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Here is a kicker, fixing TTK alone won't address the power scaling and pvp balance issues. The power gap is simply too large.

Alpha Two Phase II Feedback

Context : only been playing for a week.

Top 3-5 Most Important Bugs:
1. Quests that are not completing when all objectives are completed. (Proper Burial is one that comes to mind.)
2. Dismounting bug where player gets stuck inside the horse and has to relog.
3. I don't have any recollection on how it happened but basically the betrayal horn event was incredibly buggy and did not show locations and was confusing.

Top 3-5 Most Important Feedback Topics:
1. Distance between POIs is a bit too far
2. Monster aggro range covers roadways making it annoying to travel
3. Wand should be able to be in same grouping as focus (wand + focus not sword focus and wand as secondary) Maybe theres a reason why its not? but it just seems weird that i cannot equip wand focus and a bow.
4. Make Samia's Hope similar to Lionhold where players can pick which side of the map they want to quest in off the jump.
5. I think Ranger needs more work, it worked well off the jump but it just doesn't seem worth to roll this class over mage at all. Maybe increase their range?

shout out to @NyceGaming for getting beat up for this

I'm going to repeat what I've been saying here, about TTK:

Their intended design is:

"If I were to say average TTK between same level characters and average gear score, I would say that we're probably talking anywhere from 10 to 15 seconds upwards of 30 seconds, depending on the archetype." – Steven Sharif

So while they are iterating on TTK, I still think they are sticking with their design of trying to balance it around 10~15 seconds for a same level same gear DPS duel. So while It's going to get better, the issue with it will not be solved.

Short TTK (even with equal gear) creates a very gank box environment in which whoever jumps first, unless there is a massive skill and/or gear disparity, wins. In the majority of fights, I have seen and experienced, whoever engages first wins. In the open world, It is terrible being ganked with almost no chance of fighting back and winning, and taking death penalties like XP debt and material loss.

Additionally, a lot of the combat's complexity gets made irrelevant with the current short TTK. The game has a 3 attacks basic attack combos that add procs like wounds (anti-heal) and chill that further stack turn into freeze. It has soft and hard CCs like roots and stuns. The fighter has momentum that builds over time. We have damage over time, and debuffs that decrease damage mitigation. None of that matters in fights bigger than 1v1s because players die with 2~3 skills. While you are trying to stack wound debuffs on the target, reducing their armor, and doing proc combos, the enemy is just doing damage and is going to kill you before you can take advantage of any of those mechanics. You don't even have time to properly do 1 basic attack combo to add procs to the enemy, because it is more efficient to just use all your big damage skills and kill the enemy.

Build diversity? Different playstyles? Forget it. The most important thing is getting your attack power as high as you can, and the rest is way less important. Damage over time builds? Non-existent. Everything becomes extremely streamlined and meta becomes boring as hell.

A shorter TTK design becomes even shorter when level and gear disparity are introduced. A TTK of 10~15 seconds for the same level and the same gear 1v1 means an instant kill TTK for an unbalanced encounter. A guy that has reached max level and has started working on BiS gear will instantly kill a level 40. And healers and defensive won't do anything here, a guy that can be killed by a couple of abilities from a single person will be totally destroyed in large-scale pvp regardless of healers and support from other archetypes.

How long will a new player take to reach level 40? A couple of weeks if he rushes like crazy? More likely the general audience will take a couple to a few months. So the question would be, how long before a new player can participate in PVP content with the older player base? How long til he can engage with the other pvp systems and content? Can he even catch up? Will he stick around for that long before he can enjoy that content?

Will the player base grow if no new player can participate in PVP content with the established players before putting in 200~300 hours just rushing leveling? I seriously doubt it. And this is not a game with instanced content. Node wars happen whether you like it or not and you're fighting against higher level more geared players. Guild wars are also a player-driven event and you don't choose where and who to fight. Most important of all, open-world PVP is supposed to be an important feature of the game. There is no matchmaking, there is no auto-balanced ranking system to put you in the same category as your enemies. You'll spend 90% of your time fighting ppl either stronger or weaker than you. If that power difference means you kill or die in a split second, without a chance of playing the game, no one will participate.

Steven said in a recent interview that: "intrinsically those two philosophies are tied to one another. The shorter TTK and the how do you solve the Zerg problem.". While that is not entirely false, it is not true either. The reason smaller groups have a chance against Zergs on shorter TTK is that smaller groups have a chance to kill a big part of the Zerg by engaging first. But that is also true for the Zergs. If Zergs engage first, they win, regardless of the skill of the smallest group. In short TTK, smaller groups have a better chance against Zergs because of the initiation advantage, and not skill. In fact, short TTK requires less group coordination and skill, as the only thing groups need to do is focus damage (which is incredibly easy since we have marks on the target and target of defensive target key binds).

The good news is that you can also give small groups advantages against big groups with long TTK. The better news is the advantage of small groups over big groups in long TTK actually has to do with skill, team play, and coordination. Having to coordinate the use of all those complex mechanics that you already designed into the game (damage mitigation reduction, anti-healing, CCs, procs, and combos) to effectively eliminate your enemies is a huge advantage for small groups.

In long TTK, a small coordinated group can kill a target in 5~10 seconds, while a big uncoordinated group can kill the same target in a minute. That's a big skill gap, and in the time the Zerg killed one target, the small coordinated group killed 10~20 targets (the same goes for AoE scenarios). In short TTK, a small coordinated group can kill a target in 2 seconds and a big uncoordinated group can kill the same target in what? 5 seconds? the room for improvement is not there.

Longer TTK also gives players the chance to react and fight back against ganks, giving them a better chance of winning and not giving the players that feeling of unfairness in the encounter.

Finally, long TTK means players with power disparity can actually survive long enough to use CCs, apply procs, and participate in damage and healing dealt in PvP content. They won't of course be on parity with geared higher-level players, but they can contribute without being one-shotted.

People argue that in group pvp the TTK is going to be longer than in 1v1 pvp. While that is true for small groups (8v8), it becomes the contrary when the numbers keep increasing. In Ashes and in any game, DPSs are ~4x more prevalent than tank/healers. A party is consisted of 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 bard, let's say for shits and giggles 1 summoner which is not a DPS, and 4 DPSs. So in a 40v40, you will have 5 tanks, 5 healers, 5 bards, 5 summoners, and 20 DPS and it only gets worse from there. Damage will severely out-scale defensives. A 10~15sec TTK will mean an instant fight in large-scale content. If you're under-leveled or under geared, forget even trying to participate in content, you're just gonna die over and over without doing anything.

So the cope that group pvp is going to have increased TTK is not exactly true, especially as you go above raid vs raid sizes. And one of the main appeals of this game, a true MMOrpg, is the open world with no limitation on sizes. Node wars, guild wars, nodes and castle sieges, world bosses, open world PVP, and caravans are the main PvP content in the game and they are more often than not bigger than 40v40s. Designing the game with a TTK that completely destroys any skill, coordination, and strategy on large-scale is a terrible

People also argue that in long TTK design, fights are never ending and it only ends when a cleric runs out of mana. That's also not true. Even for small-scale pvp, The most consistent duel times are in high TTK games and they generally don't go over the designed TTK. The reverse is actually true, when you have a low TTK design, you need to overtune healing and defensives to make support classes playable, and it creates those 45 minute duels that never due to mandatory overtuning in a low TTK environment. In high TTK design, healing is properly tuned and you have anti-healing debuffs and CCs as tools to deal with healers, creating a fight that usually stays inside a reasonable duration.

People also say a fight lasting an entire minute is too long. I think that's crazy. Maybe people haven't played a game with 60 sec fights or misremember it, but 60 seconds is not a long fight at all, especially with your skewed perception of time when you are playing and the adrenaline of PVP kicks and you're having fun. This is a 45 second duel:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CdM1rBr0dNc&t=3s

Regardless of how you feel about the combat in the video, that 45 second fight is far from too long. When you're playing and having fun and enticed, those 45 seconds fly by. 60 second fights are completely fine.

I'm not talking here about completely destroying the feeling of progression or even giving a level 40 a chance to win in a 1v1 duel against a level 50 player. I want players to be able to play, press their buttons, and feel like they have a chance to escape or contribute to the fight before dying. You can still have fun participating in large battles and group pvp if you have a chance to use your abilities and contribute to the fight, even if you are contributing way less than the other more progressed players. This can't happen if the TTK is 10 seconds for a balanced 1v1.

If you increase TTK back to the original design of 30~60 seconds, when you introduce gear and level unbalances an under-geared and under-leveled player can still survive long enough to play, have fun in the fight, press their buttons, and feel like they're a part of the conflict.

Intrepid claims to be very open and acting on feedback, but the majority of feedback I've seen on TTK both here and in-game is that people prefer longer TTK. Examples: (based on the number of likes and comments supporting high TTK)

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/63918/current-pvp-ttk-design-is-bad-for-the-game/p1

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/66616/i-dont-see-myself-subscribing-if-the-current-trend-of-grind-and-character-power-continues

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/66307/adressing-the-combat-system-ttk-and-comparison-with-tera

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/66307/adressing-the-combat-system-ttk-and-comparison-with-tera

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/66422/a-simple-fix-for-the-ttk-time-to-kill-problem

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59292/reasons-to-have-high-ttk

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/64434/gear-adjustements-are-much-better-now-but-still-not-enough/p1

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59422/10-15-seconds-ttk/p1

And much more. We had short TTK (beginning and middle of phases), and we had super short TTK (now). The community rejected both. None of those make sense with the overall game design and conflict with your own combat features like basic attack combos and debuff procs. So why are we sticking with it if its failed a few times now, it is disliked by the community and intrepid hears our feedback? It's not like TTK is a core philosophy of the game like risk vs reward.

My last argument for long TTK over short TTK (more subjective and personal): IT IS NOT FUN. Fights that don't last long enough for you to play your class, use your abilities multiple times, and perform your role properly ARE UNFUN

Examples of games with Long TTK for devs to take a look at and grab inspiration: Tibia, Lineage 2 (at least classic version), TERA (debatable? Just heard it was long), Warhammer Online, Perfect World, and most recently Ravendawn (Highly recommend as they have some great ideas for combat and power progression). Feel free to mention others I don't know about.

I beg you intrepid, do not design the power curve and TTK in the game like you would for a game with instanced matchmaking ranked battles. Don't make the same mistake as all modern pvp MMOs that end up failing miserably.

AI summary:

• Current TTK Design: The game's intended TTK for balanced 1v1 fights is around 10-15 seconds, but this creates issues where the first attacker often wins, leading to a "gank box" environment, with a frustrating experience for players who are ganked with little chance to react or fight back. This is problematic in open-world PvP where players can be attacked without warning.
  
• Impact on Combat Mechanics: Short TTK makes many combat mechanics, including various debuffs, CCs, and combos, irrelevant, as players die too quickly to utilize complex strategies or abilities. This reduces the depth and skill required in fights.
  
• Lack of Build Diversity: The focus shifts to maximizing damage output, reducing the viability of diverse builds and playstyles.
  
• Level and Gear Disparity: A short TTK exacerbates the power difference between high-level, well-geared players and newer players, making it difficult for new players to participate in PvP content. This could hinder player retention and growth.
  
• Player Retention: New players may struggle to catch up and engage with PvP content, potentially leading to a stagnant player base.
  
• Zerg vs. Small Groups: While short TTK can give small groups an advantage through initiation, it also benefits Zergs (large groups) when they engage first, reducing the importance of skill and coordination.
  In longer TTK, small groups can leverage complex game mechanics like damage mitigation, anti-healing, and combos to outperform larger groups.
  
• Large-Scale PvP: In larger battles, the short TTK favors damage output over strategy and coordination. This is detrimental to the game's open-world PvP focus, where large-scale conflicts are a key feature.
  
• Community Feedback: The majority of player feedback supports a longer TTK, arguing that it allows for more engaging and strategic gameplay. The author urges the developers to consider this feedback and iterate on the TTK design.
  
• Suggested Changes: The author proposes increasing the TTK to 30-60 seconds to allow players more time to react and use their abilities, allowing for more strategic and skill-based gameplay, making fights more engaging and fair, especially for new or under-geared players, enabling these new players to participate more meaningfully in PvP content and aligning better with the game's open-world PvP focus.
  
• The text emphasizes the importance of balancing TTK to enhance player experience and ensure the game's longevity and appeal to both new and veteran players. The text also mentions examples of games with successful longer TTK designs. The author urges the developers to consider these points to avoid common pitfalls in modern PvP MMOs.

My main concern is that most players (especially the younger ones) have never experienced a proper long PvP TTK MMO before and the general audience will stop giving feedback about it when TTK is less bad and not when it's good, and since Intrepid is set on a short TTK design, we will be stuck with a mediocre TTK and the game will fall short of what it could be. With a mediocre TTK we will end up with the same old same old large-scale pvp formula of following the blob and jumping in and simply doing damage when the shot caller says so. We're going to end up along other modern mmos that alienated the more casual player and failed to entice the general audience to this type of content, inevitably cannibalizing its own player base and ending up in a death spiral.

At least give us one proper iteration of the game with a long TTK for the player base to decide which they like the best.

I realise this is Alpha, however the current settings using a 4080super card the graphics look extremely blurry, I have tried every setting and nothing seems to change at all?

thats unreal engine 5 for u