Dungeon Revamp - need Character Revamp too

[Sevin0oo0]

PvM would be a little bit more interesting if the Devs would auctually work on the AI of monsters and not just think that adding a monster with 5,000,000,000 hit points and making it so it does 1 hit kills ever 5 seconds makes it harder.

I took that from an unrelated thread, it makes a great first statement. Ever since someone decided a certain direction would be "challenging", I kept noticing that 'something here just isn't right'. After looking at the numbers surrounding these 'challenges', I saw examples, looking at just the low-level new mob stats.
HP: Ours (str/2 +50), Theirs (str X 1.5 to as high of x35 <-35times!?
MANA: Ours (int), Theirs (int X 2.7 to a high of x7.8
Specials: essentially 1 hit kills, and 60 pts damage(in all 70's) is more and more often used now. whether an "aura" or a bare handed armor ignore for 60pts? whaa?

With Hit Points spanning into the Thousands, and all resists raised, I think Players should get a little revamp as well. I'm not saying str X 35 for hit points, nor the equiv. for mana, but I do not see how ours can stay the same if All mobs are increased. And not just increased stats, but the increase in sheer mob numbers
Too high an increase for us and it'd negate all the work done. Many have said they like the new challenge, but funny the places are always free of players, and why I've yet to see any one waltz thru clearing the levels? - You Can't, that's why, and i'm not saying it should even be capable either. Impossibly stated HP makes it a grind, imo, is that really supposed to be "challenging"? Like someone said, Isn't it supposed to be Fun? I say yes.

Maybe it's just me and there's something I'm not seeing, but I think players need a little love, ya know?

 

[Thrakkar]

If you just beef up the characters, the boss fights won't get more interesting, just shorter.

The problem is UO itself and it's game mechanics. In almost every fight it doesn't matter, if you die a lot or not. I.e. the stygian dragon... people die there all the time, they just rez and continue the fight, over and over again. Because you have absolutely no death penalties and you can resurrect infinitely often.

Modern MMOs require tactics, when fighting a boss, just because when someone dies, he's out of the fight until it ends. And if too much people die, you won't be able to win anymore. This is something, i miss in UO. Here you can zerg everything down. If you bring less people, it will just won't go as fast as with more people.

But I think, it's not that easy to design a good boss encounter in such an environment as UO:

We have no threat. Therefore we also can't have tanks. Honestly I don't know, if that's a good or a bad thing. But of one thing I'm sure: Boss fights without a tank are always chaotic. And tactics and chaos don't mix that good...

We have almost no crowd control, no snares and no roots. Doesn't make it easier to design an interesting and challenging encounter without these.

Our chars have no roles in combat except to do damage. There is no dedicated healer. Everyone tries to survive on it's own, except from the one or another healing spell from a fellow party member.

And the list goes on...

 

[Shakkara]

The problem is all these items and the powercreep over the years.

Players became 5-10 times as powerful as was ever intended when they launched AOS. Thus the monsters had to go up as the player's gear went up and up and up as devs released stronger and stronger and stronger items to have a carrot to dangle in front of the players.

We don't need to raise the player caps. We need to do a reset and put things back into perspective. Dragon = powerful creature that should be difficult to solo. Ancient dragon = very powerful creature that needs a group to slay. Harpies/lizardmen/ogres shouldn't be one-hit-kills either. And having any kind of magical effect on your gear should be special.

UO is ahead of all other MMOs by NOT having a stupid mandatory holy-trinity of tank-heal-dps. You can be anything you want and tackle an encounter in any way you like. Only now other MMOs like Guild Wars 2 start to breathe the sigh of relief as they rid themselves of such silly mechanics.

I personally think UO should step away from the Diablo path they went in to at AOS, which subsequently ruined a large part of the game. UO needs to go back to being UO and make use of its strengths (Sandbox, Skills > Items, No levels/classes/roles, Be-anything-you-want) and not try to immitate the INFERIOR branch of MMOs that started with Everquest and led up to WoW.

 

[G.v.P]

Would be interesting if they developed an alternative to mana, maybe something similar to the berserker fury system except without needing a suit. You don't often see pure dexxers...I guess the bandage healing changes did help a pure dexxer out some but for DPS a dexxer still needs chivalry for the best output. There's also the matter of how dexxers only get two weapon abilities at 70 and 90 skill...leaves a lot of room from 90-120. We know the team could add special moves for PvM only as well. All they have to do is set type, like how undead creatures can't be bled with bleed attack.

 

[Ashlynn_L]

I agree with what Shakkara said. All of the monsters basically need looking at across the board. They need to make monsters challenging in ways other than increasing HP too (and they have done that in the past). It feels like I'm fighting optional boss monsters from a JRPG sometimes.

Does anyone else remember the pre-AoS Exodus Minions with the shifting force fields? They didn't have monstrous hit points, but the existence of that field made them interesting to fight.