Quote:
Originally Posted by Priceline
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Yea damn them for adding in raid mechanics (mostly "don't stand in the stupid" but at least they tried), instead of the bring enough healers and dps zergfest that was classic EQ raiding.
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They meant well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions: I *will* damn them for those mechanics because they make effective first-person gameplay almost impossible. EQ and its world was designed with the first-person camera in mind; Warcraft isn't and cannot be. In Warcraft the player has to be zoomed out just so he can see all the crap on the floor in the area around him. Then, so as to accommodate the use of third person as the standard view mode, interiors are made open and airy so as to provide space for the camera to pivot without clipping through walls. Because of this, small, cramped EQ-style dungeons like Guk or Solusek's Eye can't exist in that environment. Trying to build a complex dungeon with suitably large interiors results in a place so large and sprawling that most folks can't do it in a single gameplay session--thus explaining a major portion of why we've devolved to "dungeons" being little more than a couple of rooms connected by straight hallways. I don't think they intended that to happen, but it's the law of unintended consequences at work.
Trash mobs hitting like raid named is another ill-conceived idea that promotes single pulls over crowd control and therefore also promotes boring gameplay. Few people want to pull 4 or 5 monsters if any one of them will one-shot the enchanter then the healer without even time to react if someone accidentally breaks a mez. Stuff hitting for less, and looser tuning in general, is the very thing which allows recovery from sloppy pulls and the other sorts of emergent gameplay that make EQ's dungeons as memorable as they are.
With respect to the original thread purpose, I stayed with EQ longer than I should have--I permanently quit in spring 2004 along with a lot of other folks. I considered every expansion to make the game a little worse and if my friends didn't all play I probably would've quit a good 18 months earlier.
Danth