Revisiting downtime

Manguadi

Dalayan Beginner
Last time I brought this up I made a blanket statement that people should get mana back vastly quicker than they do now. The response was more or less "slow down son don't rock the boat, waiting is what sod is all about." So this time I want to address waiting as it applies specifically to raiding.

This is a game. Waiting is not a feature, it's a pain.

The best of cases a wipe is minus 15 minutes. The average is closer to 25. These numbers were generated scientifically.

That's just ridiculous.

The layers of waiting for a raid wipe are currently:

- running back or porting (maybe)
- rezzing close to 18 people (nearly 3 minutes of chain-clicking lifeward but I bet you'll never find a rez session on a full wipe that took less than 3)
- death effects
- rebuffing
- medding

This is too many. You can get rid of some with your own work, but not always. Also, when you are preparing to do a boss again your recovery is only as fast as the slowest person.

Ideas!

1) Make medding in raid zones like 10 times faster. You already can't med in combat so it's not going to help bind rushing, and raids are almost never waiting on mana between pulls anyway.

2) Make rezzing someone dispel death effects. I mean you already can't do it in combat and you have no mana anyway.

3) Make each tick of meditative trance do more than the previous one.

4) Make a tradeskill item thats expensive and hard and everything else that lets someone construct something like the oops I killed you bot, except not everything instantly. Fish feast forever.

5) A cm command casters can use every half hour to gain full mana back over a minute or two long unbreakable mez/fear/whatever.

6) (credit to someone else) Make the end of death effects restore most or all of your mana, and make rezzing not reduce your mana to 0.

Really anything that makes it so waiting is less of a feature.
 
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I am in great support of this scientific, fact based endeavor.

This is a game that we play to have fun. No matter what encounters or ideas the development come up with, (and they are generally fantastic in all areas) that is why we keep playing. To have fun, in whatever way we see fit, and waiting around for 25-30 minutes on a wipe is just not fun. It's a detractor to the game experience, and is just an all around terrible idea. It's a terrible bottleneck, a terrible deterrent, and a terrible penalty for wiping to an encounter.

Resurrection removing death effects has been brought up before and shot down, but I still feel it's an unneeded effect. Surely the staff could come up with a different penalty for wiping/dying then "lol artificial timer, have fun doing -absolutely nothing- for ten minutes, but make sure to donate because man we've been in the red for a loooong time now, and we'll even throw in a t-shirt and coffee mug! Enjoy, thanks for playing :) :)" Ugh. See how bad that is? Thought so.

Make it so if you're 65+ with a Codex under your belt, EXP debt accumulates and has to be paid off for a much higher cost, or the debt per death is much, much higher, and can't be paid off. Make it something, but having to wait is just a bad idea. There obviously needs to be a penalty for death/wiping, this isn't WoW, but I don't see why wasting more time needs to be one of them.

After all, you can't argue with science.
 
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Not that I disagree with the above posts but they seriously make me wonder what kind of poopsocking SOD-obsessed robots can't appreciate a 15 minute downtime every so often to go and do such RL necessities as:

-prepare a meal
-make a phone call
-do homework
-go to the bathroom
-exercise?? hah
-make posts on the forums
 
this isnt downtime where you can be away from your computer

you have to run/port
you have to rez/be available to be rezzed
you have to sit/do self buffs after rez
you have to buff/make sure your buffs are correct
 
I agree, I think the unnecessary downtime caused by death effects (in the name of preventing bind rushing) should be addressed and that the act of preventing bind rushing could be done in other ways that do not penalized raids who are not trying to bind rush.
 
3) Make each tick of meditative trance do more than the previous one.

I kind of like this idea, but last I checked the disabled med-while-your-group-is-fighting feature wasn't working perfectly, so it might could be exploited :/.
 
2) Make rezzing someone dispel death effects. I mean you already can't do it in combat and you have no mana anyway.

This was my favourite suggestion, it keeps the bind rush prevention in place and allows for the unnecessary slow down of waiting on death effects to fade to be removed.
 
You could have 2 different death effects. One that affected being able to fight and one that effected mana regen. When you get rezzed, the mana regen on fades.
 
Not that I disagree with the above posts but they seriously make me wonder what kind of poopsocking SOD-obsessed robots can't appreciate a 15 minute downtime every so often to go and do such RL necessities as:

-prepare a meal
-make a phone call
-do homework
-go to the bathroom
-exercise?? hah
-make posts on the forums

Whenever I afk tyrone gets lost=(
 
Wipe 1:
Camped out a cleric.
Rezzes done after 5 minutes.
Ready: 14:20

Wipe 2 (approx 72 seconds after engage):
Didnt camp.
First corpse pulled approx 9 minutes into wipe.
Rezzes done 11 minutes.
Ready: 20:30

Wipe 3:
Camped out a cleric.
Rezzes done 5:30
Ready: 17:20 (1 LD before engage)

Wipe 4:
Didn't camp.
Ready: 23:30

Wipe 5:
Got necro down.
Rezzes done: 4:10
Ready: 15:10

Wipe 6:
Ran back.
Rezzes done: 12:45
Ready: 20:10

Wipe 7:
Got necro down.
Rezzes done: 4:30
Ready: 19:30

Wipe 8:
Necro down.
Rezzes done: 6:00
Ready: 14:30

People are abusing the science pie =(
 
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I didn't know we wiped that many times, heh.

Wipe 1: Prepared meal
Wipe 2: Made phone call
Wipe 3: Went to bathroom
Wipe 4: Ate meal
Wipe 5: Made phone call
Wipe 6: Went to bathroom
Wipe 7: Made post on forums, not this one
Wipe 8: Rang Tyrone's doorbell

Honestly, running back when you can't get a rezzer down is something you just cannot avoid. But, waiting around for death effects, 5 minutes, med to full, maybe another 5 minutes, buffs and than another minute med? That seems to be a minimum of 11 minutes at best. Spending almost half your raid because you need to get back and stare at your screen until your blue bar is full is just an amazingly bad amount of downtime.
 
I sat vigilantly at the computer, not wanting to tear myself away from the wonderful immersive experience of pretending to be dead and revived.
 
exercise?? hah

Son, I do 15 minutes straight of curls everytime we wipe, I got guns that are illegal in 42 states.

also...
Clerics could get an ability/item that lets them port to their corpse once an hour or so, I love all of the original ideas sitting around makes me bored, and my arms sore.
 
Son, I do 15 minutes straight of curls everytime we wipe, I got guns that are illegal in 42 states.

also...
Clerics could get an ability/item that lets them port to their corpse once an hour or so, I love all of the original ideas sitting around makes me bored, and my arms sore.

Have you seen my diesel legs?
 
Have you seen my diesel legs?

Tadalafil, Rise of the Envied

[MAGIC ITEM] [LORE ITEM] [NO DROP]
Slot: Legs
AC: 21
Focus Effect: Companion Health VII
STR: +18 DEX: +15 STA: +14 CHA: +20 INT: +20 AGI: +15 HP: +180 MANA: +255
SV MAGIC: +15 SV POISON: +30
Mind Shield: +3%
WT: 0.4 Size: Large
Class: NEC WIZ MAG ENC
Race: ALL
Slot 1 type 5: empty


damn bro those ARE diesel legs.

edit:
i do agree totally with these downtime issues. as mang's delicious apple pie chart shows, half of your raid night can be spent doing corpse runs and rebuffing when you're learning new encounters which is pretty dumb and unless ur doing tons of bicep curls during downtime it's a big waste of everyone's time.

2) Make rezzing someone dispel death effects. I mean you already can't do it in combat and you have no mana anyway.

this one sounds pretty awesome
 
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Wipe 1: make food
Wipe 2: ate food
Wipe 3: Exercise on ye-olde ab machine chair thingy
Wipe 4: HOT SHOWER
Wipe 5: found shoes, went to store
etc
 
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