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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.
Thoughts on Gear and Progression
Sevrecords
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hey together,
i dont know how far you are in the endgame gearing process. But i just wanted to speak out my thoughts. Im upset from games making gear obsolete after progressing to a new tier of items. I think some items are way to class changing to just throw them into a bin. So what would be cool is, if there is a way to upgrade older gear to the new (ilvl) standard.
Lets say you are in some kind of end content on patch 1:
Every class has a weapon or armor that enhances or modifies some skills or abilitys in a way that it changes your char is played.
On patch 2 gear progresses and becomes stronger because horizontal progression is booring in some way.
But also if you think the Patch 1 sets were good balanced and well designed, why not make them so you can upgrade them to the new Patch 2 balance.
Some players may prefere the old set playstyle over the new patch 2 sets playstyle.
If you keep on going in doing a thing like that you have alot more gear to define your char. Every player can end up using a complete different armor set and changing the way he plays.
What i disslike from most other games is that DEVs inventing cool gear sets and like in the next dungeon tier everything they balanced and put alot of time into is basicly useless. Some games even achive to make older content useless.... ^^
I hope you get what i tryed to say, sry for my bad english.
i dont know how far you are in the endgame gearing process. But i just wanted to speak out my thoughts. Im upset from games making gear obsolete after progressing to a new tier of items. I think some items are way to class changing to just throw them into a bin. So what would be cool is, if there is a way to upgrade older gear to the new (ilvl) standard.
Lets say you are in some kind of end content on patch 1:
Every class has a weapon or armor that enhances or modifies some skills or abilitys in a way that it changes your char is played.
On patch 2 gear progresses and becomes stronger because horizontal progression is booring in some way.
But also if you think the Patch 1 sets were good balanced and well designed, why not make them so you can upgrade them to the new Patch 2 balance.
Some players may prefere the old set playstyle over the new patch 2 sets playstyle.
If you keep on going in doing a thing like that you have alot more gear to define your char. Every player can end up using a complete different armor set and changing the way he plays.
What i disslike from most other games is that DEVs inventing cool gear sets and like in the next dungeon tier everything they balanced and put alot of time into is basicly useless. Some games even achive to make older content useless.... ^^
I hope you get what i tryed to say, sry for my bad english.
0
Comments
Once upon a time there were no cosmetics and the higher you got the better you looked. Mmos would release yearly expansions with REAL new content. Massive new areas, a few new skills and lv cap, new systems. That was real contebt that would enable you to progress further.
Now, there are cosmetics. We cant change that, it's 2021. Even I dont what it changed, no matter how much I miss the feeling of seeing good gear on high lv players.
But here is the thing. Take eso for example. Gear is obsolete. You can look however you want. Underneath you dont wear gear... you wear an assortment of stats. It doesnt matter what pieces you have put together and unless there is a really gamebreaking set after 3 months, ---- THREE MONTHS IS TOO SHORT TO RELEASE A TINY BIT OF "NEW" CONTENT. IT'S ANNOYING---- you stick to the stats you wear underneath and you put on a new look.
A transmorg system that requires you to farm/craft the cool looking armor pieces you want, destroy it so that it alters the appearance of the armor you wear.
Every time you want to change the look of a piece of gear, you need to waste a piece of gear (after hard work).
No collection libraries and no easy results.
Look at eso. The 90% population of eso wants new boring quest lines every day.
So ofc the devs will release a tiny tiny map every 3 months, with a 10h content.
And ofc they will slap new OP gear for the competitive gamers to make them buy the dlc.
Over 1k armor sets in eso. They can be worn from lv1 to lv cap. Only 20 of them are viable, with the newest usually being at the top of the list.
Every 3 months. But hey, if the players want to pay for meaningless content bethesda will cash in.
Add new areas every year, add a couple skills per class every year, increase the lv cap by 5, add new geat sets and a 1-2 epic bosses. New quests and systems.
Add a new race 2-3 years after release, or a new class or a new weapon.
That's how you keep the players invested and HAPPY.
That's in good part why I haven't much interest in raiding.
End game gear progression is like digging a hole. Everyone dig and dig, frantic and excited. I ask them why they're digging this huge pit, and they say it's because there is treasure buried here! They rejoiced when a chest in found. They are overjoy when they open the chest to reveal... a shovel. But it's made of precious metal and studded with gems and imbued with powerful magic! Cool..? What are you going to do with this new... shovel? Dig another hole! We might even dig latrines at some point!
So yeah, more a fan of lateral progression (diversification of options) than vertical incremental progression.
But I'll endure, I'm well aware people can't resist pursuing the mythical carrot dangling so close in front of them.
I agree with this, gear should be a tool, not the main focus for your abilities. As with weapons, they're only as powerful as the person wielding them. That shouldn't mean gear is obsolete but MMO's have consistently failed to address the idea that player skill should be more important than character skill. There's a fine balance to be found here and I guess we'll see if Intrepid can pull it of, which I doubt as of now.
I'm not sure how you can do this without crippling the blacksmiths.
I also don't like this argument because it's equivalent to the argument that we shouldn't have exp and levels because "player skill" is better than grinding stats.
Have you guys tried playing Rust?
Is that what you want Ashes to be like?
It doesn't have to be equivalent, though.
In Monster Hunter World, as noted recently, the actual 'attack' and 'defense' values of most gear are very similar within tiers, if not exactly the same, and only the abilities matter. You certainly can build with 'only abilities that increase attack or DPS', but there's a reasonable variety of other 'ways to make your situation better or easier or aligned with your playstyle' that can substitute fairly well if your goal isn't 'make the opponent's HP drop as fast as possible'.
Usually it's 'defense against a specific thing' but sometimes it is 'enhance this utility skill that I use to keep my own personal skill advantage going'.
Multiple MMOs have done this, just not recently. Themeparks have been moving away from horizontal progressions for years, as Steven has (somewhat irritatedly) complained.
Technically you need blacksmiths more in the case where more specialization should happen, and we've already seen from the Alpha that at least right now, two pieces of gear with the same name and sometimes (this might have been a bug?) even the same rarity and name, can have different stats.
So 'me asking the blacksmith to make my robe more resistant to ice because I live in the mountains and fight yetis', then later coming back for another one because the Yeti 'World boss' does more physical attacks and I need more of that and less ice defense, is just better.
Edit: This is more of a general mention since I know that @maouw is someone who would like the entire crafting and gear system to basically be Monster Hunter style, to some extent.
You know me too well.
Specialization options is exactly what I want - but I also enjoy the progression of the weapon trees in MH - would be sad if that was removed (also allows bigger resource sinks because they're broken up into progressive steps, doesn't hit as hard all at once.)
Do we have to choose between horizontal/vertical progression - why not do both?
(especially since - as you said - stats are similar within tiers)
This sort of contemplation gets too deep into game design theory and we don't know which of the multiple directions Ashes hopes to take. It's possible they don't know either, yet.
I can probably make one of those types of posts about it, but right now, I think people are more interested in either 'wait and see', or 'discussing other stuff', so we can only consider what we know is definitely current.
If I have a skill that does a thousand damage to a target of equal level I don't want my skill to do zero damage to a target that's five levels above me.[11] – Steven Sharif
This implies a type of number crunching that is hard to balance but easy to understand. I disapprove entirely because it tends to suck long term, but my goal is always to 'get whatever Intrepid intends into a state players can agree on for them to work from'. I mention this because I can't 'support' this strategy with 'explanations of how it can be good' because in my experience it universally sucks (HP bloat, ineffectiveness of build progression, oversimplification of meta, to name a few).
Gear has approximately a 40-50% influence on a player's overall power in the game.[16]
This is more number crunching. Is that '40% for standard gear and 50% for max effectiveness gear'? Lots of tuning here, and anything tuned can be reverse engineered, but it seldom supports horizontal progressions unless the gear is extremely similar across the board, due to a specific issue that comes up with stacking of stats.
These two things alone make me think that we 'can't' have both vertical and horizontal progression while still achieving the other goal.
Having the ability to gain power at a sacrifice... That's a way to kind of reach a horizontal type of progression. It may not be entirely, because there could potentially be a meta if balancing isn't done correctly; but the objective there is to make sure we have both vertical and horizontal progression in the game.[2] – Steven Sharif
I am not sure they're confident.
I've done this for years (non-professionally, moreso in the same vein as Steven himself, if I had more money to do what he's doing I'd have done that to 'convert the experience') and I wouldn't be confident. The methods are finicky, and the two known ones don't fit Ashes' current 'feel'.
This isn't to say 'horizontal progression, specialization, and crafting trees' isn't something we can have. That's been done, and there's ways to combine two 'halves' to get a new working one.
But you have to drop something. And Ashes' current ideals grind against the resultant systems pretty hard, in terms of PvP being two-sided (objective based but also possible to just kill people), complexity goals, and Hybrid Combat.
If I see any sign of changes or lose confidence in this analysis at all, I'll say so, but running the numbers on the entire fractal now results in 'Gear being a simpler trademill with a meta-abuse aspect'. Specialization will be possible, but low complexity, because of the simple effect that HP bloat has on games.
"If it dies faster it is more profitable to me, as long as I don't die." + "If it dies faster it probably does less damage." = 'Specialization in the form of reverse-engineered minmaxing per enemy."
Basically, 'Monster Hunter speedruns'.
If anything, a characters progression should benefit the players skill, not makeup for a lack of it. I don't want character progression to be nullified but it's rare for an MMO to reward players who are better over those that have grinded longer. As I said in my original comment, guess we'll see how Intrepid finalizes it.
A non-universal cost isn't a cost, to a min-maxer.
e.g. in Monster Hunter, your total slots to enhance your gear and the numbers of abilities on that gear, are pretty set. Literally every player has to give up Ability A in order to set Ability B. Now, your class might not need Ability A a lot, but you still feel some of the effect of not having it, for most things.
In FFXI, the same thing happens. Classes with similar skills and armor can share gear, but every time, you are giving up something that you need at least a little bit.
But in a situation where you 'give up defense' to get more attack, but your character doesn't need defense, or can find a way to consistently not need defense, the issue will get worse.
So the reason I think it won't work right now is that there isn't 'enough' universally necessary things in the combat, for tradeoffs and true horizontal progression to matter.
Also, from what we know, we should not be using the best gear, or very good gear, all the time. When you use the gear, you have to repair it. This could be expensive if you are using epic or legendary gear. So when you use your best gear to do PvP or world bosses or dungeons, it will feel like you are more badass than you were.