On Raiding, gearing up & world firsts in AoC

Asgerr

As I was playing a number of MMOs I often noted how frequently people's discussions revolve around the end game raiding scene.

As it stands, in most MMOs, people need to gear up from previous high end dungeons, or previous raid tiers, to get a better chance at completing the newer raid.

It then becomes a race to see what Guild in the world is the best, by seeing who can clear it first.

Seeing as in AoC raids will unlock at different rates and in different orders, will all raids be equal? Meaning: will gear from any dungeon, or by any crafter be sufficient to clearing the raid?

Will you have to clear X raid before being able to complete Y raid? If so wouldn't that force nodes to develop in a particular way across all servers?

With not every server having access to the same raids, how will guilds compete? Will it just be a matter of kill time? Perhaps a time from unlocking to defeating?

Will there perhaps be no competition across servers and only within the server itself?

How do you feel about it, and how do you see it going down?

grisu

It's one of those things that we just have to wait and see how it unfolds.
I think a very natural assumption will be that a raid unlocked through a node will have all you need to partake in it anchored in that nodes development.
Maybe raid x only unlocks because you have node y AND z unlocked and you just need to make the connection that you need something from over there first?
I'm curious myself about what kind of hurdles they will introduce to challenge a raid. Will there be stats on gear like resistances against certain things like the classic of, fire, ice, nature or similar?
From what steven said so far, this seems highly unlikely. (not wanting too many gear sets cluttering around)

If all raids are equal in terms of strength and there is no need to re-gear yourself with better/stronger/approriate stats will we finally go back to quests chains to unlock it individually? I would welcome that, but it just feels like, it's not enough. What will raid preparations look like? To me personally the raid system, with 90% assumption to be fair, just doesn't feel like it develops a desire to do it.
It's just assumptions tho, we barely know anything around that topic so, full circle, we will have to wait and see what they plan.

McShave

About world firsts, they will have to be localized to the servers. With different servers developing at different times, it would be unfair to compare them like this.

Raid difficulty is tied in with the Node System. When your server has all 5 metropolis nodes, the server will most likely have the highest level end-game available to them. Once you have the gear from these raids (also crafted gear with materials from these raids will be on par with the gear from the raids), then you are pretty much done. Try to get a legendary, which will be super rare, and then enchant your gear to as high as you can (enchants go to +15). Since enchanting your gear will have a chance to break it, you will need multiples of each item, so you will have to farm the raid many times.

We don't really know what the progression will be like before this point tho. Let's say you are in a level 5 node, and there are only 2 metropolis nodes on the server. If there is a raid in your node's Zone of Influence (ZoI), will the gear be worse than gear from a raid in a level 6 node's ZoI? What if your node is level 6, so there are 3 metropolises on the server, then how does that gear compare to a server with 5 metropolises?

BigRamble

I think we are still too in the dark about the nature of the end game raiding to even come close to answering the question.

My understanding (which is likely wrong), is that each dungeon only opens in the domain of the node, so the most end game level 50 dungeons are only going to open in the domain of a metropolis. Max of 5 in a world at one time.

Each dungeon seems to be procedurally populated (and probably polished and tuned during the rise of the metropolis), and mostly open not instanced. The details of the bosses would appear to be spawned based on the located nodes geography (ie. Icy mountain top, icy dungeon), The type of metropolis (ie Religious City, Undead Dungeon), any of the grand lore of ancient Vera about this region (ie Used to be the kingdom of Drus), and (especially speculating here) hopefully some other meaningful choices like the nature of quests put forward by the city mayor as it reached for Metropolis. (ie slaughter the local dwarves). Put together a mountain top dungeon full of yeti and undead dwarves, with bosses being the ghosts and liches of the fallen kingdom of Drus opens to the players.

Inside appears to be a series of 5 bosses. How quickly a team kills a boss will determine the strength of the next boss, and increase the value of its drops. The last boss appears to be through a gate so that is likely instanced and will include an elaborate environment.

How the bosses 2-4 are getting stronger while in the open dungeon, I got no idea. Maybe they are not open and after a fight through the dungeon and first boss, the party unlocks the gate to a series of instanced bosses.

I think we can presume that unless they have an amazing algorithm for micro tuning the bosses to be stronger against groups that trashed their predecessor, they are probable just going to be a series of stronger bosses for activation, IE defeat Guardmaster Duncan Iceforge in over 5 minutes, go on to face Shadow King Drus (Basic), do it in 4-5 min load Shadow King Drus (Standard), Do it in 1.5 to 2 min, SKD (Epic) with his similarly epic drops.

If something like this is the case, then guilds could fight over clear times for each level of the final boss and so the dungeon. Gives a job for the science or military nodes to track/announce the guilds that did that.
But even after all that, each server will almost certainly have different metropolis nodes, changing their biggest dungeon that little bit, making it not a pure competitive scene. Hopefully hearing about X dungeon on another server is a motivator for guilds to conspire to bring down a metropolis and raise a new one to seek the dungeon for themselves.

And like I said, I am working off vague details and pulling some out of my ass, so maybe it is they plan on having only one big copy paste metropolis dungeon to start then with major patches new ones open. And maybe they have some more static named and set dungeons beside the five castles.

Sorry, I went off on my own hopes/conclusions and did little for your question.

Saedu

Yea I see server first boss kills being a thing, but not world first since they open up at different times.

We know they plan to have 6-month seasons for the pvp arenas. They could potentially increase the level of gear from raids/dungeons/crafting every 6 months as well. This tactic has been used in the last few WoW expansions to keep people going back to the same dungeons season after season in Mythic+. I'm not necessarily advocating for this type of system, but it could work here. (Before all the anti-WoWers jump in here: I'm also not saying implement the M+ system, that involves fully instanced dungeons, clear timers, etc. Im just referencing how they handle seasons to make the same content repeatable over a ~2 year period and it worked).

I do hope they continue to add more dungeons/raids over time. It will be interesting to see how they do this with the node concept as it limits the currently available content. It might give some servers advantages depending on their node setup and where the additional dungeons are setup.

One thing I would like to see is all older raids/dungeons remain relevant. I think the node system may make this possible in a unique way that other games just can't replicate. If they can pull this off then it would be awesome.