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.
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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
20:44
And this one:
Our seasons are non-static. I mean, they are static but also non-static.
Zones will experience seasons based on their location in the world. And they'll be going through these seasons, and you'll have different types of crop cycles and rotations associated with seasons and you'll have pathing that opens up when Summer comes but is closed when Winter approaches. You'll have solid water, where you can walk on the water and you won't have access to it if it's in Winter but, the water will be open when it's Summer and Spring.
And then you'll have Events that bring with it, weather:
If some Winter Dragon appears because some Node has developed to Stage 4, and that Dragon brings with it an Eternal Winter, if players don't kill that Dragon, that Winter stays.
How long will that Winter Dragon be available for farming for that "super-rare drop" the OP posited??
The OP states: "In my opinion farming bosses should not be something that can be done over and over without variance, it should be something that always keeps you on your toes in order to keep the farming interesting."
And I'm asking, "Is that really how 'farming' works in Ashes?"
I asked that question in a hyperbolic manner, sure.
This kind of event will be more akin to public quests, or the rifts from Rift, or the anchor things from ESO.
This is not a raid encounter a top end guild cares about.
Here are some things that have not been mentioned yet at all from the wiki page for raids https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Raids
"Raids will also have dynamic elements that can change from session to session.[9]
The types and numbers of bosses and mobs present in the raid and their skill repertoire."
"The difficulty of PvE content, such as raids and dungeons will adapt based on the performance of the raid or group against previous bosses in that encounter.[14]
Higher performance in earlier phases will increase the difficulty of subsequent phases of the encounter.[14]
Certain AI behaviors might activate based on progress within an encounter.[15]
The higher the difficulty, the better the loot tables will be.[14]
Bosses and mobs will not auto-scale based on group size.[16]"
Will Intrepid succeed at making it a good experience ? We don´t know.
Are these things applicable for other PvE scenarios like smaller world bosses? We don´t know.
But i think it´s at the center of their design decisions and how they plan out the modularity of the encounters that is build up through the content distribution of nodes.
I just don't want the devs on my server - insider knowledge is an unfair advantage, especially if there are dev commands available to them.
The variations that Intrepid have planned should hopefully make things less predictable, but we don't know to what extent (and maybe Intrepid don't yet know). Until we see a wider spread of how Bosses are implemented (not just A1 content, because that was a server test) it's difficult to assess. Having several different game mechanics that a boss could use keeps players on their toes for a little longer until they have learned to recognize the mechanics and adapt.
Honestly, it's fine. In almost all cases, if they use their position for gain in game, they are putting their job at risk. Most people don't consider it worth the risk.
It is fun though, when they screw something up just a little - if you know what their responsibilities with the game are - to send them a message as soon as they log in next joking about how they fucked the game up.
Unless you constantly introduce more and more random mechanics and events around and during boss fights, eventually people will get the hang of all of them and the boss will become 'farmable'.
On the other hand, if a single guild is able to monopolize a world boss (they will probably have to respawn timers that are a week or two long, so...) and nobody has attempted to gather people to stop them, then they kind of deserve to 'farm' the boss.
Depending on how the scaling mechanics for bosses world (the anti-zerging boss scaling) works it may be enough by itself to reduce potential monopolies. Example:
Boss: Big-Ass Spooder
If there are more than 30 people in a 5 square kilometer proximity around the boss, then the boss scales up, summons more adds, calls spider web tornados and spits acid. It gets passive regen and a 250% hp boost that heals it up to the new max hp. Boss now deals %hp damage per second to all players in a 200m radius
Something like this will discourage camping the spawn with 300 people because it will make the boss infinitely harder to 'farm' and monopolize. And if the guild wanted to have just one normal party farm it and the rest 260 people guard around so nobody interrupts the farm, then they would have to stand a lot further away from the boss area which would give more opportunities to sneak up behind the 'farmers' and stick one in them.
How about having world bosses move/fly around instead of just sitting there waiting to die? For example, a dragon on a mountain could see a herd of animals below and decide it's feeding time, and fly over there. Sticking with dragons, they're usually depicted as being intelligent, so perhaps if it sees a massive zerg coming it's way, it
calculates the odds against it and maybe it decides to fly away? Then players would have to follow on the ground if they really want to kill it...and since it left, guess what some items/treasure it has are left behind at its original spot...new quests could happen from those items perhaps...and if you want to get crazy perhaps there's an option for players to "defend " the boss by attacking its attackers and not the boss? What if the dragon remembers who did what (maybe in a general way), like "they all seem to come from that town" and if it survives that town is in for some revenge the next night, or at least a fly-by scorching whomever is out and about, destroying some buildings, etc.
Btw I love the idea of gms controlling the boss, it would need to be done right of course, but the idea of bosses/mobs reacting dynamically would be cool.
Or if a dragon feeds on sheep and for some reason the sheep population declines in an area it goes to a different area...
This post could go on forever but one last thing: what if that dragon got too close to another dragon's feeding grounds, how would the resident dragon react? They could have a spectacular aerial battle...
Looking forward to this game!!
I guess you could make it so that the boss creates a big PvP zone like the caravans do, but then bosses would become a huge mess with TONS of people since there wouldn't be any death/corruption penalties. The boss mechanics would then have to be designed around having adverserial players that are trying to get you killed.
If the boss does not create such a PvP zone then guilds will to come to an agreement that whoever is ready first gets a shot at the boss. These agreements will be enforced by the huge number of people around them that know they can't kill the boss but hope there is a conflict where someone turns red.
What I meant is having a finite number of RANDOM mechanics that are both big and impactful, so when facing a boss for the second, third fourth time you wouldn't be able to just blindly follow the same steps over and over again but you will need to adapt to said mechanics.