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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.
Comments
Clerics resurrect you back to normal, but necromancy brings back your friends semi-alive with all their gear. Like they can quick cast your ashes and you return as either a decaying revenant (immune to non-holy magic, weak to physical damage) or an ethereal wraith (weak to magic, immune to physical damage) as long as they have the mana to sustain your form.
Then you pair them with a class that keeps everyone's mana topped up, and the necromancer basically sustains your whole party in undead form.
that's true, we will just have to wait and see. I just do not want to see people combat rez left and right just because they can. With a long cd you will need to think about when and were to use it, 10 min cd would be fine for this aswell
True, we don't even know about possible CD reduction skills/buffs/items yet
Aren't we all sinners?
Chain pulling is when you pull the next encounter before you have finished the current one, the fights for each encounter overlap like the links on a chain.
This doesn't work on an encounter you are wiping on for 16 hours, because you can't pull the encounter a second time while you are still fighting it the first time.
Every game I have played has required at least a minute for a full raid to get themselves back up and ready to pull again after a wipe. This minute is enough to break concentration and provide that small period of mental rest.
This may be different for a game that has single group sized raids though.
And while some people do spend 40 hours on arcade games and such, these are not people that just got home from work on a Friday afternoon.
People that do this kind of thing have nothing else going on, or at the very least have cleared out a large chunk of their schedule.
I sort of agree with this in the absence of fail mechanics.
If an encounter has mechanics that will wipe the raid if they are failed, an enrage timer is not needed as the longer a fight goes on, the less likely you are to succeed.
Adding an enrage timer to literally everything means literally everything is basically the same. Raids in games with this as a design decision can literally be nothing more than a few mechanics on top of a DPS check.
A good raid game should have raid encounters that are all about DPS, that are all about doing what the raid asks of us and then getting back to DPS, but should also have encounters that are vastly different.
The best raiding I have seen had in an encounter that was all about mana preservation - there was a specific percentage band that you had to stay in between. If you didn't, bad things happened. That same expansion also had an encounter where 90% of the damage done to the main boss was not done via class abilities. It also had an encounter where CC was the key element. It also had an encounter where DPS on the main mob needed to be within a specific band. It also had about a half dozen pure DPS fights, and another 20 or so that were somewhere in between all of this.
With this, if you are a scrub guild, you won't progress. However, if all your guild is able to do is DPS, you won't progress. You need to know how to do more than only max pew-pew, though max pew-pew IS a requirement to get to those encounters that ask more of you. It almost seems as if FFXIV raiding is only the entry level raiding of a game with a good raid game - honestly. It is testing your raid to make sure that you have the basic minimum DPS needed to be able to raid, but then they forgot to add in the content that this was a check for.
To me, this is one of those things. If all you have done are WoW raids (not that this is you), then it is often hard to think that raids done differently to that can be good.
If all you have done are encounters with enrage timers (this seems to be you), then it can be hard to see how raids can be made in any other way that still retains their difficulty.
If you have raided in games that have enrage timers everywhere and also in games that use them sparingly, you can see why they are great sometimes, but not needed for every encounter. It sounds to me like the exact kind of thing Ashes will see with raids, since we will have some elements of encounters be somewhat randomized.
It is very hard to do that randomization without there occasionally being a combination that makes it far harder to kill than it should be - which is what happened to us. In an instance, this isn't an issue. You accept the wipe and go again.
I'm keeping my opinions on the topic in large scale PvP mostly to myself, as I have significantly less experience in large scale PvP than I do PvE, but this is about what I was generally thinking in that regard.
It does, I just don't you are familiar with the use of the term in the context I was using. That is kind of my fault at this point. I know you have not spent much time in FFXIV/WOW. Chain pulling in a progression context is when you do the next pull as soon as you wipe, and you wipe as soon as 1 or more people die.
In FFXIV this is instant, because every boss room has a wall that will kill you or a ledge that makes you fall to your death. In WOW people do what ever they can to die as fast as possible. Prog chain pulling is slower in WOW most of the time because you have to walk back to the encounter(Which is not always slow). Ever since Stromblood in FFXIV everything is reset on wipe. Basically, people will be on the next pull within 5-10 seconds of their last pull in FFXIV, and in less than a minute in WOW.
The only time this chain pulling stops is when gear needs to be repaired or the instance timer needs to be reset. Often times that will be speed run itself. People will zone out next to a means of repair then insta que back into the raid.
You are not going to convince me that "Player fatigue" is real. I literally got my first 1CC clear of my favorite arcade shmup in a 18hour session where I was going 100% the entire time. The only "breaks" I gave myself was the first three levels of the game being easier than the last two. Every time I do a POE league I go non-stop for the first 16-24 hours trying to get as far into the atlas from level one as I can in one session. A 45min PvE encounter does not sound fatiguing in the least to me.
All enrage timers are is a bare minimum about of DPS needed to be maintained during an encounter. Without this people could make all lot more mistakes and still clear the encounter. It is really that simple. I have raided with and without enrage timers, and I know this to be the truth. It is a constant required amount of pressure that makes encounters harder, and in my opinion that is good for any MMORPG. I am firm on that opinion.
This we can agree on. In the context of Ashes I am sure they may try to rely too much on randomization. I encourage them not to do this as over lapping mechanics like the ones you described in your 45min boss fight happen because of too much relying on randomization. To the point that they just let things overlap. If any two raids get patterns where one is easier than the other on the same. It is bad raid design. One raid should never have a easier time than another due to boss mechanic RNG. There should be a standard of difficulty with each boss. Hopefully the Ashes DEVs look more at WOW/FFXIV for their boss designs than any other parts of those games. The good raid bosses are what is keeping those games alive and relevant IMO. WOW/FFXIV has randomization in nearly every boss, but it is done with competence. You see every mechanic it a raid, but you still have to react to each one because the orders and targets are random. Your 45min raid boss just sounds like the DEVs were throwing mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, and that is awful. It is not something to be celebrated or encouraged.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Also, the definition of chain pulling you have is a bastardised form of it from EQ, just thought you should know. A chain is unbroken, each link has the previous and next link in the chain within it - and so chain pulling should have the previous and subsequent fight within it as well.
It's all good if that it what chain pulling is in that game, but... yeah.
I am used to games that have a number of encounters where it is a literal, factual impossibility for everything to go your way. FIghts where deaths are guaranteed, and good raids recover from that rather than wiping and trying again.
To me, a guild that can't recover from a few deaths in a raid is a scrub guild.
Yes, enrage timers mean guilds can make more mistakes - but only if the guild is good enough to recover from those mistakes. I mean, I agree with this, but my point is that enrage timers (or timers of any sort) are not the only way to apply pressure.
There are other ways to apply pressure on to a raid, and a good game with good raid content from good developers will try and find as many different ways to apply that pressure as they can, and spread them over different encounters.
Thus, enrage timers are great, sometimes, but so are other forms of pressure, sometimes. Nope, the encounter was actually very well tuned in comparison to other encounters in the same game and in WoW at that time - other than the timer of two specific AoE's being able to be started fairly close together.
I watched a kill of the same encounter on another server a few days later. They had about 7 seconds between those two AoE's and killed it in about 8 minutes with only 4 or 5 deaths.
Yeah, to me doing the encounter right is no deaths. Everyone knows what they are doing and supposed to do, and they execute it perfectly. They get to that point with practice and skill. Can their be moments where people recover from mistakes with clutch AF gameplay. Yes, but in my opinion that is just some players making up for the short comings of other players who made a mistake. At the high end their should be no mistakes.
We are just not going to see eye to eye on this. Wandering mist had a thread a few months ago on different types of player skill. I used the manic vs methodological skill types from Shmups because I feel that the same categories of skills applies to MMORPG raid bosses. Manic is where the difficulty comes from randomization and chaos within a boss script. Methodological is far less random, but normally has patterns, and mechanics that are only possible if you have practiced how to do them perfectly. I think the less random bosses are more valid in all MMORPGs with progression, but I am a fan of both styles. I do think that manic works better for open world raid bosses like the ones Ashes will have.
If I had my way you would fight manic bosses in the open world to get keys to fight methodological bosses in an instance. I still think both types of bosses should always have a enrage timer to maintain a standard of DPS. It just seems irresponsible to not have an enrage timer on a boss in a modern MMORPG.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
High end content should not be possible to do without mistakes. If perfection is possible, the difficulty is simply not high enough.
Not true if it takes high end players days to weeks of prog to get to the point of perfection on a single encounter. What you have their is high end content that is extremely unforgiving. This just don't work with raid design that abuses randomization to create inconsistent difficulties across the same boss. To me relying on randomization is just bad irresponsible raid design. It means that a worst group might get loot while a better group doesn't because the dice gods will it.
It is hard to even talk to you about raiding because your prospective is so limited. You often mock WOW/FFXIV while it sounds like you have not spent any time in heroic/mythic/savage/ultimate raids. Right now as far as PvE is concerned these raid styles are the best you will find in MMORPGs, and you just write them off because you have some beef with WOW/FFXIV. They are not my favorite MMORPGs, but I will give them credit where they do things correctly.
If Ashes has any form of instanced high-end raiding(like you want), and they let us battle res with no enrage timer. The race to world first will be over less than half a day from the moment a group first enters the raid. Ashes PvE will never be taken seriously. It is just too easy for the modern raider. From every conversation I have had with you. I can only think that you are not a modern raider. You have a good understanding of the importance of parsing, and guild structure. I just don't think you have experienced a real raid in the last five years.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I think you are misunderstanding me.
I am not mocking them as individual encounters. I have done a LOT of WoW encounters, almost all of them at mythic level (my brothers guild - I've raided with a number of them in other games, they often "find" a spot for me if I am visiting my brother). Some of them have been enjoyable.
What I am mocking, if anything, is the notion that there is only one way to do it - or the notion that any one mechanic should be present in every encounter in a games raid progression. Even WoW doesn't use enrage timers on every encounter.
Variety is the key to anything.
That is a relief to hear then. You do come off as someone who has only played EQ2 and AA. Which to me would be a very limited prospective.
If we get this rumored instanced high end raid scene in Ashes, I don't want it to be cheesed with people res spamming, and turtling with all defensive/resistance gear. Raids with unreasonable amounts of healers and so on. I mean with unlimited time. The best raid comp would be a mix of tanks and healers. The only reason to bring DPS would be for buffs if they had any worth while.
To me there just has to be some sort of soft or hard enrage built into every encounter.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
And if the necromancer dies, so too do their resurrected allies!
Let's also not forget the awesomeness that is Bard. Bard appears to be a support class, and so should probably have a resurrect skill, albeit weaker than the Cleric's.
EQ, EQ2, AA, AoC (the first) Allods, Neverwinter, DDO, STO, WoW, WAR, Rift, GW2, LotRO, VG, PS2, EvE, BDO, Runescape, DCUO, Defiance, Trove and ESO.
There are a few others, the above are just the ones I played enough to consider myself to have an understanding of the basics or at least the basics from when I played them.
The reason I talk about EQ2 and AA the most is because EQ2 had by far the best raid content of any of these games (you will hardly hear me mention it outside of raid discussion), and AA is the game most similar to Ashes that I have played.
While EQ2 is the game I spent the most amount of time in, Archeage is not the game I spent the second most amount of time in, despite it being the game I talk the second most about here.
Again, if this is possible, the develoeprs failed.
Unless the content is designed so there is only one method to kill an encounter, enrage timers can't really be used. Different methods will take different amounts of time - this is outright unavoidable.
Now again, it's great if some encounters are designed around there only being one way to take it on. That is absolutely something that some encounters should do. However, there should also be some encounters that are designed around there being several different possible ways of taking the encounter on, each way potentially requireing a different raid build - and as such leaving the raid with completely different DPS outputs. To me, mechanics that can wipe a raid perform the same function as a soft enrage. The longer the encounter goes on for, the higher the chance of the raid failing one of these and wiping. The better the individual players in the raid - and the leadership of the raid - the longer they can survive through these mechanics.
However, if the developers built the encounter well, there will be a limit.
Yeah I can see that. Seems the most appropriate class for out-of-combat resurrection?
hehehe... I would love if bards could feign death too.
If you are brought back by a necro, you have a window of somewhere around 5 or 10 minutes where if that necro dies, you die again as well. Combine it with the idea above of clerics having a fairly slow cast that requires two clerics while the necro can cast it fairly quickly on their own, and I could see it being quite good.
That is the sort of thing that could instantly swing a PvP fight, in some situations.
I'd say yes
Good luck killing us tho
Having raided for about 36 consecutive hours on one raid(/Wave Plane of Fear when it originally came out), I can say that it gets tiring. A raid should not last much longer then 6 hours. It just really shouldn't. Now a raid could last longer initially when learning the content but even that should be something that could be continued the next day as a guild/group progressed. Most players do not want constant game attention for long periods of time because it does drain you. The only reason I put up with such a long raid before was because I did not want to lose everything that was on my character. Plane of Fear and Hate in the old days was a B*&(^.
That being said, I support an in combat resurrection system, as long as it is not abusive. If players can chain res an encounter, that design needs to be reworked. I have heard of a chain res system being used in a major encounter before but nobody really said anything, because it was such a raid, that was only done to say it had been done(/Wave Sleeper). No real loot came from that fight.
It really is difficult to measure anything right now because nobody here knows the whole system going into this game. This game has so much work left that it is impossible to judge how a resurrection system will effect it. I am positive that this discussion was had many times within the developers meetings.
An ability like that is so powerful I wouldn't mind if it had a 16 hour cooldown. Not opposed to it being lower, but a lot of games really undervalue how powerful that ability is. There needs to be a drawback big enough so people don't do the crap they did in WoW like when they had a warlock tank vanilla nax or when they cheesed fights by having nearly all warlock comps. Just having a Warlock alt was basically mandatory in WoW due to the soul stones.
I also don't want dungeons or raids to feel like you really need these abilities to do them. You should feel weaker overall doing them with classes that can battle rez if the battle rez is on a lower cooldown.
I am against Clerics doing it baseline simply because of the sheer power of battle rez and I don't like the idea of having it for easier content before you become a class. On top of it being a cool unique thing certain classes could have for themselves to make options people would normally not pick more of a good option.
U.S. East
This way players can still res all party members after a wipe without cooldown, and in combat you have to either coordinate with the raid to heal up the newly rezed player, or weigh the risk vs reward (perhaps you can res the rouge who can hide and heal up themselves or you need your party to do without your healing until you can regenerate enough mana to be functional).
I like this - but if it didn't work into their fantasy for whatever reason another way you could do it would be for some of the support style classes to store some 'soul shard' type of charge for use with in-combat res and once that charge was gone it would have to be 'recharged' out of combat. That way a raid of 20 people could prepare in advance and know that they had say 5 in-combat charges ready and dispense them carefully - maybe a Cleric/Cleric could have 2 charges and use them both to self-res in a pinch.
The flip side of using charges for res purposes could be to give the stronger DPS style classes the same type of advantage from a DPS perspective. They could store charges for use as long DPS burst windows like 20 seconds of bonus critical strikes or one long cool-down, high damage charge like a Shadow Knight's Harm Touch from EQ1.
The latter would also add a little fun/risk to PVP - "should I jump this guy or not? .. wonder if he's got his Harm Touch up."
This is essentially the equivalent of players creating their own rudamentary spawning point on the battle field that requires a bit of skill on the part of the healing squad and their party members to keep them out of combat so that they can do their job and keep the "zombified" corpses of their allies respawning to uphold a push on a strategic point.
That sounds to me like it is creating a single point of victory for large scale PvP.
Take out the other teams rez squad and you've basically won.
I could agree with this as a reason to limit in combat res, but not to remove it.
I would disagree, it just creates another strategy to win by. Just like if you sneak a group of players around and flank the enemy casters you can win a fight. It's basically another element of proper positioning on the battleground.
Let me put it another way, combat rezzing is extremely difficult to balance. It is either worthless because you come back with no resources to actually fight or absurdly overpowered because you can. If there is a class or specialization that can combat rez you will see the exact same sort of "rez group" except now they are also fighting you at the cost of nothing. having a large group of essentially cloned characters for the express purpose of being able to "double" your combat numbers in the middle of combat does not seem like a good idea to me.
With it requiring you to leave combat these rezzed players will have a reduced immediate impact on a fight, needing to heal/mana up before traveling a distance to return to the battlefield.
Another good thing about this is, it encourages defending parties to actively try to disrupt this "supply chain" of reinforcements.
Now, if you can give me an idea of the restrictions you would place on said combat rez that would actually work in such large battles, I am all ears.
revival vs resurrection vs reanimation
similar, yet different.
Would be interesting to reanimate fallen combatants before they can be resurrected and possibly blocking resurrection/revival temporarily
The strategy of this will be held in place perfectly fine if there is limited in combat rez, it just means that the loss of your out of combat team (or even the opposition managing to get your out of combat team locked in to combat) isn't an automatic loss - which is what it would be if this was the only way to rez players.
Again, it's a good thing, and if there were limited in combat rez available this is something that would be great to see large scale PvP organize, but this as a strategy only needs a limit on in combat rez, not a complete absence of it. And if it is limited rather than completely absent, it makes this specific strategy a generally good idea, rather than a must have and lose if it fails situation.