I found this little rant I wrote a while back. Thought it was interesting enough to post. Just a warning though, the first part is a little bleak, I was in a bad bad place when I wrote it. :P
I have a dilemma. It exists in every MMO game I’m playing right now – CoX or DDO.
See, I’m going off on a business trip next week – that’s 6 days without an MMO – rest assured I’m going to be installing a lot of Angband, text adventures and various simple classic single-player games that can be run on a crap company laptop so that I don’t drop dead from game or computer withdrawal. Plans are to do some writing in my free time. And hopefully, I’ll have an inet connection somewhere where I can get my daily KoL fix.
But what this means is that I’m in desperate need of a fun experience in my MMOs in the limited time left sans packing and preparing and generally working my ass off.
And I want TEAM fun experience. I’ll be singleplayering with no choice soon, so dammit, I want a team.
Unfortunately, the time it takes to get into a team is driving me up the wall. I’ve taken to running all kinds of ‘equipment-exchange’ and ‘gather new quest’ errands with my LFG flag up in DDO. Takes about 30 mins to get a group, which is starting to piss me off a little. Soloing in DDO has become challenging. I think it’s still doable, but involves a lot of tavern trips aka hospital visits.
Which is alas mirroring my Pinnacle experience. I want fire imps, dammit. Hell, I want better control too and I’m looking forward to bonfire – which tells you how desperate I am. I’m starting to get very very bitter. Pinnacle appears to have bought into the spiel that doms suck – because I get absolutely zero invites. It puts me in a foul and villainous mindset, but then it kills me off because I get so aggressive I want to mutilate 3 mobs at one go without single pulling. Which makes me even more fouly angry.
It got so bad that I accepted a barracuda farming mission. +2 mobs, I try to use flashfire, but as usual, I just end up pissing off 8 freaks who decide to pound me into the wall instead – because the corruptors and the mms are just single-targeting their precious mobs. And the lackeyed /thermal corruptor has the nerve to count how many times I died and tell me to watch my aggro.
Fine. The next time I completely lay off, I single-target my own minion off to the side and just lay into him with ranged attacks. Now aggro flies all over and not solely on me. A whole bunch of bots die. The mms drop dead. The corruptors end up at slivers of red health, but they spam heal themselves back up to normal again. The mms get rezzed without a word. Barracuda is picked away slowly…much slower than when I was near her and laying all my melee into her, but she’s dropping, so I just spam char and stay far far away from her nearly-dead psychic nova this time around. Now a mm that was too near drops and bites it. Again, rez without a word. ‘cuda dies.
I dunno which is more annoying. Me trying to do something useful, and then getting blown into the pavement and get a telling off from the ‘healer’ that I need to watch my aggro. Or me NOT doing anything useful and seeing them succeed, albeit slower and steadier, and with the odd seriously dropping hp bar now and again. Of course, since corruptors have higher hp bars than I, they can survive it whereas I can’t. And they get easy mode buffs, and higher damage to boot.
I dunno. I’m not one to get jealous easily or believe what the other dominators whine about on the forums that corruptors rule so much more over doms. But if this was the everyday experience of a dominator, I can see why they are so belligerent – because I’m pretty fucking mad and carrying a huge bundle of hate at the moment. The dormant volcano of my temper is kinda about to bust its cap and blow. If only for a little while.
I don’t think I’ll feel this way on an ice/ dom. Ice slick is always useful. Plant/ has seeds of confusion. I’m sure mind/ is ok too, they have so many tools. So it’s not all doms.
I just feel so gosh darned HELPLESS on a huge team with a fire dom. If I do anything, I fucking pick up ALL the goddamn aggro. And I die because no one can react in time to heal me – and none of the stupid godforsaken healz0rs know how to use their shield buffs anyway. Nearly 1/3 of the damn team (a stalker, a corr, a mm) had the gall to share with everyone that they were barracuda pleveled – otherwise, they wouldn’t be this high in levels, they said. Since level 18. (And everyone was about 24-27.)
Fuck this. Fuck stupid people who don’t know how to play in a team. Fuck stupid people who think they know everything about the goddamn game and tell you how to play it. Fuck a group going after a +2 and +3 farm and fuck me for whoring myself out cos I wanted a team and for thinking I could control that kind of spawn single-handedly. Oh, and fuck a team who can’t control aggro well enough so that I can use my control powers without dropping dead.
*sighs* Me angry. And happy to indulge in it. If only for a little while.
And what makes me most angry of all is that I can’t just wash my hands of them and forget the whole issue – because there aren’t enough random people around to make random teams. I’m starting to miss Freedom rather badly.
If I go back there though, I may never come back to Black Jeremiah until character transfers happen. If ever. And I still want fire imps. :(
And I’ll admit it. A little part of me does not want the forum nay-sayers to ‘win.’ If I take a vacation on another AT, it’s like betraying the ideal of dominators – to me, anyhow. I’d like to get Jeremiah up to 40 before I move off and do something else. Unfortunately, without a team in the upper levels, it’s going to become painfully slow progress.
Kinda masochistic.
Dunno. I was in the blackly hating mood for quite a serious time. Enough to wish some nerfs on the corruptor side of things. /kin and /rad is so damn powerful. It seems like everybody and his mother is ice/kin or fire/kin – which so happens to be the current ubergod on the controller side of things as well. Seems like there’s a dark side of human nature that says “well, if I can’t have it, no one can have it either.”
I try not to indulge for too long. The kind of people I don’t like most in real life are those who have to constantly put others down to feel good about themselves. See, what’s the point of wishing nerfs anyhow? All it does is lower everyone, make things less fun, and make people more sensitive and upset. Out of some misplaced ‘sense of fairness’ which involves cutting off the arm to spite the nose to seek some elusive ghost of “balance.”
I think what’s most frustrating is this search for optimal effectiveness taken to an absurd point in a computer game. And it’s sooo common in online games. If you’re not playing class X, if you don’t have skill Y, you are gimp and worthless and not worth teaming with, etc, etc. Wtf?
Part of it is the game design’s fault. In RoD, if you didn’t go running with a thief or vampire, you’re setting yourself up for higher chance of failure on the bigger mobs.
But part of it is also player culture and acceptance. Hell, we’ve all done funky RoD runs before. All-cleric runs. All fathomer-runs. All druid-runs. I still believe my most memorable RoD run was the one where we hit Mandor with three Rol na Feinners. A paladin, a vampire and a mage. Eating black packets. Talk about gimp. Talk about ferocious battle. But we did it.
It was a lot more painful than the standard way, of course. Warrior-type tank with triggered pickup weapons. A whole gaggle of thieves to circle and do damage. But you know, Mandor this way, you can kill every repop but it becomes mechanical and boring and not fun.
But yet, people do it. So that they can get the loot. So they can sell it and get rich. So they can do the same crap again on a bigger mob.
It’s the whole stinking real life rat race again, more salary, bigger house, bigger car in a fucking computer game. That I thought people PLAY to get away from real life. Evidently NOT. Because some people feel the need to be superior by having more ‘prestige’ than everyone else by being richer, more mercantile, more effective, whatever.
Grrr. I dunno. The whole thing makes me angry.
I get groups more easily in DDO. I have a cleric tag next to my name, after all. What bugs me in DDO is how long it takes a group to get going. Takes an hour before we’re finally in a goddamn dungeon, and another half hour to get through it so that –some- xp is gained. Visible time sink, anyone?
It’s nice when you’re in a good group in DDO. Things work smoothly, everyone feels useful.
Again it’s been my luck to get on some dysfunctional ones. Stupid ass warriors need to learn how to BLOCK with their shields. They are just swinging like morons and expecting to be healed. Well, take it from the cleric who’s watching: you sir, are a drain on a limited resource – my mana.
At least CoX defenders have an end bar that refills by itself, but they still get pissed off about stupid idiots who run off by themselves down three corridors into 28 mobs and beg for or expect heals.
I get to watch the same thing with the moron diving headfirst off high places and right through traps to boot.
Oh, and my most recent group had a rogue who didn’t know when it was his turn to DISARM the fucking trap, and we had to sit there for 15 minutes waiting on him. In the end, I had to go visit a rest shrine, memorize immunity to cold, and buff everyone up to get by it. I love the flexibility of a cleric.
I’m tempted to put something into my bio that goes in this vein:
Unless I’m taken by surprise or caught unawares, the speed at which you are healed is inversely proportional to how suicidally foolish you are being.
This would involve things like: deliberately running through not-yet-disarmed traps without any form of protection, falling repeatedly off high places, running off by yourself instead of staying with the party, triggering monster ambushes over here while the rest of the group is way over there, etc.
Later: Writing really makes one cool off. I’m not as angry or indignant now as when I first started ranting about all this. I went and reread some really old blaster guides – before you make a blaster – and the 3b bible. I’m oddly tickled that the blaster hero has a villain counterpart.
Doms are kinda like blasters, except we just sacrificed significant damage for more control.
So we’re on hard mode. So what? If I blew a brute or a corruptor or an mm to 40, it would be sleepwalking, probably. Blasters take pride in the challenge, and dominators should too. We’re on hard mode because we have no defence but active defence, and that’s just how things are.
There’s no need to be oh so unhappy that this guy is so much more super than you or whatever. I do pve things with my invul/fire tank that I wouldn’t dream of doing on any other AT. (Like take apart an entire Rikti Crash Site spawn without pulling to separate them.) I suppose someone skillful at a controller might manage the same feat, but 3-4 rikti bosses? Can they really not die to them? I dunno if a defender could with an anchor’ed debuff, but it’s not something I’d personally want to try. A scrapper would drop dead if he tried to tank them all, he would probably do fine if he single or clump pulled them. And a blaster nova wouldn’t take ‘em all out.
There’s always going to be a class slightly better than them all, and it’s human nature to turn that into the superman FOTM class. RoD thieves for example. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few more, useful in different situations – ie. RoD vampires, CoX fire/kin/fire controller.
If you (in a general sense of whoever) want to play that way, then play that way. I don’t. I might even like the added challenge of something more tough.
The one thing which does cause friction between us is when you start cherrypicking teams for uber FOTM builds that meet your abnormally high standards. Frankly, if you were just a single picky person, I wouldn’t care. There are some random freaks I’ve seen on the forums who had this ‘ultimate’ criteria for perfect teams and what not. Random freaks are what they are, as long as others aren’t as picky, we’re all good.
I guess the disturbing part is when too many others start to believe the propaganda you spread, and then ignore so-and-so class for teams “because they are gimp.”
I kinda feel a little sorry for TA/A, in a way.
Ah well. Life goes on.
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