How will all 64(?) class combinations have meaningful interaction?

After consuming quite a lot of the media out there I don't really understand why the ability to have a secondary class even exists. Simply augmenting your abilities doesn't seem to add that much content, and attempting to balance / add value to every combination in the game is just going to be a headache. This mechanic just seems like an undernote when compared to a lot of other systems in the game...And in other games the ability to have a subclass would be a core pillar of gameplay. It definitely seems neat, I just don't see how it can be feasibly done impactfully, I just have a sneaking suspicion it'll end up just feeling like bloat. Thoughts?

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PlagueMonk

The nice thing is, the secondary shouldn't have a major impact on the primary class so it 'should' be much easier to balance.

The secondary is what will give your particular class "flavor'. So while a Summoner/Cleric is able to have undead pets, a Summoner/Ranger would have possibly woodland pets? The pets could then all have slightly different abilities. Or the difference between a Tank/Tank and a Tank/mage might be that while the Guardian is just straight up tougher, the Spellshield would have a possibly a protective aura that makes him just as resistant to damage, just in a different way.

I for one am more excited to finally see the details of all the secondaries because the primaries are pretty much the same ol' same ol' we have seen 100 times before.

7Legion

I always wanted to play a 2h barbarian using fire.

I can do that in only 4 games :

Skyrim and Divinity OS2 with some mods

Guild Wars 1 as Warrior/Elementalist
(no 2h but still)

Age of Conan as Herald of Xotli (best class I’ve played)

Basically the secondary class doesn’t offer additional skills as in Guild Wars 1 but it does help to customize your primary class skills in ways that would suit the playstyle you are looking for without making you useless (how many games allow you to be hybrid and be actually decent?).

Example : I plan to play as Fighter/Mage.
Fighter as a basic and classic charge, with Mage as secondary I can make the charge become essentially a shadowstep/blink on target. Making it instant. Attacks being enhanced by elements such as frost, lightning and FIRE.

Secondary classes are essentially an addition to customize your playstyle by adding effects to your skills.

As of now we don’t have all the details and it’s ok, there are a lot of combinations, it will take time to polish them.

CaptnChuck

It adds a significant amount of counterplay, variation and flavor to your base archetype.

Say you're playing a mage. You're countered by rogues. You can take secondary classes to mitigate the advantage rogues might have over you. You could take fighter or tank to give you tankiness to survive the burst dmg. You could take cleric to heal the dmg or bard to mitigate the incoming damage through dmg mitigation songs or something. You could also take rogue and try to burst the rogue down instead. It adds a lot of counterplay to your base archetype.

Another important point is variation. Variation creates identity. The more different classes there are, the more unique each of them feel, as you won't encounter the same class repeatedly in the world. The world will feel different.

And finally, we have flavor. I personally love the idea of being a fighter that uses magic. And just like me, there are a ton of others that like different types of classes that cannot be fully encompassed through just 8 base archetypes. Allowing secondary archetypes, allows you to play whatever class fits your fantasy.

As for your secondary classes being insignificant, that's not true. Steven has clearly stated that secondary class augments will add significant vertical progression to your abilities. Yes the rush to teleport example is not the best, but it is still a solid example. You can easily be cced while you're charging and the time it takes to complete the charge, gives the opponent time to react to it. But if you change it to teleport instead, you cannot be cced and the opponent has a MUCH lesser time to react to the ability.

So to conclude, I disagree. I feel like secondary classes should definitely be a thing in AoC.

plusbrian

I think the system is interesting, but I don't have enough data other than high level abstracts currently. In theory there are 32 variations (actually, way more with religion, race, et al) for each of your skills (maybe not each, maybe only some, who knows), because there are 4 schools inside each subclass. The normal example of teleport rush is just 1 school, there is still 3 other elemental school you could choose with fighter/wizard to augment your rush with. And then the base skill has 3 tiers, which all add all kinds of variations to the base skill which now need to work with the 32 different augmentations. All speculation at the moment, but it is a lot to balance/get to work effectively.

Bond

+ Don't forget the racial augments to abilities.

Getsmurfed

Yeah @plusbrian and @Bond, almost seems like each ability is going to end up like a Path of Exile tree all of it's own. Who knows, maybe that'll be a positive thing...I just don't have the confidence to see it being positive, and I'd almost rather see that kind of meticulous attention to detail be paid to some of these other insanely complex systems that have a much higher impact on your experience.

plusbrian

@Getsmurfed I get your OP for sure. In my example we are talking nearly 100 variations of 1 skill for 1 class, now start layering in combos from interacting skill effects, ala GW2 style.

Ravudha

plusbrian wrote: »

@Getsmurfed I get your OP for sure. In my example we are talking nearly 100 variations of 1 skill for 1 class, now start layering in combos from interacting skill effects, ala GW2 style.

I wouldn't expect the augment to change based on the tier of the base skill though; I assume it's 1 augment for all 3 tiers.

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