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Classes and Augmented Subclasses
Zexo
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Below is a description of Steven and Jeffrey's thoughts on the 8 classes and augments.
'Even though augments do radically change the way your active skills provide you abilities, there's still a primary focus on the base archetype itself and not the 64 whole classes.' – Steven Sharif
'We're not really talking about 64 true classes, we're talking about eight classes with 64 variants... There isn't as much variance between the 64 classes as you might expect. It's not like there are you know 64 different versions of... radically different classes.' – Jeffrey Bard
I found this interesting because after seeing the image of all 64 classes, I thought there would be 64 different classes that would be available. However, this cleared my worries as 8 classes that are slightly different between each variant would still be interesting in terms of combat. My main question is regarding what Steven also mentioned below:
'Certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a Tank archetype and a Mage is my counter, I can take a Mage secondary and kind of bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly.' – Steven Sharif
My main question from this is will players who choose for example, starting as a mage and then choosing mage again at level 25 be held back against players who have a mix of 2 different classes?
Any information on this would be nice as I couldn't seem to find anything myself.
Thanks!
'Even though augments do radically change the way your active skills provide you abilities, there's still a primary focus on the base archetype itself and not the 64 whole classes.' – Steven Sharif
'We're not really talking about 64 true classes, we're talking about eight classes with 64 variants... There isn't as much variance between the 64 classes as you might expect. It's not like there are you know 64 different versions of... radically different classes.' – Jeffrey Bard
I found this interesting because after seeing the image of all 64 classes, I thought there would be 64 different classes that would be available. However, this cleared my worries as 8 classes that are slightly different between each variant would still be interesting in terms of combat. My main question is regarding what Steven also mentioned below:
'Certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a Tank archetype and a Mage is my counter, I can take a Mage secondary and kind of bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly.' – Steven Sharif
My main question from this is will players who choose for example, starting as a mage and then choosing mage again at level 25 be held back against players who have a mix of 2 different classes?
Any information on this would be nice as I couldn't seem to find anything myself.
Thanks!
1
Comments
We barely know anything about the extend and impact of the augment system. All the information you get right now is mostly pure speculation.
Right now, i'd just go with the assumption, that Intrepid's class design lead isn't completely incompetent at their job and makes the doubling down either significantly stronger or weaker than the other augmented classes.
We don't know much. All we have is small glimpses of information, and speculation.
This is all my speculation (Do not take is as fact.):
For mage/mage you are talking about archwizard.
-I would first assume that something like mage/summoner(Warlock) has a good pet, you would for sure be giving that up.
-Mage/Rogue(Shadow caster) might have a stealth or be able to crit more from behind.
-As a ArchWizard, I would assume you have only the most powerful version of all mage ability's. The purist version of the class.
The thing is that even the DEVs are not 100% sure how things will be in live. I know they have ideas for how they would like things to work, but it is just too soon to tell.
Maybe pure mage is a caster god with unrivaled DPS, maybe it is just lacks any utility and is only good on some raid bosses.
We will not start to see a picture of how good things are until we start to see some of this stuff added to the game.
The thing to get excited about is play testing all of the combinations in your archetype.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
The issue on paper would be that if you build to reduce the hard counter in one direction you may open a different or secondary hard counter into the mix. We have been given a broad but shallow representation so far. Everything is subject to change too.
One thing I can say I am 99.9% sure on though, is that the players that will be at the most disadvantage are players that are unwilling to alter their secondary class to suit the situation.
By doubling down on your primary class you'll be giving up variety for more depth. In my opinion variety will be more useful in this game because you'll find yourself in a lot of different situations where those extras will be more useful. Whereas a mage/mage would be doubling down on mage qualities - tons of dps sure, but squishy, lacking in other areas. So something like that might be good in an instanced WoW raid, but you'll be using the same build for most of your gameplay, and most of it will be open world - solo/group, PvP, PvE, a variety of different content types - so that build needs to be at least decent if not better in those different situations all at the same time. Mage/Mage is too specialized in my opinion for an open world game like this one.
They've said that changing your secondary class will be a difficult and time consuming process. It sounds like the intention is for people to be unable to "alter their secondary class to suit the situation".
There's a good clip here where Jeffrey speaks in full about their intentions for the secondary class swap. They want it to be flexible to a degree, but not so much that you can switch classes on the fly or to suit every situation you come across. So he said you'll have to likely go back to a node to switch, there will be some sort of either cooldown or quest that serves as a cooldown. They've playing with the idea of double spec it sounds like but they're still unsure about that and they want to wait until they test the secondary classes and see how it feels.
I imagine you'll have your "regular, everyday" setup and then maybe if you have a major node/castle siege, guild war, something else of the sort, on your schedule, then maybe you'd switch for that major event and have a more specific build for that. Then you'd go back to your "regular open world everyday" setup afterwards. But changing too often sounds like it's either not possible, or too much work. Which does make sense because it gives your build choices more weight and consequence, and that fits into the risk vs reward idea the game is built around.