How to fix rangers and warriors without losing the "classic" feel.

[greatdane]

It can work, but root isn't the most reliable thing. It tends to break quickly, and even moreso if people deal any kind of direct magic damage. If your group has a monk with trance sticks, a wizard, a nuking ranger and a lifetapping necro pet, root on high-level dungeon mobs (who are often buffed by nearby cleric/shaman mobs) typically won't last more than a couple of ticks. It's nice in the lower and mid-levels, but I wouldn't want to depend on it in Sebilis.

[Zagtor]

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

I also suspect it's one of those things they can't remove because it's fused to the client, like the [53 Warder (Druid)] tags and such.

Sorry for slight derail, but this is fixable if you know how to hex-edit: http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=40061

[Lucia Moonglow]

Interesting replies. I'm going to ignore the "rangers/warriors eventually get fixed" nonsense because that's exactly what it is. This server isn't going to pass Velious, so the fixes the classes needed that they got in Luclin aren't going to show up.

How can you claim that it won't compromise the classic feel when what you want to change is the classic feel?

I've already explained what the classic feel is. It's not broken mechanics unless you fondly recall broken mechanics as contributing to gameplay.

Agro was Based of damage and swing rate, not procs as it is here.

Aggro was never based on swing rate, this was a very common myth. Aggro was always based on the amount of damage output. The myth that it was based on swing rate came from the fact that fast weapons put a more steady stream of DPS out, therefore if you're fighting a mob that's just barely at the cusp of picking between you and someone else, waiting 4 seconds for that next swing can mean the other person gets hit once or twice. While swing rate could technically improve your ability to hold aggro, that was simply a side-effect of the way damage translated to aggro, not any sort of intrinsic bonus to fast weapons specifically.

A big factor in the "warriors suck" perception is that gamers have lost the ability to wait. I'm sure pretty much every one of us has played WoW or one of its clones, and in those games, non-tanks expect to be able to unload immediately and with little concern for aggro if the tank knows what he's doing.

Great, someone else using the WoW comparison to try and strengthen their argument. This isn't about comparing warriors in EQ to warriors in WoW, it's about comparing warriors in EQ to other tanks in EQ. Building aggro is something warriors should have to do for raids, not for normal leveling groups. Besides, knights don't have to spend a few rounds building aggro.


I will admit that rangers aren't too bad off really and generally just have a bad reputation. Warriors, however, ARE broken and Verant and SOE both acknowledged this later in the game. EQ was the first real game of its kind, so to pretend that anyone would have gotten group role mechanics right on the first shot is just silly.

I hear a lot of people saying that fixing taunt would somehow "break the classic feel", yet nobody's able to say how besides just saying "It's not exactly like classic!" So in other words, the only thing that bothers you is the knowledge that it's different rather than the actual impact it has on the game.

Let's face facts, warriors are underplayed compared to other tanks. Guess what? They weren't in classic. Know why? Because A) We didn't realize how broken they were and B) We always hoped there was a fix coming around the corner. With this server, if the "OMG classic" fanatics get their way, we already know they'll never get the fixes they deserve.

I love what Rogean and Nilbog have created here. It does bring with it a sense of nostalgia and an enjoyment of the way EQ used to be before Planes of Power, Nexus, cat people, and horrible concepts like recommended/required level on items. Those are the concepts that ruined EQ. Making the world small, restricting or eliminating twinking, making a bazaar so that players could sell AFK, making zones that allowed you to get from 1 to 20 in a single day without powerleveling...classic was an absence of that and a hard grind towards 60, it wasn't someone sitting there with a checklist saying "Nope, that's not technically classic. Nope, that's not either. Nope, it was different in classic."

[baalzy]

Mechanically warriors might be broken on this server because things aren't working the way they should.

This doesn't negate the fact that warriors were still heavily relied on for raid tanking in classic. So while they underperformed they were still viable and capable.

My experience with them in groups is that they tank just fine (admittedly the only warriors I tank with are rolling BOBDE&Ringed Mace).

Rangers suffer because they don't offer enough to a group to justify the xp penalty. Once the penalty is removed then life should get easier for them. Jolt (which should be in any time now) should also help. Now picking up a ranger gives you respectable DPS and a backup tank with their utility and no negatives. They still probably won't be picked over a monk or rogue, but people will be less likely to ignore them outright and xp with 5 people and wait for a rogue/monk to become available.

I'd agree though that Luclin AA's were what finally allowed rangers to come into their own. Respectable sustained DPS while outside the range of most AOEs? awesome. Massive DPS for a good duration outside the range of most AOEs? Super awesome.

[greatdane]

If you want to balance the game, you'll have to change just about everything. Make warrior aggro easy and you've erased knights from meaningful existence. Make ranger in line with the other top DPS and you've made the best DPS class in the game, considering their ability to SoW, root, snare, track, invis and so on. There is some measure of balance in good old Everquest, it just isn't very kind to the players. The classes were apparently not designed to be equally strong but rather equally appealing to the player in one way or another. Druids and rangers were hugely popular classes despite their weakness, and that's because they can do so many things and are convenient and versatile to play. If you're a casual player who wants to be able to do many things without caring too much about being the best at any, druid is the perfect choice - you can solo, you can group as either healer or DPS, you don't have to worry about travel, and people will often want your help. Same thing with rangers - you can tank or DPS and you have almost every general type of spell available to you, they're just mostly weak. Turn rangers into rogues with the huge variety of utility that rangers have and there would be no reason to play a rogue.

Analogies are perfectly valid. Don't get frightened and defensive whenever someone mentions WoW. There's no need to be reactionary. People were pretty happy with the classes in the beginning, and it's not until we all started playing with math and efficiency in mind instead of immersion and relaxed enjoyment that we started to care that some classes had weaknesses that didn't correspond to their strengths. It's a change of mentality, one that was amplified by WoW's mainstream lowest-common-denominator style of playing and now manifests as a complete inability for many players to adapt to the classes in their group.

What you want to do is switch the imbalances around. Give warriors built-in aggro that allows them to hold it reliably and easily and they would be the best tanks for everything, dwarfing out paladins and shadowknights. Then you'd have to buff those two classes. Make rangers do as much damage as monks and rogues and you'd have to give those classes similar utility and versatility. There's no point trying to fix the classes because they'd all need so much fixing that this wouldn't be the same game. You can't try to fix everything while preserving the classic feel, because part of the classic feel is the class structure.

Besides, trying to argue for changes like these is useless. They won't do it. It's not a matter of convincing the developers. You'd have to murder and usurp them. The entire point, the defining property and purpose of existence of this server, is to copy the way the game was. Every month someone comes in trying to spearhead some silly "fix", and every time people have to tell them that it won't happen, not necessarily because the fix is bad but because it cannot happen. Why would you come to the one server that revolves fully around the ideal of getting as close to 100% identical to classic Everquest and try to suggest the exact opposite? It's futile.

[Hasbinbad]

All of these suggestions are great you guys! I can't wait for you to start, develop, pay for, and moderate your own server where they can be implemented, and rangers can be a viable class, and the mission statement of the server won't be the dusty old p99 "Relive the classic Everquest MMORPG Gaming Experience as it was in 1999 and onward." bullshit, but the cool new one you're starting "Experience the classic feel of Everquest as I think it should have been!" ..and the sun will rise in the west and set in the east, and unicorns will shoot rainbows out of their asses!!

OMG CAN'T WAIT

[Dantes]

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

It can work, but root isn't the most reliable thing. It tends to break quickly, and even moreso if people deal any kind of direct magic damage. If your group has a monk with trance sticks, a wizard, a nuking ranger and a lifetapping necro pet, root on high-level dungeon mobs (who are often buffed by nearby cleric/shaman mobs) typically won't last more than a couple of ticks. It's nice in the lower and mid-levels, but I wouldn't want to depend on it in Sebilis.

Works well enough in Sebilis with a high level shaman. Had a few great groups with Shaman root parking everything in the disco camp. I think it depends on who's spending the mana on it, in the case of a shaman this is a very useful utility.

[Knuckle]

I was very pleased to find that I wasn't the only vampire at the meet and that a couple of my sisters of the night were also there. They told me that they'd been staying with a friend of Ursa's called Wetsuit but that he'd sadly passed away recently and so they had found a new home with Gibbmodoll along with Wetsuit's other girls.

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[YendorLootmonkey]

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

I will admit that rangers aren't too bad off really and generally just have a bad reputation.

You kinda just made me stop reading anything you had to say after that. :P

Rangers have very little necessary role in groups or in raids right now. In Velious, we at least bring Trueshot and Weaponshield as tools to a raid. And some ATK buffs to groups/raids.

Right now, what we bring to the table -- aside from some nice outdoor pulling tools that not many groups take advantage of, because a druid can do the same thing AND serve as a healer or backup healer, AND evac you when shit gets hairy -- is "versatility". The problem is, that versatility only benefits the person playing the ranger. While it is what makes the ranger class fun, and is why I started a ranger on P99 knowing full well what I was in for, after having played a ranger as my only class for years on Live, groups generally don't care how much of everything you can do. The min-maxers want the specialists in DPS, the specialists in tanking (also contributing to the warrior problem, as knights are the specialists in tanking for groups right now), and the specialists in crowd control.

Not only is a ranger not a specialist, unless you want to know what mobs are up in Fear/Hate/Sky, but they bring their 40% XP penalty to the group for being that generalist that no group really desires. To me, that puts rangers in a fairly bad position in Kunark. As others have said, if you wipe away all the unjustified ranger-hate on P99 because of years of being the butt of all jokes... a high-level ranger in the pre-Kunark Classic era on Live was actually pretty bad-ass, and could actually tank.

Now, it wouldn't be so bad if rangers could solo effectively, but we can only solo in very set circumstances during certain level ranges with certain gear. And even then, I wouldn't say it's effective. Bow-kiting something around for 10 minutes while a group is killing 10 mobs in 10 minutes isn't "effective", in my book.

I'm not saying warriors aren't "as broken", but a lot of warriors' problems are because groups forgot how to let the tank gain aggro. Keeping aggro on the tank was never solely the tank's responsibility -- it was a group effort and we worked around it back on Live, because we didn't know Taunt fixes were coming. We didn't know Jolt was coming. We adapted.

[Kassel]

Oh Shiz, I agree with Hasbinbad, looks like i hasbinbad