Bring back percentage linked adds

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Kiras, Mar 17, 2019.

  1. Kiras Augur

    Please make more missions that use percentage linked adds instead of just timered adds.

    Smoke - Trial of Ashes: Timered
    Smoke - Cyclone: Timered
    Smoke - Ampitheater - Timered for the waves (although this one wouldn't work well as percentage, unless it was linked to the minis somehow)
    Prince Ralaifin - Timered
    General Reparm - Timered

    Why is percentage a better mechanic? Well, timered basically means that DPS is the most important thing by far. If you have enough DPS, you can bypass most or all adds, trivializing the events. It also has a large influence on what your group composition should be. On the other hand, percentage based adds means that all groups have to face the same number of adds. You can build a group around more interesting things, like kiting some adds while you kill one at a time, or offtanking, or otherwise crowd controlling. High powered groups will have to face more adds, making it more challenging to them. Low powered groups will have to face less adds than they would with timered, making it less challenging for them. Endurance becomes a viable strategy with percentage adds, whereas it is not with timered adds.

    For that matter, bring back percentage linked mechanics in general. I've had Relic Raiders groups where some of the mechanics literally never showed up because the boss was blown away with DPS. That's a boring way to get an achievement.
  2. Sancus Augur

    Of the 16 classes in the game, at least 8 specialize in DPS. Percentage based adds make them doing their job actively detrimental. It makes far more sense with the current system, where them doing their job makes events easier (just as tanks, healers, CC, etc. performing their role is beneficial rather than actively detrimental).

    Having an encounter here or there where DPS have to be very selective about how to do damage is fine, but I'm glad TBL has fewer mechanics where tabbing out and reading the forums is more helpful to your group/raid than actually playing (although Esianti definitely qualifies as the former, for different reasons).
  3. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    Please … forget you ever made up the word timered. Timed is acceptable.

    I think you are forgetting that the group missions are pretty much carbon copies of the raids (sometimes dumbed down slightly, and depowered). For the raids, having timed encounters makes more sense as it rewards better tactics by letting you face fewer adds. Changing the mechanics would be a lot more work AND tuning, which given the number of folks working on stuff … I don't see happening anytime soon. General Reparm isn't so bad since they have isolated the fights. You can wait on burns coming back up for each step.

    That said, I do agree with your general argument. It would be a lot more fun if the GROUP missions had a number of different ways you could win events rather than just a dps bar. But that's what EQ is now … DPS Quest. It has been for a number of expansions.
  4. Aelen Augur

    I agree with some of this, but there’s a ton of it I disagree with. Pretty strongly actually. I’m gonna word-vomit on the why’s for a bit.

    I think preventing DPS as a solution to mission problems is a bad thing. Preventing DPS as a simple solution to problems typically ends up making DPS more important, not less. Rather, it means more people aren’t allowed into group X to do activity Y, because to keep good burst execution from being effective either means inflating HP values, so that only high DPS can make the time you’re handling the boss/adds/mechanics be a reasonable duration, or it means adding punishment mechanics for DPSing at the wrong time or speed, meaning playing a DPS class well is generally unrewarding. Burns get wasted, DoT’s become potential failures on their own and low quality DPS players are taught bad habits like stringing all their discs out or ignoring them entirely, instead of proper stacking and rotation.

    One thing I do agree with is missions shouldn’t require a stacked burst solution to be reasonably completed. That does mean if you go out of your way to stack a good burst solution, it’ll probably be easier, but I’m not particularly inclined to listen to the guy stacking either 6 raiders or 4 Wiz or Zerk boxes whine that “it’s too easy now”. That isn’t reflective of how most people engage with the content or the people they play with. If they wanted it harder, they shouldn’t have taken such exceptional measures to make it easier—breaking content for yourself on purpose, and having that then break more content for everyone else even worse to try and solve your problem is inherently stupid.

    I’m going to come at this from another angle here now, and say that I actually think they did a better job than average of making more classes interchangeably useful for the content. They did so by leaving more options for how to approach the missions than previously, so I do call into question the “only DPS matters” assertion you’re making. Most of the people in family or mid/low tier raid guilds I know of were doing a lot of these missions with intentionally defensive setups—2 tanks, 2 priests, that kind of thing. I actually don’t find that type of setup more interesting, I find it to be a balance/design/community problem in the making, as tanks and priests are each only 21% of the choosable classes, or 43% combined, yet are making up 66% of some of these groups. The fact the you can instead do a lot of these by putting more attention toward DPS is very good. The fact that a lot of the expansion’s missions allow both mez and root centric CC, not either or, is also good. The fact that a lot of stuff is stunnable is good.

    I like doing Trial of Ashes with really high DPS. I do think if I DPS well, I should be able to be rewarded for that, not punished. But I’ve led that mission a lot for people who aren’t really DPS champions. I typically “carry” from the puller role on that mission. We make use of burst for the bosses, because less of the team has to be particularly amazing at their job that way. I GINA the phoenix AE, and use it to time boss pulls such that the 2 AE’s don’t overlap. And I run circles on the island chain pulling golems while waiting for burns /discs for the bosses. Sustained DPS has to exceed the rate the golems pop, but overall I think that mission would be less accessible if burst was essentially made into a bad solution for the minibosses. When I play my Necro, the mana tap actually ends up useful sometimes due to how long it runs, and the fact there are still lulls. That’s unusual, the Necro mana tap is usually forgettable due to time concerns not lining up with it well.

    Cactiiki last expansion, and End of Empire wave 4, and maybe a couple spots on the Goro mission if we’re talking short-handed, were probably better examples of what you’re talking about. The tilt points were tighter making the difference between easy and impossible turn on more of a dime, and less other stuff had a chance to matter.

    A lot of the missions have areas where you can kind of take a break, and allow burns or discs to come back. If you’re strong and going for speed, you can just push through. If you’re weak and going for accessibility, you can take a break. I don’t see that as bad.

    One of the major, over-arching concept layers to this is the fact that saying DPS shouldn’t be a major focus is just inherently wrong. It’s very easy to set the thresholds for DPS to where our community ends up with a ton of people unable to access content, so it can’t be set too high in a lot of places. But it shouldn’t be ceilinged or devalued either, as it’s the one place where basically every class has some skill expression available to them, and the place where the single largest number of classes have it as their primary role. Devaluing it or making it less fun or not rewarding can only be bad. Mostly you just have to be careful about requiring too much out of people, since most of that bell curve needs to be able to say it’s having fun.
    Moldar, Ssdar and Sancus like this.
  5. Kiras Augur

    I think there's a big mismatch in class distribution between raiding and grouping. Just because there are only three tank classes, doesn't mean that 3/16 players are tanks. I don't have actual numbers on this, but the tank population feels disproportionately large, especially knights. Now, that's obviously not true with high end raiding guilds, which have lots of DPS, but designing group missions around them is a bad idea for the health of EQ.

    Years ago, I used to have fun going into missions with very much sub-optimal group makeups, and do them in weird ways that would somehow end up working. Kiting a large wave and picking off mobs from it one by one for instance. However, the last couple years have had a ton of missions that are basically glorified DPS checks. The worst of the lot are the adds that spawn every X seconds that you're forced to kill, and those have become more and more common. Mission winning groups for me have degenerated into tank + healer + DPS + DPS + DPS, with far less flexibility in class makeup. That's especially unfortunate for necromancers and weaker tanks. I end up running the same missions more times because I have less flex slots.

    I'm not saying that no missions should have DPS checks, but I am saying that percentage based add waves is a better mechanic than timed adds. DPS should be very helpful to have, even the optimal solution in a lot of cases. It would be with either type of adds, because killing them fast is better for risk minimizing than killing them over an extended period of time. However, timed adds can be an absolute bar to bizarro group setups, whereas percentage based adds are not. And on the other hand, percentage based adds actually make it more challenging for DPS heavy groups than timed adds do, because they cannot bypass the mechanics as easily. The worst example of mechanic bypass (although several years old now), would be Grannus. Bring enough DPS and you ignore all of the mechanics in the event. That's lousy design.

    Percent based adds and other % mechanics make it more challenging for heavy DPS teams (which, let's face it, are the ones that always whine that EQ is too easy.... because they're basically playing Contra with the spread gun only). And they make it less challenging for DPS light teams (which complain about EQ being too hard). Win-win.
  6. Morthakia Augur

    I completely agree with Kiras that adds should really be percentage-based rather than time-based (and my group is designed nearly entirely around maxing DPS). Events such as the Cactus mission in RoS OT are literally unbeatable without a certain minimum level of DPS. The two tank / two healer model can’t do enough DPS to stop the cactus from going perpetually invulnerable. The same holds true for the raid. I personally find this type of mechanic discouraging even though it has never held me back and usually plays to my advantage.

    In terms of addressing Aelen’s comments on the fact that DPS should be rewarded not penalized, percentage-based adds don’t incentivize poor performance or lower dps. The group doing 1 million DPS is going to get through the mission twice as fast as the group doing 500k DPS. The difference is that for time-based adds the high DPS group didn’t need to contend with nearly as many mobs as the low DPS group, so the disparity between the two isn’t as large.

    Time-based Adds Example: Boss mob has 50 million hp and spawns an add every 30 seconds with 10 million hp
    1 million DPS Group: Total fight time is 60 seconds (30 seconds on boss, 10 seconds on a single add, 20 seconds on boss = win)
    500k DPS Group: Total fight time is 240 seconds (30 seconds on boss, 20 seconds on add, 10 seconds on boss, 20 seconds on add, 10 seconds on boss — repeat for 7 total adds)

    Percentage-based Adds Example: Boss mob with 50 million hp and spawns an add with 10 million hp at 80, 60, 40, 20, 10. All adds must die for boss to die.
    1 million DPS Group: Total fight time is 100 seconds (50 seconds on boss and 10 seconds on each add)
    500k DPS Group: Total fight time is 200 seconds (100 seconds on boss and 20 seconds on each add)

    It’s a really basic example but essentially demonstrates that percentage based not only allows the “tank heavy” or “non-traditional” groups to be succcessful, but also closes the gap between high DPS and low DPS groups.
  7. Absor Developer

    Luckily, we have both those tools at are disposal. Heck, we can even use both at once!
    Axxius, Drogba, IblisTheMage and 2 others like this.
  8. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    But let's just use the percentage based. Seems to be better suited to groups regardless of thier makeup dps intense or not. But that is just an opinion.
  9. Laronk Augur



    Timed adds actually makes things easier for high tier raid guilds and harder for mid tier raid guilds because of raid comp issues in the mid tier it allows for less flexibility in your raid comp.

    In the group game timed is even a bigger issue, if you do pickup groups specially on off hours you end up with sk war bard cleric shaman merc because thats all that is LFG. It's group with these players or go work on solo achievements. Group events like cactii or the ones that the OP listed pretty much have a hard DPS check. It's nice that 8 of the classes are dps classes but that doesn't reflect how groups actually end up being made.
  10. Sancus Augur

    ... And that's a bad thing? It would be pretty messed up to have a mechanic that made the raid harder if you play your class properly.
    Gyurika Godofwar and Daedly like this.
  11. Cicelee Augur

    High end is always complaining about a lack of challenge...

    But I guess I disagree with the whole "do not punish me because I know how to burn and thus trivialize an event" philosophy. If you can burn for 90 seconds and kill a named in 20 seconds and thus bypass the "adds every 30 seconds" feature of the named, then how much worse is it to kill a named and adds at 70 and 30? It takes you an extra 15 seconds to kill those two adds while still burning?

    Percentage adds helps non elite players. It does not necessarily affect elite players. But times adds may cause non elite to fail, while *again* not affecting elite.
  12. Tappin Augur

    Can we please see more of both? That way we are hosed no matter what :D
  13. Natal Augur

    Percentage based adds are much better design than timed adds in group missions, because they make the mission doable by everyone rather than just those that can do X dps. Cactus in RoS and the last wave of the SF mission come to mind as particularly egregious in this respect. If you don't have X dps up front, you might as well not even bother trying those missions because you will not beat them. There is no other way to beat them.

    For those who claim that it penalizes dps classes, you are wrong. There is still an advantage in killing quickly because it reduces the probability of PCs going down to incidental damage. The longer the event runs (in other words, your group has low dps), the greater the chance of losing a tank or running out of mana. Challenge should come in the form of AEs and other disruptive mechanics that provide an incentive to finish as fast as possible, but do not make the event impossible to beat otherwise.

    This really applies to raids as well. So many raid events are dps checks now that guilds pretty much have to focus on stacking dps rather relying on tactics. The same argument applies however …. the longer a raid event runs the higher the chance of losing tanks etc, so there is an incentive to maximize dps even if the event runs off percentages. The problem with these massive dps check raids is that it may be fine for high end guilds that are front loaded with dps classes, but become extremely difficult for mid tier guilds who typically have a more balanced class makeup. They essentially become filters for who can raid and who cannot. If you have a smaller raid force, or a lower dps guild makeup, raids become impossible rather than just harder as a result.
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Caell like this.
  14. Sancus Augur

    Except it does. If damage in EverQuest were perfectly transferable and scripts worked perfectly, it would be fine. But neither of those are true, and it means that past implementations of percent based adds have disproportionately punished guilds and players for playing too well.

    To explain that a bit, since apparently it isn't obvious, damage over time spells account for a substantial portion of the dps of a number of classes. Necros are pretty much entirely reliant on that form of damage, and Druids, Enchanters, Shaman, Beastlords, and Rangers all deal a substantial amount of damage in that way. DoTs can't be turned off on a whim, and they can't just be moved to adds that spawn. That creates a situation where if anyone in your raid playing at an optimal level does too much damage to the boss.

    EoK was a good example of this; we spent most of that expansion yelling at our DoT classes for doing too much DPS. A few examples:

    In the Gorenaire raid, if RoI all burned on the Dragon (which is the only time to really burn given the setup of the event), we could take it to 5% before a single add went active. Then every percent based add goes active at the same time, which isn't controllable. It's quite literally a game of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs waiting for adds to show up so that we don't wipe the raid

    In the Queen raid, we had the same issue. That raid had terrible lag to the point the adds rubberbanded all over the place, and we kept the warcasters out of the raid when they first spawned because of their AE. It was really hard to not spawn multiple waves simultaneously, and again, we were yelling at our DoT classes (and all DPS really) to stop casting spells and sit there.

    Same thing on the Atrebe raid. To unlock the mobs so that they took damage, the correct CC had to be found and then used in the portal room, and then used on the adds. In the time it took for that to happen, we could easily spawn the next wave of adds. At that point, not only do you have twice as many adds, you can't use AE CC because using the wrong bane has negative repercussions for your raid.

    So no, it isn't just a matter of "wuah, I want to burn this dead in 20 seconds." It's much more so that the damage certain classes are capable of doing is flat-out not useful or detrimental with that mechanic. They could add HP locks to prevent the latter, but then a large portion of DoT damage doesn't actually help at all. I have no problem with designing encounters in such a way that suboptimal setups are viable, but that doesn't mean utilizing a mechanic that makes a substantial number of classes show up and go "wow, a large part of my toolkit in no way helps beating this event, so I'm going to have fun standing around and doing nothing."
    Warpeace, Ssdar and gotwar like this.
  15. Natal Augur

    I am kind of glad Kiras brought this up. Having raided since the Velious era in mostly mid tier (and sometimes high tier) guilds, I have seen this trend towards dps checks become more and more of a problem. In the old days you could hang in there by your fingernails and slug it out against the mechanics even if your numbers were low or your class makeup was sub-optimal. There are not many raids nowdays where that is possible. These sorts of checks might be fine for high tier guilds, but they are raiding killers for the mid tier guilds who usually have to make do with smaller raid forces and less optimal class makeups.

    If you look at the sorts of raids which bring mid tier guilds to a grinding halt, it is almost always those that have timed adds. What happens is that the raid does not have enough dps to kill the wave before the next wave spawns, or at least with enough of a window to do damage to the boss, and consequently it becomes impossible for them to beat the event no matter what they do.

    It is really unfortunate when these negative design principles are introduced to the group game simply because the missions are scaled back versions of the raids. In both cases they become dps bottlenecks to the detriment of everything else.
  16. Natal Augur



    Your problem would be solvable by locking the bosses hp when adds are up. That is a trivial design issue to deal with.

    If your dps is so high on the queen raid that you are spawning multiple waves at once, then you have a really extreme set up. The game should not be designed to cater to really extreme setups, it should be designed to cater to setups that normal groups/raids have.

    How about having your dps classes on the adds rather than queen if that is your issue? It is a problem of your own making. In a percentage based model if you are spawning multiple waves together it is an issue of poor management on the guild/groups part, not a design issue.
  17. gotwar Gotcharms

    This. All of this.

    Edit:

    Please, no HP locks are even worse.There's nothing less fun than standing around waiting for things to happen because a script is firing and the boss is invulnerable. Prince raid would be the most egregious example in recent memory, but there are others.

    In the Queen example, you're physically unable to DPS the adds because, thanks to server lag and bad pathing, it can take upwards of 30-60 seconds for them to even be in range for DPS to hit (or even able to be damaged).

    On a similar token, on FV we've had the Cactus go from 100-49% without spawning a single add wave, then spawning 3 HP-based add waves at the exact same time.

    We're not going to slow our DPS down because the server/script/whatever is lagging/misfiring/badly implemented, forcing half our raid force to go AFK while everything catches up.

    In a perfect world where every script fires on time, lag doesn't exist, and we're playing on a platform that isn't 20 years old, sure go for the HP-based adds. There are better ways to make raids doable by mid-tier guilds without punishing raid forces who excel at DPS.
  18. Sancus Augur

    I think you may need to re-read my post, my point was exactly that some (actually a fairly large portion) of damage isn't instantly transferrable to adds.

    The bottom line is if there are multiple classes in the game who have a substantial amount of their toolkit dedicated to damage that doesn't function on adds, doing damage that doesn't function on adds (i.e. to the boss) should still be useful.

    If you lock the HP while the adds are up, a Necro sustaining 400k DPS might only be contributing half that while the boss is actually damageable. That substantially diminishes their value on a raid compared to a class that can deal damage indiscriminately and also sustain 400k DPS. It's better than having their DPS spawn extra adds and kill the raid, but it's still a poor mechanic if used with any degree of frequency.
  19. Morthakia Augur

    Not a problem. Just replace your DoT classes with a more optimal makeup of Rogues/Monks/Zerkers whose toolkits are a better fit for the raid environment. Afterall, isn’t that what is being asked of the smaller guilds who can’t meet the DPS checks on timed adds because they have too many Tanks/Healers whose toolkits aren’t being fully utilized?
    Natal likes this.
  20. josh Augur

    I didn't read all the replies in this thread but i would like to throw in my support for the title. Time based adds are too common, every raid these days is, have enough dps or , it's irritating.