The potential issue with the augment system (And hype about classes in general)

So we are all very excited for the augment system and the creativity and customization it will allow us in our class creation, but there is an elephant in the room regarding it.

There are going to be an outstandingly ridiculous amount of augmented ability variations, which might come with many problems.

We have 8 archetypes, each with supposedly 3-4 augment "types" from what I understand. These being things like "Fire/Ice/Lightning/teleport/etc." for the Mage archetype as an example.
Each archetype has around 10 abilities at level 10 in the current iteration of the game. For the sake of this argument I'll say each archetype has 30 abilities at the max level of 50.
This means any class is going to have effectively 120-150 abilities, augmented and unaugmented. (Slash, Slash + teleport, Slash + fire, Slash + ice, etc.)
Now lets add non-archetype based augments, of which they've confirmed to exist. Those being gained from your race, your religion, special quests, etc. Lets assume for the sake of this argument a character has 3 extra augments.
This means any player will have access to effectively 210-240 abilities minimum.

I'm sure anyone can see the kinds of problems that can/will arise with this.
Unless the devs are gods at making abilities, the abilities aren't going to change in any major way because customizing every augment is going to take a ridiculous amount of development time and resources.
In the above example, accounting for 8 primary archetypes and 8 secondary, and only accounting for the 3 extra augments gained in the example (not the entire list of possibilities), there are theoretically at least 8,640 combined unaugmented and augmented abilities in the game.

It's highly likely that augments are going to be

Minor to the point of not really being noticeable for the vast majority of abilities, or
Abilities will only have specific augments they can utilize

The former is disappointing for many, and the latter is disappointing for many.

There are posts where people discuss what they think specific classes are going to be, and people had tons of ideas about that topic. In the reality created above, a class like Necromancer is either just going to be

The base summoner with some sparkle/death effects on their abilities, or
Not even close to as amazingly customizable as some people are thinking, but the choices you will have will be tailored to the namesake of the class.

The reason I bring this up now is for one, I don't think many people are thinking critically about this and are getting overly hyped about augments, and two because the dev team does not have a solid idea on the combat they are going to be using yet, and thus does not know what abilities each class is going to have yet, and thus doesn't know how they will be augmented or how augmentable they will be, so I want to caution people from getting too overhyped about something we don't know much about yet. The comments I've seen show me that people are having varied ideas, and I just want to bring this to the forefront of the community.

Edit: The math I used originally doubled the amount of abilities, fixed my calculations
If I don't lowball it as much and assume there are maybe 30 extra augments that can be gained through guilds, leadership, different religions, city type, race, extra-special quests, etc. then the number of possible augments reaches closer to my original calculations at a whopping 15,120 different abilities
(Though personally I think there might end up being more than 30 extra augments)

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Okeydoke

I mean that does seem like a lot of god damn skills. 15k+ total different skills in the game. Maybe each individual skill of the base 8 classes won't have an augment, only some of them. As in, "precision shot" will be the same skill, no augment available, for both Scout(Ranger+Rogue) and Soulbow (Ranger+Cleric) Don't know if that's been confirmed one way or the other yet. But yeah it does seem like a lot of skills.

BigRamble

I can't disagree with these concerns. It would be great to hear some more from a dev stream about how they plan this, especially do augments add individually to powers or to all powers.

Does a player get one augment for second class that applies to 10-20 relevant primary skills or an augment per skill for hyper variety. eg Does a scion get x augments of fire, cold, lightning, and teleport, and the teleport can get on the dash and roll back skills, while the lightning goes on arrow skills, fire on sword. Or does she get only the one choice, and works on all adaptable skills, ie teleport augment so arrows don't shoot just leave the bow and appear in the enemy?

The latter is definately easier but the fact there are plans for racial, religious, leadership, and gathered augments suggests the former. Unless there is a tier so the primary skill can be boosted by second class augment and another augment on top. eg Spellblade charges with mage teleport and love god threat mitigation augments.

Summoner I think is very awkward to use in this discussion because it sounds like it will have VISUALLY the largest impact of Augments but it amounts to I summon a bear with Mage fire, "fire elemental bear". Or cleric of death augment "undead bear". Or ranger snare augment "beartrap setting green bear".

I was initially hoping the augment system would allow some second class augments from the cleric and tank for the player to step into that role in the trinity system but how could they possibly tank as as well as a tank/tank augmented, or a cleric outheal a cleric/cleric healing augmented?

Noaani

Dreoh wrote: »

So we are all very excited for the augment system and the creativity and customization it will allow us in our class creation, but there is an elephant in the room regarding it.

There are going to be an outstandingly ridiculous amount of augmented ability variations, which might come with many problems.
We have 8 archetypes, each with supposedly 3-4 augment "types" from what I understand. These being things like "Fire/Ice/Lightning/teleport/etc." for the Mage archetype as an example.

Each archetype has around 10 abilities at level 10 in the current iteration of the game. For the sake of this argument I'll say each archetype has 30 abilities at the max level of 50.

This means any class is going to have effectively 120-150 abilities, augmented and unaugmented. (Slash, Slash + teleport, Slash + fire, Slash + ice, etc.)

Now lets add non-archetype based augments, of which they've confirmed to exist. Those being gained from your race, your religion, special quests, etc. Lets assume for the sake of this argument a character has 3 extra augments.

This means any player will have access to effectively 210-240 abilities.

I'm sure anyone can see the kinds of problems that can/will arise with this.
Unless the devs are gods at making abilities, the abilities aren't going to change in any major way because customizing every augment is going to take a ridiculous amount of development time and resources.
In the above example, accounting for 8 primary archetypes and 8 secondary there are theoretically at least 15,360 combined unaugmented and augmented abilities in the game.

It's highly likely that augments are going to be
Minor to the point of not really being noticeable for the vast majority of abilities, or

Abilities will only have specific augments they can utilize

The former is disappointing for many, and the latter is disappointing for many.

There are posts where people discuss what they think specific classes are going to be, and people had tons of ideas about that topic. In the reality created above, Necromancers are either just going to be
The base summoner with some sparkle/death effects on their abilities, or

Not as amazingly customizable as some people are thinking, but the choices you will have will be tailored to the namesake of the class.

The reason I bring this up now is for one, I don't think many people are thinking critically about this and are getting overly hyped about augments, and two because the dev team does not have a solid idea on the combat they are going to be using yet, and thus does not know what abilities each class is going to have yet, and thus doesn't know how they will be augmented or how augmentable they will be, so I want to caution people from getting too overhyped about something we don't know much about yet. The comments I've seen show me that people are having varied ideas, and I just want to bring this to the forefront of the community.

This is something we talked about a few years ago.

Your math is a little off though.

If we assume each primary archetype has 30 base abilities, that means the game has 240 base abilities between the 8 primary archetypes.

From there, each secondary archetype - of which there are 8 - adds 3 augments to each ability, and we can assume that race, religion, social organization and others will add maybe 2 in total to each ability.

So, ((number of secondary archetypes * number of augments per secondary archetype) + number of non-archetype augments) * number of abilities.

((8 * 3) + 2) * 240 = 6,240. You can then add the unaugmented abilities if you want to count them, and end up with 6,480 abilities.

I think your confusion may be in relation to the non-archetype augments.

If you are a ranger, you are given an ability called "Fleeting Shot".

If you then pick Rogue as your secondary and become a Scout class, you will still have that ability called Fleeting Shot. Your secondary class will give you augments for it, but the ability itself is still the same.

If you then pick up a religion, and that religion gives you an augment for Fleeting Shot, that augment will be the same for your Fleeting Shot as it will be for a Ranger that picked up Fighter as a secondary class to become a Strider. The augment from the religion is for Fleeting Shot, and is the same for all Rangers, regardless of their shoice of secondary class.

Dreoh

Noaani wrote: »

Dreoh wrote: »

So we are all very excited for the augment system and the creativity and customization it will allow us in our class creation, but there is an elephant in the room regarding it.

There are going to be an outstandingly ridiculous amount of augmented ability variations, which might come with many problems.
We have 8 archetypes, each with supposedly 3-4 augment "types" from what I understand. These being things like "Fire/Ice/Lightning/teleport/etc." for the Mage archetype as an example.

Each archetype has around 10 abilities at level 10 in the current iteration of the game. For the sake of this argument I'll say each archetype has 30 abilities at the max level of 50.

This means any class is going to have effectively 120-150 abilities, augmented and unaugmented. (Slash, Slash + teleport, Slash + fire, Slash + ice, etc.)

Now lets add non-archetype based augments, of which they've confirmed to exist. Those being gained from your race, your religion, special quests, etc. Lets assume for the sake of this argument a character has 3 extra augments.

This means any player will have access to effectively 210-240 abilities.

I'm sure anyone can see the kinds of problems that can/will arise with this.
Unless the devs are gods at making abilities, the abilities aren't going to change in any major way because customizing every augment is going to take a ridiculous amount of development time and resources.
In the above example, accounting for 8 primary archetypes and 8 secondary there are theoretically at least 15,360 combined unaugmented and augmented abilities in the game.

It's highly likely that augments are going to be
Minor to the point of not really being noticeable for the vast majority of abilities, or

Abilities will only have specific augments they can utilize

The former is disappointing for many, and the latter is disappointing for many.

There are posts where people discuss what they think specific classes are going to be, and people had tons of ideas about that topic. In the reality created above, Necromancers are either just going to be
The base summoner with some sparkle/death effects on their abilities, or

Not as amazingly customizable as some people are thinking, but the choices you will have will be tailored to the namesake of the class.

The reason I bring this up now is for one, I don't think many people are thinking critically about this and are getting overly hyped about augments, and two because the dev team does not have a solid idea on the combat they are going to be using yet, and thus does not know what abilities each class is going to have yet, and thus doesn't know how they will be augmented or how augmentable they will be, so I want to caution people from getting too overhyped about something we don't know much about yet. The comments I've seen show me that people are having varied ideas, and I just want to bring this to the forefront of the community.

This is something we talked about a few years ago.

Your math is a little off though.

If we assume each primary archetype has 30 base abilities, that means the game has 240 base abilities between the 8 primary archetypes.

From there, each secondary archetype - of which there are 8 - adds 3 augments to each ability, and we can assume that race, religion, social organization and others will add maybe 2 in total to each ability.

So, ((number of secondary archetypes * number of augments per secondary archetype) + number of non-archetype augments) * number of abilities.

((8 * 3) + 2) * 240 = 6,240. You can then add the unaugmented abilities if you want to count them, and end up with 6,480 abilities.

I think your confusion may be in relation to the non-archetype augments.

If you are a ranger, you are given an ability called "Fleeting Shot".

If you then pick Rogue as your secondary and become a Scout class, you will still have that ability called Fleeting Shot. Your secondary class will give you augments for it, but the ability itself is still the same.

If you then pick up a religion, and that religion gives you an augment for Fleeting Shot, that augment will be the same for your Fleeting Shot as it will be for a Ranger that picked up Fighter as a secondary class to become a Strider. The augment from the religion is for Fleeting Shot, and is the same for all Rangers, regardless of their shoice of secondary class.

I figured my math might have been a bit off, but I was a little distracted while typing this up, regardless 6k abilities is still a ridiculous amount.

Edit: Yea I think you're right that my calculations counted the "extra" type augments wrong, but that's not saying much because I lowballed those numbers anyways. There might be 8 religions instead of the 1 I counted. There might be like 30 or more extra augments possible to get through religion, quests or other means.

That's 30 variants on the 240 base spells. That's a lot more than we counted.

Noaani

Dreoh wrote: »

There might be 8 religions instead of the 1 I counted.

There are 7 religions.

I do not think each religion will add an augment for every ability. My assumption would be that each religion would have an augment for maybe 5 abilities from each archrtype (making a total of 280 augments from religion across all archetypes), each social organization would have abilities for a different 5 or so abilities from each architype (120 for all social organizations), I would assume a total of 3 augments from race (9 races, 214 total augments), and we have no confirmation of any others (though there may be).

My assumption of 2 augments per ability from non-class sources was - in my opinion - a slightly low assumption, but fairly close.

Dreoh

Noaani wrote: »

Dreoh wrote: »

There might be 8 religions instead of the 1 I counted.

There are 7 religions.

I do not think each religion will add an augment for every ability. My assumption would be that each religion would have an augment for maybe 5 abilities from each archrtype (making a total of 280 augments from religion across all archetypes), each social organization would have abilities for a different 5 or so abilities from each architype (120 for all social organizations), I would assume a total of 3 augments from race (9 races, 214 total augments), and we have no confirmation of any others (though there may be).

My assumption of 2 augments per ability from non-class sources was - in my opinion - a slightly low assumption, but fairly close.

Right, but this goes into my point of "it's not as customizable as some people are thinking"

I see people getting hyped that they'll be able to change any ability with any augment.

I'm not arguing whether any of this is good or bad, just that there is a big elephant in the room that no one has been addressing.

Noaani

Dreoh wrote: »

I see people getting hyped that they'll be able to change any ability with any augment.

I've not seen anyone claim this.

I would correct them if I did.

Each player is likely to have access to around 26 augments for each ability, but since 24 of those are secondary class dependent, once that secondary class is chosen you will have about 5.

Vhaeyne

@Dreoh

I totally agree with you.

My assumption with the augment system was that it was just going to do small things, like change the practical effects, and damage types of abilities.

It is unrealistic to expect a galaxy brained system where there are tons of drastically different abilities created by augmenting skills. Then magically try to balance that? They would be talking about it more than anything else if they had all of that on their plate.

Bricktop

Vhaeyne wrote: »

@Dreoh
It is unrealistic to expect a galaxy brained system where there are tons of drastically different abilities created by augmenting skills. Then magically try to balance that? They would be talking about it more than anything else if they had all of that on their plate.

It's wild to me the amount of people who think it's going to work that way though.

Noaani

Vhaeyne wrote: »

It is unrealistic to expect a galaxy brained system where there are tons of drastically different abilities created by augmenting skills. Then magically try to balance that? They would be talking about it more than anything else if they had all of that on their plate.

I totally agree, and this is why I have something of an issue with the way the classes are set out.

The difference between a Beast Master and a Necromancer is a few augments, and if a player only uses augments from non-class avenues, there is literally no difference in them at all.

Vhaeyne

Noaani wrote: »

I totally agree, and this is why I have something of an issue with the way the classes are set out.

The difference between a Beast Master and a Necromancer is a few augments, and if a player only uses augments from non-class avenues, there is literally no difference in them at all.

Reasons why I roll my eyes every time I read the words "Class Fantasy" on here.

maouw

(reasons why it should be called class + subclass instead of archetype + class)

*ahem*

Just remember: they did ask for ideals last Dev Discussion.

JamesSunderland

Even tho the numbers are quite off, it will definitely be an enourmous amount of augmentations for the theoric 30 skills of each class you used for the argument(i would guess 20 or 24).
So not only it will require a lot more animations for the skill(even if very slight visual effects) and messing around with numbers/effects i can't imagine the insane balancing issues. More elaborated and complex skill modifications require even more effort to make.

I believe the 1st option you said to be highly likely: "Minor to the point of not really being noticeable for the vast majority of abilities" to be the most certain, even tho how "minor" or how "noticeable" those augmentations might be is quite subjective. In the end it will depend on how skilled and how much time the skill designing team have.

People usually have unrealistic expectations a lot of the times especially about things they are passionate about so it being disappointing to many is quite expected for some people no matter what.

Anyway, i wish luck to the Intrepid skill designing team, as the task at hand seems quite monumental and might push their creativity and skills to their limits.

Dreoh

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Even tho the numbers are quite off, it will definitely be an enourmous amount of augmentations for the theoric 30 skills of each class you used for the argument(i would guess 20 or 24).
So not only it will require a lot more animations for the skill(even if very slight visual effects) and messing around with numbers/effects i can't imagine the insane balancing issues. More elaborated and complex skill modifications require even more effort to make.

I believe the 1st option you said to be highly likely: "Minor to the point of not really being noticeable for the vast majority of abilities" to be the most certain, even tho how "minor" or how "noticeable" those augmentations might be is quite subjective. In the end it will depend on how skilled and how much time the skill designing team have.

People usually have unrealistic expectations a lot of the times especially about things they are passionate about so it being disappointing to many is quite expected for some people no matter what.

Anyway, i wish luck to the Intrepid skill designing team, as the task at hand seems quite monumental and might push their creativity and skills to their limits.

Now that I had some time free of distraction I fixed my math lol
But that is indeed besides the point

Jeff did say in the Oct. 2020 livestream exactly this.
"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"

It's just best to get in front of the hype train before it takes off and people get unrealistic expectations, as can and will happen as we have seen time and time again with games like No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk, and others.

I absolutely hope that Intrepid has a plan and that plan is born of passion and they keep that fire lit to create something astounding, but I'm prepared for something simple and won't be disappointed if that's the case.

Archmonk

This augment system is too vague at the moment, like @Dreoh says. I don't think they will make even close to 5000 separate spells purely out of impracticality and the obvious many many many issues this would cause.

The Wiki https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Augments augments described are super undetailed!

The design behind augments is to not just change the flavor so that it reflects the secondary archetype, but it also fundamentally changes the core components of a skill.

Steven

I believe what he means here is that the augments will change the core components of skills but not the core components of the primary archetype.

The augment tree are mostly based on the Secondary Archetype! So that would mean only 8 potential augment types that each have 3-5 trees. These combos with the abilities from the Primary can be quite similar across the embodiment of the Second Archetypes! The Augment system is the way to imbue your Primary Archetype with your Secondary Archetype and doesn't fundamentally change the functionality of the primary archetype's role/archetype expectations, except summoners?

Naturally there will be certain Primary/Secondary combos that are plain better than others. It won't be possible to balance 64 combos between these two systems, at least not easily. But why not allow a Rogue to be a Cleric Secondary even if the secondary trees don't synergise as well as other choices.

I want to wait and see what their implementation is when it comes to augments before making any assumptions about the practicality of the system, but to me it sounds pretty dope. It is the way to incorporate a secondary archetype, and IMO is quite unique and interesting.

Dreoh

Archmonk wrote: »

... The augment tree are mostly based on the Secondary Archetype! So that would mean only 8 potential augment types that each have 3-5 trees. These combos with the abilities from the Primary can be quite similar across the embodiment of the Second Archetypes! The Augment system is the way to imbue your Primary Archetype with your Secondary Archetype and doesn't fundamentally change the functionality of the primary archetype's role/archetype expectations, except summoners? ...

You're missing a key point here, each of the 8 secondary archetypes is confirmed to have at least more than 1 augment types such as

That leads to exponentially more augments than you're thinking.

A Nightspell (rogue/mage) could augment his dagger throw ability in any of the following ways

Dagger teleports to target striking instantly, or possibly makes rogue teleport to target
Dagger deals flame damage + burns, or possibly does aoe fire damage
Dagger deals frost damage + chills, or possibly roots
Dagger deals lightning damage + ministuns, or possibly chains to nearby enemies

That's not even including non-archetype augments

Dagger deals more damage to non-orcs? (orc racial augment)
Dagger charms target for a second on hit? (Love goddess religious augment) This is theoretical Idk any of the religions
Dagger striking causes other guild members to do more damage to target for a duration (guild leader augment)
etc.

Now think about how many different customization effects will exist with all 30 of the Rogue's abilities
Then think about the 7 other archetype's base abilities and their customizations with all 7 of the other archetypes.
Then think about the non-archetype augments.

Edit: Actually I just found out that supposedly religious augments will stack ON TOP of your class augments
This means that religious augments will either add another exponent to customization or will be implemented in a way that we don't have to calculate religious augments in this.
What I mean by this is they will either make the abilities more customizable by changing functionality even more, or they will do something like rep tabards in WoW, meaning the religious augment doesn't do anything effectively customization-wise.

polarbear

I don't think it too unreasonable to have the number of skills discussed in this thread. The idea is that they build the animations in blocks such that they can switch part of the animation with another animation. This would mean that of the 5000+ animations there might only be 10 teleport animation elements.
In the most recent live stream, the devs mentioned they have a new skill authoring tool. I assume that the tool would look something like a spreadsheet where they could the primary archetype skills as a column and the secondary archetype skills as the header. Then in each cell, you could select the series of animations desired and set the base stats of the new "augmented" skill. I think having a procedural approach like this is the only way they could pull off such an ambitious system. tough, not impossible

Dreoh

polarbear wrote: »

I don't think it too unreasonable to have the number of skills discussed in this thread. The idea is that they build the animations in blocks such that they can switch part of the animation with another animation. This would mean that of the 5000+ animations there might only be 10 teleport animation elements.
In the most recent live stream, the devs mentioned they have a new skill authoring tool. I assume that the tool would look something like a spreadsheet where they could the primary archetype skills as a column and the secondary archetype skills as the header. Then in each cell, you could select the series of animations desired and set the base stats of the new "augmented" skill. I think having a procedural approach like this is the only way they could pull off such an ambitious system. tough, not impossible

Right, that's exactly what I was saying in that we could have sort of what are "procedurally created" abilities where augments just "plug in" to the base ability. That's still exactly what I described in that many people who were expecting abilities to be tailored to each Class (that's class, not archetype) will be disappointed and they need to expect something realistic.

Saedu

I just hope that augments provide meaningful changes, not just the same spell behaving slightly differently (e.g. a */tank gets mitigation built into augments that is sufficient enough for some of the archtypes to actually be end game/hard content viable main tanks).

Similar idea for */cleric being end game healers and */bard being end game support.

Noaani

Saedu wrote: »

I just hope that augments provide meaningful changes, not just the same spell behaving slightly differently (e.g. a */tank gets mitigation built into augments that is sufficient enough for some of the archtypes to actually be end game/hard content viable main tanks).

Similar idea for */cleric being end game healers and */bard being end game support.

Intrepid have said that your primary class determines your role.

This means that if you pick Rogue as your primary class, you are DPS. If you then take healer as your secondary, you are still DPS.

As has been said many times, the point of this is so that your class choice matters.

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