Meditation Problem

iBluNT

Dalayan Elder
After taking some time off Shards and going to other RPGs, it became very clear that medding was a huge issue in making raiding / grouping a complete bore and seemingly endless. I know it's been looked at in the past such as the 12-man meditation bonus, but I'm not sure that seems to work great, if at all right now.

Recovery on other MMORPGs can take as little as 60-90s for a complete raid to rebuff, full mana, and engage again. On Shards, especially with certain cooldowns and death fatigue, you're looking at a minimum of about 8-10 minutes for a complete recovery.

I'd estimate a raid spends at least 25-40% of the night medding or waiting for mana. Personally it's pretty deterring to even log in and raid knowing it's going to take 3-4x longer than other games.

I don't have many suggestions, but I'd love to see consumables be a bigger part of the game now that we've moved on to more potion-based buffing. I believe it'd take some looking at in order to pull off, but it'd be awesome to see water and food have some sort of benefit similar to WoW that'd speed up meditation.

Kinda sucks to have water and food be such a detriment to be without, but once it's in your bags you just forget it's there. There's already stat food, but it'd be sweet to see water/food with some sort of effect similar to Placid Focus with a short-duration mana/health regen only usable out of combat, and fragile so it goes away once in combat.

If anyone has other suggestions I'd love to hear them, but I think this would be a huge QoL improvement as we try to gain player attention and not make raiding / leveling as big of a timesink as it once was. Being able to clear a raid zone in 1hr compare to 2.5hrs would be massive.
 
Waiting 3 minutes for death fatigue to fade while a healer runs back to raid zone, only to have half their buffs fade during this 10+ minute window is really absurd. Why isn't death fatigue either shorter, or once it fades, you're full mana/stamina? Saying it prevents re-engaging raid monsters before they've healed to full is so 2000 because there are other mechanics for that (ie mobs resetting once everyone's dead or the wisp mechanic like in Silent Halls). So please rethink what exactly is the purpose of death fatigue except wasting time? Because time could be wasted in more exciting ways.
As a mage, I first wait for death fatigue, then memorize and summon pet, have it miss all buffs because I wasn't able to summon it in time, awesome. And then summon stuff to him and other pets. The mage in raids is usually the last one to finish medding if she supplies pets with summonables (besides that cleric that ran to rez), but it's not pleasant for anyone.
 
Potion that can only apply out of combat that gives you 2000 hp/mana per tick. Also fades on combat.
 
#RazadianRestorationTotems

Probably the best addition to any raid zone in the game. Forgot these existed -- it's been a while since I've been in there. This is exactly the type of option I'm looking for.

Between the recent death fatigue change, waiting for cooldowns, waiting for raid mana, or waiting for exhaustive stances to finally break and recover stamina, raid recovery is just unnecessarily long.
 
Not that I play SoD now but I agree with Emzur. I've played a few other mmorpg's (currently ESO) and SoDs down time due to medding and recovery is abysmal at best in comparison.

On ESO if I die mid boss I hit a soulgem, pop back up and in 30seconds I'm back in the fight full magic, sta, hp.
 
So what is the main concern by the designers? People will rejoin a fight after dying?
This can be dealt with in tried and true methods. Some of witch probably could not be done before LUA i would imagine. Right now it is a design choice.
 
So what is the main concern by the designers? People will rejoin a fight after dying?

No. All of the suggestions so far have been out-of-combat solutions and fragile, meaning if you enter combat, whatever effect you have on you breaks. We're not trying to break encounters or anything of that sort, we're just simply trying to recover in like 2-3 minutes instead of 10-15 minutes. Medding takes a massive amount of time with top tier mana pools, and I haven't even gotten started with exhaustive stances and stuff like that.

I believe, like many of these topics, are just hard stuck on "this is how it's always been." As we move away from traditional EQ buffing and become more of the custom EQ experience, there's no reason to not try stuff out like this. Everything on this game just feels slow and sluggish. From zoning, to questing, to grinding for a charm, etc. And rightfully so; it's an ancient game. It just doesn't have to feel like one, at least for the portions of the game where it's spent with trying to tie in the most amount of people.

It's not easy getting 18 people together simultaneously, for the same amount of allotted time, especially with a population like ours. It just makes sense that you'd try to improve the process of raiding so that people can actually get more done with the time they do have.
 
It's not easy getting 18 people together simultaneously, for the same amount of allotted time, especially with a population like ours. It just makes sense that you'd try to improve the process of raiding so that people can actually get more done with the time they do have.
This pretty much sums it up.
Majority of the raids I've attended recently last ~2 hours before people start to log off. When you factor in the amount of time it takes to form up, travel, buff, and then throw the wipe recovery times on top of that it starts to become a bit much. This is not even counting stupid stuff like zone crashes, invisible bug, uplayable zone lag, etc.

Basically any kind of QoL changes to help raids feel less "dated" would be super welcomed. Start by fixing the ridiculous med times and then work on the buffing situation.
 
I haven't actually played SoD in a few year (though I'm rethinking that now that Season 1 is coming), so maybe this is totally wrong, but is meditation a flat rate? If so, a fresh faced 65 with [...4k?] mana is doing alright but life is hell for a [...10k?] mana endgame spell slinger? Is it possible to change that to a percentage?

(Mediation skill + modifiers)/X = 5-10% per tick... or something like that.

That and trade skill stuff like Latten suggested above, though maybe 30/60 second cast times.
 
We've talked about med/recovery times a little bit internally and have some ideas, but we need to work out details first. Once season 1 is up and any bugs that crop up are dealt with, we'll have time to look more at this.

Appreciate the transparency. Very excited to see what's in store.
 
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