Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Raid Sizes and Difficulty
Tarnish
Member
Hello All,
I have been putting a lot of thought on the Raid sizes and difficulty. I wanted to make this post separate to we do not have a mix of topics in one place.
For open world bosses my proposal would be to scale the bosses to a 32M raid should be a scaling so in world if you have 40 that is only 1 additional group. If the world boss is difficult enough it could easily wipe a uncontested open world raid. However in a position where you're contested i think the extra group will definitely help with the PvP portion of the battle, however i do not feel it would be enough to secure a win over a contested boss.
For instanced Raids i would suggest a choice of 16M and 32M raids. This would allow a size large enough that 2 dungeon groups would be able to combine forces and take on a boss. This would also allow the possibility of guilds creating alliances to combine 2 good 16 man groups and have the perfect amount of people to do the larger raid size. This could be a normal occurrence if the guild work together to take on world bosses. However in the situation where ties break or a guild dies it still allows the smaller team sizes to work towards a collect end game goal and only realistically effect world bosses.
The pros of a 2 group raid size. As a Raid Leader i always enjoyed strategy. Having to carefully decide on what i take to a raid is really fun. In WoW 10 mans and Swtor 8 mans, I had a lot of fun picking what classes i wanted to take because there was a risk/reward. If i stacked classes like WoW raids have had issues with. it punishes you for taking too many of the same class. However you have to balance it. I really like this and i know raid leaders of the past have also enjoyed it. Recruiting and grouping up. In small raid teams i have built much stronger connections with my raid teams. I have friends from my very first raid i ever lead. The larger the group the harder it is to really get to know everyone and the more work that goes into running the guild. For those of you who do not know of the work of leading a organized guild. It takes a lot of WORK.
Cons of a 2 group size raid team. The only real con i experienced is when a friend would start playing and want to join the team and they had their mind set on playing the most OP class in the game yet our raid comp was full on those roles. This con could easily fit any raid size however with smaller raid sizes it is much easier to meet the caps. This is why the 32M option is nice. Choices instead of being dead locked to a set number.
Raid difficulty scaled to a 32M in world would be very effective if the raid is actually difficult in world. Where this would not work is if the boss is easy because they are expecting PVP to contest the fight. In this case i would suggest giving the boss a lot of health to increase the time spent fighting the boss. If PVP is the point then long drawn out battles will be expected. However i have noticed world bosses not being a go to thing in WoW because of the time vs reward. The real question for world bosses is the reward for such a drawn out battle and what is truly going to make players want to go after these bosses.
I would like the end game to have multiple difficulties or ways to make it more difficult. I know they mentioned events in the world and node progressions will effect the bosses mechanics. Raid Leading in AoC has the potential to be really fun and require a very verbal raid leader. However i want to be known for taking down a boss in its most difficult form. I wonder how to achieve a standard like that? i hope a difficulty does arise with possibly a item you use in the raid or from the raid after defeating the boss to unlock a more difficult level.
Another thing i am curious about is how the bosses get harder. How does it tell if you have done well or not? is it counting how many times someone gets hit by a mechanic or player deaths? Is it dps and how long the boss takes? so many questions and i imagine it may vary by boss. This is kind of why i hope there is a extreme end game where if you smash the hardest version of the scaling difficulty it gives you a item to push a boss to a insane level giving it more mechanics and more standards.
I think a cool idea to help continue progression is to give a key or item that begins a quest in another node to unlock that nodes raid. This may also help push guilds to want to progress a node for better loot or even to attack a metropolis to unlock their next teir of raiding at a more difficult level with more loot. This also gives the guild aspirations to gear up the current roster and gives more progression like deadlines instead of timeline deadlines.
Let me know you're thoughts. I know they have plans for content for 8/16/32/40 man and i think this format would also fit into those plans.
I have been putting a lot of thought on the Raid sizes and difficulty. I wanted to make this post separate to we do not have a mix of topics in one place.
For open world bosses my proposal would be to scale the bosses to a 32M raid should be a scaling so in world if you have 40 that is only 1 additional group. If the world boss is difficult enough it could easily wipe a uncontested open world raid. However in a position where you're contested i think the extra group will definitely help with the PvP portion of the battle, however i do not feel it would be enough to secure a win over a contested boss.
For instanced Raids i would suggest a choice of 16M and 32M raids. This would allow a size large enough that 2 dungeon groups would be able to combine forces and take on a boss. This would also allow the possibility of guilds creating alliances to combine 2 good 16 man groups and have the perfect amount of people to do the larger raid size. This could be a normal occurrence if the guild work together to take on world bosses. However in the situation where ties break or a guild dies it still allows the smaller team sizes to work towards a collect end game goal and only realistically effect world bosses.
The pros of a 2 group raid size. As a Raid Leader i always enjoyed strategy. Having to carefully decide on what i take to a raid is really fun. In WoW 10 mans and Swtor 8 mans, I had a lot of fun picking what classes i wanted to take because there was a risk/reward. If i stacked classes like WoW raids have had issues with. it punishes you for taking too many of the same class. However you have to balance it. I really like this and i know raid leaders of the past have also enjoyed it. Recruiting and grouping up. In small raid teams i have built much stronger connections with my raid teams. I have friends from my very first raid i ever lead. The larger the group the harder it is to really get to know everyone and the more work that goes into running the guild. For those of you who do not know of the work of leading a organized guild. It takes a lot of WORK.
Cons of a 2 group size raid team. The only real con i experienced is when a friend would start playing and want to join the team and they had their mind set on playing the most OP class in the game yet our raid comp was full on those roles. This con could easily fit any raid size however with smaller raid sizes it is much easier to meet the caps. This is why the 32M option is nice. Choices instead of being dead locked to a set number.
Raid difficulty scaled to a 32M in world would be very effective if the raid is actually difficult in world. Where this would not work is if the boss is easy because they are expecting PVP to contest the fight. In this case i would suggest giving the boss a lot of health to increase the time spent fighting the boss. If PVP is the point then long drawn out battles will be expected. However i have noticed world bosses not being a go to thing in WoW because of the time vs reward. The real question for world bosses is the reward for such a drawn out battle and what is truly going to make players want to go after these bosses.
I would like the end game to have multiple difficulties or ways to make it more difficult. I know they mentioned events in the world and node progressions will effect the bosses mechanics. Raid Leading in AoC has the potential to be really fun and require a very verbal raid leader. However i want to be known for taking down a boss in its most difficult form. I wonder how to achieve a standard like that? i hope a difficulty does arise with possibly a item you use in the raid or from the raid after defeating the boss to unlock a more difficult level.
Another thing i am curious about is how the bosses get harder. How does it tell if you have done well or not? is it counting how many times someone gets hit by a mechanic or player deaths? Is it dps and how long the boss takes? so many questions and i imagine it may vary by boss. This is kind of why i hope there is a extreme end game where if you smash the hardest version of the scaling difficulty it gives you a item to push a boss to a insane level giving it more mechanics and more standards.
I think a cool idea to help continue progression is to give a key or item that begins a quest in another node to unlock that nodes raid. This may also help push guilds to want to progress a node for better loot or even to attack a metropolis to unlock their next teir of raiding at a more difficult level with more loot. This also gives the guild aspirations to gear up the current roster and gives more progression like deadlines instead of timeline deadlines.
Let me know you're thoughts. I know they have plans for content for 8/16/32/40 man and i think this format would also fit into those plans.
0
Comments
Why keep this talk continuing, but in a few different words from your last post? We already know you opinion on where you think this should go, and obviously even though you state the opposite you are clearly going to be playing this game.
A lot of this post seems to be slight tweaks to the current WoW raiding system, which IMO (and in a lot of other people's) sucks in retail and is outdated now in Classic. I hated most of the changes to raids from Vanilla to TBC, however I know this is not shared by everyone, but it was bad enough to make me quit the game after having nearly two years of play time.
Different difficulty modes, or hard modes for raids is IMO a cop out by developers to create more, harder, and rarely better content for their users. If you are not up to snuff to get to and/or complete a raid you should not get to experience it (watch a streamer or something else, I don't want content dumb down so everyone can get a participation trophy, even if that means I won't get to do it either). Its the idea of getting there, the goal, even if its unreachable, like the flying mounts.
Finally you seems to be stuck on the fact that raiding will be the end all of gearing / PVE content, and seem to forget that the best gear is crafted (or at least this is my understanding), even if some of the materials come from raids. This will change the dynamics of gearing up for raids, for parties and everything else related to it including group size and comp. So trying to pinhole these things with numbers already is EXTREMELY premature and this is WHY the alpha and betas are needed. I imagine we may see how many people make up raid comps change drastically as the game gets developed and other systems required to balance this get flushed out. This won't even be possible with Alpha because we won't even have the second classes (I believe.) to play with. I expect to see a light raid mode at most till closer to the end of the last betas.
Now that I got that out of the way, OVERALL I think this was a WAY better post in discussing your worries about the game and giving real feedback and suggestions. I just think its really premature, and I think focusing on something else for now would be more productive and provide far more helpful feedback, like how the hybrid system may impact raids / forcing certain builds to play one way or basically be removed from raids for falling behind their same class playing either tab or action combat or perhaps them taking some of the lessons from New Worlds preview and learning from them (cause there were problems...).
Hey he used paragraphs and didn't come off as elitist, that I felt deserved a reasonable response.
Heh. I've raised two toddlers; 'elitist' wasn't the word that came to mind.
You came in telling us why you weren't going to play the game in another thread, with a whole load of reasons to back up that statement.
I think it is probably wise to write up a post saying why you were mistaken in that earlier post, and why you may well end up playing still.
I do agree with your notion that 32 player raids are a better option than 40, and have thought this for several years. My main reason for thinking this though is that most existing PvE guilds are based around raid sizes of 20 - 30 players. Since most top end guilds only have a few more members in them than a full raid allows for in the game they are playing, this means most top end guilds have 22 - 34 players.
Making the raid size 32 would mean these guilds could easily switch to Ashes without needing to go on a large recruiting spree (they may need to get in a few more members though).
Making that raid size 40 though, that would mean many of these guilds would need to double in size in order to play Ashes the way they want to. With a 40 person raid size, top end guilds will want to carry 46 - 52 players as standard, and that is a guild size that would make many of these guilds uncomfortable.
Anyhow, just because you have had a positive experience (for you) in one game does not mean it's the only way to do it. I have a preference on raid (and group) size that is different from what AOC is going with (and different from WoW for that matter), but I am willing to let them implement their vision for the game. If you think a single group will be sufficient to contest another competing raid, I would be very surprised and disappointed.
Yes. Yes I did just bump this thread for the only reason of pointing out that, once again, that when the Captn's responds, it's usually on point.
Please move on and stop bringing your WoW agenda here.
I was going to post the exact same thing.
Kind of odd to be concerned with raid sizes for a game you aren't interested in playing.
Very little