Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
honestly thats all this post is about really. Not saying what tanking is, but what it potentially should be in this game as far as role assignment. Its interesting to see so many want to keep a single class cornered into one role, which ultimately may turn people off from playing it since it has the possibility to grow stale over time just doing the same thing. But that is simply speculation.
There isn't one.
X/tanks are useless.
I mean if he can't tank and would only 'off tank' why would you want a class who isn't as good to be your off tank. Just get a second tank/x, they're a better tank, so they would be a better off tank too.
-___-
[Other archetypes will likely have a similar situation, with some of it classes better designed for solo play, but that is a different topic.]
But why even have an off tank?
If the content calls for two tanks (single group content wont), then you take two tanks.
If it doesnt call for two tanks, you take one tank.
I dont see a place for the concept of an off tank at all.
If this is how it works out, it would mean a fighter/tank is a fighter that has a bit more in the way of survivability than a regular fighter/fighter, but is still a fighter, not a tank.
Since there is more to tanking than just survivability, this says to me that it is unlikely that a fighter/tank would be able to be an actual tank.
Same this with a mage/tank - it is a mage with higher survivability than the other mages. No one is going to expect it to be able to tank
The only exception to this that I see is the summoner - this is because summoners dont really have a "role" as such, so their role is the class they take as a secondary.
This is exactly how I think this will play out. Which is why I’m contemplating the Sentinel. Plus I know I prefer sword and board for melee anyway, so it might just make me a tougher ranger. Given the rigors of exploration I think it will come in handy.
Just speculating here but wouldn’t that be pretty cool?
"Fighters are going to be the DPS equivalent and counter-part of a Ranger. But, moreso in the way that dealing burst damage for Physical as opposed to consistent Damage Over Time that a Ranger might be doing. What we want the Fighter to do is to be able to cut through enemy lines, get to the support area of a raid perhaps and take out healers with some quick DPS burst damage. We want them to be masters of different weapons. We want them to be able to be versatile in whether or not they want to be a ranged fighter or melee one. It's going to be up to the player."
---Steven Sharif
If you primarily want to main tank, you should choose Tank for your Primary Archetype.
Fighter/Tank isn't useless for the group - being able to efficiently kill enemy healers is not useless. It is a different role than main tank.
You could try focusing on augments from the Threat and Damage Mitigation Schools and hope that the burst damage from the Fighter active skills make you a very good off-tank. You might also, perhaps, be able to get some healing augments Religions that effectively mitigate damage.
Especially in PvE, being able to use Threat augments to focus enemy healers on you rather than on healing the boss that the main tank is dealing with is a great role. Same for using Threat augments to focus enemy Mages on you instead of your allies - especially if you also have Damage Mitigation augments to help you survive the enemy Mages' DPS.
You get a Fighter/Tank to off-tank when what you want is someone to grab the attention of and fend off a bunch of enemies quickly rather than grab the attention of and fend off the boss for the duration of the encounter.
In some ways, the Fighter/Tank is the opposite of a Ninja. We expect a Ninja to use Stealth and burst damage, but the Dreadnought wants to be seen by the enemy as they do their burst damage. In some ways the Fighter/Tank is similar to a Swashbuckler, but the Dreadnought will be soaking damage rather than Evading damage.
All depends on how you want to play.
But, yes... if you want to be the main tank in an 8-person group, you should choose Tank as your Primary Archetype. There should be no confusion there. It's right there in the name.
Tanking mobs is the tanks job. It's right their in the name and the role.
If you get adds during an encounter, the tank takes care of them, and the healer takes care of the tank.
If there is a valid reason to have a fighter/tank in a group, this is not it. You are better off having a more DPS or support focused fighter here, in order to more quickly deal with the adds the tank is tanking.
Again, the entire notion of off tanking (significantly different concept to multi-tanking on content that specific requires it) is for actual, absolute amateurs - it is for people that do not in any way trust that their tank is any good.
If I were a tank in a group, and someone came along with tank as a secondary stating that they can off tank, I would be offended.
And here we see a meta forming before we even know the actual augments and skills in question just based on a preconceived notions of tanking, and one line from Intrepid. If they go this strict route and make augments this weak then yes there are only 8 classes and people will quickly optimize for a select few styles. What a bland ass game.
"Tank/Tank is the best Tank possible so it makes no sense to for a top end raid group to allow any other Tank class."
It isn't one line from Intrepid - it is the entire concept of the game in which choice matters.
The first choice that you make is your class - if you pick tank, then you are a tank, if you pick mage, then you are DPS, if you pick fighter, then you are melee DPS. The augments don't change this, that is not the point of the augment system.
If it were the case that a fighter/tank were able to tank, then a fighter/cleric should also be able to heal. Why would you expect one without the other?
If this were the case, why then should a mage not expect to be able to tank if they are running tank as their secondary class? Or be able to heal if they are running cleric?
If this were the case, then that choice that we made at the start - our primary class - no longer defines our role, and as such no longer matters. Suddenly, we have just one more in a long line of games where every player can perform every role - THAT is bland.
And to be perfectly clear, I am not "forming a meta".
Tank/tank will be best for raiding, almost without a doubt.
I don't expect it to be best for group content though, and it almost certainly won't be best for PvP of any kind.
You are also mistaken on your comment that "it makes no sense to for a top end raid group to allow" anything.
Once you are in a top end guild, all that matters is your performance. You are expected to be able to make the choice as to which build you run all by yourself, like a big boy.
Top end guilds don't dictate anything other than performance - mediocre guilds dictate builds.
This is why I say it'd be bland. Your pigeonholing people into singular role when roles are not so black and white innately. It inadvertently focuses builds down to one or two styles because those roles only have so many approaches when augments are as weak as you seem to want.
I am not arguing for 'ever class every role.' I am arguing for flexibility to tilt obviously synegistic concepts towards one another. Without it the game will be bland and have an extremely harsh and stale meta.
A game supposedly about teamwork taking away choices for teams to have their own unique mesh because of presuppositions of how the roles in question work. Whether you like it or not you are basically imposing a meta by 'deciding how a role is 'supposed' to function when done 'optimally''.
I'm hoping that Bard/Tank can augment the Bard skills to provide additional survivability for the whole group. Plus, you get to be a shmexy Siren.
Lol
I'd be ok with fighter/cleric coming up with a build to heal. They have said the cleric augments will be able to heal themselves AND those around them.
But again just choosing your primary and secondary archetype isn't the only aspect of building your character if you make this character and don't dump enough points into mana pool and mana regen as a passive. If you weren't getting gear that gives bonuses for healing, then no you shouldn't be able to heal.
They would also have to expect that they are going to lose all of their DPS aspect.
In no way am I saying just because you have x/cleric mean you should also be able to heal on top of whatever your primary role was. More of that it should give you the option that if you build towards it (gear, stats, skill points, augments, etc ) you would be able to instead of DPS.
It does sound kind of funny going from "catch these hands" to "catch these healing hands" and punching health into your allies.
A melee healer sounds kind of interesting if the healing augment changes the charge ability to something like intercept where you dash to your lowest health Ally and apply a healing hand.
No one is doing that.
If you pick tank as your primary, you are a tank, that is your role.
You can argue that, but those are Stevens words.
What I dont get is why you think this means the role of tank is the pigeonholed in terms of how it is supposed to function.
As a tank, you can opt to take tank as your secondary and double down on it. You are likely to be a better over all tank than any other class, but this is something that is likely not needed in group content, and not desired in PvP.
You can maybe take rogue as your secondary, and perhaps you are now an avoidance tank rather than a mitigation tank. This is a seriously different kind of tank - so different that very few games actually even have a build for this.
Perhaps you take summoner as your secondary, and now you are able to tank one mob yourself, and have a pet tank adds.
Maybe you take ranger, and you are able to tank mobs from distance - who knows.
But yeah, sure, saying that your primary class dictates your role is pigeonholing how all tanks in the game are supposed to function.
Sure, why not.
Hope they wont take this to the extreme.
I hope that if you choose a dps sub-class, have dps gear, dps tattoos, dps affiliation and dps talents you'll be a viable tank-dps hybrid.
Contrasted that with a strong augment system where you can pull your chosen archetype closer to another part of the trinity gradient where its more debatable what's optimal depending on team composition. If you don't have this classes and team compositions are rigid and will ultimately devolve into a single meta/countermeta. People will start complaining about someone not being tank/tank and thats all it takes.
'Pros can rise above it' as a 'solution' to the average humans desire to not be excluded just for wanting a certain play style neglects the average end users experience and leads to less enjoyable games.
A Fighter/Cleric would, by definition, be able to heal some 'percentage' of what you could rely on from a full Cleric. And therefore, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that a Fighter/Tank would be able to 'tank' some percentage of what you could rely on from a full Tank.
I can't contribute because I'm not used to 'faceroll tanking' style games, where the Tank basically just has to 'do a rotation and not mess it up and they will succeed'. Tanking is a 'team effort' in at least half the games of this type, that I play, and that leads to 'any team that puts a sufficient damage-mitigation class in the same slot as a Tank and makes a greater effort, succeeds in having that class act as the Tank'.
So...
How much heals could a Highsword sling if a Highsword could sling heals?
To push this a little farther. What if all group members had the same secondary archetype but no one had it as a primary? Let say, everyone is x/tank, but no one is tank/x. What level of functionality could we expect from such a party. Nothing in the realm of raid capacity most likely, but in the non-boss part of dungeons? In PvP battlefield? How about if everyone was x/cleric, but not proper cleric?
It's something my friends and I talked about a long time ago for a D&D party concept: everyone multi-classing/dual-classing fighter or thief. The idea has been, more or less, adapted by many over the years in other games. There are videos of full parties of mages or paladins in WoW for example.
The reverse concept, which seems less viable, would be for every group members to share the same primary archetype, but with a different secondary. A full group of tank/x could be a nightmare to finish off, but a full ranger/x group could make a frightening entrance. Bam! Healer down!
People using augments from the Cleric's Life School will be able to heal. They just won't be able to heal as well as a Primary Archetype Cleric using Active Skill heals.
And that should be similar for a Bard/Tank using Bard AoEs.
So let's look at this further. 'Won't be able to heal as well as'.
Ok you are a fighter/cleric and took healing. Let's ask, why?
Noaani would go 'you don't trust your healer.' I would go 'because hopefully this frees up the cleric to have a somewhat more offensive build that they both enjoy'. In a good system neither option is incorrect, just different and has situational advantages and disadvantages.
Alternatively let's ask how good is this healing?
If it isn't very good, it's a very fair question to ask why the designers made that option available at all. To trick 'less skilled builders'? 'Flavor that makes you superficially help your allies with your band aids?' If it's low impact compared to things that let you do more damage, people have no reason to choose it. That's very bad design.
But if its designed well, how many /clerics do you need before your party heals as well as a cleric?
The answer to this question is less important than how you decide the answer to it.
My reasoning behind the answer is: Just because you can heal didn't mean you do everything a cleric does, but maybe for your teams style the rest just isn't that neccesary. For everything but top end raid content, your team is good at avoiding or resisting debuffs, or damage mitigation etc.
Im sure you all have differing reasonings behind answering that question.
A Fighter/Cleric can only heal themselves.
https://www.ashes101.com/classes#archetypes
“While Bard does have some direct off-healing ability, the intention is for Clerics to be the main healer and Bards to be the off-healer and support. Additionally, when taking Cleric as a secondary Archetype, while you may gain some self-sustain augments, you will not be gaining any direct heal abilities.”
She was reffering to these.
Choosing life augments will provide self-healing benefits as well as limited life-giving benefits to other players.[30][28]
Some cleric augments applied to certain skills will indirectly provide the ability to heal others. These will not replace the need for a cleric archetype.[31]
My expectation is pretty simple.
Hit enemy, cause AoE healing or AoE Castigate effect (HP and MP regen).
And I'd expect this to be incredibly easy to balance to be both 'useful' and 'not enough to easily replace a Cleric' as a result. Three stacks of Regen on your Tank is not enough in hard content, but it's also a viable option instead of 'just hit the mob harder', especially if it's an AoE enemy that is constantly doing some small damage to everyone.
The Cleric would continue to heal the Tank, while not having to spend as much mana on everyone else, making the whole experience smoother.
It's not that hard to imagine people 'planning to go level up on some enemy type that definitely has AoE or reflects some portion of melee damage' and explicitly going 'Exp party 6/8, lf Fighter (pref Highsword) and Bard) while they already have a Cleric.
And/or you like the overall Highsword thematics.
Even for top end raiding, x/Clerics will still be viable.