10-22-2009, 12:45 PM
Skill based or class based doesn't make a difference as far as I can see, so far as this topic goes.
The issue I'm getting at is that if you were to design your character and you could give him any skills you wanted, what would you give him that would be interesting, tactical and not ruin other people's gameplay?
Basically, list for me your dream character. What skills do you have on your toolbar? How does that character play?
I'm not even sure how to answer this question myself, because most of the interesting effects are CC related.
For example, if I wanted to create a tank character that works in PvP, what skills would he have? Just about anything I can think of that's "tanky" would end up being a sort of CC. I want to protect my healer so I.... stun you? Snare you? Root you? Knock you down? Knock you back? Force you to switch targets to me? Physically block you with player collision? These are all basically crowd control abilities -- they force the target player to do something other than what he wanted to do, which was beat on my healer.
Maybe we could have "indirect crowd control", though, like if I get a shot at your back it's going to be a good one, so you'd better not let me get behind you with a sword. But I'm afraid that would tend to result in some awfully twitchy gameplay.
I'm still tempted to do something with "henchmen". Like rarely would you ever control just your character solo. You'd always have a selection of henchmen with you which you can control via an RTS like interface. This would let us keep your main character fairly simple and the real focus in combat would be on controlling your "troops" -- flanking, ambushing, scouting, etc.
Not sure that's what people have in mind when they think of "MMORPG", though.
The issue I'm getting at is that if you were to design your character and you could give him any skills you wanted, what would you give him that would be interesting, tactical and not ruin other people's gameplay?
Basically, list for me your dream character. What skills do you have on your toolbar? How does that character play?
I'm not even sure how to answer this question myself, because most of the interesting effects are CC related.
For example, if I wanted to create a tank character that works in PvP, what skills would he have? Just about anything I can think of that's "tanky" would end up being a sort of CC. I want to protect my healer so I.... stun you? Snare you? Root you? Knock you down? Knock you back? Force you to switch targets to me? Physically block you with player collision? These are all basically crowd control abilities -- they force the target player to do something other than what he wanted to do, which was beat on my healer.
Maybe we could have "indirect crowd control", though, like if I get a shot at your back it's going to be a good one, so you'd better not let me get behind you with a sword. But I'm afraid that would tend to result in some awfully twitchy gameplay.
I'm still tempted to do something with "henchmen". Like rarely would you ever control just your character solo. You'd always have a selection of henchmen with you which you can control via an RTS like interface. This would let us keep your main character fairly simple and the real focus in combat would be on controlling your "troops" -- flanking, ambushing, scouting, etc.
Not sure that's what people have in mind when they think of "MMORPG", though.