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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.
Comments
Idk dude
They should be able to do everything, IF they have spec'ed for it
Sure they can summon tank, heals, or DPS but they shouldn't be able to switch between them in a fight freely to the point where they can change their role at a notice. A summoner/cleric with all DPS gear should not be able to summon something tanky enough to fill the role of tank in a boss fight . But a summoner/tank in gear that has tank stats should be able to.
Being able to swap out your monsters role for solo'ing is fine, but swapping on the fly for group content would be nuts.
Depending on how the summoner works I definitely want to play one, hence my interest in them. If they are able to flexibly switch from a role to a different role I feel like having your summoned creatures stats based off of your gear stats would be the smart way to go. Do you want your summon to be tankier you should be wearing something with tank stats you want your summon in the deal more magic damage you should have a magic damage gear set.
I'm all for summoners having more flexibility than the other archetypes but there has to be equal costs to do so.
My concern here is either it will be too efficient at being flexible and tons of people will want to play them, or they will be too "jack of all trades master of none" and not be good enough for anyone to want them for anything. I feel like the solution would be setting them up in a way to where building your summoner as a different role is akin to leveling it as an alt. You have to get a whole different gear set, collect different monsters to summon, etc... And for you to switch roles you have to effectively respect your character.
If tab target feels boring to you, it is because you are playing boring tab target games.
I know full well that you know tab target can be good. What you seem to have missed is that good tab target does exist.
If you knew good tab target already existed, you wouldn't be asking why tab target feels boring, you would be asking why bad tab target feels boring, and then probably realize how easy that re-framed question is to answer.
If I was asking "why bad tab target feels boring", then I would still talk about beatmaps, because it's not sufficient to say "because it's bad". You have to talk about why it's bad, and what makes it bad!
Point is, the comment "why does tab target feel boring" was made. So I essentially replied "because people play boring tab target games, rather than good tab target games".
Forgot to reply to this bit!
To use your driving analogy (I really dislike analogies in general), everyone has different driving skill, but the cars themselves are different. So you go to get on the track and you can pick between a mustang, a dune buggy, a porche, etc.
It can be the case that someone really, really excellent at racing a dune buggy can outrace someone really, really terrible at racing a porche, but on a normal track, the porche has an advantage. The porche itself, independent of who is driving it, has properties (acceleration, weight, handling) that separate it from the dune buggy. The driver has to make use of these properties, but it has properties nonetheless.
The matchup chart says "If a top player who is excellent at playing row_character plays against a top player who is excellent at playing column_character, they will win number% of the time".
So if we look at the Fox row, and then scroll over to column Z and see bowser and look and see "80", that's saying "if a top fox played against a top bowser, we would expect the fox to win 80% of the time".
This is because bowser, as a character, lacks tools to deal with the tools that fox has. If bowser attacks fox's shield, bowser gets punished. If fox attacks bowser's shield, bowser gets punished. Fox is faster, has better recovery, has more mixups, better pressure, etc.
This isn't to say that bowser can't win against fox, and indeed, a better bowser player can have a winning record against a worse fox player, and evenly matched browsers should still be winning 20% of their games. It's just that if you play just as well as your opponent, you'll likely lose, as the bowser.
Just like if you drive just as well as the porche driver in your dune buggy, you'll likely lose the race.
It's relatively close to what I was getting at
Now correlate that to AoC by allowing said bowser to augment their abilities to some degree, you get a much deeper chart as that fox player could do the same. Who is to say they will be so black and white in the spectrum opposed to shades of grey?
I think the system isn't intended to be overly complicated, but it will add personal and situational flavour to AoC's combat system for a plethora of different situations regardless of augment synergy for damage bonuses across the shared schools.
Not every situation will be statistically in your favour regardless of class/augment school variables with/without environment factors such as LOS etc.
For 1v1s, each "build" (main archetype + sub archetype + passive skill allocation + active skill allocation + armor choices + weapon choices + augments, etc) is like its own character, so there will be thousands of "builds". If you want to get spicy, you have a different matchup chart for each environment or content type that's different enough to make a different matchup chart for.
For 2v2s, each "team" of builds is its own "character", and there are now hundreds of thousands of those, and millions of matchups.
You end up with top-tier builds that most folks gravitate to and the game will be relatively balanced for those, in the same way, that you have top-tier characters in melee and the game is balanced in that small subset. But I repeat, melee is not a balanced game (look how many 80-20 matchups there are), and I don't expect that Ashes will be either, in any mode of play.
For an example of this in practice, World of Warcraft The Burning Crusade had 9 classes, 10 races, actual millions of ways to allocate talent points in each class, millions of possible ways to allocate stats, etc.
If you were to try to write out the number of possible unique 2v2 teams factoring in class, talents, and races, you would be in the billions.
When you looked at the 2v2 ladder, the top 100 teams were all almost exactly the same. They were all hunter/druid, warrior/druid, warlock/druid, rogue/priest, and rogue/mage. They all played the same races and played the same gear and played the same talent point allocations.
These 5 teams with these exact talents and gear setups are relatively balanced against each other in the same way that fox, falco, marth, and puff are all relatively balanced against each other. They also crushed all of the other possible ways to create 2v2 builds, so you were forced to either switch to be one of those or lose, same as in melee. That isn't balance.
I was thinking that its an interesting way of doing it. Having summon with their own xp bar. Some o them can also evolve which is could also be a nice feature to have for the Summon/X class to make them a bit unique
There will always be meta builds, min/max builds, cookie cutters etc. Some players prefer looking up how to play vs learning to play.
I don't disagree there! That's entirely separate from whether or not a game is "balanced", though, right? As in, if a 1v1 game is "balanced", then the matchup chart looks like that little subchart from melee with just fox, falco, marth, and puff, and if it's "imbalanced", then you have a meta where folks don't play the bad characters and instead just play fox, falco, marth, and puff (or they play the bad characters and have poor performance).
So in order for a game with a lot of characters to be considered "balanced", it has to make sure that a lot of matchups are close-to-even. Once you have bunch of characters (in ashes' case, buches of builds), this is impossible. It gets worse with higher player counts, not better. If they don't care about balance, and say "let the players just play in the sandbox we've created", that's totally an option.
Players will figure out what the best is, will gravitate toward that, will equip the best stuff, pick the best augments and play the best classes, and the lesser builds will get absolutely dunked on.
If you want players to be able to "play what they want and succeed", your game has to be "balanced". Otherwise "I want to play bowser" runs face first into "bowser has a 20:80 matchup vs falco". If melee was balanced, you could pick whatever character you'd like, with the assurance that all of your matchups would be close to 50:50.
In ashes, if there was some sort of assurance of balance, you could play whatever build you wanted (or team composition, or class) with some assurance that you weren't absolutely hamstringing yourself in the long term in the way that bowser players are hamstringing themselves.
I'm saying that there will be no such assurance of balance.
To make this problem even worse, this all changes periodically at the whims of the developers. To stay competitive, you need to hedge against meta builds being nerfed by playing enough to keep non-meta builds up-to-date that you predict will be meta after the most recent round of nerfs. This is miserable.
Like in the WoW example, you may notice that none of the meta 2v2 comps include a paladin or shaman, so you hedge that in the next round of nerfs they'll make sure that paladins and shamans get time to shine and nerf everything else, so you make sure you have a paladin or shaman ready for when the patch comes, just in case.
Classes have pro's and cons to them. That doesn't mean everything should be balanced for 1v1's exactly the same. Intrepid's goals for "balance" are not based around 1v1 per se. Some classes will have advantages in 1v1 while others will have advantages in group play such as 8v8 and 40v40 with the addition of their augment schools group play synergy. Take any large scale pvp game, if you focus fire with enough players, that target dies quickly.
I am curious on their PvP mechanic goals. But that's all I can really say as they're still working out those details being only in Alpha at the moment. IIRC, they're doing something similar to Lineage 2 and GW2 in terms of combat. Those large scale pvp battles are probably going to mainly focused around siege events with siege weapons, combat mounts etc. There is still the chance of players massing in the hundreds and going zerging but that's another story, lol.
Point is, there is multiple ways to kill players with the scaling of numbers and damage from those players. The better chances for even combat is the siege events with an attacker and defender faction.
Let's talk 3v3, because it's a little easier to write out than 8v8 (but all of the same principles apply).
Here are some example team combinations in 2v2: minstel/shadowmancer, scout/apostle, shaman/spellshield, etc
Quick napkin math says that there should be ~2000 different 2v2 teams in ashes that you can make with the 64 classes (before we get into augments, armor types, weapon types, skill allocations, etc). Each one of those 2v2 teams have pros and cons to them, and none of them will fight exactly the same.
Would you agree that in the 2v2 bracket that there would probably be a meta? Where some teams (out of those 2000 compositions) would perform statistically better than others?
Then, add in another player and you get the 3v3 bracket. Now you have team comps like minstrel/shadowmancer/predator, scout/apostle/argent, shaman/spellshied/soulbow, etc. Each one of those 3v3 teams have pros and cons to them, and none of them will fight exactly the same.
Would you agree that in the 3v3 bracket that there would probably be a meta? Where some teams (out of the ~131k different 3v3 compositions) would perform statistically better than others?
Then add in another player and you get the 4v4 bracket..
Repeat until you get to 250 players
If Elon Musk came in and said "1 billion dollars to the 250 man team that's top of the ELO ladder in ashes of creation 5 years from now", to incentivize the nerds to actually get out there and optimize, do you think you'd see tons of build diversity in sieges, or do you think there would be a meta in the high end chasing that 1 billion dollars?
The math doesn't go away, and the meta doesn't go away. The best 250-man-comp composed of the builds that are the best at doing 250-man content will absolutely dunk on a 250-man-comp of randomly picked builds. You can't just "play what calls to you and be successful". Design clash.
It's totally separate to balance your game around a bracket of play, than it is to design class kits to make sense in the context of that bracket of play.
If you want to balance your game for 250v250, then you have to care about matchup charts, because that's what balance is.
If you want to design your classes to all feel incomplete unless they're part of a huge group setting, that's a totally different conversation outside of the context of balance. You can make it so that each class has their own identity and "role" in a siege context that's fun/interesting, and those roles feel weird/incomplete in 1v1 settings.
For example, you might have a front-line tank that is great at stunning or controlling space, but has no way to follow up on it, or not get kited, so it's terrible at dueling, but is awesome at locking down a bridge. This isn't what balance means.
It's totally possible to do all of that, and create all of those unique roles and fun gameplay, and then still end up with a game that's has absolutely lopsided 250v250 matchups.
You're very close to the answer, it's just not black and white
how many variables are involved with 250 vs 250 from from attackers vs defenders? open world vs gated scenario? mounts and combat abilities? races? religions? character level, attribute points from gear, consumables, augment schools, siege weapons, zerg vs organised tactics, how many players will meta? how many will cookie cutter, shadowbox? what is their adaptive learning curve? what kind of cap do they have as a player compared to the tools at their disposal in the game?
They'll figure what relatively works through the testing phases of the game. There is always some chaos in PvP when it comes to large scale battles. They'll figure out the variations for all min/max values and go from there to adjust over time.
you'll figure it out
This is all true, but depending on how the game is designed, the more people present, the less of a difference the particular class make up will cause.
A two person group consisting of two DPS is going to be quite different to a tank and healer
A 250 person raid of just DPS will be quite different to a group with 125 tanks and healers.
However, while the scenario with 2 players is absolutely going to happen quite often, the second scenario is not likely to ever happen.
Every time there is a raid of 250 players, assuming random sampling, there will be representatives of each primary archetype.
As to your suggestion of the reward for the best 250 person, before I get started on that I feel the following is necessary - Elo rating (not ELO, it is named after a person, so it is proper to only capitalize the first letter - but details) is not the best system for this as it is only really suited to zero sum situations. I can think of several situations in Ashes where the actual point of PvP is not necessarily going too be winning. It may be that you are more interested in wasting the oppositions time or resources, or you want to get them to leave an area, or you are just trying to harass them.
Elo rating is only really suited to lobby games, not open world. It would just be a poor design decision to use it as a rating system in any facet of an open world game.
That said, if we just ignore that and assume the basic premise of what you are saying, there will be multiple different builds.
If there was just one build (and by build, I mean the class make up as well as the general strategy used - as these inform each other), then all anyone needs to do to be able to beat literally every other team that entered this competition was to come up with a build that is a counter to that one build. Since every build in every game has a counter, that counter will exist.
Sure, people may just try and play the build that has the fewest counters, but the more people that do this, the more viable the few counters to that build would become, and the less likely that build that has the fewest counters is to win.
Over a five year time period, you will likely see the meta go in circles several times.
Why not? If that is the way they specced what, should happen is that summon doesn't last very long. This would not be useless nor 'intentionally trying to main tank'. No, you throw out your tank summon in that spec and situation to cover your main tanks mitigation cooldown because the boss design pushed on that mitigation for some reason. To go 'they shouldn't have ACCESS' to it would mean they lose a part of summoner's core role. Ie the ability to help the group adapt and optimize their strategy beyond their core composition mid-battle.
What your describing will lead to pug only design. Every class can do their job better than a summoner can do their job by design, otherwise everyone would just play summoner to evade the respec limit in Ashes. A summoner's role must be something beyond being a temp at a hiring agency or else they will get relegated to being a fairly pointless class to have in a serious group. Hence my stated abstract definition of what their role is.
Is pug only a valid summoner design? Yes. BUT that is also something IS could have been and should have been up front with. That's a day one design decision when thinking about the class' role in the game and many summoner mains who are serious summoners would not have invested in this game if that was their design intent stated from the get go. I'd personally demand a refund at that point, because it'd be pretty high up there on the 'looks shady even if they did this by accident' scale.
If you choose to play a summoner the risk/reward should be that without a summon present the character should be weaker than all non summon classes.
I want choices to have consequences not wishy washy respec on the fly 'game mechanics" which are not mechanics but sloppy design decisions to give thee illusion of 'choice' which is a flawed perception of freedom.
The main benefit of being a summoner type class is crowd control. if that player decides to augment their play style so that the summon/s tank/dps/support should be a perk but not a replacement for another player.
Many other classes will have crowd control and probably do it better given the games base mechanics (I think it will be easier for a fighter or ranger to get higher accuracy bonuses making them much better at cc than summoner for example).
I think we sort of agree on both a summoners weakness and that respec on the fly should not be the main strength of the class. Although in my opinion you should be able to build for this, it just should be a heavy gear and spec commitment compared to other summoner styles.
I'm less sure about what your first paragraph is on about.
Combat and combat related mechanics are fun.
Combat and combat related mechanics are relevant.
Pooping isn't.
This being said, the wotlk ''get the seed out'' outhouse quest was pretty fun.
I think having warriors or assassins or rangers who also get physically tired, as opposed to only casters getting mentally tired, makes for a better game.
As I said, could go for best of both worlds by making sure max level water (max level updated to expansion) works far far faster as to not get the effect you just mentioned but also get the benefit of socializing while out in the world.
This is just one example of how you could do things.
At the end of the day it depends on how much time and mental energy a dev is ready to invest in polishing the hell out of every single mechanic.
Couple of things here - there have been a lot of games where once you cross a threshold of team size, the team becomes "well rounded", and there are no longer counters, per-se. For instance, in overwatch, all of the heroes were originally designed to have soft-counters in 1v1s. Yet, when you play 6v6, even if you know what 6 heroes your opponents are going to use ahead of time, and even if they have to pre-commit to those, the best team to play against those 6 might be the same 6.
The way this ends up working at a high level is that you play a team that all covers each other's weaknesses and don't leave any real holes. It's typically map-dependent (so the meta team for ilios isn't the meta team for hanamura), but you'll often see overwatch league teams run mirror matches, or play the same 2-3 comps against each other, rather than the cyclic counter-comping that the devs were expecting when they designed the game.
This gets more apparent the more players you can have on one team, and the more you're able to cover your bases. You don't have to build for "rock" when you pick the individual builds for your 250-man team, you can build for "extremely good stuff", so to speak.
Put another way:
Some consider the following matchup chart to be a kind of balance:
Because none of the options dominate. Whether you pick Rock, Paper, or Scissors, you will be equally effective (though, this depends on how many players are playing Rock, Paper, or Scissors on your server). It also leads to really frustrating gameplay where your outcomes aren't based on your play, but instead based on luck-of-the-draw. Bleh.
Then, something like this happens:
Most folks would clearly call this "Imbalanced". Shotgun is clearly better than the rest of the options and it's throwing off the "Balance". Other folks may say that "Shotgun is S+ tier, and Rock, Paper, and Scissors are all B tier". Folks may call for Shotgun to be nerfed (or for the others to be buffed).
I'm saying that playing within this design (even before something like Shotgun is introduced) feels bad. Your 8-man squad of friends will occupy a row in a chart. You'll have the best time if your row has as many even matchups as possible. If you have a bunch of lopsided matchups (matchups that you win because you counter them, or matchups that you lose because you got countered), then those are all a waste of time. I dislike this type of design so much.
As for the points about the marginal effect of changing comp as player count increasing - yeah, agreed there. Changing out one player will make a huge difference in 2v2, because you're changing out half the team. Changing out one player will make less of difference in 3v3 because you're only changing out 1/3 of the team. Only 1/4th of the the team in 4v4, etc. By the time you get to 250, you're only changing out 0.4% of the team when you swap out one build.
But!
You have the ability to swap out 250 builds!
So now, the search space for "what is optimal" is absolutely massive and the performance difference between that optimal team and an "average" team can likewise be massive. The performance difference between that optimal team and that if you swap out a single DPS on that optimal team for an assassin will be tiny, but that doesn't particularly matter!
If you want realistic combat, then make it like mortal online 2 where you can put your shield up and directionally block attacks.
Like yeah if you take balance on paper somes class will look better than other but doesnt mean they wwill be easy to play for mos people. Cause most people see Pro player do something and they say Ah its new Meta so they replicate. But their skills asa person will not reflect as good as a pro player. And with the number of possibility in term o build. I dont xpect to have a Meta before a while to be honest
Objective based PvP is their tentative solution. I'm unaware of a better one.
Teams are going to be good at something relative to the map or the target. Getting through a road chokepoint, keeping away or drawing in and 'controlling' random enemies nearby, winning because they are strongest when there are no enemies, fortifying a specific position, etc.
A sufficiently well designed world would lead to the equivalent of 'Overwatch style maps, but they blend into each other and people can somewhat choose what map they want to do battle on'.
Tacticians would then tell groups things like 'we can break through here because we are stronger in this situation, coordinate for a push.
This doesn't work in OverWatch because if you can buy enough time by killing off your opponents, you switch comp. It works in the parallel game Paladins, because you must choose your team and cannot change the Heroes/Champions, so you must adapt a new strategy to every opponent.
"They picked three Tanks and we didn't choose any Tank breakers to get them off the objective, let them win it once and then destroy them in the next area which is terrible for 3 tanks, that way we build 'points' and 'currency' for kills and they don't. Then use that to modify our group so that we get tank-countering abilities before they can do much, and try to win the last part with all our built-up Tank counters."
This is another interpretation of 'objective based PvP' I think.
For sure, when you get to a specific size, you focus on a strategy, and the counter is to that strategy. Your class make up is informed by that strategy though.
An example of this would be Archeages mageball strategy that the game had for a while. It was thought to be unstoppable.
As it turned out you could stop a 40 person mageball with 10 players - if you did things right. If you did things wrong though, that 40 person mageball would mow through 100 well organized players (well organized for anything but a mageball, that is).
I spent years in Archeage. Funny thing about that game is that the individual player meta literally never changed in the years I played (Darkrunner and Daggerspell or bust), but the meta around large scale not only didn't really need either of these classes, but it changed often.
This is because, as I said in my above post, the meta on this scale is about strategy, not class make up. That said, your strategy will inform the class make up that you want to take (if the strategy is to try to engage and hold up the enemy, you will want more tanks and healers in Ashes than if your strategy was to try and kill the enemy, for example).