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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
Steven played L2 and I believe in my theory crafting. Steven understands that in a PvX Game you can't have large disparities in gear. The enchantment system replaces up to 5 tiers of raid armour. Even if we had 5 tiers of raid armour it would still only be 2.1% difference between each tier. My calculations have been the best since I mentioned them much earlier in the thread. Of course, I would prefer 5 tiers of raids rather than an enchantment system but the enchantment system is what we will be given. Make hay while the sun shines.
That's not the topic. Nikr keeps spinning the tale to find some short of small win, and that's sad but not my problem.
The fact that me and my friends are pvp giga chads whether in l2, tera, eso and their respective gear impacts in combat is irrelevant.
In L2 cheap gear could be used to cause the issue I presented. Why? Because it had low importance in stats.
This is the topic.
I am happy with what I heard from Steven today. In lower levels gear wont make a difference. Who cares.
As you go higher you'd wanna make sure you are properly geared.
You are safe from my ranged PK CP. Rejoice.
george, while you are right, you arent getting what we are saying. the amount of power your gear gives you doesnt matter to prevent the issue you presented. what matters is the difference between gear tiers
in l2, gear was basically 90% of your power. no gear = wet noodle.
a karmian and homun would give you 90% of your power at level 40
a dark crystal robe and a miracles would give you 90% of your power at level 61, same as a karmian at level 40
now imagine the dark crystal robe is 500 times stronger than karmian. boom issue solved
I'm in full agreement with you. However, there are so many sources of damage that I think it will be impossible to be properly 'geared'. Steven talks about having to gear for specific resistances - melee alone has like 5 different types of damage. Thus, armour could be like titanium against some builds and butter against others. In such a regard, stats are king which is why i think enchantments will also enhance stats on items. Again though, minimal difference in stats can have a big impact. It depends on the calculations from those stats.
In Age of Conan my Guardian was a Master Gem Cutter. I build crafted armour and packed One Handed Damage Gems into all slots. I added only 21.25 One Handed Damage to the build but the build enabled my Guardian to one shot everyone. I plowed through whole raids before the gems were nerfed. That is why i state the power difference will be 0.75% or there abouts per tier/level of power gain because the calculations will transfer the power gain into actual damage/defence/heals/buffs etc at whatever rate the formulas are designed to do. Formulas are not my job, only theory crafting the power gain for 40-50% power.
Alright, gear tier gap not theoretical numbers. We established this.
Well those resistances are another tier of pokemon like RNG combat outcome. I dont see anybody crying about "mA SKiLL" there.
This is a discussion having about in its own topoc
Personally, I'm for PvE Armour and PvP Armour. I don't like attunement armour. I don't see why I need to have multitudes of armour/resistance gear. Thus, I hope the resistances are waterfall stats much like the current stats so we can cover more than one type of damage with one type of stat. Haven't got much information on it though.
And what are you gonna do if whilst you pve with your pve gear you get jumped by a pvp geared guy?
Separating gear in pve and pvp dmg modifiers is bad.
I like PvX Armour for that reason but the last time I called the armour PvX I was told PvX Armour doesn't exist lol. Hence, I paraphrased for you and explained my PvE and PvP Armour fetish from other games. Of course, a combined armour set is preferred.
We dont need "dmg vs mobs/bosses" "dmg vs players" in armors
I like just straight forward pvx armour. One set to rule them all. I was quite remised that the pvp seasons give pvp enhancements for the pvx armour.
If gear wasn't impactful, it can't be providing 100% of characters power.
I'm not saying you're wrong about L2 - just that the wording (perhaps thinking, not sure) is wrong.
How impactful gear as a whole is actually has no bearing at all on how much skill players are able to display.
A game like L2 where some items are desired for years at a time - that is always going to result in players being fairly close together in terms of gear. That is the point I was making about gear restriction. If the game starves players of item upgrades, then sure, more room for skill so shine. However, that same thing can be maintained by giving players item upgrades, but in a way where players that care enough are always within a few tiers of each other.
I don't quite see the difference between these 2 parts of the comment.
I feel like they are both talking about tight scaling, but the second one is even tighter, because it has more gear steps, while not going up in power drastically.
If that's not what you mean, then I dunno what you mean
The point I am making is that this is completely seperate from the actual power of the gear. It is the difference between gear on two players that matters, not the amount of power that characters gain through gear. Yeah, they are. That was kind of the point.
The difference between the two is that one gives players many item upgrades, the other gives players few.
The scaling (or difference between players) is still tight in both.
This is what Archeage did reaonably well - at least was something I noticed while playing it for so long. They would always increase access to what was essentially the lowest tier of acceptable gear, and one tier above that (perhaps 2), every time they were about to release new top tier gear. The lower tier always came first, because players playing around these areas were always going to take longer - but it was always followed by an increase in the top tier of gear available.
This meant that any player that was actually just playing the game would always find themselves in the same general spot in relation to over all gearing. I was always about 3/4 between the top end players and the baseline acceptable gear. No matter what I did, I always found myself there - because this is where I should have been based on the effort and (lack of, in my case) money I was putting in.
Because lower tier items were used to make higher tier items, increasing access to lower tier items meant that access to the items that those items were used to create were easier, giving players access to more regrade attempts (and fails) for the same effort etc.
It also meant players returning to the game could - if they wanted - achieve the minimum viable gear tier fairly easily if they tried. Perhaps the biggest problem with this is that players would leave the game after a few months, come back a year later, see the gear everyone was in and assume it was still just as hard to get as it was when they last played, and nope out of it without actually knowing what was going on.
But iirc each new update would provide an easier way to acquire the gear that was 2 steps below the max.
So AA wasn't all that far from L2 in the general approach to gearing. It just had more stuff I guess. But we've discussed our different preferences when it comes to the amount of stuff before, so there's no point to rehash that whole thing again.
Most games (even PvE games) do it, but doing it and doing it well are different things.
they can be truth. your gear gives you most of your power, but on equal gear, your skills matter a lot more than your gear.
If your gear gives you most of your power, it is impactful.
Individual gear upgrades may not, but your gear as a whole is.
Imagine a game where gear gives you all of your power, but where PvP has full loot mechanics.
Lmao. That would be an epic troll of a PvP game. That would be like PvE Armour breaking after one death in a PvE game.
Its actually also Rust and Day Z. Most survival games in fact. Albion is more about levelling the armour abilities and weapon proficiencies. Mortal Online is based on toon height and weight too.
Yeah but we were discussing power application being the primary source from gear, not whether you can attack without the gear - it doesn't matter how much power items give if you can't do anything without them. That's the whole reason back up gear works so well. Because you don't need top end gear per say. Its the same principle for PKers who won't use top end gear to go red. Complicated matter
Gear gives you 100% of your power, but the differences between the gear provide a range of power among players. So gear can both give you 100%, while not being as impactful for you as other gear is.
so if we both have the exact same gear, and we are playing the exact same class with the exact same build, other than luck with crits, dodges, etc, what determines the winner?
Sometimes you get lucky like Day Z and can kick and punch. Or, have a High Fantasy MMO where Wizards can do magic with hands alone - that's why I love hands for my wizards. Steven and the devs won't give us hands though because of the corruption system - can't have a serial killer with no weapon to drop.
Your power doesn't come directly from the 'something', that's based on the damage formulae chosen.
L2, FFXI, and Ashes A1 use the 'base damage * pDif' family of formulae.
EQ2 and BDO use the 'base damage * sSt' family.
ArcheAge does a lot of esoteric 'skill damage + base ability damage dif' stuff (yech) but there's definitely a bunch of this in the other games too.
The statement made by Steven is perfectly normal within the L2/FFXI family, and completely meaningless to the others. But that could be taken to quite literally be 'them telling us that it was in that family', which is what I did take it to mean back then.
Maybe Tradd has changed it to whatever it is WoW uses (even trying to check this is painful due to the amount of shifts, it was originally in the first family I THINK?) which would be reasonable given the sort of health values we saw on some bosses and Steven's dislike of anything level related in pDif, but the original statement could just mean that.
OE is not incompatible with the pDif family precisely 'because' it has so many factors in the structure, many of which are constantly, situationally, rotating in and out of meaningful-ness in combat.
All i'm really saying here is that Steven's statement does have a specific meaning to me, and if it came from Jeff, directly or otherwise (like, if Jeff promised to make it so and Steven liked the idea), even moreso.
The inconsistency was always 'wait you want to use the pDif family but have a 30s TTK and no level scaling... in a Hybrid Combat game?'.
I suggest just ignoring the statement, both the original one and the recent stream one. If they're sticking with pDif family, it's still right and everything will depend on the OE tiers, which they can balance anytime.
Does sSt imply that you can cast a full-power spell with no weapon, because the power of the spell is completely separate from the power of your weapon?