Large Scale PvP Question/Concern

Valkura

I am new here and this might have been answered, but this is a major concern of mine.

How will the war system for nodes have a healthy representation of melee and how will it prevent stacking of ranged classes?
How will the system promote this? i.e. will objective make members be dispersed/staggered, balancing, etc.

Example: Black Desert Online melee was not represented well and mages dominated the needs for such content.

Thanks for any who reply.

Dygz

Sieges are objective-based.
A successful attack or defense will rely on melee and ranged adventurer abilities, crafting professions and ballista. You can't capture objectives from range.

Valkura

Dygz Thank you for your reply.

I do understand this, but ranged can easily push as well. In Black Desert Online if you were melee you were nothing more than cannon fodder. Without proper scaling melee could not survive an onslaught of missiles.

Black Desert Online became a game of out maneuverability and nuking of targets at ranged and slowly advancing. You would have your few token warrior tanks for the later advancing stages, but the ratio was 90% ranged. Some classes such as ninja were not taken.

So, my question remains what is there to prevent a turret style defense/offense? Will there be scaling for melee? Will the objective be large enough to disperse and create opportunity for melee within the strategy? Elder Scrolls Online had size to help with this disparity because the overall objective created dispersion. Some games such as World of Warcraft have implemented scaling for melee in large scale battlegrounds such as Ashran.

It sucks, but the day of playing what you want over what is viable is a thin line to tread nowadays in the gaming industry. When it becomes a detriment to your level of fun, you concede to that mindset. I don't mean to speak for everyone, but I do feel there is a large group of people who feel the same. Side rant over.

I do agree siege equipment could be the key if there is adequate siege power for both defense and offense. This would promote a more staggered approach on both offense and defense of a node. This would allow melee on the defense side of a node to advance upon the offense's siege equipment without being mowed down. And this allows the offense to punish a clumped turret style defense of a node.

TLDR: All in all this is a delicate balance and I was wondering if the dev team have talked about sieging of nodes in this level of depth.

Khronus

In real life melee fighters essentially became cannon fodder as time went on. Most games end up being similar. Some strats I have used with my larger groups is stacking ranged and spreading out. First melee to the line gets focus fired (also with having someone assign targets with macros).

In AOC I would imagine that some of the siege jobs should be taken up my melee players. Melee teams can be assigned to flank key positions or hang back to protect the healer areas. Everyone will have a role to play but we are the ones who have to put the pieces of that puzzle together. If something is not balanced, I am sure IS will patch it into the game to balance.

Being a tank, I cannot wait to watch my fighters/rogues rip apart all of the poor mages and healers I hook.

Xyls

Also, there are no caps on how many people can participate in node sieges... so its not like whoever coordinating the siege or defense will ever say "No melee" or something. You will want as many people as you can get.

Castle sieges are a bit different since its a guild that owns the castle. They could theoretically have a set "comp" they want to achieve. However, castle sieges are 250 vs 250 at a minimum (Intrepid is still trying to make it 500 vs 500), so it would be hard to only try and take range or melee.

Tyrantor

It's a legitimate question and it will likely become a bigger issue once the games been out for an extended duration once players have multiple characters/max gear. If siege meta becomes giant groups of casters shooting at each other it's very likely that melee will get neglected from any real functional use outside of bashing walls or tanking NPCs.

The castle sieges may play differently since it could be primarily inside of the castle offering less LoS for casters compared to Nodes.

They've suggested their character balance is going to revolve around the larger scale fights so we can only hope at this point that melee gets balanced in as best they can. It's hard to have a real discussion about this with such little information at present.