While the game is being patched, someone named "sonylies" (lol) posted in
the rpg ng about the combat model in EQ2 and how much they disliked it
mostly, I believe, because of how different it is from the EQ model they are
used to. It occurred to me while replying that this newsgroup is a more
appropriate place for this discussion, and I didn't want to crosspost my
reply so I thought I'd start a new thread here. The topic is something
that's come up over and over again as people compare the tactics they're
used to in EQLive with the new combat system in EQ2. Lots more will be said
about this over the new few weeks as the game comes to market, and people
will form their own impressions, but I thought I'd make a couple of
observations to frame some of the discussion. I'll apologize in advance for
plagiarizing my comments in the other message, I got lazy.

One of the complaints I've read from people comparing the two systems is
that many of the tactics that we've come to know and love in EQLive no
longer play a part in EQ2 combat. Since you're told how many mobs are coming
when you pull, there is none of the subtlety and risk that you face when you
use lull pulling and other single-pulling strategies. This is being viewed
by some as a dumbing down and a reduction in tactical subtlety.

The problem with this view is that it relies on an assumption that EQ2's
battles were designed to be fought in the same way that EQLive's were and
the inability to use tactics fondly rememberd in the old game leads some to
believe that tactics in general are no longer required. It's an
understandable reaction, I felt the same initially . But over time (and some
good discussions with Ben Sisson) I came to a different view and realized
that the EQ2 model is designed from the ground with completely different
assumptions. I'm going to make some generalizations here, but hear me out.

EQLive is a game where you often strive to limit battles to one
mob vs. you and your group. Adds are disfavored and cause great problems in
a lot of situations. So pulling strategies are developed and sometimes
required in order to limit your exposure to a minimal number of mobs.
Preferably one. Feign death is used frequently to give the group a free pass
to try again when a single-pull goes bad. When that fails crowd control then
is then required to handle adds via mezzing, root-parking or off-tanking.
There are even encounters where the mere presence of any adds means a wipe
and entire strategies are built around ensuring that you can isolate the
battles to keep them incremental.

This isn't how EQ2 is designed. Linked mobs cannot be split and when you
pull any one of them, you *must* fight them as a group. Once you adjust to
this significant departure, you realize that the tactics and strategies
don't go away, they just change from being pulling and isolating tactics, to
how-do-we-deal-with-all-these-mobs tactics.

Example. In EQLive if you have an encounter with a named surrounded by
minions, you look at ways to approach the pull in a way that will limit your
exposure to discreet, incremental encounters. Not always, but pretty often.
We're all familiar with the concept of "breaking" a room so that we can
handle solo pops, or clearing the room of adds and isolating the named so
that we can fight him alone. If things go south and you get the named and
all his minions you might wipe, evac or just get very badly beat up. And in
some cases you might win. Sometimes you can offtank the adds and focus on
the named, or even offtank the named while focusing on the adds. But in most
cases that I've seen, the challenge is to limit the battle to one mob at a
time or the most minimal number possible. Very often you can use crowd
control to mez the adds and do the entire battle incrementally.

The  designers of course don't know how you're going to approach the battle
and so they present an encounter that may be way too easy
with maximum crowd control available or overly difficult for teams that
don't have crowd control available. They have to design encounters to be
handled across the entire spectrum of possibilities and this winds up
promoting these pulling and crowd-control tactics but also winds up
promoting optimal party composition strategies and different kinds of holy
trinities.

In EQ2 if you see a named and he's linked with 4 adds, you know that you're
going to get all five of them. The discussion is no longer what to do if you
get the adds, the discussion turns to:

1) Should we fight the named first or the adds?
2) What kind of threat does the named present? Will it nuke us, will it mez
us, will it heal its friends? Are there unusual damage dealers we need to
special case? AE's? Mental damage?
3) What kind of threat do the minions present? Do they have special
abilities that the named does not? Are they the primary challenge or is the
named?

And so on. You don't plan this as a contingency, you rely on it as a battle
plan and hope that you've got what it takes to face the breadth of the
challenge right up front. Also, linked groups re-pop as a group, so you
can't "break" a room to avoid having to deal with groups, you just have to
step up to the plate and deal with it. It's a core expectation of this
combat model.

My group has fought Amaylia the Rat Queen in the Crypt of Betrayal three
times now. The first two times we wiped because we had no idea from the con
system what kind of challenge she and her group presented. It didn't help us
at all to know how many mobs were coming on the pull or to read "Looks like
an even fight for a group of six" in the conning text. She conned white with
two double-up arrows and her minions were all white with no arrows. Didn't
help us much, lol.

The Rat Queen's Chilling Winds AE is devastating and is what kept killing
us. Once we learned the range of the AE and learned how to position
ourselves for the fight, and in the process learned what kind of challenge
the minions presented we were able to take her out on the third attempt in a
real squeaker of a battle. Unlike EQLive, you cannot med during battle and
while you are in combat your regen drops to next to nothing so we knew that
we'd have to use our Power judiciously on only those things that would get
her dead. That meant no DD or DoTs for me on my duty (because I needed every
drop of Power for Slow, Ward, Heal) and very careful use of Wizard and
Cleric Power. Because her lair is crawling with dozens of wandering non-KoS
mobs, no AE DD, no AE Taunt. Careful execution, positioning and use of
resources is what got her dead and got us our quest completed, it wasn't
because of the con mesage or because we knew how many mobs were coming on
the pull. The tactics did not have to address the issue of single pulling,
that wasn't a possibility. We had to focus instead on how to execute against
the entire group within the time frame of available Power. And because all
players use Power to fuel their spells and combat arts (including taunt,
kick, etc), Power is not just the concern of the casters, it's a resource
management issue for the entire team.

Notice also that the presence of up arrows is a unique way to reduce mob
difficulty inflation. What I mean by that is that if you didn't have the up
arrows and relied instead on varying the difficulty of the encounter by
changing the mob levels, you'd wind up unbalancing the encounter for one
group or another. If you raise the level, for example, you take the mob out
of the range of lower level players who might otherwise be appropriate for
the dungeon. If you lower the level, then the higher level players have an
easier go at the target. With this new up arrow convention, you can limit
the encounter in an interesting way, making it a *lot* tougher for players
of the same or lower levels, but also making it so that the higher levels
will go out of color con range sooner and thus will get little to no
experience fighting the mob, and no loot per the TLC rule. It's a neat way
imo to additionally tune encounters without messing with levels and it adds
a whole new dimension of mystery to every fight with a double up-arrow mob
or group. There is no inkling of any kind of what the double up arrows
signify, other than "you gonna be hurtin". That, and the hard lessons of
experience.

Anyway, after living in a basement for so many levels crafting I'm just
starting to get out and adventure and I'm still enjoying the combat into the
20's. I have no idea if this will continue into the 30's, 40's and 50, or
what will happen after the devs add in all the new individualization
enhancements that are coming. But just like the crafting system that turned
things upside down for everyone who was used to thinking of crafting as a
relaxing interlude, this new combat model where you have to fight the whole
group, and nothing but the group, appeals to me as something new and
something different. I gotta give 'em credit for that.