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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
How many Skills will be useable in a fight ?
Hello everybody!
At pax there will be just 8 skills available for u to use in a (demo) fight ... but will the number increase as they add the secondary class?
did they comment on that ?
i watched every twitch stream but maybe i missed something ; )
hopefully there will be more than 16 accessible skills in future ... what do u guys think ?
At pax there will be just 8 skills available for u to use in a (demo) fight ... but will the number increase as they add the secondary class?
did they comment on that ?
i watched every twitch stream but maybe i missed something ; )
hopefully there will be more than 16 accessible skills in future ... what do u guys think ?
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Comments
- Your primary archetype's skill set may be augmented by your secondary archetype and race.
- Selecting the same archetype for both primary and secondary (e.g. Bard/Bard) will enhance the focus in the primary archetype.
So the secondary skills will enhance a primary skill not add a new one.just 8 skills seem to be a little .... ähm unimpressive
As it stands rangers wont use anything but slow charged power shots during the pax pve exp, hahaha. (plain dmg buff with long cd and debuff which will be applied only once per fight does not count)
Theres still a little hope, in a stream months ago they've shown a gameplay video with 10 slot action bar and steven casualy mentioned in another very old q&a they might double the amount of aviable skills.. However i wouldnt set my expectations too high,
its been a not really public discord voice q&a, his wording was pretty vague + he never said something similar again.
In my opinion 16-20 skills would still lead to dull gameplay, but lets wait what they come up with at launch in 2 years.
in Gw2 u have acces to 5 Weapon 1 Heal 4 Ultility and 1-4 class skills. (11-15 skills in total) and its perfectly fine.
Source: Deltias Gaming Livestream Q&A
This would make PvP more exciting because you will dont know that skills that enemy have, so you must spy him or just give everything in one card and try to kill him from suprise!
Hard to master...
And...
A low-level skill used in right way so much powerful than highest-lvl skill wasted in wrong occasion...
u cant compare ashes to a moba ??? ahhahahah
a lol game takes maybe 30 -45 minutes . u have like 100 champs to choose from ---
here comes the variation.
but do play your main character for 1 year with just 5 or even 8 available skills ... dont u think its getting boring?
i played wow (and every other mmo ) ... where u had more than 30 skills available ..and everybody was enjoying it ..
it gives you more opportunities and the CHANCE to make failures. it took time to learn a new class ...
as a arena/pvp junky who likes competition im just concerned this beautiful lookin game will be too... ..Ähm........ Simple.
But yeah lets wait gameplay and reviews from pax ....
I want the game to be skill capped and not gear capped.
the only reason i see is LESS BALANCE WORK ?!
If you want to play the game for a long time (>2 years) above casual level, you will be happy about every extra spell you can use. It doesnt mean much to choose 8-12 out of 100 skills, because you would use the same 3-4 skill sets all the time anyway after creating them once. Rendering the remaining ~75 skills meaningless, unless theres a huge balancing change going on over time.
You would then repeatedly push just 10 buttons for years, in what way is this 'much better'?
You cant even do various combinations with this amount of skills, you would just do at best 2 various effective rotations.
Look at the actual ranger setup as example, he only has 1 attack to use on a regular basis. So one would spam this power shot and sometimes use snare/fleeting shot/etc if needed. Theres no difficulty included.
Thats no fault of choosing the wrong skill set but a fault of choosing the wrong aviable skill number.
To make mmo combat long term interesting, you
1. need to avoid to make skills spamable -> cooldowns (>10s)
2. need to make sure players have something to use at all times (with choices to make).
These 2 statements cannot fit into a small amount of aviable skills.
Single player games usualy have few skills, because theyre not designed to be played for multiple years. You buy the game, get into the gameplay, make 1-3 playthroughs and go to the next game. They dont get any money by keeping you playing. After all the developers want you to buy their next game too instead of playing the first game forever.
Moba games do have a small amount of skills too, because moba combat is focused on fast and short encounters, so point 2. does not apply. Also mobas get their money through character skins. What do you do to sell many skins? Make classes short term interesting but boring after some time so people play a new class and buy the new skins too.
Guildwars 2 has just a few skills too and is also an mmo. But they have no subscription model, instead the game was initialy designed with B2p in mind so it basicaly has the same rules single player games have. It now focusses on cash shop, but its to late to change the combat system because they already build their playerbase and making such big changes during a lifetime of a game is a bad idea because humans dont like change.
AoC has a subscription model, so its in their interest to keep us playing for as long as possible. This game has alot of innovative ideas, but if the combat doesnt try to provide long term playability its worth nothing because the biggest part within a mmorpg is the combat.
i hope they will change it : ( at least to 16 available skills + 4 focus based skills ..
"3 to 4 abilities for years.." Now we speaked of 8 and would it be 10 or 12, but it does not have to be like in WoW where you have all your abilities in hotbar. If you have limited amount of abilities in use you have to create a specific build and you cant select all your viable skills at the same time. That does not mean you will play with that one setup for years. You will propably need several build for different situations and that way use lots of your abilities. That way you can play more defensive, offensive or support way. So you can basically play different roles and not just one.
1. Having 100s of skills to choose from and only having a viable choice of 3-4 simply means they aren't balanced. If they were balanced they would be equally viable. So saying you only ever use 3-4 is a strawman.
2. a Limited bar means everyone can get upto combat speed quickly because you don't have to level up 100s of required skills. No one can use any more skills than the hotbar size allows.
3. Build variety. Option 1....100 skills and 20 on the toolbar. Option 2.... 100 skills and 5 on the toolbar. As long as all 100 skills are balanced and equally viable, you have automatically created much more build variety by limiting deployable choice.
Personally, I don't want another FoTM MMO where everyone must use the same skills because the rest are unviable, or that you cant do content because its scripted and then optimised and then the min maxers discover the optimum class, gear, skills and builds that are 'best' and therefore everyone else must use....or else.
Granted pressing 1,1,1,,1,1,,1,1,,1,1,,1,1,,1,,1,1, isn't exactly stimulating. But this isn't an whackamole contest style MMO waiting for timers to expire either. The game is trying to escape from that style of play and make it tactical.
You didnt pay enough attention while reading, when i refered to the numbers of 3-4 i was already talking about the diffrent builds (aka skill sets). However some skills will just be superior and always be used in competive gameplay for that reason.
Thats why i said ~75 out of ~100 will be useless instead of 90 out of 100 or 60 out of 100.
You dont have all your abilitys on the hotbar in wow either, with its talent system u chose (depending on version) ~10 out of ~30 skills and have ~25 additional class skills with spec flavour.
With a limited skillset u are absolutely abel to pick all the viable skills, even more the less skills u can pick, heres some example:
you can choose between skill a,b,c,d. For simplicity i assign to each skill a effectiveness number: a=10; b=11;c=9; d=10.
Case 1: You can choose 1 skill out of the 4.
In competive gameplay you will choose skill b. Always.
In casual gameplay u will choose a random skill, but these type of casuals usualy arnt the ones who keep spending money for years.
Case 2: You can choose 2 out of the 4 skills.
Competive players now have a potential first choice by picking b,a or b,d.
They have a second choice during combat by using skill b or skill a/d first within a rotation.
The amount of choices you can make during combat increases with the amount of skills you can pick at a time exponentialy.
And the absolute amount of skillset choices has its peak when your abel to choose ~50% of all skills. While most of these choices dont make any sense, you can still say that developers naturaly try to make all skills viable, but thats honestly impossible. The more they try, the closer + more normally distributed 'effectiveness numbers' would be. Which effectively means to give competive players more choices the more skills they can pick
And choices are important for interesting gameplay.
Irrelevant of the amount of skills you can use, without big balancing changes, you will keep using the same build for the same task. That may be skillset a,b in boss fights and set c,d for duels and so on, but it never changes by itself for each particular task.
Note that good game design requires as few as possible post launch balancing changes. Or do you want developers to constantly change the balancing all over again every month to make people use various builds?
I dont get the point of your last sentence, this is totaly possible with a small as well as a greater amount of skills.
The buisness model is the main point of everything basicaly lol. In which world do u live to belive someone would invest dozens of millions of $$ without thinking about profit? Steven made his money by some kind of share trading profession if i remember correctly. His love for mmo's may sure be true, but he also expects to make money with this project (which isnt bad, just a fact to be aware of). Same goes to all the other Developers who created games with much money. And ofc a person in his position thinks about how to maximize the profit and putting the product in relation to its buisness model is the most natural thing to do.
You whole argument rests on the case skills will be imbalanced.
Its a house of cards.
I dont understand your points and most of your post content either, so i guess we are even.
1. Having 100 skills balanced is a dream that will never come true without superhuman artificial intelligence.
And actualy i said u will use about 25 out of the 100..
2. Thats true, but u can easily increase the speed someone enables new skills to a point where its absolutely equal.
3. Our number example is bad to provide meaningful mathematical facts, but we wont be abel to pick from 100 skills per subclass anyway.. so lets take some more real numbers; case 1: 12 out of 40, case 2: 20 out of 40, case 3: 30 out of 40.
case 1: 5586853480
case 2: 137846528820
case 3: 847660528
You have the biggest amount of choices with 50% of the skills usabel. But since the perfect balance is just a dream, we have ~7 skills out of 40 that for sure are better than all the others and also ~7 that are worse (within a random but constant scenario like during a node siege). With these the equation looks like:
case 1: 65780
case 2: 10400600
case 3: 2600
The result stays the same: magnitudes more choices for more skills aviable up to 50%.
Noone wants an FotM MMO and thats why im writing all this. Because its incredibly hard to balance for a low amount of aviable skills, if just 1 skill is off the amount of choices decrease drasticaly to a point where therese only one choice (the FotM).
My previous calculating is based of 26 skills beeing totaly equal, if you add further reallife factors and make them slightly diffrent you decrease the amount of choices to below 3 pretty fast so having a thousend extra choices doesnt sound too bad in my opinion......!
If you constantly need to wait for timers to expire there are potentialy 3 things wrong with ur game:
1. you used a bad rotation.
2. the cooldowns are too long.
3. you have too few skills.
That wasnt detailed enough i guess. Balancing is nessecary ofc, however it should be used to repair game breaking elements instead of making combat interesting as a key part of the game, i could write another big explanation about the reason behind that but i dont think u care enough and i wrote enough essays for today.
its a dream ~~
How do you ensure to make skills that use diffrent mechanics, in every part of the game equal meaningful?
And how do you prevent people from pushing random buttons if each spell is as usefull as the others?