The big problem that I see is a clear detachment between the developers and the raiders. And if the developers change what to us is the basic state of the game, it's no longer the game we love. Now I very much understand that VG "wasn't working" as an MMO and changes have to be made. But I believe these changes that were suggested will not bring in new players, nor add in the challenge that many of us crave. I'm afraid that this change isn't going to do much other than annoy and irritate the people that have stuck with the game without bringing in the necessary new blood to keep the game going. For example: This makes no sense when one considers the actual state of the game right now. No one raids without getting diplos unless the raid strips said diplos (Tharridon, Alagan, POTA). You do not have to be a diplomat to *get* diplo buffs. So saying 'that part of the game that doesn't appeal to them' doesn't make any sense. And when raiders put up diplos, it benefits the entire game's community, that they can go to the cities to get some boosts for their own daily questing. If they try to balance raids by removing all diplos, then no one is going to put up diplos. It's going to be yet another grand change to the game that causes players to simply and completely stop using something that many of us enjoy as part of Vanguard. Raid zerging makes no sense to those of us that raid in that I don't think any guild ever uses "zerg" as a raid strategy. If anyone is "zerging" a raid, it means that they're just trying to recover where they failed - and in this game that rarely, rarely ever works. Zerging is by itself a pain and unlikely to succeed. So I don't even know why this is a point of contention (Other than where they've placed the latest *latest* raid mob.) In other words, most of us that are raiders see this as making zero sense in the practical application of the game currently. To everyone else, it may seem like a reasonable solution - a solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist. I think it's safe to say that many of us are glad the developers are giving this game attention. The reason that the raiders are in an uproar about this is that it's killing our fun without giving a reasonable substitute, or reasonable justification. And that's the problem with it.
Just a reminder for the discussion--the proposed system changes to prevent release zerging is not necessarily to address a plethora of existing raid mobs. Instead, this will allow us to place raid mobs in more places, without being restricted by alter locations. The select raid mobs which do exist and are susceptible to this will also benefit from having goofy anti-zerging mechanics safely being removed. Moreover, keep in mind that for those who raid, releasing once during a raid will show you no difference than the current system, so not all raid releasing is being punished in the proposed changes. In fact, in the proposed changes you could release several times during a single raid encounter and not be affected by the changes. If you are releasing once every five minutes, you will never exceed 10%. This means that the system is forgiving to players who just need a single release to help them get back in the fight without taking the time away from a player to resurrect them. If you release once--no big deal. If you release more than once in a five minute period, that's release zerging. I say this to point out how little the average and honest raider is affected by this. In fact, the average raider only receives benefits from the resurrection changes and sees very little of the negative effects of raid releasing, because they still can do it once every five minutes without seeing any change in penalty. The team is interested in is if resurrections need to be more flexible and/or powerful, and if so, how that could happen. Could more of them be made to work in combat? Could certain ones have lower refresh timers? Could they return you to life with more health/mana/endurance? You players get a lot more time playing the game than we do, so we know your opinions are a huge help, especially when presented as objectively and well thought out as possible.
A good place to start would be to lower the cast time of Bloomage and Shaman's combat rez to be more in line with the others. Currently it's liek 10seconds whereas a disciple's is like 2. No shaman on BM actually main healing someone can afford 10s to sit there and look like an idiot while the tank dies and your spell cast gets pushed back like 10 times.
This I completely disagree with.. ever Die on a karax fight? be a squishy class and die.. you get rez'd back and if you live through the AOE for the first couple seconds, there is no guarentee that due to the rez effects that any healer is going to be able to keep you standing.. do this as a single character 2-3x in 5 minutes.. and thats Zerging?.. No... in my opinion its not.. Zerging would be.. more like half or more of the raid keeps repeatedly dying, releasing running back in, living for 20 seconds to do dmg, rinse and repeat.. , but maybe we have different definitions of "Zerging" Even moving forward.. I'm still not seeing why this is even felt to be an issue.. If you are worrying about players using some sort of tactic when you make an encounter and then suggesting making changes to the way the game works to try to compensate for it.. maybe your worrying a little bit to much about a specific tactic?... and yes.. Zerging can be considered a "tactic", maybe not the best one, or the one with the most style, grace, etc.. but It is still a tactic... Regardless of what you do, players will find a way around it.. where there is a will, there is a way..
Hate quoting myself, but let me elaborate on this. The idea is twofold not only to reduce the zerging that is trying to be addressed, but to put some form of calculated strategy into combat rezzing. By making the buffs disperse on release rather than on death it allows a person rezzed to retain their buffs. How many times in the heat of battle do all the healers stop healing and start buffing someone who has been rezzed. By allowing someone to keep their buffs upon being rezzed you allow players to arise still fully raid buffed, which helps alleviate the rez sickness affect to some degree. It also doesn't slow the raid down by people having to go back and track down civies if they die (where applicable) because they still have them. Right there you have a very solid reason to not release, but to wait for a rez either in combat or after the fight. This also puts a decision upon a raids healers. During the battle when someone goes down the question will be asked how badly does the raid need this person back in the fight. That already exists, but being able to rez someone with full buffs will turn some non rez situations into rez situations simply because the rezzed person fully buffed is doing significantly more damage with lesser risk of immediately dying again than someone rezzed with sickness and no buffs. Perhaps rez rotations will be formed so that 3 healers aren't all trying to rez the same person at the same time. Again this part exists currently as the battle rez choice has to be made, but no's could turn to yesses. The rez sickness timer is being used to entice a battle rez over an out of combat rez, and an out of combat rez over a full out release. Maybe the timers for raiding instead of as listed above could be 10 minutes for release, 5 minutes for out of combat rez, and 1 minute for in combat rez. Really the times I am suggesting are just arbitrary the point is to entice battle rezzing over out of combat rezzing over releasing in a raid situation. The refresh on battle rezzes could be looked at as well, but I understand you may not want it so short that there is no choice to be made rather you just do it because it becomes so beneficially obvious to do so. Sometimes battle rezzes are held back for main tanks or if a cc person goes down that will be required later in the encounter for its success.
if this is really your biggest concern, get rid of the rez gems and lower the cast time of battle rezz on some of the healers. this conversation just seems like a transformation of the tombstone mechanic the dev team wanted to put in last year.
You have to be careful with this, otherwise you're going to make the cleric shield epic worthless. Which, I might add, needs a reduction in cooldown. 1hr for an epic rez is far, far too long.
For me i am not worried about death penalties, If i die oh well, one thing that is lame though is things like the 15 minute timer on Runes of Health and 1 hour timer on the Book of Ancient Ro. Nothing more annoying than going into a fight (especially tharridon) and getting wrecked right away.
If this is such a big deal find a way to code the raid mob to enrage if it kills enough people and leave resurrection stuff alone.If some new raid mob manages to kill blow or register death of 24 raiders it doubles its damage output or something. You would have to code it well of course no buggness and lag issues would have to be totally fixed.Oh and stuff like Monk/disc fd and succor or necro fd would have to be excused in such coding. Overall though this is totally waste of dev time and effort until lag issues are fixed.It doesnt matter how good a raid is at killing an existing encounter in vanguard if the server decides to lag out for 10 seconds or longer which it does regularly deaths happen. Also think devs and raiders have difference of opinion about what is classed as zerg raiding.If your talking 5 people alive on the raid mob and 19 people swooping in after release repeadly ok.this is zerging but highly impractical in vanguard raiding. If some squishy whos at limit of gear & buffs is dying from overpowered aoe or some melee who has to be near excessively hard hitting raid mob releases 2 or 3 times that isnt zerging. Also what happens in a raid encounter when your healer ctd or tank leaving chaos on multiple people if they return to the encounter after death would this be considered zerging or merely an attempt to rescue situation? Truth be told Tharridon and Alagan plus CoB has proven one thing very clear before content EVERY dev should be working on fixing lag and as easy as changing resurrection is doing so before this major lag is solved is both unwise and reckless.
Apaelias hits the nail on the head. As a shaman, the raid leaders will often ask me not to rez because my cast is so long.
I dont mind the change really makes little difference I think. I try not to die at all and if I do not more than once. I think fixing up rezz cast time is a good idea. I think the problem most have with this is the fact that there are such bigger issues. While maybe not looking at the fact you are trying to make pushing out new content faster by fixing some issues that are harder to deal with. Then to top if off we hard heard little from devs in the past few weeks and we get something that the player base sees as little or no progress or something they cant see as an issue. I for one would love update on net code changes. As lag, chunk deaths, and other such problems are an issues with me every day once more more a day. And issues with raid mobs are once a week or so. So I think the negativity here comes more from lack of information on other fronts and not the idea it self so much. Its like having you car in the shop for a problem with the engine and they call you telling you they need to touch up the paint a week later. I don't care about the paint what the deal with my engine.
Since the conversation died down a bit, I wanted to ask something that seems to be the biggest bit of contention so far, which is the consistency of releasing to be considered zerging. Karii, you disagreed that more than once every five minutes was too often. And Ghostchild, you commented that if you only release that consistently, you'll be benching the next raid. There seems to be an issue with being restricted on how much you can come back to life in a given time span. What I want to point out is that there shouldn't be that restriction in coming back to life, so long as the right method is being used. Currently, the best method of coming back to life is releasing. That isn't how it should be. To help clarify, the reason why releasing isn't the preferred method of actively coming back to life during a fight is because releasing is intended to be a resignation from battle. Active combat resurrections are intended to be "down-but-not-outs" and "put me back in, coach!" If active resurrection abilities were made to be able to be used more frequently and with lower cast times (although, not to trivialize epics), would that be sufficient to replace releasing as a method of active resurrection. This means you can die and resurrect just fine as often as you need (and only accrue up to 25% DP!). Raiding will change a little bit, where there is more resurrection happening and less releasing, which is the preferred method of play. What I'm saying is that coming back to life once every 20 seconds through active resurrection isn't zerging. However, releasing more consistently than once every five minutes is zerging, due to the nature and intent of releasing. Karii and Ghostchild, given changes to how resurrection abilities currently are, is this something you could agree with?
My question is.. Why does it matter if someone resurrects me back into battle, or if I release and fly/run back into the fight? Either way I am getting 'back into the fight'. Why try to limit or penalize the me (the player) for which they choose to do? either way i have 'resigned from battle' by dying. How I as a player choose to go about getting back into the fight shouldn't matter. So what happens if I release and then get resurrected back into battle? which is going to affect me.. I took a combat rez, but I also released to get buffs? So if I release Personally, I still think that this should be left alone as it is.. and that development time or even encounter mechanic's should not be changed or added to deal with a 'tactic' that actually isn't even used currently in Vanguard. To try to prevent players from using a tactic in the future? If you are going to try to implement things or change the way the game works to compensate for different tactics that players come up with that do not fit the 'developers' way of thinking that it should be done, you will forever be chasing the end of the rainbow.. So getting a rez back into combat every 20 seconds isn't zerging, but releasing and flying back every 20 seconds is? I fail to see much of a difference?
TLoch it seems that you give great importance to the concept of res'd over releasing. I think that it'd be beneficial in this case to consider the idea of substance over form. You guys have implemented rifts across the map and now given everyone 200 speed flying mounts either from the shop or from lockboxes... At this point, you could put the bind stone 2km away in the next chunk and I'll still be back in that fight within a minute if I choose to "zerg". Its too late to worry about the type of death, overland death is meaningless. Releasing is no longer "giving up". Whether I release, or res, I still end up back in the fight and I still end up weaker. I highly doubt that many players care particularly about what each method symbolises. Also, death does often = instant release because you have time to hop across a couple of rifts for new civics before you are res'd from your tombstone. Releasing, these days, is a form of re-buffing. All this talk about changing the mechanics... it's just focusing attention on something that players just don't seem to care about... Also, where are you getting your information on players zerging overlands? I personally have no experience of zerging overlands. none. I don't know anyone who does... If you want to prevent this zerging, as you describe it, just add an Enrage to the mob (as was already suggested) so that after x minutes or x player deaths = +100% damage and raid wiped. Win. No more Zerging all of those overlands...
Yeah I mean you sell this 'big world' but I feel like I can get from LA to London if you will in 3 seconds... a little consistency please... "come explore this big world!" REALLY FAST.... The reason no one is talking is because no one is trying to hear anything that doesn't begin with "end of lag", "release of expansion without bugs", "were not going to reinvent the game you have stood by for 6 years", like you are doing right now. Just stop it. You have the support of what, 5 posters? Some more productive please. I still can't make a trade in game without it effecting he other character. Fix that.
If you want players to want to Battle rez why are you penalizing them then with Rez sickness? I always figured taking the healer away from the rest of the group and risking everyone elses' lives to bring you back was a pretty big risk, especially if you died in a raid/difficult fight. Most likely due to AEs, or stealing aggro. Meaning the healer is probably already on his toes. I know if I'm going to rez someone in combat, I want to make sure I have the time, and sometimes, that only comes up for a brief moment, and deciding on whether to risk it or not is part of the choice. On top of it they lose all their buffs. And let's not forget you come back without full HP/Endur/Energy risking the chance of getting smacked upon rezzing and dying again. Getting battle rezzed (or even just rezzed) with no rez sickness, and in other words not being gimped 5-10% for 5 min, sounds like a great incentive. Allowing the raid or group to move on. If you need incentive from battle rez > regular rez, I liked the idea of keeping all your buffs. That would definitely make people choose who they spend time on rezzing in battle. Make it so battle rez is short enough to want to use it and itll help the group benefit, but have the reuse timer long enough to not be using it more than once in combat, or every fight. If someone releases, they usually end up going around grabbing civs anyways. This right here can take upwards of 5 minutes. That right there prevents most zerging. If you were to implement the Civ idea presented by Graye, on top of putting new raid targets near altars or w/e the future might hold, I can maybe see people trying to zerg something, but the penalty itself (even the original one) was/is more than enough to prevent almost all possible zerging, unless the mob was first tier raiding, from an end raid guild. Which means they're either slacking or goofing off.
