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
Also important to note, lots of games on the D side of the spectrum just make mobs have more HP with maybe more unavoidable basic attack damage.
What I'd enjoy is monsters that are hard to kill not long to kill, don't make it take 2 minutes to kill but it's just spamming skills. I'd rather the mobs be 10-15s to kill, but have dangerous avoidable mechanics / attacks with blocks / dodges / interrupts that make you able to challenge a bigger number of these mobs as you get to learn their mechanics from repeatedly farming them instead of purely being a statcheck
A and B don't fit with the spirit of the game. Ideally I would see monster mechanics being possible to use with enough knowledge to help you fend off gankers when you get jumped while farming like baiting the gankers into dangerous mob mechanics you know you'll avoid and CC them while the mobs do their mechanics, so you'll be able to pull off a skill based 1vX with your skills and knowledge of the mobs and area
D would probably feel boring for most modern MMORPG players, so I think around C would be the best for the game. I really don't want it to be B, because that's past the threshold where I'd consider encounters meaningful.
Unfortunately it seems like AoC is closer to B than C currently, but they clearly didn't balance things property yet, and likely won't for some time, so there is always hope.🙏
Another important aspect of the game is that there isn't supposed to be some kind of "level difference" based difficulty. In WOW, you get increased miss chance, exp reductions, etc. It is all based around level difference.
Not so in Ashes.
That means that you could get effective EXP and resource collection rates at a large variety of areas. You aren't necessarily restricted to fighting mobs equal to your level.
All they have do to is create lots of respawn areas; solo mobs, 2,3,4,5 pull packs, starred mobs, roaming pulls, etc. for each level bracket in each node and then players will have to find the best places for them and their available group.
You could have a level 15 solo grind a level 20 - solo mob respawn area, or a level 13 - 3 mob respawn area and still have similar exp rates...
I think at some point the idea was to have dynamically spawning mob packs based on various triggers and world conditions. Some of that idea has been showcased with the Tower of Carphin. Will likely see some changes with node progressions. Corruption for sure. The basic idea being that one day you find some groups in a certain area, and other days you find different groups spawning in the same area.
We don't know the tuning yet, but at the end of the day you will be judging an area based on the exp/resource rates and aren't restricted to fighting monsters of the same level bracket. If you want to fight harder monsters you can fight higher level ones and it may actually be more effective depending on your build.
To me this sounds awesome.