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.
My feedback/ideas on 100+ hours in alpha1
truelyyy
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In this thread I'm only going to comment on the core features and not give feedback I don't believe to be too relevant at the moment for example UI.
I'll give a rough overall feedback of progressing well or needs work with my thoughts for such comments with influences with discussing with other Alpha1 players for some well balanced viewpoints.
Atmosphere - progressing well
- Looks beautiful
- Diverse biomes
- The long draw distance gives you that immersion of being in a big world
- Lots of different height depths all across the world
- The different areas are really well designed, are unique
Character Models - needs some work
- Not sure how placeholder these are but I feel some of these need a lot of work. For example the dwarves currently look like gnomes or hobbits rather than dwarves. I think they should look much more something like this body frame wise:
- Also I played as a female elf and just wasn't feeling it. I didn't feel like the beautiful female character I wanted to play as
. I particularly thought the face needs reworking.
- Some of the male human models look good actually, they actually look like models!
- One comment I would say is don't be scared to add more skeletal frame thickness, a lot of the male models seem a bit skinny at the moment! (especially dwarves!)
- Adding some fantasy to the character models would be nice or making them a bit more anime and a bit less ultra realistic may fit the game better but I'm not an expert in this area.
Combat - progressing well
- For me at the moment the game is developing into an enhanced tab or hybrid system you can call it. You have a strong trinity system at its base (which I like) with the associated tab targetted skills you would expect. You get all the action type skills you can get from GW2 such as dodge rolling, aoe ground targetting but they have also shown you can do aim targetting (prismatic beam) so for me this is a great direction for me of a nicely enhanced tab combat system. I think they should go with this and polish it to perfection rather than trying to add elements of a NW/BDO type of combat. I find this kind of combat very satifying, also in this tab system, you still have to aim, for example the mage stun even in tab mode the target has to be in an invisible aoe cone from in front of your character otherwise you can still miss. Had a great discussion about how the action combat could be implemented into a enhanced tab/ hybrid combat system - https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/50969/action-combat#latest
- I currently dislike the large amount of RnG associated with hard CC, at the moment is either hit for full amount or misses completely. I would prefer either reducing the amount of RnG associated with hard CC either CCing for the full amount or a reduced amount or removing the RnG from it altogether. When you go for your CC is it just doesn't come off, it just feelsbadman. Makes for unfun & unbalanced combat.
- Having a split down all stats between physical and magic is interesting and can make interesting builds,styles, splits. I like this idea but will need to see more.
- The amount of dodge rolling is good, I wouldn't add more. ( such a 2 dodge rolls possible in one go, sometimes less is more!) I think adding iframes to dodge rolling would add more dynamic gameplay.
Classes - progressing well
- I like the amount of hard CC associated with the current classes, as it makes sense to me. Tanks - multiple hard CCs, Dps 1 hard CC and healer no hard CC. If this is the kind of rankings of who gets most hard CC to least CC this seems to make the most sense.
- I could feel how the trinity system was in play in combat and it felt good. Cleric heals, tanks tank and CC, the DPS do the burst damage. (I am aware obviously things arent well balanced at the moment as cleric are OP and tanks have all physical resistance when nearly all the DPS was magic damage)
- Clerics need to be balanced at a core level in some way as having stats that boost both healing and damage maybe OP. In return of reckoning (warhammer online private server) there's a healer class that has a togglable skill with a CD so it can decide whether to do more DPS or Healing. Something like this maybe a good way to balance the class.
Economy - progressing well
By the end of this Alpha when they fixed everything you could see how expensive things would be with schematics being used per craft, mount costs, fixed housing costs. This is a good sign as these gold sinks are important for a well working economy.
Siege - progressing well
- Has a great base, currently played around 50v50 siege and it ran pretty well, frames were low but acceptable. Obviously as there are more iterations performance is improved each time so going well. Most existing MMORPGs cannot do this.
- I generally had a lot of fun and didn't get annoyed or anything when dying.
- At the moment all the stuff in siege feels like a bit of a dump of everything rather than well organised so I guess they are getting feedback on ideas.
- I don't like the fact you farm legendary materials in a PvP siege. I don't think it makes sense because it splits focus rather than everyone getting together to focus on the same goal. I feel like in general if there is something in the game that doesn't contribute to the overall goal of the game it shouldn't be there. In this case the purpose is to capture the throne room, you can also take objectives to give buffs which contributes to taking the throne room. Then you got farming legendary mats as like a side game and it detracts from the siege experience.
- I've been playing some of return of reckoning (warhammer online private server) and they have some great realm vs realm combat which is the only other largescale pvp MMORPG with a trinity system.(I just got into it and there was like 150 v 150 combat, it was epic!) One thing that I like that they have is battering rams which are generally run by a group of tanks. I think adding in this type of dynamic could make for some nice siege gameplay.
- The siege map could be more dynamic so the objectives you take for buffs are more interesting/have height to them for more interesting gameplay.
Mounts - progressing well
- Frankly they look great and have their own unique animations. Also getting a sneak peak at the type of mount skills you can get, looks great also.
- Combat-wise mounts need a nerf as they seem to be too strong in terms of diving in/running away from combat. Perhaps %dmg to your HP bar and you get knocked off. Perhaps a longer cast time to mount up, there are a variety of ways to balance this.
Bosses - progressing well
I wrote a whole thread about how they seem to be going in a good direction with bosses:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/50948/what-intrepid-are-doing-right-with-boss-fights-feedback-poison-dragon-example#latest
I'll give a rough overall feedback of progressing well or needs work with my thoughts for such comments with influences with discussing with other Alpha1 players for some well balanced viewpoints.
Atmosphere - progressing well
- Looks beautiful
- Diverse biomes
- The long draw distance gives you that immersion of being in a big world
- Lots of different height depths all across the world
- The different areas are really well designed, are unique
Character Models - needs some work
- Not sure how placeholder these are but I feel some of these need a lot of work. For example the dwarves currently look like gnomes or hobbits rather than dwarves. I think they should look much more something like this body frame wise:
- Also I played as a female elf and just wasn't feeling it. I didn't feel like the beautiful female character I wanted to play as
. I particularly thought the face needs reworking.- Some of the male human models look good actually, they actually look like models!
- One comment I would say is don't be scared to add more skeletal frame thickness, a lot of the male models seem a bit skinny at the moment! (especially dwarves!)
- Adding some fantasy to the character models would be nice or making them a bit more anime and a bit less ultra realistic may fit the game better but I'm not an expert in this area.
Combat - progressing well
- For me at the moment the game is developing into an enhanced tab or hybrid system you can call it. You have a strong trinity system at its base (which I like) with the associated tab targetted skills you would expect. You get all the action type skills you can get from GW2 such as dodge rolling, aoe ground targetting but they have also shown you can do aim targetting (prismatic beam) so for me this is a great direction for me of a nicely enhanced tab combat system. I think they should go with this and polish it to perfection rather than trying to add elements of a NW/BDO type of combat. I find this kind of combat very satifying, also in this tab system, you still have to aim, for example the mage stun even in tab mode the target has to be in an invisible aoe cone from in front of your character otherwise you can still miss. Had a great discussion about how the action combat could be implemented into a enhanced tab/ hybrid combat system - https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/50969/action-combat#latest
- I currently dislike the large amount of RnG associated with hard CC, at the moment is either hit for full amount or misses completely. I would prefer either reducing the amount of RnG associated with hard CC either CCing for the full amount or a reduced amount or removing the RnG from it altogether. When you go for your CC is it just doesn't come off, it just feelsbadman. Makes for unfun & unbalanced combat.
- Having a split down all stats between physical and magic is interesting and can make interesting builds,styles, splits. I like this idea but will need to see more.
- The amount of dodge rolling is good, I wouldn't add more. ( such a 2 dodge rolls possible in one go, sometimes less is more!) I think adding iframes to dodge rolling would add more dynamic gameplay.
Classes - progressing well
- I like the amount of hard CC associated with the current classes, as it makes sense to me. Tanks - multiple hard CCs, Dps 1 hard CC and healer no hard CC. If this is the kind of rankings of who gets most hard CC to least CC this seems to make the most sense.
- I could feel how the trinity system was in play in combat and it felt good. Cleric heals, tanks tank and CC, the DPS do the burst damage. (I am aware obviously things arent well balanced at the moment as cleric are OP and tanks have all physical resistance when nearly all the DPS was magic damage)
- Clerics need to be balanced at a core level in some way as having stats that boost both healing and damage maybe OP. In return of reckoning (warhammer online private server) there's a healer class that has a togglable skill with a CD so it can decide whether to do more DPS or Healing. Something like this maybe a good way to balance the class.
Economy - progressing well
By the end of this Alpha when they fixed everything you could see how expensive things would be with schematics being used per craft, mount costs, fixed housing costs. This is a good sign as these gold sinks are important for a well working economy.
Siege - progressing well
- Has a great base, currently played around 50v50 siege and it ran pretty well, frames were low but acceptable. Obviously as there are more iterations performance is improved each time so going well. Most existing MMORPGs cannot do this.
- I generally had a lot of fun and didn't get annoyed or anything when dying.
- At the moment all the stuff in siege feels like a bit of a dump of everything rather than well organised so I guess they are getting feedback on ideas.
- I don't like the fact you farm legendary materials in a PvP siege. I don't think it makes sense because it splits focus rather than everyone getting together to focus on the same goal. I feel like in general if there is something in the game that doesn't contribute to the overall goal of the game it shouldn't be there. In this case the purpose is to capture the throne room, you can also take objectives to give buffs which contributes to taking the throne room. Then you got farming legendary mats as like a side game and it detracts from the siege experience.
- I've been playing some of return of reckoning (warhammer online private server) and they have some great realm vs realm combat which is the only other largescale pvp MMORPG with a trinity system.(I just got into it and there was like 150 v 150 combat, it was epic!) One thing that I like that they have is battering rams which are generally run by a group of tanks. I think adding in this type of dynamic could make for some nice siege gameplay.
- The siege map could be more dynamic so the objectives you take for buffs are more interesting/have height to them for more interesting gameplay.
Mounts - progressing well
- Frankly they look great and have their own unique animations. Also getting a sneak peak at the type of mount skills you can get, looks great also.
- Combat-wise mounts need a nerf as they seem to be too strong in terms of diving in/running away from combat. Perhaps %dmg to your HP bar and you get knocked off. Perhaps a longer cast time to mount up, there are a variety of ways to balance this.
Bosses - progressing well
I wrote a whole thread about how they seem to be going in a good direction with bosses:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/50948/what-intrepid-are-doing-right-with-boss-fights-feedback-poison-dragon-example#latest
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