Support classes in Parties vs in Raids

Ludullu

All the recent discussions about zergs and smaller groups (mainly this one) made me think about the ways that different mmos approach support class design.

I'm used to party-based design (with a single exception in the form of a class that's meant to buff the entire guild), so healers/buffers/tank buffs/etc - all only affect their party members and the only way to cast stuff outside of your part is to directly target someone (aoe positive effects don't work outside the party at all here).

Quite a few games seem to have gone the way of WoW (maybe there were others like this before it) and have given support classes the power to affect the entire damn raid, so, instead of being responsible only for your own mates, you're now responsible for 40 (or whichever is the max raid size) people.

I'd assume this was done to make the game easier to complete, because majority of people don't want to play the support classes, so designing your game around a single one of them per raid is easier than around one per party. But here's where AoC's design comes in. Intrepid want to balance the game around the 8-man party, with one of each archetype as somewhat of an optimal build. To me this implies that classes will be balanced around supporting your own party and not the entire raid.

But here's the, now usual, contradiction in design. In the world event stream we were shown and told that newcomers will just get added to the raid group of the event. Which means that majority of players in that event will most likely be random non-support classes (as it usually is with random pugs). This implies that mobs will be balanced around this possibility, with lower attack power and potentially lower overall complexity and difficulty (or that support classes will be able to support, potentially, an entire raid solo).

During that event showcase when another group joined the event raid they didn't join as a new party, but immediately got their members added to the initial party. I'd hope/assume that this was the case because it was a 4+4 situation and that if either of the parties had >4 members - they would've joined as Party2, but I don't think that was stated anywhere.

In the latest cleric showcase there was a single party heal. Everything else was either single-targeted or "any ally receives this effect" (with "ally" seemingly meaning any unflagged player). Obviously WIP and all that, but as someone who's used to party-based balancing, a single party-based ability out of 18 shown kinda hints at a more raid-leaning balancing to me.

My point here is this: in your opinion, should support effects only influence your own party in the raid or the entire raid? And if you want a variety of applications - what in your opinion would be a good mana cost difference between a party effect and a raid-wide effect (x2? x3? higher? lower?).

Noaani

My experience (and preference) is for a lot of variance, but keeping most things within the party.

AoE heals should be (by my preference) group only, but single target heals should be able to be cast on anyone not in combat with you.

In EQ2, the exact makeup of your raid, which DPS classes you bought, which healers and support you had, and specifically which group each of them were in, were all fairly important aspects of running a raid. You could have the right classes, but if players were in the wrong group for what ever reason, it would be really easy to outright wipe in the first 15 seconds of most boss pulls.

However, since Ashes is looking at having the content types you are talking about - community content where people just show up and join - that kind of system really won't work. There is no way it could have worked in Archeage - the game that type of content seems to be derrived from.

So, in my opinion, a game should have buffs and heals largely (but not completely) restricted to the group the character is in. However, that simply won't work in Ashes, so Intrepid will need to compromise in order to make the game function.