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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
If it ain't broke, don't fix it kinda thing with this one.
Agreed, thats by far the best
For example you full physical dmg, and the target is plate armor, with skills that reduce physical dmg and ect. so you do almost no dmg. With no indicator you will hit the target long time till you realize you are doing something wrong.
With indicator you can swap to attack other target to which you actually do dmg
Also when the battle is chaotic with a lot players seeing the target getting healed means that you may want to cc or focus the healer.
I dont think having no hp indicator will be good. We need to test the current design with approximate indicator to see how it behaves, or if its not good - then to make it exact indicator as other games.
Which is why there are Health bars.
If Steven could get the Designers to provide sufficient info to judge Health without Health bars, Ashes would not have Health bars.
hmm I thought castle sieges were instanced. 250 vs 250
where did you see they will happen in the open world?
Non-registered combatants are not permitted on the siege field in castle or node sieges.[53]
To me, that implies instancing, because that's exactly what instances do. If it's gonna be some random barrier that prevent others from entering the siege location - Intrepid might as well just put that shit into a proper instance, to lessen the load on the servers.
If no-one can interrupt my activity in any way - that's a damn instance.
Please don't listen to everything noaani says he stretches truth. IE if it happens int he world but no one else can go in the area do to it beign set numbers ie 250vr250 (which even numbers is good) He is giivng you the wrong idea most likely. Also the fact nothing is 100% confirmed. We don't have new information on how sieges will work at the moment.
Has nothing to do with what is int he game, he is belittling the person and throwing incorrect information. As he looks at things differently to say the person is wrong multiple times just cause.
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Why to have PvP enemy health indicators:
1) Executes/builder-spender/combo/dmg burst styles of gameplay. They've already leaned into these styles of play with their class design. Fighters even have an execute. And, no, knowledge of the game and a feeling for TTK doesn't make this go away. Those basically only apply to fair duels. In open world pvp and group battles there's no accurate sense you can develop for who is low on health and not.
2) Target choice. This matters for group PvP.
Why not to:
1) Gaming the flagging system.
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These seem like the main important factors. I don't think the aesthetic (or immersion) reasons or seeing the bars change matter as much. There will be combat text, so big numbers are shown anyway. Aesthetics just take a back seat to gameplay - especially right now as things are aesthetically going to change a lot before launch.
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A: The partial HP bars seem like they address both issues pretty decently already. If anything, there are still issues with the con. Maybe you can't tell exaclty if you will kill a low HP player, you can be reasonably assured that you won't accidentally kill a high HP player.
B: Seems like the better answer for the con is to just change the flagging system to where if I attack a green and the green dies within ~30 secs, I get corruption regardless of if the killing blow was an NPC or other players, or myself.
It has been sitting weird with me for a while now that the flagging feels like too rigid a structure with obvious loopholes and that needs to be over-explained because it's very unintuitive.
Agreed.
Different coloring has been brought up as an alternative but I see two issues with that:
1. It's not very good at a glance. A bar is something you can track quickly and easily when you are making snap decisions.
2. Multiple colors is the same thing as multiple segments so the lower visibility gains you nothing.
I suppose this could be a UI option for those who prefer.
"Castle seiges occur in the open world, but may become instanced based on testing."
We should politic for open world for sure.
Node seiges, it's not clear. Could go either way based on what was said.
Node and Guild Wars are open world. We just saw that.
yeah the decision of run away and hide...
1- it snot that hard to see who is injured or not. just look at your screen. unless someone just came new to your screen, you can always tell. on top of that, you are supposed to coordinate strikes with your team. your reasoning for health bars is "I wanna go for picks so I need to know exactly who to pick on". it doesn't matter if you could have done 5% more damage with your execute, since the target will die anyways because you are hitting him with your team. doesn't matter who gets the kill.
2- god no. that has been suggested before, and its one of the worst changes that could happen to the corruption system. only the person who lands the killing blow on a green should get corruption, otherwise you make the system worse and super abusable.
This comment
Seems fairly straight forward to me - I don't personally see much room for interpretation.
While the comment about non-registered combatants with sieges would fit with instancing, it is also possible to limit players without using instances - it is possible for that comment to be correct while sieges are still open world.. On the other hand, I don't see how the above comment can be correct without sieges being mostly open world.
This doesn't make sense to me.
I'd be interested to hear what situation you think would cause being able to see what percent health a rival is on would make you want to run away and hide, when not knowing that wouldn't cause this.
And to me this simply comes down to almost classic failures of presentation from Steven. He might be saying "open world" because it's happening in an open space and potentially people might be able to watch the siege from a hill or something, but effectively the siege is still instanced, because is no one can interrupt it - that's a fucking instance.
And at a point where you have yourself an effective instance, I'd imagine it'd be only a small step to go into a full instance, especially if that step lets you have a way healthier siege because it's now on a separate server body or smth like that.
To me, it is the blatant statement of "otherwise open-world castle and node sieges" that signals that they will be mostly open world.
I mean, it is absolutely easier to implement sieges using instances - that is why instancing them was always the fall-back plan.
Since sieges are always going to be number restricted, I actually don't understand why many people really want them to be open world. It makes no functional difference to me, and I've not heard an argument from anyone in relation to this.
However, there are a lot of people that really want sieges to be open world - which is why Intrepid said they will attempt to make it happen.
If they are able to pull off the target of 500v500 siege in an open world setting without much impact in playability, that is something that even I would be impressed with - even if I don't see the point.
Hell, at 10k concurrents on the server at release, those starting gates will have to not crash the server when there's at least 2k people right in the same spot.
If anything, I don't see the point in putting a limit on siege participants, when the game already requires the ability to support way bigger number of players in a much smaller location than a huge castle, let alone a big node.
But in the current design sieges are effectively instanced and the only thing that would make me think otherwise is Steven saying "yeah, any player can stroll around the castle during a siege" (just as it was in L2, which had true open world sieges).
If there are 1000 people in the siege in total, and there is no significant performance hit, that is a feat that no other MMO has done.
That is more than the entire population cap of some early 2000's MMO's, all fighting in one place.
Not really.
People aren't all going to sit in town at the same time. If you look at your in game habits, I'd wager you spend less than 5% of your time in town - meaning they only need to be able to support a fraction of that 1000 players.
This is an issue that every game has to a degree.
It isn't all that unusual for MMO's to have staggered starts - only allowing a specific number of people to start a new character on a server over a specific timeframe.
That is often (though not always) what queues are doing. The point of limiting it is gameplay based, not technology based. This is only true if you only factor in one aspect of instances, and ignore the rest.
In all other aspects, it is open world.
technically you can. the open world itels is an instance. each server is an instance.
anyways, the differences are probably loading screens. if you have the siege in an open world and then some barrier where only registered players can enter, this is different than teleporting everyone to an instance and separating them from the rest of the players.
in the first scenarios, while non registered players cant enter the siege area, they could still kill and prevent registered players from entering. also, people could potentially go outside to heal then come back in. who knows. you also don't have loading screens, which means you don't get spawn camped and you can assist your allies quicker.
I wouldn't run and hide if I'm winning. the other person would when they realize they are losing hard. imagine someone hits you while you are farming, you hit them back, they get chunked and you don't, they gonna run away when they see your health bar not moving. it removes risks.
we wont see the exact hp, but if you need to hit me 3 times to drop 1/4 for my bar, and I can drop 1/4 of yours with 1 attack, you will most likely run, even after initiating the fight. as nikr pointed out, without seeing any health or anything, we fight until someone dies. they can still run, but its less likely.
you also miss the opportunity to bait players. you run back a little bit making them think they are winning, they could make a mistake chasing you, wait for them around a corner instead of dashing to them, for example or they might waste their execute or something thinking you are low. good players wont fall for it, but bad players will. this is also part of being good or not. when people can see your health, it lowers the skill ceiling. you cant bait as well, unless you have some super defensive skill tat you use at 10% or so, but absent those skills, you take away tactics.
seeing the enemy hp is almost as bad as having gear inspection. you simply gonna avoid certain fights and risks, but it also only works for the person looking at you, since they are the ones that have the intention of attacking you. they have all the time in the world to change their set up to whatever is strongest vs you, while you don't get that opportunity, unless you notice them and decide to stop attacking mobs and do the same. then they change and you change and they change etc.
hp isn't as bad as gear inspection, but it can give you an idea of what build they are running, along with their visible gear. for example, you could swap weapons or augments to something that does flat damage vs hp 5 damage to gain an advantage, while the other person might not have the chance to match you. these are the type of informed decisions that are unfair. its fair if we can both do it.
Are you a Dygz alt now?
Why would you want or need to go outside to heal?
Spawn camping can be prevented with either method if Intrepid wish to prevent it.
None of this registers as being relavent at all.
And yet, this doesn't happen all that much in games that show health.
That's the thing - you seem to be talking about this as if it is some new thing that we have no examples of, and so conjecture on how it will play out is valid. In truth, it isn't new, we have many examples of how it plays out, and so conjecture isn't needed.
If people have something to fight over, if there is a reason for the fight to happen, running is not something that happens very often.
See, this isn't how it works.
If you think that is how it will work in Ashes, then you'll be bottom tier PvP.
When gearing a character, you aren't just adding raw HP to it, you are adding other defenses. To most classes, these defenses are more valuable than raw HP.
If all you are looking at is the amount of damage - as a rough eyeballed percent - that your opening attack does against me, then you're not going to win.
No, this still exists. It is just a little bit more effort than taking a few steps back, or walking around a corner.
Again, keep in mind, we are not talking about a new thing where conjecture is valid, We are talking about a system that is known and understood - just perhaps not by you.
1- the whole game is a big instance. can you interact at any time with players in another server? also, everything in the game is also an instance. every rock, every tree, etc. but I get it, somehow players started to use the word instance for stuff that is separated from the player mass. it still an instance, but not the only thing that is an instance. i just use it that way when communicating since not every gamer is a programmer. they are right, but doesn't mean I'm wrong. i was just pointing out that technically, the castle siege would happen in an instance of the game, even if everybody has access to it at any time.
2- when I said spawn camping, I meant you can get killed while loading. some games add a protection if you arent moving. if you do anything by accident you are dead. you cant control where you load inside the game, but if there was a barrier and you could see inside, you could choose where to enter it avoiding being camped.
3- it does. pvp more.
4- obviously defenses and stuff are included. i didn't think it was necessary to mention those. if I'm a mage and you are a mage and my hp doesn't move when you hit me and you lose 1/4 when I hit you, obviously I have higher defense or more damage than you. there are many factors not worth mentioning since in the end, what matters Is that my hp isn't going down and yours is.
4- seems its you who doesn't understand the system. don't you mostly play pve games? or focus on pve in PVP games?
That is the specific and only definition of that word we are talking about here.
Stop being Dygz. It's unbecoming. Good games don't put your character in to the game world until your game client has control of said character.
There is nothing more to add here. It really isn't. Yeah, but that range is unrealistic.
Realistic percentage numbers for a mage are that my hit deals 10% of your total HP in damage, but your hit only deals 9% on me.
That is a 10% differential in damage, that is actually huge. However, it is also objectively small. With any system other than showing exact percentages of health, players are simply not going to notice if they are looking at health bars. Is this 4.1? 4 the second?
The answer to your questions here is a simple; no. I haven't played a PvE MMO for a decade.
What I've been doing is playing PvP MMO's, all of which show player health (some as percentages, some as raw figures). None of the things you are talking about in this thread are true. Players do not run from fights, players do not look at the percentage of a rivals HP that their first attack does.
Rather, players stay and fight if they committed to that fight. If they are going to run, they are going to run from the start and won't even deal that first attack. Rather than looking at the percentage of health a hit does, they look at the amount of damage the hit does, especially if they are also able to see the damage roll on the attack.
I honestly have no idea at all where you get the idea that people will run after watching their first hit land - it really just doesn't work that way. It kind of seems like you are desperately trying to find a justification for a pre-existing opinion.
from the wiki: "Green players killed by mobs (the mob deals the killing blow) do not flag attacking players as corrupt, but since the exact health of another player is not known (outside of the same party, raid, alliance, or guild), attackers run the risk of killing the player and becoming corrupt.[80]"
If i can play a ranged/ambusher, couldn't I hunt noncombatants at will by attacking during PvE fights and timing my damage so the mobs kill them instead? This would greatly reduce my risk for ganking gatherers. Or I if I am not worried about gaining corruption can I kill them at low life, so they dont even have a chance to flag. This will theoretically double the drop rate of materials (Combatants have 50% reduced death penalties).
It's very normals for these questions to arise when old school hardcore system is being implemented not as a whole, but updated for wider audiences who are pissin' their pants when they don't see a health bar above their enemies and don't know what to do. Yes, you are right. Still, my childish anger will be corrected by experienced game development professionals who most probably know what they're doing and we will get a working system, but still..
This is a non issue in most games I have played. If a player interacts with another player in any way, it counts as a player vs player death, even if the mob deals the final blow. It would not affect the drops you receive. Yea its annoying to be attacked while questing and some guy waiting for you to be low health before he attacks but them are usually bad players. Than you just come back and kill them quick.
Well, the player is usually bad, or they are a rogue. Still haven't met a rogue I like in any game, usually all toxic people. Specifically rolled warrior in WoW long time ago just so I could kill rogues easily, Overpower was one hell of a drug.