Most of TAO's members haven't played in many months; I doubt they will come back so there's that. I may know who you are talking about. I've no intention of letting things continue the way they were as I don't want to see any of this happen again either.

My post was more directed towards some... unwelcome behavior by some people recently which has been brought into this thread as well as being persistent in-game. If someone has an issue with a player, they shouldn't bash them publicly or their guild on the forums.

I guess to sum this up, people need leave old and long-dead issues alone; there's no benefit to bringing them up. The guild as it was is not the guild as it is currently. I believe the 4 current people leading TAO are on the same page about this issue as well... so no, it shouldn't ever happen again.

I've been hoping for such a system, however I do have one concern... there was talk about opening a window to click or drag abilities to the queue. This is highly infeasable to do while moving or fighting stronger enemies that require fast reaction. Is there a way to use shortcuts to add abilities to the queue? If not, can we get an "/addtoqueue <ability>" command?

Just bear in mind many of those houses hold treasures and memories... this is something that should have been implemented at the start but now is difficult to do. It would however ease server load; I believe I was told every item in a GH adds to server load and old GHs are packed with them sometimes.

Implementing a property tax might not be a bad idea for new house sales, but however you go about it, the rare or GM-only items in the houses would cause problems...unless items could keep track of their owners. If they could, items could be returned to the storage of the item owner upon a reclamation of a house. Guild storage could also be used potentially as a place to dump items following a seizure of a house (if we had such a thing).

Just some food for thought.

Cookie reagent amalgamation apparatuses!

To add some actual value to the thread... anything that seems like something you can hold in your hand (meaning, has a handle) would be a tool you can get from some NPC. Everything else exists in the world; try clicking stuff to see what they are . This is true for pretty much every crafting profession.

*runs off to get cookies now*

I do like the idea of some form of reallocation; the game is currently highly inflexible and every choice has a high degree of permanence. This would be fine if characters lasted a few weeks, not fine if the character lasts for years and years (and grinding is tuned to actually *take* years and years).

I'd be fine with seeing some sort of cap preventing someone from mastering all the things if the game were more alt-friendly in addition to a reallocation. I've yet to touch Brown or Blue way (apart from realm 2 blue) just because I don't want to go through the hassle of, again, trying to get into the Winch, collecting glyphs I've no clue where they are or what ones to even look for, spending hours randomly mixing glyphs to find spells and hoping there isn't some random glyph from other Ways I'm missing... This is a big reason why you see people mastering everything on a single character and not a bunch of them. I don't think forcing people into even more permanence on one character will help anything at all, just make players angry for the sake of trying to force everyone to RP well via mechanics.

As far as the caster killing ulbers with one hit of their sword, with how high some mobs can get with their resistances, mages who actually follow the current Way guidelines are often forced into using weapons and armor to actually kill something that wants to eat them. I still firmly insist that the damage caps on each spell need to be bumped up and the way resistances are applied for magic are wrong, but that's another discussion entirely... and group combat is still not very practical given many of the mechanics needed for that are also missing (which is another discussion as well). This often leaves mages with the option of mastering HA and a weapon, or becoming food. That's to say nothing of people who want to be able to duel on their main character...

I'll note that mages in other games have a high degree of crowd control and slowing/knockback at their disposal, and mage armor and damage absorbs. Planeshift kinda has some of these though I've not seen any that are implemented in a way that allows a pure mage character without armor. The crowd control spells I've tried like darkness and fear just make everything in a large area mad and cause me to take quite a bit more damage... not what I want when I'm being chewed on already. Armor spells just apply an armor modifier, forcing the use of stronger armors to be effective. The damage caps and very high damage resistance on the mobs means mages cannot kill things before they themselves are killed (barring things like standing on rocks or very high range magics). Even if there are effective crowd control spells, if someone who's played as long as me can't find them there's almost no hope of new players doing so.

So I guess my point is... forcing people to specialize is going to cause a lot of problems to become substantially worse. The game as it stands currently forces breadth and not everyone has time to level the amount of characters needed for the variety needed to actually play the game with specialized characters. Specialization should not be attempted before each specialization can be made combat-viable on its own, and ideally not before grinding alts becomes realistic for more people.

</rant>

Yeah... some area of effect spells are a bit wierd/broken. I've not used dazzling light in... *thinks for a bit*... no less than 2 years ago, but I remember the AoE version of energy arrow I completely forgot the name of (shows you how much I used it) doesn't work in a proper cone; nothing between you and the target is hit, and often times things behind the target aren't hit either. Assuming it *does* hit everything properly though, the issue is that it's not a proper taunt; it won't necessarily grab enemies attacking other targets to yourself.

I'll probably be able to give this a shot soon anyway, likely on the weekend where time is only bounded by the end of work on Friday, and Sunday night. I actually have a use for Glaciusor in group combat interestingly enough; I'll be able to test the "fast debuff" thing as well as dazzling light's effect.

Right, there are some spells that let you do certain things (though I completely forgot that CW spell was AoE XD). I just meant, it's not very widespread and a few either don't exist or you have to kinda trick the system like the tanks having to run right up to every creature and trying to fast debuff them, and hope the rest don't run off to the casters because one of them decided to spam meteor or energy arrow/machine gun.

My thoughts were more about fleshing out a few key things common to other group combat systems to make group combat here a bit more organized - not having every player doing everything, which aligns well with skill set specialization. Really, a taunt spell/ability and a way to increase threat generation are the only must-haves, the others are just improvements on that to make things smoother. Examples of such spells might be "Death's Grasp" for DW or "Inflame" for RW; Flash may also be a great AoE threat grab for CW.

Just a final note, because players pretty much have to fend for themselves and fulfill every role, nearly everyone learns CW, and you'll have muscular mages in heavy armor so that they can take a hit without becoming food or a splatter mark on the ground. Without such a high necessity for this, players will probably resist specialization a little less.

I was thinking a bit about some things I've mentioned before, but now I'm interested in what people think about it.

Currently, there's no reliable way to direct aggressive NPCs to specific players in a group, nor are the buffing or healing spells particularly well oriented to group combat. Perhaps this should be changed some.

Currently the only AoE heal I know of requires you to master Blue Way, perhaps a few weaker ones should be added to BlW and CW, and maybe other Ways if they make sense. As well, regenerative spells (HoTs) would also be very useful for group combat to place on tanks or other members that happen to be being attacked or afflicted with a DoT.

I'm unaware of any reliable way to focus attacks on a single player. For those familiar with WoW, I'm referring to threat management. We have heavy armor and shields, all we'd need is either a special ability (which as far as I know may be in the pipeline but I'll mention it anyway) that can generate threat (a taunt) and perhaps AoE threat generation. Stance should also factor in; typically defensive stances in games generates more threat so if a tank goes defensive and casts flash, they should be able to generate more threat than another character using flash I think; this approach would mean casting should put a player in a stance or treat them as if they are in normal stance, but without the attacking warnings. Perhaps there could be a buff which increases the amount of threat you generate (probably at least one for each Way), one that can be cast on any friendly target.

And then we get to buffs. Some can be cast on friendly players, some can't be but it won't cast it on you if you have something else targeted (gives you an error message), then some cast on you regardless of what is targeted; these should probably be cleaned up and refactored to make them consistent, and reconsider which ones should be able to be cast on group members (while leaving some as perks for picking a certain Way). Group-wide buffs are important and encourage people not to just focus on the Ways that deal the most damage. Perhaps a master Red Way user can boost everyone's strength, while a master Brown Way user can boost defenses.

Finally, can we get a res? For quick-thinking, high-level CW healers it should be possible to revive someone if they've not yet gone to the Death Realm; the description of CW even says that this should be possible. This makes sense especially with role-focused characters in a group. This would probably be one of the draws to having a CW healer with you (where BlW would be for the massive AoE healing).

With these various types of abilities added/modified, group combat will be a lot more practical, and a lot more attractive as well. This will further increase how people focus on their skills and should help keep people from trying to become "master of everything" if they find they like a specific combat role better than others, and since players can pick both a weapon and a Way you could get some very interesting combinations when you factor in role specialization.

I also find that good group combat opportunities can be both a lot of fun, but also can work towards playerbase cohesiveness; most of the people in my raid group on WoW I didn't know when I started, and we're all pretty good friends now. This is also not to mention the doors that are opened to further development, things such as dungeons and raids (stone labyrinth runs, anyone?), smaller events that can be held in separate instances, world bosses that can drop rare and sought after loot that only spawn once every few hours...