of course i have not read the whole thread, just some posts here and there (hey, i'm not getting paid for this)...
I have a few things to say
first: multi level missions with mission bosses.
Sounds great! One thing to be wary of though..
what if my team takes a mission, stampede's through two levels of dungeon, reaches the mission boss and gets smashed..
i mean what if the mission is doable but the big boss just isn't doable? It's ok if my team gets defeated by the boss.. so long as trying again with better organization will eventually have us prevail.. otherwise it would be really frustrating.. right now you usually know whether you can do a mission or not in the first multi-mob room.. which is good defense from frustration..
So, this works if team organisation does make a difference, and if the boss is not too uber.. also i think the situation in which combat occurs should provide some room for strategy, meaning:
- it happens in a big room, so rooting, slowing etc can be effective
- there are one or two henchman that can maybe be pulled to fight them separately, or pacified while the boss gets killed, or maybe one of them will die before the team dies/flees making the next atttmpt more reasonable...
ok another subject (this one is more of a rant): i think team missions, as soon as they come into the game, however they are, and especially if they are fun, will make the "my class can't solo" problem a lot less serious. Meaning you will be able to get tokens, equipment, money by doing group missions and not need to spend your time soloing missions if your class takes forever to kill a mob. (btw replace the word class with profession.. we don't want to be fantasy now do we?)
What i mean is yes all classes should have some ability to go solo.. on the other hand some classes are obviously more solo oriented than others, from their structure, not from game balance issues, and i don't think there's anything wrong with that..
I mean one of my chars is an MP and i created it expecting to solo, the other one is an NT and right out from the start it was planned as a group character.. of course it would be annoying if my NT could not solo a low difficulty mission if i really wanted to, but that's not how i would want to spend my time with that char... you expect pet professions to be good at soloing and DD professions to be capable of some soloing through tricks such as rooting or slowing opponents to nuke them.. resulting in quick death of the nuker if something goes wrong but still a viable option with some care.
Doctors should feel lucky about how much they can solo in this game.. in EQ not only clerics can't kill anything, but they can't even get anywhere without some other class's help.