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Re: Another Approach to Handling Subclasses' "Flavor" Problem
BackgroundDust wrote: »The concern of many is that you will not find "Cleric skill that does the most Rogue-like thing when augmented". Concern is that when you go Cleric/Rogue you will be Cleric with Rogue-looking skills.
People see names such as Paladin and Necromancer and imagination instantly makes you think how cool you'd be playing that charachter, but what it looks like is that it will be just a name. Now, players imagination is not devs problem, it's players' problem. But what have they prepared for us? What's the difference between Guardian (Tank/Tank) and Paladin (Tank/Cleric)? Will you feel the difference?
At risk of being dismissive, of course I'd feel the difference?
Ashes is a game in which terrain, group composition, tactics, enemy group composition, gear, and things like weapon strike uptime all make differences.
Those are where I would expect differences to be felt and experienced, like any group-tactical-battle game, of which there are obviously many.
My Dagger/Wand build in TL feels entirely different in a battle based on whether I focused on the Dagger or the Wand because Wand focuses on building for control, output, and relies on lower strike-stacking thresholds and has lower damage efficacy uptime against a sustained DPS target, which I don't like, so I build to focus on the Dagger because I like strike-stacking thresholds.
My equivalent Sevarog builds in Predecessor (RIP original Prophecy item) are so different from the tanky ones that it's a real struggle to play the tanky sometimes, particularly within my preferred team, because the situations required to make them effective don't come up/need to be forced in different ways, or are countered differently by enemies leading to the entire fight changing.
I could understand if we're talking about the vague class fantasy where people imagine what the class is going to let them play like, but that design path doesn't turn out particularly differently. You still have a lot of people who think 'being a Bard will let me debuff my enemies' and then end up in a game where every enemy you want to debuff is basically immune or will kill you long before you reach them.
That player doesn't 'feel the difference' between Bard and [some other support class], they just realize what they imagine, won't work within the confines of the game's flow basically at all. So they switch because it's hard, or they switch because the game's combat scenarios are shallow and therefore a specific build is meta.
That problem of classes/builds 'feeling the same' doesn't come from things like 'Secondary Archetype flavor', it comes from bad balance and/or limited paths to victory in combat, combined with meta-chasing players.
In Predecessor the difference between Tank/Tank and Tank/Cleric was profound enough that when they removed the item that let certain characters be Tank/Cleric, at least 15% of matchups became harder, and that was just one item in a MOBA
Azherae
1
Re: Another Approach to Handling Subclasses' "Flavor" Problem
My take on this "problem" is that people want to come to Ashes, play a class with the same name as one they played in a different game, and get some sense of nostalgia from that. People seem to want to do this as opposed to just playing Ashes as Ashes is.BackgroundDust wrote: »Reason:Problem:
- People want a Paladin to be an actual Paladin, not just a class with the name and similar spells that essentially functions the same as any other tank. (I want that too.)
- The developers likely don’t want to balance 64 classes; they want to balance 8, which is understandable.
- You can balance a specific number of skills and their augments for 8 classes. However, you can’t balance a combination of 20 main skills by 20 sub-skills for 8 classes (or whatever the actual number of skills is). For this reason, I think it's better to have an augment system rather than a permanently unbalanced world.
- No one wants their class to be nerfed, especially when the game mechanics don’t allow for class switching. If your class gets nerfed, you would have to create a new character, and no one wants that. But that’s what would have to happen from time to time.
- We want freedom of choice, but too much freedom will bring significant imbalance.
That is the real problem.
Noaani
1
Re: Forum suggestions to be ready for the influx of users
I am very much talking about information that would not be on the wiki. I'm talking about how the game handles specific calculations, how the games RNG system works - that kind of thing.
Unless you can verify it yourself, "correct" depends on how much you trust the source of information.
This is true, but only sort of.
It is perfectly valid to also state what you know as correct information, and let others work out where they went wrong themselves. The kind of people I usually discuss game mechanics and systems with respond far better to this, as they don't want to just know the answer, they want to know how to get the answer themselves next time.
It's only really people that have no interest in knowledge outside of the specifics of that one discussion that really need that verification - as they don't care about how to tell its true, they just want the answer now.
In the context of video games, where someone can go to the wiki to verify the information.
Once the game is live, if it is on the wiki, imo it is basic common knowledge and isn't worth a discussion.
However, your example situation in the above post is precisely why I generally only discuss MMO's with people that want to know (these forums are the only exception to that, honestly). When it comes to debates, people that are not interested in knowing tend to only be interested in winning - and will often go to great lengths (such as in your example) to achieve that goal.
I will admit that sometimes on these forums I do enjoy seeing how far someone that is clearly wrong will go in order to try and seem right (Mag is the worst at this that I think I have ever seen), but when that is happening I no longer consider that MMO discussion, it's just pure entertainment at that point.
Noaani
3