Why can't/How Could a modern MMORPG have combat like you'd see in a MOBA?

[Vitruviansquid]

So ever since Everquest, combat in most standard and popular RPGs have kind of been like this:

There's a player who's the tank, and the tank holds aggro on every enemy in an encounter who is not under long-term crowd control, or something has gone really wrong. Everyone else in the group who is not the tank is expected to fold under fire really quickly if they end up with aggro on an unhindered enemy.

As a result, players' roles are very narrow. The tank is solely responsible for making sure the enemy is targeting him, the healer is solely responsible for the tank's survival, and the damage dealers are solely responsible for the enemies dying.

In MOBA, on the other hand, the same rough roles exist in a team. There are usually designated tanks, damage-dealers, and healers. However, each player often has a hand in responsibilities for every role. It matters a lot if you have a healer with good damage or a damage dealer that has high hp in a MOBA because the healer is sometimes going to need to smack someone, and the DPS is sometimes going to take damage, even if the team has executed their plan flawlessly.

Really, I'd find it hard to make a case that any MMORPG has more interesting combat than a typical MOBA being played right now, whether that's LoL or Dota 2 or HOTS or Paragon, or whatever. Battles in MOBAs look better with more chaos, play better, and force players to consider more of what's going on than just executing their one role. You would actually have times when it's advantageous for someone who is a damage dealer to compromise some damage for survivability or whatnot. So why can't MMORPGs have combat that feel more like MOBA?

Yes, MOBA is usually made interesting by the fact that they are multiplayer games, but there are definitely functional AI's in MOBA games that can play roughly as a team against a player-team. LoL and HOTS, at least to my knowledge, both have AI's that reasonably play like very bad, but actual people.

[GloatingSwine]

The fundamental concept of combat in a MOBA is different, because there's no aggro mechanic.

A tank in an MMO isn't just tough, as you identified the tank in an MMO has tools to hold aggro. There's no aggro in an MMO because the opponents are human, so the concept of a "tank" character is different.

The way combats play out, therefore, cannot be directly compared. The existence of AI bots in MOBAs is irrelevant because other than creeps they're intended to mimic a human player not the systematised hazard that aggro mechanics produce.

In a classic MMO with an aggro mechanic nobody else needs survivability or healing if the tank (and troll) is good enough at their job, because nobody else is getting hit, the tank is holding the aggro and using their other tools to shut down stragglers (eg. in DCUO tank characters tend to have a lot of yank moves to pull in mobs that didn't want to pay attention). So characters are free to specialise hard. The DPS can be squishy, as long as they don't stand in red stuff they live.

MOBAs are still fundamentally built on the Parts of the Machine design though, your support is not your AD carry and is not expected to do what the AD carry does. (The whole concept that a character can even be a "carry", expected to win the late game teamfights due to having all the damage moves ever when appropriately fed, exposes how MOBAs are a Parts of the Machine design, build a team of five supports and you won't win all that often). The machine is a different machine doing a different job in a different environment, and its parts might have very slightly broader roles, but the machine still needs all its parts to be truly successful.

MMOs can use a "whole machine" design, where every character has damage, survival, and healing tools at their disposal all the time though. Marvel Heroes (despite Diablo being one of its parents) is basically an MMO, and everyone there has the whole machine. Same in Destiny. I'm p. sure Guild Wars is a "whole machine" design too.

In fact, I suspect that more modern MMOs use whole machine designs than they do parts of the machine, it's just that most modern MMOs aren't WoW and so don't have that kind of visibility.

[A Tad Insane]

First, all of what gloatingswine said.

Second, as he also said, most modern MMOs are using more loosely defined roles. WoW is... What? 12 years old now? Holding it as your one example is a big disservice to the MMO genre.

Finally, again, as Swine said, that's when the game is pve. In basically all MMOs, PvP very much resembles what you're looking for, even WoW. There have been a few times, in low level bgs, were I was healing a warrior murdering everyone else because they didn't think to walk away from the giant dude with the equally giant axe and kill me.

[Vitruviansquid]

The fundamental concept of combat in a MOBA is different, because there's no aggro mechanic.

A tank in an MMO isn't just tough, as you identified the tank in an MMO has tools to hold aggro. There's no aggro in an MMO because the opponents are human, so the concept of a "tank" character is different.

The way combats play out, therefore, cannot be directly compared. The existence of AI bots in MOBAs is irrelevant because other than creeps they're intended to mimic a human player not the systematised hazard that aggro mechanics produce.

In a classic MMO with an aggro mechanic nobody else needs survivability or healing if the tank (and troll) is good enough at their job, because nobody else is getting hit, the tank is holding the aggro and using their other tools to shut down stragglers (eg. in DCUO tank characters tend to have a lot of yank moves to pull in mobs that didn't want to pay attention). So characters are free to specialise hard. The DPS can be squishy, as long as they don't stand in red stuff they live.

Yes, I know what makes MMORPGs play the way they play, and what makes MOBA play the way they play. The question is why can't MMORPGs play like MOBAs, which tend to be far more interesting.



MOBAs are still fundamentally built on the Parts of the Machine design though, your support is not your AD carry and is not expected to do what the AD carry does. (The whole concept that a character can even be a "carry", expected to win the late game teamfights due to having all the damage moves ever when appropriately fed, exposes how MOBAs are a Parts of the Machine design, build a team of five supports and you won't win all that often). The machine is a different machine doing a different job in a different environment, and its parts might have very slightly broader roles, but the machine still needs all its parts to be truly successful.

MMOs can use a "whole machine" design, where every character has damage, survival, and healing tools at their disposal all the time though. Marvel Heroes (despite Diablo being one of its parents) is basically an MMO, and everyone there has the whole machine. Same in Destiny. I'm p. sure Guild Wars is a "whole machine" design too.

In fact, I suspect that more modern MMOs use whole machine designs than they do parts of the machine, it's just that most modern MMOs aren't WoW and so don't have that kind of visibility.

Yes, in MOBA, the classes are designed to be "parts of a machine," but it is obvious that there is more fluidity between those parts than the parts in WoW, so it is more interesting. That was the point I was already trying to make. You could think of the question as, why do so many current MMOs use the outdated aggro mechanics that have been around since at least Everquest?

In these examples, I'm pretty sure Guild Wars 2 actually does have the rigid roles. I haven't played it myself, but looking at videos of it online, people refer to tanks, healers, and etc. and it looks like they are indeed just in charge of their own roles. Destiny is a co-op multiplayer shooter that shares basically no DNA with MMORPGs besides the character advancement. Marvel Heroes is more of a Diablo clone with weak enemies.

[GloatingSwine]

Yes, I know what makes MMORPGs play the way they play, and what makes MOBA play the way they play. The question is why can't MMORPGs play like MOBAs, which tend to be far more interesting.

Because MOBAs are played against human opposition and MMOs are not. They are attempting to do completely incompatible things, one is a 5v5 player vs. player on a level playing field, the other is a cooperative PvE where the core structure of a fight is a many vs. one.

You're asking why oranges can't drive like motorbikes.


In these examples, I'm pretty sure Guild Wars 2 actually does have the rigid roles. I haven't played it myself, but looking at videos of it online, people refer to tanks, healers, and etc. and it looks like they are indeed just in charge of their own roles. Destiny is a co-op multiplayer shooter that shares basically no DNA with MMORPGs besides the character advancement. Marvel Heroes is more of a Diablo clone with weak enemies.

Destiny and Marvel Heroes both have MMO style raids and dungeons with raid specific mechanics which strongly resemble more traditional MMOs (and when you're talking about the way MMO fights "work" you're talking about how they work against raid/dungeon bosses, because that's where they reach their purest expression). They are far closer to MMOs than MOBAs are, despite the differences in presentation and control.

[Vitruviansquid]

Because MOBAs are played against human opposition and MMOs are not. They are attempting to do completely incompatible things, one is a 5v5 player vs. player on a level playing field, the other is a cooperative PvE where the core structure of a fight is a many vs. one.

You're asking why oranges can't drive like motorbikes.

These MOBA games do already have AI. Heroes of the Storm has AI that can play any individual character. I mentioned this already.

Most MMORPG dungeons are already divided into discrete encounters that could each resemble a teamfight in a MOBA, only sometimes with "patrol" mobs that could add into fights. You could really consider each pull in WoW, Rift, LOTRO, TOR, FFXIV, Wildstar, or whatever as an individual teamfight. I have no idea why you bring up that MOBAs are 5v5 because most MMO's do strictly ration the amount of mobs that *should* be present in each pull. I have no idea why you bring up that MMORPGs are cooperative PVE of many vs. one because that is patently not true. All of the MMORPGs I mentioned above support group vs. group combat. The majority of pulls in instances in those games have mobs that are linked to all aggro at once, no matter how you pull them.


Destiny and Marvel Heroes both have MMO style raids and dungeons with raid specific mechanics which strongly resemble more traditional MMOs (and when you're talking about the way MMO fights "work" you're talking about how they work against raid/dungeon bosses, because that's where they reach their purest expression). They are far closer to MMOs than MOBAs are, despite the differences in presentation and control.

I asked the original question, so I get to explain what I meant by the question, right?

No, I am not talking about bosses. I am talking about the core gameplay of "trash packs." I would go into why it's weird and arbitrary for you to declare that bosses are the "purest expression" of MMORPGs, but that is outside the domain of my question.

[Keltest]

These MOBA games do already have AI. Heroes of the Storm has AI that can play any individual character. I mentioned this already.

Most MMORPG dungeons are already divided into discrete encounters that could each resemble a teamfight in a MOBA, only sometimes with "patrol" mobs that could add into fights. You could really consider each pull in WoW, Rift, LOTRO, TOR, FFXIV, Wildstar, or whatever as an individual teamfight. I have no idea why you bring up that MOBAs are 5v5 because most MMO's do strictly ration the amount of mobs that *should* be present in each pull. I have no idea why you bring up that MMORPGs are cooperative PVE of many vs. one because that is patently not true. All of the MMORPGs I mentioned above support group vs. group combat. The majority of pulls in instances in those games have mobs that are linked to all aggro at once, no matter how you pull them.



I asked the original question, so I get to explain what I meant by the question, right?

No, I am not talking about bosses. I am talking about the core gameplay of "trash packs." I would go into why it's weird and arbitrary for you to declare that bosses are the "purest expression" of MMORPGs, but that is outside the domain of my question.

The difference between bosses and trash mobs is, for the purposes of this discussion, largely semantic. The only way a tank role works is if they have some way of compelling the enemy to attack them. In Heroes, the tank warriors tend to have moderate damage and sharp crowd control, so they can get in your face and actually hurt you if you ignore them, and its still a perfectly valid tactic to just corral them somewhere until you've dealt with the healers and the assassins in the back line. Without the ability to actually force an opponent to target you, a tank cant do its job, so the entire machine falls apart. The problem is not the size of the team fight, the problem is that in mobas youre facing an intelligent opponent capable of deciding that attacking the tank is not the most productive thing you can do and instead go on and attack someone easier and more beneficial to kill, like the healer.

[Hiro Protagonest]

These MOBA games do already have AI. Heroes of the Storm has AI that can play any individual character. I mentioned this already.

Okay. First of all to get it out of the way, that AI kinda sucks and people only recommend playing against bots as a way to get a feel for your own character in the intricate environment of the arena.

Second, the fact that those aren't players is semantics because those are player-characters. Those are heroes. They aren't bosses. In a MOBA, a jungler can take on bosses by themselves. That doesn't win their team the match outright. It's a different fight.

[GloatingSwine]

These MOBA games do already have AI. Heroes of the Storm has AI that can play any individual character. I mentioned this already.

That AI is intended to mimic human players though, and fundamentally if you're playing vs. AI you're not playing the game. MOBAs are games which are designed to be played as teams of humans (because they originate from a Warcraft 3 mod and the Warcraft 3 AI wasn't designed for it), the AI is a concession to people needing to occasionally practice or play offline not as anything you should consider to be playing the actual game.

MMO fights are intended to be highly asymmetric, with several players vs. one extremely powerful boss. This works because the boss behaves systematically not intelligently.


No, I am not talking about bosses. I am talking about the core gameplay of "trash packs." I would go into why it's weird and arbitrary for you to declare that bosses are the "purest expression" of MMORPGs, but that is outside the domain of my question.

Nobody cares about trash packs in MMOs. That's why they're called trash.

Dungeon and raid bosses in MMOs are where the majority of the mechanical challenge lies. They are literally the place where the "parts of the machine" design shows its nature most strongly, because these many vs. one fights are what the machine is built for. Boss fights are what MMOs are actually about, fights with trash are just something to space out the boss fights and let players have a breather between things where there are actual stakes and a chance of failure.

[Vitruviansquid]

The difference between bosses and trash mobs is, for the purposes of this discussion, largely semantic. The only way a tank role works is if they have some way of compelling the enemy to attack them. In Heroes, the tank warriors tend to have moderate damage and sharp crowd control, so they can get in your face and actually hurt you if you ignore them, and its still a perfectly valid tactic to just corral them somewhere until you've dealt with the healers and the assassins in the back line. Without the ability to actually force an opponent to target you, a tank cant do its job, so the entire machine falls apart. The problem is not the size of the team fight, the problem is that in mobas youre facing an intelligent opponent capable of deciding that attacking the tank is not the most productive thing you can do and instead go on and attack someone easier and more beneficial to kill, like the healer.

In Heroes, the tank cannot compel an entire enemy team to attack him, nor does the tank want to, even when playing against AI. The AI is capable of both discriminating to not attack the tank when the opportunity appears, and attacking the tank when it is forced to by circumstances.

But that doesn't mean there aren't tank heroes, and that doesn't mean their job of being a big defensive guy is worthless. Tanks still function by taking the brunt of enemy damage EVEN WHEN playing against the AI.

If an MMORPG wanted to have more fluidity between roles, which would make the game more demanding and interesting, the model for it already exists in MOBA with AI modes. So no, the problem is not in that MOBA combat requires intelligent opponents.

[Vitruviansquid]

Okay. First of all to get it out of the way, that AI kinda sucks and people only recommend playing against bots as a way to get a feel for your own character in the intricate environment of the arena.

Second, the fact that those aren't players is semantics because those are player-characters. Those are heroes. They aren't bosses. In a MOBA, a jungler can take on bosses by themselves. That doesn't win their team the match outright. It's a different fight.

Yes, the AI sucks, but it is still functional to deliver a combat more interesting and chaotic than you would see in MMORPGs.

On your second point, I have no idea what you are talking about because I felt I was pretty clear in meaning about the entities players are expected to fight in PvE circumstances in a MOBA or MMORPG and the characters who are player avatars interacting with them. And no, changing the name to hero, boss, jungle, minion, whatever, doesn't change the meaning I am trying to convey, which had nothing to do with jungle minions in the first place.

[Vitruviansquid]

That AI is intended to mimic human players though, and fundamentally if you're playing vs. AI you're not playing the game. MOBAs are games which are designed to be played as teams of humans (because they originate from a Warcraft 3 mod and the Warcraft 3 AI wasn't designed for it), the AI is a concession to people needing to occasionally practice or play offline not as anything you should consider to be playing the actual game.

Yes, to put it in yet another way, since these posts continually declare MMORPGs to be different from MOBAs without addressing the question, why don't MMORPGs merely use combat systems where their AIs *also* attempt to simulate humans.


MMO fights are intended to be highly asymmetric, with several players vs. one extremely powerful boss. This works because the boss behaves systematically not intelligently.

Well you can't just declare that and have it be true. It seems a lot more sensible that MMORPGs, especially those catering to hardcore players, or those featuring content designed for hardcore players, that the idea isn't to make encounters more systematic, the idea should be to make them more interesting.


Nobody cares about trasapacks in MMOs. That's why they're called trash.

Dungeon and raid bosses in MMOs are where the majority of the mechanical challenge lies. They are literally the place where the "parts of the machine" design shows its nature most strongly, because these many vs. one fights are what the machine is built for. Boss fights are what MMOs are actually about, fights with trash are just something to space out the boss fights and let players have a breather between things where there are actual stakes and a chance of failure.

I really shouldn't keep explaining this, because on this forum there is a tendency for people to accuse me of flaming when I am explaining something that they don't get. And I really have no interest in this point whatsoever, but heck. Last try.

Boss fights in MMORPGs tend to be more interesting because the developers add a lot of unusual gimmicks to bosses while they do not spend as much time and attention "trash" mobs. You have pointed out that boss fights tend to be more interesting in MMORPG's than trash packs. Yes. That is the premise of this thread. It is asking why MMORPG designers don't apply something that would (apparently) easily make trash packs more interesting. I don't care about bosses. They are outside the domain of this thread.

[GloatingSwine]

Yes, to put it in yet another way, since these posts continually declare MMORPGs to be different from MOBAs without addressing the question, why don't MMORPGs merely use combat systems where their AIs *also* attempt to simulate humans.

Because they're asymmetric. And that's not me declaring it, that's me observing it based on experience playing them and having friends who also play them.

If Deathwing could ignore all the tanks and go and splat the DPS because that was the clever thing to do, he would have to be far less powerful for the party to stand a chance. Because the bosses are very powerful the players' advantage is in how predictable they are. The thing which makes MMO players engage with the fights is figuring out the boss mechanics and honing their execution and builds to beat them most efficiently.

You are claiming that the game would be more interesting if it was more like MOBAs, but that's based on your subjective opinion about what's interesting in games. MMOs are a different thing, the people who play them are looking for a completely different type of engagement to MOBA players, just as fans of eating oranges are looking for something different to fans of riding motorcycles.


Boss fights in MMORPGs tend to be more interesting because the developers add a lot of unusual gimmicks to bosses while they do not spend as much time and attention "trash" mobs. You have pointed out that boss fights tend to be more interesting in MMORPG's than trash packs. Yes. That is the premise of this thread. It is asking why MMORPG designers don't apply something that would (apparently) easily make trash packs more interesting. I don't care about bosses. They are outside the domain of this thread.

Because trash packs aren't the point of the game. They're trash. They're there to be trash.

They are breather content.

MMO bosses are long term relatively attention intensive fights usually under time pressure before the boss enrages, trash packs are intended to die quickly to give the players space and time to decompress between actual fights. They give no rewards, they take no effort, and that's what they're for.

Even oustide of comedy nonsense like Pandemonium Warden* a raid fight might take ten to fifteen minutes of relatively constant attention where a small amount of inattention might mean a wipe and the whole team has to start the fight again.

So between boss fights (which are the point and where all the rewards are) there are trash mobs to blow off steam by killing something that is just trash.

* A boss from Final Fantasy 11. A 36 man raid fought it for 18 hours and were unable to beat it. They stopped because they were becoming physically ill from the constant level of attention they had to give to the game. It was later changed to a mere two hour fight.

[Keltest]

Because they're asymmetric. And that's not me declaring it, that's me observing it based on experience playing them and having friends who also play them.

If Deathwing could ignore all the tanks and go and splat the DPS because that was the clever thing to do, he would have to be far less powerful for the party to stand a chance. Because the bosses are very powerful the players' advantage is in how predictable they are. The thing which makes MMO players engage with the fights is figuring out the boss mechanics and honing their execution and builds to beat them most efficiently.

You are claiming that the game would be more interesting if it was more like MOBAs, but that's based on your subjective opinion about what's interesting in games. MMOs are a different thing, the people who play them are looking for a completely different type of engagement to MOBA players, just as fans of eating oranges are looking for something different to fans of riding motorcycles.



Because trash packs aren't the point of the game. They're trash. They're there to be trash.

They are breather content.

MMO bosses are long term relatively attention intensive fights usually under time pressure before the boss enrages, trash packs are intended to die quickly to give the players space and time to decompress between actual fights. They give no rewards, they take no effort, and that's what they're for.

Even oustide of comedy nonsense like Pandemonium Warden* a raid fight might take ten to fifteen minutes of relatively constant attention where a small amount of inattention might mean a wipe and the whole team has to start the fight again.

So between boss fights (which are the point and where all the rewards are) there are trash mobs to blow off steam by killing something that is just trash.

* A boss from Final Fantasy 11. A 36 man raid fought it for 18 hours and were unable to beat it. They stopped because they were becoming physically ill from the constant level of attention they had to give to the game. It was later changed to a mere two hour fight.

You want nonsense, try The Sleeper from Everquest. I think he's been beaten once, ever, by a combination of like 5 guilds zerging it to death.

[Thiyr]

As a result, players' roles are very narrow. The tank is solely responsible for making sure the enemy is targeting him, the healer is solely responsible for the tank's survival, and the damage dealers are solely responsible for the enemies dying.

In MOBA, on the other hand, the same rough roles exist in a team. There are usually designated tanks, damage-dealers, and healers. However, each player often has a hand in responsibilities for every role. It matters a lot if you have a healer with good damage or a damage dealer that has high hp in a MOBA because the healer is sometimes going to need to smack someone, and the DPS is sometimes going to take damage, even if the team has executed their plan flawlessly.

I just want to point this out that this isn't entirely true. MMOs have more narrow roles, yes, but they aren't to the exclusion of all else. Tanks and healers are still supposed to be doing some damage, even if its not to the same degree as a dedicated damage character. To quote some rando from the WoW forums (where, as was mentioned, the class distinction is probably at its strongest):


While DPSing is not your main priority, if the healing burden is low you should be trying to weave some damage in.

Healers are not going to get the DPS of a DPS or even a tank usually, but if you can get 3k DPS over the course of a 5 minute pull that's 900k damage. I've seen wipes with bosses at lower health than that.

So its not that them doing damage is a bad thing, but rather that their priority is keeping people alive above all else. Their toolkit is geared towards that.

And it's not all that different in mobas, either. I admit, most of my experience is in HotS, meaning the role split is a bit closer to in an MMO, but while the breakdown of the roles tends to fall a bit differently, you still hit a lot of the same ideas. Outside of very odd situations, you need a support that can keep people alive more than do damage, you need a warrior that can keep the enemy from hitting things they're not supposed to, and you need damage to make things fall down. And while yes, your DPS and Supports are gonna need to be able to soak some hits, the same is true in MMOs (incidental damage is a thing). Going no warrior is possible in a moba, but it's happened in MMOs as well (Rogue Tanking was a thing for a while in burning crusade apparently). The big difference is, in addition to what others have said, less about the distinction between roles being looser and more about the scale of the encounter

Consider: This Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agPbq8F0S8) gave me a rough estimate of the final boss encounter of ICC being ~10ish minutes (About half the length of a game of HotS). A teamfight in a moba is usually under a minute. These are very different beasts, and what works in one is not going to work in another. To extend a team fight to that length would require everyone to be a lot sturdier than they are at the moment, which narrows the scope of what damage dealers do. No longer can you sneak up on your enemy's backline, unload a salvo of arcane power into their squishy underbelly and start a fight with them down a player, because that's too fast. Burst damage ceases to meaningfully exist. So for dps to stand out from tanks or supports, their job is to do more damage than the other guys. Healers can't do as much damage, so they become better at keeping things alive for longer (as that's more important). And tanks have to be able to take damage for longer, so they have to get a bit sturdier. That's sounding mighty familiar. What once was a moba is growing a lot closer to an MMO.

But still, we could make the AI less predictable, yes? Well, in theory, yeah. But in practice that's a bad idea. First off, because the rudimentary MOBA AIs are, as have been mentioned, bad. And remember that these AI are probably fairly close to their RTS predecessors. And anyone can tell you how laughable those AI get once you know their quirks. So in order to compensate for this and have it be a meaningful challenge, you stack the deck in favor of the AIs. You give them more abilities, more things they can do. They're going to be predictable by the nature of the beast, but make it so that if you don't react to the prediction properly and you're punished a lot more than if it were in a PVP environment. At which point, you're essentially in the realm of a standard MMO raid boss.

Now of course, you could avoid this by having an easier MMO, where you can abuse the AI and destroy your enemies in a 30 second maelstrom of destruction. At that point, though, you're playing a moba's vs AI mode. It would lose interest quickly, your playerbase wouldn't bother to stick around, and your game would be at best remembered as an abysmal failure. In short, the fundamental nature of these two vastly different genres are so vastly different that trying to make one like the other is either going to be ineffective, or not change anything.

In short, the answer to your question is that MMOs can't feel like mobas because they're not mobas. That's the point. The games cater to different audiences, and as such have different priorities. And because different people find different things interesting, that's perfectly fine.

[GloatingSwine]

You want nonsense, try The Sleeper from Everquest. I think he's been beaten once, ever, by a combination of like 5 guilds zerging it to death.

Killing The Sleeper only took four hours though. (Because EQ wasn't instanced so 200 players were fighting it, admittedly, whereas FFXI allowed a max of 36)

Pandemonium Warden stood undefeated after 18 when the players themselves were becoming ill trying to fight it. Absolute Virtue once had a 30 hour fight (after which it used an ability that restored 100% health so 30 hours of progress were undone.) Though it was beaten several times every time someone found a way to do it Square would patch that way out like the worst kind of ******* GM, until they rebalanced both bosses to have much fewer HP but a two hour despawn timer so you still had to race to kill them before they went away.

[Keltest]

Killing The Sleeper only took four hours though. (Because EQ wasn't instanced so 200 players were fighting it, admittedly, whereas FFXI allowed a max of 36)

Pandemonium Warden stood undefeated after 18 when the players themselves were becoming ill trying to fight it. Absolute Virtue once had a 30 hour fight (after which it used an ability that restored 100% health so 30 hours of progress were undone.) Though it was beaten several times every time someone found a way to do it Square would patch that way out like the worst kind of ******* GM, until they rebalanced both bosses to have much fewer HP but a two hour despawn timer so you still had to race to kill them before they went away.

I bet the Warden didn't go on a rampage across the continent, killing all the players who were otherwise there for XP, when it won, did it? And then despawned forever?

[GloatingSwine]

I bet the Warden didn't go on a rampage across the continent, killing all the players who were otherwise there for XP, when it won, did it? And then despawned forever?

No, it nearly killed players in real life instead.

[A Tad Insane]

No, it nearly killed players in real life instead.

The most extreme boss ever.

[Winthur]

So ever since Everquest, combat in most standard and popular RPGs have kind of been like this:

I'm assuming that, by the thread title, you obviously meant MMORPGs and not RPGs, because for most single player RPGs that is never true, even for very MMO inspired games like Dragon Age Origins, where a tank-oriented warrior character 1) isn't necessary and 2) does not have ignorable damage, and healers are usually toolboxes of ass-whooping (most D&D derivations will have the Cleric/Druid own everything in sight, as in the tabletop).

This is, also, however, also not the case for online hack'n'slash games such as Diablo 2 or 3, Path of Exile or whatever else you have out there - each character is expected to pack their own survivability, damage and, to some extent, utility. No matter if they're a Barbarian or a Sorceress. Each has their own escape ability, defenses and playstyle.

Also, consider that in MOBAs, you have a few distinctive phases where each character gets to do damage. Nobody cares about a pure support Janna build's damage dealing capacity outside of the laning phase; even a Thresh, Lulu, Sona, or even weird behemoths of old like support Annie or Fiddlesticks stop being relevant in damage past the laning phase, unless the game allows them to amass near unlimited gold. Likewise, the goal in MOBA is to destroy the enemy base, but you don't necessarily need a healer or a tank to do so; you can have poke compositions or compositions that lack sustain in favor of other things.

In an MMO, you would have to account for those playstyles and make some instances/bosses that would account for those playstyles. There actually are some like that, I vaguely recall a WOTLK instance where my tank specifically had to avoid engaging enemies because they would melt him, but were extremely slow. But then again, you would also have to coordinate that. Imagine being queued into an instance with 5 uncoordinated hunters and the enemy is not very prone to staying in one place.


Also I would say that both combat systems suck and that if you wanted something more interesting you'd run something akin to IWD or D:OS multiplayer or whatever.

[Bucky]

There's no reason why a game couldn't have both big dumb bosses and smart MOBA-like enemies. Heck, some of the MOBAs have big dumb raid bosses in the middle of the map.

[NeoVid]

Guild Wars 2 and WildStar both have MOBA minigames, with Reaper's Rumble and War of the Wilds.

Though like everything I enjoyed the most in GW2, Rumble was only available for a very short time...

[gomipile]

I played Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) for a while about six years ago. The combat was more tactical than traditional MMO combat, and the enemies could switch targets at any time. This gave it a moment-to-moment feel much more like a tabletop RPG, which I assume was the point. It also combined well with the ability to set the difficulty of dungeons to match the party's/player's capabilities.

Unfortunately, the game had other drawbacks which caused me to lose interest.

[boomwolf]

MOBA style won't work as it requires the players to fight a similar number of opponents with similar intelligence and skills at thier disposal, and with the fact MMOs tend to have unpredictable party sizes, it's really hard to set up similar groups, let alone make them as smart.

However, arcade style can work, where the mobs are a viable threat (if only of draining resources), and half the issue is the swarming threat, rather than the individual intelligence or strength of each opponent.

Both hordes and bossfights are easy to make. But as currently existing MOBA AI proves, an actual "teamfight" against counterparts, is really poor. The AI just isn't good enough to know who's the best target at any given time., or to know when to fight and when to fold. Even the "hard" AIs are simply being cruched by inhuman reaction speed to cover their poor decision making.

Thinking of it, another issue is that MMO enemies shouldn't pick when to fight you and when not to like MOBA enemies do. An enemy that has to fight you when YOU choose, is at an obvious disadvantage if it's a supposed "fair fight"