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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.
Comments
Only if the 10% say it's good content.
If you know people that have done something you haven't, and they all unanimously say its shit, how excited would you be to give it a go yourself?
That leaves the gear as the only reason to want to do that content, and people running content just for the gear is why so many people in WoW hate on the game while still logging in every day.
Well, I'll just keep hoping that Intrepid can make a ton of bosses for every expansion then.
~I don't like to spend time learning and getting better at the game I want dps meters to do that for me.~
Exactly what I have been saying, people don't want to think they want to do the content and turn their brain off without spending their own time learning all aspects to improve, and having social discussions with people learning more elements of the game. + the toxic element.
(did edit previous message for other part if you want.
yes combat tracker as i said will help a lot to master more the game mechanics and the classes/builds. so a faster progress early. and will be a help for each balance patch, and a small help on bosses (mainly to adapt your build/rotation for this specific boss with its specific timing, etc etc)
And i can understand you think sad/problematic to have this speed up. But the slow due to lack of data can be considered a false difficulty.
Personally, i hope to have the fight designer able to generates fights like the hardest we saw in other MMORPGs. Because those really hard fight were not only about strong DPS but a really good personnal analysis from the players. It would reduce the impact of combat tracker to master the fight to really low, but ALSO would reduce impact of guides a lot.
To answer to what i quoted :
From my own experience : top guilds (not top world but top server, and one of top in my language, french) then casual guilds...
Those kind of people are those under the tops that dreams to be at top without understanding the long term investment... Those are the gold/plat players in LoL, but also those silver or lower complaining about "Elohell"
they dream about summit, and think they are good, the other are bad. They also consider that they are good enough to just have to follow a guide.
Yes you are right, they are consumers and not players. But it remains a big problem this is where most toxicity in PvE environment is generated. They don't want to lose time : kick anyone low in DPS, or kick tank in FFXIV that don't do door to door pulls. They will ask their guildmate to follow the last guide for their class on icyveins blindly. and to learn the strategy, watch videos before the guilds goes to the boss.
they are a problem for a simple reason : they are those younglings will encounter soon enough when they want to progress in the game, and they will force into them this way to play that could be fun for them... but absolutely NOT fun for lot of people... I won't say "majority" or "minority" but most people i know that don't want to be "in top" literally hate to have to watch video before going to fight, and many prefer to learn fight... while doing it (this is what with my FC we did for all people who didnt care about "top content" and just wanted to progress at their pace.)
They simply forgot that at first people come on a game to play a game. not to read guides or be spoiled fight before doing it
And from what I understand, all boss designs usually come down to just dps gates. Yes, you can have countless cool mechanics, but there's always gonna be some form of dps gate, because that's where the difficulty comes from in the fight. If the boss is on an arbitrary timer (or especially a literal one) that counts down to its ultimate raid wipe ability - of course you'll have to squeeze out your raid group until the very last drop of dps comes out, because you gotta beat the timer.
And the more bosses you make and the more stronger gear you give to the players - the more those players will have to use the tracker to figure our where they're lacking. And I dearly hope that Intrepid can somehow find a way to avoid this pitfall of endless boss hp/atk growth, but I somehow doubt they can.
And if the pitfall remains, so will the vicious cycle of trackers that increase the speed of content clearing that increase the "difficulty" of content that increase the requirement of the tracker. I see this as very sad indeed, but I guess that's partially because I don't see pve as the final frontier of great content in mmos.
And as for toxic people - they'll always be toxic, no matter what features the game has. And there'll be more toxic people in Ashes purely because it's gonna be a competitive game rather than a cooperative one (at least in most places).
No, this is just, unfortunately, again, your limited experiences.
Part of the reason this is a problem, is that there are some people who have more mental... 'slots', let's call them. They can calculate and simulate and track many more things that the average person.
For those people, everything is happening too much and too fast. The DPS meter is 'taking the place of those extra slots', for those people, so that they can attempt the content by spending time reviewing the outputs, instead of using 'mental slots' they may not have.
I'm not sure what is worse, personally, bosses that a certain subset of people can't beat because they literally don't have enough focus basically 'no matter what they do', or the frustration of people who don't want to be subjected to DPS meters, but there's another outcome, the one you were suggesting.
If Intrepid could somehow completely prevent DPS meters, either by design or by ... I dunno, magic... they could make bosses that only the people with enough 'focus slots' could beat. The problem would be that those people would find them easy, other people would find them hard, and there would be less ways to understand why in both cases.
The only real solution I could see to this is some form of a catalyst item that you use on bosses during the raid, which would change how the boss behaves. It could be awarded through quests of some particular actions.
For example, a catalyst that's tailored for the "meter people" would boost the boss' overall complexity (and randomization of mechanics) and bump up the chances of certain drops by some amount.
The "layman's" catalyst would make the boss more of a dmg sponge with fewer mechanics, so people can just concentrate on their own rotations rather than both the dance of mechanics and dps. And there'd be no boost to loot.
The casual one would decrease the stats of the boss and would decrease the mechanics variety. Obviously would have the lowest drop with maybe even some drops missing.
In order to fully activate any of those 3 versions of the boss, you'll need to use all 40 catalysts of the same type during the fight (that is if we only apply this to raid bosses). If the boss wasn't killed after the usage - the catalysts go back to their users. If the boss was stolen (killed by a non-og-raid people) - same shit.
This way you'd have open world tailored experiences that are also "equalized" in their complexity, while also accounting for the skill lvl of the players. The pvp for/around the boss still remains. The encounter itself can still be repeated, and maybe even in a different version if so desired. The top rarity drops are still mainly farmed by the people who can farm them (the <10%), while the boss itself can be content for more people if they manage to catch its spawn in time.
What's the glaring cons of this suggestion that I'm missing, cause I'm sure there's some.
For me, in my experience, no glaring 'cons' exist. This is the only way I know that this is normally achieved. MMOs just have to jump through more hoops to do the same sort of thing that other games do by changing difficulty or encounter 'type'.
However, Ashes is Open World Contested bosses, so I guess we could count that as one.
Back to the DPS Meter issue though, the only problem I'd see with just making the bosses 'hard to beat due to overwhelming focus' is that the actual thing a DPS meter does (let's use the example of me 'having the Combat Log and then parsing it using literally Excel) is keep track of a flow for you.
If an aspiring group has to attempt the boss 60 times because they 'can't pass the focus check', they may still eventually get lucky. If the 'high focus' group can farm it after 6 attempts, they will move on. Not everyone is a 'winner' in Ashes, so it's unlikely to matter as much.
Steven's choosing between two forms of frustration, and slightly choosing between two 'target groups for that frustration'. It's probably fine either way.
This is true, but you see it from the bad side focusing on "you have to do enough DPS" becoming => "DPS is the main issue"
Lets take one of most famous "hard boss" Arthas 25 HM, was at the biggest spike of wow golden age, and was really a big fight a really challenging one. the NM mode was already a tough fight also.
Did Arthas need an insane DPS around 90%+ of the "perfect" DPS people could bring ? yep. Was it enough to kill boss ? absolutely no, even a raid 25 team with the good raid comp and all people doing their 100% damages could totally wipe and wipe again.
Because this fight has LOT of mechanics, which are hard to deal with, and where the mistake of one is the wipe of all.
And a good way to explain all is taking just a little (really) part of this fight : 2nd val'kyr + defile.
Valkyr : 3 winged lady spawn, grab one random character (out of the 25) and travel with them to the closest border (circle arena with border being empty so you fall). They had many life and you had to burn their life asap. it already asked a little mechanic : have all 3 valkyr getting the same way, so the raid had to gather middle "slightly" on a side (enough to be sure hte 3 valkyr goes the same way, to have them gathered to make this big DPS easy)
Defile : one character is targetted by arthas and a black area spawn under his feet, after 1 second, all people in take damages and the area grow for each people hit. So again, the raid gather at same area, and move at once far from the defile area.
Separate each mechanic are not so hard (even if each can easily be source of death or even for defile a wipe). but at 2nd and 5th time of the fight they appear it becomes really tricky : they spawn nearly together... so you have to be all in middle (where the mistake on defile will be the biggest problem) move as late as possible (to have valkyr have the most travel to do so most time to kill them) BUT as soon as possible to avoid any little tic of defile (most of time it was enough to have a snowball effect and in the end get it in most if not all area)
it was a BIG DPS check, which was hard to do because mechanics were hard to deal with
reduce the life of valkyr (so DPS check) this part become easy.
Now lets take soul's bosses they are mostly 100% around avoid (we can consider "mechanics" due to the design of the games) ok, so you can play safe, wait your time to hit as safely as possible. the fight could last 30 minutes, or more, you still do it. just long, full of pressure.
Now lets take a limit for example of 20 minutes, meaning that each time the boss does a skill that is its best time to hit you HAVE TO go to hit him, the fight gets harder, you can't allow yourself to play perfectly safe.
reduce this limit to 15 minutes, now even skills where hitting will need a hard avoid just after, or a "perfect frame" to be allwo to go to hit the boss... the fight is even harder.
Just because i added a timer limit to a fight, i made it harder.
Combat tracker in WoW or FFXIV (2 MMORPG currently considered with the most challenging PvE) are not so usefull to understand the hardest fight.
I did "high end" on both...
and for FFXIV i even was in a team of people that wanted to build from fresh their own strategy : no one of us watched any kind of small information about bosses before we killed them ourselves... FFXIV is far more around "DPS gate" than wow in my opinion, but what makes us struggle to fight was mostly understand mechanics and find how to deal with... The DPS was always our last problem, and in fact because we all mastered well our class, and due to building step by step strategy... when we manage to see the last part of fight, trying to get the "most damages we could" was clearly not a problem.
The need of DPS forced us to play "as perfect as possible" no more no less. (and we speak about a game were 2/3 if not 3/4 of Global Cooldown of healers are spent in... damages ^^" for healers the difficulty was timing their heal perfectly to soak the high spike of damages while keeping as much DPS as possible)
Now the question I have, are the ff14/wow bosses interesting because they have a proper "culmination" to the battle (especially in ff14's case), with the intensity of the fight growing throughout the fight, or was it just the fact of overcoming the peak difficulty of the boss?
What I'm trying to get at is this: would those bosses still be interesting if their skillset was completely randomized right from the first second of the fight? Or am I wrong and they were already randomized?
To me, it is a well designed boss.
However, this is only true if you consider a boss to be part content, part puzzle.
That said, I agree with your point that we shouldnt need tools outside of the game - this is why the tracker should be built in to the game.
WoW and FF14 bosses are not randomized generally. It's almost impossible to compare them, a boss of the non-random kind is designed (for me personally) more as a spectacle or a speedrun.
I don't find them interesting, so I don't play those games. I believe I can see why others find them interesting (you can see it in Monster Hunter, a sufficiently 'overgeared' player can defeat certain higher level Monsters just by 'playing perfectly' but if you're not overgeared ENOUGH you still have to deal with its 'Rage' and 'Desperation' mechanics, even more perfectly... or you could play with much less stats and have to use tools, terrain, and sometimes teamwork)
I want to play Ashes because I saw (and experienced) the FF11 type bosses within Ashes, and hope for more of those.
To each their own, really?
I'm just trying to figure out if it's possible to have a fun boss fight w/o the timer of dps (the rising difficulty is that timer). Or would the hardcore pvers see such a fight cheap and boring (the fight being completely randomized and at peak difficulty right from the start)?
I consider myself hardcore ENOUGH at PvE to be an answer-er here.
I don't need rage mechanics, other people need rage mechanics. Lemme explain.
If the boss does not rage, it's just '100% from moment one', then I have to be 100% from moment One. I have to learn and adapt in timeframes on the order of seconds, and react to things and UNDERSTAND what happened because of my reaction in fractions of seconds, right down to 'individual frames'.
Bring it on.
It's other people who don't enjoy this, it certainly ain't me.
If anything, it's the opposite, because I don't want to have to go through the entire easy first part every time I want to practice the harder second part. It's not there for me. It's there for a different player type.
It's not a DPS meter, it's a Combat Tracker.
A Combat Tracker is a way to 'watch the replay' of a battle, skipping unnecessary parts, and sometimes with more info than a player might have had from their perspective unless they read at significantly above average human speed (Combat Log).
The DPS part of this is often more relevant to me to find out (in FFXI for example) when someone did TOO MUCH DAMAGE, not when they didn't do enough.
Why did my Black Mage die? Their big spell hit at the end of an accidental Magic Burst and the boss now decided they looked tasty. Now we have no Stunner and everything's gone to hell. Oh well, ok, let's change the Weaponskill the Ranger uses so that this won't happen.
Parsing for damage is easy, you can just use a dummy or similar at-level mob for that. 'Watching a Replay in full' is harder.
They were a mix of both types (the only game I know to do so).
Top end content doesnt need DPS checks, but they do need fail conditions. DPS checks are just one option for adding a fail condition to an encounter - there are many other options, and a good game will take advantage of as many of them ad they can.
If I understand correctly, you needed to see that course of events in the fight in the tracker in order to understand boss logic at that moment, right? What if there was no logic? What if the boss wouldn't have any particular triggers and would just use random shit from his skillset and switch his targets randomly - would that still be interesting for you?
Subconscious avoidance of a specific interaction.
I don't need the meter, my teammates do. For them, I AM the meter. Hopefully you know what I mean enough that I don't really need to say it and provoke the potential ire of a certain type of person.
I don't use combat trackers, I just need a combat log that I can access after the fact, because people can't pull references directly out of my brain.
Completely randomly?
Sure, I'm fine with that too, but that defeats the Trinity System of MMOs and lessens the 'Role Playing' aspect.
On the other hand, you just described one of my favorite FFXI bosses, so there's that. It's still true to say that the 'Tanks' don't get to do their 'usual job' when going into that fight, though.
Other than that, if you kept at least 'chances for Enmity to influence the attack's main target' but otherwise completely random, then yes, you just have 'most of FFXI' at that point, bearing in mind that the boss is limited by TP and cannot 'just spam powerful abilities if no one is attacking it' (given how TP gain works it CAN spam those abilities as soon as about 10 people are attacking it).
Randomization (complete randomization) is where you need a tracker most.
You want to look back at a pull (successful or not) and see why that pull succeeded or failed. What ratio of abilities did the boss use, were there abilities used one after the other that caused specific issues, and if so, is there anything you can do about that next time?
While it is absolutely possible to look this up in your logs, a guild based combat tracker is essentially nothing more than a faster means of looking this up and comparing the logs of those in your guild.
It's when trackers get removed from a guild setting that what some people consider to be issues start to happen.
Trinity and RP is about how the group uses the strengths and weaknesses of each class in the group to defeat encounters.
Random attacks from the boss lessens efficiency of defeating the encounter by making it challenging to anticipate what's coming next. Also makes it challenging to guarantee win conditions.
But, none of that affects the Trinity System or the RP aspect of combat.
DPS Meters and META tactics that result in cookie cutter builds lessen the RP aspect of combat.
I think Azherae meant it as "tank is no longer tanking, because the boss is never tied to the tank and instead just runs around". Some other roles might get diminished too, if the boss' and class design doesn't account for the randomness of the fight. Maybe healer is never needed because the boss does some weak random shit. Maybe archer is useless because he's constantly getting attacked and get utilize his range dps (though it could be argued that archer's kiting role is played at that moment). I'm sure there's a few other possible hole in the trinity system and roleplaying aspect of it that appear once the boss is no longer controllable by the players in any way. The tank is just the most glaring one.
Which is why it's important to not just look at numbers and instead check to see what else an individual is doing for the group.
There is more to being a main tank than just holding aggro. And there is definitely more to playing a Tank/x than just holding aggro.
Ashes encounters are designed with the expectation of 8-person groups that have one of each Primary Archetype, so whatever randomness a boss might have... that's still going to be a part of the design.
I think we know that "completely random" has to be hyperbole. No boss is going to have attacks that are 100% random. I don't even know what that could possibly mean unless we have AI always procedurally generating brand new attacks on the fly.
I don't understand what can be meant by "maybe healer is never needed". A healer is never needed means that no one ever takes damage. And that must mean the group is so over-powered compared to the boss that a combat tracker is irrelevant.
"One of the design elements that we're implementing into our raids is that the raid will not be exactly the same every single time. You're going to have variables that can't necessarily be pre-planned out for. You can pre-plan out for a lot of the raid like how many DPS do you need and healers and support; where the key position and all that kind of stuff; but I think the compelling aspect of Ashes raiding will be the difficulty in achieving this content and having that content change from session to session as well. We want there to be variables that get manifested by you know what type of node got developed elsewhere. Is he going to have acolytes or cultists? What will the acolytes have skills [available] to them? What kit is the boss gonna have? What available skill repertoire will the boss be able to [wield]? ... A lot of those systems are influenced obviously by world development. So the raid kind of takes into account at what stage has the world developed: Are there two metropolises now available in the world? Okay well let's activate this skill in this skill. Now you have five metropolises, well now all these skills have been activated. Are there are they all economic nodes? Are they all military nodes? That we can change things based on that stuff. And it really is a threat assessment from the environment against the players."
---Steven
Just because you "didn't need a healer" in one run of the raid does not mean you won't need a healer when you return. Also, just because you don't "need" healing does not mean you won't want a Cleric. A Cleric is more than just a healer.
A Ranger/x is more than just ranged DPS. What else is that Ranger doing to aid the group when they aren't doing ranged DPS.
The Trinity System simply informs us that there is a rock-paper-scissors aspect to the strengths and weaknesses designed for each Archetype and that different Archetypes will want to rely on each other in a group to synergize strengths and mitigate weaknesses.
RP should primarily be about the Archetypes and how the Archetypes synergize their abilities with each other to defeat content. Trinity is mostly a meta-textual way of thinking about the underpinnings of combat.
If the group can defeat a boss without the Tank/x ever using aggro, that's OK. It doesn't diminish the Trinity System and it doesn't diminish RP.
If you can find a way to defeat a boss using all Tanks or all Clerics - that is still RP. And it doesn't really "defeat" the Trinity System unless defeating bosses with all Tanks or all Clerics is the rule, rather than the exception.
The trinity system is system whereby the tank stands in front of as many attacks as they can, keeping the target occupied, healers heal said tank, and any others that may take damage, and DPS deal out the damage.
The trinity system isnt some R/P/S system of class design, it is black and white roles within a group.
I'll tell you what has destroyed MMO's over the last 15 years even more than LFG systems, more than cross server content, more than daily quests or log in rewards - special little snowflake players that refuse to fall in line with the trinity system.
Want to make MMO's great again? Have a hard and fast trinity system where there is no room for ambiguity, no blurred lines, no "well, I'm a healer primary, but I've got my DPS bow out and I've taken Bard secondary, so put me in as a tank" people that think they can just be and do what ever and the rest of us need to accept that.
You would. You are in the 'bring it on' category of player. I'll leave it to your personal experience to inform your perspective as to how many others like you there are.
That's usually easy to tell, but the entire reason you do that is so that you know that the issue was random and not with your plan, or you 'realize that you may also need to prepare people for that scenario' because the path through the fight might be so different. We're back to 'Jormungand' again (and I'd just go back to that topic). A 20-30 minute fight where multiple people are properly engaged, as we discussed there, means someone eventually misses something, possibly quite early in. (Even considering what this topic is, I prefer not to derail it, because despite what might currently be under discussion, I truly do 'see the purpose of this thread as giving Noaani a space to discuss with people and advocate for the suggestion given on behalf of me and others', glad to poke at boss design there though).
This is another whole separate topic and I'm sure we could find some post to piggyback that discussion off of that 'no one is using'.
Anyways I have no answer for you, Dygz, that you are likely to 'understand'. Your definitions are not similar to mine. NiKr, I don't personally care about the Trinity system, 'hard tanking', or that type of combat role. TL is purported to be Weapon based, as is Onigiri, as is Elite Dangerous.
I'm not going into a discussion about 'player synergy vs player twitch skills vs player role' again, as it leads to things that my mind labels as contradictions even when I try to understand a certain point of view. I will gladly throw a bunch of data and answers at NiKr if you two want to hash that out, my personal request is that you make a new thread for it or use the 'Character Balance' one on the front page somewhere.
I'll definitely segue that one into this if you want.