How was DAoC pvp more "skill" based than other games?

You can easily tell a Modern MMO player who plays casters vs one who played a DAOC caster.

Modern MMO caster, does not pan, and will wait till Melee gets to him, DAOC one, will pan and is paranoid as hell of letting a player get to him.

It very easy to determine when watching a video.

Modern MMO's in general just don't pan at all.

This was very noticeable in Rift for example during White fall BG, My group would side swipe the enemies or hit them from behind when they were in Middle, and they would never see it coming.. and really, you should be able to see it coming in that game, as it wasn't exactly hard to see the group running by.

Yes... but other mmos have enjoyable pve- including this one. Thus, many players are pvers. DAoC pve was absolutely awful, so there was nothing else to do, and if say, a server capped at 500- those 500 would almost all be wanting to pvp.

TOR- if you have 500, chance are half don't pvp much or at all, another chunk split their time between all aspects- and you might end up with 100 or likely less actually interested in pvping most of the time.

So what your saying is 5% of the people had the exact same WAY overpowered gear. 5% is a far cry from "all the people."

DAoC was very very high skill cap game.

Noobs were soooo bad, and the best players were killable yet, dominant.
Killable in the sense you could kill the best caster in the game rank 11 or whatever in 4 good melee swings. Yet dominant in the sense, they could just drop people in 3-4 nukes.

Now, different types of team setups were what made the game so competitive

You had:

Caster extend groups
The Albion realm caster extend group consisted of generally a cabalist (body 50% debuff + disease), 2x sorcerers (1 CC spec, 1 body nuke spec), a theurgist or 2 (spam pets that chase enemies, ice pets snare, earth pets hit hard, wind pets stun lock), an armsmen or paladin tank(peel bot! most essential! HAS TO SNARE ALL MELEE, SLAM [9sec stun] targets and call for burst) 2x healers [high realm rank meant they would have realm abilities such as group shields against melee and magic, purge, higher heal stats, mastery of physical defense]

Melee train groups
The midgard realm was most unanimous for this setup

2x beserker (turn into a bear and hit like a truck), skald(super speed and cc class), warrior(peel class) , runemaster(PBT aka group buff that makes targets miss 3 or so attacks in a row), shaman (spec buffs aka str/con, dex/qui and buffs that healers didnt have, AND MASSIVE INTERRUPTS/BUFF SHEARS (steal buffs), healer(mez spec), healer(heal/melee attack speed buff spec aka CELERITY)

Hybrid Groups
Hib had strong hybrid groups composed of casters and melee etc etc etc

Anyways in DAoC your group moved so fast that the most efficient way to roam was to /stick your driver who was mainly the CC sorc on alb, CC healer on mid, or bard on hib.

Imagine a game where groups of 8 run around a planet (frontier in daoc) and RESPECT other guilds fights, if you saw 2 realms fighting each other, there was MUTUAL RESPECT from all players and they would not RED ITS DEAD.

Imagine a game where your reputation was the only thing that mattered. People that assjammed fights were blacklisted and called out on the forums, never to get groups again. If you didnt have a good guild or good rep, you would simply never get in a decent 8 man.

Honable fighting at its finest.

gosh darn i miss daoc

if you werent a MASTER at panning the camera, kiting, snaring your target as melee, NOT OVEREXTENDING, you were as good as dead.

If you overextended or "fell behind" aka got rooted or just slow to pull back, your team lost, and you probably got yelled at.

The problem was the most people just didn't pvp... If you actually tried, and played with other people that actually tried, getting 2200 wasn't difficult. You can't really blame the game for the fact that the majority of the playerbase was so afraid of actually pvping.

DAOC actually had a very good PVE system, sorry to say.

I think my fondest memory was sadly a bug in this game. It was just so many giggles. I had a enchanter i was messing with in the teens and a patch messed up the way pets worked. I could stand on a bridge and wait for anybody of any level to come by and send my helper after them. Rarely failed that after they got done with the horse ride and into a battle my pet would attack them out of nowhere and i would get credit. It was much much giggles.

Like I said in my previous post, you could abuse it but yeah.

Actual raid groups doing ML's/dragons and such was fun... But animist/thurg mass pet attacking messing with bosses defenses, buffed necro pets being nearly unkillable to melee, spiritmaster pets close to necros.

Positioning mattered. Casters/Healers couldnt cast at ALL if something hit them, they would get interrupted. I remember the first day of WoW going omg I can cast while people are hitting me!!!!

Working as a team, even while leveling, was also important. Healers were mostly that, healers. For a healer to solo a npc it was usually a much lower level npc since they didn't have a lot of damage. Put a healer + a dps or tank together and the power of the group would increase dramatically for pve.

8 man groups had specific make ups. You needed a class that could give group speed, 2 healers (that way if one healer was being interrupted, the other healer could still heal), and damage dealers and a crowd control class. All the specific things like crowd control/healing/high damage were all specific to characters. You did not have one char that could heal/dmg/cc all in one. That made the character rolls a lot more focused.

You even had an entire other subset of classes that would NEVER get a group, ie the stealthers. They were not good at all with groups since most of their moves came out of stealth and they didn't have any cc-reduction abilities. But the stealthers ruled the bridges and thoroughfares of the pvp zones if they caught you alone.

But, since the game was seriously based on skill, someone who couldnt play their class would just drop dead to someone who knew how to play their class due to interrupts etc, it wasnt a game for the masses. People who sucked can play WoW but not DAOC, which means a lower population for DAOC than WoW and other games.

Every other game I have played since, its more like every man for themselves, even in group scenarios. The only every man for themselves gameplay in DAOC was the solo 1v1, which was mostly stealthers. You did not play badly or stupidly while in a group because you would get a reputation and no one would group you again.

Hib and Alb had it rough on ML's and Dragons, because of the way Theurgist/Animist worked it didn't require a huge raid and didn't foster realm pride like midgard did.

Mid's didn't have that classes, so that meant if you wanted to take on a Dragon or an ML encounter, it meant bringing people...

I remember doing ML raids, with 400 people in Midgard, 400 people.. moving around killing things.. was hilarious..