Partying is always a very hard thing to manage. Has anybody seen it done excellently on a mud before?
The muds I've seen generally have massive groups of people with triggers to attack when the leader does. I've seen it lead to a lot of AFK people just collecting xp and some MUDs even have strange questions just to ensure that players are around. (Asking simple questions that require a reply like "what is two plus 4)", "does gravity pull things up?". Things that would be difficult to answer by trigger.
I've also played some MMOs that have party systems. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. In Final Fantasy XI for example past a pretty low level you can no longer solo anything. The easiest mob that gives you xp will destroy you if you try to solo it, regardless of skill or equipment. I don't think anybody wants something like this for darke.
The biggest problem *I* think with making mobs have to be grouped up is that combat on darke is first very much based on crits, and second that it happens very very fast. By the time a cleric can type 'th harold' (trueheal alias) at least one round will have gone by. By the time it goes off another 3 or 4 have gone by and harold is probably dead.
The problem I think with combatting monsters is that either the monster will crit you so bad that you'll die in a few rounds (before any potential healing or even attack spells would go off) or they can't hurt you at all.
I think one possible solution could be slowing combat down in a party setting (the higher-level mobs should offset the xp for slower combat) AND/OR make mobs, and potentially players more damage focused instead of crit focused. Each hit might do say 50 damage or so, but not 10 damage and sever off an arm. This effectively would make the goal to keep the player's HP above 0 and to bring the mobs down to 0 instead.
The healing in Darke is already set up to accomodate this with the various levels of heal spells doing more and more hp return.
To clarify I don't think healing should always be necessary. Right now however if you have 2 fighters the one that crits even slightly harder will be doing 90% of the damage/killing. If instead they did outright hp damage, even if the lesser fighter did half as much damage to the mob, it would still die 33% quicker than if the first fighter were alone. An xp splitting formula would have to take place somehow of course.
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If you say plz because it is shorter than please, then I will say no because it is shorter then yes.
