Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
Are you suggesting that the best players on the best characters won't be the ones that come out on top?
I'm curious as to what your reasoning for this is.
Players outputting the most damage will win those objectives , so it does matter. Optimizing your character stats and being skillful in using that damage will beat any unprepared player.
I don't think it's your place to dictate how people should spend their time in the community.
Read the comic here!
Especially the way Ashes is designed with rock-paper-scissors to have groups working together.
RPGs are intended to be more about the team work - the group maximizing whatever individual strengths to create group strength while shoring up each other's weaknesses.
In Ashes, a Rogue having strong Stealth may be more important than having high DPS.
You don't need a tool to tell you the numbers for your damage to get a feel for how powerful you are.
My Tank duo partner and I were quickly taking down mobs more than twice our level.
We didn't need to see damage numbers to figure out the sweet spot of quick kills vs mobs that felt too high for us. It's easy enough to devise tactics and strategies from observation and a bit of experimentation.
It's not just about reducing toxicity. It's also about Steven's philosophy regarding how to observe and communicate with each other while figuring out how to defeat the encounter.
In objective based PvP, you have other people trying to kill you. If you want to succeed at your objective, you first need to kill them.
While it may be all well and good that you can work out what level of content you and you friend are able to kill at low levels in alpha, when you start coming up against other people - people that will put time and effort and thought in to being as good as they can - the only way to beat them is to also put that time and effort and thought in to being as good as you can.
A combat tracker is an essential tool in this. If you are not using one and I am (which you know I will), you honestly don't stand a chance.
You can figure that out based on how you allot points to your a skill trees and how you stack your augments - in addition to how you synergize your abilities with the abilities of your allies.
If you're focus on combat rather than the objectives.
When I did PvP back in NWO, I topped the leaderboards for captures by ignoring combat and letting opponents kill me. Because captures were worth twice the points as kills.
So, no, who does the most damage does not necessarily determine who will win the objectives.
Pvp and leveling with a friend are very different things , players will be very cutthroat in squeezing any advantage they have in pvp fights and the stakes will matter a lot in this game. Damage will always matter in a pvp fights , healers cant heal if they are taking a dirt nap because they got blasted and are unable to out heal the damage , tanks are useless if they cant absorb the incoming damage they are taking and someone hitting like a wet noodle not going to be much help.
That would be true if it many of the victory conditions to different aspects of the game didn't literally come down to who did the most DPS
World boss loot? Most DPS
Mob tagging? Most DPS
Castles? Most DPS
Best gear from instanced dungeons? Most DPS
Like...It's not even by a little bit, a lot of this game depends on being able to crank out high numbers and the only reasons people have for not wanting them is some sense of magic and wonder or to slow toxicity and frankly I don't see either of those downsides outweighing the benefits of at least knowing the numbers on my tooltips.
It's objective-based PvP - not mere group-v-group direct combat PvP.
Damage does not always matter in PvP fights that are objective-based. Which is why Ashes of Creation focuses on objective-based PvP.
We focus on DPS before combat, and get it perfected.
That way, when we are in a siege, we can put more of our focus on things like watching out for people trying to stealth past, and when we find you, we are automatically better at DPS because we put the effort in.
A combat tracker is about preparedness, not about staring at a thing in combat. We don't even need to be using it during PvP to get 95% of the benefit from it. While this is true, if I am sieging your node and I kill the people sent off to try and stop my small group meeting it's objective, then we are going to have a much easier time of meeting said objective.
If you are trying to siege my node and I am sent to prevent you from meeting your objective, you had better believe that you won't even reach it.
Sneaking not going to help much with caravans and sieges where you need to control the area and kill the opposition.
We will have to see whether or not Sneaking helps with Caravans.
Sneaking doesn't really matter much if you cant win the fight , and in order to win the fight you need output as much damage as you , it will always matter in pvp and combat in Ashes is no different the any other mmorpg where that is concern.
Sneaking isn't going to help you if the opposition has someone stationed right at said relic. It is very, VERY unlikely that they will allow you to pick it up while stealthed. You will need to be in control of the general area around any objective in order to meet it.
So Sneaking can matter even if you don't do the most damage.
You have to kill the defenders guarding the relic in order to take it. That fight will most likely need the most damage output for success as it will be a last stand situation for the defending side.
Try sneaking up on a bunch of clerics maintaining hallowed ground around a relic.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
The character with the high Sneak does not have to be the one to kill them.
And, the defenders don't have to be killed - distracting them long enough can also work.
High CC could work for that instead of high damage.
And, again, all of that is really about points allotted to the skill trees.
The thing with a combat tracker, it can also help you work out what the best way to spec for CC and anti CC is.
So, if your argument is now down to CC'ing people so you can stealth through (why did you even need to stealth when you have to bring CC classes along?), then the side that will come out on top is likely to be the side that best understands the games CC aspects - which will be the side that uses a combat tracker to understand them.
As someone who has pvped in a lot of mmorpgs I can tell you it wont play out that way , pvp will always be about killing the opposition , no defender will be remaining alive around the relic if the attackers win.
Yea, w/ exception to some games like in Overwatch where you can have a Tracer sneak behind the enemy and cap a point most online games (and most matches in OW) live and die w/ the DPS...on top of that, there might be one or two areas where outplaying is the way to win, but for the majority of how AoC is currently planned DPS is just flat out the deciding factor.
So what you end up having is one group (PvE players) having the advantage of addons assisting them with in game content while PvP players get no benefit at all. There was a suggestion that when guilds reach a certain level, instead of getting a buff, the PvE guilds would get a meter instead. What would PvP players get as a buff that would equal an addon that tells you how to build your character perfectly to obtain maximum damage?
Seriously, what buff could you offer the PvP community that would equal what PvE players are getting in a meter? If raid bosses have the best drops, and the PvE community gets a tool to help them topple this content, what do we get?
Any legitimate suggestions?
Having no way to measure who in your group can do the most damage is a problem , you have to do the most damage on a raid boss to get the looting rights , those that get the looting rights will get the better gear and they will be out putting more damage in pvp fights. Ashes siege mechanics is no different then ESO , Guild Wars 2 or other mmorpgs with sieges and often the deciding battle is the last stand by the flag , relic or npc you have to kill or protect, to take the castle. This is where the defenders often break the attackers because the attackers cant output enough damage to break the turtle around the objective.
The original intent of the thread wasn't to vouch for meters but to at least show numbers on the tooltip rather than the "small heal" they currently have.
Do we need full meters? Realistically no, minmaxers can survive w/ a small stopwatch and a few minutes on a training dummy. Hell AoC could even go so far as to simply have training areas w/ meters but disable them outside...I honestly think this would make most everyone happy.
The biggest issue I've seen from this topic is that the game isn't supposed to be "care bear friendly" yet people are bending over backwards to eliminate any type of min-maxing in a weird attempt to curb toxicity and the mindset just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Before combat though, when you are working out the best builds, a combat tracker is still invaluable to PvP situations.
Also, comparing what a PvE player gets vs what a PvP player gets (based on my suggestion that a combat tracker be added to the game as a guild perk) is a flawed concept.
If a PvE player wants to raid, they have no choice but to pick the combat tracker. Rather than being a boon for PvE raiding, it is an essential. It is like saying "well, if the guy in a car has four tires, what do we give the guy on the bike that only has 2?".
Assuming Intrepid want to support a top end raid scene, a combat tracker is an outright necessity for those players. As such, literally anything a PvP player opts to take in it's place is better. If there is a choice between a combat tracker and 5 additional HP, those 5 HP are literally free to someone that has no use for a combat tracker, and are literally unavailable to a top end raider.
Maybe call out the people who brought them up in this thread (this page even) before I did
I do not care about toxic players........ meters, tool tips... whatever, does not make a player toxic.
My point is, in a game where everyone should be on an even playing field, whether it be PvE or PvP... why should PvE players have access to outside resources that improves their character? Because again... those tool tips or whatever will not help PvP players in mass PvP... at all. Unless it will show a player how to tank 20 to 30 players at once for more than a second...
I am starting to think some of you have never mass PvP'd before and if you did, it was not well coordinated. Because in mass PvP, once the shot caller points out the next target, the target is dead before they can even click a skill.... tool tips/meters have no use here.
Your argument seems to assume most PvP is going to be during mass events. Honestly the most common PvP will likely happen in small squads of less than 5 people as players bump into each other out in the wild. If I get deleted during a 1v1 I want to know what I should have done to be stronger and that's exactly what the meters are for.
On top of that the game isn't solely PvP...many PvP players will have to venture into dungeons and kill mobs so knowing how to maximize your damage under ideal conditions will be helpful to everyone.