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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.
Concerned that world bosses will become the same as the ones in Guild Wars 2
SquirrelTeamSix
Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Was watching the latest dev update and the bit where they discuss world boss scaling got me thinking about why I quit doing them in Guild Wars 2.
They weren't fun because everyone just stood in the safest spot and stayed there the whole time.
The only real solution to this is minimize the "safe spots" so that there isn't much of that, but I think player collision will be huge in these events, but then the battlefields will have to be HUGE to house that many people, and allow them to move enough to dodge the attacks.
Just wanted to toss this out there and start the discussion!
They weren't fun because everyone just stood in the safest spot and stayed there the whole time.
The only real solution to this is minimize the "safe spots" so that there isn't much of that, but I think player collision will be huge in these events, but then the battlefields will have to be HUGE to house that many people, and allow them to move enough to dodge the attacks.
Just wanted to toss this out there and start the discussion!
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Comments
I don't see how environment scaling in difficulty results in everyone standing in safe spots.
Environment scaling in difficulty seems likely to lead to the opposite of that.
None of these games have raid level PvE content of note.
Meaning they'll get new abilities the more people there are, not more health/attack/defense/etc.
That doesn't really mean a whole lot. They are not the first to attempt to do that.
It means a lot compared to what OP is specifically scared of.
No it doesn't.
This is what a raid boss looks like:
I have every doubt in my mind that AOC will have anything like my friend Titan in it. While I am not convinced the raid bosses even need to be that hard or complex. Considering that it is not the main appeal of the game. I will take PvE difficulty where ever I can get it.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
God what a fun fight though right? Part of me hopes they take this sort of boss fight and uses the dance mechanics that nearly one shot you if you fail. The other part worries about the scaling difficulty that builds up the more players that show up.
What about this? Let's say a boss is designed for 40 people, so the first 40 players that come within range gain a first come first serve buff. Any other player that arrives afterwards gains a debuff instead. This debuff will cause the boss to actually one shot you if you get hit by any of its damaging mechanics. The debuff goes away if one of the original 40 players dies, granting the nearest debuffed player the "first come first serve" buff.
With this system it rewards the first group to get to a boss but allows outside forces that are good at avoiding mechanics to come in and attempt to wrest control of the boss away. I'm not saying this is a perfect solution though. What else could be done to make it better?
That could work. Reminds me of the raid curse in l2. When you hit a raid boss that was way below your level. They have options. I just have not heard anything from intrepid about mechanically challenging fights being within the scope of the game.
Personally I really liked my idea of the open world bosses dropping items that can open a temporary instance for a challenging raid boss with a set player limit. Like once you open the portal, you have an hour to go in and attempt the boss, and only X players can enter the portal. The items could be traded sold on the market or attempted. Risk vs reward. This also means that the open world bosses are just as valuable.
It really comes down to. What does Intrepid want? I posted two ends of the spectrum above. Where does intrepid want AOC to be in that spectrum?
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Replace "concerned" with "certain" and I would fully agree with this. Everything they've said has alluded to that, just along with the fact that other games of this style - like the ones noted above - have had PvE like that.
And honestly nobody in this community thought the game would have raid level PvE content of note until Asmongold and the other major influencers did interviews over the summer, and because they typically only play games with that sort of PvE, everyone who came here after those interviews immediately made the assumption it would.
I don't think it'll be that bad where you're literally standing around wacking on a boss who does nothing. You may see fights like this with actual mechanics to deal with, albeit not terribly complicated ones:
Because you are going to have world boss fights that look like this, with one raid PvPing a rival raid while another raid or two is busy fighting the boss, so the boss can't be too difficult with so much going on around it:
As I have said in this thread, and in others, several years ago there was more talk about the PvE content in Ashes - specifically the raid content - than there was the PvP content.
Steven has said outright that he wants Ashes to have progress based PvE raid content in Ashes, and that he wants the top end of that content to be difficult enough that only a single digit percentage of players would be capable of killing it.
This was information that was given to us before we knew about Bounty Hunters, before we knew the game would have arenas, before we knew non-combatants have twice the death penalty of combatants.
You may not have known that at the time, but that doesn't mean others here didn't.
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I have been saying since around June 2017 that Ashes needs to have three distinct types of raid content.
The first are the event encounters - things like monster coins fall in to this (but so can other events). These are open world encounters where almost all players are expected to work together to take on the big bad challenge. All those wanting to work together to take it on should be welcome to do so - these encounters would essentially be like the rift events in Rift.
The second type of encounter are the open world bosses. This is the kind of thing Steven and Jeff were talking about in the recent live stream. Their desire to increase the challenge based on number of players present will likely end out as being unnecessary, as the challenge from these encounters comes from the PvP that they bring, not from the encounter itself. This is as per games like Archeage and L2, and these encounters should be considered PvP content moreso than PvE (as the best PvP raid will win).
The third type of content is where the raid progression that Steven wants will take place, and has to be instanced in some manner.
Ashes as a game can not have everything that Steven has said he wants for it without the game having all three of these encounter types - and again, I have been saying this for over 3 years, as it was over three years ago that Steven informed us all of what he wanted for the top end scene in Ashes.
Can you find me some examples where he talks about this? Because either I totally missed those interviews or I understood his words in an entirely different manner.
It is not possible to have progression based raiding in an open world environment. Steven may not have been aware of this when he made the comment that he wants Ashes to have progression based raiding, and that he wants it so hard that only a single digit percentage of players are able to defeat the top end of it. His gaming experience has not involved any games at all with progression based raiding, so it is understandable he didn't have any idea what was involved.
His acceptance now of needing to fall back on the 80/20 split in relation to raiding - and not limiting that to only story content - is a strong suggestion that he now understands that you straight up can not have progression based raiding on an open world environment, and also that he still wants that progression based raiding.
Yes this is the part I'm talking about, is where he talks about progression based raiding. I've certainly heard of him talk about 40 man raids in a world boss sense, but I'm not sure there were interviews where I personally had the impression he wanted typical progression raiding with several bosses and continually introduced new content.
I've heard him talk about it in the sense of you'll have open world dungeon content for 8 man groups, maybe harder open world dungeons requiring 16 man groups or other PvE content for 16 people, and then 40 man "raids" for bosses. I've heard him use the term "progression" for that, but not the idea of progression that a WoW or FFXIV player might understand it.
Yes lol, it does.
OP was specifically scared of just stat scaling and fights not changing
New Mechanics specifically address that, you're being disingenuous arguing otherwise.
In your opinion, if the above don`t, what games do have raid level PvE content of note?
In no particular order - WoW, EQ, EQ2, AoC the 1st, Vanguard, I have heard arguments for FFXIV but have not played it to have my own opinion.
Rift, ESO and DDO come close, but fall a little short.
Sorry for the long post, though I have made it as worth your while to read as I think I am able.
This isn't what is being talked about.
No one is expecting Intrepid to be in a position where they feel a need to introduce new raid content every few months in order to feed top end raiders. This is not a requirement of progression raiding, it is a result of lazy development from Blizzard (which is the only game 95% of players have experienced raid progression in).
Good game development processes would allow the development team to implement new raid content on a yearly basis and keep the raiding population happy. Most of the senior staff at Intrepid are ex-SoE employees, and worked on three of the five games I listed in an above post as having good top end raid content (EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard). So, it should go without saying, the staff that Steven have are capable and experienced in implementing progression raiding in a manner that blows everything Blizzard has done away.
Whether that happens again in Ashes is yet to be seen - but the ability to do it again is there.
As to comments from Steven in relation to progression based raiding. In this quote, Steven is talking about differences between how he wants Ashes raid content to be in comparison to most other games. The differences have the potential to be great, and this line of thinking could make Ashes raid content stand out from other games by itself.
However, I would like to draw your attention to the bolded part above. Some aspects of teh raid can be pre-planned.
One of the key aspects of pre-planning a raid is knowing that you have a target to take on. There are only two means by which players can know they have a target to take on - either the target is in an instance they have access to, or the target is an encounter they can force spawn.
Since force spawned encounters can be very easily exploited for large gain, the assumption that should be made is that a good number of these encounters would be instanced. Now, if this comment is not describing something extremely similar to a progression based raiding scheme, I would be quite interested to hear exactly what kind of content it is that you think would fit in to the above description. Now, this is more specific.
This comment is essentially describing top tier raiding in EQ2. In the hardest of encounters, you can't simply repeat what you did the time before. Even comments like the telegraphed abilities not being stenciled on the ground is right out of EQ2.
Again, I should point out, Intrepid have a number of senior staff on board that developed raids in EQ2.
Any player that raided in EQ2 and is aware of the early hires Steven made would not be able to read this quote and not immediately make the assumption that Steven plans to model raid content at least in part on EQ2's raid content.
Now, you are a comparitively new member of this community, as far as I am aware. As such, unless you have gone specifically looking for information on raids, you wouldn't have seen or heard much about them at all. This is why I am giving you a reply that is as full of information as I can make it rather than my usual style of posting when I think the poster in question should know better.
Basically, since you don't strike me as being a player that is overly interested in raids, and since there hasn't been much new information on top end PvE for actual and literal years (as my initial post pointed out, there hasn't been any new raid info in years - all quotes above were from early/mid 2018), I have no reason to expect you to be aware of what has been said in relation to PvE raiding.
However, after reading the above, I would hope that you, as well as many others, come to the same understanding that I came to many years ago - Steven at least at one point intended this game to have a solid top end PvE scene, and people bought in to this game because of that.
Again, this is untrue.
The way almost all guilds will eventually realize is the best way to take on content that has these scaling mechanics is to assume that they need to kill the hardest version of the encounter.
As such, guilds will go in to the fight under the assumption that all mechanics will be turned on, and any that are not simply make the encounter easier.
This basically leaves content as being the same as it is in other games like GW2, but with the potential for it to occasionally be easier.
come in to play as well some people may be pushed out even farther and not able to help.
I have confidence they will surprise us on this.
Seems fairly normal.
If you don't want to read, don't ask questions.
We have no reason to expect anything of the world bosses as of right now because the devs haven't even really made any that would support 40 ish people yet.
They can say anything they want, it doesn't mean that their words will work in practice let alone make it into the game.
And that's not me calling the devs liars, it's just that I don't think the issue is as simple as "the devs won't make the same mistakes as x devs because reasons"
There are reasons the world bosses are the way they are in other games, and I would bet a lot of money it's not because the devs were lazy or unoriginal. It's tough to make content of that scale and have it be impossible for players to find ways to trivialize mechanics.
Hell Stephen even kind of eluded to that when asked about over zerging the world bosses to begin with.
There's no way anyone can say it won't happen, no one knows that, not even the devs.
I am not assuming anything, just starting a discussion on a possibility.
I see what you're saying, I guess the argument just returns to whether or not the fight is cookie cutter or not
Maybe, but the thing with raiders is that we spend time reducing content down to it's basic elements - meaning everything is cookie cutter to us.
To me, open world encounters are all inevitably going to end up as some version of GW2, L2, etc. The solution to this that I see as being the best is to not try and fight it, but rather to accept it and even lean in to it.
Rather than trying to force open world encounters to fit in to a raid progression box (a box Steven has said he wants Ashes to have), my suggestion would be to implement a raid progression, and also implement these open world bosses. Then you simply state that these open world bosses are not a part of that raid progression, but rather are their own thing.
Then you have the open world raids that guilds spend hours fighting over (which in itself is enjoyable content), but you also have the progression raiding that many guilds need so they simply have some PvE content to run as a guild.
This is - surely - the best of both worlds.
I hope this is true in some ways and hope it isn't in others. Did a ton of EQ2 raiding, both on PVE (Najena) and PVP (Nagafen). The actual PVE design of the game was very good with (in most expansions) good raid progression that stratified player progress based on difficulty. Obviously, there are at several key issues that make the model they utilized so unworkable that I'm not sure a facsimile of EQ2 raiding should even be utilized. First, they clearly aren't using the encounter locking mechanism, which will make the scaling difficulty in the open world uncharted territory. Obviously this is addressed via instancing.
The bigger issue is that EQ2 failed on contested PVE in a PVP environment, which is a huge part of AOC's goal. The only encounters where this would really work were those that were trivially challenging from a PVE perspective such that you could actually defend against the attackers while also doing the raid content. Anything that was PVE challenging you pretty much had to sneak in the middle of the night to avoid PVP contest in order to complete.