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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.
Raid Size Concern
Steven stated at PAX that raid sizes would be 40 people. Personally, as someone who loved the raids from vanilla WoW, I think that's great. But my concern is that I'm not sure how many people agree with me. While I wish it were otherwise, I'm just not sure enough people like 40 person raids to sustain a game. Wildstar also tried 40 person raids, but had to quickly back off that to 20 person raids.
What reasons do we have to think that Ashes will do better than Wildstar in this regard? In addition to 40 person raids, will there be some content in between 8 man dungeon groups and raids, e.g., 20 or 25 person raids?
What reasons do we have to think that Ashes will do better than Wildstar in this regard? In addition to 40 person raids, will there be some content in between 8 man dungeon groups and raids, e.g., 20 or 25 person raids?
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If it's still a thing later down the road maybe i'll see if some one wants my kickstarter stuff at a discounted price or something.
With more players in a raid we can hope to see more class-specific challenges in a raid encounter. Hopefully AoC will bring back some of vanilla WoW fights, where you had to have certain classes for countering certain boss mechanics. Nowadays raids are just a mass of certain numbers of tanks/healers/ranged-dps/melee-dps regardless of their class.
But aside from my nostalgic feelings, with the 64 class-combos of AoC its almost mandatory to have a more serious raidsize to have most classes a chance to participate. In theory WoW has 36 classes through specializations, which is little more than 50% of AoC, while the usual WoW raidsize is 14-15 players (bellow 50% of AoC raidsize).
But it would be also good having smaller raids ala 20 players. Many players liked raids like Zul'Gurub or AQ20.
Greetings.
I always have to ask this question when this comes up - if you're a raider and you like raiding your current game, why are you looking for a "different" kind of raid?
^^^
Dont forgot this is predominantly an open world game.
After a few years if the numbers die down it may be hard to find enough people to fill raids / dungeon groups,
especially with servers with smaller populations (oce for example). Atm it can be hard to fill dungeon groups in
today's mmo's with only 4 people groups. Will have to see how it all plays out of course....
As for other who have said it's not gonna be wow/wildstar. I actualy think wow did it such content pretty well, but it was still not what folks wanted. While wildstar fell flat on it's face.
BDO has big raid content where you can fight different levels of a boss and that reduced in popularity and the smaller group size versiions of these boss fights were the more popular, and world bosses turned into a zergfest. Both of these situations were low on mechanics and skill requirements, and also had little to no group communication.
Things that don't change are getting groups of 40 players together is difficult to do, and getting a guild that does this regularly is even more difficult, and requires large guilds, which many folks don't like. With smaller content you can have large guilds doing multiple versions of this small content or small guilds running this smaller 24 man content with one group.
Now if the content isn't required to feel semi competive. I think i could live with that, as long as they have decent dungeons or other small group pve content to distract from my pvp.
The reasoning behind 40 man raid is, as far as i know, because they want to get 5 parties in a raid. One party is about 8 people. 8 different classes that is, because they want to make it like "All classes are useful" so you want 1 of each in your party.
If game has a lots of active player base than 40 people raids will not be a problem and will be a great thing.
If game population would happen to be low, than due to pure player shortage 40 people raids would be an inconvenient thing, because of players having a hard time to fill them up with people.
I personally like 40 people raids. However, I think that there should be events that cap the raids at different number. So there should be events in game that ask for 20 people raids, and 40 people raids, and cap raid number accordingly.
The way to accomplish that is to have 2 different type of raid groups: small raid, and big raid.
So you have party (8 people), small raid (20 people), big raid (40 peolple), and then specific event require from you to be in particular type of group in order to get reward.
Bosses / raids of varying degrees of difficulty with varying rewards based on difficult, speed, group makeup.
Bosses that remember you and behave differently second time round!
If your clan wish to have
- an epic battle over a long period with a small team and high reward or
- grouping en-mass taking out the highest end boss or
- grouping en-mass to take out multiple bosses in a short time;
I`m fine with the variance.Variety of opportunity is key!
Sieges will induce exactly the same phenomena where far more than 40 players will have to group up ad hoc. Many of those will be tight knit 8 man groups that will gel through necessity.
Its not like themeparks where multiplayer groups have no investment or real interest in working together...other than to complete an attraction for shinies...or work against each other directly for leaderboards. Working together in number is the only way to guarantee node survival in ashes.
Exactly. There is just too much we don't know to start worrying about raid size. Are we talking about raiding boss monsters, castles, nodes, or what? Will raids only be 40 man or will there be other types/sizes? How will the raids be structured? Are they instanced or in a dungeon or just anyone shows up, first come first served? Will it require 5 groups of 8? 8 groups of 5? 40 groups of one?
The only "40 man" raid I've been in was in Secret World Legends where they had an instance with a boss mob. You showed up at the instance (solo or in a group), and when the instance opened, you ran in and fought the boss. Lots of fun but totally chaotic. (I would think co-ordination between different groups would be impossible if any real co-operation is required).