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.
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.
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
Since most people do not want multiple roles on one character, if that is what summoners are sold as, most players will not want to be a summoner - resulting in fewer summoners than other classes.
I think the big sell for summoners will be Necromancer - so the bulk of summoners will likely stick to that.
I cannot argue with that. majority of summoners will probably be necromancers.
Most of the people I know in MMOs don’t put any serious amount of time into a different role. Not that they don’t dabble, but my friend who plays a warrior DPS in WoW spends 99% of his time as that DPS warrior, my friend that heals only plays as a DPS while leveling and then never specs back to dps, etc etc.
The point of this is while there are people who want to be able to do whatever they want whenever they want, in a game where that’s not possible, there will be more people that know they would prefer to just be a dps, tank, or heals and maximize that potential, as opposed to being a jack of trades and a master of none.
Ashes has Racial specs and Religion Specs and Social Org specs for each Primary Archetype.
Doesn't mean those specs shift you into a new primary role such that you can replace the need for some other Primary Archetype in an 8-person group.
People have one Primary Archetype to choose from for their primary role. That primary role will remain primary.
People can also dabble in a secondary role via the Secondary Archetype. And they can even swap out the secondary role by switching to a different Secondary Archetype.
Each character has more than one archetype to choose from. They can be two different archetypes at the same time, if they want to be.
But, Primary Archetype is always the primary role.
I've had a number of friends that would play shadow priest or feral for solo stuff or PvP content, but have the gear to swap to the heal spec when doing raid content.
I wouldn't exactly consider that doing whatever I want whenever I want. But that is some kind of flexibility.
I normally tank, but sometimes I want to DPS. Granted that's just because I don't want to do the work of tanking and DPS is just easier. Or because tank specs usually aren't the best in PvP
I understand that's not what ashes is going to be, what I'm trying to get at is that there are people who like changing and anyone who is used to switching or something like that is only going to have the summoner as an archetype to choose with any flexibility. Im not trying to say it will have the same degree of flexibility as a wow druid changing specs, but I would say it's the only archetype that looks like it will have any flexibility.
Every class has some flexibility.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to come back to how much will a secondary archetype change the primary, I was more so commenting on the thought that “because the summoner can be flexible it is going to skew the majority of the player base to play that archetype due to said flexibility”.
I think there are people who will definitely choose summoner because of that, and some like me are interested by the archetype because I love pet classes in any form, but I personally don’t think it’s such a large subsection of the player base that you’ll see 50% of players take that archetype, with the other 7 being left to the other 50%.
Speaking on that example you said where friends will switch to a dps spec to solo, while I don’t think the change will be so dramatic that you won’t feel like you’re playing the primary archetype you chose, I do hope that it will push you towards your secondary archetype enough where say a cleric/x may switch to cleric/mage so their attacks don’t hit like wet noodles, and same thought for tank. To flip it a mage/x who knows they are going out to solo switching to mage/cleric for some sustain while they grind.
I should also note they have said that switching secondaries won’t function in the same vein as retail WoW where I just press a button and now I’m another spec(class in AoC’s case). It definitely seems like it is going to lean more towards classic respeccing but with a little quest instead of a flat gold sink.
Mhmm mhmm ok ok I like where this is going please do elaborate c:
I'm right with y'all! Can't wait to see what the design team is cooking up for classes. I can't wait for the day that I can see what playing a Bladedancer will look like!
That a summoner can be a tank with a pet for it, that you can tank based on dodge, that you can tank based on enduring, have life, defense, own healing, with swords, maces, invocations, or even a knife creating copies of oneself or transforming into other creatures, gives wealth.
That various classes can play a role, it's not because I want to change every often, but so that each player who wants to tank has a style of play that fits with him.
If it is not to offer wealth that there are 64 classes with NAME, and they are only slight changes for me, they should have said that there were only 8 that could vary depending on faction, religion, profession and secondary class, in this way you would not give importance and so much debate and speculation would be avoided that it would end up disappointing one and the other by expecting one thing or another...
Any class can use any weapon and any gear.
Any race can play any class.
All Rogues will have the same Active Skills, but can attach a very wide range of Race/Religion/Node/Archetype/Social Org augments to the Active Skills to signifcantly change how each individual Rogue performs.
A Py'Rai Shadow Disciple can play significantly differently than an Empyrean Shadow Disciple due to the different Racial augments.
A Py'Rai Shadow Disciple can play signifcanty differently than a Py'Rai Py'Rai Scryer due to the different Archetype augments.
A Py'Rai Shadow Disciple from a Trader's Company can play significantly differently than a Py'Rai Shadow Disciple from a Scholar's Academy due to the different Social Org augments.
And all of the above can be supported with a variety of different weapons and armor.
So, yes, each Rogue/x has a wide variety of styles to choose from. And the same is true for Tank/x
The devs said what they said.
A class is a Primary Archetype combined with Secondary Archetype.
Secondary Archetype does not provide new Active Skills. Instead Secondary Archetype provides 4 Schools of augments which can be applied to a Primary Archetype Active Skill.
One of the types of Summons a Summoner/x can Summon has Tank abilities.
A Summoner/Tank will also have Tank augments to apply to their Summoner Active Skills.
The ability to NOT equip a wand in exchange for massive damage!
No unnecessary spammy filler wand attacks, just massive damage burst, then we must rest.
Make us spec into the Passive tree somewhere to unlock it, give us increased cast times and Mana cost if you have to - make us rest MP in battle if you have to - but give us the option to be a glass cannon!
Think Megumin from KonoSuba but not quite as extreme!
This is something I've thought about a bit and I'll take a hard stance with the hope that I am proven wrong in time:
The current design will fail if the class design goals are:
- Finishing the game
- Class identity
- Meaningful and interesting augment choices
How I see it, the current design can only barely satisfy two of the above at the same time. Let me elaborate.First, why did Intrepid pick the whole archetype/secondary archetype system? To me, it's obviously to cut down on development costs by reusing assets! Asset reuse is a vital game development tool seen in games both old and new. For the same reason that games feature recolored/reskinned monsters, Ashes plans to offer more build variety with the augment system. Instead of just offering 8 classes, the plan is to offer a total of 64 variations that alter the base abilities. This is objectively a pretty damn good idea if there isn't enough development resources to make 64 totally unique classes!
However, problems start arising if we start thinking about the numbers involved in the current plan:
8 archetypes.
35-40 skills per archetype.
4 secondary augments per skill.
8 secondary archetypes.
Even before thinking about religious and sociel augments, we are looking at roughly 10000 variations of skills. Just writing the TOOLTIPS for all of that is a big effort, not to think of the design, coding and balancing work involved. I don't think the current skill design team at IS is large enough to make all these variations unique or meaningful.
My closest guess is that the skill variations will be mostly churned out by using the Unreal Engine pipes to plug some augment school based colors onto abilities, and then slap the skills with some basic stat changes. At best, there will be flexible projectile and aoe change effects that are easy to connect to skills with UE that might be interesting, but these can become generic when applied en masse. My fear is that the "frost" Mage school will just add some blue color, cold damage and a snare to skills, while the "life" Cleric augment will add a small heal instead. Does the "Teleportation" school make everything it's applied to teleport?
The thought exercise I like to think about is if I can come up with 32 meaningful variations of fireball that also adhere to the four augmentation schools and further class identity while not taking years to develop. If you can come up with some, good job! Now think about something like the "Inciting Strikes" we saw from the Tank or a Rogue stealth ability. It gets quite tricky and most of the combinations seem redundant.
Finally about class identity, as we've seen, people are (subconciously?) expecting some sort of identity already:
I think many people are expecting a difference within the Summoner archetypes similar to that between Diablo 2 Druid and Necromancer, while I'm expecting to see the difference between WoW affliction and demonology warlock at most. Furthermore, if a Necromancer doesn't pick any Cleric "Death" augments, there probably won't even be any undead involved!
So yes, I don't have high hopes about the augments no matter how good the theoretical potential is with the current practical implentation.
How would I fix this? I'd get rid of the whole concept of augmentation schools and offer a narrower set of augments that focuses on the class identity/secondary archetype role. Instead of offering a Tank variation of fireball, maybe Tank secondary archetype could augment the more defensive Mage abilities and vastly change how they work. This way the design and balancing effort can be spent on making a few impactful choices instead of a legion of meaningless ones. Additionally, I'd also target some of the abilities that seem key to the primary archetype role. For example, "Grit" and "Aegis" from the last Tank reveal seemed to be core abilities to the Tank role. Offering secondary archetype specific variations of these abilities would be more efficient at building meaningful choices and class identity than same effort spent on "Inciting Strikes". Not every ability needs to be augmented by every secondary archetype.
Thanks for reading, and I hope I'm wrong.
A Cleric can heal. If you want to play a healer, you choose cleric. What you choose as secondary archetype will give your healer a specific flavor.
A Tank/Cleric is still a tank, not a healer.
A Cleric/Tank is still a healer, not a tank.
In summary; Ashes of Creation have 8 classes. Each of these classes have 8 choices of flavor.
Ashes of Creation have 8 core classes. One of them is tank. That one tank class have 8 different flavors.
From a player perspective, this is very good, and vastly more options than other games have given tank players.
i love this anime.
but i wish and it will not be implemented is dual wanding like in pPathfiner (or Dd3.5 can't remember).
AoC class wish: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/422108#Comment_422108
I'm not even sure if Intrepid intends to have all 8 classes available for the start of Alpha 2 (During the AMA Stephen was careful to say "Yes, we will be seeing some of those" when replying to if we will be seeing Rogue, Summoner, Mage, Bard in Alpha 2.
I've also been thinking a bit about the question regarding the number of skills for each Class. Steven said around 35/40, which seems like quite a lot, but when you consider that's both active and passive abilities. It isn't actually that many.
I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly how the secondary augmentations will be implemented. Can some of you fine forum folk help me out?
We know that the secondary archetype won't provide new skills, but will provide augmentation to the primary skills. Take the Ranger's Airstrike ability.
What were we actually seeing in that presentation?
I assume that is a Ranger using an ability pre-level 25? Before the secondary archetype has been chosen. So that is the "Vanilla" version of that skill. When the secondary archetype is chosen that Airstrike ability can/will be changed through augmentation. Perhaps if you chose Ranger again as your secondary class the skill will essentially stay the same but the damage will be improved and the slow duration increased?
Or do people think we were seeing a skill that already had an augmentation applied?
I'm also thinking about it in terms of development. The team has created this cool ability. Do they now need to essentially create 8 "Variations" of the same skill? If what we saw was the Vanvilla version of the skill, if you pick Bard as your secondary archetype how much will that ability be changed? Will the animation essentially stay the same with some changes to the SFX and stat effects for each of the secondary archetypes? Will the secondary archetype affect all of the potential 35/40 abilities or just some? That's a lot of variations if they are all affected.
I understand why Intrepid would be hesitant to show this, but I'd love to see the potential skill tree matrices they must have laid out for each of the classes. With 8 classes at 20 active abilities each. That's 160 different abilities even before you take into consideration passives and secondary archetype augmentations.
Am I essentially understanding the secondary archetype role? Just how much do people hope/expect for secondary archetypes to impact a character's identity and skills?
in DD/Pathfinder a druid can remove his pet to gain a rogue sneak attack.
in short an augment could remove a spell and change it for another really different, if many augment do that it could be really awesome.
if augment let us exchange core gameplay element for another one we can expect really cool stuff.
i hope they were inspired by this games.
AoC class wish: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/comment/422108#Comment_422108