Arelith

While mass combat and raids are a crucial part of the server and bring storylines and role play to many with a single event, in their current state it tends to be 2 groups rally a large amount of people fully warded and the server grinds to a halt, making any combat completely a coin toss, with spells taking minutes to cast, often in the wrong place, sword and board folks teleporting around as their target does the same with the lag caused. Due to the limitations of the game engine it feels there is no real way to fix this with the current way these things happen. So I prepose the following.

A raid mechanic, much like crafting points on level ups a player is allocated a set amount of skills that can be entered into a number of options, such as mundane defensive training, mundane offensive training, arcane defensive training, arcane offensive training, subterfuge, battle tactics and formation training and so on. This list can be as vast as devs would care to make it. It can either be a free selection or similar to skill points in that some are class specific only or entirely hidden and allocated based on class choices, a fighter getting points in mundane defensive training and mundane offensive training and a wizard/sorcerer/elementalist gaining the same but for arcane for example.

On top of this the player can pick up to say 3 roles that they would perhaps take part in in such events, front liner, healer, scout, diviner and so on, this list should cover most roles that people would take in a combat down to resupplying ammo for folks that are say commoners.

Then when these events are arranged and groups are gathered the DM overseeing them can use the skills folks have to determine outcomes. numbers would have to be tweaked and if this is given an approval I and I imagine many others would be willing to test and let the Devs tweak numbers till they where a good fit. There should be roll offs between people who have allocated opposing rolls, for example the commanders or leaders of any two groups should roll off with there skill in battle tactics to see who gets the upper hand in the tactics. This result can then be used to calculate who of the two opposing forces was able to gather what intel.

This would need a great deal of number crunching to balance and I am more than happy to spend the time going into this more if it is an idea the Devs and staff think might help to keep mass encounters fun and able to forward peoples stories without the limitations the current engine is able to handle.