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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.
Ranges of Engagement
GrilledCheeseMojito
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I can't see how to give feedback on the Dev Discussion when there's a fundamental problem at the root of sieges that hasn't been addressed.
The most important feature for mass PvP combat is the combat itself. That sounds obvious, but I believe that if you have a fundamental issue with the ranges of engagement or your ability to play tactically, then it won't matter what kind of PvE systems, environmental design, or anything else you use to spice up the event - it will still feel wrong. I do not think Ashes has a strong enough combat system for a mass PvP event now, as the engagement ranges are very far, making it difficult therefore to make any kind of grand strategic judgment that can lead to pushing through on a siege. It's already hard enough just to see a Ranger as a singular engagement point, much less for someone leading the siege to have any view of what's happening. In the end, when you engage a siege, someone is leading it, and it is not fun to be leading a fight that feels exceedingly random because of how difficult it becomes to track the effect of any individual action. Having such wide engagement ranges also makes formations at best strange and at worst completely ineffectual, which also detracts from the higher-level tactical enjoyment you can have in such events.
If you want to have a mass PvP event that doesn't feel like an RNG slog for both fighters on the ground and tacticians, you need to solve the engagement range problem. Until I know whether these engagement ranges are going to become shorter, I can't see how to give you feedback on the quality of the siege.
The most important feature for mass PvP combat is the combat itself. That sounds obvious, but I believe that if you have a fundamental issue with the ranges of engagement or your ability to play tactically, then it won't matter what kind of PvE systems, environmental design, or anything else you use to spice up the event - it will still feel wrong. I do not think Ashes has a strong enough combat system for a mass PvP event now, as the engagement ranges are very far, making it difficult therefore to make any kind of grand strategic judgment that can lead to pushing through on a siege. It's already hard enough just to see a Ranger as a singular engagement point, much less for someone leading the siege to have any view of what's happening. In the end, when you engage a siege, someone is leading it, and it is not fun to be leading a fight that feels exceedingly random because of how difficult it becomes to track the effect of any individual action. Having such wide engagement ranges also makes formations at best strange and at worst completely ineffectual, which also detracts from the higher-level tactical enjoyment you can have in such events.
If you want to have a mass PvP event that doesn't feel like an RNG slog for both fighters on the ground and tacticians, you need to solve the engagement range problem. Until I know whether these engagement ranges are going to become shorter, I can't see how to give you feedback on the quality of the siege.
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skill issue tbh.
what if range classes didn't have such long range? then they would complain that they cant do anything and that melee is king.
someone Is always gonna get the short stick. range classes are more effective in open areas and melees are more effective in close areas, such as dungeons or castle corridors.
I'm used to very long ranges of engagement, with even fewer gap closers than what Ashes already has, so to me this is completely fine.
Now if we can figure out which archetypes are rocks, papers and scissors and why Steven thought rock beats paper.
I find this an interesting point of divergence actually. The difference is mobility. The balistas are mounted and put in specific places. There is real risk vs reward for the range. You are rooted into position, can be ganked in ui, and have a limit on angle of shot. I really don't get how you compare the two so I'd be interested in your insight here.
The gap closers are kind of in the same vein of problem as op is saying here. They kind of make spacing and position a little less meaningful than if they didn't exist.
If what you are used to 'longer range' is l2, lmk because that influences how I view that explanation. We probably have very different backgrounds to siege warfare in mmos (Dark Ages of Camelot and TL for me.)
Yeah, it's a bit of a chicken and an egg situation. Ranged classes have advantages, so the melees get some gap closers to balance things out a bit, but if there's too many closers or if they're too strong - that's a problem on its own.
And then the devs gotta decide what's the true initial problem here. Is it that the ranged classes have inherent advantages or that melees' closers gotta be balanced better.
Having gone through L2's evolution from barely any closers to almost every melee class having at least one - I'd say I prefer the version with them.
I was talking more about general gap between melee range of attacks and the maximum distance of ranged attacks.
As for siege machinery, L2's were mostly dwarf summons. At first it was purely big golems, but later there were warhogs with some ranged attacks.
You can see the golems here at 1:25
They were usually used purely to destroy the gates and walls.
If we are all right up against each other there is no variance. It's just a melee slug fest.
How can mages, rangers and bards expect to do anything effective? With everone right on top of each other just bring two tanks, two warriors, two rogues and two healers. You win. With gap closers and better survivability the squishes get shredded.
At least this way the ranged classes are effective, and the tactic to beat them is to position well and take out their back line. That seems to have more strategic variability than a slug fest.
It's not about that at all.
I want to know what the people who fought in the siege in the showcase, if this is the range that Intrepid wanted to fight to happen at. Enjoyable PvP is a holistic system. Long engagement ranges mean that you're building with a certain set of constraints, and closer ones let you build combat differently. In a click-to-target game where there's not many big ground AoEs or huge leaps/gigantic gap closers, it becomes "a game about a military formation holding together and picking off targets". In shorter engagement range games, you can build a game around reacting to the break in formation and shifting, or trying to break the formation yourself while knowing you won't get instantly deleted before your teammates arrive because of the shorter range.
The problem is that Intrepid is trying to have the long enagement range game while also having huge evades and gap closers, and not even universally as the Tank still seems more for the "military formation" type of game than the one where everyone has big gap closers and big evasive moves. Even in what I see from L2 in NiKr's post, the engagement ranges are long but they don't come with the giant evades and giant gap closers currently in Ashes.
Basically, I want to give more feedback on the siege showcase, and for that I need more info to know if this is the intended/expected engagement range. I heard the verbal NDA is lifted, so I hope the PI people can chime in and talk about the experiences in the siege.
That was pretty much my thought when I was seeing how mobile the fighter class was in its showcase.
Everyone should have its place, its strenghts and its weaknesses and reducing the range of engagement is taking that away from classes. Sure we dont need realistic longbow ranges like 140 to 300 metres (450 to 1,000 feet) but we should keep those in mind.
As a fighter/melee you are typically strong enough, especially because you really start to shine in a group that supports you.
This depends on the game style.
Roughly speaking, the 'three types' of mass PvP as my group understands it (relevant for the feedback part) are pretty much ShotCaller, Skirmish, and Frenzy.
What Ashes appears to currently be. Your goal should be to stay in formation until your shotcaller/commander calls the target, and everyone does their best to lock down and kill that target. Failure means they get healed and your stuff is on CD. Small group combat is more volatile and slightly less fun, particularly with /assist kills. Feels kind of lame in Tab Target for some, feels pretty cool in FPS/Action Combat style for some. Tends to make Mages and Rangers frustrating, or make Evasion really 'fun'. Can contain a lot of CC because people expect to get shredded anyway and it's easy to control who the enemy formation is able to safely attack. Small groups can beat bigger ones by just having better ShotCalling.
Skirmish
What Throne and Liberty currently is. Your goal is to stay in formation, but since all ranges are shorter and mobility isn't as important, if you're engaged in a fight on the fringes of the skirmish, and you're winning, you shouldn't move to try to focus down anyone. 1v1/2v2 skill matters more. Plays 'better' when healing is a bit weaker, and is fine to be like that, since you're not supposed to get focused as easily (or it's a bad trade for the enemy to overdo it). Rangers and Mages play more around 'distracting enemy with damage while standing in positions where going for them isn't the best plan', but you can still try to get them without having to dive into a storm. Doesn't matter too much if Tab or Action as long as it's easier to escape big frontloaded damage, but sucks when there's too much CC or Evasion builds. Keeping numbers on each side relatively even is important either by objectives or some other thing.
Frenzy
What most First Person MMOs and some Korean over-the-shoulder games are. Your goal is to split your focus between watching your cooldowns and looking around you since you, by design, can't have more than a 180 degree viewpoint of what's happening in the First Person ones, and you can't use bird's eye while targeting correctly in things like BDO. Shotcalling is valuable but actually responding to the shotcall is difficult even if the game is lenient on targeting, since you have to at least be focused the right way. Feels way more frustrating with too much CC or frontloaded damage and tends to have status effect stuff and slow back-walking. Any Evasion stat is a frustration point, but skilled players get to feel cool by dunking on multiple less focused ones.
If Ashes is supposed to be a Shotcaller game, then there's no feedback for Skirmish-Preferrers to have on the Node War. It was fine. That's a personal preference of 'not liking long-range ShotCaller gameplay'.
But it matters because, why would you make a ShotCaller game with this much PvE supposedly in it? That's just asking for misery. I'm happy for all the PvP players who also like ShotCaller type games, but it's a massive waste of time to put 'good' PvE with Player Item drops on-death in a ShotCaller game and then also go 'but people should expect to play in parties'/'people should run Caravans'.
So, either Ashes doesn't know yet if it is a ShotCaller game or a Skirmish game (and I bet you that they already have posters sorted into their preferences from their feedback, it's easy), or it's just being weird again. Did someone tell Steven that he, a ShotCall enjoyer (I assume), can make a PvX game as long as there's enough 'Corruption'?
From the perspective of someone who likes Skirmish or Frenzy play better, the PvP doesn't look as fun. Imagining basic owPvP when the enemy kill squad rolls up with 6 rangers, a tank, and a healer, to snipe anyone leaving your Node, even less fun.
But the feedback can't just be 'yeah this sucks, there's no tactics'. It's FULL of tactics. It's full of 'synergy', it's full of 'teamwork'. It's just ShotCaller teamwork, cogs in the machine activating when mother brain tells 'em to. I've been told this is what Steven is used to/expects. And Ashes may not be for us if we don't like it, but what's with all these other systems then?
To be clear, I'm not even slightly upset about it. I want Ashes and TL to go different directions, and TL is Skirmish, so it's all good. Hopefully AA2 will also be Skirmish so I get something to play that has all the advanced systems TL doesn't have in it yet.
But this design is, again, incongruous.
And that's kinda what I was foreseeing for Ashes. A party comes up with their own build of synergistic abilities/augments and then this party does their best to synergize and syncronize their actions as best as possible.
Great. Everyone who likes that should absolutely have a game to play. Obv I'm not here to 'argue for it to be taken from them'.
I just happen to be the talking-head of a group of Skirmishers who are occasionally still trying to figure out how to help Intrepid, and who are sometimes a little salty about 'betrayed expectations'.
Because for us, everything originally said 'works better in a Skirmisher game', and A1 was a Skirmisher game, and Ashes is now still seemingly building a bunch of stuff that will be less fun outright (talking about outcomes now, not playstyle preference) in a ShotCaller game. Nearly every time we have any serious PvE vs PvP, Action vs Tab, or even Econ discussions on this forum now, it's coming down to that.
So now, finally, we've hit the point where giving proper feedback is becoming impossible, because even if we switch to 'ShotCaller', the rest of the game won't be fun for us, win or lose. ShotCaller style in a game with obfuscated health bars, obfuscated gear, evasion stat, and huge build freedom, is just RNG.
Perhaps, or shot calling just becomes about positioning. You can still get to the back line and hit strategically, but no you won't have the large clusters and proximity you have in games like Eve.
I don't think It'll be so bad, you'll have be more deliberate and do more leg work to fight that way.
Edit: Well unless you mean strictly formation fighting. Then no, that won't work.
Base skills, you can throw together something testable without deciding which type of game it is, but for augments you have to actually consider it, since you can't be putting augments that rely on certain things into the wrong type of game.
Good luck to whoever is working on that.
It's impossible to be more deliberate when the game has been engineered in several different systems to hide as much information from the shot caller as possible. You can't have a game that is primarily centered around a party synergizing their strategy around someone giving commands if there's obfuscation at every layer (health, gear, build freedom).
Ashes right now is building in two conflicting philosophies. Giving feedback is really difficult in the direction the game is heading.
If we are talking about much shorter ranges for engagements, then no I don't agree with you. Not interested in short range formation combat.
If what you are talking about is not hiding information then I totally agree with you.
I would say it's more of a case of feedback on something like this not being possible without experiencing it in action.
That said, I disagree with the rest of your post. You can indeed have a game that is reliant on synergy and strategy without knowing the opposing sides health other than in 25% increments. You can still have a strategy without knowing what gear or build your rivals are using - you just may find yourself in a position where you are out played due to those things.
If you and your guild are any good, they will take that obfuscation of information and make it work for you, instead of work against you.
Not sure what this aspect of the game has to do with combat ranges though
what? so if you are in mass pvp and you see someone overextending you cant say "kill overextendeddude42069" on discord and then people wont be able to click that person and press f1 unless they have all the info about that dude?