Furious makes me furious

[Jakkal]

After thinking about some of the people posting about 51+ content I got to thinking.

About how much I hate Furious.

I think Furious has it's place, like on mobs like guar or other important boss mobs. Putting it on every mob in KDQ was obnoxious. For those not familiar, around 20% pretty much any 50+ 4-6dot mob might go furious. By 'might' I mean, will go furious except for a few rare occasions. The furious buff on the mob made it so that it would riposte melee attacks, and ignore spells. And also somehow it would catch ranger arrows and throw it back at them, even if they don't have hands.

I think Silius thought it would amusing to put furious on every mob in KDQ because people were prone to falling asleep during the endless grinding, and thus, it would kill the meleers that don't pay attention.

The worst part is, if you waited for the buff icon to show up in their buff bar, you were already dead, cuz it would go furious before that showed up and one's own auto attack could easily kill a meleer.

I just really hated everything about the furious mechanic and I would love to see it go away for all time.

[Kilsin]

Yeah as a fellow main Rogue I completely agree, limiting it to several Raid mobs is fine but KDQ/SoD and some random mobs over 51 just plain sucked.

[John Adams]

How about if Furious was actually balanced better, to be challenging and not stupid? I can kinda see how a mob might know it's about to die and that adrenaline kicks in and it takes one last attempt to beat you back. But, making it be a little more random and less offensive to the senses.

Is it possible to keep Furious where it won't make you furious?

[Jakkal]

The mechanic as-is forces meleers to stare at their chat window while fighting mobs, which I found to be very annoying. By the time you realized the mob was furious, it was too late, it onyl takes like 2 or 3 auto attacks and furious will kill you.

I think if you made furious randomly show up, it would make it even worse, because as it was on live, we would only have to check around 20%. Having it happen at any point, means we'd be staring at the chat window the entire time.

If it worked for melee like it does for casters - in that your attacks basically do no damage, it might work. But it always felt as something tacked on just to make the grind take that much longer. You can't just kill the mob, you ahve to wait for it to unfurious.

Having it lash out and hit the tanks really hard might be a good alternative, but that really just punishes tanks and healers I think. Unless you seriously need to ramp up the DPS before it kills the tank. Then it might be more fun.

Also, it would be great if auto-attack didn't trigger it. That was the worst part. I could control button mashing, but the auto attack triggering it pretty much guaranteed you were dead if you didn't stop as soon as the chat message flashed up.

[Kilsin]

Yeah it kind of takes you away from the emergent gameplay and makes you stare at your combat chat or whatever chat tab you had it assigned too to watch for it because you knew that with lag and ping issues watching for it visually would result in you dying 9/0 times.

It was to slow us down and stop us burning through everything because we were too powerful by that stage and we were blazing through content as soon a they released it, so with SoD came furious and a ridiculous faction gain of 1 per named mob and 0 for trash, until it changed and became a lot easier later on.

If we address the power issue and itemisation, it will literally fix a dozen other issues like furious, exploits, lack of content etc.

[John Adams]

Gotcha. Perhaps "random" was the wrong word. I meant simply make it "random" at the expected time, meaning it wouldn't happen as often. I am now having a memory actually of APW when our raid leader would spam "STOP ATTACKING" and everyone just stood there for a moment while we debuffed the boss. Maybe that's what you're talking about?

Either way, let me add this before I continue: If "FURIOUS" was simply something added later in the game to annoy players, and was not an inherent feature of the "strat" then I can see us doing away with it. However, see below

[quote="Jakkal"]If it worked for melee like it does for casters - in that your attacks basically do no damage, it might work. [/quote]
[quote="Jakkal"]Having it lash out and hit the tanks really hard might be a good alternative, but that really just punishes tanks and healers I think. Unless you seriously need to ramp up the DPS before it kills the tank. Then it might be more fun.[/quote]
This has me thinking; what if OUR furious simply behaved differently? Talking tactical concepts, the bosses have to have something you don't, or they are not Bosses right? I totally agree, yard trash doesn't need to be Furious (ie, everything in the stinkin zone). But (imo) there needs to be a little more "strat" involved in taking down a big boss. But let's certainly discuss that. Just spit-ballin here

What if the mobs riposte was 100% during it's 30s Furious time? Meaning, it takes no damage from you, but does return some of that damage back causing the player to pay attention instead of hitting /autoattack and going to nuke a Hot Pocket?

Did VG Bosses complete-heal? Not talking regen, but at some point they say "screw this, I'm playing my LoH"? What I'm thinking is if we get rid of some annoying strat, we'll have to replace it with something equally as annoying j/k

I believe there was some encounter (General Vicus?) where everyone had to get behind the boss during a specific effect, lest the paper dolls died.

What I'm getting at is, let me keep Furious, but you tell me (brilliant raid leaders) what would be a more acceptable manner to implement such a thing - that still resembles the namesake of "I'm going to get all FURIOUS on yo azzes".


Btw, in the bottom line, I'd be okay with nerfing it out completely... but it would be more challenging to come up with something fun to replace it.

[John Adams]

Oh, and my last thought after the fact. Didn't EQ (the 1st everquest) have all sorts of rages for their bosses? I forget the terms, but I thought FLURRY or FRENZY was a couple. Not sure if FURIOUS was.

I'm asking that you take the definition of the term and come up with something that applies. Or if you simply hate it that much, we don't have to talk about it at all

[Jakkal]

Furious is fine for boss encounters. For things like Guar and a some other bosses, it's a "you need to pay attention!" check. The problem is that they put it on every single trash mob in KDQ and several 51+ trash mobs around the rest of the world. It becomes a tormenting waste of about 20 seconds, which I realize doesn't sound like much, but when you needed to kill thousands, literally thousands, of mobs in KDQ for the POTA grind, it becomes very, very obnoxious, second only to the Scrappy the Coolest named kill dance.

My request is to just get rid of it on trash mobs and leave it on bosses/named mobs.

[Kilsin]

Jakkal is spot on, it was only ever a mechanic on some boss fights but it spread to nearly every single mob over level 51 to slow us down.

Reversing that and putting back onto a few boss mobs that it was appropriate for is definitely fine with me. I would add it to any new one though, it was balanced quite finely for a lot of the raid mobs, especially for Dps burn type fights but APW only ever had a few and those were mainly mechanic that stops you doing damage because it would piss the boss off or buff it or depending on the damage type, kill you group/raid, not because of furious

[John Adams]

[quote="Jakkal"]My request is to just get rid of it on trash mobs and leave it on bosses/named mobs.[/quote]
Oh.

Then, you got it

My bad, I thought the request was to nuke it completely. Which we could have done as well, but I enjoy tormenting players almost as much as SOE, hence the push back