Caster quest/farm efficency.

[Silosobi]

Dude, summoning mobs exist in game to shove thumbs in casters eyes. So you get to listen to asshats tell you how they were soloing them in tier 3, and how come haven't you finished that quest, why do you have to be carried through all this content, and wow never noticed this stuff summons.

As, all the other classes are trivially wrecking it.

Vell has some crazy and off-kilter rants. Some of them make no sense, but this one is pretty spot on for how I have felt for a long time.

A lot of this game is based around questing, or farming. Both of these are generally boring, so they are often done alone. Any meele/caster can box and be 10x more efficent/effective than a caster would be. Casters end up unable to complete many quests, and their meele/healer counterparts that were able to duo all of that content are often not so inclined to help, since after all they did it on their own w/o help.

This is not a "this game sucks" post. We have a truely amazing dev team, who have created an amazing game. I give this feedback because I care about the game and would like to see it improve.

I don't know the complete and final fix to this, but the best suggestion I can make would be to vastly reduce the number of summoning mobs. Outside of raid situations, I don't think many mobs need to summon. A solo caster really cant exp at a rate anywhere near close to a group, and often they will still be slower than the healer/meele duo even vs non summoning mobs. Trying to kite in the tight cooridors of dungeons provides its own challenge, and I really think that summoning could be removed from 99% of exp mobs and it would not pose any balance problem(you may need an occasional summoner to prevent abuse of insidious infection)

Obviously this is a pretty daunting task, and it is merely my opinion not to be taken as anything more than that.

 

[stral]

I'm under the assumption that summoning mobs were originally created as a way to keep people from duo'ing or soloing things, where group play was wanted. That said, the disconnect between what you can do with all your hard earned raid gear is huge between int casters and melee/healers. Here's another approach to what you're addressing:

-Get a rough average of max mana for casters associated with each tier.
-Decide roughly what tier each (exp)zone is intended for.
-Decide how many tiers ahead of the intended tier is considered op enough to deserve a mob to not summon.
-Set up a default mana value for each zone, which applies to all mobs in that zone, to check against.
-Work in that check prior to a mob calling the summon, making sure the character isn't too op to deserve to be summoned
-Work out kinks and exceptions as they emerge

So if you're tier 99, and you're soloing a t0 mob that happens to summon, it's going to check and see you're vastly overtier for it to be summoning you. Keeps what I would assume is the intended purpose of summoning intact, but also evens the playing field as far as class capabilities (ie an overtier melee/healer can kill a thing, and doing this would allow an overtier int caster duo to kill a thing).

tldr: I don't see this ever happening, but it's a solo thread so I felt like brainstorming ideas.

 

[Boehm]

The disconnect is that melee/healer dps and global mitigation scale in proportion to gear, and int caster global mitigation doesn't scale at all. This is a vendor design choice and it can't be changed as its designed into the client. Giving caster's shields with huge ac might help, but i doubt that is going to happen.

 

[Shouki]

Everyone could just box Grupo more.

 

[Shouki]

I don't have any pure caster chars, but I do think casters should get a more balanced opportunity to solo.

 

[Rorne]

Summoning definitely is overused. Removing it from stuff like the non-skeletal undead frogs in the Murk would not diminish the game in any way, in my opinion at least.

 

[neonovas]

not to take away from how much worse this is for casters, but even boxing a bst/dru summoning mobs could be get more frustrating (breaking a cast, trying to move away from ramp, messing with rooting/kiting an add, etc) than doing it with a tank (or some other melee that didnt have their agro/dmg split with a pet). Down with excessive summoning mobs!

 

[vistachiri]

Summoning definitely is overused.

This. Many many times this. That was one of my more frequent rant topics. Everything summoning is just straight up boring. Well over half of the most fun times in this game could probably be boiled down to "so then someone fucked up, so I've got like 8 things rooted, and ...etc, etc, etc."

 

[luciferblack]

Voicing my support for this. Summoning makes sense if you talk exceptionally powerful magic creatures... gods and such. Any other time I always thought it was just plain goofy and terrible duct tape that the original game creators came up with instead of a better solution.

 

[booster]

This. Many many times this. That was one of my more frequent rant topics. Everything summoning is just straight up boring. Well over half of the most fun times in this game could probably be boiled down to "so then someone fucked up, so I've got like 8 things rooted, and ...etc, etc, etc."

agree

root cc is so underused. nobody gets to be a hero any more.

 

[Zapple]

I agree. Unless you have a class that can take the hits, trying to solo/duo farm quests is a big pain in the ass. Summon was (in the original EQ) and is still is here way overused.

When I try to duo things where summoning mobs are involved I have to pray I can root adds (or that they aren't immune to it) before they take enough damage from my pet's innate damage shield to summon, or it's likely all over for me because neither of my characters can really take hits, and the relic mage pet is a pretty poor tank for more than 1-2 mobs worth ~6-8k group exp due to its poor mitigation.

 

[Silosobi]

I think a large part of the problem here is that somewhere in the code mobs are made to automatically start summoning when they are set to a certain level or above. This means that devs have to go in and intentionally remove the mechanic, which I assume is a fairly tedious process when dealing with a zone with dozens of different mobs. Also, in some cases devs may have not even intended or cared that a mob summons, they just happened to be above the magic level and thus they summon.

If it was possible to raise or remove that level, that would be awesome.

It would be cool to see some non standard group setups, and I really don't foresee this being that abusable or hugely changing the game.

What a caster can solo is limited by their mana pool. I think if one were to go through the a tiers and see what a tier x meele healer combo can handle verses a solo caster of the same tier, it would vary from zone to zone and across the tiers, but it would be kinda similar.

As a caster its kind of depressing to not be capable of doing many of the quests that all your friends duo'd with ease. Ive done the wiz/pally thing, and the wiz/end thing, and wiz/dru. They work to varying degrees, but never nearly as well as a traditional setup does. I waited until t12-13ish to be able to handle a ton of quest content on a wiz/pal that most people I knew were doing at t6.

I really do believe this would be a positive change for the game, how practical it would be to implement is another question.

 

[stral]

I think a large part of the problem here is that somewhere in the code mobs are made to automatically start summoning when they are set to a certain level or above. This means that devs have to go in and intentionally remove the mechanic, which I assume is a fairly tedious process when dealing with a zone with dozens of different mobs. .

Yea, you would have to go in for every mob that summons that you don't want summoning and drop its level manually. Alternatively you change how summon works to not be level based (levels also relate to charm among other things, so there are reasons you wouldn't want to go dropping levels) and then go change every mob to fit your new found definition of how summon works, or you change the level they summon at, in which case I'm sure there were a lot of mobs that were intentionally set at that level -to- start summoning.

That's why I'm thinking dropping a global variable for each zone, which automatically gets applied to every mob in that zone unless you specify a specific mob with a different number, and checking that against the characters max mana (or whatever your dertermining characteristic is) would be easier. Then all you have to do is modify how summon is called, making it check against that number.

The most time consuming process would probably be figuring out what mobs you DO want summoning always. Getting mana numbers is as difficult as calling out for guilds to drop an excel doc of their roster with their class/hp/ac/mana and tier if they want the change to come (and I think most would), and then whip up some averages. The ac/hp and etc are in there to play with class specifics: if you wanted to make it check if you're a bst for example, and balance it accordingly. That would also supply numbers for any future changes that might want to use a similar methodology (discussions of different approaches to -end the ringers- come to mind, where numbers like that would be extremely handy).


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edit: actually, you could probably just create an exemption clause for summon, and make it pretty easy to make a mob not summon.

 

[Silosobi]

I dont personally like the specific zone vs a players gear thing because it would require very careful balance to do right and take a ton of time/effort as well.

I think if all non-raid mobs were made to not summon, mob hp vs caster mana would naturally dictate what is or isnt possible. I really think there are very few mobs that really need to summon outside of raids, so those select mobs could be individually flagged as summoned on a case by case basis.

 

[Goldfolk]

Agree 100% with this thread, a further option is to make higher end casters somewhat less squishy but obviously not so robust as say rogue

 

[oozu1234]

don't get me wrong i agree with this post 100%. i've been in an "All caster group" in the past like say when 2 mages an ench 2 necros and a druid got together in say EW orcs and just had at it with kiting them all around.

The only real problem i see is where do you cross the line? i saw someone posted FR as one of the zones that should have Summoning remove and i agree up to the beggining Sivyanian's. but if you took it off say the Bloodfires... whats going to stop Solosolki, tarutao and 4 other wizards all going down there and casting 1 spell at the same time and bam the monster is dead?

 

[vistachiri]

whats going to stop Solosolki, tarutao and 4 other wizards all going down there and casting 1 spell at the same time and bam the monster is dead?

Other than just a generic, well they're casters that's why! I fail to see why that would be a problem. Also I fail to see how that situation would be any different, seeing as how if the monster was dead in one barrage it wouldn't be summoning anyways.

 

[oozu1234]

Other than just a generic, well they're casters that's why! I fail to see why that would be a problem. Also I fail to see how that situation would be any different, seeing as how if the monster was dead in one barrage it wouldn't be summoning anyways.

I thought about that after i posted it lol and the only thing i can think of is on multi pulls is a. they try to root it and it summons someone continuously or b. it runs rampant and murders everyone. only way to balance something like that out i guess would be to remove summon and add root immunity (if its not already there) but then you'd be back at square one anyways. \

But i mean really most non dungeon places unless its 65+ content dont summon anyways. Dungeons were made for a band of adventurers to go and kill things, not gandalf the wizard to go and slay all by himself.

 

[Boehm]

yeah, you certainly never see melee and healers duoing that stuff. it would just be terrible if a caster managed it.

 

[stral]

But i mean really most non dungeon places unless its 65+ content dont summon anyways. Dungeons were made for a band of adventurers to go and kill things, not gandalf the wizard to go and slay all by himself.

Dig around the forums for why summoning is the way it is, and you too will join the 'end summoning outside of raids altogether' movement. I thought there had to be some very sound justification for it. There really isn't.