It’s a week since Aradune opened. Raid guilds have the planes of Hate and Fear on lockdown. Naggy died last night; probably Vox has died, too, when I wasn’t on to see it. Groups have level 50 alts to sit outside the group and buff and heal.
I was not prepared for the pace of a Time-Locked Progression Server. Kunark doesn’t open for another eleven weeks! I guess it does take time to farm a full set of planar. I’m hoping people will still want to raid when Kasul and I get there.
I was so, so glad to escape from my newbie zone Monday. I’m still working from home, so I get to get in the log in queue sooner than Kasul, and get logged in sooner. While waiting for him to get through the queue Monday, I got into an Orc 1 group in the Commonlands and had a great time. Kasul joined eventually, and then we moved to Bandit 1 in North Ro and eventually took the nearby undead camp as well. The XP rolled in. Kasul had to leave early. I stayed a little while longer and hit level 12.
Yesterday, I vowed to not get into any groups before Kasul logged in. He wanted to take it easy, so we went to Lavastorm and duoed yard trash (lava drakes, fire elementals, lava spinners) for a couple of hours. He had made a mage to give me a summoned dagger with which to kill the elementals, as otherwise I couldn’t touch them — they can only be harmed by magic weapons, and my best weapon is a bronze rapier I looted in Northern Ro.
We talked about getting in place for a dungeon group tomorrow. We did check in on Befallen. The zone is heavily camped, but we still managed to get ourselves killed on the second floor. Kasul couldn’t heal because he was being beat up, and I couldn’t pull them off him because hate is broken in EverQuest.
I wasn’t a tank my first time in EQ; I took on the job in EQII and kept on as a tank in Neverwinter Online and Final Fantasy XIV. I feel I have a good feel for how tanks work in various MMOs.
And I can say that, without a doubt, tanks are broken in EverQuest, at least at low level. Crowd control is a necessity in EQ, because a tank at my level has all she can do to keep one target’s hate, much less three or four. I can set my pet on one to try and draw off a little aggro, but my pet is no tank.
Other games, you taunt everything, pop your defensive cooldowns, and hold the line while the DPS AE everything to death. It’s a far more dynamic situation than in EQ. In EQ, you pull one creature and everyone focuses on that one creature, or you pull multiple and the enchanter keep the adds occupied until they are ready to die. This is why crowd control is a big thing in EverQuest and unknown anywhere else.
This is a graph showing the class distribution on Aradune right now. It’s also a graph showing how easy it is to solo with any given class. I asked Kasul, before I showed this to him, what he thought the least popular class would be. He said “rogue!” right away, and of course he was right. Rogues cannot solo at all.
Tanks in general have it rough. Warriors are more popular than Shadow Knights, who are more popular than Paladins, who are just above rogues in popularity. I’m honestly surprised SKs aren’t above Warriors, but I have to guess that’s because evil classes are in general less popular than non-evils. We’re not evil. We are just misunderstood.
This chart is good news for me. I’m leveling slowly, but eventually groups will need a tank. And there I will be. As long as we just pull one at a time. (Not sure when SKs get AE taunt, but maybe once my taunt skill improves I’ll be able to grab hate from two or more at a time…)
Unless things are radically different on TLE servers to how they were in the original, it should be a long time before tanks need to hold agro on more than one mob. As far as I recall from as far along as lost Dungeons of Norrath, the method never changed from “pull one mob at a time – if anything adds, lock it down”.
As a tank it was never my job to do that locking down – there were usually several classes in any group better equipped to do that. If we had an Enchanter or Bard it was obviously thier responsibility but when I was on my Beastlord I routinely took adds and off tanked them. Our Shaman loved to offtank as he healed. Our necro mezzed or charmed any undead adds. The druids and rangers pulled things away and root-parked them. Not that we often had a ranger except out of charity.
In fact, thinking about it, I can’t recall a point when pulling more than one mob, intentionally, ever became standard procedure outside of soloing (ironically). AEs seemed to come into their own mostly when things had already started to fall apart and we had more adds than we could park. Then the mages and wizards would start to let fly in the hope of burning things down before we all died. I rarely saw it work, though.
The only other game I can think of that supposedly used crowd control as heavily as EQ would be City of Heroes but I think everything there was different. I never played past the beta.