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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.
Questions about open world dungeons, raids and bosses
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I have neve limited experience of open world dungeons, raids and bosses. Because of this I would like to have some of my concerns answeared.
1. How will open world PVE be rewarding since you can simply zerg rush everything with tons of players?
2. How will we stop hardcore guilds endlessly spawn killing them and wiping anyone trying to compete?
3. How will be stop anyone from just spawn killing/clearing these dungeons and raids or bosses by using too many players?
3. How will trolls be handled that will rush in and ruin the fight for people?
1. How will open world PVE be rewarding since you can simply zerg rush everything with tons of players?
2. How will we stop hardcore guilds endlessly spawn killing them and wiping anyone trying to compete?
3. How will be stop anyone from just spawn killing/clearing these dungeons and raids or bosses by using too many players?
3. How will trolls be handled that will rush in and ruin the fight for people?
1
Comments
2: respawning on different locations and if most of that guild becomes corrupted they risk losing gear, you could gather ppl and storm them in the hope to win some dropped gear :P if you dont win they will get weaker from more corruption, drop even more and so on. non-combatants could do this with relativly low risk.
3: my guess is again : dropscaling. It hasnt been confirmed but either less drops or less mob/boss respawns should decrese efficiency with a big group. Unless anyone else sees a solution ?
4: they build up a bad reputation, get KoS PK-ed
With impunity, and a dagger in their back.
Honestly, more than anything else, this is my biggest concern about Ashes. Open world content is great, but if you don't put a hard (read; artificial) limit on how many people can attack a given target, it really limits what you can do.
I mean sure, Intrepid could scale down the rewards of an encounter, but that wont stop large guilds killing the encounters just to prevent others from doing so - rewards be damned.
They could also just scale up the HP and damage of the encounter based on how many people are attacking it, but that kind of thing only works on encounters with simple scripts.
My honest hope is that the open world raid content are the bread and butter of such content, with the few instances they have hinted at being the real challenging content.
But this is one of the aspects i don't like about this game. It is to open world, even dungeons (or some of them, aren't instanced), which is a bad combination with open pvp.
I have a feeling this game will have quite a bit of a-hole players in it. Like those players who take/took their twink or high level char to a level level area in wow, and would just kill players for hours and maybe even npcs
I think a version of this system for roaming bosses would be good. I dont know about the level requirement but the debuff is a good idea and the do dmg will stop people from 1 hitting a boss if they are 40+ levels above it and just dealing with the debuff.
I have a feeling that won't happen in AoC. Especialy since max level will be like 50 or so
That way you don't have to fight over who gets the "tag" but everyone can just jump in, help, and get rewards based on when they entered the fight and how much they added to it. So if you jump in and a boss is at 10% health your not getting much, but if you're there for the whole fight even if you're not in the group/guild you still get gear for being there and contributing.
Also even if you're there for the whole fight but only do 1 attack and sit back hoping to get something you shouldn't be rewarded, it should be based on effort.
Sure a guild could still push people out by attacking them and having members that are "corruption sacrifices" and kill anyone not in the guild coming in, but I would hope if everyone is getting stuff guilds wouldn't mind tag alongs unless you are trolling and purposefully getting the group wiped.
The systems in the EQNext design were supposed to track all the actions of each player - seems like the Daybreak devs should be able to implement something like that into Ashes.
Who gets loot rights will be tested during Alpha and Beta.
The reward itself is easier part of the picture but it also has some difficulties (Explain later). The harder part is that make the raid difficulty challenging enough. The developers has to decide the difficulty, for example:
10 man impossible
15 man hard
20 man normal
25 man easy
That is the question in the point 1. The chance is not much worse with 25 people than 20, but you finish with it much faster so you can expect that most of the people will go with 25 people. Additionally, even if you want a challenging fight and go only with 15 people, as it is open, you can't exclude other people who goes there and also want to fight. So say good by for your challenging fight. If the raids are not challenging the people who loves the raids will leave the game.
Go back to the difficulties with the reward. It is very hard to find out how many and type of buff earn the same reward as 1% damage dealt. You buff everybody with ice resistance, but the boss do not use ice damage. You use max health increase buff, but the boss do not use much damage to the party so it is useless.
It is also not easy if we compare heal vs heal. The tank healer can heal only the tank so only one person. The raid healer heal everybody. If we do not count the overheal, it is also depend on the fight type who receive more damage so who will need more heal. Even if you are the heal god itself, you can't increase your contribution to the fight more than the received damage.
And what about the tank? How can we compare a tank to anyone else?!
This is why I hope we will have a decent amount of instanced raids too, as these are a lot easier to tune for higher difficulty than open world bosses.
I think in guildwars 2 and/or ESO you get loot based on how long you where in the fight, how much you did. Not completly sure how it work. But I do recall there being a difference in the loot i got, based on if I was there from the start, or arrived at the end. I has been some time since i played those games, especialy guildwars 2. So i can't exactly remember it.
“Participation
Each player who participates in killing an enemy will have the opportunity to loot the body. Each enemy has a damage table and a threshold value of damage done to it by the player before it will give full credit for the kill. This value is about 5% to 10% of the enemy's health. The loot dropped is unique to the player, and loot received by one player does not affect what another player receives. One enemy may drop the same rare item for multiple players.
Supporting your allies contributes toward earning rewards for killing enemies and damaging event bosses. The actions listed below cause a percentage of the target ally’s damage dealt for the next several seconds to also count toward your participation. In addition to that, damaging an enemy’s defiance bar will also grant you some participation toward receiving rewards from that enemy. In order to discourage AFKing with boon-applying auras, you must still be actively attacking targets to receive rewards from them.[2]
Applying boons to an ally (small percentage).
Removing conditions from an ally (small percentage).
Reviving an ally (large percentage).
Healing an ally (percentage scales based on how much healing is given).
Homever, it seems like a "cap" for reward exists, which limits the amount of players who can receive rewards of enemies. The cap is around the first 50 players reaching enough participation to receive loot.”