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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.
DoT/HoT Snapshotting - yay or nay
Tragnar
Member
Snapshotting is a game mechanic where you can buff yourself up and in the short duration of having all the buffs you unleash all of your damage over time(dot) skills on your enemy and those dots are buffed for their whole duration even though the buffs ended a short time after the dots long before those dots finish doing dmg.
example:
your bleed ticks for 20dmg every 2s for 14s total (7ticks in total= 140dmg), but you have a short duration buff that increases your damage by 50% for 5 seconds. which makes the bleed tick for 30dmg instead for 20dmg. Snapshotting makes the bleed uneffected if you use the cooldown after applying the bleed, but if you use the bleed while you have the buff active then all 7 ticks are going to do 30dmg (210dmg total)
Since Ashes wants to have giant mass pvp battles I think they will have snapshotting in the game, because the alternative is to recalculate the damage based on the casters current amount of stats every time the dot makes dmg.
But what is your opinion on this skillbased "hidden" mechanic where players are rewarded for using their skills in the right order at the right time.
example:
your bleed ticks for 20dmg every 2s for 14s total (7ticks in total= 140dmg), but you have a short duration buff that increases your damage by 50% for 5 seconds. which makes the bleed tick for 30dmg instead for 20dmg. Snapshotting makes the bleed uneffected if you use the cooldown after applying the bleed, but if you use the bleed while you have the buff active then all 7 ticks are going to do 30dmg (210dmg total)
Since Ashes wants to have giant mass pvp battles I think they will have snapshotting in the game, because the alternative is to recalculate the damage based on the casters current amount of stats every time the dot makes dmg.
But what is your opinion on this skillbased "hidden" mechanic where players are rewarded for using their skills in the right order at the right time.
“Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.”
― Plato
― Plato
0
Comments
So, similarly, buffing up beforehand, you should expect your DoT to carry on with the buffed figures, as that's how you cast it at the time.
also snapshoting became a problem in wrath, because blizz gave dot classes powerful damage cooldowns, when you count into that on use trinkets and damage potions then a skillful player would dumbster damage.
Also the "balance" problem is totally arbitrary one, because cooldown based dot builds should be acknowledged being a high skill floor so the damage would be balanced around proper snapshotting.
I am completely fine with creating builds that have high skill floor, because they need several things to align in such a way for the build to actually shine
― Plato
Not 100% against this as variety in spec can be fun but I'd hope there would be more thought put into it than just allowing this. Maybe buffs that are designed to affect DoT/hots in more ways than making it do more damage/healing.
What?
I don't like it.
The fact that snapshotting is lighter on resources is just a bonus that would be great in the 500 player (or possibly higher) battles intended for Ashes.
The other option to still facilitate large-scale pvp is just have dots always do the same amount, non-modifiable by buffs/stats, but that just sounds boring and hard to balance as dot-based classes would not scale well with gear.
W/ 36 different types of classes it'd be wild to not have at least one centered on maintaining DoTs and (at least to me) equally wild if you couldn't buff them.
Most Buffs will be on a Bard Class. It would take skill to time skills with Bard Buffs. I'm not sure if other classes will have buffs, I don't believe the buffs would be extensive. In terms of Damage Efficiency and Bard Buff synchronisation, I'd be a tad perturbed if my biggest and best buffs were used for DoTs and not Bursts.
Either way, if you can stack buffs and/or chain dots to effect big numbers (even for a few secs) - this should absolutely be included.
i believe the term came to use when I think it was WoW allowed you to super buff your dots and then maintain the buffed dots for the entire fight by renewing them before they expired despite your temporary buffs wearing off. in that way it was actually a different playstlye/rotation than the traditional "playing your class well" because normally playing your class well means letting the buffs use their entire duration before re-applying (unless it has a stack component). I hope dots can be buffed for sure but the snapshot mechanic of letting you maintain buffed dots with unbuffed re-casts is dumb imo and hopefully does not work like that in AoC
Egh. Agreed - if that’s how ‘snapshotting’ is defined.
Being able to really think through a rotation to build up intense damage is one thing. What you’re saying above reminds me of all the unintended consequences of having downranked spells in other mmos. I like complexity, but complicating complexity only results in pain.
I would consider refreshing dots/hots without recalculation of new value as a bug anywhere
also people that play good are a minority to my experience. The vast amounts of players just have no clue about how stuff works and they just press every button they have available
― Plato
This might come as "easy" to some players, but we don't know what the rotations are going to look like so it is entirely possible that there might be a too much of things to track
― Plato
You just halve the effectiveness of buffs for no reason then. Buff uptime is key for skilled players, and there’s no need to balance for the lowest common denominator.
I TOLD you, you wouldn't like it.
As our Mod above, Wandering Mist mentioned,, snapshotting is much more difficult to balance against other classes that don't have it.
So w/o it there is absolutely NO skill required to play any class? Snapshotting is the defining ability, otherwise you are just pushing a single button and remaining stationary??? Or maybe, just maybe, you can find other ways to be skillful with your class.
Across literally every game that has them, your ability to keep buffs up continuously is a major expressions of player skill. Where in the world did you come up with the conclusion that anyone said buff uptime is the only expression of skill?
The only issue you presented was the faulty code that treated recasts as refreshes rather than recasts. If your code isn’t spaghetti, every DoT calculates at initial cast every time.
I don't like the argument that snapshotting makes it harder to balance classes. It is totally ok to balance the dot class in such a way that when you don't snapshot you are automatically the worst dps class. However if you do snapshot then you can barely be above the rest.
In my honest opinion the wow dev team reasoning for removing snapshotting is false in its core. They literally tried to strip any kind of complexity from the game to the point where in bfa every class was just looking for the strongest random proc and the characters output was literally a roullette regardless of the players input ( people doing literally triple damage of others if they were lucky for more than 1 proc.
Introducing skillful mechanics and taking them into account when balancing them is the right way to go. If you want to play a class that is really good in skilled hands than dont cry when you suck and try to get better.
― Plato
I didn't, YOU did by saying it a "KEY" for skillful players. That statement implicitly implies that's where all the skill is. The sad thing about this statement is, you can run a macro that will AUTO refresh your buffs as soon as they become available which isn't all that skillful to me (yes I'm aware AoC will not be allowing 3rd party addons, just an example of what you can do in other games). I was also trying to point out that there are PLENTY of other ways that a player can show how skillful they are with their class without snapshotting.
Would it really be the end of the world if a certain class didn't have this though? It's just a mechanic and the Devs can do something ELSE to define a particular class, it will not make or break the game or even a class.
So you misunderstood one word and blew it out of proportion, good to know. For a DoT class, buff and DoT uptime are the most important ways they express skill. Pre-buffing is another way to express skill especially in PvP encounters. Literally never said or implied uptimes were the only ways to express skill.
Snapshotting doesn’t even have anything to do with balance anyway, but sheer technical stability.