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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.
[Feedback]Please reconsider allowing other groups to interact with you while doing a PvE boss!
Endonae
Member
I just watched the Alpha One Raid Boss video that was released a week ago and you guys mentioned that you were going to allow other groups to steal raid boss kills. I strongly believe you should reconsider doing this. Other groups to interact with you while you're trying to kill a boss, let alone steal boss kills. I want to be clear that this level of restriction is not necessary for non-boss encounters.
I come from Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), which had a little bit of that PvP during PvE with the Dreadtooth and Nightmare Pilgrim world bosses and it was just super annoying. Thankfully, you couldn't ever steal kills since the combat is locked to the group that pulled it, but it was still ridiculously easy for individual players to completely ruin things and cause a wipe.
In SWTOR, one of the tank classes has stealth, so all they'd have to do is just hide in stealth until we pulled the boss and then they could just taunt it periodically to mess up positioning or just keep aggroing it to prevent the actual group from successfully even pulling the boss. If we tried to kill them, they could just stealth out and run away/hide and then cause some more mayhem later on once their cooldowns came back and because they're a tank, they have stronger DCDs and armor, so they can survive long enough to do this even if a ton of players attack them all at once.
I am not sure how much influence individual players will have in this game, but I imagine tanks will be capable of at least some level of this, and the more challenging the boss is, the less influence is required to cause a wipe anyway because you can just intentionally cause a raid wipe mechanic to fail as opposed to just attacking the group . For example, if there's some cleave attack that does a ton of damage so it needs to be pointed away from the group, all the troll needs to do in order to cause a wipe is taunt once to turn it around and cleave the raid, and with proper timing, this wouldn't take more than a second to accomplish.
Now the problems in SWTOR were mainly just from obnoxious trolls, I hate to imagine how much worse it would be if enemy guilds/nodes/whatever feel obligated to stop you because you're granted a buff or they don't want you to have access to the loot or want to steal it for themselves (not sure if all of that is possible). Keep in mind that all this frustration comes from just enemy players being able to interact with the boss, not steal kills. People will leave the game if they have been working for months or weeks trying to kill a difficult boss, only to have some rando come out of nowhere to steal the kill at the very last second. Even if they don't leave the game, raid groups need to be coordinated and scheduled, and these sorts of complications put additional unnecessary burdens on the coordinators and leaders because even if people don't leave the game outright, people are gonna choose to not show up to those events, meaning replacements will need to be found.
There are some ways to design around these issues, but they come with their own tradeoffs and drawbacks, a lot of which would greatly restrict the way that classes, roles, and boss mechanics are designed. I would hate to miss out a cool ability or mechanic simply because it would make it too easy for someone to ruin a whole raid group's day. Furthermore, while there are some players that like both, a lot of players strongly prefer one type of content to the other in regards to PvE and PvP and some of the required skills to be good at each are vastly different and in some cases the optimal play is opposite. For example, a good raider will not necessarily be a good PvPer, and while it may be optimal in PvP to use lots of self heal abilities, you wouldn't be caught dead trying to use an off-heal in a raid (this may not be how things are balanced in AoC, but that's how things are balanced in SWTOR). Forcing a player to get good at a type of content they don't like in order to do the content they actually want to do is going to make most players look elsewhere. This is a step beyond making people do something they dislike, such as grinding for gear, because you don't have to be particularly good at gear grinding to get it done. In order to get good at PvPing, you have to practice. Even if they can't interact directly with the boss, I'd hate to get all of that valuable loot stole by having an enemy group of skilled PvPers attack immediately after the boss dies or be prevented from doing the boss in the first place because that group was guarding the entrance. I am happy to elaborate on more potential solutions if people want, but honestly, that's enough for a whole post on its own. Bottom line: the benefits of PvP during PvE bosses do not outweigh the drawbacks. Thank you for reading my essay.
TL;DR It's way, way too easy for individual players, let alone large groups, to completely stop an actual group from being able to beat a boss. Allowing other players to interact with raid bosses, let alone steal kills, is ridiculously frustrating and designing around it would require too many restrictions on how classes, roles, and boss mechanics are designed.
I come from Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), which had a little bit of that PvP during PvE with the Dreadtooth and Nightmare Pilgrim world bosses and it was just super annoying. Thankfully, you couldn't ever steal kills since the combat is locked to the group that pulled it, but it was still ridiculously easy for individual players to completely ruin things and cause a wipe.
In SWTOR, one of the tank classes has stealth, so all they'd have to do is just hide in stealth until we pulled the boss and then they could just taunt it periodically to mess up positioning or just keep aggroing it to prevent the actual group from successfully even pulling the boss. If we tried to kill them, they could just stealth out and run away/hide and then cause some more mayhem later on once their cooldowns came back and because they're a tank, they have stronger DCDs and armor, so they can survive long enough to do this even if a ton of players attack them all at once.
I am not sure how much influence individual players will have in this game, but I imagine tanks will be capable of at least some level of this, and the more challenging the boss is, the less influence is required to cause a wipe anyway because you can just intentionally cause a raid wipe mechanic to fail as opposed to just attacking the group . For example, if there's some cleave attack that does a ton of damage so it needs to be pointed away from the group, all the troll needs to do in order to cause a wipe is taunt once to turn it around and cleave the raid, and with proper timing, this wouldn't take more than a second to accomplish.
Now the problems in SWTOR were mainly just from obnoxious trolls, I hate to imagine how much worse it would be if enemy guilds/nodes/whatever feel obligated to stop you because you're granted a buff or they don't want you to have access to the loot or want to steal it for themselves (not sure if all of that is possible). Keep in mind that all this frustration comes from just enemy players being able to interact with the boss, not steal kills. People will leave the game if they have been working for months or weeks trying to kill a difficult boss, only to have some rando come out of nowhere to steal the kill at the very last second. Even if they don't leave the game, raid groups need to be coordinated and scheduled, and these sorts of complications put additional unnecessary burdens on the coordinators and leaders because even if people don't leave the game outright, people are gonna choose to not show up to those events, meaning replacements will need to be found.
There are some ways to design around these issues, but they come with their own tradeoffs and drawbacks, a lot of which would greatly restrict the way that classes, roles, and boss mechanics are designed. I would hate to miss out a cool ability or mechanic simply because it would make it too easy for someone to ruin a whole raid group's day. Furthermore, while there are some players that like both, a lot of players strongly prefer one type of content to the other in regards to PvE and PvP and some of the required skills to be good at each are vastly different and in some cases the optimal play is opposite. For example, a good raider will not necessarily be a good PvPer, and while it may be optimal in PvP to use lots of self heal abilities, you wouldn't be caught dead trying to use an off-heal in a raid (this may not be how things are balanced in AoC, but that's how things are balanced in SWTOR). Forcing a player to get good at a type of content they don't like in order to do the content they actually want to do is going to make most players look elsewhere. This is a step beyond making people do something they dislike, such as grinding for gear, because you don't have to be particularly good at gear grinding to get it done. In order to get good at PvPing, you have to practice. Even if they can't interact directly with the boss, I'd hate to get all of that valuable loot stole by having an enemy group of skilled PvPers attack immediately after the boss dies or be prevented from doing the boss in the first place because that group was guarding the entrance. I am happy to elaborate on more potential solutions if people want, but honestly, that's enough for a whole post on its own. Bottom line: the benefits of PvP during PvE bosses do not outweigh the drawbacks. Thank you for reading my essay.
TL;DR It's way, way too easy for individual players, let alone large groups, to completely stop an actual group from being able to beat a boss. Allowing other players to interact with raid bosses, let alone steal kills, is ridiculously frustrating and designing around it would require too many restrictions on how classes, roles, and boss mechanics are designed.
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Comments
What you would consider a bad experience, I would consider a good experience and what I consider a bad experience, you would consider a good experience.
At this stage, I do not think IS will change core concepts. Once Alpha 2 rolls round I would expect there to be heated discussions. It is easy to keep feedback limited when under NDA. When there is no NDA the hype train will smash straight into the physical concepts.
We could perhaps implement said contestation on the basis of a percentage of damage dealt.
So for instance, let's say your party comes in and get the raid boss to about 1% then some random shoots it for the remaining 1%, and gets the rewards for killing it. That sucks.
I would thus offer that if you want to "own" that kill, that you should at least participate to a percentage of the damage dealt to that boss. This number would of course need to be tested.
Edit: Spelling mistakes.
No such thing as boss ownership.
Especially true where monster hordes can raid a node.
I love PvE best when you don't have to be part of a group to join in combat against mobs. And it's best when everyone who participates in a fight gets some loot (like in NWO).
I hadn't heard of that, but it would definitely work wonders to avoid raid ruining interactions. If you find the quote or Wiki article do post it.
Also, whilst I agree on that threshold thing, I don't think we should limit PvP while in combat. Being attacked while raiding, though it may suck, is going to make for some great stories, and might be some of the few ways smaller groups can oppose larger guilds.
And if you survive the PvP encounter and then manage to kill the boss? How badass would you feel?
Also stuff like a boss having a "player limit" where once you go over said limit, it insta wipes everyone, could be fun as a way to screw over former guildmates or trolling etc.
I wasn't aiming to ridicule the PvX tag, I invested because the game will be PvX. I merely summarised the limited knowledge I have and produced a limited post because I don't like to make huge posts if I can help it.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Loot_tables#Loot_tagging
Looting rights (also known as Loot tagging) is based on a tag and DPS (damage) system.
This does seem a much more bearable way of dealing with things.
With this any PvP that may occur during a boss fight would be a very interesting scenario
Looting rights (also known as Loot tagging) is based on a tag and DPS (damage) system.[3]
The first party to obtain a tag (on a mob or boss) will require approximately 40% or more of the total DPS to be granted looting rights.[3]
Parties who do not have the first tag will be required to do more than approximately 60% of the total DPS to quality for looting rights.[3]
I still believe personal loot is not an option. There was a large thread about personal loot a while ago. I believe risk vs reward is the standard process. There is not risk/reward in personal loot.
NA | Pirate | Hardcore PvP | Corrupt | PvX
Yeah it does seem like it's a matter of the one who is tagged to qualify for the loot is able to loot it, but what loot is offered is random and will have to be split in accordance to the party leader's looting rules
Also, that video is literally a siege (PvP) environment. Think of it like the generals you kill in AV, you can and absolutely should interfere with such boss fights.
I am still concerned about trolling though and the influence that an individual or small group of players can have on an entire group's ability to clear something. Like I said in the original post, there's not much you can do to stop someone if they can hide in stealth and just taunt the boss right before it casts a huge high-damage cleave. That sort of interaction only takes a second and is something an individual can do. Scouting an area won't help if they arrive after the boss has been pulled or if they are hiding the entire time. They could also just drag one of the other bosses over since they're so close together unless they will de aggro if they leave their arena.
If all bosses are out in the open world, I worry that the main ways to solve this would be by making bosses a lot more forgiving (and therefore significantly less challenging) or by taking away powerful and interesting abilities from classes to make it harder to do things like this.
I am not sure what the general MMO terminology is, but at least in SWTOR, the instanced bosses are called raid/lair/operation bosses while the non-instanced ones are called world Bosses. World bosses tend to be much easier than raid bosses (except for Dreadtooth and Nightmare Pilgrim) while raid bosses tend to be more difficult and complex.
From the video, I got the impression that no bosses will be instanced. My biggest worry is that it prevents the game from having actual challenging bosses that require a significant amount of progression (as in more than a day or two) and can't just be cleared with whoever happens to be online right now or can otherwise be completely figured out after a wipe or two. A better solution would be to have a combination of much simpler, open world bosses that are designed to better accommodate PvX gameplay and then instance bosses that have more complicated and difficult mechanics where it would take very little effort for any outside interference to cause a wipe.
I am completely fine with PvX open world bosses existing and would be happy to participate in killing them. I am not fine with traditional, high-difficulty, progression raiding being done in the open world. If this game doesn't have traditional raiding, I'm fine with that too, it's just a massive waste of time to have high-difficulty progression raiding in the open world.
On the contrary, I would argue that being able to accomplish high-difficulty progression raiding in the open world adds a massive incentive to go out and contend for the boss. Since, you know, you are not getting any of that unique loot without spending a bunch of coin. But hey that's also a good thing, those that can pull off doing these bosses will have access to valuable loot that they can use or sell. Key word being sell, this means you can do something else entirely to stack up your own wealth and when you find a rare drop from that difficult content you are unable to do atm, you can purchase them instead of "wasting your time".
That incentive to get fancy loot would exist regardless of whether or not the boss is instanced, which makes it irrelevant to this discussion. Loot isn't a good reason to play any game anyway. If you feel the need to get rewarded for the time you spend consuming entertainment, you aren't actually being entertained.
The end result is that super challenging open world boss fights become so much more about luck than they should be because the bosses will always be easier when there is no interference whatsoever. This creates a perverse incentive for players to raid at later hours when more of the community is asleep or for guilds focusing on this content to seek out/settle in less populated areas.
I don't think you're recognizing the fact that there are things that trolls will be able to do that can cause a wipe in super difficult content. The only solutions are to heavily restrict what individual players are capable of, which isn't fun for anyone; make the bosses easier, which means we aren't talking about super difficult content anymore; or accept reality that you can't have actually challenging yet still enjoyable content unless you instance it.
It definitely isn't worth that single memorable moment where you manage to outsmart the troll because the instances where the troll will infuriate the entire team by doing something you have absolutely no way of dealing with will always outnumber that single success, simply because it is easier to troll and ruin people's day than actually be good at the game.
That's the game they're building. It's what the Kickstarter backers and everyone else since then was sold and bought into.
If we're talking about some other type of game that is not an RPG, sure, loot may be irrelevant.
I don't know what this means.
In Ashes, a significant motivator to kill a boss is because the boss is disrupting the livelihoods of the citizens of the node or region. Loot acts as a bonus. If the primary reason to kill the boss is just loot, sure, PvP might ensue. If the primary reason to kill the boss is to end the eternal winter the Winter Dragon is causing in the region, groups will most likely ally with each other, rather than fight each other.
"A raid boss, such as a winter dragon, may appear because a node has developed to Town (stage 4). This may bring an eternal winter that affects crop rotations until it is killed."
I see nothing perverse about the strategy to play during hours when PvP is low, if/when avoiding PvP is a goal.
We will have to see how common it is that trolls can accomplish what you assert.
Sure, if it's as bad as you predict, the devs might drastically change the design - similar to how New World changed their PvP design due to more trolling than they expected.
I believe you might be mixing up what will be available in a world boss on release, versus a boss during a siege, versus the bosses presented in alpha 1. When he made the comment about last hits getting the buffs it was presented as being for the bosses during a siege. And from what I understood it seemed like it was for the 100v100 fights during the alpha 1 testing.
As for having mechanics like that during an open world boss I'm all for it. It will mean you'll not only have to cooperate with your team, but also have a plan in place for potential intruders. Perhaps you have a team of 8 focus on taking out anyone that approaches your team. But I think the conversation has been focused so much on loot as that is the primary reward and function of these bosses. Sure, some people might kill them for fun, but they wouldn't just leave the loot there because they only did it for fun, they'd still pick it up. The point of doing this type of content is for loot, experience, and gold. If players didn't receive anything for doing this type of content they simply wouldn't do it except maybe to try it out once or twice.
And as things stand the loot distribution system sets things up so that a small group wouldn't be able to snipe the boss and gain anything beneficial from it. Of course there will be troll parties that try to do this things, but that's what guild wars, social blacklisting, and having a prepared group is all about.
Will this make bosses more difficult and risky? For sure. But it won't deter people from trying to get that top tier loot. It'll just make them more cautious and aware of their surroundings (which as a healer I'm all for people being aware of their surroundings. 'Yes. You died because that was a pool of laaAaaAavvva. Noooo I caaaan't heal through that. Ha...silly dead people')
My goodness they need to work on being more clear about this stuff and maybe not use such misleading terminology! Thank you for providing some clarification. When I think of a raid, I think of a longer, purely PvE activity where the main focus is a gauntlet of bosses that tend to feature far more mechanics than and sometimes less of a focus on trash mobs in between the bosses shorter PvE content like dungeons. On higher difficulty levels, individual raid bosses tend to take at least a few weeks to clear, if not more.
When I watched the video which specifically refers to them as raid bosses and presents what looks like their take on a raid, I imagined what the max level difficulty (nightmare, mythic, master mode, etc.) raid boss might look like if you decided to remove it from its instance and just plop it in the open world. The vast majority of the bosses I know of would be literally impossible to clear with any sort of PvP interference, especially if it was more trollish behavior where the enemy is just trying to cause a wipe rather than beat the boss themselves. I wasn't worried as much about the open world nature of the bosses they showed at the difficulty levels presented in the video. I was more concerned about what it would mean for the higher difficulty level I enjoy.
I get what people are saying about having people whose primary/sole job is to protect those fighting the boss and that combination of PvP and PvE does sound interesting. Though the harder you make the boss, the more important it becomes for the guards to make sure that absolutely no one gets through while the boss is getting fought and I am not sure how feasible that will be. The less feasible it is, the more likely it will be that the boss needs to be made easier.
I don't think what you said about trolls is gonna do much though. It doesn't work to punish them in social ways because trolling is inherently an anti-social behavior. Yeah it might help in a few cases, but I think most trolls are lone actors or band together specifically with other trolls. I am concerned about what the individual or a small group is able to do to completely wreck what a large group is doing without the large group being able to do anything about it by abusing game mechanics, like taunting the boss from stealth or dragging a nearby boss over.
I would like to see them put a couple big boss fights that were super hard to do even without PvP. Just so we can see who can do it anyway.
Securing a raid boss is not about who was lucky enough to get their first like in your standard theme park MMORPG. It is a substantial calculated risk a large group of people have to make together to attempt a world boss in a highly competitive open world environment.
You are risking around 40 peoples time, energy, repair costs, and opportunity costs. All of this to try and secure raid loot. There are other potential costs to attempting a raid boss such as reputation (If a guild was to lose a raid fight that would surely not be good for the guilds social reputation). Protection costs are also something that may be a factor (Some PvP guilds may charge raids to allow them to attempt bosses in "their area" without harassment). And many other costs that may arise from a highly social open world.
All of this is Risk, for a shot at the best rewards in the game. Raiding a world boss is not something you do every Tuesday for a extra shot at some sub par raid loot before your guild gets together for instanced prog. It is the competitive end-game of Ashes with the highest reward.
This is what draws me to Ashes.
Above all else... The Tulnar must be destroyed.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Based on these rules, if three groups of players all do equal damage to a mob (33.3%), no one qualifies for loot.
While there is an argument that this could be implemented as a means to discourage zerging, it would be ineffective at that task (zeros would organize a full raid of 40 players as DPS). All it is doing is punishing groups attempting actual encounter contesting.
To the OP, as easily these forums biggest advocate of instanced raiding in Ashes, I have to disagree with you.
The game does need (and will have) some instanced raids. However, Ashes is all about conflict with other players, so the majority of raid encounters will need to reflect this.
1:Unfortunately, tanks with stealth may be possible since we don't know what the tank/rouge class will get. Although I would be surprised if primary class tanks get more than a few seconds of stealth from any ability.
2: At least in the case of open world bosses, the raid and world boss seems to be interchangeable in Ashes.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Raid_bosses
3: 80% of dungeons and raids will be open world while the remaining 20% will be instanced.
4:Thats a good question and there have been a number of threads discussing whether open world raids and dungeons means that content will be less challenging in order to be possible.
In the citation given on the wiki for this, when talking about the 40%, there is the use of the word "maybe", as in, that number is not set in stone as yet.
To me, this says that the whole thing is still a work in progress, and will change.
One big thing to remember is that AoC doesn't have any predetermined factions. All factions are player made through nodes, guilds, parties etc. and this will create lots of diplomacy and drama. It will create an environment where people need to interact with each other often and build relationships.
Yes, you might have another individual or party come and mess with you while you do the boss, but you can team up, fight back, bring more friends to fight back, or take it further and exact revenge by later attacking their caravans or maybe even their node.
World bosses are often not the ultimate "endgame" in sandpark (sandbox) PvX MMORPGs such as AoC. The interactions between players and all the emergent gameplay that follows said interactions is the real "endgame".