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
To clarify from that same link though...
Choosing life augments will provide self-healing benefits as well as limited life-giving benefits to other players.[18][16]
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.
It isn't a hybrid.
If that paladin isn't a le to fulfill the role of a healer in that group, they are not a hybrid tank/healer. This goes back to notion that a tank or healer being able to do some damage doesn't make them a hybrid DPS.
In order to be a hybrid, you need to be able to fill that role in a group.
A paladin with some healing ability is taking that healing ability at the expense of other aspects of tanking (specifically in relation to survivability) that other tank/* classes are able to take.
This is perfectly viable, and is literally what I described a paladin in another game as doing. This does not make them a hybrid, however.
In this situation, you have a tank that is able to take on some of the healers role in healing the group a little, but requires more focus from that healer to keep that tank alive (due to having to forgo other survivability aspects that other tanks have access to).
This is perfectly viable, and if the game has a healer class that specializes in keeping one target alive, this may be a good pairing.
For a third time though, this doesn't make them a hybrid. That paladin is a tank, and only a tank. They may go about being an effective tank in a different manner, but tanking is still the only role they can fulfill in a group.
Don't remind me. What have they done to Vilgefortz...
Yeah, I hear you. Some of their adaptations have been silly - though they look like militant anachronists compared to the cluster-f*ck the Amazon team is doing to WoT.
*lets pretend we are not going off topic*
DPS is the main element of rogue and ranger and assuming the main element of the class you will fuse with will be absent more or less negates the whole concept of the system Intrepid said they will use.
Also the presence of an evasion tank could be achieved via stats and gear more than combining any two archetypes, so let's not jump to assumptions regarding it.
Not did I say it should be on part, I said the dmg should be present tho and I even gave a suggestion of 80% of a fighter/figher.
I'm not, a discussion or two in the last years occoured on the matter because it is a major aspect of the class and trinity system employed by Intrepid.
Everything I've been ''shown'' was rather based on assumptions I disagree with as opposed to arguments.
Which is not necesarelly something I disagree with as the game isn't out and speculating is all we can do and it's something I do too, but let's not go into things like ''you lost the debate because you were proven wrong'' because the evidence, the proof, doesn't even exist yet.
As I said I used WoW because it's the most known mmo-rpg and because it's more simplistic and if you didn't read me saying that, that's not my fault and I don't really appreciate the suggestion that I used it as an example because of ignorance of other games.
I'd say they started doing things wrong since late vanilla but this is off-topic, I just wanted to give WoW's simplistic but pretty loved class-spec system as an example of class gameplay.
Even though augments do radically change the way your active skills provide you abilities, there's still a primary focus on the base archetype itself and not the 64 whole classes.
And from Jeffrey Bard:
We're not really talking about 64 true classes, we're talking about eight classes with 64 variants... There isn't as much variance between the 64 classes as you might expect. It's not like there are you know 64 different versions of... radically different classes.
Another quote from Steven:
We're fairly similar to the holy trinity of class identity. I think that the way our primary archetypes and secondary archetypes, the combination of that creating these 64 different classes, it is a goal to kind of blur the line between those identities, that standard Trinity that's present. I think additionally the way that we're developing classes is to be that rock-paper-scissors type of interaction, especially balance them around group vs. group kind of dynamics or group dynamics; and... by utilizing the augment system allows for players to kind of take skills outside of just the realm of their identity and into a different area.
They're careful to temper expectations. Augments are not going to be dramatic changes to a class. It's not turning your Warrior into a Paladin (in WoW terms). It's a subtle thing. Not meaningless, but not a huge change.
Another Steven quote:
Certain archetypes are capable of moving the gap between their counterpart per-se. If I am a Tank archetype and a Mage is my counter, I can take a Mage secondary and kind of bridge the divide slightly; and then move my identity that direction ever so slightly.
And here is possibly the biggest quote about augments, given by Steven in Discord:
Our player class advancement follows both a vertical progression in the traditional leveling sense, as well as a horizontal skill customization platform. When players start the game, they will be able to choose from 8 separate Archetypes. These archetypes represent the staple fantasy classes; Fighter, Tank, Rogue, Ranger, Mage, Summoner, Cleric, Bard. As the player progresses vertically with their primary class, they will have the opportunity to add a second class. This second class will be chosen again from the 8 archetypes, and will follow more of a horizontal progression. The second class will allow the player to augment their primary skills from their main class, with effects from their secondary class. For example; A fighter has a skill called “Rush”, that allows him to rush towards a target and upon reaching the target, deals x damage with a chance to knock the target down. If that fighter were to choose Mage as his secondary archetype (Spellsword), he would gain access to certain augments that he could apply to his primary skill tree. Let’s use his Rush skill as an example; As a Spellsword, he could choose to apply a teleportation augment to the Rush skill, which would allow the skill to now teleport you to the target, eliminating the charge time on the skill. Each skill in the primary tree will have several augment options from your secondary tree. The secondary skill augment tree will follow a horizontal progression that will be expanded upon further in a developer’s blog.
I think it's fair to expect augments to be fun, cool, and useful. I don't think it's fair to expect augments to completely change what your character is capable of doing. They won't let a Tank fill a healing role in a group, and won't let a Rogue step up and take over tanking duties.
Seems very close to how Steven and Jeff originally architected the class construction. It will be interesting once we move deeper into class development and Alpha 2 how close this concept holds since Jeff’s departure last year.
Not that it matters, but I'd have preferred a class system that is more traditional, with a much larger suite of abilities available to each class. Then, an additional large pool of archetype or general abilities, even some more rare class abilities, that need to be obtained through various methods in the game. You might even need to choose between which rare class abilities to obtain, not being able to obtain all of them. Then, I'd have done something like added a huge pool of hidden classes in the game that can be obtained. Once you locate a hidden class, if it's available to your class and suits your style, you can go through the legacy quest to obtain that hidden class' legacy, which includes another specialized suite of skills. You could swap hidden classes by going through a different hidden class' legacy quest, abandoning your previous hidden class and the suite of skills that come with it. Some hidden classes could even be more powerful than others, but also have much more difficult legacy quests that need to be completed. It should be so that your ability suite matches the skill level of your gameplay. It's both fair and allows for room to improve.
Something that went as far as having some overpowered as hell hidden classes might even be good, where world events were centered around those players. Creating some star players that are really driving world events. If anyone has ever read Overgeared, a character named Kraugel became the Sword Saint. It was supposed to be the strongest combat class in the game, but he had lost too many fights and began to lose his qualifications to the Sword Saint class. If you were going to go as far as to have that kind of overpowered aspects, it should definitely have very high maintenance requirements.
Unfortunately, that would be a lot of work to develop so many abilities, hundreds of them, but it sure as hell would bring class diversity and character identity to a game.
If we take that and assume 3 ranks per ability (which add additional effects to abilities), 4 augments per ability per class, 1 per race, an average of 1 per ability for religion, and an average of 1 per ability for social organizations, that adds up to a total of 40,320 ability combinations in Ashes.
If that doesn't at least somewhat impress you, then I am not sure what would.
This maybe because you have not yet seen any abilities that are expected to be in the final game, as they have not yet been developed.
That all depends on how each of those augments affect the abilities they're tied to. Again, my worry is that the ability augments are marginal or superficial, not really changing much of the functionality. If they do, fantastic, but if they don't, then it will really kill any hope for class diversity. In any case, personally, I would rather have more ability options and less augments per ability.
In my opinion, everyone is too concerned with balance when the matter of balance can be removed entirely by making it a matter of horizontal gameplay. If you're underpowered it would then be because you haven't obtained more powerful abilities rather than your class being imbalanced. Instead of developers spending time constantly trying to balance classes between each patch, they could spend that time implementing new abilities and means of obtaining those abilities.
That's quite possible. I am optimistic that what I've seen already will be significantly improved upon, but like you said, they haven't developed a lot of abilities yet. I'm simply not impressed with what's been shown so far, and that probably has a lot to do with many of the existing abilities being easy to pop out of the box in the Unreal Engine.
That's fair. It makes sense to be skeptical. We haven't really seen much of anything yet and we don't know too many specifics. We barely know anything about 5 out of the 8 archetypes, aside from generalities, and we really don't know how augments will work outside of the basic philosophy behind them.
There are two high level effects in MMO's.
deal/create damage
heal/prevent damage
Every single ability in an MMO comes down to these two functions. CC is simply a way to stop an enemy dealing critical damage to an ally, as is a heal, as is a debuff that lowers a targets chance to hit, as is a blink that teleports you out of the way, as is a buff that increases a tanks mitigation temporarily, as is an active dodge or block ability.
Likewise, a backstab is a way of creating damage, but so is a debuff that lowers the targets mitigation, so is a buff that increases an ally mages intelligence, so is a combat roll that puts a fighter in striking range of a target.
So, in reality, there are two effects in MMO's. There are different ways of arriving at these effects, but there are two effects.
If you wanted to, you could expand that list of two effects to about 6.
Deal damage
Heal damage
Movement
CC
Buff ally
Debuff enemy
I challenge you to come up with a single ability that is not just a combination of these 6 components, and does not have the purpose of the further above two base effects.
Using the scale of the combat system outline from my above post, I am unsure what it is you expect here. How are the developers supposed to take these six effects and make them in to 40k+ abilities, in a way where each ability that an individual class has is changed in a material way?
I mean, even if we drop the 40k+ total abilities and look at things from the perspective of one player, playing one class. You want Intrepid to make each augment non-superficial. This means that for each of the 8 classes, Intrepid need to spread these 6 effects across 5,040 augmented, ranked abilities.
Do you honestly think what you are asking here is even mathematically possible?
Still too soon, man... it's still too soon...!
Bwahahahahaha! 😂😂
What Atama said.
Rather than many abilities leaving players with little choice, Intrepid are making fewer base abilities (though still likely more than 250 in total) and giving players unprecedented ability to alter those abilities. Each individual ability will have around 170 different variations.
So, you are basically saying that although Intrepid may be making the best chocolate ice cream ever, you want vanilla.
Atama said many things, this has no context without a quote.
Based on those quotes you could draw the conclusion that classes will significantly differ from one another.
Based on other quotes tho, you could draw the conclusion that they won't at all.
Intrepid keeps contradicting itself and at this early stage in development I wouldn't be surprised if they had no real unitary idea themselves.
And even if they had, I wouldn't be surprised if it changed notably or even dramatically over the course of development.
All we can do is suggest the direction they should evolve, which is what I was doing.
He said "Don't date people you work with".
But I don't think that's what they're referring to.
The question is how significant are those variations.
Because if the vast majority are just numerical or visual that's a disaster.
If you take on board the context in which they are to be found in, there is less confusion.
I mean, if I am buying a cold drink and am a dollar short, if I turn around and say to my friend "I need a dollar", it is fairly well understood that this has a totally different meaning to a homeless person unable to afford food saying "I need a dollar".
The context of many quotes from Intrepid change the actual meaning of the quote. This is why the wiki provides sources.