What makes Rangers worse tanks than Shadow Knights or Paladins?

[Pint]

Originally Posted by Tecmos Deception [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So you and I should be equally successful at soloing a betabuffed enchanter through a Velious zone, right? Since we will have the same pixels? Since I've never honed a skill with all the days I've spent playing an enchanter in classic and kunark zones? Let's do it. I'll stream it!

Hey I'll accept that challenge, sounds like a good time to me.

Also sorry for derailing this thread, as a ranger main from live rangers are the tits.

[fadetree]

I think there is definitely skill involved. Some classes bring that out more than others. When you've got a tough fight going with 4 merbs in camp, and everyone is just barely surviving, your skill in playing your character makes a difference. If you are standing around with a bunch of overgeared min maxers just grinding through loads of easy mobs, not so much.

[Whirled]

Anyone who knows how to REALLY play guitar would know that it requires much more skill than ANY game. To strum a few chords and call yourself a guitar player is like fixing a flat tire and calling yourself a mechanic.

ITT: So, from what I'm hearing I guess there's lots of shitty guitarists around here, lol

[fastboy21]

Originally Posted by Whirled [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Anyone who knows how to REALLY play guitar would know that it requires much more skill than ANY game. To strum a few chords and call yourself a guitar player is like fixing a flat tire and calling yourself a mechanic.

ITT: So, from what I'm hearing I guess there's lots of shitty guitarists around here, lol

One, the question he raised isn't about the amount of skill...its whether there is skill AT ALL.

Obviously, there are different tasks that require different amounts of skill (talent and learned ability). Just because something is only a game however has nothing to do with the amount of skill needed to do it good or to perfection.

One of the most interesting observations about humanity is how much energy we put into developing skill sets that have no immediate application to our day to day survival...and require tremendous skill and time to master. I'm not claiming that EQ is such an endeavor, but anyone who has played a sport at top levels of competition knows that being only a game doesn't make the tasks any easier or less skillful to master.

I'd be interested in watching a heads-up-display-of-no-skill-required-competition between Tecmos and Xer0.

Its so obvious that playing EQ well requires a developed skill (call it natural reaction time, call it a learning curve, call it a knowledge base, etc.) that you almost have to think its trolling.

[Deltaloko]

As someone who played a bard on live from launch until depths of darkhollow, the game absolutely took skill to play.

When you look at the bard class, you have an incredibly large toolkit, and you had to learn how to apply that toolkit to all the various situations you would encounter as a raid bard.

Hell, there was a raid boss in BoT Towers that i would use deftdance + song of highsun to split, when they were supposed to be aggro linked and fought together.

There were quite a few nights in PoFire when there were 2 guilds in zone fighting over the namers that spawned in the field. By your argument, it was a simple 50/50 coinflip as to which of us would end up with a named, right? Except somehow our pulling team used to consistently beat the other guilds pulling teams and end up with most of the raid mobs.

Maybe because i was a raid puller for 6+ years, but pulling most certainly took skill. Especially when racing against other guilds in the open world content.

There were a lot of things that I was able to do that other bards did not know how to do, because i spent years learning how to play the class. Isn't that the definition of skill?

[Whirled]

I wasn't disputing anything other than the bad analogy of playing a video game =/= and the guitar argument. I will agree that the learning curve for EQ is very harsh if someone has never played before or never known ALL the little secrets that some (or most) know around here it would make any game difficult. I have played sports at higher levels in several forms (All Star baseball (no, not little league, lol), Volleyball for U.S. Army & free play in Ft. Lauderdale beach, dozens of static line, free, or chopper blast parachuting excursions (no I was not tandem) ..... but there's just no way any of that can equal pressing auto attack or clicking a button to root something.

YES; there IS some level of attendance one would need to keep timers on spawns, buffs, item recharging & all that EQ stuff that comes along in the package of the game but to consider it anything like a rough game of lacrosse is just ludicrous.

Natural reaction time = 1 can say the same just to drive a car....
Learning curve = agreed*

I think when u say knowledge base; you hit it more on the head.... it just requires the player to know the game inside and out (at least from people that seem to have knowledge of every little shred of what npc walks to what loc point, drops X item z% of the time & takes a shit @ every noon.) Some people have time for that... some don't.

P.S. = I played a bard on live for several years - did the whole carpal tunnel craziness before the /melody thing. Sorry but pressing 1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 5, 7, 7, still does not require much more skill than tapping a finger. Next we'll have Olympic sandwich making because people will think that it takes skill & some have gone to subway college to learn this ultimate skill, lol

[fastboy21]

Originally Posted by Whirled [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

P.S. = I played a bard on live for several years - did the whole carpal tunnel craziness before the /melody thing. Sorry but pressing 1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 5, 7, 7, still does not require much more skill than tapping a finger. Next we'll have Olympic sandwich making because people will think that it takes skill & some have gone to subway college to learn this ultimate skill, lol

If that was the extent of what you were able to do on a bard then, yes, you had no skill.

[Deltaloko]

Originally Posted by fastboy21 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If that was the extent of what you were able to do on a bard then, yes, you had no skill.

I'd have to agree there. I was generally our puller/pull coordinator, our tank coordinator, our heal coordinator, and our CC coordinator. I was usually in about 10 chat channels during a raid. Had to keep up manual twists while directing most of the raid around the various mechanics.

The Bertox event comes to mind, I remember being on a 1280x1024 monitor, with chat boxes filling all but probably 320x200 in the middle, for ~2 hours.

[Supaskillz]

Eq is more about the plan than the execution. Execution is often easy, but that is one thing I like about this game. Strategy I enjoy. Lightning speed reaction times are not my strength

[Deltaloko]

Again, no one is arguing playing a game is equal in skill to playing olympic level sports.

But to argue that its not a skill at all is false.

"Sorry but pressing 1, 1, 2, 2, 5, 5, 7, 7, still does not require much more skill than tapping a finger"

You're right. And strumming a chord doesn't require much more skill than moving your hand and tapping a finger on a string.

When you strip away all thought process and knowledge required from an action, and boil it down to just its simple motor movements, anything sounds simple. "throwing a football is really just swinging your arm"

Why did you pick songs 1, 2, 5, and 7? When do you play songs 3 and 4 and 6 and 8? What songs did you pick for 3/4/6/8? What are you doing while twisting 1/2/5/7? Just standing stationary completely zoned out? Are you moving/positioning based on fight? Are you reacting to any fight mechanics? Are you helping coordinate the raid via chat or voice communication?

You seem to be under the impression that video games are always 100% rote memorization of a task, and other things are dynamic skills.

I can show you people "playing" a guitar that have simply mechanically memorized a motor movement to specific timing. They don't understand notes or music and if you asked them to deviate from what they're doing and personalize it at all, they could not.

I can show you people playing a video game that are reading and reacting and making decisions/judgement calls based on variable inputs. You put them in the middle of a raid and throw a whole new mechanic at them that they were not expecting and they could adapt to it and survive.