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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.
Should Secondary Archetypes be More Permanent?
McShave
Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
We know that you can change secondary archetype and that Intrepid are trying to design it so that you can't change often. What do you guys think about the permanency of picking a secondary class? Do you think class identity or primary archetype identity will be more important?
I had an idea where if you wanted to change your secondary archetype, you would revert your character level to the level where you initially pick your secondary archetype. This way you can't change it on a whim and have full character power of the new secondary archetype instantly when you switch, but you would have to develop your character as that of that specific class. However, we know that leveling will take a long time and it would suck to lose literal months of character development just to stop changing class quickly.
I was thinking of this when pondering Looking for Guild advertisements. Would you advertise yourself as a particular class or a particular primary archetype, since you can change your secondary but you cannot change your primary?
I had an idea where if you wanted to change your secondary archetype, you would revert your character level to the level where you initially pick your secondary archetype. This way you can't change it on a whim and have full character power of the new secondary archetype instantly when you switch, but you would have to develop your character as that of that specific class. However, we know that leveling will take a long time and it would suck to lose literal months of character development just to stop changing class quickly.
I was thinking of this when pondering Looking for Guild advertisements. Would you advertise yourself as a particular class or a particular primary archetype, since you can change your secondary but you cannot change your primary?
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And... already can't change Secondary Archetype on a whim.
I would not LFG. I would go find the people in my Node who play at the same time I do.
Ok, but when you join with the people in your Node, if you play together often, you all will want to coordinate your character builds so that they benefit each other. This will require a change in secondary as well as maybe new gear/ weapons, etc. We know you can change your secondary, so a lot of people will (like myself).
This is a good point, maybe stacking effects will not be a thing in Ashes and each archetype will have it's own thing going on. I was going off the idea of weapon procs and augmentations. Let's say rogue secondary gives a bonus damage to bleeding targets, you could have everyone stack rogue secondary and spec into bleed weapon procs, and then overall there's a greater chance to get the proc and then everyone is doing more damage more often.
You could still have everyone's unique primary archetype kits, but then work together to maximize damage. But, we'll see how it goes as Intrepid releases more information.
From my understanding, you will want to co-ordinate more around your augment schools for synergy which is somewhat determined by your secondary archetype choice. The secondary archetype determines more of what kind of subclass in your primary you want to be before synergising augment schools.
What do you mean by "what kind of subclass in your primary you want to be"? If you mean what class identity you want from your primary archetype, that is a personal choice and more power to you. But if you mean what kind of role you play in a group as a member of the primary archetype, then that can change since you can change your secondary archetype.
And if "you will want to co-ordinate more around your augment schools for synergy which is somewhat determined by your secondary archetype choice", and you can change your secondary archetype, then you can change which augment schools you have access to and have more synergy options.
There will always be people and communities that want to min max everything, and they might want to everyone to have X primary or Y secondary archtype or even just playin XY locked. This is fine as long as you find that fun in a game.
Different secondaries make you use different weapons / and or bonuses. Regardless the'll require different gear to be fully optimized. due to gear degration, and aquiring multiple sets of gear for different secondaries, the hurdle will already be big enough for most people to not switch on the fly.
Als remember that you can only switch secondary archtype in certain area's
And...if I am a Necromancer, I'm a Necromancer. I'm not going to stop being a Necromancer for some fotm meta crap.
Very likely I will change gear, weapons and non-archetype augments.
But, other people, who love fotm meta crap, will want to change their Secondary Archetype.
There are paths which will allow them to do so... but, not on a whim.
If I'm a Shadow Disciple, I might want to have my primary group all be x/Rogues with a focus on the Shadow School.
Don't have to coordinate around secondaries, but we might want to do so.
Depends on the individual players and the group.
I prefer healer usually (perhaps as a disabled veteran both support and as an Infantry officer, I get tired of killing quickly especially among a bunch of civilians) if going to do anything group. I solo mostly and in group would rather just stay back and heal folks with a little damage thrown in if nothing to do at the moment. Most MMO's you don't get anything for healing though and so being a healer is slower progression. But, healing is the most challenging to me of all classes particularly when playing solo (most of the time) because you have to think to survive as your offense isn't as strong. Most damage classes in MMO's (especially non-magic) are boring as can be to me as they require little thought. You quickly see "this is how it's done in this game and how to build your character for maximum damage". So, you copy a plan and then go spam some buttons in a pre-planned routine. No real thought. The more thinking to survive is involved the happier I am. Group play as a healer is a chance to relax sort of and support.
If you want to change it, make another character.
/Disagree
It'd really be nice to be able to play a single, "main" toon - and to be able to explore the full (or near-full) content of the game with a single toon. This is a BIG part of what made playing SWTOR after SWG so painful; I went from years of freedom of poking at every aspect of the game with my toon in SWG (i.e. imperial content & rebel content, space content), to playing SWTOR - in which you *need* to create alts and invest time in them, in order to explore all of the game. It was purposeful and by-design.
Now, that's not to say that you should be able to *craft* everything via a single toon; In this case, it feels appropriate to have to invest the time and effort on alts, if this is your goal. HOWEVER, you should still have the freedom to continually explore and then drop all of the crafting abilities - should you feel the need to explore all of them on a single toon.
You'll obviously need different toons to explore all of the combos and class-mixes - but that's fine. But it feels wrong to lock players into a "forever"-type of choice, in regards to their choice for secondary class-combo. If you change your mind at *any* point in the future beyond making that choice, then you'll need to abandon your main toon in favor of creating another.
I'm curious
Why do you think that would be better? How would that be good for the game?
Yes, true to the real feeling of a "class." That's why I presented my idea in the op, a nice balance between leveling a new character for the new class and the ability to just swap some talent points around.
There is the argument tho, that ashes is changing the identity of the word "class." I think each archetype is going to be what feels like a "class" and the second archetype (or class) will be a "subclass."
I like when people is locked on a class, I feel it gains much more meaning to your choice and you feel more bound to your character, you learn to make the best of what you have and truly maxing out your potential instead of reinventing yourself every time, "swapping some talent points around" and going on what you percieve is stronger or whatever. And btw, youtube will be filled with these meta-slave videos about what is the best combination and then everyone will swap to the current "trend". No personality or meaning to your toon at all.
The true masters are made when you have to stick to one thing and really squeeze the juice out and max to the possible limit.
@Tyranthraxus
Hi, I think you can really experience all the content in the game without having to change a secondary class. And if you change your mind, at least it should be very hard to swap secondary class, leveling from when you chose it OR having a maximum of 3 swaps in the character's life. For me I would like it to be completely permanent, or at least very hard to change.
But do I not get to test drive the different combinations first? If I can, that's switching. if not why not just choose it at the beginning? Why would I want to level a character to 25, choose a secondary hate how it plays, and then what, start over?
Should you be able to Respec skill points? Or should those be permanent too?
It sounds like you're promoting that if you made a choice and you hate it you should be stuck with it? Maybe you enjoy that, but I don't think that's going to be a majority feeling.
My understanding is that the secondary archetype is a choice like your skill points you're supposed to be able to change the flavor of your character, without having to change your character.
But if your goal is to avoid min max current trend builds and videos... Good luck that's going to happen no matter what, it's just gamer culture these days.
Primary Archetype is a permanent choice.
Secondary Archetype can be changed, but not on a whim. And progression in the Secondary Archetype is lost when you switch.
Secondary Archetype choice is a "more permanent" choice than skill point allocation.
Even swapping augments has to be done with an NPC, in town.
I greatly dislike the following scenario:
I play x class for y hours. x class is fun and desirable in the current meta, and so I'm having fun, and also effective. Then, the developers decide that x class needs to be nerfed, and y class needs to be buffed, and so they take my tools away. Now, playing x class is less fun (because the thing that made my build work potentially doesn't even exist), and x class is no longer desirable. My high-end raiding/pvp team wants to replace me with y class.
I have seen this exact thing, at varying levels of abstraction, at varying levels of commitment, happen countless times in different games.
For people with enough time, they're able to avoid losing their spot on the roster by making sure that no matter what balance changes happen, they're able to play whatever class turns out to be the top in the balance patch. This is exhausting and involves leveling tons of alts and farming tons of gear sets. For folks with less time, this often means selling your account to buy someone else's account that has the now-meta class.
Here's my ideal: when you level to 45 as a mage, you can, at any time, just swap over to being a level 45 summoner. Maybe you're given a sprout leaf icon to indicate that you don't know what you're doing on summoner yet, and you can clear that icon by going into the "proving grounds", and beating some benchmark challenges related to your level and role:
maybe switching involves going into the proving grounds and doing that first. But the idea is that it should hopefully just take a few hours instead of hundreds if you're a relatively skilled MMO player.
"but muh class identity"
Yeah. The immersion is getting in the way of class supply and demand. It causes tank shortages, dps surpluses and folks to get frustrated. It causes people to be extremely annoyed when the class they've invested 10000 hours in isn't performing well enough in the current balance patch, and they don't have any real choice but to keep playing it, because rerolling would be another 240 hour investment with no guarantee that as soon as you're done there won't be another patch.
I know that I'm in the minority here, and I know that ashes won't be designed this way
/rant
Now, I must say that we don't know the extent of the full combat system of Ashes and how the augments will play their role in combat, but I am speculating here based on what Steven and Intrepid have said. I think group composition will be much more open-ended than in previous mmos we have seen. With secondary archetype augments, different classes will be able to synergize like we have never seen before, and there will be as many ways to synergize as there are secondary archetypes (theoretically).
We know that, for example, a class can spec into weapon tree to get bleeding damage, and then spec into their abilities to increase damage to bleeding targets. So what if multiple people in a party specialize the same way using specific augments and weapons so that many people may cause the bleed, and many people now do bonus damage because of the bleed? Now, what if instead of bleed, there are many options, like knockdown, freeze, ignite, poison? Sure there might be a "best" debilitation at a certain time, but as long as your party has specialized into the same one, then does it ultimately matter?
As a side note to last paragraph, I assume a party would want many different debilitations so that if one of them is removed (or protection to it occurs), then there will be a backup option or 2.
Let's put it this way... I fully expect that swapping your weapon will be more impactful than swapping your secondary class. Because you have an entire skill tree devoted to a weapon, while your secondary class just gives different augments. Putting down a sword and picking up a mace will likely change you more than going from Rogue/Mage to Rogue/Summoner. (Speculation on my part since we haven't been able to see how this stuff actually works, but this isn't blind speculation either.) Would you suggest that once you pick up a weapon you shouldn't be able to change it?
If the developers screw up an archetype so badly that it’s not worth playing anymore then this game will be so bad that it won’t succeed. That’s not a reasonable thing to request or expect.
Also keep in mind that each one will have a very specific and distinct role in the game. You’re saying that you should be able to swap from being a tank to being a healer because they change how tanking works to the point where it’s not worth tanking anymore?
Changing primary archtype sounds a bit much.
I'm all for changing secondaries in town, and having certain secondaries change a primary archtype's role... But just freely changing primary sounds like FFXIV and u less they're going to do it the same exact way where you have to level each primary archtype separately too, that's gonna be a hard no for me.