Future MMO Prospects

[synaesthetic]

Well, to be honest I think that the whole idea of increasing your stats actually does nullify difficulty. It's why I think PvP in MMOs is completely stupid unless all stats are normalized.

 

But you're taking my words a bit stronger than I intended.  Key words here were "considerably easier."

 

Twintania and Titan EX are good examples of where the mechanics can still kill you even if you massively overgear it. No matter how hard you overgear Titan, getting hit by Landslide will still knock you off the edge.

 

Leviathan EX is an example of an encounter where overgearing it can actually make the fight harder (or even potentially unwinnable, if your DPS is so high that the converter doesn't have time to charge up).

 

What I meant is if overgearing the encounter takes it from "difficult" to "faceroll," then the fight was never very difficult to begin with. Success was just unlikely. You just didn't have the gear to leave the realm of "statistically improbable." A good example of what I'm talking about is Patchwerk from Naxx40--it was a straight-up gear check. Just barely passing it required the best available gear at the time, but once you passed Patchy and got geared up from later parts of Naxx, he became very easy, because Patchy had almost no mechanics. It was just a DPS race.

 

Pre-Rising/F2P Auricadis and Nightmare Auricadis from TERA are also good examples of this. The boss's mechanics are relatively easy to deal with. Almost everything he does is easy to avoid. The fight is very, very forgiving in every aspect until Phase 3, where you have just over two minutes to kill him before you unavoidably die. If you don't meet the gear check, it's impossible. If you just barely meet it, it's unlikely but doable. If you overgear it, it's laughable. When my sorc had maxed out weapons and armor two tiers higher, I and a few friends cleared the fight with 3 people instead of 5--I was the only damage-dealer, with one tank and one healer--and it was still easy.

 

tl;dr: if the mechanics are not challenging, the fight is not challenging.

 

Edit: Actually I think that on a player with Convalescence up it might be possible to eat a Landslide and not be knocked off if a scholar crits Adloquium for 2k-ish (which would give them a 4k shield). I know that Manawall prevents the knockback effect, but I'm not sure exactly how that works. I've never been hit by Landslide and taken 0 damage except under the effects of Manawall. Anyway, it's a corner case and not something that you can achieve on demand, so it doesn't really invalidate the argument.