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Apok wrote: »

I would run around on WoW back in the day looking for fights, usually people just ran away and cried.

?

I‘ve been playing WoW on pvp servers from release until end of WotLK and there was plenty of open world pvp everywhere, in all scales and sizes. Played rogue and warrior mainly, and had thousands of hours pvp-ing from 1:1 to large scale fights.

So, cant share or understand your experience at all.
I‘ve played Horde. If that makes any difference, but I dont think so.

And sure, wow vanilla was also very grindy in several aspects, all the QoL stuff was implemented later on.

Some cool ideas there. We do know that with the secondary class, you will have 4 augment sets you can pick from. So 256 options =-) I am sure Ashes could use more threads like this.

Almost forgot to check out the September artwork! What a pic!

So many talented people at Intrepid.

Inb4 outraged rant by Flanker about how Noaani admitted to not thoroughly reading his posts before replying.

Apok wrote: »

@Kilion I don't think they know what they want to do with second archetypes yet. they have mentioned flavor and that's about it. It's my assumption they are wanting to iron out 1st archetypes and basic skills first before rolling out anything for second archetypes.

I feel like tackling both at the same type is a recipe for disaster. balance and flush out the first archetypes then go from there.

100% they should finish the walls before putting on the roof^^

As for the augment system, this is just me speculating, I think the concept for that already exists as in what the system is supposed to do, while the details which puzzle pieces are supposed to be merged aren't.
As to flavor VS big changes - again me speculating - I think we will see both. Some augments will change skills more than others and there is no reason i can think of that would justify expecting all augments to be equally ground breaking.

Yeah over world PvP doesn't always work out like how people think it is and you can't force it. if there's nothing to do besides hunt people in the world for any pvp I doubt they'll get the player base to make it a viable system.

game will definitely need some kind of instanced pvp even in a survival game like ark on a well populated server it can be hard to come by people unless you're using esp hacks which is usually the case when someone finds you in open world situations.

Having recently done my own Tank class concepts (as a subset of a doing all 64 concepts) I'll contrasts your theorycrafting with my own.

First off I am not a fan of the perfect block, dodge, parry AS TANK SKILLS. The game already has activated directional sheild blocking as a universal system and dodge and parry would in my opinion need to be similarly universal abilities for all archetypes available right from level 1, not an end game feature of a particular archetype (though I could see some potential for parry as a feature for certain fighter classes). For Tanks augments to interact with or enchance these abilities is reasonable and fruitfull grounds for augmentation if they were to exist, but I'm very hesitant to base theorycrafting ontop of theorycrafting as it leads to theory-Jenga.

Overall I think you missed a significant oportunity to interact with a mechanism which dose exist, the Courage meter of the Tank. Adding new ways to generate, consume and providing new benifits to courage levels which evoke or blend the secondary archetype is a straitforward way to really feel the fusion of two archetypes. Also you use a lot of Cooldown and stack resets which just seem superflous to me, all be it that may just be me personally having a low opinion of such mechanics broadly as I think it leads to designer enforced ability cycle meta, Intrepid dose use them but it seems to me you ramped it up a lot.

Overall I fail to get much of a sense of playstyle or class fantasy distinctivness from the augmented skill descriptions. Had you not listed them I wouldn't have been able to derive them and in many instances I can't see how the augments fufill the fantasy or playstyle, the augments just seem like a set of 'it would be cool if..' buffs that have a flavor. I don't get the sense of a kit that is going to give an intended gameplay, or if I do it comes off as a piecemeal 'graft' of the secondary archetypes abilities rather then a fusion.

My own bias is certainly the source of this sense because in my own theorycrafting I put the class fantasy and playstyle front and center and try to state it as explicity as possible, and to make it as strong, distinct and as much of a true fusion of the two archetypes as possible and only touch very lightly on some ways that it is implemented and almost never down to individual augments. So any theorycrafting which dosn't start from the same perspective will look muddled and indecisive to me. Part of the reason I do that is to hopefully inspire Intrepid to do likewise strong distinctivness when designing classes and thus avoid the 'sameyness' problem that so many folks worry about.

I'll follow up with a class by class and more detailed blow by blow.

@Kilion I don't think they know what they want to do with second archetypes yet. they have mentioned flavor and that's about it. It's my assumption they are wanting to iron out 1st archetypes and basic skills first before rolling out anything for second archetypes.

I feel like tackling both at the same type is a recipe for disaster. balance and flush out the first archetypes then go from there.

Do we actually have any conclusive information on how skill augmentation will work in regards to the secondary archetype?

So far I just thought we would have a skill tree that contains all active skills, that we can choose to ignore or unlock, with an additional augment slot attached to that skill, that would become accessible by 1) unlocking the active skill and 2) being LV 25 or above, plus a series of other skill options to modify the basic active skill (as seen in the Fighter Showcase).

As for making a secondary, small skill tree. Kinda reminds me of Cyberpunks Relic Skill Tree. I wasn't a huge fan of that and after a bit of thinking I guess its because I like to have as much of the core gameplay modifying elements in one place as possible, if only for the convenience of me being able to just have it all on the screen at the same time and better decide what works best together with another skill modification and augmentation. I guess same could apply in the development process for Intrepid, but I'm no game designer so what the hell do I know.

What I can say for sure however is that there don't seem to be any plans to come up with completely new skills due to secondary archetype selection. At best, some of the skills might be augmented in a way that they feel almost like new skills. And for me personally thats enough.
But I'm afraid the entire debate about proper augmentation will not progress much until we reach Phase 3 in 2025 because as of now the first tests to augmentation will be by that time. So for now I am not very invested beyond maybe some theorycrafting.