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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
you are right, but there is stilla difference between character power and fight outcome, which is what i tried to illustrate.
when people say game "will be balanced if gear is only 30% of your character power" or "gear should be 80%", they were wrong...or incomplete. power from gear can still be unfair if its 30% and it can still be fair if its 80%. what matters for the fight outcome is the difference between gear tiers, which is what i showed trying to clarify... add ot my example other stats such as defense, health, mana, crit, etc, etc but the correlation doesnt change.
I don't consider that to be a "but"....
Yeah I would tend to think so too. But I really don't know. I bet Azherae knows
Because we can expect a Level 50 player in Level 20 gear to lose most of the time against a Level 50 mob.
Going back to the original post - we can use similar logic.
We can expect that a Level 35 player wielding a Level 35 Sword will sometimes be able to defeat a Level 40 mob.
There's going to be a balance where players will feel pushed to upgrade their gear.
The devs will figure out that balance. And, yes, that will affect what PKers are able to do with trash gear or no gear. At some point they will be ineffective. Especially the more Corruption they accrue.
Players don't really need to argue over what the specific numbers are.
But, no matter what, there will be some gamers complaining that the devs got the balance wrong.
If people can achieve tactics with cheap or underleveled gear (since gear wont affect power to a critical point) they will bypass the fear of losing gear and I have given examples.
I have also listed other reasons as to why gear should matter. It's that simple.
% of power coming from gear != outcome of the fight
Using the base stats that mostly scales with the weapon passive skill is certainly not the best method for measuring characters power in L2 as most of non-gear characters power comes from their active skills.
Those 2 passive skills are the difference in p.atk between the lv 1 and the lv 77 character.
Using power level 1 Power Strike and max level Tribunal would be more reasonable for this power measurement.
Aren't we all sinners?
According to the L2 and FFXI damage formulae, the level 50 player will always win, but that's by evasion and HP gaps.
HP and MP is the way level gaps are balanced, in the old games. For a player with 3x the HP to lose in a 'serious' fight, even naked, we'd first have to establish that the lower player won't just literally run out of the resources and power to kill them with.
Meanwhile the level 50 player could probably spam their most basic damage skill (for at least 3x as long as they could in a level-equal fight, even if the level 20 player was somehow landing every attack) but it would only take 1/3 as long as an at-level kill.
No contest whatsoever, using the common HP scaling values for these types of games.
Item rarities
Poor
Common
Uncommon
Rare
Epic
Legendary
Steven said that veteran players will be not have more than 140%...150% of the power of a player who just reached lvl 50.
A player who reaches lvl 50 will typically not wear a 'poor' or 'common' quality armor. If some do, we should not consider them for this case.
I think we should assume most players who care to be in good shape will have uncommon and rare gear.
Maybe uncommon 50 or rare 46 or epic 42 (if these are somewhat equivalent, will/should also have similar value/effort to craft)
So lvl 50 epic tier should bring 40%...50% additional power if it will replace uncommon tier set of level 50.
I don't know how will the damage of a lvl 40 player compare to a lvl 50 player.
Maybe the difference will not be huge and two level 40 players will defeat one lvl 50, all 3 of them with lvl 40 gear, same tier, and all 3 having same class (to prevent rock paper scissor relationship).
Which was kind of the point I was trying to make. Gear is a smaller % of the overall player power, which is at the core of this entire thread.
From weakest sword to strongest one (the shop had +3 B grade, so it's a bit higher in atk than it should be), x8 increase on the powerstrike James linked. This is on a lvl78 char against a lvl78 mob.
I prefer this because people at the same lvl can still stand up to each other even if they're on different stages of progress gear-wise. George obviously doesn't, even though he keeps mentioning that his friends and him were super cool and could fight against stronger people.
A level 1 wizard, against level 1 encounters, using that same Solar Flare, deals an average of 16.2 damage per cast.
A level 2 wizard using that same Solar Flare deals an average of 21 damage per cast.
At level 5, that was up to 52 damage per cast.
Equipping the best gear available to me, at level 5 the spell was dealing an average of 494 (note that this gear is significantly better than the gear that would ever be available to someone new to the game).
Going up to level 92 (the level I was when I stopped playing) with the gear I just happened to have equipped when I stopped playing, I was dealing 71,100 per cast, on average. Without any equipment, that spell is dealing an average of 9,900.
Attacking a level 1 mob with a level 92 wizard didn't see any increase in damage, but that is just the way EQ2 does mob resistance in relation to level (there is never a decrease in resistance based on level, but as you start attacking mobs more than 5 levels above you it increases).
The only real points that are worth looking at are the low level naked attacks and the level 92 naked attacks (16.2 damage vs 9,900 damage). This is the increase in ability strength purely from gaining levels.
The thing to keep in mind with that though, is that while this is how much that ability has gained in power, it isn't any indication at all as to how much the character has increase in power. This is because (I've mentioned this to NiKr in the past) that ability is one that you simply don't use at high levels. When you hit about level 70, you shouldn't have any space left in your priority casting for Solar Flare - the only time you would cast it is if you made a mistake somewhere. That 71k damage is nothing in comparison to Fusion dealing 850k damage to three targets, or Ball of Fire dealing 350k, or any of the other 20+ damaging abilities Wizards have.
The other thing to really keep in mind is that if all you are doing is looking at the numbers above between level 1 and level 2, it would suggest an increase of about 25% in character power. That is about how much additional damage Solar Flare deals. The thing is, the actual increase is over 100% increase - simply due to the fact that you can an additional spell, meaning you do from one spell to cast with a 2 second cooldown, to having a second spell to cast while Solar Flare is on said cooldown. This second spell deals more damage than Solar Flare, so the actual increase in character power is around 135%.
Note that the above is all based on 100+ data points per comparison (ACT really is amazing), as opposed to just a few. There were some times in there where I could have taken screenshots of lucky or unlucky runs of hits that could have made the numbers look either better or worse for any of the above situations. I'm not saying NiKr did that - just that having many data points is always better, and having ACT to colate them just makes doing that much easier, and thus makes having discussions like this easier.
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Talk:Combat_Mechanics#:~:text=The tl;dr:,AllCB)*(1-MobsMit%)
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/eq2-damage-calculator-combat-engine.571986/
Some folks have already put in a lot of research and statistical analysis into these to develop calculators to damage formula. I will work on one later on in the Alpha2 and Beta phases when I get time. Devs usually keep these things a "closely guarded" secret, but players can figure it out with close enough approximation or even exact solves. It just requires enough data collected to account for rng and variance. I dont plan on getting into it right away because I suspect things will change frequently.
*straightens glasses and puts on number crunchers hat* (any other old people remember that old number crunchers game?, from the 1980s?)
Every stat will have some formula it follows to contribute to the damage formula, and its 2023 now, not 1990s anymore, so we have much more powerful tools like pythons scipy library for curve fitting, we really only have to trial and error the form of the equation and supply data to extract the damage formula now.
And not even really have to guess at that, there will never be a case where you keep adding 'Power' and your physicals damage goes down, its monotonically increasing.
So we just feed scipy curve fitting function
Polynomial(a,b,c,d,...) (however many powers of x we wanna solve for) + Exponential(a,b) (magnitude and rate), + Logarithmic(a,b) (same)
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.optimize.curve_fit.html
//Exponential and Logarithmic are there to account for diminishing returns
//Games like FF14 have 'breakpoint' stats, these take a little more effort to solve for because each function becomes a piecewise solution, but the method of finding those start-stop points of the piecewise function is the same in scipy, just a bit more work to setup the solving function
//Data collection looks like it will be manual copy-paste from the personal log. We get a personal log but I dont see them giving us a "send_to_txt" button with their belief that data is somehow toxic. Not only that, but the data available to us will show jobs like bards at a disadvantage to others, since we wont be able to see how much we boost our teammates in the personal log. So in short, we will never know the true value of a enchancement based job (we will with 3rd party addons, but I will not risk a ban while I am figuring out the damage formula)
Feed it tons of data, and find the best curve fit to get the coefficients.
We have life so much easier now than before as far as numbers go. And as players we can use this to pick which stats we want crafted for on our gear to suit our personal playstyle best.
Disclaimer::
I know a lot of folks will get upset with me for 'solving' the game and my data being used by others to create a "META" build for each class, but I think it would be more important to look at it from the other way instead. Intrepid have been very eager to engage with us about every single issue. If we as players through our analysis find there are some clear winners and clear losers as far as the numbers games goes in terms of some playstyles just not working at all compared to others, we can just hand the data we take to Intrepid. I fully anticipate they will adjust things throughout the games life to keep all playstyles competitive. Plus of particular interest to us as players, will be searching for bugs and broken things in the alpha/beta.
The balancing simply has to be done in a way to make gank squats gains < what they lose from being a gank squad.
I think the other downsides of PKing is what will be the major decider of whether gank squads are +EV or -EV. And these downsides can easily be tuned.
Let's say you have a high PK number (which a gank squad will have). What if it takes 20 hours of /played time to fix your character after a gank session (Fix as in remove the corruption penalties to PvP combat effectiveness). Will it be worth to "gank"? Do you gain more than 20 hours /played of resources or advantage from said gank?
What if the penalty ends up being more?
It's a numbers game. As long as the devs balance the penalties of corruption so that PKing is -EV (grinding off the penalties takes more effort than what you gain), it should be fine.
Ganking will always be possible. You just want to turn it into the following: "Hm... do I really want to spend the next 3 days grinding off my corruption, just to kill that group farming the world boss?". That number (3) can be adjusted as needed, until it hits a balance of "probably not... I think I'll pass".
Ya'll aren't necessarily as far apart as you think. Keep in mind, the example given is at level 1 and level 2. Plus Nooani is talking about using more than 1 ability for comparison vs using a single ability. In any case, that 25% increase in the single ability isn't as far away as it seems for just a single level.
The example in discussion is level 1 and level 2. In the way that power scales the formula have diminishing returns. In a diminishing returns setup, the lowest levels have the highest gains per stat point. 'Level' is a stat also.
What I mean to say, in plain english. The gap between "1 and 2" is more than the gap between "21 and 22". Its easier to see if you look at a logarithmic scale, should become apparent quickly that the tick marks on the axis don't have the same distance everywhere. Diminishing returns setups usually follow an exponential decay where a log scale will make a straight line. The takeaway point here is, if you die at max level and de-level one level, you are not likely to suddenly do 25% less damage per fire spell cast.
The scaling in ashes should be a lot better in the sense NiKr wants it to be, because Intrepid wants to keep numbers small, letting each number have more meaning, rather than things get so big they start to not matter. There will still be disconnects between the low end and high end on how much each number gives value compared to the number before it.
What that means is, it will be a lot easier to custom tailor your build based on changing stats around.
Obviously Ashes will get solved before it even releases, so the "seemed to matter" won't matter at all, but the builds themselves should still matter and the RPS balancing of classes should be visible and semi-counterable through said builds.
There's no way this will be 'solved beforehand'.
We have come too far as a design space in games for that to be true. Everything that normally led to 'solved metas' in games up until this point was based almost entirely on limitations of the games, and the fact that games that don't give in to the limitations are generally considered too hard or unapproachable.
But the game industry managed to get past even that, amazingly.
There's a lot of things about Ashes I don't have full confidence in, but 'there will not be a meta' is not one of those things. Everything about this game by design down to the tiniest bits, runs counter to 'players having the ability to Solve For Optimal'. They will 'solve for personal victory' and then argue about whose style of victory is 'the most meaningful', ofc.
This is the hope. I will have playstyles I want to try, and will solve for best numbers that suit me.
What will suck, for me at least, is if "oh your a fighter... just stack power, nothing else matters"
Except it isn't.
The point of lower levels is to teach players the class and their abilities. There is no need or desire to have a specific rate of increased power, because that just isn't the point.
This is why I have long since been questioning the 40-50% of player power from gear claim Steven has made - it makes no sense without many more qualifying points.
Ashes will be the same, players will be gradually given abilities. As we gain these abilities, there will be massive increases in player power between levels - and that's ok. I mean, Steven has already said some levels will see greater jumps in power than some other levels - so just expect it.
This is a conversation I had in my community multiple times, especially about PvP, and a very strong feeling I get that I can share is that Gear should never completely overtake the player's skill, build composition and the matchup itself.
Gear should be just a part of what would define who wins a matchup, but it should always be a combination of:
- Player skill - who can outplay the other, make better decisions, better reflexes, better movement and use of terrain,
- Build - which class has a natural advantage against the other
- Build - which skills/passives did you pick
- Build - overall character stats
- Gear - which armor type are you using (physical or magic def resistances etc)
- Gear - which weapon type are you using (different type of damage)
- Level of course should also influence
these I think are the main factors that should define who wins a matchup, and not just "I have a level 40 or a purple weapon and gear so you lose because you have a level 35 set or a Rare set"
the numbers Steven gave once, sounded good to me, I personally enjoyed how the original L2 did it, where there wasn't such a big difference between set tiers as in games like Archeage, I really dislike when games take away from player skill, a good combat system and balance should be hard enough that people need to practice, know their kits and be able to outplay others, Guild Wars 2 I believe is a perfect example in regards to skill play (not balance)
Iirc the high lvl weapon I used in one of the screenshots was introduced ~2 years after release. So dmg scaling was even less before it. I prefer that pace, not the "I do a million fucking damage after leveling up a bit".
You prefer EQ2's pace of "to infinity and beyond". This is why I said it's pointless for us to discuss this.
And if you're fine with low number scaling, then we agree and it's even more pointless to keep discussing this
It is worth pointing out that you didn't include gear quality at all here.
This is an oversight on your part, as gear quality absolutely should be playing a part.
I also find it interesting you include things like which abilities you gain from your build, but not which abilities you gain from your gear. Same with stats - you include stats from your build as having an impact, but not stats from your gear.
The funny thing with a game like Archeage - gearing up was a skill in and of itself. People that just got better gear - gear that just that made number go up - and didn't actually pay attention to what they were gaining or losing, they could find themselves at a disadvantage. I recall a number of items I opted out of "upgrading" due to what I'd lose if I did.
You literally gave examples of you and your friends fighting upwards and winning. Were you not overcoming difference in gear AND in evasion/block stats? So that would imply that you overcame that with your skill, right?
And when we were losing we didnt say "oh he had better gear". Simple as.
Don't quite see the point of this post. Don't remember anyone here asking for gear to remain 50% of player power simply because they'd be able to use this excuse.
Hell, making gear a bigger % of power would literally enable this excuse. If your enemy's hits do 1k dmg to you, while yours do 100 - ya ain't killing that enemy. And if that dmg difference is due to gear difference - your excuse would be quite literally "well, his gear is way better".
So just once again your comments come off to me as if you're confused about the very thing you're trying to argue for.