Protecting Our Casuals: Gear

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Now, hold a moment here, Dygz, even though it's not inherent in the claims made by OP, this makes too many assumptions.

The 'casuals demoralized' problem doesn't require being solo.

If my 'gang' of four has better gear than your 'gang' of four the effect is multiplied, not reduced.

If you were out with your gang of four, even 3 of you dying to the mob doesn't result in resource losses overall, my group experienced this multiple times in Alpha-1 while trying to see how high an enemy we could kill. The last one standing just picks up everyone else's drops. You don't even have to kill the mob if everyone runs and the last survivor gets out of mob leash range.

In a group PvP, this isn't the outcome, the enemy takes all the drops. I say this to illustrate the difference between what a casual group experiences when they take on a mob that's a bit too strong. I get your point, but your concepts presented don't support it.

We have not received permission from JamesSunderland to share the quoted post.

Actually, I agree with this, but I didn't want to start there because making the assumptions you are willing to make brings the game closer to most fighting games and further from most MMOs that also have a design that can consistently or reasonably lead to a 30s TTK while still fitting the situation most players seem to have liked.

So if we're continuing the discussion, I would have to ask if I can reference the outcomes from my other game genre, as I've often got meaningful pushback on that, though according to my data, never from you.

I'm quite happy to make a 12-15 skill assumption, it's my expectation. The important factors for highly rewarding gameplay are all there with a smaller attack skill lest. Most things are made worse, a few are definitely improved.

As I noted, I also am on the side of not actually believing that the problem is real, and in fact think that 50% gear power (leading to 25% damage gap) may not be enough. If you pull up the old 'whiteboard' from the big combat discussion thread, it wouldn't work, but I have to make a lot more assumptions. I'd prefer to, because they are what I consider the 'correct' assumptions and expectations.

Disparate skill damage bursts using a standard bell curve spread across 16 skills would make certain Fighter builds very hard to counter. The 30s side of TTK 'belongs to them'.

Part of the issue when you don't homogenize is simply 'where do forced errors come from'?

If we don't want BDO, then the amount of 'proper evasion or reactive escapes' can't be too high, which implies they're on cooldowns, but that could mean that the player can be placed in a situation where they don't have enough defensive skills to even meet the thresholds for the 'required forced errors'. That makes the game very much 'both swing at each other in a brawl and hope you can make your opponent miss something big with one of your defensive skills every so often'. Alternately, it's very 'aha you happened to dodge my big attack and now a big chunk of my chance of winning this fight is gone', which brings us back to the 'fighting game' thing most people dislike (but seemed to be the case in Alpha-1, which is what these are based on)

Fighters would generally have rapid, reactive counters to other people using escape based defensive skills (that's where the design doc ends up, with Fighters just 'ignoring' things like defenses or kiting by using gap closers, stance breaks, and occasionally CC) and this means that for Fighters to be 'good' (not against other classes per se, basically 'at their job'), they need to have a decent number of these, probably 'more than or equal to most mobility builds.

This can be built around, but not while Summoners are part of the game, which is another huge explanation. Summoners and the presence of their pets are one of the things that have to be taken into account the most with the 'possibility of homogeneity', because they practically 'must' do this sort of '3% per second' damage.

Any specific thoughts, or shall we call it 'done' here? I'm always happy to do these, they're never wasted effort/time for me, but idk for others.