In retrospect, it amuses me that I have so many screenshots of herding in City of Heroes.
I suspect the whole concept was fairly amazing to a ex-MUD player who was used to running (or “raiding” in today’s MMO parlance) a single big, bad and powerful mob with a group of 5-8 players.
In City of Heroes, the whole thing was inverted.
There were a LOT more enemies, but they were mostly minions, mooks of very little consequence attempting to swarm an impervious superhero.
Herding was a heady and powerful drug for a tank (if deadly boring to everyone else waiting for the one player to do their thing.)
Since I tended to fall on the exceedingly bored and frustrated side of the spectrum every time I played a non-tank in a group, I usually adopted the “run from spawn to spawn” routine in my groups and saved my power-tripping for solo expeditions.
Solo herding was also a good way for me to practice the then new-to-me concepts of using line of sight, corner-pulling, and experimenting with whatever scenery caught my eye to see if clever usage thereof would fool mob AI into doing what I wanted them to do.
To this day, I still greatly enjoy the control aspects of a tank, much more so than the typical I-need-to-trust-a-healer-to-keep-me-upright sort of tanking in more standard MMOs.
Yep, I even did it outdoors.
The blindly running swarm in a line is somehow so satisfying.
I did that, it declares to the world. These mobs are in my power.
Of course, it helped that City of Heroes made some characters so overpowered that they could get swung at by 15 mobs and not see a dent in their health bar.
As long as you did -some- damage then, the outcome was a forgone conclusion.
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NBI Writing Prompt: Are there any unexpected combat tactics that evolved in your MMO?
Why I Game 