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Stats\Gear\Level vs Skill - Ashes of Creation
Magic Man
Member
In almost all MMORPGs stats are very important as they should be imo. However, I believe stats\gear score alone shouldn't be the reason why you win or lose a fight. That's where the element of skill plays a role. 'Skill' is something rarely required in most MMORPGs (including 'action' combat ones - not just tab) as they appeal to the same old once great, but now a niche community - 'MMORPGers'. Ashes of Creation wants both skill and stats matter at the same time which is interesting. Skill through action combat and stats\gear through general gameplay. What are your thoughts on this - should a skilled person be able to beat a player that has invested more time into the game with a higher gear score\stats?
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But in answer to your question; Yes. It's a rather stupid question to ask tho. You have asked the negative of "Should it be impossible for a player to beat another player that has higher (1 point higher counts as higher) gear score, no matter how skilled, each of them are?"
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I can understand if that person is outleveling you by like 10 - 20 levels that it should be PRETTY dang hard to just outskill them BUT. I feel like the opportunity should be there, with action combat requiring a lot more skill. You both have to aim and time abilities, along with rotations and anything tab targeting could have; just with added mechanical skill instead of clicking on someone and not even having to look at your screen to win.
I really hope outplay potential is there, I haven't seen that in an mmorpg before and it really made me want to play ashes. Thinking about being able to outplay people rather than just have to farm more to beat them. It feels so boring and easy and bland if you just basically have to outfarm and grind to beat people.
I'm NOT saying someone who is lvl 5 should be able to "Outskill" a level 40 or something. I just mean within a reasonable range, lets say 10-15 levels, maybe even more but I wouldn't push it past 20.
I agree, I really just don't want it to be a farm and grind fest (I know farming and grinding will be in the game, no problem with that at all) I just don't want to see items determining how good you are TO A REASONABLE EXTENT.
But having said that gear should make a difference to a degree but skill should win in the end.
If I max my character's Intelligence - the character should be able to acquire knowledge better than I can as a player. If I max my Dex, my character should be able to aim better than I can as a player. And if I max my Wisdom, my character should be able to perceive things better than I can as a player.
Same for abilities like Stealth - if I max my character's Stealth, that character should be better at hiding than I can hide the character manually as a player.
Player skill should really be about knowing how to build your character to best enact its role(s).
But, most people who play MMORPGs really want to play them like an MMOFPS and don't care about roleplaying.
That being said, player skills/knowledge can trump character skills. A newbie player who jumps to max level in a game like WoW or EQ might not know basic combat tactics.
With Ashes, in addition to stats and gear, we will have to factor in augments and possibly racial, social and religious progression. But we should expect stats and gear to a point where the discrepancy in level is significant enough that a lowbie cannot compete with a high level character. That damage and mitigation of the high level character will easily outclass what the lowbie can achieve, regardless of player skill, in 1v1 direct PvP combat.
Whether one high level player could win against two lowbies really depends on the level gap.
Obviously, the wider the gap, the more likely it will be for the high level character to win.
But, for example - if one of the lowbies is a Rogue who doesn't know that some abilities will increase damage when delivered from behind the target, it will be easier for the high lev character to mitigate their damage.
If the other lowbie is a Cleric who focuses to much on attacks and not enough on heals, they might be surprised by how quickly the high lev dispatches them.
And, yeah, definitely depends on the class because I could see a knowledgeable Paladin tossing up a lot of barriers as well as self-healing. Even if the Paladin was a relative lowbie who is unable to kill the Rogue and Cleric, she might be able to prevent them from killing her if she uses her abilities wisely.
I'd just like to point out that just because a game uses a tab-targetting system doesn't mean it is "easy" compared to an action-combat system. Some people look at WoW's combat for example and think it requires no skill at all, and yet you can have 2 players with the same gear score playing the same class and spec, doing vastly different dps. That's because there is a difference between mechanical skill and game knowledge/decision-making. Anyone who has played League of Legends should be familiar with this concept. You take a champion like Zed vs a champion like Pantheon. Zed is mechanically a lot harder to play than Pantheon but Pantheon requires greater game knowledge and decision-making to play well. That's because Zed has lots of ways of escaping a bad fight. If he jumps in to a bad fight he has the option of jumping out again relatively easily. On the other hand, once Pantheon jumps into a fight he can't easily escape, meaning he has to think a lot more about the play before he commits.
Action-combat systems often favour mechanical skill, whereas Tab-targetting systems favour game knowledge and decision-making.
Anyway, going back to the topic at hand, are we talking about PvP or PvE here? Because that completely changes the situation. That said, no matter if it is PvP or PvE, both skill and gear always matter in an mmorpg. The difficult part is deciding which should impact your performance more. I think it's important in this to distinguish between PvP and PvE in this context, since in PvE especially, gear scaling is important to show character development and progression.
What makes this even harder is a third element that nobody is considering, which is class balance. Often in mmorpgs you can have 2 players with similar skill and gear levels, and one person wins purely because their class is stronger in x situation. Is that fair? Not at all, but that is the sad reality of online games.
EDIT: One more thing I've just thought of when it comes to skill. Part of the skill in games like WoW is deciding which stats to focus on. Now this process has been made a lot easier in recent years thanks to all the third party tools players have access to, such as gear calculators and simulators to tell you exactly which gear piece is better. And yet, there are still lots of players who just automatically equip the gear with the highest item level even though their character would actually perform better with a "worse" piece of gear.
Gear is important, but knowing what to do with that gear has the highest priority.
But classes should not be so easy/strong, that you can kill people with no gear equipped, no matter how good you are (see rogues in WoW Vanilla)
That's why many WoW guilds have put a bigger emphasis on a player's logs than on their gear or achievements. Unfortunately, very few mmorpgs have those kind of tools available, and given Steven's opinion on addons, I doubt we will have anything like warcraft logs in Ashes.
Thanks for putting an effort to explain the basics of MMORPG combat @Dygz. However, I believe what you've mentioned applies to traditional MMORPGs and unless someone is dumb enough to not know how to build the character and can't even understand the basics of combat tactics, it really doesn't apply to what I call 'skill' - they should stick to crafting or something - if they can even do that ffs. What I meant by 'skill' isn't just being skilled in taking good aim but a variety of strategies that includes taking good positions, being aware of your surroundings\enemies and thinking ahead of your opponents etc. A truly skill based combat would allow the most skilled player to excel against other players with similar stats\gear scores. Augment is system imo shouldn't just allow the player to beat others just bc he\she counters them but make the combat even more in depth. Although I disagree, I respect your opinion.
I guess you could say that. I really just feel like from the outside it just looks like in tab targeting better gear = wins all the time. In level difference there basically is 0 outplay potential unless you're basically afk.
I haven't played mmorpg games myself but I know about game knowledge vs mechanical skill. you CAN have them both though, and I don't really feel it has to favor mechanical skill. Instead of everything instantly locking onto something you can just have to aim at it, that adds an extra layer of skill. You would still have to know what's best, timing and everything but you'd also have to aim. Just comparatively speaking tab targeting is easier to me at least, when I tried wow I didn't even have to press any buttons if you're talking about that game. I just clicked onto a creature and it killed it. I feel like there's room for both, strategy and mechanical skill too. That's one of the only reasons I checked out the game, I hadn't really even heard of MMORPG games until ashes. Only one I knew about was WoW but the combat in that ruined the whole entire thing for me. I guess it's also a preference though too, if you'd rather not have to aim or think more.
I just believe that you can do both, have rotations of spells and abilities and stuff having to be managed, along with action combat.
Another player may use gathering, processing, crafting, and trading to acquire exceptional gear to win in combat. These are PvE-oriented skills.
A third player may use advanced scouting, logistics, and spying to gather some friends to intercept an enemy and win in combat.
All these players leverage different skill sets to gain an advantage in combat. I think if any of these skills are executed well then the player should be able to overcome opponents who have their own advantage like numbers or gear.
Bottom line - 'combat skills' are not the only skills that factor into combat. Stats from gear can also be tied to a player utilising their skills in the game.
By "skill-based system", you seem to mean player skills rather than character skills?
Even if players have similar stats/gear scores - they still have to know how to build their characters well - choosing the abilities and augments that best fit the playstyles of the specific characters. It's not that augments just allow a player to beat another, the players have to know how to augment their abilities for the best advantage... that is part of player skill. And the form of player skill that, in an RPG, should trump motor-twitch skills. Knowledge about tactics like snaring and kiting can also give advantage to a knowledgeable lowbie over a higher level character who lacks MMORPG player skills.
As far as I can tell, we don't disagree.
How much advantage positioning gives to a lowbie over a high lev is going to greatly depend on how much damage the high lev can mitigate and dish out. If the lowbie is too low to penetrate armor and stats, positioning will be largely irrelevant. So, again, that will depend on how wide the level gap is.
Being restricted to only starting rags was a great character flaw and always sparked conversation when encountering unknown players.
When I played NWO, I mostly duoed with an MMORPG newbie who didn't know tactics. He would frequently rush into battle in dungeons without thinking about basic tactics. We might wipe several times before finding a strategy that would allow us to prevail, but we had the time to devote to making mistakes. And it was fun figuring out to defeat a dungeon designed for a larger party.
I prefer wiping with a subpar party until we figure out a viable strategy over being ordered to follow maximally efficient strategy with a cookie-cutter build and ability rotation.
Also, in NWO PvP, I would typically top the leader boards for most deaths but highest number of pylon captures. My role in Arena PvP was to capture pylons. I would ignore combat as much as possible.
And for the Raid PvP sessions, I would focus on the PvE objectives over direct combat as well.
So, yes, really depends on the specific set of circumstances.
Stats and gear will matter. Character skills will matter. Player knowledge and player skills will matter.
But, how much they matter should be determined by individual playstyle and specific circumstances and objectives.
Yes if you like you can intentionally equip rubbish gear to your character to put a greater emphasis on player skill and give yourself a greater challenge, but in my opinion this shouldn't be necessary in an mmorpg. If I get a new piece of gear I feel compelled to use it as it appeals to my sense of character progression. Not only that but if a developer chooses to make my character completely overpowered, that to me speaks of a developer who doesn't care for character or player progression at all, and I lose interest.
So far I've seen this kind of thing happen in 3 different games and it has made me quit all of them. In WoW at end-game you get showered with gear early on, making your character ridiculously overpowered and then you are pushed into content that you (as a player) aren't prepared for. In BDO even at the early stages your character is so powerful that you can legit spam right click to kill everything, and often take on 4-5 mobs your own level without dying. Finally in Tera, as soon as you get your first avatar weapon you become a god, killing everything in your path.
Yes I could have done things differently to make it more challenging, but honestly if the developer can't be bothered balancing my character and the mobs I'm fighting, why should I bother playing?