic (which was placed in gloves armor, unlike other epics) had a clickable ability that summoned a little ooze pet. It was pretty basic as far as abilities/stats but the real benefit was that it would have a special ability that was determined by the type of mob targeted when the epic was clicked. The best mob to target was the extraplanar ones (e.g. flarehounds, eyelords), because the ooze's special ability was a 10 minute 5% damage group buff and it would cast the buff on the blood mage's group every few minutes (I used to summon this pet and WALK to some raids just to have it). The off-hand epic had a passive ability that would proc and create a blood pellet in your inventory. There were four different kinds of pellets that could be randomly created: red, blue, green, and gold. Like symbiotes, these pellets were inventory items (more stockpiling!) that when clicked on a defensive target would cast single target buffs with a 10 minute duration (except gold). You could only have one active on someone at a time, plus since they were clicked from inventory there was a few second cool down which meant it took some time to hand these out and added to that pre-raid tedium if you were trying to give these all out before engagement. Red was garbage and only gave some bonus hit points. Blue granted a ridiculously high mana regen, which was real handy if you were fighting something that drained mana or if someone just got rezzed and needed to regen quick. Green gave a flat damage bonus and was VERY good (I pretty much gave this out to everyone, regardless of class). Gold was rare and you could only have one of these in inventory, but it gave a 10 second massive damage/haste buff that once it ran out, the player would be stripped of all buffs and be stunned, so it was used for big DPS burns toward the end of certain fights (like Shendu and Sparkles). That might've been a bit more detailed than you were looking for, but that's the synopsis of what I remember about the Vanguard blood mage. I can talk about Vanguard's bards a little too if interested, I just won't have quite as much to say since most of their cool and unique factor is in the song related stuff.
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Dec 8, 2021 05:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y7ZnFZ7KSA December Update Video. Mostly unimpressive stuff. Good news is they actually hired someone to work on their video game. That's cool right? hobocrunch fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Dec 10, 2021 |
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Dec 10, 2021 07:44
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Pantheon: Mostly unimpressive stuff
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Dec 10, 2021 18:17
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2022 is the year of Pantheon. I can feel it in my bones. Who else can't wait to play this new hit MMORPG?
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Jan 6, 2022 18:01
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Remarker posted:2022 is the year of Pantheon. I can feel it in my bones. Who else can't wait to play this new hit MMORPG? Okay! Grab a 2022 bingo card boys: 
hobocrunch fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jan 8, 2022 |
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Jan 8, 2022 07:02
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hobocrunch posted:Okay! Grab a 2022 bingo card boys: poo poo, this is very good. Just needs a free space in the middle for "blog post full of extremely vague language about the timeline for alpha/beta/launch"
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Jan 8, 2022 20:52
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I'm amazed that they're still working on this game. They've made a lot more progress than I expected. Of course, I expected at most procedurally-generated terrain and bought unity assets. That there's more to it than that is a miracle. Why, they might actually release a buggy, bare-bones, completely unfun product before 2030!
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Jan 8, 2022 23:26
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