Old School Players In The Modern Game
From time to time on occasion, the Hobo likes to place a rant that is traditionally aimed at some group of foolish players he has encountered. This is such a rant. As usual, since I'm incapable of making a concise, direct point without multiple paragraphs, the rant has been lj-cut to save space on friends pages and spare those who don't want to listen to my random griping anyway.
We all know that back in the "glory days" of I3 and I4, tanks could (would...did...) gather up an entire mission into one little corner so that they and/or the team could procede to dismantle every enemy in a mission within seconds. The herd itself would take a few minutes, there'd be maybe a minute or two (assuming no nukes and huge mobs) of actual combat, and then the team would either move on or reset (farm xp over getting content? Never! :/)
Post-I5 and ED, of course, have made this sort of thing the stuff of myths and legends to new players. Numbers that kick around say that a tank can't control more than 17 enemies at a time (who comes up with this stuff?), which doesn't stop him/her from bringing a pack of 30 or so enemies but does neccessitate that the damage dealers kill faster so that they don't have to worry about the huge aggro they're about to draw. Most players who were around before ED/I5 have adapted, but apparently there are some whose ideas of "adaptation" are rather...lacking.
Tank herds have now become tank pulls in some instances. Why it's even called a "pull" I don't know, since the point of a pull is to thin a group of enemies by selectively bringing a few over at a time in manageable chunks, not just bringing all of the enemies over and around the corner. Things like that used to be called bad pulls, but I digress. Anyway, these tank pulls, or mini-herds as I like to call them, are supposed to serve the same purpose as old herds--getting decently-sized chunks of enemies into one location in order to let the area damage most efficiently murder, slay, maim, and destroy.
Enter a team I joined up with yesterday. To their credit, the leader did send me a tell first, and they were a group that ran with each other regularly with a couple of pick-ups, rather than being a conglameration of randomly strung-together players. I remember teaming with them before and having come up with some excuse to leave, but couldn't remember why. Fortunately, within a few missions, I was reminded. I was running around on Space Girl, who was 46 at the time, and we were doing portal missions. Some of the enemies were conning at 47, some were laughably conning at 45. Being the tri-form that I am, I see blue enemies and delight in the impending two-shot goodness. For the first mission (Shadowhunter), it works fine. We move from mob to mob, have a few laughs, the tank keeps using her bind of "Charging in, WAIT FOR READY" and I keep ignoring it because between the two peacebringers on the team (myself and some other player I haven't run with before) I expect things to pretty much fall over, as they do, while the scrapper and tank can focus on the bosses. Call me crazy, but if you have two AoE gods on your team, targetting minions ought to be just for the initial taunt--fighting them is a waste of time, since they're going to be dead in a few seconds.
Partway into the next mission, fighting against 46's and 47's, the tank starts declaring pull points for her herds. I point out that a) she's taking them much farther than she has to (a minor aggravation) and b) most of them are already clumped up enough for AoE's, so it's really just wasting time. Naturally, nobody will hear anything of that. After all, if the enemies are all in one location, that makes AoE's more effective, right? Right? (Well, not really, but I'll get to that in a minute.) I play along a little, all the while a little agitated that I'm spending half of the time standing around turning in circles. Some of the mobs I just rush, anyway, hoping that the people will notice that they are being decimated just as easily and just as quickly, except without the standing around being bored part.
For the next mission, I note that the mobs start at 45's. Again, with two pb's on the team with nova form, we're practically walking into the candy store and being given the entire chocolate aisle. The tank declares her pull point and I ignore her outright and just two-shot the mob's minions, switch to human form to finish off the lt's, and watch them catch up to take on the boss or two and couple of lt's I haven't gotten to yet that are nearly dead, anyway. At that, I'd've thought that my point was pretty clear, but she calls for the next pull spot, anyway, against more 45's.
That continues that entire mission, and the next mission one of the players announces that she only has 40 minutes left to play and asks if that will be long enough to do this mission. I reply a little jokingly (and slightly seriously) that if we can't finish a mission against 45-47's in 40 minutes with a full team of 45-47's, we're probably doing something stupid. The tank replies at the same time that we "should" be able to finish in that time, provided everybody follows her lead.
Naturally, me being me, I let everybody know, in no uncertain terms, that herding +1's is one thing--a waste of time, but hey, however you want to have fun. Herding -1's is pointless and out of the question. On top of that, herding EVERY mob individually or even two or three at a time is pointless. This, of course, sparks a "discussion" between all of the people who regularly team together and myself that leads to me being shown the door.
No harm, no foul, I suppose. I mean, everybody wants to have fun their own way, and I can respect that, so it really was for the better that the team and I parted ways--they could do their herding without my...er..."interference"/sensibility and I could get a team that wouldnt' make me want to pull my hair out. The real nagging thing, though, is that they stood their ground to the point of being rude on herding vs rushing mobs.
Since Space hit level 20, she has charged every mob in sight that she possibly could. Pulling is great, don't get me wrong--after 50 levels of blasting, you not only become damn good at pulls, you embrace and cherish them every moment of all the time. Herding is also great, don't get me wrong--sometimes, the damage dealers and area holders/damagers just don't want to chase down a few enemies here and there or take on a mob that's too spread out. Doing either for every single mob, though, is pointless.
My reasons why:
Take pulls. In the Hollows, we all know and love them and they save our lives when we're on teams of dimwits and new players. Unfortunately, some of those players get it into their head that it's the only way to succeed. They load up Unyielding or Invincible missions, then pull one or two enemies from yon mob of 16 at a time, demolish those one or two enemies, then procede to the next one or two, rinse, repeat over the next hour and a half of mission time. Their logic is that charging in will get them killed--quite right, in this case. Pulling every single mob, however, tells me that what is really going on is that they are trying to fight enemies that are too strong for them, in the first place. The idea is that they're getting big, huge xp and that they'll level up faster, but when one thinks about it, one realizes that the time they spend thinning each mob by one or two at a time counteracts their "fast xp" by leaps and bounds. Let's not even mention the fact that taking on a +3 minion doesn't even get them the same xp that taking on a +1 lt would, but gods forbid anybody tell them that. There ARE times, however, when a pull is absolutely neccessary for survival--two heavy duty mobs packed closely together, a couple of really tough bosses in a single mob, poor environmental choices for the battlefield, etc etc etc. Pulling every mob, however, is both a waste of time, a waste of the rest of the team's patience, and more indicative of trying to bite off more than you can chew than of good play.
I'm a hero--I don't want to have the enemy packs start up a conversation about last night's game with occasional statements of "Hey, where'd Bob go? In a completely unrelated note, what was that blasting sound and bright blue stream of light? Oh well. I'm sure they aren't at all connected. Steve seems to have run around the corner a few minutes ago and hasn't come back. He must be taking a nap. Those screams of agony were probably from him having a bad dream." No no no, I want to wade into a pack of enemies and demolish them in epic battle. Buffs and endurance bar willing, I want to immediately move on to the next pack and demolish THEM, too, justto make my point that crime doesn't pay and that it doesnt' matter how many bad guys there are, there will be powerful heroes to put an end to their dastardly plans. Plus, you know, dynamic battle is fun.
Then there's the herding. In the 45 seconds it takes to get a single mob from point A to point B for "efficient killing", I could Build Up and fly in (2 seconds), switch to Nova form (1 or 2 seconds), pop off two AoE's that will probably level all of the minions or at least leave them dead enough that a couple more AoE's will finish the job (another 5-7 seconds), switch to Dwarf form (1 or 2 seconds), Flare to finish off those minions who survived (a second), and turn my attention to the bosses and lt's. At most, I'm looking at 15-20 seconds of combat that has only the tough enemies still standing, and the single-target damage dealers, mezzers, and aggro-magnets probably focussed on them first, anyway. Or, I can wait 45 seconds (at least) for the enemies to move from point A to point B and THEN do all of that stuff. Gee, let me think.
In the case of two or three mobs for "efficient killing", the argument still fails. Say each mob has 14 enemies in it--not an unreasonable number for a team of 6-8 with the difficulty high enough. Two such mobs would bring 28 enemies. Three would bring 42. Post I5, show me the area damage dealer that can affect that many enemies with one blast (excluding a horde of Trip Mines--which while terribly fun, is also terribly, terribly time-consuming). Instead, the area effects semi-randomly determine the targets from those available based on maximum number affected, then roll to hit. If I'm firing off two AoE's, some of the affected targets of the second shot are probably not going to be among those who were even targetted in the first shot, so instead of taking down 24 enemies in two shots I've actually taken down probably 18-20. Compare that to consistently hitting 10-12 of the 14 enemies of each individual mob. Where am I saving time here again?
Now, naturally, there are still times when I'd rather herd than take each mob individually. The final room of the Eden trial is a major case in point--playing hero in the hole, herding huge mobs in an attempt to kill Gale, blasters taunting each other to see whose nuke does the most damage--these are the stuff of fun times all around, and a couple of decent tanks or a tank and a scrapper tend to keep a pretty steady stream of enemies coming so everybody has fun. Other times, as with pulling, situational problems make a direct rush into certain death for the squishies, so a bit of herding by the tanks can get the mobs' attentions and get them into one place for multiple area affects to blow them to smithereens instead of giving the whole group debt. Every. Single. Mob? Waste of time and patience.
The tanks that really, really irk me, though, are the ones who herd up all the time and absolutely insist that the entire team wait for the Ready before engaging. Once upon a time, this was for the safety of the group--it ensured that the tank had time to gain and control aggro. Now days, however, many herding tanks that I've run into seem to just think that the success or failure of the team depends entirely on their judgement. Unless one has played (not PL'd) every combination of every set of every AT in every conceivable fashion, I'm pretty sure one does not know everything, however.
If I'm telling you that I can two-shot entire mobs of -1's within a few seconds because I've been doing it for 46 levels (okay, more like 34, but you know what I mean), you can rest assured that I'm probably going to two-shot entire mobs of -1's within a few seconds. All of the aggro I will draw from doing it will not matter because everything around me is dead. What things will be alive, I'll tell you, will still not matter--for the past 26 levels I've been doing just fine murdering all of the mob's minions, then switching to dwarf to tank. Yes, from time to time the shape changing is too slow or I get mezzed mid change and I end up dying. No, I would not have died had I let your pretty little tanker face herd, instead. On the other hand, the debt I've gained I'll work off in two or three mobs within the next few minutes because the rest of my team hurredly got me rezzed while immediately adapting to me not being there, finished the mob, and are probably halfway to the next while I'm still standing up and cursing while switching my trays back to where I want them. Instead, I get to self-rez or wait for somebody to rez, then stand around waiting while the pretty-faced tank goes to collect another herd and I spend the next thirty minutes working off debt I could have worked off in ten because I get to stand around picking my nose the rest of the time.
If you're a puller or a herder and have a usual group that does specifically that and does not deviate, that's okay--to each their own way of playing. The game is meant to be fun, and if that's the way you have fun, then so be it. Just don't expect that everybody is going to blindly accept it and follow along. Believe it or not, there are OTHER teams out there that would be happy to have me, so leaving a group that plays one way to join a group that plays another is not all that rough. If a player joins your team and breaks your comfort zone, politely state that you like to do things one way. It's possible that he/she will politely offer alternatives. You might consider politely trying them. Who knows, you might actually like it!
I used to snipe-pull at every mob, space permitting. Fighting more than a couple of enemies at a time was suicide, as far as I was concerned. Then I got suckeed into a group of global pals who live fast and die hard working themselves into a fast-paced killing frenzy from mob to mob and saw that it actually WORKED. I gained xp just as rapidly as I would standing around waiting for the tank's Ready or moving from place to place to scope out ideal pulling positions. Now, whenever I lead a team, I tend to be a slave-driver who expects the entire team to give 100%. I have been converted--you may be, too.
So, to sum up, everybody has their own way of playing the game. Some playstyles, however, are rather antiquated in the modern game environment. Constant pulling or mini-herding at every single mob is as much a waste of time or indication to turn that difficulty slider down a notch or two as it is an "efficient" tactic. Neither actually is efficient for every mob, either for area effects nor use of time. If you have a team mate who breaks your comfort zone on a group that is working fine in some certain way, it usually pays to be polite and talk to him/her instead of setting down a "my way or the highway" attitude. (Certainly, it'll avoid Hobo Rants.)
And for goodness sakes, if you really, really, REALLY need your tank to herd a single mob of -1's in order to survive, the issue might not be with that 'wildcard' who keeps two-shotting everything... ;)
We all know that back in the "glory days" of I3 and I4, tanks could (would...did...) gather up an entire mission into one little corner so that they and/or the team could procede to dismantle every enemy in a mission within seconds. The herd itself would take a few minutes, there'd be maybe a minute or two (assuming no nukes and huge mobs) of actual combat, and then the team would either move on or reset (farm xp over getting content? Never! :/)
Post-I5 and ED, of course, have made this sort of thing the stuff of myths and legends to new players. Numbers that kick around say that a tank can't control more than 17 enemies at a time (who comes up with this stuff?), which doesn't stop him/her from bringing a pack of 30 or so enemies but does neccessitate that the damage dealers kill faster so that they don't have to worry about the huge aggro they're about to draw. Most players who were around before ED/I5 have adapted, but apparently there are some whose ideas of "adaptation" are rather...lacking.
Tank herds have now become tank pulls in some instances. Why it's even called a "pull" I don't know, since the point of a pull is to thin a group of enemies by selectively bringing a few over at a time in manageable chunks, not just bringing all of the enemies over and around the corner. Things like that used to be called bad pulls, but I digress. Anyway, these tank pulls, or mini-herds as I like to call them, are supposed to serve the same purpose as old herds--getting decently-sized chunks of enemies into one location in order to let the area damage most efficiently murder, slay, maim, and destroy.
Enter a team I joined up with yesterday. To their credit, the leader did send me a tell first, and they were a group that ran with each other regularly with a couple of pick-ups, rather than being a conglameration of randomly strung-together players. I remember teaming with them before and having come up with some excuse to leave, but couldn't remember why. Fortunately, within a few missions, I was reminded. I was running around on Space Girl, who was 46 at the time, and we were doing portal missions. Some of the enemies were conning at 47, some were laughably conning at 45. Being the tri-form that I am, I see blue enemies and delight in the impending two-shot goodness. For the first mission (Shadowhunter), it works fine. We move from mob to mob, have a few laughs, the tank keeps using her bind of "Charging in, WAIT FOR READY" and I keep ignoring it because between the two peacebringers on the team (myself and some other player I haven't run with before) I expect things to pretty much fall over, as they do, while the scrapper and tank can focus on the bosses. Call me crazy, but if you have two AoE gods on your team, targetting minions ought to be just for the initial taunt--fighting them is a waste of time, since they're going to be dead in a few seconds.
Partway into the next mission, fighting against 46's and 47's, the tank starts declaring pull points for her herds. I point out that a) she's taking them much farther than she has to (a minor aggravation) and b) most of them are already clumped up enough for AoE's, so it's really just wasting time. Naturally, nobody will hear anything of that. After all, if the enemies are all in one location, that makes AoE's more effective, right? Right? (Well, not really, but I'll get to that in a minute.) I play along a little, all the while a little agitated that I'm spending half of the time standing around turning in circles. Some of the mobs I just rush, anyway, hoping that the people will notice that they are being decimated just as easily and just as quickly, except without the standing around being bored part.
For the next mission, I note that the mobs start at 45's. Again, with two pb's on the team with nova form, we're practically walking into the candy store and being given the entire chocolate aisle. The tank declares her pull point and I ignore her outright and just two-shot the mob's minions, switch to human form to finish off the lt's, and watch them catch up to take on the boss or two and couple of lt's I haven't gotten to yet that are nearly dead, anyway. At that, I'd've thought that my point was pretty clear, but she calls for the next pull spot, anyway, against more 45's.
That continues that entire mission, and the next mission one of the players announces that she only has 40 minutes left to play and asks if that will be long enough to do this mission. I reply a little jokingly (and slightly seriously) that if we can't finish a mission against 45-47's in 40 minutes with a full team of 45-47's, we're probably doing something stupid. The tank replies at the same time that we "should" be able to finish in that time, provided everybody follows her lead.
Naturally, me being me, I let everybody know, in no uncertain terms, that herding +1's is one thing--a waste of time, but hey, however you want to have fun. Herding -1's is pointless and out of the question. On top of that, herding EVERY mob individually or even two or three at a time is pointless. This, of course, sparks a "discussion" between all of the people who regularly team together and myself that leads to me being shown the door.
No harm, no foul, I suppose. I mean, everybody wants to have fun their own way, and I can respect that, so it really was for the better that the team and I parted ways--they could do their herding without my...er..."interference"/sensibility and I could get a team that wouldnt' make me want to pull my hair out. The real nagging thing, though, is that they stood their ground to the point of being rude on herding vs rushing mobs.
Since Space hit level 20, she has charged every mob in sight that she possibly could. Pulling is great, don't get me wrong--after 50 levels of blasting, you not only become damn good at pulls, you embrace and cherish them every moment of all the time. Herding is also great, don't get me wrong--sometimes, the damage dealers and area holders/damagers just don't want to chase down a few enemies here and there or take on a mob that's too spread out. Doing either for every single mob, though, is pointless.
My reasons why:
Take pulls. In the Hollows, we all know and love them and they save our lives when we're on teams of dimwits and new players. Unfortunately, some of those players get it into their head that it's the only way to succeed. They load up Unyielding or Invincible missions, then pull one or two enemies from yon mob of 16 at a time, demolish those one or two enemies, then procede to the next one or two, rinse, repeat over the next hour and a half of mission time. Their logic is that charging in will get them killed--quite right, in this case. Pulling every single mob, however, tells me that what is really going on is that they are trying to fight enemies that are too strong for them, in the first place. The idea is that they're getting big, huge xp and that they'll level up faster, but when one thinks about it, one realizes that the time they spend thinning each mob by one or two at a time counteracts their "fast xp" by leaps and bounds. Let's not even mention the fact that taking on a +3 minion doesn't even get them the same xp that taking on a +1 lt would, but gods forbid anybody tell them that. There ARE times, however, when a pull is absolutely neccessary for survival--two heavy duty mobs packed closely together, a couple of really tough bosses in a single mob, poor environmental choices for the battlefield, etc etc etc. Pulling every mob, however, is both a waste of time, a waste of the rest of the team's patience, and more indicative of trying to bite off more than you can chew than of good play.
I'm a hero--I don't want to have the enemy packs start up a conversation about last night's game with occasional statements of "Hey, where'd Bob go? In a completely unrelated note, what was that blasting sound and bright blue stream of light? Oh well. I'm sure they aren't at all connected. Steve seems to have run around the corner a few minutes ago and hasn't come back. He must be taking a nap. Those screams of agony were probably from him having a bad dream." No no no, I want to wade into a pack of enemies and demolish them in epic battle. Buffs and endurance bar willing, I want to immediately move on to the next pack and demolish THEM, too, justto make my point that crime doesn't pay and that it doesnt' matter how many bad guys there are, there will be powerful heroes to put an end to their dastardly plans. Plus, you know, dynamic battle is fun.
Then there's the herding. In the 45 seconds it takes to get a single mob from point A to point B for "efficient killing", I could Build Up and fly in (2 seconds), switch to Nova form (1 or 2 seconds), pop off two AoE's that will probably level all of the minions or at least leave them dead enough that a couple more AoE's will finish the job (another 5-7 seconds), switch to Dwarf form (1 or 2 seconds), Flare to finish off those minions who survived (a second), and turn my attention to the bosses and lt's. At most, I'm looking at 15-20 seconds of combat that has only the tough enemies still standing, and the single-target damage dealers, mezzers, and aggro-magnets probably focussed on them first, anyway. Or, I can wait 45 seconds (at least) for the enemies to move from point A to point B and THEN do all of that stuff. Gee, let me think.
In the case of two or three mobs for "efficient killing", the argument still fails. Say each mob has 14 enemies in it--not an unreasonable number for a team of 6-8 with the difficulty high enough. Two such mobs would bring 28 enemies. Three would bring 42. Post I5, show me the area damage dealer that can affect that many enemies with one blast (excluding a horde of Trip Mines--which while terribly fun, is also terribly, terribly time-consuming). Instead, the area effects semi-randomly determine the targets from those available based on maximum number affected, then roll to hit. If I'm firing off two AoE's, some of the affected targets of the second shot are probably not going to be among those who were even targetted in the first shot, so instead of taking down 24 enemies in two shots I've actually taken down probably 18-20. Compare that to consistently hitting 10-12 of the 14 enemies of each individual mob. Where am I saving time here again?
Now, naturally, there are still times when I'd rather herd than take each mob individually. The final room of the Eden trial is a major case in point--playing hero in the hole, herding huge mobs in an attempt to kill Gale, blasters taunting each other to see whose nuke does the most damage--these are the stuff of fun times all around, and a couple of decent tanks or a tank and a scrapper tend to keep a pretty steady stream of enemies coming so everybody has fun. Other times, as with pulling, situational problems make a direct rush into certain death for the squishies, so a bit of herding by the tanks can get the mobs' attentions and get them into one place for multiple area affects to blow them to smithereens instead of giving the whole group debt. Every. Single. Mob? Waste of time and patience.
The tanks that really, really irk me, though, are the ones who herd up all the time and absolutely insist that the entire team wait for the Ready before engaging. Once upon a time, this was for the safety of the group--it ensured that the tank had time to gain and control aggro. Now days, however, many herding tanks that I've run into seem to just think that the success or failure of the team depends entirely on their judgement. Unless one has played (not PL'd) every combination of every set of every AT in every conceivable fashion, I'm pretty sure one does not know everything, however.
If I'm telling you that I can two-shot entire mobs of -1's within a few seconds because I've been doing it for 46 levels (okay, more like 34, but you know what I mean), you can rest assured that I'm probably going to two-shot entire mobs of -1's within a few seconds. All of the aggro I will draw from doing it will not matter because everything around me is dead. What things will be alive, I'll tell you, will still not matter--for the past 26 levels I've been doing just fine murdering all of the mob's minions, then switching to dwarf to tank. Yes, from time to time the shape changing is too slow or I get mezzed mid change and I end up dying. No, I would not have died had I let your pretty little tanker face herd, instead. On the other hand, the debt I've gained I'll work off in two or three mobs within the next few minutes because the rest of my team hurredly got me rezzed while immediately adapting to me not being there, finished the mob, and are probably halfway to the next while I'm still standing up and cursing while switching my trays back to where I want them. Instead, I get to self-rez or wait for somebody to rez, then stand around waiting while the pretty-faced tank goes to collect another herd and I spend the next thirty minutes working off debt I could have worked off in ten because I get to stand around picking my nose the rest of the time.
If you're a puller or a herder and have a usual group that does specifically that and does not deviate, that's okay--to each their own way of playing. The game is meant to be fun, and if that's the way you have fun, then so be it. Just don't expect that everybody is going to blindly accept it and follow along. Believe it or not, there are OTHER teams out there that would be happy to have me, so leaving a group that plays one way to join a group that plays another is not all that rough. If a player joins your team and breaks your comfort zone, politely state that you like to do things one way. It's possible that he/she will politely offer alternatives. You might consider politely trying them. Who knows, you might actually like it!
I used to snipe-pull at every mob, space permitting. Fighting more than a couple of enemies at a time was suicide, as far as I was concerned. Then I got suckeed into a group of global pals who live fast and die hard working themselves into a fast-paced killing frenzy from mob to mob and saw that it actually WORKED. I gained xp just as rapidly as I would standing around waiting for the tank's Ready or moving from place to place to scope out ideal pulling positions. Now, whenever I lead a team, I tend to be a slave-driver who expects the entire team to give 100%. I have been converted--you may be, too.
So, to sum up, everybody has their own way of playing the game. Some playstyles, however, are rather antiquated in the modern game environment. Constant pulling or mini-herding at every single mob is as much a waste of time or indication to turn that difficulty slider down a notch or two as it is an "efficient" tactic. Neither actually is efficient for every mob, either for area effects nor use of time. If you have a team mate who breaks your comfort zone on a group that is working fine in some certain way, it usually pays to be polite and talk to him/her instead of setting down a "my way or the highway" attitude. (Certainly, it'll avoid Hobo Rants.)
And for goodness sakes, if you really, really, REALLY need your tank to herd a single mob of -1's in order to survive, the issue might not be with that 'wildcard' who keeps two-shotting everything... ;)