Quote:
Originally Posted by Uyaem
Say we want to tune stuff for a duo and we want to have it challenging. You will not be able to balance encounters/the game in a way that any duo of classes (or even archetypes) will have it equally challenging. The bigger the group of players playing together is, the less important/more replacable single player archetypes become.
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Ok, but duo (and even trio imo) is not a representation of something you want to make complex in EQ2, because you can't even cover all the roles in the game and a single character has a limited set of skills.
If you had a game where the only role is "dps", then yeah, even duo content could be made challenging, but since you need to have tank+healer+dps+utility (last may not be always necessary) at the very least, once you cover all these roles you reach the complexity peak so to say, everything else is redundance.
Increasing the numbers of players partecipating in an event raises the odds someone will fuck up something, because of some abstruse math some other person is certainly better at explaining, I heard it was called statistic, but I'm not so good at it
Stupid example made in 4 minutes:
You have a 6 players party: tank1, healer1, healer2, dps1, dps2, utility1.
You have this group against a script, this script includes a named that doesn't hit overly hard, heals himself a little bit with heals over time casted instantly and that for the first 10% health is plain tank and spank.
At 90% you have him spawn one add that cannot be killed, or he'll heal up fully once per second, so you have to handle it in a different way and a second add that will do little damage, but randomly stun a group member for 0.5 seconds (more like an interrupt).
At 80% one person in your group gets charmed (randomly), non removable charm, if it's the tank, get someone else to tank, if it's the healer it's going to prolong fight, etc. This charm bounces every 20 seconds to another group member.
At 70% the named splits in 2, leaves an uncurable -mitigation on the tank that brings him in the negative and the splits must be handled by different group members, maybe even one melee and one caster.
At 60% he'll stun the whole group, merge back into a single target and memwipe. The tank debuff disappears and all healing will work at a -50% on everyone for 1 minute.
At 50% he starts flying around, melee attacks cannot hit him, he does some AE damage.
At 40% he becomes immune to spells.
At 20% he goes on a rampage, dealing double damage in a frontal arc.
At 10%, he'll posses a group member, you have to kill him and once this has been done, the named gets back at 15% health with a big +dps mod (or +spell dmg).
3 seconds after dropping to 0% the named explodes, doing a big AE dd.
Ressing in the named room is impossible, just to make things more nasty.
Let's assume that this is not a typical EQ2 mob that dies in 5 seconds, but the fight will be substantially long (3-4 minutes for a 6ppl group).
Now, what a second group would add here? More adds? A copy of this encounter tuned differently? A version that has to be tanked by a mage (hi2u twin emperors)?
With a bit of creativity you can surely pull out something fun for a 2nd group too, but chances are it's going to be already very close to the first group job.
Move fights towards a more thought out approach, at least once in a while. Mobs that 1 shot everything not in plate are boring.
Re: The waaaa-factor
