Glorious Alpha Two Testers!

Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here

If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.

Best Of

Re: Eliminate these reason to quit

A game should strive to cast as wide a net as possible while sticking with its core game pillars.

At the end of the day, MMOs are only fun with people to play them. Ash’s needs to be somewhat casual friendly or else these aspirations for giant servers with giant meaningful battles will just be a pipe dream.

You don’t want ash’s to too punishing right out the gate, because then players won’t invest the time to find out the game can be fun and worth the punishment.

I really worry that most of the people in these forums are missing the forest for the trees.

RonDog98

A Small Amount of Feedback on Ranger - New for Alpha 2

I am new to Alpha starting with this phase of Alpha 2. These are my feelings on ranger after playing it as my main. I am normally a lot of bow/ranger/archer classes in mmorpgs, and while I feel like there are some great things, there are some that make this class feel very sluggish or uninteresting.

1. Scrap or Redesign Marks
I get where you all are going with marks and their class flavor, but having a VERY miniscule buff a few seconds every minute is just no fun, ESPECIALLY if this is supposed to be our core mechanic.

If you are all set on this being the mechanic, it has to be something we interact with more. I don't know if you all maybe just have plans for the augments to primarily focus on these or not. However, if you keep them in, we have to be able to press them or have them last a bit longer than like 3-5 seconds. I don't know many rangers atm that even bother taking them unless specifically just for the crit on snipe wombo.

2. Movement
There is zero reason that bards should be moving faster than rangers imo. I understand that this could be contentious for some but at the moment I feel like that is our main thing. But bard is a whole other issue that seem to do everything better than everyone.

3. Thundering Shot
This ability is WAY too slow and really takes you out of the immersion/rotation/etc. It feels like we are actually casting a long spell in the middle of a rotation and moving at a crawl speed. The long cast would be okay but the fact that we move so crazy slow is kinda crazy and counter intuitive to the ranger class.

4. Regeneration
This ability feels absolutely useless early on, and probably will feel mediocre later. Honestly, I find this to be an entirely waste of an ability.. Give us something fun and just increase our regen or lower our mana costs passively. I dont exactly understand why we feel like the most mana intensive class as an archer. Feels kinda weird.

5. Air Strike
This feels like the most sluggish ability I have ever used in any game. This really should just move at the same speed as Disengage, or at least close to it. I feel like using this ability in PvP against anyone competent is just a death sentence. If it was an i-frame I would say that it is fine functionally, but either way moving that sluggish just feels bad as the ranger class.

6. Strider
I am not entirely sure why this isn't just a toggle or at least a longer buff. Even from an RP perspective, I feel like it would normally just be the passive of a ranger.

Conclusion:
Anyhow, I am not ENTIRELY worried about the balance as I know that is more of a beta/polish thing. But the issues with these abilities of this class are more focused on the fun and fluidity issues. At the current moment, I kind of feel like I can make a better archer as a Fighter or Bard and skip ranger altogether in that endeavor.

Knetik

Re: Please don't make our silence tied to a long cast time

bigassgun wrote: »

"I play range class, i have more advantages compared to a melee class....they get instant CC in melee range so i must get an instant range CC myself!"

P.S. "i play an archetype(ranger) that is very capable at 1-2 shotting people in pvp atm and i have a root ability that can root a whole raid of people at range. I totally need an instant range CC that stuns, sleeps, trips or silences."

lmao.

I mean I am not sure if you play ranger? But this is just untrue

We can break it down

Mobility wise ranger gets strider 10% movement speed, and disengage a small backflip backwards about the same distance as a roll

Every single class has counter plays for rangers toolkit, where as ranger has none for other classes kits, this is more noticeable if you actually play ranger but for example

Fighter gets 20% speed buff with momentum, fighter gets a charge that goes 3x the distance as disengage, fighter gets a leap that goes twice the distance of disengage, fighter can break out of roots with momentum, and if all of that fails fighter just swap to a bow and can kill you from range quite easily, not to mention fighters multiple knockdowns

Tank gets a charge ability that goes twice as far as disengage, tank has multiple trips, tank can grapple you back, tank can also break out of roots I believe

Cleric, the archetype we would need this silence for, has dispels for daze so any good cleric will never actually get silenced, 99% of clerics are using ranged weapons so our mobility is useless, and even if it wasn't we can't run and reset because we have no defensives, to even get the silence off on a cleric you would ideally want to land it when the cleric is 50% hp, this is next to impossible to do as this silence takes about 6 seconds to setup if all the stars align

Mages, have more ST damage than a ranger, and an absorb shield that is a second health bar, their burst is also faster and again our mobility does nothing vs this class, we can kill a mage if it's a stealth gank and we get a lucky crit but in a duel no chance

Bards this matchup is tough because of bards huge toolkit, they have insane damage for a support class, can out heal almost all of our damage, and are more mobile than rangers in pretty much every way.

I think you miss understand the point of the post I'm not complaining and saying we need everything but it's very clear that rangers toolkit does not synergize well compared to the state of other classes

Not to mention they buffed dodge roll so any good player that knows a silence is coming because of the extremely obvious and long setup we need to do, will just double roll when it lands and take 0 damage with our entire burst

Chicago

Please don't make our silence tied to a long cast time

I am greatfull that our silence has been fixed but my god does it feel bad, first off you need to use the worst of the three ammo imbues, then hope for a daze proc and then hope that daze procs at the time you want to time your burst window, then whilst this is happening, you need to stop your dps rotation to hard cast thundering shot, which is such a huge dps loss it's insane, then hope that your target doesn't heal whilst it has its god awful slow travel time through the air, taking a path to the target that is not even a straight line so add another full second before the silence even hits it's just awful

I know this miiiight have a place In group play but even then, when every other class has more than 1 hard cc, stun, trips, knockdowns, sleeps, rogue has insta silence and a snipe that does not have a cast time, please review this

Chicago

Re: AoC isn’t Punishing its Frustrating

RonDog98 wrote: »

I’m not saying any one of these is bad in a vacuum, I’m saying that all three together suck and will discourage a large number of players.
Also, there’s a difference between “participation trophy players” and players who don’t want their time to wasted.

XP debt is an outdated mechanic and there’s a reason that almost no games utilize it. It is not a rewarding type of difficulty and it psychologically not fun.

Also, nothing about removing XP debt goes against any of the core pillars of this game.

Hell, I think making all your materials recoverable on death also doesn’t go against it.

Waste is a subjective term but in the purest sense, anyone this concerned about wasted time should consider avoiding games all together and stick to real life.

I found humor in your statement that xp debt is wrong because 'it is not fun or meaningful' and that dropping loot is okay but you want it all recoverable. The fact that you feel a risk/penalty should be fun and you think that there should be no risk to dropping loot, just demonstrates your confusion on what a penalty is.

XP debt is not an outdated mechanic but by your suggestion that almost every consequence is bad (xp debt, dropping materials not against core ect.), I see why I might have hit a nerve bringing up participation trophy types of players. 😉

Its_Me

Re: AoC isn’t Punishing its Frustrating

RonDog98 wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

RonDog98 wrote: »

My main issues with XP debit is all of you would still play and love the game if it were gone, but there are an unknown number of potential players who won’t play the game because of it.

This game needs to attract a healthy full player base, and XP offers nothing positive and only negative.

It is an objective negative for this game to implement it.

Sure, but I also play Throne and Liberty as my main game now, and therefore I'm not as hardcore as the people who want to play Ashes.

But that's kind of the point. It's not necessarily a negative, because people who really don't want exp Debt have an objectively better (using your logic) game to play already, considering their main playstyle profiles.

Why should AoC strive to compete with a game for an audience that is better suited for that game already? It makes no sense as even a business plan.

Removing XP debt does not drastically change the formula of the game.

Also, just because a game doesn’t have an XP debt doesn’t make it an all around objectively better or more complete game.

Classic wow is very popular, if classic wow added XP debt nothing about the game formula would change, it would just introduce something 90% of players don’t want and there for it’s a negative.

I'll try to clarify what I meant a bit more because I agree with you, Throne and Liberty originally had exp debt, then they removed it in favor of something more sensible for their version of a strong PvX game, and I don't think anything was negatively affected at all.

What I'm saying is that Intrepid believes they have a design where Exp Debt is important to shape player behaviour in the way they want. We aren't seeing that design in full, but it's a good 'signal'. If you 'show players' that you want to create a game where that sort of feeling is important, and the players can decide in advance "I don't like those feelings" then great, they will go play Throne and Liberty.

But a game like EVE has a powerful 'cost' to dying that is necessary for the feelings of its sandbox nature. Ashes is also a similar type of game, if you don't like that type of game, then what exactly do you want that isn't provided by another game?

Removing exp debt can drastically change the formula of a game, we just haven't had any games recently that were built with the base design that can actually be affected. EXP Debt is a deterrent from certain approaches to problems. The 'problems' in AoC are an entirely different type than most other games.

Azherae

Re: Everything feels so unfriendly...

ELWOW wrote: »

Edit: Oh I just noticed that you spend even more time on posting here, thats why you are so butt hurted, sorry for that!

I'm talking about you calling out Dygz of all people on "being too invested". The dude have gone through a period of telling everyone on these forums that he won't play the game. He has criticized every other feature in the game, because majority of AoC's features don't jell well with his own playstyle. And he's literally one of the biggest critics of the game and especially its development and presentation.

Yet you're saying he's a suckup to Intrepid who sees no faults in them

I've also criticized Intrepid on their communication and presentation of things, so you saying that I'm butthurt over some minimal critic against them is also real ironic.

As for the feedback itself, you do realize that different people work on different parts of the game, right? SFX artists are not the same as system developers, nor are they the same as 3d modelers or any other type of dev at Intrepid. You're complaining that an artist is not doing a programmer's job, which is real silly.

Ludullu