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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.
Tab/Action skill investment ... i need to understand, it's strange/crazy.
Medrash1
Member
So what i mean with that.
As i saw in some videos on the internet and in the wiki i have a general idea of how it will work, but correct me if i'm wrong pls.
So at max lvl you will get a max of 30 spells/skill as i understood right? But then i saw that you have to choose between a tab oriented one or an action one... and you can choose a max of a 75% of a certain category (don't ask me why this limit, it's non sense game design for me). This means you will have a pool of 60 spells to choose from , something less probably, maybe 50. Right? But then .. it's not only this, you will have to choose if upgrade certain spells or get new ones, and considering that you will have 3 variations of a spell we can say that there are around 150 maybe more different spells . But you can pick just 30 or less .. 10.
Is this crazy? Am i right? You will have a class (cleric for example) that get only a 20% of his kit at best (5/8% at worst?). So this will create nameless subclasses, and it all depends of what type of spells are going to be. This game has already a pretty restrictive class choise, becouse each class have a limited rule, such tank or healer ... 60 skills are a lot to get and to design for a limited class. How are you going to design 60 different type of heals? Isn't too much? becouse they will become 150+ with the improvements. Are the devs capable of making them balance?
If this is the case and it will be reality there are lots of game design problems i assume.
What if you get all aoe spells and heals for raids .. you will not be good at one vs one or solo questing or maybe even dungeons. This is just one case, but each spell will be better in certain situations, and this will force the player to play limited game content, similar to some issues WoW has.
Will the player able to respec his skills investments? how often and how easly?
The fact that a skill doesn't have a version for both the targeting types (tab and action) is Great. I love it. But this means there will be more unique spells to choose from. In some way is good and in other ones is not. I don't see and don't believe it is possible to achieve something like this xD . Or it will be too caotic and time expensive.
I whould like to get all the spells of my class at max lvl, and not an impaired/maimed one ... pls illuminate me or help me to understand this craziness.
*Also i don't get how a character can choose to have more powerfull spells but less buttons to use .. this will force the devs to advantage who take more spells, becouse nobody will use more buttons to do less or the same. But also the "noobs" will be weaker and this is not fair if you setup your character this way to play with. It's rly restrictive and problematic, not a good design choise for sure .. if i understood right*
*Also, do you know WoW? He had a great idea by giving the player all the different tier of the same spell, so a player can get 30 or more buttons to improve his job, or just the base ones to do basic stuff with less buttons.*
*Last thing about wow is that gives uniqueness and importance to each class, that prevent them to be useless in almost every case scenario, i don't feel this game has a same thing, it misses , expecially with this type of skills problem. With many spells that you cannot choose, and so many different subclasses or specs into a predetermined class there is nothing to give value to a certain player setup, so each player will be weaker or not usefull in certain situations. Becouse you can get another player with the same class but just different and better skills.*
As i saw in some videos on the internet and in the wiki i have a general idea of how it will work, but correct me if i'm wrong pls.
So at max lvl you will get a max of 30 spells/skill as i understood right? But then i saw that you have to choose between a tab oriented one or an action one... and you can choose a max of a 75% of a certain category (don't ask me why this limit, it's non sense game design for me). This means you will have a pool of 60 spells to choose from , something less probably, maybe 50. Right? But then .. it's not only this, you will have to choose if upgrade certain spells or get new ones, and considering that you will have 3 variations of a spell we can say that there are around 150 maybe more different spells . But you can pick just 30 or less .. 10.
Is this crazy? Am i right? You will have a class (cleric for example) that get only a 20% of his kit at best (5/8% at worst?). So this will create nameless subclasses, and it all depends of what type of spells are going to be. This game has already a pretty restrictive class choise, becouse each class have a limited rule, such tank or healer ... 60 skills are a lot to get and to design for a limited class. How are you going to design 60 different type of heals? Isn't too much? becouse they will become 150+ with the improvements. Are the devs capable of making them balance?
If this is the case and it will be reality there are lots of game design problems i assume.
What if you get all aoe spells and heals for raids .. you will not be good at one vs one or solo questing or maybe even dungeons. This is just one case, but each spell will be better in certain situations, and this will force the player to play limited game content, similar to some issues WoW has.
Will the player able to respec his skills investments? how often and how easly?
The fact that a skill doesn't have a version for both the targeting types (tab and action) is Great. I love it. But this means there will be more unique spells to choose from. In some way is good and in other ones is not. I don't see and don't believe it is possible to achieve something like this xD . Or it will be too caotic and time expensive.
I whould like to get all the spells of my class at max lvl, and not an impaired/maimed one ... pls illuminate me or help me to understand this craziness.
*Also i don't get how a character can choose to have more powerfull spells but less buttons to use .. this will force the devs to advantage who take more spells, becouse nobody will use more buttons to do less or the same. But also the "noobs" will be weaker and this is not fair if you setup your character this way to play with. It's rly restrictive and problematic, not a good design choise for sure .. if i understood right*
*Also, do you know WoW? He had a great idea by giving the player all the different tier of the same spell, so a player can get 30 or more buttons to improve his job, or just the base ones to do basic stuff with less buttons.*
*Last thing about wow is that gives uniqueness and importance to each class, that prevent them to be useless in almost every case scenario, i don't feel this game has a same thing, it misses , expecially with this type of skills problem. With many spells that you cannot choose, and so many different subclasses or specs into a predetermined class there is nothing to give value to a certain player setup, so each player will be weaker or not usefull in certain situations. Becouse you can get another player with the same class but just different and better skills.*
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Comments
It is indeed a situation in which you won't know the arsenal of a player until you engage the player. It definitely will be a case of take the best skills and leave the lesser skills. Whether you must unlock the best skills through lesser skills is anyone's guess.
Sometimes complexity is a good thing and sometimes complexity is a bad thing. It could boil down to cookie cutting or there should be more than a few viable builds. It is impossible to state which way the dice will fall.
I'd compare it to a card game, you've easily got thousands of cards to pick from, but in the end need to be condensed down to a 40/60/100 card deck depending on game and format. Using magic the gathering as an example, there's certain types of effects that every deck should have like mana ramp and some removal, but if your deck's theme is about swarming with tokens/weak creatures you might not want many high cost big hitters. Some decks are also based around the type of creatures in it such as bringing zombies back from the graveyard or humans or elves giving buffs explicitly to other humans or elves.
Of course we have few informations, exacly for this i'm a bit confused and not 100% sure of the info i currently had in the internet, but still, secondary class and augments are not the focal point in my discussion.
yea i actually didn't thought about that , you will fight an enemy without knowing his build or what he does at all xD this will lead to a caotic and random fight. So it's a big nono issue for pvp too.
There are too many spells to take track of.
If the game forces you to choose the best one becouse it has unbalanced spells it's already a fail of game design . I actually don't know what is better xD and i don't care less for now that the game is not ready, but i care that one will be better and the other one worst.
Maybe it will be close to balance, i guess and hope.
Complexity is always a good thing in videogames , if you know how to balance and design it properly .. It's what makes a game actually a good game in my opinion.
Sure it's a personal opinion, the personal opinion it's what matter here, becouse we are all "Persons" with personal opinions.
Sry but i never played ffxiv, but i'm planning to try it, so i don't know what system you are refering to.
I know that you have huge global CDs that help you from choosing the huge ammount of spells the character has, and for many is the fun part, but so i suppose it has his limits when a player want to focus into a certain rule or "job" .
I also never played Magic either xD so i'm in a bad spot right now haha ...
When a card game forces you to get certain cards, becouse they are op, it's boring .. bad.. and i know this as a yu-gi-ho player and some other card videogames. I grew up as a child playing yu-gi-ho, and i liked as fk the possibility to customize your deck and create your own strategy. What i didn't liked at all is that your deck will suck and lose 90% of the times becouse the other one have just better cards. So at the end there is no strategy involved.
Anyway a card game is a totally different and more complex topic, in a flashy fight you cannot think too much about what the enemy has and what he will use, and in the card games you can understand better the enemy setup.
In ashes is more difficult to understand or "read" the enemy spells/cards.
Immagine having a pve set of skills, you will not be able to pvp properly .. but also if this is not a problem i have one more for you...
Into a pvp combat there are many different situations... if one of the two factions has a better pvp setup there is no counterplay or strategy involved, they will probably win the fight. It will be more random and less skilled. Same for pve, if you have a setup in a dungeon or Raid there is the risk of not beeing usefull in all fights or bosses. Forcing your character to leave the party if you cannot respec skills.
So it all depends on the skill design, maybe it's not possible to have such system of rules, i need to think more about this system.
So sure, i get that you maybe like the style of having a certain rule with a limited skill set and options, but you need to play the game fairly, be usefull in all situation and fit a spot in all groups. This is rly important for a game.
Yes, sure. The concept of giving freedom of choise to the players equipment is awesome, but at the end some of them will be better for you, and the others will not be that good, so at the end you cannot used them effectivelly ... good idea but not developed properly.
The fact that you can also build broad skill sets or deeper one is also a great idea, but in the same way badly developed.
So why not giving to the player access to all skills? Like the Armors and Weapons? It seems they advance in some aspets and then go back in others.
Having only 10 spells on the bar out of many is bad in Strategic and tactic situations, becouse will be almost impossible to choose a set of 10 spells if they are well balanced, or it will have 0 choise (then no Strategy) if they are unbalanced. If you can change specialization easly. In the tactic aspect you will have less choise with few skills, and then less tactic. So it's also bad for the tactics too.
I don't know why you said that is good, if you explain to me, but i probably know why..
For you having to choose between some spells is a Strategic activity, but it's not if you don't know the enemy setup. Having to choose what is best it's a game exploit at the end, there is a bit of strategy, but it's Static and you can do that only one time, then your setup is frozen as the Lich King in WoW xD He is powerful thought. If you can respec the skills of course ... the Strategic aspect regard to the team composition is good, becouse you can spec into the rule your team need the most ... but still some set of skills are not going to be usefull.
The skills of a player are a more Tactic one, the class is more Strategic. This is the basic pronciple.
Skills are designed to affect the combat and instant game choise, if you have less you have no tactics options. But maybe fof you having less means having some restriction and rules to follow in a fight ... but that's not true, becouse it's static, if they counter you it's a loss. tactics means that you can choose in the moment how to act , but to do that you need all the options available, if you have 10 skills out of 50 you will follow your Strategy and it's a roll of dice.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/46849/slight-concern-on-combat
The 25%/75% is a rough number and its not the final answer or established limit.
A skillshot will always be harder to hit than targeted skill. But will be more rewarding when you land them, depending on the dificulty to do so, that's how you balance skillshots vs tab target. Not the 25%/75%.
Augments will change how your main abilities work, and sometimes the nature of how that ability is played will change from a targeted ability to a skillshot just for the sake of gameplay and what makes sense.
What I'm getting at is not power, utility, or meta but synergy. Just the idea looking at all of your abilities and passives and selecting the ones that match the playstyle you're looking for and that feed into each other, like having a passive that grants temp buffs on DoT crits, and then using equipment that increasing crit chance for instance.
Intrepid is making a game in which choices matter, and not everyone will win at everything, trial and error, risk vs reward. Someone who spec'd into being a fire mage because it has the highest burst potential is likely to not find themself at the top of the ladder when it comes to a fire themed raid/dungeon.
You are contraddicting yourself here, when choise matter it means that a player can win at everything. When choise doesn't matter the games makes your viable in certain situations and not in other, preventing you from doing dinamic choises. If everyone will win at everything means everyone can choose everything.
Of course a fire mage with a bad skill set is going to be weaker to fire enemies, but there is no reason for a Fire mage to be weak against Fire enemies, he just need different type of fire spells to dominate the fire enemy. This is choise and strategy .
If you make limited skill choises and you will not be able to reset your skill points it means that the game kill the player choise and tactic in the game. It's bad game design.
Of course customization is important, but it not justify permanent limitations and penalities.
Sry i didn't get what you ment exactly.
The class rappresent the player in the game, his identity. The strategy of the player is directly linked to the class and the game itself.
"you think this game gives the freedom.. etc" , but you never played it lol.
You can think or immagine everything you want, but untill the game isn't in our hand we cannot know, we have little informations to know that for now, almost nothing ^^ .
How do you know that upgrading some abilities will change them from tab to action or vice-versa?
I read on the wiki and videos that the devs said they will not make the same spell be tab and action, each spell is unique i suppose. Am i right?
Link to me where you had this info pls!
Look In the middle part of the video
Interesting, so they limited the targeting skill choise to 75/25 for balance purposes. Becouse they know that skillshot and tab one will be unbalanced xD ... so everyone is forced with 25 of the weaker style of targeting.
Lol this is a bad concept to begin with, this mean you don't trust in your balancing skills as a developer.
The way you balance skillshot is not making them stronger ,this will lead to predominant combo where you need to cc the enemy and then nuke him with easyskillshot. Skillshot and tab are 2 different systems, and the game concept need to address certain type of skills to tab and other to Skillshot.
Each time you trow something at someone it should be a skillshot, becouse making them travel and follow the enemy is not a targeting option but an addictional game mechanics, like a magic arrow/missile. So if you want to mix tab targeting with skillshot you have to mix both style of gameplay, the new one and the old one.
The way to do this is by adding a dodging ability or stat to a player, so when a unavoidable spell or object find him it can miss o be dodged. But for skillshot when it hits you cannot dodge.
This is the only way to balance them ... not making skillshot do more damage or adding more power, that's pretty difficult to achieve and exploitable.
One thing I don't like is basic atacks having AOE arcs, too much hack&slash for me.
The part about balancing skillshot vs targeted I think they will make a good job, it all depends on the ability, the context, and how strong it is into the actual game.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crowd_control
How are you going to evaluate whether an ability is tab target (so that you can dodge as given in your example) in the time that it takes for the ability to fly at you; and, decide to hit a dodge key rather than some other key? Even if you can correctly identify some abilities to dodge, how can you identify all tab target abilities from 64 classes as the abilities fly at you fast enough to make a decision and dodge it reliably?
You are right, AoE attacks don't rappresent correctly the use of a sword or any type of weapon... it's not like a wave of fire, but i think they wil fix that correctly
So the way to make autoattacks a skillshot is similar to DarkSouls , they need to make that each attack can hit only one enemy , the first he encounter . Or that the damage spread to all the near enemies. The Aoe is also too big. ^^
Anyway usually mmorpg in medieval style are usually Hack&Slash , like d&d does ^^ .when it comes to Fight!
I hope they will make a good job too, they have too much pressure on their shoulders ... they need some WoW expert xD they are trained to carry heavy and absurdly big shoulder armor haha ... it should be funny xD it's hard for an italians to make jokes in english haha
Yes sure. It's something that skillshots will not have hard cc, but at this point you can put a weak cc first, then an hard cc and nuke him, combo done xD . Also there are some situations where you cannot move properly, or multiple skillshots will make almost impossible to dodge the stun.
As you said it's hard to identify a skillshot or spell while in combat, then some skillshots will be so fast you cannot even dodge them ... anyway it's pretty hard to balance correctly the damage between tab targeting and skillshots. Immagine someone good at dodging ... the skillshot is almost useless if you cannot hit. Or another one that is pretty bad at it .. he will die faster becouse the skilshot has a broken advantage. So how can you know the avarage skill of the players to balance exactly the damage of both, tab targeting and action targeting. And even in that case, the people that will dislike the skillshot gameplay are going to be in disadvantage, becouse the action targeting skill will be predominant, and so they will be mad cause of this becouse their style of playing is not viable.
The fact that a skillshot is not avoidable when it hits is already a huge power up, imagine a tank beeing slowed and then everyone uses skillshots, the only difference is that it is easly balanceable and more coherent with the style of gameplay, and logic of the game. it will make everything more clear for the player to understand ... instead of asking to themself , what is better more damage or tab? (if you tried to answer this you know it's almost impossible to answer xD )
So the problem you rightly adressed to me is easly fixable ... if you mix 2 different style of gaming with a parallel function ( they do the same things just in a different way), they need to be present in the game together, example:
If you hit a dodge skill it will simultaneously activate the passive dodge and movement speed, becouse they are linked and do the same thing, so if a spell is going to you or two spells you can dodge both with one ability, moving and dodging at the same time. Everything that boost your speed will boost your dodge at the same time. Lol you don't need to have monstrous reflexes, anyway you had a good point.
i didn't thought that a spell can boost only your dodge or speed
It's possible to add 2 spells for pro players, one is dodge based and the other is movement speed based, so when you activate one it will increase only dodge or speed, to increase the skill in the videogame, if someone is capable of understanding the spell type ^^ . But this is a + for the advanced game.
Also you can increase dodge or moviment speed separatelly with passive buffs from armors or blessings, when you are out of combat, becouse it's not required to recognise spells in action. So for the activable moves/skills the dodge and moviment component will be a 50/50, and for pros maybe a 75/25.
Anyway the best choise is to use just one of the two, the action targeting is more complex and overall the best choise, more realistic and advanced ... but it's heavier to run for a Videogame.
Some tab targeting is always needed ^^
I hope I have met your expectations with this answer!
Love skillshots!
ps. LoL has this problem anyway, it started with tab targeting spells for the most and now he is shifting to skillshots. Every champ now have skillshot and rarely some tab targeting... and they have an Hard time trying to balance this mess xD lol ...
We don't have anymore all the complicated auto-hit spells, now it's a complicated action game
Rather than making skillshots unavoidable, I actually see it the other way. When a ranged tab target attack is fired in many games, the attack will move wherever is needed to connect with the target. It will fly around or even through walls, arrows will curve as needed to track the movement of the target, etc. Such tracking is generally necessary for the in game targeting to hit a randomly moving player. Otherwise, the tab target system is easily avoided without using a dodge. Imagining dodging in such a system that tracks so perfectly does not fit to me.
Maybe I misunderstand what your trying to say?
We don't have much information about this system and I don't understand it. So there for it is bad/broken?
You said:
ea i actually didn't thought about that , you will fight an enemy without knowing his build or what he does at all xD this will lead to a caotic and random fight. So it's a big nono issue for pvp too.
We disagree here. WoW is horrible for this. At no point should any of us know exactly what skill the other player has. That is super boring knowing exactly what they have and what they can do.
There are too many spells to take track of..
GOOD! This keeps things lively.
If the game forces you to choose the best one becouse it has unbalanced spells it's already a fail of game design . I actually don't know what is better xD and i don't care less for now that the game is not ready, but i care that one will be better and the other one worst.
Its called player agency. Being able to decide for yourself and experiment. Maybe in one situation a build works good. In another you get better synergy with a different group with a different build.
Every time you say "balance" I read "homogenization". It is WoW's biggest failure in the last several expansions. Every class is so close to being the same might as well just have one.
In ashes is more difficult to understand or "read" the enemy spells/cards.
Immagine having a pve set of skills, you will not be able to pvp properly .. but also if this is not a problem i have one more for you...
Into a pvp combat there are many different situations... if one of the two factions has a better pvp setup there is no counterplay or strategy involved, they will probably win the fight. It will be more random and less skilled. Same for pve, if you have a setup in a dungeon or Raid there is the risk of not beeing usefull in all fights or bosses. Forcing your character to leave the party if you cannot respec skills.
So it all depends on the skill design, maybe it's not possible to have such system of rules, i need to think more about this system.
So sure, i get that you maybe like the style of having a certain rule with a limited skill set and options, but you need to play the game fairly, be usefull in all situation and fit a spot in all groups. This is rly important for a game.[/quote]
This keeps coming up in multiple threads.
So many people want to break Ashes into a bunch of mini games.
Ashe of Creation the Dungeon Crawler.
Ashe of Creation the Battleground.
Ashe of Creation the Arena.
Why not have Ashe of Creation the game?
Why must a build work for one situation but not another?
Lastly Life is not fair. Get a helmet if you need one but stop expecting to win at everything.
The fact that you can also build broad skill sets or deeper one is also a great idea, but in the same way badly developed.
How you know this?
So why not giving to the player access to all skills? Like the Armors and Weapons? It seems they advance in some aspets and then go back in others.
Choices matter. Picking one class over another effects what skills you have and how the game will play for you.
Having only 10 spells on the bar out of many is bad in Strategic and tactic situations, becouse will be almost impossible to choose a set of 10 spells if they are well balanced, or it will have 0 choise (then no Strategy) if they are unbalanced. If you can change specialization easly. In the tactic aspect you will have less choise with few skills, and then less tactic. So it's also bad for the tactics too.
Guild wars 1 was like this you had a bunch of skills but could only use a few at a time. Made you think about what you wanted to do before leaving town.
I don't know why you said that is good, if you explain to me, but i probably know why..
For you having to choose between some spells is a Strategic activity, but it's not if you don't know the enemy setup.
Why do you need or want static fights? Not knowing what the enemy has for skills is half the fun.
Having to choose what is best it's a game exploit at the end, there is a bit of strategy, but it's Static and you can do that only one time, then your setup is frozen as the Lich King in WoW xD He is powerful thought. If you can respec the skills of course ... the Strategic aspect regard to the team composition is good, becouse you can spec into the rule your team need the most ... but still some set of skills are not going to be usefull.
This sounds like Vash in his thread. Respec I hope is costly and has a timer. All perception on what skills are good/bad. I have seen good players use a "bad" skill to great success.
The skills of a player are a more Tactic one, the class is more Strategic. This is the basic pronciple.
Skills are designed to affect the combat and instant game choise, if you have less you have no tactics options. But maybe fof you having less means having some restriction and rules to follow in a fight ... but that's not true, becouse it's static, if they counter you it's a loss. tactics means that you can choose in the moment how to act , but to do that you need all the options available, if you have 10 skills out of 50 you will follow your Strategy and it's a roll of dice.[/quote]
Again , Static fights are boring. Being forced to make a choice on how your class plays and putting the choise on YOU the player is a good thing.
Interesting you started a thread and about this very thing then try to pin it on someone else.
ataulfos is right on this one.
Start at 25:00 they talk about tall vs wide and having multiple hot bars.
So a skill that can be avoided easily and takes more personal skill to hit with should do the same damage as a skill that autolocks?
The Hybrid video starts at 11:40 Stevens showing off what they have so far. At on point he talks about IF they run into problems they will go tab vs action.
I recommend the whole stream.
Agree to disagree on that one
So for the first point you made you are right a bit, but it's not enough ... you cannot know the average skill of the player base. Skill-shot hit ... with the tab targeting can be a precise measurement to do. Hit/dodge. But for the skillshot you cannot know if it was directed to the enemy or not, the meta and other stuff.
If the meta is a cc meta of course the hit rate is going to grow, and there are many factors that can influence that. So usually the aiming skill of the player changes and improves while playing, plus the fact that the meta and game itself can change and evolve, it will lead to huge different results of the average aiming skill. It will probably change between server .. so what are you going to do in that case? Are you going to make skill-shots stronger (+damage) based on the server? One server has fireballs that do 100 and another one has the same spell that does 120 xD wow , how convenient and fun. For that reason it will never be balanced, or lead to a fun gameplay.
Anyway it's also pretty hard to do such math and take enough info in the game, you need to build a heavier game with more "stat Counter" and maybe new hitbox to try to catch the skillshot you miss .. all this to just not use the dodge feature, that will 100% guaranteed fix and balance the problem. xD
For the Second point, i didn't get what you ment by saying that for you the skillshot shouldn't be unavoidable, you see it in the other way? What way? You spoke about tab targeting and not skillshots after that phrase, so the logic of your statement is totally broken xD .
I never said that the skill-shot should be unavoidable anyway xD ... of course i agree with that xP
With "unavoidabl"e you meant that the "skill-shot" is a tab-targeting or that when it hits you there is no stat that can randomly make you dodge the spell. It's not clear.
A skill-shot that is totally unavoidable by physics and moviment is called a tab-targeting skill, and not skillshot.
Anyway why are you against that? why did you broke your thread of the discussion? :P you didn't explain to me
Of course an old style skill (tab one) will follow you until it hits, it's unavoidable, but dodgeable by stats.
Maybe you don't know what i mean with dodge and movement speed. The dodge is an old stat, made for rpg style of games... there is no physics. It's just a math variable that set your ability to dodge, and then when you receive an attack it will determinate if you got the hit or not, there is no action involved. The dodge stat is part of the tab-targeting kit, they are linked together.
The whole point of this balance is to make skillshots beeing avoidable by moving the hit-box of the player, and for the auto-hit (tab -targeting) by calculating the stats (numbers) of the player. So they both have a way to be "dodged" and a unavoidable component. 2/2=1 . For that reason it is a balanced solution and expression.
I hope you understood everything
If you understand "homogenization" in your mind, when you listen or read "balance", it's your problem. It means you don't know the meaning of the word BALANCE. It has completelly different meaning , Homogenization it's a totally different thing.
Sure, the easy way to balance a game is by homogenizating everything, withotu putting any work in the game at all. An extreme example:
"1-hey guys .. we have the bard that is too op, he can cast damage, heals, and be also tanky ... and it is also bugged, so what's the solution?
2- Simple, just put the same spell of the priest for healing and ... the damage of the priest as well.
1- But this way it will not be a Bard anymore
2-Ah sure, get rid of his skin, design and concept ... just call it priest ... n°2"
This is the meaning of Homogenize. You just make everything feel the same, paste and copy.
Instead Balancing (or good balancing) means designing a Different and heterogeneous object (class, cities, spells) that will interact with the game in a proper and not destructive way, for the game ... In balance. When nobody prevails to anything, if not for gaming choice. A game with you beeing weaker or stronger for no reasons, and permanently, that's when a game is unbalance.
Of course usually it's complicated to balance a game the more heterogeneous it is, and more diversity it has. And that's where the game designer skill lead too. So usually bad game designer try to make everything more homogeneous and simple/ripetitive, becouse they don't understand how the game works and his complex structure, and how to balance that.
Example of balancing:"
1-So guys we have a problem with this spell of the necromancer that is pretty cool! What can we do to not remove it from the game? How do we Balance it? Right now it's too broken becouse it spawn a lot's of undead if you kill large groups of low lvl mobs, and it's weak in pvp.
2-Mmm, maybe we can change it to be an active spell instead of a passive one .. and then link the numbers with the priest and his counter spell damage. Right now the Priest need to use 100 base mana to banish an undead with one hit, if we make that each undead cost a base number of 200 mana instead of 50 and it die in 2 hits it will be fair."
This is a small and stupid Idea that i wrote now, but it should do the work.
It didn't homogenized anything .
Hope you learned the difference, then you will not exchange the two thing
Wow has failed cause of both of the problems, it's unbalanced and homogenized. that's why everyone complain about it right now... terrible choises, due to the low time the usually get for the game to be release.
Wow it's unbalance, if it was well balance then i would say it still a great game
You are making me crying now, i'm so fond/affectioned of WoW
When i see the state of WoW now i just cry xD ...
Anyway, for the point of the skills you probably are right, i need to study more this concept to get a general view , so i will not say too much.
You are right that there is value in the surprise and the unknow, but at a certain point you will know almost everything, if you master it. This doesn't mean it will be boring, the surprice still present even if you know the spells, or even better, if you know his spell you would be much more amazed by what he achieved or he build in the fight. An example can be the rogue ... all the rogues know their spells, but someone found the way to permanently stun an enemy . The first impression of a rogue Main is fun and surprise, amazement. But a non main will be less interented in it, becouse he doesn't get mindblowed .. not knowing the spells.
This is a bad example maybe... immagine League of Legends or some Mortal Combat/Fight game (i'm not an expert) , you know what the enemy has and what he can do, but he can still beat you and impress you.
If you don't know what a fighter in mortal combat does, you will just not understand and not enjoy, until you learn it.
So knowing the enemy skill-set doesn't mean it's going to be boring. But usually when a game is Unbalance and you know all the enemy spells, then it get boring, becouse you will use every time the exactly same combo, knowing that is op, and he cannot counter it in any possible way ... so easy win. That's a game design problem ... of the balance aspect of a fight, and not knowing or not the enemy spells and kit.
When you know the enemy kit there is strategy involved.
Also trying to understand what an enemy does it's strategy, so you are right that having some unknown factors is important ^^ . But going into an enemy that can oneshot you, and you don't know that, it's bad .. becouse you cannot play around it, and also frustrating.
So i spoke too much for just your first post, it's better if i stop or my fingers and your eyes will bleed xD just kidding.
So try to discern the meaning of balance and homogeneous