Fuck having lots of buttons for the sake of having lots of buttons to push. See EQ2 for an example of too many buttons. I have a level 12 Glad that I was saving to level with my wife, and I have more than three abilities worth using.
Fuck having lots of buttons for the sake of having lots of buttons to push. See EQ2 for an example of too many buttons. I have a level 12 Glad that I was saving to level with my wife, and I have more than three abilities worth using.
I remember everyone in wow begging for more buttons to smash. I mean fire was at one time, scorch 5 times, throw a living bomb up, cast fireblast to tag other mobs around your mob if there were any, then fireball a couple times for a pyro proc, hit pyro, scroch again to refresh, and hit living bomb if it ever blew up during that time, rinse repeat while running around from pools of whatever you couldn't step on this fight. It gets old, especially when you see other classes not half as crazy to do and have to keep up with casts times of insanity. Now I've not played wow in a while, but I doubt they've made it any easier really. In fact they had added a cicle you had to put down to have to stand in, and added in that orb that you also had to throw into the rotation. For what? I remember in vanila, frost mages did the most damage, but were labeled so boring, because all they had to do was spam frost bolt for win. I dunno, throws hands up!
For EQ casters, the main thing was that spells had a considerable casting time; nothing like WoW and the 1-2 second cast max (aside from some 3-6 second channeled spells). When casting a nuke or something, you had anywhere from 3.5 - 6 seconds casting time, and then many spells had a longer cooldown so you weren't just spamming the same thing over and over.
Yes, there were spammable spells - but it was usually only efficient to use those in special cases like mass-AE.
Concussion was a spell I loved and hated at the same time due to it's spam-able nature. I just think if you are gonna give a class a bolt spell or whatever, designing 99% of your boss encounters to make them move about the time they start a rotation, isn't fun. Giving them a DoT that has to be refreshed every 15 seconds or less sucks too! Of course it created an entire class of twitchy casters though. Guess they wanted boss encounters to be more like pvp in that regards. At least they didn't introduce a large amount of resist gear and make casters completely ineffective or halve the damage of spell when they chose to pvp.
I really hate how wow has over time given in and really morphed a lot of classes into the same roles and abilities. Sheeping was huge at one time... Now why not just aoe. my list of ugg's goes on and on.
Just need something completely different. Like wow was completely different than EQ. While catoony, it felt alive with moving creatures that were just there to add ambiance.
WoW added a lot of gimmicks like spell procs and ability rotations because they removed downtime. If your game has downtime, then you can't just chain cast your spells, and deciding when to use them becomes a strategic part of the game. For example, your puller might bring 4 mobs on a pull in a dungeon, and killing the first mob as fast as possible reduces the threat to the group a lot more than killing the last mob as fast as possible. Killing spell casting mobs faster than slowed melee mobs; nuking single pulled mobs late to ensure the tank has solid aggro on it; saving mana for a possible large pull in the future; etc.
Remove downtime and your spell casters might as well have autoattack spells-- you remove virtually all decision making from them. Blizzard had to add whack-a-mole with 3 flavors of fireball cooldowns just to make combat more interesting since they removed so much from the game by removing downtime. One of many reasons why EQ has way more depth than WoW ever did.
I'm still digging it. Got my Monk up to 50 and am working on my gathering/production jobs. End-game has a variety of dungeons to run for tokens and a long quest chain for your Relic weapon (currently the best in the game I believe). When starting a new job your actions are pretty limited but you end up with a nice amount mid-late levels.
The combat is slower and a little more methodical with 2.5 second GCD. Feels less button mashy than other MMO's I've played and you have a nice variety of abilities. When I had gone back recently and played Rift again, that game had almost too many abilities and overly complex dps rotations (at least for most mage builds I tried). Then there was GW2 which had very few abilities you could have at a time (although you could swap them out as needed).
FFXIV is a nice balance I think. What you lose in amount of abilities and ability speed you make up with fight mechanics, starting in the mid level story dungeons while leveling, they get decently difficult.
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