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
Take a dungeon or large raid in WoW for example, sure there are some AoEs and ground targeted abilities that the entire party has to dodge away from, but the boss always either stays on the tank or is fixed in one place. This relatively stationary boss behavior is what necessitates the ridiculous barrage of AoEs in order to keep the rest of the raid from sitting still for 5-10 minutes burning the boss.
What if magical threat-inducing mechanics weren’t a reliable form of constant aggro management for tanks? Perhaps there’s a temporary aggro effect for emergency situations (tank-mage could use mind control, tank-bard could use a magical verbal taunt, etc) but the rest of the time, their job is simply to CC and debuff the boss.
Imagine an open world boss in Ashes. You’ve got a big area that’s had the surrounding mobs methodically cleared out, and you pull the boss. Sure, you can give the tank a moment to build up some aggro, but as soon as the rest of the group jumps in, that boss will start picking people out based on damage, health, etc, and will do whatever it takes to get to them. The rest of the party will have to stay on their toes and remain mobile in order to avoid getting roasted by the boss. As players are forced to lower their DPS / Healing while they avoid the boss, those of other players’ will go up, and the boss’s aggro will eventually redirect.
Meanwhile, the “tank” will be using abilities that diminish the boss’ armor, lower their attack damage, slow their movement speed, grapple them away from other players, apply dazes, stuns, and knock-backs in conjunction with other players’ abilities, occasionally force the boss’s attention away before cone-based attacks, and generally reduce the threat that the boss poses to their teammates.
This sounds like a bunch of fun to me, both from the tank’s perspective and the perspective of the other teammates. The team that put together the showcase this weekend were stacked right on top of each other so often, just staying relatively still in the same little 3-meter-radius circle the whole time. A bit yawn-inducing IMO. I think a system like I proposed could potentially fit into ashes of creation given that they’re trying to strike a balance between old school stationary-tab and action combat. I think it would be a lot of fun, and could potentially make tanking a more popular role. Such fight dynamics would be much more akin to how we see “boss fights” in fantasy films like the cave troll encounter in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
It is an actual self evident truth - yet you fuckers are arguing the point simply because I said it.
That is the kind of people the two of you are, and then you go and blame me for derailing the thread.
Ye I think you're absolutely correct with the limitations of the genre back in the day noting lack of mobility and the prospect of allying together even with strict abilities such as hard taunting and the like were negligible, it was new and incredibly exciting. It still is a good experience which has been made abundently obvious for a mainly younger generation with the likes of FF14 who don't have high gameplay expectations set from either a history of play or delving into what other genres are capable of.
To force backrow engagement a many and wide array of AoE's are made (I call it the donut game) and this can be a "good enough" game for some but I highly doubt gameplay such as this will do very little to compete with the very popular games we see today and to keep a high concurrent playerbase for all sorts of drama and easy partying for a game that will not use WoW's "make my party and teleport me to that instance!" you need to keep the attention of the audience with addictive elements such as gameplay and challenge and an incredible mixture of the two that imo needs to be on some of level playing field with the complexities and challenge of PvP (which can help massively serve as a learning curve and acceptance to those grudgingly against it as a feature in their game).
I am very keen on the idea of "emergency" type abilities as they are obviously very impactful, can be made to look awesome that makes you feel good and can certainly put a player in the spotlight, for good or bad reasons but that is the beauty of the adapting and learning curve and serves to elevate player interaction and teamwork. A focus on this can drive to make a lean more towards thinking, rather than mmo's prior that essentially devalue a lot of your learnt abilities by spamming them in a rotation and keeping up with the dps charts which is against not only completely void of good pvp gameplay practices but for most I imagine a pretty bad skill plateau vs knowledge and understanding based off of reactionary play and sudden variables.
Such skills as you suggested seemed pretty decent although I'd like to toy around with the idea that there could be a "Tank Sense" as such where mentality and physical weaknesses of the boss become apparent for only the Tank and his studying perceptions while safe in his heavy gear and shield haven and then based on that he can make sudden decisions of whether "this boss is susceptable to a good taunting/physical exploit" or "I cannot fix its gaze onto me and I can see its itching to make a big attack, I will manuveaur to protect this formation of allies". I mean with that said I think it could be rather interesting if there were "senses" from other classes to exploit or punish quality creatures/bosses but that's an indepth kettle of fish.
I'm generally against easy and/or long duration debuffs as it often turns out to be a neccessity than be more involved with interactive gameplay interaction although defensive debuffs provide a nice thrill when damage dealers see their bigger numbers and instantly feel more special and involved but I would naturally like for their task to be more gameplay involving than maintaining optimal dps.
I'm not using the pve as an example because the current pve is a joke. I meant there's a square in PvP.
Been away for a little bit, sorry.
If you have grown tired of the discussion then just stop replying to it. There's no rulebreaking going on here that I can see so no reason to close the thread.
If anyone wishes to post here regarding the topic at hand, which can basically be summarised as "I feel the power of tank taunts in itself is a silly answer to what can be more involved activity for all, let's try to discuss and hopefully expand on that!" then do so and perhaps what you post will garner the attention of people working on Ashe's.
I've obviously said enough on my thoughts, happy posting!
As I have said a few times in this thread, many games do exactly this. Raid wide threat management in EQ2 specifically involves more players than raid wide healing.
I get that you have never seen this in action, which is why I have been attempting to explain to you that you are figuratively asking for the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater. You are asking for the concept of tanks to be thrown out, simply because you have only ever played games where tanks are overpowered in PvE - and it seems to have just not occurred to you that they can be done differently, and indeed have been done differently in other games.