Classic vs. Challenge

[Raev]

Rumor, which runs before us like a barking dog, hints that the Beta server is not going to be up again, and the raid targets are going to be buffed. On the one hand, I love the fact that raid content is finally going to be challenging in ways other than poopsocking/FTE. On the other hand, it deeply bothers me that we won't have a classic server. We have a bunch of classholes talking about how we need to nerf the client so you can't move items out of banked bags, and yet we currently have:

• Dragon fear lasting 2-3x longer than it should
• 'normal' AEs should be resisted like 85-90% with max resists, not 30-40%
• Many dragons with 1.5-2x HP
• Avatar of War hitting 35% faster than he should be
• Dragons with way overtuned ATK values

And so on and so forth. I think when people start actually playing Velious there is going to be a massive outcry about how hugely overtuned these targets are. But then, on the first hand again, if Velious is released with truly classic values everything will be stomped on day 1.

Here is my suggestion: let's introduce a 'difficulty' knob that explicitly makes mobs more challenging, kind of like 'players 8' in Diablo. For example, suppose our difficulty was set at '+50'. Well, in that case, all raid targets get 50% more HP, their AEs all do 50% more damage, their AC/ATK goes up, etc. I'm just making up numbers here, but I think this has some big advantages over the current ad hoc system:

• We have the code for a true classic server
• Fresh servers can start at difficulty 0, and the staff can gradually increase it to keep things challenging
• Kunark with 2x raid target HP and other NPC buffs might actually be interesting
• Guilds won't be able to stomp Velious on day 1, because everything will be much harder than it was on the Beta server the night before.
• Which means that the beta server can stay up and we can continue to find bugs like 10th ring war mobs warping through the ground