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
(ok my last post went a little far and made me slightly queasy so I'mma dial it back and be slightly more serious)
The benefit of the design type so far in my runs has been that the only thing you really need to think about or balance is the impact of CDR itself.
It is one of the rare cases where you generally do not have to care how overpowered the ability has the potential to become in a long fight because it is entirely in the control of the Marked player, presuming your 'Threat Values' weren't terrible to begin with.
And since it ties directly into Cooldowns for abilities that are chosen by the Tank player, and in Ashes (and our design space) we mostly know what abilities will be available due to Tanks having a clear skill tree, it's sufficient to not worry about it.
More Damage would please some tanks and not others. More defense or percentage reductions in damage help some situations and not others. More CC or buffing other people's attacks makes the game less interactive for the Tank and turns them into a Totem.
More CDR is literally telling the Tank "Oi, that person wants to ignore you playing the game/having an impact with whatever you chose to do. Whaddya say I make you able to do it even more/faster?"
And even better for the opposing side, if the enemy Tank was useless in some way due to their build, i.e. you have easy counters for their Abilities, you know that you actually can ignore them because all they will do is use the same non-effective abilities more often. Then one can balance just the abilities and not grind out thousands of slightly different 'but what happens when the Tank has this much extra melee damage from being ignored?'
Everyone gets to play their style, and everyone gets the outcome they expect (though not necessarily want) with the correct tradeoffs.
Now if only I could find a way to make it so that Marking PvE enemies and then having someone else shred them didn't result in boosted Tank DPS, while still being understandable to most players...
I'm kidding of course, our design space explicitly works around that, it's Ashes that would need to actually solve anything like that. But they have Javelin on Tanks still so it's probably fine.
only in olys, not in ow specially with healers healing you...
As I said earlier in this thread, forcing a reticle shift is another option, though one I've not put much thought in to considering.
Since I've not personally spent much time on action games with anything other than a fixed reticle, I dont consider myself qualified enough to have an opinion on it without a discussion taking place.
So, I'm sure you know, the way I look at suggestions is to find ways to counter play them based on my MMO experience.
My first thought with this is that I will just send my worst player in on a Paladin to put that mark on your paladin, thus forcing those two Paladin to basically ignore everyone but each other, basically taking both out of the larger fight.
I'm sure you and your people have come up with other ways this would be played, but that is how I see myself playing it.
I'll send my worst tank on your tank and they both taunt each other infinitely so they cant do anything else.
So, while I think this would be a valid tactic, the first Paladin also applying Mark and engaging the second isn't necessarily the only approach to that situation.
While focusing on a different target is giving the enemy Paladin some mechanical advantage, it isn't necessarily overpowering enough that a strong player couldn't counteract it via activating a defensive stance, trying to debuff the enemy, or similar. Other members of the party using CC to create an opportunity to disengage from the Paladin could also work, depending on the formation/terrain.
I think it comes down to an opportunity cost, mostly. The enemy Paladin marking the allied one can make things harder for them, but it also implies that they're not occupying someone else in the allied party, which, depending on the team composition, could be disadvantageous.
It's turtles all the way down.
Forced camera shifts are really bad. There's not one instance of it I can reference except Genshin where it is hilariously bad for other reasons.
The beauty of action is the ability to dodge attacks. Thus, skill rather than defence or resistances are king. It would look damn weird to have an aim bot on a tank where by the tank can't dodge.
Furthermore, you can't really call action combat action combat if you lose control of your targeting system for windows at a time. Where is the skill in such a circumstance? I'm sure the hybrid system in Ashes would be ridiculed if forced target is applied.
Let's imagine you are a mage, and you want to kill in (in game, presumably).
Now let's imagine NiKr is a tank, and he is on my side.
He taunts you, meaning you are facing him - but you still want to attack me.
In order to attack me, what you need to do is maneuver yourself so that I am in between you and NiKr.
If anything, this allows for a greater display of player skill.
By all means argue that you dont like it, I'm not really attempting to shift subjective opinion - just making sure those opinions are formed with the right set of facts.
Also, there is no reason to assume a change in camera facing would have any impact on dodge at all. You may not see the incoming attack as easily, but that is kind of the point of taunting someone.
If this were the case, then in all situations the whole thing could just be ignored.
Either it is strong enough that the Paladin would have to play in the way mentioned above, or it is weak enough that the Paladin could ignore the other Paladin, meaning everyone can ignore the Paladin.
It's all well and good to talk about small scale fights. In large scale fights the mage would be behind a lot of melee, thus, anyone moving to get behind the mage would have to survive a lot of enemies. Its suicide in motion.
A camera change is so bad its not even funny. Why would anyone attack the tank due to a camera change? Furthermore, how will the tank protect anyone with a camera change? AoEs can still be planted free aim, tab target skills can still be used and pot shots can be taken by the attacker.
Either you need to force target on the tank or just not have force target. A halfway house just won't cut it and would be a detriment to the combat. There are reasons it works in tab and we might end up with tab but there are reasons it won't work in hybrid and we have hybrid now.
I mean, in a large scale fight (at least the point of the fight you are talking about here), mages shouldn't be in range of taunts.
If you are a mage getting taunted, it's either small scale PvP, or the somewhat shambolic end of large scale PvP that often happens.
Or you and your guild have been outplayed.
As to why anyone would go after the tank if they are able to force you to target them (please keep in mind that this is the point - camera movement is tangential), it's fairly simple.
If I am trying to kill a healer or a DPS, and every time I so for a big hit the tank forces me to target them instead (canceling the cast in the process), it wont take me long at all to realize that I will not be able to kill that healer while that tank is preventing such attacks.
This means the only way to get to the healer is to either kill the tank first (via attacking it first), or via outplaying said tank (via distracting it with an attack while allies stealth their way to where they can attack the healer).
Either way, both methods involve attacking the tank - something the currently broken paradigm of MMO PvP does not require.
A key thing here though us that having this in the game will still require players to display an amount of skill.
If your melee are silly enough to ignore a tank then expect your rear to be pulled apart. Such is the way of a battle in large scale. We can talk of how tank can be ignored and how forced target is required to make tank less ignored but the reality is forced target won't perform said action.
The only viable way to make tank less ignored is to make tank an actual threat on the battlefield. Not by making the tank a beat stick that can't hold its own in a fight. The hard counter to tank will have a field day and the taunts would be made redundant. I've never been one fir durational taunts anyway, I prefer threat booster taunts.
Some of these instances were all on the tank, other instances were pulls from a third party and a taunt applied by the tank after the pull.
Of course it would be OP, it has to be.
Let's not forget we're talking about the skill that, in PvE, can compel a raid boss to focus on the player that, not only doesn't hurt it much, but can actually survive a few of its attacks, all the while ignoring all the other players that keep that brave tank alive and those who do hurt it. It may sounds like a roleplay BS explanation, but it shows the scale and impact of taunt in a PvE context.
We can't go to these heights in PvP (not that anyone really ask for that much), but if people want tanks to be more than a cute distraction, the archetype will need to be perceived as a real threat and not a simple annoyance that can be, if not completely ignored, dealt with when time can be spared to tackle its high defence/HP. People want the wet noodle to become the main target. And it must be done without upping its damage output, turning it into a CC machine or a debuffer, etc. There isn't much that can be done unless you're ready to break a few paradigms...
Removing the meat shield power fantasy paradigm is the easiest way to "fix" the tanks. But as long as people wish to "protect" others ONLY by being the masochist tough one, we'll be limited.
Another paradigm with way more impact we could fiddle with is the concept of life (HP). The norm in almost all games is that characters are either 100% effective or dead. So long as you have 1 HP and the required resources, your skills work at full power, you move at full speed, your aim is perfect. That's why in PvP burst damage is king, while it's easier to deal with slow and steady damage over time. But if we were to add a ... lets call it pain scale... that gives maluses as it goes up (kind of like the heat scale in Battletech for those familiar with the tabletop version) and that the tanks had high resistance to pain by default. Pain could make skills/spells cost more mana, or be cast slower, or receiving more pain add a chance for them to fizzle mid casting. With more pain, moving speed could decrease. Weapon hit could deal less damage. Range attacks be less accurate. Now, while everyone suffer effectiveness attrition as the battle progress, tanks keeps going and going. Their subpar damages barely going down and them going about and around the battlefield at full speed.
Buffs to ignore pain. Hexes that create temporary one. Berserks whose attack increase with pain... It's a complete different paradigm, one in witch defensive type character have a place. Not seeing this ever happening in AoC, but the though experiment is fun.
Aye for the last part, and as such, you'd better deal with them soon because if you don't they will slowly, but steadily, deal with you all.
But I don't see pain as baked into the HP bar, more a separated thing working in parallel, with skills/potions to reduce it, alleviate it, ignore it temporary. Goes away fast with heals, but regen on it's own faster than HPs usually do. Defensive type classes, not as affected by it, would have a more consistent, but still viable, gameplay style than others. Burst would have a harder reign.
But changing such a basic paradigm of gaming is not a solution for taunt skills in the current one. Too different approach.
I think the idea is kind of bad in some ways but good in other ways but then we might need other systems like you mentioned to be effective. Kind of links in to the reagents topic in the other thread. I'm not really for excess additions just to fight optimally though. I still like my Threat Stacks idea which is based on the PvX System rather than the PvP or PvE Systems. Threat Stacks can be useful in the PvX Realm without nerfing the whole class system overall.
Though, the threat stacks debuff can be applied to multiple players in terms of aoe so long as the aoe generates threat stacks.
What I mean is, having threat in PvE only content is the best way to do it, and there is good reason its been the standard in RPG games for decades.
For pvp?
Forced target is a big no thank you for me, theres already so many different forms of crowd control around, dont need stacked tanks to effectively have a 'come over here' features to pull enemies into aoe for easy wins.
In SWTOR, tank threats caused massive damage reduction to the target, unless that target changed to attack the tank.
This allows the player that is the target of the taunt to keep thier agency, and gives them the decision to make. Do I keep on the target I was already attacking and do massive less damage, or do I go to the tank, or do I disengage to try to find a better opening.
Something similar to that allows the tank threat mechanic to have purpose and meaning in pvp.
In other words, my previous ping to Vaknar about having a dev discussion about these kinds of mechanics still applies. This thread is just too small in its feedback scope.
And why feed back is important, wish more people spoke up against these things (my guild included). THey want a good mmorpg, and have insane strong reactions to things like this but people don't really type and voice their thoughts enough.
So it generally comes down that IS takes feed, back but also looks at potential issues that can be caused and understand what players want at the same time (even if it is many voiceless ones), and of course what players won't want. Finding the right balance to apply things in reason.
Assuming taunts have an appropriate range, if you are getting taunted while you are at the back, you got outplayed.
Taunt range should be fairly short - a third to a quarter of a mage or rangers range. AoE taunt should be basically melee range.
Tank/ranger may be something of an issue with this, but not necessarily.
As to the tanks from the above two games - I'm not going to.bother with L2, but both Warhammer and SWTOR had taunts that turned tanks in to a debuff class,rather than a tank.
Put that version of a taunt in a game with serious PvP (WAR was somewhat serious, SWTOR is not,
Ashes by all accounts should eclipse both games) and tanks will literally be used to maintain that DPS debuff on as many people as possible.
That will be their role in PvP - DPS debuffer.
This is a scenario I am personally specifically attempting to prevent.
Forcing a player to choose whether to hit the tank or not is a debuff same applies yo the howling gale. Its a classic and much loved system of taunts. To state no one else can have a debuff other than bard is a misnomer.
Also, the debuff only works on players. Warhammer Online was a crap game with excellent interplay between the classes. Ashes combat is trash in comparison right now. You can apply a band aid and call it force target but the band aid will not fix anything.
People will be force taunted, won't hit the tank, will dance around the tank and then go back to killing others. Though I suspect you would also want targets to be disabled by a forced taunt so tank can limp in for the kill. A short range taunt is also crap for pve when you only have one charge.
Full vibe if tanks don't do what you want how you want it isn't a tank to you. Makes absolutely 0 sense, it isn't about a debuff, etc it is how it is applied and functions. You are just using the argument to try to refute other suggestions.
Sudden tank taunt as very limited rng compared to all other mmorpgs, and the aoe taunt is only melee range. So pve aggro skills are now suddenly nerfed conveniently. So if you are suggesting range be a lot more limited I'm already sensing flaws in you suggesting it works the same, which can raised a bunch of other red flags. Though i already talked about all this