| It is; the thing is finding ways to either disguise it, or mitigate the amount of it. At first I thought WoW was going that way, especially with Priests having serious support spells such as Sleep, Mind Rot, and Shadow Word: Fumble (all removed from the class in alpha/beta)... but well, we saw the result.
At any rate, sure you'll always have whack a mole, but one of the main issues is that NPCs always require you to have it to some extent. If they do too little damage, they're either an endurance fight (larger HP to compensate) or trivial in any context. Now, that's not to say there couldn't be, say, skills to counter skills or mitigate effects of abilities NPCs have, but that's one for the designers, really. We all know what's involved in the process of combat, but it's one thing to bitch and another thing to put your money where your mouth is as far as dealing with design issues. I think Furor could tell us about that firsthand, and by that I mean talking about how to fix/do it and actually fixing/doing it are two very distinct and separate things. |