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I'm optimistic that there will be a little trick here and there to defeating certain mobs... that's never really been a problem for SE. That kind of strategy works just fine for a single player RPG that might get played for 100 hours. But in an MMO, one person in the alliance can look up the answer, tell you what to do, and bingo bongo bango, all sense of strategy is killed for everyone else. Chess just isn't chess if you have a computer tell you the best move to make.
If you're making a game that hopes to place the challenge in the strategy, you have to create problems that players really have to think about to overcome. They don't even have to be too brain-bustingly difficult considering they're making those decisions against the clock.
The problem is that the designers are so married to the basic MMO formula that they can't see how overly simplistic it is. When your game is one of pitting one HP bar against another, you're not setting your game up with the elements of a strategy game. Strategy games are all about effective allocation of resources. When you don't have many resources and/or the way they should be allocated is obvious, you don't have a strategy game.
If you're making a game that hopes to place the challenge in the strategy, you have to create problems that players really have to think about to overcome. They don't even have to be too brain-bustingly difficult considering they're making those decisions against the clock.
The problem is that the designers are so married to the basic MMO formula that they can't see how overly simplistic it is. When your game is one of pitting one HP bar against another, you're not setting your game up with the elements of a strategy game. Strategy games are all about effective allocation of resources. When you don't have many resources and/or the way they should be allocated is obvious, you don't have a strategy game.
I think an effective way to deal with some of the strategy would be insted of having "X ability happen at Y % of HP" would be to have a whole list of abilities that could happen. Lets say your fighting a dragon and at 50% hp it uses a breath attack, instead it could use its 25% 10% ability. Knowing what abilities your up aginst is one thing but never knowing when they will actually come up is another. This would be fun to me knowing that its not 100% scripted that X boss does X move at X %.
