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I mostly agree with TM's take here. I like that fights go a little longer and certain classes now have more of an impact in the longer engagements, especially fighter and tank. Combat feels less initiative-based than before, where simply opening on someone first was usually enough of an advantage to win, and is instead more strategic and timing-based, seeking kill windows, which I like as well. Getting the jump on someone in an ambush or flanking maneuver should be rewarding, but with the previous TTK, it simply ended the fight in most cases. That said, I think that the better way to address TTK would've been a smaller shift in stats within the stat weighting system we previously had in place, specifically buffing defensive stats and health pools by roughly 10% and slightly reducing the impact of strength and intelligence overall simultaneously. To be honest, the new system is terrible as far as I'm concerned. It's visually unappealing, determining the overall value of stats is an absolute chore now when pursuing better items for your build, and the nerf makes PVE feel truly awful even when you're well geared and there are that many more values to weigh against one another. With Phase III coming soon, I sincerely hope this gets reverted. It'll only confuse new players.

Subject: Feedback on Recent Stat and TTK Changes

As an active player who has been deeply engaged with the game’s systems and combat, I wanted to offer some feedback on the recent stat changes and the increase in time-to-kill (TTK), which I believe have had a significantly negative impact on gameplay.

1. Stat Fatigue & Diminished Clarity

The recent change to item stats—moving from small, easily understandable values (e.g., +1–2 Strength or Intelligence) to values in the hundreds or thousands—has introduced a sense of "stat fatigue." These inflated numbers make it more difficult for players to parse the value of upgrades, creating confusion and diminishing the sense of progression. This mirrors a problem seen in other MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, which led them to implement multiple stat squishes over the years to restore clarity and meaning to gear upgrades.

2. Enchanting System Downgrade

Previously, enchanting gear felt meaningful and rewarding. Each enchant provided noticeable stat increases across the board, and the waterfall nature of stats meant that crafted and enchanted gear could be tailored in a way that felt impactful and unique. Now, enchantments contribute less than 1% to an item’s total stats, making them feel negligible. This removes a core layer of the gearing loop and turns enchanting from an exciting gold sink into something that’s barely worth engaging with.

Instead of altering the core enchantment system, a more balanced solution to TTK could have involved scaling down the offensive impact of Strength and Intelligence (e.g., reducing power gain per point), while simultaneously increasing the value of Constitution and Mentality to enhance survivability and defensive play.

3. PvP Feels Sluggish and Less Engaging

Ashes of Creation's PvP combat was one of its standout features—fast-paced, tactical, and rewarding. The recent changes have made it feel sluggish and unresponsive. With lower damage, reduced healing effectiveness, and haste being nerfed, combat lacks the tension and immediacy it once had.

From extensive PvP testing and scrims, we’ve found that engagements now often devolve into prolonged focus-targeting with raid-wide callouts, excessive in-combat resurrecting, and battles often only ending when support players run out of mana. This doesn’t encourage dynamic team play—it promotes monotony. If the intention was to raise TTK, a better approach would have been to distribute more defensive cooldowns and interrupts across classes to introduce tactical depth, rather than simply stretching fights by reducing all throughput.

4. PvE Combat Feels Chore-Like

Combat satisfaction in PvE has also been significantly reduced. Previously, players enjoyed the impact and power their characters exhibited when taking down mobs, bosses, and caravans. Now, everything feels slower and more punishing—not because it’s more challenging, but because combat lacks the visceral feedback and pacing that made it enjoyable. This undermines the PvE experience, turning engaging encounters into drawn-out slogs.

5. Loss of a Unique Gearing Experience

One of the most innovative parts of Ashes was its gearing system. Crafting high-rarity gear at lower levels and progressing through enchanting created a sense of agency and investment. Unfortunately, with the shift in stat scaling and the devaluation of early-level gear, players now skip directly to farming mobs for basic level 20 gear. This erases a large portion of the game's progression loop and removes incentive to interact with crafting, enchanting, or the broader economy during the early to mid-game.

The previous issue with static nodes could have been addressed through greater PvP contestability or randomization, rather than reworking the entire gearing model. The unique path of character progression through gear rarity and enchantment was one of Ashes’ strongest differentiators—and it should be preserved.

Closing Thoughts
While the intent to increase TTK is understandable, the way it was implemented has hurt multiple aspects of what made Ashes fun and engaging. A more targeted approach—such as tuning primary stat scaling and adjusting enchantment costs across tiers—could have maintained the unique gearing and combat identity of the game while achieving balance.

We appreciate your commitment to developing a living, evolving MMO, and we hope this feedback will be taken into consideration to restore the game's momentum and preserve what made its systems truly enjoyable.

*TM*

- Gear Level matters too much. Gear quality matters too little. Result: Apprentice crafting is useless

Forsaken Blades Wand is the most magic power rated apprentice item, while Pinion Pen is an easily farmed boss drop. It would take 100s of gold to craft the first wand, the 2nd option would take me like 2-5 hours to farm. While a level 19 and 20 wand aren't that farm apart Forsaken vs an Iron wand as examples. The reality is no one is going to craft and iron wand (20) either, when you can farm a level 27-29 boss drop.





- Why was apprentice useful before: Enchanting

Due to the scaling nature of strength(str) and intelligence(int) enchanting made any time with these stats scale very hard. Allowing for apprentice gear to surpass most journeyman gear that could be farmed as drops. Allow players to get very "cheap" gear and enchant it.

- This came with its own set of problems, such as gear int/str gear scaling so high that power numbers got ridiculous, making a very short Time to Kill (TTK). Also any Journeyman gear w/o int or str would never be better than its novice/apprentice counterpart.

This can be broken into 2 problems. A. All secondary stats went up by an equal amount. B. Waterfall was too powerful
A. An item with 10 Int (30 Magical Power Rating) and an Item with 42 Magical Power Rating( 14 Int worth) as a base item the magical power is better. But after +8 enchantment we would have 18 Int (54 Magical Power Rating) and the other item would have 50 Magical Power rating ( 16 2/3 Int) making the Int item better. This cause the INT is king meta and could have easily been fixed by making Magic Power rating scale by 3.

B. Waterfall was too power power partially due to reason A. Int/Str/Con were just scaling harder than there waterfall stat counterpoint Power/Health on top that they also gave stats such as crit power and mitigation leaving any stat that wasn't a core stat in the dust with enchanting.

- My solution, if you care, would be to make quality value have a bigger impact on items. Make quality a more logarithmic curve making common, uncommon worse and making rare and heroic close and epic and legendary better. This would allow for apprentice epic and legendary gear to surpass rare journeyman gear and give people a worthwhile reason to craft apprentice gear high-end gear while waiting on Journeyman Stations to appear. But would also allow for Journeyman gear to eventually be better than all apprentice gear

- For enchanting it really just needs a more thorough investigation for how you important Intrepid wants it to be. Current enchanting won't be touched until people have Best in Slot (BiS) gear. Its too expensive to every use on bad gear and only gives a minimal benefit. This will still be used by Sweat Lords that want to give every drop of power they can, but average users probably won't touch enchanting until a BiS or an time obtainable BiS has been acquired.

Remove gear drops from mobs, Easy fix. Progress the towns first before you get gear.

Is there going to be an auto attack? I am hoping not I do not like clicking on icons.

SmileGurney wrote: »

Dear Intrepid,
[...]
I like pvp sandbox MMORPGs, but this is heading straight towards the niche of a hamster wheel stat grinder, where "get gud" means insane gear grind time investment, not actually "getting good" and enjoying the game content built around player competition.

You are designing Ashes into a game which core content is built around player competition, that is fine, but that by itself is already a niche. You allow for player time investment to rig the outcome of that competition to the point that too many players willing to play a competitive MMORPG are going to simply walk away after few months, due to the stat race.
[...]

I am worried about their implementation choices on a genre and a niche inside it, with such low pop already, repeating some mistakes that eventually led to the downfall of many games:

1. Long leveling and progression: That's great. That's one of the things people enjoy about the more old-school games. Even the more sweaty players will have some progression to achieve long after the game launches, and the lull between progression and expansion is going to be low.

2. Big power creep and power gap: Here, we start seeing the problems. Alongside long leveling in progression, you create big power spikes, creating a big disparity between players that play hardcore (12~16h) and players that play like 4~6 hours a day (which is more than most casuals). It's good that progression is meaningful and gear matters, that's the old-school philosophy.

But when gear is the main thing that matters, even between players who started at the same time and play a little less than the other, it creates a huge problem. With a big power gap, and long leveling, how long til a new player, a guy that started 3 months late, will be able to participate in content with older players? How many new players will the game acquire and hold throughout its lifetime, and how does that not lead to a death spiral in more players quitting than joining?

3. Open-world pvp and "forced" pvp events: Again, another great design choice. The game should be always on pvp. Node wars, node sieges, PVP events, competing for gatherables and grind spots, and caravans. It's all unavoidable PvP, and it's PVP without any rank matchmaking or balance. Max level players will be fighting with players that just started the game. How will a guy who is 3 months in the game feel when he still has no chance to contribute to a defense in his node against a siege, or when he is getting killed over and over without any chance, solely because he started late, and gear is a huge part of why he is losing? Will he stick around when he keeps losing caravans to way more geared players without a chance to fight back?

4. Low TTK: In here, all the problems above get hyper-boosted. You are late to the progression, the power gap is big, and because of that, you are literally being one-shotted out of the game. You go to join a siege, you don't even have a chance of landing a spell before a random attack hits you, and you die. You don't get to press buttons in PVP until you are max level with good gear. Other than that, you die in 1 second. Will players stick around when they are unable to play the game for 3+ months before getting good gear and not dying in an instant?

Groups don't fix this. Doesn't matter how much shield or healing you throw, the guy is way weaker and he will be deleted anyway.

5. Death penalties, lost node stash, destroyed ships and caravans: So we established that the guy is weaker compared to the more try-hard players, or even started late and is tryharding, but it's still a long time before catching up. He is being deleted in 1 second because of the power differences. Every time he dies, he either gets exp debt, he loses the materials he was gathering, his caravan, or in worst-case scenarios, loses every material on his node stash. He never had the chance to win in any of these scenarios, but worst of all, he didn't even get to play. A random guy showed up and deleted him before he could react. Now he has to walk back 10~30 minutes just to get back on where he was, and maybe risk dying again in 1 second without a chance to fight.

So the guy keeps getting bodied everywhere he goes, doesn't get to participate in any of the PVP content in the game, and every time he dies without even a chance of running or fighting or playing the game, he suffers a loss. Don't worry, 3 months of this and (hopefully) that changes, and you get to be the one doing the bodying.

How many players will take that deal? Will the players who started on launch but play more casually endure this situation? For how long? How many new players will the game attract, knowing they have 3+ months of pure grinding before getting to the good parts of the game? Enough to substitute everyone who is quitting and keep the game from entering a death spiral? I don't know.


Don't get me wrong, I enjoy most of those design decisions. The long leveling and progression, the open world PVP, the losses tied to death, even the part where gear matters. I just think putting them all together in the direction that is going is not gonna be healthy for the game.

Suggestions:

1. Properly saturated power curve: The power growth should be proportional to the time spent getting there. Power can really spike in the first week or two of the game, as it is a low time investment required to reach there. But after that, we need significant reductions in power growth per time spent. Every time we get deeper into the game, you should get less for the time you invest. By the time we are end game, players should be investing hundreds of hours for 0.01% power growth. That way, players can easily, in the first month reach, let's say, 90% power cap, and have enough power to at least participate in PVP content against the players that are 6 months ahead and grinding to reach 99% power. This is how old-school games have made long progression work without breaking the balance of the game and maintaining a healthy player base and new player acquisition.

2. Naturally gated progression: We already have the foundation for this. Node progression naturally gates progression by being behind the player's level. We have level 25 players using and investing in level 10 gear because level 20 enchanting was not unlocked, so level 10 was better.

With the increase in level cap and mobs dropping gear in a future launch, this won't be the case anymore. Players will completely bypass early-level crafting, rushing to max level by acquiring the gear they need to keep grinding stronger mobs. No systems in the game will matter before max level, no one will run a caravan, and no one will care about gathering low-tier mats unless it is to progress their profession. Players probably won't fight for it. This destroys the early game professions economy, increases power disparity between sweaties and casuals, and makes every single system in the game irrelevant until players reach endgame.

If low-tier mob drops are removed (rare and below), players will have no choice but to engage with the economy and make crafters relevant for gear. They will be soft-locked into progression, temporarily reducing the power gap between try-hard players and casual players. The incentive to rush to max level is reduced, because now you are in lower level gear, grinding inefficiently to reach a level that is meaningless because you won't be that much stronger than a guy that is just grinding 2 hours a day and the rest of the time engaging with all the other systems and enjoying the content. Players will have to gather, fight for resources, and run caravans even at early levels to get gear. You still have progression avenues like enchanting, increased rarity upgrades, gems, and all that in lower-tier gear, and sweaties won't run out of things to do. You retain some of that dopamine hit by substituting gear drops with valuable material drops that are used for crafting gear, and you still maintain that dopamine of dropping high rarity gear (heroic and above) without being reliable enough not to engage with the rest of the game.

3. High TTK: This one I have fought for over and over again, and won't write everything I've said previously on it. I'll just say this. In high TTK games (45~90s), even the more weaker players, new players that are behind, get to at least have a chance to run, or fight, and they actively play the game before dying. No more one-shots. You drastically remove that feeling of unfairness that players get when they die without a chance to play their character.

4. Player agency on some of the biggest losses:
I'll give the example of node sieges. Once your node is successfully sieged, citizens lose their material inventory. This will generate a feeling for the majority of players of losing their stuff without any chance to do anything about it. You are not a guild or alliance leader, you're not a mayor, you don't have control over a large number of players. All you do is be an ant in the big battle, and it's out of your control if you win or lose.

We can improve this, not by removing the losses, but by giving a player a say in what and how they lose it. You can do it through a few possibilities:

1. A special vault: Most games with big losses do this nowadays. You get a small vault that you get to keep when your base (node in this case) is destroyed. You have a choice in what you really don't want to lose, and while it keeps the losses, you remove the player's feelings of unfairness and lack of control.

2. Once a siege is declared, allow players to move their resources out through caravans. See that this is not a bailout for players. Once a siege is declared, and enemies know the citizens will be looking to move material caravans out of the node, players will totally scout for it. The risk of losing your mats is still there, and to be honest, the risk of losing your mats in the caravan might be greater than losing them in a node siege. But it gives players a choice: Do you want to bet on a siege defense, which is not in your control, or do you want to risk it on a caravan run, which could possibly be riskier but at least you have some control over the outcome.

By allowing players to choose, even though they are still likely to lose and the risk remains, they are going to feel much better about taking that L when eventually it happens.

This has been an issue I've kinda just dealt with and try not let bother me as I've been playing. The issue is, while in action mode the game has a hard time acquiring new targets and the mouse needs to be moving or in my case (not sure what other people do) use tab to get my target when it's something right in front of me which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole action cam.

This has been a nuisance until recently now that rouges are are a thing. A part of being a good player and knowing your kit and not having to look at your keyboard and hotbars when taking action. This being said when a Rouge stealths and unstealths in front of me, I loose my target. With my crosshairs right on target and I go to use my skills nothing happens because of this and sense I'm focused on my target in front of me I'm having to train my brain to do extra steps like having to look up to make sure my target is what I want to be and having to hit tab every time something breaks target.

even the delay of having to require your target like this is enough to give people a slight advantage by loosing fractions of a second from your attacks. If a player isn't ready for this; and is depending on the action cam to do what is intended, they loose seconds instead of fractions of a second which is basically a death sentence vs an aggressive player who knows what they're doing.