Best Of

The

"petting it to death"

part is no doubt, deserves a bard song 😄

As you described, that artisan, gathering skill profession is probably not even half ready, better to say, it is a placeholder as you mentioned. But lets be honest, it is funny like hell!

My feedback, as a new player via the steam EA, who is in love with the idea of this game and have been following it for 8 years. Full disclosure, I'll be playing Ashes on full release, regardless if nothing changes. But these are the things that I, SUBJECTIVELY, feel are good and others that need work (there are a lot). I've played over 250 hours now, made it to max level on a Cleric (as well as tank, 2x bard and another cleric to 10+)without a guide or any outside help - outside help meaning gear/gold/mount hand outs, crafting guides/tips or level boosting. Obviously Im grouping, its an MMO ;). And I have done a good amount of the end game content. I also have Master mining, JM stonecutting and metalworking. I'm sure a lot of what I'm listing are already planned to be changed or common feedback, so I apologize if this is redundant. But, seeing as they said that they want feedback from new players, figured I'd oblige.

Combat feels good (outside of bugs). Its responsive, visually pleasing and has good skill expression. Having situational abilities that you might take for pvp but not pve, or vise versa, others for aoe grinding, some for single target healing or raid healing. Obviously there is a lot more needing to be added, as we only have half the levels currently, but so far it feels good. Also, getting used to mob behavior, utilizing dodge roll and your kit to CC or kite mobs (or players)feels great, again, outside of bugs or other alpha jank.

The world feels massive, which I love. It has great PoI's, varying terrain (which will be expanded on as the world fills out)and a great deal of exploration. I like the weight of travel time. It heralds back to the type of game that Ashes is trying to recreate. People will complain that its "not respecting your time". But, Ashes feels like an adventure. Like I'm just a small cog in a vast world, writing my part of the story. Gaming has become so hyper focused on efficiency and the end game grind, which I know Ashes will become once you open pandora's box and figure everything out. But, due to the size and scope of the game, it will be limited on how much you can efficiency the fun out of it. And it also gives that adrenaline rush when you are close to death, weather in pvp or pve. Cause in either case, one death can cascade into a party wipe and ember springs are not always close.

The leveling feels like a journey, which is rare for MMO's these days. You typically grind an MSQ to get to end game asap. But in Ashes, you can get involved in the world at level 10. Youre forming parties, traveling around the world trying to find available spots to get xp, making friends along the way or sometimes enemies. Helping progress settlements, running crates for cash or for a construction project. You all know the things that you can do in this game while leveling and I'm sure that this is anecdotal, as many seasoned players are likely petal to the metal to get to end game. But I like that its not in your face and feels like a true sandbox.

I like the caravan system, but I've seen so few of them and they don't seem worth the risk, when running crates in groups of mules is as profitable as it currently is. The whole clicking on the icon above the caravan to choose to defend or attack? I feel like it could just be if you get within a fairly large proximity of it you have a popup that says "attack, defend or decline (to partake in the event at all)", to interact with a caravan event. Theyve stated that there will be iteration so Im not too worried about it (yet), but its a cool idea that I hope to see really get love and bugs fixed.

The Gathering interaction is clunky and too specific on where you stand. It would be nice if you could interact within a certain area around the gatherable, rather than have to stand in such a tight area to make it work. It also will often say that you moved when youre standing perfectly still, which is probably just server lag or something? And Im unsure why some mobs will break you out of your gathering animation and others wont.. Im guessing breaking you out of the animation is intended though.

On the topic of gathering, I feel as though progress you make from interacting with any gatherable should be static. If you interrupt the gathering interaction, it should remember how far into that cast you were when interacting again. And if someone were to "steal" your node, they should also get the progress from youre interaction with that node - cuts to herbs, chops to trees and digging up of ore deposits don't typically re-grow or bury themselves so quickly xD.

I am personally not a fan of tiers of gatherables. I'd much prefer uncommon, rare, heroic, epic and legendary unique or special drops that could be added (not required)to give a chance to upgrade the thing you are crafting to a higher tier or add an additional modifier or stat. Its not all that much different on the gathering side, but on the crafting side it would allow you to have more interesting outcomes and unique pieces.

Trees need to give more lumber. They give a confusingly small amount of resources for chopping down a whole ass tree lol. I'd be fine with it taking longer, but giving 2-3x as much lumber.

Contrast to lumber giving more, what if all gathering just gave less? And reduce some of the requirements for recipes? Needing 72 rubies to make an earring seems excessive. If we just found far less but needed less, storage would be easier, recipes would seem more realistic/less convoluted and balancing the gathering professions would also be easier.

I don't like all the small vendor components that you need for crafting. It feels tedious and unnecessary. If they were things that we had to craft, it would make more sense. But it just feels like an annoying little hoop you have to jump through for each craft. Just take the cost of the vendor mats and tack it onto the crafting or processing fee.

Have the "hunting" profession be sports fishing, but on land with a bow. Petting animals to death is, and Im taking a wild guess, just a place holder. But I think the sports fishing, with tweaks, could actually work well for hunting. And having to go and retrieve its corpse makes more sense with hunting than it does with fishing ;). This is likely too ambitious, though. So instead, just have us be able to skin the bodies of dead animals we've killed. That is FAR better than the current "hunting" mechanic.

Have settings save in between play sessions - camera distance, action bars, weapon selected, last character played, last server played on, etc. should all persist through logout and login.

Mouse over healing of summoner pets. Currently it will heal the summoner if youre trying to heal their pet with the mouse over functionality. I would like there to at least be an option for those who want to heal pets. I know not everyone wants to baby sit someone elses pet though.

Cast bars on enemy name plates (not just their unit frame when targeted)would be amazing. Some animations are apparent and others not so much. But, regardless, when there is massive PvP numbers or huge PvE pulls, animations get blurred or lost and having cast bars to draw your eyes towards specific enemies and avoiding or preparing for the incoming damage would be very helpful. An option for this would be great, for those who would want it.

I'd like an option to customize the nameplate "current target" indicator/brackets. Right now I find it hard to differentiate what mob I am targeting and the other mobs when there are a lot being pulled/tanked in one place. This has gotten easier as I've gotten more used to the game, but I still feel like its done pretty poorly in general, compared to other games. Its easier when someone marks one, but I don't think that someone should have to be in charge of marking mobs to be able to clearly see what you are targeting.

Fix aggro of mobs who aggro through walls. Unless the intention is to have mobs aggro via audibly hearing the players and coming after them, which could be cool, doesnt seem to be whats happening or whats intended. Its just random that mobs will get site of you through walls or maybe its abilities clipping through walls and come tearing around the corner.

A commission board for crafting or something along those lines would help with gearing. As a new player, I found it very unclear on how to progress my gear. I was getting no drops from grinding mobs, I had yet to level my professions and had no idea what I was looking for on the market, so spent copious amounts of time scrolling through players shops to see if I could find something useful. It would be cool to have a master of commissions that you could speak to for a catalog of whats available in your level range and then post a crafting order to see if someone would make it for you. Without outside help or guides, it isnt very intuitive on how you gear. Now, I knew that "crafters make the best shit", but coming at this as a complete noob and trying to play as uniformed as possible, it was rough. At the very least having one of those tutorial hints pop up at level 10 and give a nudge towards leveling professions for upgrading your gear. I also later (much later)found that you can look through all crafting professions possible recipes, just by opening your artisan tab..

Sport fishing is fun, but the whole process of having to jump into the water to retrieve your catch is not satisfying. I understand giving a point of contention, but I feel like maybe allowing others to steal it while reeling it in would be better. So as the catch is on the line, it would be easy for someone to come over and just scoop it up with a net, right? Its hooked, cant really go anywhere, so if they were to just try and scoop it up, shouldnt be a problem. Well, there is a problem; they just took the catch youve been working so hard to reel in! Something along these lines would still allow for player interactions, but give you the satisfaction of "catching" the fish if there is no outside interference.

Player collision feels TERRIBLE. It makes the game feel so needlessly clunky and janky, it makes doing the most mundane things rage inducing. I understand the intent behind it, but why not just have it enabled in castle sieges and the other appropriate PvP events? I'm fairly certain I heard Steven say that theyre going to address this.. but PLEASE, for the love of god, use this SCARCELY, if at all.

Add a little sound prompt when you receive a new whisper. I miss so many cause Im just not paying attention to chat, usually because Im in discord or something. But a gentle ping in game would be nice so I'm not accidently ignoring people.

Have consumables that you have on your action bar grey out when you are out of them. Also, if you refill on them make it so if you do have them greyed out on your bar, it is "refilled" and you dont have to drag the same thing back down to your bar.

In character creation, dont automatically snap the camera back to fully zoomed out while youre trying different options. It doesn't happen with everything, but its incredibly annoying and makes the whole creation process feel tedious and annoying when you're doing a lot of editing. Also, we need a lot more hair, skin, nose, facial hair, eyes, etc options!

Ground reticle targeting can get very wonky on uneven ground or in tight quarters. It will constantly try and snap it to a location that, I am guessing, thinks is an eligible target or something. It makes using ground targeting abilities awkward when indoors, on uneven ground, or even if there is a tree slightly behind you and the leaves are in your cameras field of view, it will act like youre putting it in the tree and not cast, due to line of sight. Or its in the middle of the air sideways, due to a weird LoS with a wall or mountain side.

Have materials for crafting be pulled from the local storage. Simple, but huge QoL.

Allow clicking on.. anything that is interactable, through our action bars. Specifically ones that are empty. For those of us that have everything bound to a mouse/keyboard buttons, it would nice to have an option to make the action bars click through. If it isnt clear what I mean, if there was a mob behind my action bars and I was trying to click on them to target them, I am unable to, as the game is treating it like a solid object that wont allow me to interact. That extends beyond mob targeting into anything you are trying to click on to interact with.

Allow for blacklisting of buffs/debuffs on your buffs and debuffs bars. Either that, or dont show meaningless buffs that dont need tracking. Such as class buffs that dont give any relevant information as a buff(courageous, resonant weapon, divine power, etc), armor set buffs (heavy/light/medium) and settlement bonuses/relics. They are static and dont need to be tracked. Or perhaps have a second bar for buffs that are static and ones that are dynamic.

The HUD for crafting stations, as well as the additional vendor mats, which are sometimes unclear where to get them (or the vendors that are supposed to sell them just arent in the town youre in), make crafting very unintuitive, confusing and unsure if something isnt built yet that unlocks it, or if its a bug and they should be in town.

Make a HUD element that is similar to target of target, but make it for targeting mounts/rider of a mount. For instance, if you are targeting a mount, a smaller unit frame should appear that allows you to target the rider. Or, if targeting the rider, a smaller unit frame to target the mount. Due to some mounts being very large and some players being very small, I personally find it pretty annoying to target people at times. I think that it could also help with a pvp meta not falling into everyone playing the smallest dwarves riding giant mounts, due to targeting advantage.

Give us more action bars.. at least double. And also allow more things to be on action bars. Short cuts to profession windows, marks to mark enemies,

I do not like that at times you get a really weird motion blur effect that happens. It happens on mobs, players, mounts, pretty much anything that has a skeleton and moves. It almost looks like the game is one of those old school browser based MMO's that have really clunky animations. Or stop animation. I'm not sure if its an artistic design or something that happens when framerate or ping are under heavy load and its there to help alleviate some of that? I dont think its an artistic design, as it doesnt always happen. And if its meant to help with framerate or ping, I feel like that should be a setting players should be able to opt into. I just really dont like the way it makes the game look when its happening. I noticed it first in the live stream of the Daragal Estates with the goblins animations and thought it was weird, but figured it could just be an alpha thing (and that still maybe true), I am just saying.. I hope thats the case, cause it looks bad.

Whatever key I have bound to sprint, while not mounted, should also be the key to dash while mounted. Or at least have it be an option.

A LOT more search options for the marketplace. The amount of time I have spent looking through listings that could be expedited with some simple filters, is staggering.

Allow for gatherables to be rotated in our bags. And if there is a spot it could fit, if it were to rotate, do it automatically when gathered (if it couldnt fit normally).

I like rebinding dodge to left shift. Now, everytime I am typing in the market, at a vendor, a work station, making a /bug report, etc. if I press it to capitalize something, I dodge roll backwards and out of the menu. Yes, this is a self inflicted issue. But, can we have it so if we are in any chat menu, things like that wont happen?

Having a keybind that we can bind to stop casting would also be nice. I do know you can hit escape, but having a customizable bind would be great.

Make each settlement's layout completely unique not just a copy of another, turned 90 degrees. I hope this was just an alpha/EA things to get more settlements to be tested.

Sound design for gathering professions, namely mining, is a little timid. If you've ever played New World, they had the gold standard for MMO sound design, imo. I'd love to see ashes compete with that - hearing people mining echoing in the area, battles happening in the distance, people approaching on mounts in the distance. It was very cool.

Buy order on the marketplace. I have full listings in all surrounding towns (which wont be possible when the vassal system is working properly), full stashes in those towns and I feel like its a constant battle of inventory management and traveling to relist things. I could be doing things inefficiently, but town storage feels so low and the amount of listings I can put up on each marketplace feels so low that I am having to vendor uncommon or lower materials just to be able to continue gathering. Would be nice to just insta sell things to people who are looking for my goods.

The amount of time I wasted on trying to figure out the crate system as a new player.. well, I could be dumb, but I was so lost. I'll save you a TL:DR and just say, giving a small tutorial that walks you through it as a quest in the Briarmoor Farm, Aven's End or other relevant starting zones, would be very helpful to the new player experience.

Overall, allow more customization of the UI. Anything that is visible should be editable/moveable. Make a "class resource" bar that is optional. Make it so the current resource bar and class symbol next to our health bars can be turned off, if we dont like the way it looks. I know my buttons for auto attack, sprint, dodge, block - I wanna turn those off. Max level? I wanna turn off the XP bar, resize it, move it, etc. System frames, I wanna turn those off too. System/settlement announcements popping up in the middle of my screen? Yup, let me move/resize those, too.

There are other little things here and there that I either forgot to write down as I was playing or just ended up not being that big of a deal, in the end. I am playing it to test and help find bugs. But, despite it being hard to play at times, I have still had a ton of fun. The vision is there, the fundamental design is there. Just need systems fleshed out, bugs fixed, server stability improved quite a bit and a lot of polish and its going to be a master piece.

Currently, the "Hunting" loop feels more like a sensless grind than an actual profession. The process of killing generic mobs repeatedly just to hope for a 5% "huntable" spawn is not very engaging. Furthermore, the interaction of "petting it to death" (pressing a key on a docile target) lacks some depth, but I guess it's a "placeholder" perhaps ?

• What: The current hunting cycle relies on "forcing" spawns through mass killing.
• Why it matters: It feels disconnected from the world. Instead of feeling like a hunter tracking prey, it feels like a RNG-based chore.
• How it affects gameplay: It makes the profession feel "soulless" and tedious, especially for players who enjoy the gathering/husbandry aspect but don't want to mindlessly grind mobs just to see a interactable creature appear.

The current system isn't engaging at all, and plus, comparatively to other armors craft (plate and cloth that are more based on herbalism and mining) it's way more difficult to find raw materials.

• Perhaps a system more akin to World of Warcraft’s skinning, where every beast killed can be harvested for basic materials?
• Should "taming", aka when you harvest a horse for example, that can be tamed, be a distinct, skill-based mini-game (like filling a capture gauge or using specific baits) rather than just clicking an interact button?

I really love the concept of finding rare creatures for Animal Husbandry, and the world of Verra looks stunning. However, I feel that the current "Hunting" implementation is missing that "tracker" fantasy.

In conclusion, instead of just killing mobs to force a spawn, perhaps we could have a Skinning system for regular loot (hides/meat) from all beasts, while Rare Taming could be a more involved process. For example, finding a rare beast could trigger a mini-game or require specific tools to successfully capture/tame it. This would make the discovery of a rare creature feel like a true achievement rather than just a lucky RNG proc after a grind.

Thanks captain obvious, this is an Alpha we knows it, and it's the very reason we gave a feedback so the final product could be improved.
This feedback only says the first 25Levels are too fast, specialy in an optimised group in dungeon where you can reach that cap within a week. since its the case, there is no reason to think Lv50 will takes lot more time.

This is exactly because it's a sandbox MMO that you don't want your level cap reached quickly like in a themeprak MMO, like i already explained leveling is the red line or progress. If you cut that line or finish it, you will have lot of players lose a goal and a progress perspective.
Like you said this game is designed like older MMOs, and guess what? the Leveling was taking a lot more times, for this exact reason… People are too used to plays themepark game to rush to max level to start to play, like if leveling was actually a chore. In a sandbox MMO leveling is the key, it's the journey that matter.
Unfortunatly AoC PvE isn't very entertaining for now, dungeon are subpar mostly designed like a farm spot with walls around, mobs placement is very awkward and lack of diversity raven, ashen, wolves, bear… biomes tend to all look the same if you don't go very far etc.

Presumably they're trainable because they'll be Gliding Mounts, rather than Flying Mounts.

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