The KGB Oracle Forums The KGB Great Hall of History (ARCHIVE) Darkfall Public Forum Darkfall Peek #26 (Trade in DFO)

Healers creating AE heal bubbles, and AE healing will quickly become targets. With the advent of player-collision and FF, things will get interesting. Seems like the battles will liekly revolve around the healers, unless ranged plays a large part.

The ratio of toughness/damage , toughness being how hard it is to kill someone, versus the effectivness of ranged will be a huge indicator on how battles will go. We might see an RTS-like effect, of massed range units. Possibly with some meatshield support, and of course healing units interspersed.

In any case territory use and ability to maintain the discipline to move promptly and stay with your group will be paramount to success. I expect it will be an exciting time for the groups and guilds with the wherewithal to field and organize 60+ people.

The main reason I don't see everyone going range is because of there being no auto-targetting. In DF you'll be in first person view and just have cross hairs to aim with. You shoot a fireball from far away and the warrior on horseback that you shot it at will actually see it coming and probably be able to side step it pretty easily. Anyone who's played paintball knows what i'm talking about; seeing that paintball flying at you and actually having time to lean far to the side and avoid it.

Going to depend on speed of the missile of course, but I wouldnt necesarrily assume all the missiles will move slowly or be very visible. Plus when 40 people shoot arrows at someone, unless the 40 really suck, you can assume that several will hit.

If people mass up at a AE healing bubble, you can assume there will be hits. If they all spread out, it will be harder, but still... if you focus fire, how fast can you bring someone down vs time it takes for them to close to melee distance?

These factors will have a huge impact, but we wont know till beta.

(This isn't really a reply to you Derid just a general rant)

I personally liked how healing was done in UO. Basically there was no "healer". Everyone and their pet dog had a healing skill, whether it was bandages or magic heal or hell even just alot of heal pots. Everyone took care of themselves and once in an awhile a guildmate would cure someone if the posion was real high lvl or res you.

This really made the game skill based. Did you have the mental ability to juggle healing yourself and dealing dmg to your enemy at the same time... EQ and now all these EQ type games have just screwed things up by making the idea of dedicated healers the norm. So now instead of everyone taking care of themselves and having fun and only having themselves to blame, you have stressed out dedicated healers that get blamed for "letting" people die and then you have berserker melee types that have no understanding of what restraint is 'cause they figure "hey someone will heal me so I can keep being a dumbass."

I agree with your general observation. It may also be possible that in DFO that many characters will have some degree of healing, but I would think that given precedent in other MMOS, plus for balance reasons that non-heal dedicated characters will have signifigantly reduced abilities for healing.

In any case, if someone gets called primary during a fight, theyre likely going to have a hard time surviving without other people healing them.

Given that DFO is based on skills rather than classes, I'm certain there will be quite a few people using heal. Although I'd rather focus all my energy into Shout/stuns, melee damage, and attack rating.

I prefer full offense Melee characters. I go into battle dependent upon the current situation. However, I totally despise it when leadership ONLY uses strategies based on sitting back in defensive, using ranged attacks and not on melee. Chances are, I will charge right into the enemy leader regardless of consequences for my own life ( I don't care if I die, big deal it's a game) in order to create chaos amongst the enemy ranks. Sitting around as a tanking meatshield is a no-go for me. In fact, I doubt anyone will ever see me roll a straight-up tanking type character. Heck, the charge attack + aoe fear worked great for me as a warrior in WoW. In fact, before WoW battlegrounds, I was with a lot of KGB and allies as we attacked the horde in the Badlands. The horde kept hiding in the same hut, so I charged into the hut and AOE feared all the horde out into the open where they summarily got slaughtered. Funny thing was, I was new to KGB at the time, and only a few people had actually grouped with me besides Malphas, Elph, etc. So after I AOE feared the horde out of the hut, some idiot over Teamspeak gave the credit to some other warrior who'd been in KGB longer (although I'd beta tested the warrior in WoW since april of 2004). I was like WTF?

Speaking of people getting their due credit, DF has all the elements needed to allow us to return to giving out the service medals based on number of people you have killed.

In UO we had people take screen shots of each person they killed and for every 10 they got a medal. In DAoC I based it off honor points, or whatever they're called it, since people could get 10 kills very quickly in that game.

But DF seems to be building a world where small groups will often run into solo people or other small groups. Much like in UO. So if the devs are so kind as to keep track of our kill count we could just take a screen shot of that count and email it to the faction leader. Then medals could be awarded. Though I'm sure it'd take more than 10 kills

Somewhere I recall reading something where Tasos said DF will have some stun, etc- but that DF pvp wont revolve around crowd control, and stuns/snares will even be mimimal in effects and duration.

Extreme DPS melee will probably be uber, especially if you have good riding skills and are mobile. Mounted polearm wielding Knight 4tw.