Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
I remember testing ACT's TTS feature when it was implemented. This isn't an issue now, but back then we found we had to have one person using it and calling the AoE over TS. This was a while ago, and single core processors were still an actual thing, but some peoples computer had issues with running the game, running ACT and processing the TTS fast enough to get the AoE warning to the player. We actually had a number of people that ran a second computer for ACT and TS, because their "main" computer couldn't handle running the game along with anything else.
Good times.
It is this kind of thing though, that is why AoE's with variation are good. You can't just send out an AoE timer for everyone if the AoE in question changes each pull. Players have no choice but to work it out on the fly, and it is so much more fun.
If Ashes takes a big chunk of difficulty into actually piloting your character and actually the more difficult builds to operate are actually straight up better than the more simpler ones then the raids will be difficult enough even if the mechanics are at the simpler side.
Open world raids that are planned for Ashes have their own shot at being properly difficult, but devs should never tune them for possible pvp battles or griefing. Instead they should give players pvp tools to handle these things instead of just slapping easy instance solution.
Something like pvp event for "control flag" that flags raid area as pvp sanctuary and allows entry only for ppl that are in the raid that completed the control flag event.
Of course this is a compromise for "safety" - intrepid could also go the way that raids are literally unkillable until ppl stop griefing the raids that try to kill them - i suppose they would also add here the "only in server prime time" raiding windows if that is the case
― Plato
You and I must be playing very different versions of WoW (or you are terribly misinformed). I'm typically using 30-40 keybinds per class. What you can macro together now is much more limited than 6-8 years ago. Even back then, while some players may have done this, I never really used cast sequencing as you could get more DPS by choosing what to use given the situation of the encounter. Maybe it would help some bad players who didn't know how to DPS, but not good players. Also pretty much not applicable to healers given the reactive nature of the gameplay.
Almost every boss encounter has some sort of movement mechanic in it. PvP is also always about movement/positioning.
I agree the content should not be dummied down for the pvp battles... But the real difficulty is going to come from the pvp, not the pve.
Interesting concept with the flagging. I'm not sure if that would work or not, but you are basically turning that area into an instance that only one group can enter by doing so.
What TYPE of difficulty are we talking about here?
The impression that I'm getting is that difficulty in WoW raids came from memorizing an ordered sequence of timers. What about skills like improvisation and adaptation?
I do appreciate that everybody in those raids has a role with target objectives, and that promotes a strong sense of cohesion in the group.
That is not a great reduction of WOWs raids. Part of it is memorizing the script of the boss, yes. The other parts are coordinating your rotation, with the script and the rest of your party whilst reacting to randomized elements of the boss scripts. There is a bit of randomness in every single pull of a boss to make it so that you still have to react to things. Things can get out of hand extremely quickly. In correctly tuned fight a single mistake by one person is normally a total party wipe.
Memorization is only a small part of it, the rest is coordination, reaction, and execution.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Adding in improvisation and adaptation into a PvE encounter is usually a fruitless endeavour. Unless you add in true machine learning that can fully adapt to the players actions, any AI is reliant on "IF" conditions, which given enough time can become as predictable as fully scripted fights.
The other problem is that too much variation on a highly tuned boss can make the encounter physically impossible if certain conditions are met. Back in WoW BFA there was a boss that had a bunch of RNG involved in it that the players had to react and adapt to. The problem was that on mythic difficulty, the boss was so tightly tuned that a lot of the possible combinations for that fight were impossible to beat.
This meant that once you had the basic strategy down it was all up to RNG whether you beat the fight or not. If you got a really easy combination you could kill the boss, but if you got one of the impossible variants, you were screwed.
I agree with this as a general statement, but not as a design paradigm.
You can develop an encounter (or even an entire raid progression) around the need to adapt and improvise fairly easily, all you need to do is remove mechanics that cause a raid to wipe automatically.
I personally wouldn't look at randomizing actual aspects of the encounters mechanics, but rather make it so that the mechanics that are always present have some randomization to them.
My immediate thoughts for this would be an encounter that has a number of specific requirements that need to be maintained that are in themselves fairly easy to maintain, but then have aspects of the encounter that cause people to need to take on other tasks somewhat at random.
One aspect of randomization that would work in Ashes is high damage adds spawning that only one archetype is able to attack, debuff, taunt and such. If an add that is only able to be attacked by healers spawns as an AoE is about to go off, it would see the raid need to adapt and adjust.
If the main target (or even a secondary target) requires a specific constant DPS of 10 - 12K and an add that only mages can attack spawns, the raid may need to adapt and adjust.
Add in a dozen or so other things that the raid needs to maintain, and a few other reasons people may need to run off and not participate in the adds mechanic, and you have an encounter where there is no random combinations that make the encounter unkillable, you only lose if you and your guild are unable to adapt and improvise.
That said, I do agree that any encounter that has an automatic fail condition (whether a mechanic that causes a wipe if failed, an enrage timer, whatever) should not have much in the way of randomness to it.
It is normally like the most minor error will create a situation that is unrecoverable or, make it so that you and others around you die. Which is the same thing but faster... also yes some mechanics will just make everyone die if one person fails. The short answer is yes, the long answer is yes with extra steps... lol
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
AoC will not be able to have the same competitive PvE level as WoW's mythic content, that's simple. So making the encounters as hard doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I haven't played games with open world raids with open world PvP so it's just my imagination, but I can't believe those bosses could have mechanics as punishing as mythics, where a couple of mistakes and that's it. everyone wipes and you have to try again.
I think that was the intention already laid out for some areas but perhaps not the literal click a button / pull a level to decide approach but more a dynamic changing difficulty based on actions during a raid.
The issue is not the difficulties. It is correctly rewarding the difficulties. Correctly rewarding multiple difficulties creates massive power gaps, and large amounts of power creep.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Indeed.
I am not at all a fan of selecting a difficulty from a drop down list.
However, having specific things you can do to make some specific encounters more difficult (and increase their rewards) is all good.
In fact, this is a feature of.my single favorite raid encounter of any game. It has 4 options that the raid can take, each option adding a specific mechanic to the fight. Raids can opt to take any one of these four mechanics for the easy version of the encounter. Or they can opt to take any two of them for a harder version, any three of them for a harder still version, or a four mechanics for the hardest version.
Rewards from the encounter are based on how many mechanics your raid opts to go up against.
The current vision is a more rounded experience.
But I am very keen to have certain item scarcity in the game linked to difficulty of obtaining items and if that means that there is varying degrees of difficulty with the top bosses near unobtainable but for a few, so long as the drops are not bind on pickup, I`m all for it!
Risk vs reward, Effort vs reward, Time vs reward, Team play vs reward
Gotcha misunderstood the topic! Clearly not enough coffee 😂 I prefer a rounded experience. But I can understand the harder the fight the beter the loot.
I am very excited for the boss ability AI system, hopefully it keeps dungeon delving an interesting part of the game, more than just farming materials.