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Sleep is OP
Vissox
Member
A 30 second CD seems like nothing when you look at the ttk on these mobs. I'm assuming players will have a similar health pool. Sleeps also typically last a long time in mmos but this looks more like a polymorph from wow except it doesn't heal you, which is broken. Just based off of the tools we saw available to the cleric tank and fighter, we need some defensive CDs on other classes to counteract this. This is the first class we've seen with both disengage and a hard CC. And yes, it is a hard CC idc what the wiki says.
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and in PvP, If sleep is the same as L2, then anyone can give you a little tap and wake you up. Also seems to be short range and it will probably calculate vs your M.DEF. 30 second CD means it's a one time use in a fight.
Don't see anything wrong with this.
So, I would gently suggest that sleep be given to other classes and taken from mages (or maybe mages have an individual target sleep, rather than an area sleep), given the extent of the attack spells that mages have compared to support classes (or what I assume support classes will have).
Your theory only works if anyone is dumb enough to break the sleep. The point remains that's so far no ability shown. Can give anyone enough sustain to deal with a free frost mage rotation into a sleep and to the same rotation all over again.
You can't expect people to be in groups 24/7.
Again, why would anyone do damage to the BOD CC target? Look at WoW, do you see serious players breaking polymorphs and blinds? Yes, it is AOE they said so on stream, you can literally see it sleep 3 flower things at once. How often do you honestly expect massive open world fights? Is it really often to be a main factor in sleep balance? I don't think so.
I played an enchanter and a Bard in EQ1. I also played Every Bard class in DAoC. In my experience, the more people you have the harder it is to have people not break CC. Even in large organized raids with EQ1 vets, it would happen allot. Make it an encounter thats just random players, it will be rare sleep will be effective.
They did call it AoE but when the mobs was to the side of the mage, it did not get CCed, only what was in front of the Mage and FYI, cone is often called an AoE even thought its not really.
As for the rest of the thread. Waste of time. A single ability can't be "OP" when seen without any context.
and you wont fight mages 1v1 24/7
and you might just cc the mage while he is casting sleep and interrupt him...
I agree with this. I don't agree it's all necessarily a waste of time though. I mean what else are we going to do, play one of the currently available mmos? abahahahahahahaharoflmao
ethyrial echoes of yore mother LOL. ahh shit. I'm just jk. Major props to anyone who puts out a game these days to the savage group of neckbeards known as gamers.
Anyway, nothing wrong with raising concerns imo. But there's not much in Ashes yet to compare to on whether mage sleep is OP. The cool down of it, the range, the length of the effect, it existing as a mage ability, it existing as an ability period - all subject to change and balancing.
The skill itself does make me wonder if we're heading towards a type of combat where CC is very important. It's always important. But important in a similar fashion to DAOC from back in the day, where landing CC's was often make or break as far as who won fights between opposing groups. I imagine there's a thread somewhere on this forum where the topic of CC has been debated. I don't recall specifically though, may have been before my time here.
I agree Sleep is not OP & why.
The cooldown is OP for PVE & God mode OP for PVP. At least 40sec PVE with current balance. PVP.... 60 seconds at least.
Some people will have to experience it to understand, but that level of power from one ability should only come from Ultimates. You don't need to be psychic to know there WILL BE high burst damage attacks in the game, and there won't always be a way out of CC. I already saw some in the same gameplay video.
Also, if the enemy party can coordinate their hits that well, while in a high pace pvp fight - they deserver to win. In my 12 years of playing that pvp mmo with this skill I knew maybe a few parties that were close to that kind of coordination, but they always fought at a skill lvl where their opponents just never clumped up for it.
So, this is something I've never understood about PvP players.
If the game has abilities that CC nearby players, why would any PvP player complain about that rather than just - you know - stand a little further apart?
With top end PvE content, this is a basic aspect of life. Sometimes you need to literally be standing on top of each other, and sometimes you need to be literally as spread out as you can be while still being able to hit your target.
To me, it should be a basic understanding that if you are going up against an enemy with the ability to CC in a small AoE, you simply don't stand close together. This basic understanding turns that AoE CC, with it's AoE CC cost, in to a single target CC with an AoE cost.
In regards to the specific scenario you are talking about above, I've actually seen many groups of players capable of that level of coordination - and been in a few of them myself. From my experience, it is just another of those things that are necessary (at times) in top end PvE.
In my time playing Archeage, I only saw one group of players that were even close to it though - a group I was not a part of.
I'm not saying that this is a valid excuse for standing in aoes or just not foreseeing the possibility of them, but quite often you wouldn't be able to move to your enemy if you didn't bunch up at some point. To me that was fun, because it'd create ebb and flow situations of range classes trying to snipe out the enemy stragglers in hopes of making a hole in their front and pushing a bit further.
Obviously pvp in open areas would require you to spread out more, but pvp in those places was usually either small party or 1v1s and huge sieges or huge guild movements, so no matter where you moved there'd probably be someone else to be in an aoe with you. And all open areas would funnel into choke points, so if both groups were moving around, sooner or later someone would have to go through a corridor with aoes in it.
Add to that the fact that L2 had TP spots where you could get camped by enemy mages, and you have yourself a game where it might be difficult to avoid getting hit by an aoe. But with all that being said, better players would still do their best to minimize incoming aoe dmg with correct movement and/or defensive abilities.
I think this comes down to the differences between pvp and pve games. In a pve game you'd usually be sure that your obstacle can be overcome through repetition and practice, so more people would be willing to grind their skills up to a point of very high coordination and output.
With pvp there's always a chance that the enemy will bring more people or keep overfarming you (while also stopping your own farm), or sadly in most cases just p2w over you. And I'd imagine that a far smaller amount of people would be willing to try and overcome that kind of difficulty by bashing their heads against a wall. So in time all you have left in the game is the parties that either prey on the weak or just play w/o a super high skill goal. The former upkeep the vicious cycle and the latter will never reach the skill ceiling of the game.
I mean, exactly. This is a complicated subject with pros and cons to both sides. I'm generally pro CC. But there are definitely cons that come with powerful aoe CC too.
But one of the best things about powerful aoe CC's is that it obliterates the zergball meta. If there are powerful aoe CC's in the game, you just can't stay balled up. You learn very fast. Whether you're in the typical zergball guild group, or just a random zerg of pubs, you're going to spread out class today. This infinitely increases the quality of pvp imo.
Powerful aoe CC also gives smaller groups a better chance against larger groups. The flip side to that is that a larger group can do it to a smaller group as well.
Powerful CC increases skill gap. When two groups are about to engage each other, there is no pussyfooting around. It's serious time immediately. You spread out to avoid their aoe CC, they do the same, shots start being called by the shot caller, the highest priority targets are identified, usually the enemy CC'ers. It creates a hierarchy of who to kill, other than just kill healers first or attack the enemy closest to you. (Although in Ashes with how high of a ttk they seem to be going for, kill healer first meta may be all we're left with.) Some of this generally exists in mmo pvp anyway, but with the threat of aoe CC, it's amplified.
There's a skill gap in who can land their CC's first, who can land their CC's better, as in hitting more people or hitting the most important enemy players with it. That skill gap exists for the individual player playing a CC class, and for the group as a whole, all members being alert to incoming enemies, the group leader properly manuevering the group to put it into position to land the CC first, etc.
This is getting longer than I wanted but the cons in my view real quick.
CC can be rage inducing for the people it's happening to. Straight up. It is known to be rage inducing.
Where it is an increase of the skill gap on one hand, it can become a crutch too. Too easy. It can lead to very lopsided battles. If it's not done right, if it's TOO powerful etc.
There is this subset of players who just don't get it and never will. Aoe CC that is. Aoe CC is very powerful in the hands of skilled players, even average to above average players. But there's this subset of players who will be annihilated by aoe CC repeatedly and just not understand why its happening to them. The herding mentality is too strong in some people.
Edit: And to Nikr's point, another con is that in close quarters, or tight hallway type battles, powerful aoe CC can just create this fuckfest that's not exactly a good thing.
Some.
More to the point, most encounters in top end PvE have at least some aspect where players have to do the opposite of what they would normally do - they have to go against their better judgement.
To me, in a game where AoE CC is a thing, the only time players should be caught in that AoE aspect of that CC (as opposed to being the target) is when they follow their base level instinct without first thinking. An example of this using a corridor is that the base level instinct is to attack the enemy at the other end - while a more measured approach would take in to account the range of AoE CC's and stagger.
It isn't as if a game is going to have an AoE CC where the AoE radius us larger than the range of a heal or cleanse, so there is no real need for eveyone to rush through that choke point all at once.
As to coordination, the arena teams will have that coordination. I doubt more than 1 mage will be in a group though, especially seeing as sleep is an aoe cone/cast. Same reason why a hard cc tank would also be in an arena group but you wouldn't see more than 1 tank. There might be disparities between pve and pvp but a hard cc is definitely more akin to pvp than pve. I'm used to raid bosses not being able to be hard cc'd except in certain circumstances.
Not going to lie - the notion that there wouldn't be a cleanse effect that could deal with sleep never occurred to me.
My expectation is that every CC effect will be able to be cleansed in some manner.
sleep can also be broken by allies friendly firing u by flagging up if they cant cleanse it sooo its kinda irrelevant also some player might have skill that dmg themself too (necro maybe) which might be able to be timed to break it, it also has a cast time which can be interupted not realy an issue imo currently cant comment on anything balance wise tbh till we play the game in A2