Personally I do think the EMs now and Mesanna kind of trivialize the whole killing bit though. With a lot of YOU WILL DIE NEXT WEEK MUHAHAHAHA kind of stuff. Or the "Mesanna will kill you now" stuff. Drop that please EMs. Your events shouldn't be a death fest. No need for that. A challenge yes, but overkill no.
Just a quick comment on this; any monster that can fight against 20 of you at once is going to shred one of you if it's allowed to focus on you. Area attacks are a way of balancing out it's targeting so it doesn't do this. There are mobs in game which specifically go for an individual or track specific templates, which makes it unfair for individuals, which we mostly avoid. But if you don't give it a reasonably deadly area effect, or some way of tracking multiple targets which it can combine with an individual blow, it's basically unable to kill anyone in a fair manner, which makes every fight just punching on a damage sponge until it goes down. And that opens up the can of worms that high damage templates can sit there blasting away and get the rewards every time...
That's a debate for another day though. And I've already spoken about finding that balance, so let me talk a bit wider here and talk about what makes a "good fight"; Heroes shouldn't win
every fight, at least not easily; indeed the cliché is that they always lose their first fights to make the second one they win even sweeter. And bad guys that can't kill occasionally aren't very worthy foes... in real life of course, someone with 20x your real world power turns up and kills your girlfriend, they're not going to leave a space for you in the final 15 minutes of the movie to fight smarter and take them righteously down; they'll punch you in the face with the 20 times bigger fist there and then too, and your death puts a final stop to your ability to write the story in any further way. If you want to see the reality of your worth as an individual, turn on the news and take your pick of which current story you want to be depressed by.
In a game however, which we set up for fun, we trivialise death to support that sense of fun; Sure we can bring violent spiteful death to you at any time; but if we never use at least the illusion of it, well you don't get the heroism either. Which is what you're here for, and we want to give you...
escapism. The sense of triumph over adversity.
So let's talk completely honestly. What makes you win on any day is not how great your gear is, no matter how proud you are of it; Our powers will always be that much greater. It's that we intend for you to win, and have fun doing so. What makes it a fun fight is if we can get the balance right so you win in a smart or challenging way. Or maybe not at all today... maybe today is the day you lose to make the next fight sweeter. We have other tools, like in character trash talk to generate a desire for righteous vengeance, but no matter what, it's up to us when we decide to pull our punches. Which we can't always judge the correct level of fun force, as mentioned. But if we don't use it, you've not beaten anything, have you? We've just gone "Meh, here's a single Orc, slap it down, we don't care".
So... I can't speak for Mesanna, but one reason I have for having the odd "Ok, let's just go for madness" events is to keep both players and EM ready and able to deal with an exceptionally unfair fight... and not take it seriously. You don't get a second chance when it's taken seriously. You have to be able to brush it off and come back for round two. And with the right attitude to death, sometimes you'll beat Round 1 when we weren't expecting it, and gain an
incredible triumph over us. Someone has already, using a knife on a plague beast based mob and freezing it up completely at one of my events. Of course, take that too seriously too, start hacking and cheating, and the Giant Wrath of Banhammering has to come down to protect the spirit of escapism too...
... or from the EM perspective, if we actually have death as the target, well I could have chained the "down to 1hp" attack the map altar for the Corgul quest has, into Stomp which would have ensured even pets won't survive it. And 2 attacks isn't the limit, I might add, just a very efficient way to kill you all. But that would have been rotten EMing, wouldn't it? We all do try and avoid that though. My actual mistake wasn't trying to kill as many as possible, but that you couldn't out damage the Stomp when carried by a boss, so the fight wasn't tactical and the role of healers etc was swamped. You the players have beaten harder fights
on paper than that; the Solstice mobs had 95 resists in all except their elemental type, combined with strong AoE magic attacks; where as Gubbinz only had 80 across the board, and less hit points and all melee attacks. The equalisation effect of Stomp was too much though.
But you do have to die sometimes too.
And we'll laugh about it again, because we want you to have fun and come back, and eventually beat us, as you must.