Will PvE be trivialized by the high number of multi-target skills?
Tryol
Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Context:
You are a player doing solo, PvE content in leveling gear.
You are fighting are normal (non-elite) mob(s) around your level.
Although I believe that combat shouldn't be designed around casual solo PvE content (but group combat instead), it is still the most common encounter in the game.
Also, let's not bring group gameplay into this discussion, as that would make it much more complicated. I think it makes sense to settle on a good solo PvE baseline before discussing that.
What is your desired difficulty for this type of content?
Where would you like AoC to end up on the spectrum below?
I think it is important to discuss how we want single-target and multi-target attacks to be balanced relatively to each other, both in quality and strength.
With melee combat looking to be heavily cleave/AoE based, and ranged combat also having lots of multi-target skills, we might be leaning closer to the left side of the interval.
Some questions to help you with your responses:
You are a player doing solo, PvE content in leveling gear.
You are fighting are normal (non-elite) mob(s) around your level.
Although I believe that combat shouldn't be designed around casual solo PvE content (but group combat instead), it is still the most common encounter in the game.
Also, let's not bring group gameplay into this discussion, as that would make it much more complicated. I think it makes sense to settle on a good solo PvE baseline before discussing that.
What is your desired difficulty for this type of content?
Where would you like AoC to end up on the spectrum below?
I think it is important to discuss how we want single-target and multi-target attacks to be balanced relatively to each other, both in quality and strength.
With melee combat looking to be heavily cleave/AoE based, and ranged combat also having lots of multi-target skills, we might be leaning closer to the left side of the interval.
Some questions to help you with your responses:
- Are you happy with AoC's current PvE difficulty from what you could gather from the livestreams?
- Where would you draw the line between meaningful and non-meaningful content on the spectrum?
- How would you balance the number/type of single vs multi-target skills to get there?
- What other mechanics could be utilized outside of stat boosts to preserve challenge?
5
Comments
The context is necessary here because the picture is specifically meant to describe the average casual, solo PvE experience. As with dungeon/group content everything from A to D can be fun in different scenarios.
I'd personally lean towards D as well, but I'm not sure something like that would be a hit with the very casual crowd, so I'd happily compromise at C.
In my ideal world, you can vary the difficulty and survivability of this sort of experience by fighting lower or higher level enemies, allowing you to have a range of experiences based on your choice of grind location. A few levels lower, I might be able to take those extra enemies without as much trouble. A few levels higher, I can hunt my build's favored enemy for a good exciting fight.
But, the June 2022 combat demo seems to indicate Modern World of Warcraft.
I assume you mean PvE. The game is not made for solo play per se, and the average casual experience can vary widely based on the quests for example, hence my point of context not mattering that much. But I mean my answer is the same. I prefer D. I'll add another reason that @SongRune 's response made me think of: individual mobs are irrelevant in aoe farming. When you are expected to fight multiple mobs at the same time, they can't all have interesting and dangerous abilities, maybe just one or two of them at most. So why not remove the fluff extra mobs, only keep the dangerous ones and have them reward more xp? The only thing farming multiple trash mobs simultaneously (solo) achieves is giving you that power fantasy feel which is what most of AoC's target audience is trying to get away from, being some god-like hero.
Yes, I meant PvE (edited my post), sry about that.
I know that the game is not made for solo players. I am not advocating for them to make solo content either. I'd be perfectly fine with it personally if there was no way for a player to solo-level to max (although it'd turn of lots of people). But solo content exists in the game and it will almost definitely be viable to level to max, even if slower than in group because you can't do the more rewarding content.
As long as solo content like that exists, it is worth discussing because it will be experienced by a huge amount of players. That is why I made this post, not because I want them to focus on solo player content.
I'd be the happiest we ended up at C or D, but as @Dygz also mentioned, we might be leaning towards B considering what they've showed in the last update. I really hope that is not the case, although B would be bearable, I think A would completely ruin levelling for me.
A and B can be tossed in for events and things of that sort to add some flavor but it shouldn't be the norm, especially not for solo play.
Honestly it comes down to character development. Is everyone a "-magni bronzebeards voice- CHAMPION!" wwho literally saves the world on a daily basis? Or are they just normal adventurers trying to make a name for themselves in a world that has no idea who they are? I prefer the latter. And I also just prefer an MMO that focuses on community rather than solo play, so if the mobs are difficult by yourself, it promotes that.
Ya that is what I was starting to think as a understanding for it, mobs being like that would be a solo players worst nightmare to be honest. They accidently pull 2 mobs and they be dead unless they were skilled enough.
I think to be more inline with that C would be better and have mobs with a lot of difficult abilities to deal with.
A sprinkling of reverse population would be nice too. So that there's a few locations with hard singular mobs at low levels and then a few locations with easy group mobs at top lvls. With mid lvls having the most of both sides, which might limit the "mid lvl burnout" feeling and have a way to test your newly acquired class augments on a wide variety of mobs.
This is generally a bad idea in any field. You want your lower level gameplay to accurately represent the general form and concept of higher level gameplay. If you don't, you'll get all the "mass carnage" people joining, loving it, and quitting as they get to endgame, and you'll have all the "challenging single-target enemy" people quitting out at low levels due to the appearance that this isn't their type of game. Some players in both groups will investigate higher level gameplay, but that just means you lose a few of the first group faster, and force the well-informed members of the second group to slog through something they dislike. No-one wins. You have to make your game's intended audience clear and honest at all stages, or you'll end up with the wrong people, missed opportunities, and high attrition.
I typically pull individual mobs from groups and deal with them 1v1.
That's pretty much the way it worked in Alpha 1, I think.
On the one hand, the June 2022 made it seem like we will typically aggroing groups, so we should expect that solo combat will be challenging and we will want to travel with a group.
But, if it's as easy to solo groups as it was in that demo - it looks like combat is closer to B.
Of course, the UI was turned off, so we don't know what levels those mobs were compared to that Weaponmaster. Could be those were effectively trash mobs.
There can be elites as well.
That means that mobs and NPCs should be raiding players, especially during World Events, just as players raid mobs.
Rather than hacking and slashing through hordes of mobs.
Again, especially true in a PvX game where PvE should be on par with PvP. At least in terms of health and abilities, if not in terms of AI tactical genius.
I see it like this. Quite a lot of people will probably start the game alone and they might not like if the game is super hardcore right off the bat. But if they enjoy the game enough to get to higher lvls, to a point where you kinda need to find people to help you - there'd be more chances that by that time they would've met a guild they like or just a group of people to play with. And at that point that can try out the more difficult content, which would mainly be solo mobs (in my preference that is, I dunno how it'll be in Ashes).
If they don't like that gameplay, they can still go farm group mobs, but now there's fewer places where they can do that. So they might still have to group up at least with 1-2 people to defend themselves from other people farming those locations who might want to pvp them (that is, if the player in question doesn't want to pvp). So the difficulty of the overall gameplay still goes up. The risk vs reward equation stays the same. And this pushes people towards guilds/groups, which is the semi-final goal of the game because there's a tooon of group/guild gameplay, but you gotta be a part of those groups to experiences it and unless you push people into that situation - most people won't even try.
I might be wrong in my proposition of how things would go with my suggested mob balance, but I personally feel like it would be good, which is why I'd prefer it to be done this way.
You are a player doing solo, open world PvE content in leveling gear.
The mob(s) you are fighting are around your level. and
(The mob numbers provided are meant for "average encounter" across all classes, build and mob types.)
Q: What is your desired experience for this type of content?
Where would you like AoC to end up on the spectrum below?
A: C is the best and most correct for your average PvE encounter in my mind,
therefore i would like AoC to end up on C for average monster power encounter.
Q: Where would you draw the line between meaningful and non-meaningful content on the spectrum?
A: This isn't to say that A, B or D can't have a place or can't be meaningful in the game, it is important to have variety of PvE. If we take the same scenario but change around the power of monsters we are talking but the same player with the same leveling gear all of them can be meaningful and we can get:
A: Against Trash monsters (requiring ~10 of them to be a chanllenging encounter)
B: Against Below average monsters(requiring 3~5 of them to be a chanllenging encounter)
D : Against Above average monsters (requiring a single one of them to be a chanllenging encounter)
Just balance their drop/exp rewards accordingly and we make all scenarios meaningful, some classes might do better against a scenario or another, like Ranger high single target damage and kiting Scanario D or Mage exploding Scenario A in a single AoE Blast.
Q: How would you balance the number/type of single vs multi-target skills in to get there?
A: I would most likely balance amount of AoEs around classes,
some with less(example: Ranger and Dagger)(But more single target power),
some with more(example: Fighter and Mage)(But less single target power),
but giving the players ways to increase or decrease the number of AoEs they get through the Secondary archetype/religion/social organization augments system by making AoE skills Single target or single target skills AoE.It is important to remember that giving player tools to play the way the like is essential.
Q: What other mechanics could be utilized outside of the of player's skills to preserve challenge?
A: As previously implied, Monster Power variation for more diversity in PvE encounters.
Aren't we all sinners?
This could be achieved by introducing a system where elite mobs spawn after a certain number of trash mob kills.
Added: Normal non-elite mobs should never pose a large kill threat 1v1 threat to a competent player.
That would be a game-killer discouraging exploration on top of making PKing way too easy. If a mob on level par has a high chance of killing someone with no other enemies involved, imagine how miserable it’d be to have just one other human that decides they want to fight you.
If you knew your Stuff,
if you used your Abilities good in Combination with Bandages, Heal-Potions, Warlock HP Stones and so on,
you could for a short time vastly outclass your Classes' normal Strength-Limits. You were able of amazing feats.
Be it fighting "Hogger" in Elwynn as a LvL 10 Character,
be it fighting "ELITE Mob-Worgen" in Pyrewood in Silverpine Forests beneath being LvL 17 or above,
or the good old " Tyr's Hand " Area held by the Scarlet Crusade in the Eastern Plague Lands. You had to know your Stuff if you wanted to be able to take the Mobs there on without dying.
I hope Ashes will be very similar. I saw Player-Characters "struggle" a bit with single Mobs. I will never forget how much the Mage in the Minotaur-Camp had to be careful as heck - in Order not to get killed.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✗ Not looking for a guild atm
If a class is too suceptible to crowd control then he would struggle up to C if those mobs have some good crowd control skills
More importantly though, I think this encourages people to group up, even for basic quests/commissions. A Tank will be able to survive a lot more mobs at once, but will need the help of a dedicated DPS to cleave them all down before he runs out of resources. Alternatively, two DPS might be able to CC and burst down a group of 3-5 before they become threatening. The point being, any two players together will clear mobs more than twice as fast as they would alone.
So while solo gameplay would be at C on your spectrum, I think this quickly goes up to B for 2- to 3- player parties, and A for anything larger than that. Once you have a Tank, a couple DPS, and a Cleric (or off-healer), I think you're going to want to chain pull medium-large groups and let the DPS blow them up with a ton of AoE, while the Tank and healer worry about the logistics. And maybe, as we saw in the Bard showcase, you might slow down occasionally to single-target focus an elite enemy you come across (or particularly troublesome normal enemies, like healers or buffers).
All of this is assuming you're fighting open-world mobs that are comparatively weak. Once you get into dungeons, I expect you'll need a full party of 8 to keep up the same pace.
A and B seem far too easy - almost childishly so.