Recent Alignment/Damnation changes

[Weasel]

Still used very occassionally tho (tanks sharing the damage), although it's been a while..

[Diazz_Dizazter]

[quote:30igue9a]Chuckle, apparently Diazz doesn't remember rescue orders either...
[/quote:30igue9a]

Oh please. Could you possible spew more bs from the keyboard.

Know what you speak of before you open your mouth

[quote:30igue9a]
Old school method of fighting mobs before protect was put in game. Warriors basically took turns as the tank. Rather effective if you didn't have a cleric with you. Once mobs started hitting people other than the tank and protection chains were implemented, it became an obsolete tactic, mostly anyway.
[/quote:30igue9a]

Protect chains removed random deaths from the game.

Mobs Disengaging made tanking more fun because you had to look out
for your crew. Back in the day, not everyone had a server client to do
tintin on. Wintin simplified this a bit.

That in itself is bullshit, because without the element of a random death,
it made the game far too easy. I had to talk to Pat alot from adding
protects to the original soul code, because it cheeses the game up too
much. He was all for it, I was against it then, and still am.

Chance favors the prepared mind. But there should still be that chance.

Protect chains prevent this.

Hell, out of every mmorpg I've played, not one of them favors protect
chains. Why. Because they want their groups to die if a mistake is made.
If the tank cant provide enough threat/taunt to the mob in question, then
who ever is cranking out the most dps, is the mobs higher target, because
if they are hurting it, the mob has to circumvent this. If a mage or a thief
lets loose, and blows the tank order, the mage/thief dies, and the mob
moves on to the next greatest threat.

Sloth is the only game I've played online which favors the protect system
rather then have a true tanking setup.

Merely standing in front of the mob should never be enough.

[brady]

Personally, I think sharing damage often makes a lot of sense, especially in smaller groups. Besides, fighting without getting hit is boring as hell.

[Weasel]

So.. with this 'biggest threat gets attacked' style of mob play, what's the point of mages? If they actually use some of their prime power to blast, they get killed - unless they sacrifice a portion of their intended prime eq attributes in favor of gaining AC so they can, err, use their blasting power.. kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it? This would presumably propel the Warrior or AC-focussed classes up to being the far most important prime class (which it once was here), and/or may encourage soloing over grouping for certain classes, which I don't think the admins want.. or do they?

Death in this case isn't random, it's dependant on how fast a tank can type the name of whoever gets attacked, or how good their triggers are (I still have all my rescue triggers in place). If the point is to decrease botting, AFAIK that is not something prevalent among tanks..

Bottom line: what will be will be. If we don't like it, then we can leave etc etc blah blah.

waves - going out for dinner

[Diazz_Dizazter]

Greater threat.

Is like, warriors have taunts. These specifically increase threat, this increase
twofold with higher warrior dps. Warrior dps is moderate, and gradual. Dps
is damage per second. Since sloth still uses the archaic 12 second heart
beats, its almost moot. But in a different world, dps and threat level abilities
allow the higher ac class to tank. Since heavy armor plate is typically worn
by tanks, they have the best ac. (Scaled down, plate > chain mail > leather
> cloth > naked).

Healer classes heal, and buff, with moderate nuking ability. Any type of
damage or healing induced will increase threat level. More super on the
second healing will vastly increase threat. (mob cant kill tank cause cleric
is healing, so attacking this guy instead).

Mages and rogues (also ranged me lee classes), will be doing their dps
(this also includes other warriors who aren't tanking, but still attempting to
provide threat). This is the damage over time between healing and tanking.

Should the warriors threat level get out done, someones going to get
hit.

Some classes also get threat reducing abilities (detaunts). Which can be
used in between major hits to lessen threat).

In the big scope, if no one out does each other, the kill goes fine (or multi
kills), in which different warriors are tanking individual mobs, with a healer
to each watch over that warrior). In turn the rest of the herd is dealing
dps to a death order, as to which warriors mob gets killed 1st.).

What can go wrong. The chain can break.

Random aggro.
Someone gets to many critical hits.
Healers run out of mana.
Mob has signature ai, to help fool people.
Massive Aoe procs can run everyone out of health.
Mob crits too much, kills a tank.
Someone looses link.

What goes wrong most. A dps class draws aggro, and starts to run around
like a chicken with his head cut off. This means everyone else gets to
chase down the mob in question. This throws off the damage chain, and
is when clerics over healing to draw the most aggro will now come into
play. After this, unless the group (or raid group), is really good then they
can survive, if not, ah well.

Its a long list, as Ive led 100-200 people raids in 6-8 hour dungeons, with
mobs that can take 30-45 minutes to kill. Nothing worse then a dragon
who can wipe out 200 people in 3 minutes. 100 people dieing at once is
sorta funny.

Now days, this style seems almost traditional to me.

The essence of protect is there, assuming that the tank can keep up the
amount of threat over everyone else. But what he doesn't do, is suffer a
protect chain, ensuring that no one but him will get hit. Each char has his
or her own angle of control to maintain.

If someone step's over that boundary

Thou art tasty, and go well with ketchup.

[12345]

Hmm, dangerous night to take a nap apparently.

Sloth added protects after they added code that made mobs hit people besides the main tank. There are lots and lots and lots of muds that still subscribe to all attacks hitting the tank. I have also played many games for consoles where its entirely possible to play a warrior and a caster/archer class where the warrior does less damage but can physicaly position himself between the mob and the archer/caster to protect them and allow them to do the greatest amount of damage. The real threat being that there is more than 1 large mob in the area and no chokepoint, which is somewhat common.

That's not to say that the mob doesn't try to get to the one doing more damage, just that often you can use terrain and such to protect them, as well as skills that allow you guard instead of full out attacking. Due to the setup of Sloth, there's more likely to be a single large mob per room in xpish type areas, and the others tend to stay where they're sitting instead of running over to assist.

Also, the protect chain as it exists is not foolproof. If your 2.tank doesn't have a decent AC, they will normally get cut down pretty quick and things go bad from there.

Since muds do a poor job of simulating terrain and the tactics that would normally make possible, the concepts of rescue and protect skills isn't nearly as outlandish as you make it sound.

If you want to go ranting against a skill, pick something like push. Its ubsurb that a mob can watch someone push their allies away, never to be seen again, and then not be at least suspicious of someone trying to do the same to them. Or guards that never yell for assistance. Or someone running through an area with a warcry that's heard by everyone, and not catching on eventually.

[Weasel]

[quote:3hzhardm]Sloth is the only game I've played online which favors the protect system rather then have a true tanking setup. [/quote:3hzhardm]
Just made me think - why would the admins want this mud to be the same as every other mud? The idea is to keep sloth unique, not make it just like every other MUD out there, or so I thought.. I also thought the idea was to make this MUD enjoyable and relatively easygoing and non-conformist, hence the name 'Sloth' ..although the 'realism' factors creeping in recently may contradict what I just said. Certainly SlothMUD is more complex than ever, but not so hard as to make it a deterrant.. at least not yet. Realism is not neccessary imho, at least not in this MUD.. if I wanted realism and stupid role playing crap there are many many other options out there, but as far as casual and enjoyable mudding, Sloth is the leader imho. I just hope it stays that way.

[Avatar]

At a basic level, what it comes down to is that muds are text-based, and there's a limit to the level of realism that muds can support. Before you even reach that point, there's are points where the realism will get in the way of a fun game.

"Its a long list, as Ive led 100-200 people raids in 6-8 hour dungeons, with
mobs that can take 30-45 minutes to kill."

What game are you playing Diazz?

If you're thinking about this in terms of dps, you can rationalize Sloth by saying that this is why we use firewind instead of some more powerful magic attack. Does it make sense that a mage's most powerful spell only takes 25 mana, when the mage is running around with 700? Why don't we have spells that do 4x the damage for 100 mana? The answer is, of course, that noone wants to hit those dps levels that will make the mob notice you instead of the tank.



In all the normal aspects, I agree with 12345. In a realistic sim, you would be able to position your mages / archers (high dps) behind the warriors so that the warriors can -physically- prevent the target from getting to the juicy mages. The current MMO methods of "taunt" and "threat" are a poor method to simulate combat, and not something I'd like to see migrate to sloth. Our current protect chain does a better job, as we typically like to see 3 or 4 tanks at the top of the prot order - which we could imagine is them forming some sort of a line to protect casters / archers from retaliation.

[Weasel]

well explained, thanks Avatar

[Diazz_Dizazter]

No, neither system simulates it well tanking well.

[quote:2z892p19]What game are you playing Diazz? [/quote:2z892p19]

I currently play WoW, and will be for a very, very long time I feel.

As for where I've played, aside from a hand full of muds as well as coding
my own mud for 6 years, UO (2nd age to 4th age). EQ1, EQ2, Shadowbane,
Dark Age of Camelot, SWG, Anarchy Online, Eve Online,
AC1 & AC2.

Ive led a ton of raids on Daoc, EQ2 and large groups on UO. I mainly
play for PvP though. Most of these groups were 50-250 people. After this
running a 20 person group through the demonweb is cake

Any time I play a mud, it will inevitably make me play a mmorpg.


[quote:2z892p19]not make it just like every other MUD out there[/quote:2z892p19]

the fact that several sections of the code state that this section was grabbed from x mud code base would suggest its not. Nor the fact that
there are a ton of muds which feature a protect system would render that
most ill-astute theorem illogical.

This does not feed the fact that I still enjoyed sloth while I played, and I
hope keep up what they do. I have issue with some of their polices toward
gaming norms.

But then again, if they change stuff too much, people cry and shit gets
changed more.[/quote]

[Weasel]

heh true

[12345]

There will never be a system that simulates combat well because war is chaos and trying to organize it subtracts from its nature. It doesn't help that 95% of the things we're doing are completely fictional abilities. Since you've coded a mud, i'm sure you're familiar with the difficulties of coding positional and terrain based tactics into a room-based fighting system. Tactically, Sloth doesn't do a bad job at it, though there are always going to be quirks.

[*juggleblood*]

[quote="12345":2twjcrtq]If you want to go ranting against a skill, pick something like push. Its ubsurb that a mob can watch someone push their allies away, never to be seen again, and then not be at least suspicious of someone trying to do the same to them. Or guards that never yell for assistance. Or someone running through an area with a warcry that's heard by everyone, and not catching on eventually.[/quote:2twjcrtq]

This is a great point because the code already exists in game to handle these kinds of things (cept the warcry triggering alarm) and it makes the game a lot cooler. After my new area is complete and goes in, I would love to work on stuff like that. For example in Dweb, caller procs could be added to orcus and demogorgon that cause Marilith and Glabrezu to wander over and assist, with similar caller procs throughout the area and alarms should really be added to the castle on BH and the alchemists should be set alarm_aggressive.

I guess some of this stuff is underused because its newish and I guess there might also be objections from the original builder to have someone else poking around in his original creation.

How hard would it be to get permissions to do stuff like this as a builder?

[13]

[quote:sljxkicz]I mainly
play for PvP though.[/quote:sljxkicz]

So get on the pvp server.

[alias]

No alarms should be raised when I warcry in an area. The mobs just think Im hungry and forgot my Spoon!. Or you can just make it alarm out and it will be one more skill I wont use.



Alias