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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
oh that was a different one, but he was doing the exact same thing...just mass killing people pressing 1 button lol...doing 4k-6k with gladi aoe is ridiculous lol
It will happen but I don't think it will happen until level 50.
I feel like George definitely didn't mean for it to be quite like that. There's definitely, in most games, a difference between 'gear that they give you or sell for cheap just so you can start out your level Tier' and gear that you had to put meaningful effort into, and it absolutely does affect things in games where you can buy and sell gear.
Player A level 40 has been playing optimally and rolling with the best level 35 bow for a while, in fact, let's assume that quite a few people have these.
They then get a great level 40 bow and move on to using that. The level 35 bow goes up for sale, gets bought by someone who randomly chose to play Archer-Class-Function for the PvP luls, they're quite good at Archer. This is still okay, it probably costs a lot.
They realize they're skilled enough that they could do without it, having used it, so they sell it off and buy the cheapest they can still get decent kills with, and continue to beat on people. George's post is addressing the problem this causes, that's why he specifically points out 'cheap' gear should not be able to do it.
"The level 35, who has put in around 10-15 less hours leveling and 20h less gearing up, can still take out the Level 40 if they happen to catch them at half HP or something, because they don't need great gear to do it."
Half health? Wouldn't the level 40 just not fight and give corruption in this scenario?
Which, I believe, is exactly the point being made?
I think George might be past 'bothering to clarify', but basically, if you had a big gap, to the point where the 'cheap gear' level 35 just can't even dent the level 40, then they don't have to worry about it. They would have to change to better gear to get the kill, and then risk losing that gear.
Whereas without this, they just stay in the cheap gear because they have enough advantage to kill with it, and then when it's lost because they ARE red, they shrug it off and move on. Making sure they can't even get the kill without putting on better gear is a solution.
It's a dull solution that kills the concept of a dynamic world,; all it will do is lead to less player interaction in the open world.
Dark and darker works like this it isn't particularly fun to hit someone 10 times only to die when they hit you once.
For clarity, I still don't agree with George, like, at all.
If anything I'd be happier if augments provided power, since from my understanding, at least those, are somewhat limited, and could 'make the difference between levels' while still often requiring you to put in a lot of effort.
But then you probably wouldn't be able to just buy the power like you can with gear, so there's that too (I don't personally care about that either).
I couldn't tell if you personally agreed or disagreed based on your post.
I think you're on the right track with power being split among a wide variety of things that take a wide variety of interactions between players of all types. I would also like to stress the importance of a competitive minimum viable power level that's easy to acquire both in time commitment and skill entry.
well to be fair, i could say why is it fair that you win simply because you were born 20 years after me?at least gear is something that you obtain in game by in game effort, its not an outside factor (like p2w for example).
the issue with gicobbe was that l2 was weird when it comes to overenchanting (and hero weapons). those people could have survived the onslaught, but the effort you need to survive that is much higher than the effort you need to do that. but if they have had the gear, they wouldnt have got murdered like that. (also depends on the expansion as well, that wasnt possible in older versions of the game).
on equal gear, l2 required quite a bit of strategy and you really needed to know what you were doing. problem is, people were never equal in gear xD.
I feel like we can solve most of this just by excluding raw attack/damage values from heavy scaling.
The game has an Evasion stat, just have that go up instead of directly pumping damage numbers as you go. Diminishing returns handles the rest.
Then you can put weapon 'damage' on skills or something. Higher level players and mobs still just dodge, but they also don't just delete a group of players 5 or so levels below them. TTK works out better too.
I never said small groups i said NEW groups. This will most likely be well established guilds that make alliances to compete for the area. But due to the exclusivety that i expect to happen, they will need other avenues to level the field. Hence im against a big disparity of gear power
Depends, dear George.
Has the Character with the LvL 40 Sword better Gear/Armor - than the Character with the LvL 35 Sword ?
How many Armor Pieces are better ? How many are worse ? The Sword is only one Item. All the others must count, too.
If the Character with the LvL 40 Sword fights in Rags or just his Underwear -> and the Character with the LvL 35 Sword has full Leather Armor, Chainmail - or even Plate Armor,
you see how just one Character having a better Sword might not make all the Difference, right ?
What about Potions ? What if the LvL 35 Sword Carrier has one or several good HP Potions ?
What if one is agile like a Weasel : and the other One burdened with bad Reflexes ? Things like this decide Matches in Games like World of Whorecraft since 2005. 😅 and i bet it is important in other MMO's as well.
I am well aware if superior Gear can make all the Difference in a Fight. However i think this is only unavoidable, if both Players have equal Skills compared to each other, right ?
Reallife-Skill in playing : same as the Skills their Characters have.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
physical evasion only works for auto attacks. only skills like ultimate evasion or wind riding could dodge physical skills (basically just daggers).
but what i mean is overenchanting your your weapon, like making it +1,+2...+16. etc. a normal gladi his level cant do what he did on that video, you would need 3-4 gladis doing the same thing at the same time. also, it can be countered with good healers and overlords. he is just too overgeared and i guess the enemies werent prepared.
thats why i said its easier for one person to become that strong than it is for his opponents to counter that. there is an imbalance in the effort needed to survive vs the effort needed to kill. its easier to kill than to survive.
Honestly if the game is like that, it is going to be easy imo or going to need insane levels of action combat skill to make it challenging.
I will be able to skip progression and just go kill high end mobs since their power wont be that much more than me. Meaning game progression will be much shorter with a good group since I won't be gated by much. And guessing my group will just need high ACC so we can hit the mobs.
I dont think pve mobs are linear like player toons. Difficult to tell because a1 was either a cake walk or a stomp fest lol.
So IMO, when comparing a L50 in greens to a L50 in blues, the guy in blues should only have a 10% advantage in each stat area. IE, 10% more health plus 10% more damage plus 10% more mana plus 10% more regen plus 10% more mitigation etc. Some of these things stack (health and mitigation for example), so it's much more than just a 10% advantage once it's all added up.
Then a L50 in purples would have a 10% advantage over the guy in blues.
As far as player level, I already know I'm in the minority on these boards: I prefer a battle-leveled system. Where a L20 in L20 blue gear has the exact same stats as a level 40 in level 40 blue gear (See ESO's system). The progression 1-50 comes from skill/skill point unlocks, and secondary arch
Two points.
First, that is a 10% gap in regards to the total power of a level 50 player, not a level 40 player.
By your thought process, there is only a 10% difference between a level 1 and level 11 character.
This is why I have been saying the gap between the two at these levels is 12.5% - a level 35 has 12.5% fewer levels than a level 40 player has.
Second, a 10% gap in power equates to about a 75% chance to win. A 12.5% gap equated to about a 90% chance to win.
This is because your chances of success are not linearly correlated to the gap in over all power, as I said earlier. An increase in power exponentially increases your chances of winning - this isn't game design or anything, it is basic first principles.
or you might have power spikes at certain levels. a level 38 vs a lvl 40 wouldnt be the same than a level 42 vs a lvl 44
Yes. I do propose there is a 20% gap between a level 1 and a level 10 in naked stats. Anything wilder would be abominable. You can add armour and weapons to the level 1 and be a demi god, or, you can add weapons and armour to the level 10 and be a demi god. The matter proposed equates to the basic principles of linear progression. While I have no actual formulas for specific stats until launch, I can predict that the crunch will have to happen due to the fact that 50% of the power comes from weapons and armour. Thus, the total power difference between a naked level 1 and an armed level 10 would be 30%. Go up the tiers and get legendary gear on the level 10 and you might see a 55% power gain over the naked level 1.
We aren't talking stats, we are talking character power. Stats can't be talked about because they vary too much in their influence on over all power game to game.
In terms of character power, there is usually a 20% difference between level 1 and level 2.
You can disagree if you like, but think about what that means for the game.
If that level disparity, the skill points associated with it, the new gear that it opens up,, the new abilities it grants you, and the new augments you have access to doesn't mean that it is unreasonable that the significantly lower level player could win, that means there is no meaningful character progression to be had.
Without meaningful character progression, why have freeholds? Why have crafting? Why run caravans?
There is a massive, complex system in regards to gear that is honestly in itself probably bigger than all of L2 was at launch in terms of scope. This is just the crafting and associated activities, most of which have the singular focus of character progression.
If the gains from that progression is so small, why put in those hundreds (or thousands) of hours in to those systems?
In order for those systems to be worth it, to be meaningful, there needs to be gains from them. Thise gains need to be felt, since players don't have universal access to tools that can tell them what minor gains they may have.
If players can't feel gains from those systems, they will stop engaging with those systems. If players stop engaging with those systems, the only game left is fighting other players. There ceases to be any point to the rest of the game.
I burned dozens of items just to OE it by +1, spending weeks grinding the same content over and over again. And I saw hundreds of people doing the same. I could still be killed by a lucky crit from a lower powered player or not kill him because my crits weren't quite as lucky. I prefer this balancing because at one point I was that lucky lower powered character.
To me mmos are about grinding for weeks for a 1% increase in power, but this 1% shouldn't mean that someone weaker than me is suddenly losing way more against me.
In other words, it's about the journey and not the destination. For my group of friends and mates fun was had both when we were underdogs punching up and when we overwhelmed others either through numbers or through huge gaps in progression. Having only one side of that interaction would've been way more boring to me.
And making gear super impactful would lead to that exact boring situation.
And what happens when people reach the end of that journey?
In Ashes, that will take less than three months.
And I'd assume you, as a raider, would know that you don't really reach the "end" until your entire group is at that "end". And in Ashes that means a shitton of boss grinding until your entire raid/guild gets BiS stuff. And by the time you've done that, there's probably been an expansion or two and you keep going.
But as I've already said, we'll never agree on this because our viewpoints on this entire premise are completely different. We're also pretty much at the extremes of the spectrum on this discussion, so we wouldn't really know how all the other people would treat AoC's system. Which is why discussing it between the two of us right here right now is pointless
If it does matter, then the gear that opens up after the 10 level span you and I are talking about would in itself make a massive difference - without even factoring in the new abilities, the new augments, the upgrades to abilities and the added stats from leveling up.
Either these things matter individually and when combined will make a 10 level gap near insurmountable, or these things don't matter individually in which case all of that economic complexity doesn't matter.
This should actually almost definitely be viewed the other way if we're taking this topic seriously in the first place.
Should a level 35 in the best gear for their level be able to beat a level 40 who just grabbed the cheapest green grade gear off the nearby stalls/auction?
Cause in the end, isn't that what we're really asking about in Ashes specifically?
I don't think even half of Intrepid's intentions are going to work if this isn't a thing they know the answer to. You're definitely the type that normally just 'plays forever' but enjoys hitting the wall, and Noaani doesn't even care about most of the 'walls' before max level.
If Intrepid wants the walls to exist, then it won't matter because the player will have to make themselves stronger by getting better gear and improving their midgame skill anyway, so gear won't need to be an issue.
Disclaimer: I come from a main game with five separate 'Limit Breaks' that lock you to a specific level, at least one of which must be cleared solo and requires pretty high mastery, and spend a lot of time in similar games. This 'hasn't come up' for me during the time of my life where I was not yet 'far above average' in gaming skill.
I'm not a tracker person so I got 0 basis for anything I say. I might be completely wrong and might be completely misremembering my own experiences (or they're rose-tinted). But to me 12% doesn't seem all that big of a difference.
10lvls could represent a wild variety of progressions, majority of which, I'd imagine, would be horizontal, at which point not all of that progress would apply to any given fight or matchup and sometimes might even be a hindrance.
I already stated my preferred design for skill progression for Ashes (all skills at lvl25). And I also said in the past that I don't consider augments to be truly class-changing or vertically powered additions to your skillset (at least judging by the fucking smallest amount of info we have on them).
We'll have +-tattoos that adjust our base stats (just as L2 did), so there'll be builds that might become weaker against certain matchups, even if that side is higher lvled. This could potentially "balance out" the base stat level between certain players of different lvls.
And all of that would sum up to ~50% of your power.
My preferred gear scaling steps would be "gear lvl requirements are at steps of 5; 5 tiers per step; t3 of the previous = in power t1 of the current one; 5 stat difference between each tier; +1 enchant gives +2 stats". Or at least a similar ratio.
So say a dude at lvl40 has full +3 T3 weapon/armor set (assuming +3 is the safe limit). And it gives him 100/200 atk/def, so he's at ~200/400 dmg interaction potential overall (if we assume 50% power)
A dude at lvl50 with a T1 full set would be at 104/264, which would put him at roughly 208/528 potential.
If 100atk does 100dmg against 100def, then lvl40 player would be dealing around 38dmg and lvl50 would be doing 52.
So, depending on on class kits, their usage, hp value differentials between the two players and general difference in skill, the lvl50 is still obviously stronger, but with a bit of luck and/or skill the lvl40 can still kill him instead of losing 90% of fights (even though if my math is anywhere near correct these numbers suggest an even bigger difference than your 12.5%).
All of that in the context of lvl40 dude getting enough enchantment scrolls to boost all his stuff (which is also full T3), while lvl50 dude did the basic requirements for getting the basic gear at his lvl. And imo that is the obvious progression in strength. You spent time leveling up so that you could get better gear easier, while that dude might've played the market instead of leveling and lost pace against you, but he still has a chance at beating you.
I dunno if any of my math here is correct or if it makes sense or if my theoretical would even be anywhere close to practice if this design was put to use, but this is just what feels good to me. And as my screenshot to George showed, my preference here is even tighter than what L2 had.