Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

PvE is stale as its just 1 mob at a time or perhaps 2 or 3.

I would love to see places where you have to fight a large group at the same time of lets say 10 mobs with a mage or cleric in there.
Like that group of stone Giants at the fire mountain more encounters like that would be great even for low levels.
Encounters like that promote group play and rp as you and your party may need to talk about what to do before you run in guns blazing.

Also the way BG is set up with the endless loops you wil run in maps fighting a 1 or 2 perhaps 3 monsters at a time is meh.
Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

Face wrote:Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

Agreed! It's weird walking down the Lion's Way right now for example. Gotta dance around those flying boulders... And it feels grindy to cut one down after another. But this doesn't say anything about difficulty level in itself, except if those fewer encounters were more difficult ^^

(( So uhm apologies for semi-hijacking? ))

Also you mundane scrubs are just jelly. *Puts on wizard hat and flies away on a broomstick*

Face wrote:PvE is stale as its just 1 mob at a time or perhaps 2 or 3.

I would love to see places where you have to fight a large group at the same time of lets say 10 mobs with a mage or cleric in there.
Like that group of stone Giants at the fire mountain more encounters like that would be great even for low levels.
Encounters like that promote group play and rp as you and your party may need to talk about what to do before you run in guns blazing.

Also the way BG is set up with the endless loops you wil run in maps fighting a 1 or 2 perhaps 3 monsters at a time is meh.
Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

Please this. Fighting 3-5 enemies at time is much more fun and allows for mages to be relevant beyond being buffbots.

I'd very much prefer if 5 enemies made up the CR, 1 enemy being very easy to take down if separated.

Hoihe wrote:

Face wrote:PvE is stale as its just 1 mob at a time or perhaps 2 or 3.

I would love to see places where you have to fight a large group at the same time of lets say 10 mobs with a mage or cleric in there.
Like that group of stone Giants at the fire mountain more encounters like that would be great even for low levels.
Encounters like that promote group play and rp as you and your party may need to talk about what to do before you run in guns blazing.

Also the way BG is set up with the endless loops you wil run in maps fighting a 1 or 2 perhaps 3 monsters at a time is meh.
Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

Please this. Fighting 3-5 enemies at time is much more fun and allows for mages to be relevant beyond being buffbots.

I'd very much prefer if 5 enemies made up the CR, 1 enemy being very easy to take down if separated.

Yes

chad878262 wrote:Teleporting away is leaving the area and thus counts as a PvP 'loss' and that player is not supposed to interact with you or come back to the map for 24 hours. Thus returning fully buffed is a breach of PvP rules. If caster doesn't want to pvp without buffing to invulnerability then they should take the PvP out, not cheat by teleporting away and then returning fully buffed to blast the one who dared cross them to smitherines.

That said, why they need to teleport away to buff? Why not ethereal jaunt or just hit you with a bigby or something... Seems odd.

I should clarify this is pre pvp. Basicly you can see it's going to go pvp. But no hostile trigger settings yet. So what is happening is the players are now telephone away. Buffing. Returning and once again starting, pushing or concluding hostile rp. This was not a problem when teleport had an hour cool down.

Face wrote:

Hoihe wrote:

Face wrote:PvE is stale as its just 1 mob at a time or perhaps 2 or 3.

I would love to see places where you have to fight a large group at the same time of lets say 10 mobs with a mage or cleric in there.
Like that group of stone Giants at the fire mountain more encounters like that would be great even for low levels.
Encounters like that promote group play and rp as you and your party may need to talk about what to do before you run in guns blazing.

Also the way BG is set up with the endless loops you wil run in maps fighting a 1 or 2 perhaps 3 monsters at a time is meh.
Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

Please this. Fighting 3-5 enemies at time is much more fun and allows for mages to be relevant beyond being buffbots.

I'd very much prefer if 5 enemies made up the CR, 1 enemy being very easy to take down if separated.

Yes

All of this and more.

It would make fighter cleave ability more fun and group fighting skills. Ability not to be flanked would be actually useful.

It would be wonderful to see mobs be a mob. 3 to 6 monsters with classes. Fighter, rogue, wizard, bard, cleric.

How you approach will matter greatly.

If you get beat? Party up.

Pimple wrote: Also you mundane scrubs are just jelly. *Puts on wizard hat dapper sorcerer outfit and flies away on a broomstick*

+1, amended

Honestly i would have to agree larger number groups of enemies are more fun. Its why xvarts is so popular. Lots of fast group spawns so everyone can join in. Yet not too insane that a powerbuild cant solo. It creates opportunities for people to group and get to know each other.

Another thing id like to see is perhaps more low level quests that are not just "kill x and bring me x" but perhaps ones that show people good areas to go and adventure. I feel like i have been running the same maltz quest for 6 years.... maybe starter quest rewards for new chars can be ljke +1 gear or after a chain a set item etc??

New classes and skills are great and all but why not put a little more focus on bringing in new blood and helping people develop roots here.

I quite like the way Sigil handles its monster spawns. Not only can you set the difficulty (4 levels,: easy, normal, hard, epic) which in itself spawns progressively more difficult groups of creatures in a given area, but the more people in your party, the more monsters spawn in each grouping.

That and they have a dynamic faction system, so when you visit the Abyss and a horde of baatezu teleport in, they will fight both you and the tanar'ri! Makes some areas really interesting to adventure through.

In my opinion, this never ending discussion about sever balancing has different causes.

1) Player types

There are different kinds of players on the server that want to enjoy the game.

Steve wrote:That said, there are plenty of Players out there that just simply don't care. They'll lolz their way through the Game with a FS or a Bard or a dwarf sorcerer or a Earth Genasi rogue. They are the ones probably having the most fun.

I call those "powerbuilders". They wanna be the very best and beat the game is the best possible way. If they struggle to lvl up their new toon, they can simply ask their other powerbuilding friends for help. "Can you help me kill the mightiest demon of the nine hells?" - "Sure. No problem bud." Just like beating a raid boss in a typical MMO. There is nothing wrong about that. However, in some circumstances it leads to wierd RP if confronted with another type of players:

Those who want to get the best out of immersion. They don't care much about character strenght and itemisation. They simply want to play their unique character as realistic as possible and get most of their fun by the RP interaction with their environment/fellow players. They consider bandits as a real thread and don't breeze through a horde of dragons as if they were a piece of cake.

And then there are those in between. They want to enjoy the RP aspect, but also gain some power. They struggle the most. Especially if they watch those powerbuilders and want to be able to do the same. It's almost impossible to get the mechanically strongest character and still be something unique that makes sense RP wise.

It's almost impossible to get all those together. In my opinion, BGTSCC did a good job to provide content for each of those, and the staff is working on improve it even further.

2) What I see as the most gamebreaking issue compared to P&P: Rest timers.

The big gap between casters and non-casters hails from the ability to hit one button, wait for 5 seconds an be all patched up again with a full spellbook. Cause mayhem - rest - repeat. The big advantage of fighters compared to casters is: They don't run out of spells, and don't have to buff up to be viable. In P&P, you will loose a huge amount of time for resting. And leaves you prone to attacks if your out of town. On our server, it's only 5 seconds. But it's hard to balance this issue out. I played on a server that added a few requirements to resting. If you want to rest, you either have to rent/own a room in town, or have some food and a bedroll with you if you are on the road. This way running around in circles and blasting Xvarts for hours will require a bit more preperation.

But in my opinion the rest timers are not a big problem mechanic wise, as long as our current PvP rules are in place.

chad878262 wrote:Teleporting away is leaving the area and thus counts as a PvP 'loss' and that player is not supposed to interact with you or come back to the map for 24 hours. Thus returning fully buffed is a breach of PvP rules. If caster doesn't want to pvp without buffing to invulnerability then they should take the PvP out, not cheat by teleporting away and then returning fully buffed to blast the one who dared cross them to smitherines.

I don't see this as a loss. A loss also causes amnesia, which would mean "Why did I buff up again?". It's more like a new hostile encounter, where new RP outs must be given.

I simply don't care if someone has to rest every 20 mins. I'm good with my fighter only having to rest to debug some stuck feat timers or not working feats. That's my 2 cents about sever balance.

Face wrote:PvE is stale as its just 1 mob at a time or perhaps 2 or 3.

I would love to see places where you have to fight a large group at the same time of lets say 10 mobs with a mage or cleric in there.
Like that group of stone Giants at the fire mountain more encounters like that would be great even for low levels.
Encounters like that promote group play and rp as you and your party may need to talk about what to do before you run in guns blazing.

Also the way BG is set up with the endless loops you wil run in maps fighting a 1 or 2 perhaps 3 monsters at a time is meh.
Personaly i would rather see fewer encounters but simply larger ones.

What happened to the "call for help" script we had some years ago? When you made one mob aggro, the other two nearby would also go after you.

That pack of gnolls near green nest is also good fun for the level range and we need more of that.

Also if you trow a random element in there with lets say 20% chance to have it spawn one out of 5 difrent sort of groups pve would be so mutch more fun.

Im not a code monkey though so i have no qlue if this is a lot of work or even possible?

I think main problem is with 2nd type of player roke42 writes about (RP-ones) it gets super frustrating when you do not have a powerbuild, spend hours getting RP-XP getting what powerbuilder would get while farming in equivalent of 1/5th of the same time, and then you loose it all cause when you suddenly wanted to do some PVE it turned out to be too hard, which with builds people are used to play in PnP can easily happen even in a group if they don't have one strong build to carry it.
Perhaps some solution to divide RP-xp and grind-xp could help a bit? By significantly lowering xp death penalty if majority of what our char did lately was cumulating RP-xp?

I started off the server playing as a pure mage, but switched to an armored caster, and am now what some would consider a power build. (10Wiz/10EK/10DS). As a wizard, I can tell you that nothing was easy leveling up, and I felt useless in groups, until we came to the boss fights. Granted, the highest level I played a pure caster was around 17, so it may be different in epic levels. But I felt I could not grind anything without being completely carried, even with the "infinite fire" feat.

Now, my toon is level 23, and even with this "power build" I am just now beginning to feel like I can grind xp on mobs that are worth it.

However, playing a pure monk for a while, I felt invincible. Once I got my regeneration cloak, I was doing content solo that my wizard couldn't do until several levels later, and even then he needed someone to tank for him.

All in all, I felt very useless as a wizard, and even as a Gish until I got to epic levels. Basically, I was a buff bot, or nothing, until the boss fight. So, from my viewpoint, the server doesn't cater to casters, but to fighter archetypes. They don't need to replenish spells, they can wear armor without taking five feats to cast in it completely, and give them some UMD and they can buff themselves with most of the important wards. (SPiderskin, ima, mirrors, ghostly, bull's, bear's, etc).

So, in retrospect, I guess I'm actually saying that the server caters to UMD.

The rest timers I do not want to get rid of. They add some semblance of sticking to PnP. But, if we wanted casters to be equal to fighters, we'd honestly have to remove the rest timers and allow resting anywhere, in my opinion. But then that would create a HUGE imbalance in favor of people like my Gish.

Fighting more mobs at once is going to ramp up the difficulty you know ...

It's not always possible to party up, there are times in the day where you have no one to party with, not to mention some PCs are loners by RP. What if you play one of those or during those times only ? At the moment there are maps with group encounters (Uldoon's Trail, High Moor south, some spots in serpent hills, Corm Orp ...) as well as maps without. Choose what you prefer.

The server tries to cater to as many people as possible and their situations are extremely varied, ideally everyone should be able to play and enjoy the server, choosing only one style of spawn would achieve the contrary. For example Wolfrayne talks about Xvarts and how popular they are while for me it's an area that should be nuked from orbit with its absolutely unbearable spawn rate.

Perhaps we need a bit more group mobs as those are necessary when you play a blaster, but it's not a great idea to push this spawn system everywhere as it's harder for everyone else : a lone meleer can kill 5 xvarts in 1n1 but he'll die or flee if he faces those same 5 xvarts at once because thats' a lot more attacks to tank.

The server in pve "caters to" (mostly by accident, to be honest) high CL, melee focused casters. Druids, FSes, Clerics, gishes. And bards, of course, but they work a bit differently. They have all the tools and buffs, and they don't run out of damage to kill mobs with. Warlocks with UMD also do very well. Especially in epic levels.

Solo wise. Fighters and rogue types with UMD do fairly well also, in epic levels. Fighters without UMD can do decently solo wise in parts of the server, although I'd bring potions and heal kits. Rogues without UMD are doing it wrong.

In a party, however, nothing beats the fighter and rogue for sheer damage. When they have someone in the party to buff them up, both offensively and defensively, they do better than everyone else. A fighter with full bard inspiration, and greater heroism is so much fun. If you have a defensively built fighter and get some of those nice druid buffs, you're basically unkillable.

So pure casters who depend on offensive spells to do their stuff are on the bottom for soloing. They can summon stuff, but that is extremely slow and the summons stop being useful around level 20 content (except the Gate and Create Greater Undead, that is pretty decent even in epics, but lasts much too short to be dependable). Dominate works fairly well in epic levels, as does shadow simulacrum. The latter has the same problem as Gate, however, lasting short. Dominate still comes with the terrible AI of NWN2, and with how mobs are designed on BG, the dominated creature will still need buffs to not die very fast.

Just going for damage spells or save vs death spells is also not an option for PvE solo. Mobs have high HP and make you run out of spells real fast, and there aren't enough save vs death spells to keep going for very long either. Yeah, you can haste yourself and run around gathering up a lot of mobs and then AoE them down, but a bit of lag and your mirror images are eaten through in a blink of an eye, and then comes all the hits from all the mobs you've gathered, some of which may crit very high indeed.