Tanking is all well and good…when you’re in control. But it gets really fun when things get a little out of hand. Maybe you Aggro a Pat mid-fight, then miss a runner who comes back with another Pat while you’re still fighting the first. Mobs are running all over the place, heading for your Healer, etc., and that’s when it gets hairy but Fun! :)

For some reason our Hunter dropped out with Gahz’rilla still left to kill leaving myself (a Prot Pally), our Shaman Healer, a Rogue, and a Mage. As we entered the area with Gahz’rilla’s pool I carefully pulled a couple of solo Pats and took care of them, then when everyone was ready I pulled the big crowd to the left. I think about 5 Mobs in all. But while we were killing them I looked around and saw a 3-4 Mob Pat was bearing down on us from behind. As they hit us I tried to grab Aggro but our Shaman took a couple of cheap shots and went down.

“That is NOT good,” I thought to myself, but I gave it my best shot and tried to round them all up so the AoEing Mage and my Consecrate could do maximum damage. It wasn’t a long fight by any means, but it seemed to last some time. There were Mobs all over the place, AoE explosions from the Mage, it was chaotic! (But fun ;) And then, just like that, we pulled through. We survived!

I rez’d the Shammy and apologized to her and she said we actually did pretty good. After that, Gahz’rilla was a piece of cake, and if not for his habit of playing with his food and booting us into the air twice, it would have been a boring fight.

I would suggest that PuGs have more blame than normal because of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Any group that assembles regularly must foster higher levels of personal responsibility.

Is it because MMO players want everything to be known and a simple matter of grinding progress out? Is that why there seems to be so much resistance to raid bosses with random abilities, for example?

PuGs are PuGs; although I agree that there is an elevated chance for blame and resentment in this style of play, I don’t believe that it would be that much greater in magnitude than that of, say, raiding.

I imagine PuGs using this mechanic would become stressful pits of blame and resentment.

Do the waves of mobs get progressively more difficult, or is it wave after wave of standard mobs with the same random chance of a lieutenant spawning, with a boss at the end?

Ideally the actual strength of the basic mobs should increase in power as you move through each wave, and after X waves new mobs should be introduced into the pool of attackers which would serve to add a new level of complexity to the players’ defensive strategy.

Alas, for my sins, I never got terribly far with either Puzzle Pirates or Guild Wars.

And indeed, I like the idea of having the rewards scale to your level of success, and that there isn’t necessarily an upper limit to that success. Each time you run a dungeon you know where the end is, and once you’ve completed it for the first time you’ll always know that you can do so any time you choose to return.

Game modes where you strive to get as far as you can before being overwhelmed can offer a more classic, perhaps arcade-like, gaming experience. I guess it could be likened to Space Invaders and company, where you try to get as far as you can and gain the highest score possible before the game throws too many enemies too quickly at you for you to get further. The more you play, the more likely you are to get that little bit further. I think developers would be wise to not ignore this arcade style of play in their MMOs, it can be easily as ‘addictive’ as, say, the standard MMO level grind.

For example, I have an idea for a sort of inverse-Tetris mini-game, built around the format of a WoW-a-like MMO. WoW and Tetris combined in one game space; surely it would be banned by governments as a Class A narcotic.

On the “Cursed Isles”, there are waves of progressively harder enemies, and the rewards scale quite nicely once you get past a certain point. It’s a lot of fun, trying to push the envelope. That’s the kind of group-based PvE that I like, where the difficulty is up to you and your skills. You only push as hard as you want, and get rewarded according to your success.