Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
That is how the oldschool games definitely did it.
And then, newer games tried to 'fix it' using a simple 'give them more DPS and control options' (which depending on your biases is either the right way or the very wrong way).
So idk about L2, but yes, overall, this is one of the main reasons people complain about Tanks in old games. Their abilities are not designed well enough to be good in both PvP and PvE. Part of this is unavoidable. Part of it is not. Some games solve it, some don't.
The Tank Showcase for Ashes also actually appears that it will be like this, if you only look at exactly the tools shown, and people have been complaining about it already too. I support those people just as I (technically) support your viewpoint.
If the victim doesn't notice this in time (happened quite often in frantic fights), they might use their abilities on the tank instead of their intended target, so the tank does their main job of "don't let the others get hit". And against any mage classes it also disrupts their positioning, which is a very valuable thing, especially against healers.
In pve it's literally just an aggro that generates hate.
It depends, but in a lot of games, no, this isn't true. The Aggro generation abilities are not actual attacks in any way, you just press an ability and either have more aggro or take damage for the person who does have Aggro and don't need to attack at all.
The only "aggroing" attack ability came with a ton of way more useful effects on it, so people always used for the effects rather than the "aggro" of it.
I miiight be able to check the difference between the aggro values and judgement's one. Give me a few mins.
You may need to clarify some specifics here, since to a player from that era, this really is outright not believable.
I don't know if you have any L2 examples, but FFXI has 'Earth Staff Paladin Tanking' for Boss Content.
An Earth Staff is a weak mage weapon and Paladins aren't great at Staff skill to begin with, it does have % Physical Damage Reduction though.
Such Paladins would rely on Trick Attack from Thieves to add to their Aggro along with all their other abilities, and definitely never even enter their attack stance. No Autoattack, no DPS, just stand there and control the mob.
You couldn't even put your shield on.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Grit
In some design places L2 was really really simple
No, sorry, I was responding to the 'damage output' part. I'm still having trouble adjusting to the 'FF14 mindset', so please continue to ignore me while I work on catching up to where you are.
EDIT: NiKr I leave this to you, I'm still too much in the wrong headspace for it (I really should have played that game but it's SOOO LAAAME for me).
So against any equal lvl mob, my attacks would be barely generating any aggro, while the aggro ability would still keep its values. And while the judgement ability adds a bit of aggro as well, its debuff side is way more valuable. Oh, and its dmg is x3 of my attacks, so it's also shit when it comes to damage.
In other words, the tanking still consists of just "use the aggro ability and be a meatshield".
Same with healers. For the most part, they had abilities that would heal, and different abilities that would do damage.
As I pointed out in another thread, in EQ2 specifically (a game I played at the very top end in for most of a decade), healers were expected to keep the group alive, stay on top of cleanses, buff the group, debuff the enemy, and also do an amount of DPS.
Each of the above tasks had it's own set of abilities associated with it. There was no worthwhile cross over.
I mean, this is just a bad take, even for you.
abilities having cross over effects is absolutely not a requirement of good class design. In fact, I have literally never seen anything I could call a good class design that leaned on this idea at all.
Good class design is where each ability in a class has a well defined use. Good content in a game is where all of those specific uses are called upon, and where players often need to work out which is the most pressing.
Your suggestion that a class without cross over effects in abilities is just a whole lot of buttons slapped together is taking the notion at play here to the extreme. The equivalent of me making that argument against your suggestion that abilities need cross over effects to be good design would be to state that anyone could just slap damage, healing and cleansing on one ability and call it good cross over.
Clearly, both your statement and my statement are incorrect. The difference is that I said mine knowing it was incorrect, you seem to believe yours.
I'm starting to think you have no idea what you are talking about. Not just no idea what you are wanting, but literally no idea as to what you are talking about.
If you go up just a few posts, I pointed out that the healer class in question, as well as most healers and tanks from early to mid 2000's MMO's, had abilities that had singular functions. Tanks had a pile of abilities that deal damage, and a different pile of abilities that generate threat. Healers have abilities that heal, and different abilities that deal damage, and different abilities that cleanse, and different abilities that buff and different abilities that debuff.
The point made was that there was no real cross over, that heals healed, damage abilities dealt damage etc.
You then claimed that was bad design.
Then when called out on how that was not bad design, you posted the above as proof of what you are talking about, that you seem to consider good design.
The problem is, the above two spells are both damage dealing.
As such, in the context of the discussion we are having, where heals heal, damaging attacks deal damage, taunts taunt etc, and how there was no cross over, the above two abilities both fit in to damage dealing spells that deal damage.
In the context of the discussion, the above two spells contain no cross over - not as we were discussing cross over in the discussion we were having.
Sure, there is some interplay between the abilities above, but both just deal damage. If these two spells were on a tank or healer from EQ2, the statement that there is not much cross over in terms of heals, damage, taunt etc would still hold true, as again, these abilities are just damage dealing.
I don't know, perhaps you just forgot the context of what we were talking about - but the above abilities do not have any cross over in the manner we were discussing it.
If you want to talk about abilities that have interplay between each other, then EQ2 had more of that than any other game I have ever played (much of that interaction was not just between abilities, but between abilities of different classes)- and it managed to do that without bullshit mechanics like "Electrified Stack" - which is a childs version of ability interplay.