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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
For me it means filling gaps where the group is lacking. Like support the team in different situations by different ways so the group go forward. So a support should be a jack of all trades
Hate to break it to you - that isn't support.
All of that is what would be standard on most PvE MMORPG healers that aren't trying to be WoW clones.
WoW doesn't have a support role.
This isn't what the support role is though.
The support role in MMORPG's has been a specific thing since the 90's. You don't get to just make your own defintion up.
By your definition, if a group doesn't have a tank, then a tank is a support role as it is filling a gap that the group has.
Jack of all trades is also a role that a small number of MMORPG's have had since the 90's, and is distinct from the support role. The jack of all trades is often filled by a pet class in the very few games that have it, though not always.
i already said this: "but in other games this includes both the heal and support in 1 class. " . And thats where my concerns for the support class comes from. Because the responsibilities will be split between the 2 classes
I agree with you, and I see your point about why it would need to be based on the things you suggested in Ashes, given the game type Ashes is.
But I also agree with Noaani in the sense that if just buffing turns out to be 'boring', it will be moreso because of the game style not matching with the Bard design, than 'because just buffing is boring'. There are games where just buffing is interesting and people love to play that.
There are styles of game where that works, and styles of game where it doesn't. So, if you happen to like the game type where just buffing would be boring, I can see why you'd want to add more stuff. We don't know for Ashes, though.
Well a jack of all trades means that you cant fill a missing role completely. Like a summoner cant be main tank, But he can be off tank. You cant be a DPS, but you can help with doing dmg. You cant be a main healer of the group, but in some situations you will stop doing anything else and heal the party and help the cleric
You cant tank, but can buff a party member so he can off tank for limited time. You cant be dps, but can buff the dmg of the party to help with dmg, you cant heal, but can put some dmg reduce buffs to help the cleric.
But these all are just PVE examples.. so when you include the pvp scenarios you will need CC, mobility cleanse , debuffs and ect in order to fill in the "jack of all trades" position that for me should be equal to the "support" position
And before a comment about that comes up, Summoners are going to be specialists, just like other archetypes. That's the nature of how they interact with the class system; if a summoner becomes a Summoner/Cleric to be a necromancer, they'll get death magic and healing abilities, per the cleric, which will buff up what healing capability they already have. Choosing Summoner/Tank to become a Brood Warden means your already tanky pet option is going to become even more so, maybe capable of actually holding aggro and doing CCs. A summoner also can't swap their class on a dime - a brood warden is stuck as a brood warden, and can't swap to being a DPS class without a lengthy trip back to town and, likely, a costly respect. If you have a brood warden, you have a tank, full stop. You might have a DPS and Healer pet option for when you're not using your tank pet, but you ARE playing a tank at that point, it's just whether you're in tank stance or DPS stance.
Q: When it comes to tanking, will it be primarily the tank archetypes that will be able to tank, or can other people tank?
A: Other people can tank. It really depends on the setting. If we're talking high-end raiding or dungeoneering and playing in these areas that require a main tank, that role and responsibility lies to the Tank archetype. Now tank archetypes can obviously take secondary archetype selections and they can hybridize across different roles. That'll give them a bit of horizontal utility or horizontal progression to the augment system; and the best tanks are going to be the tanks that double down in that role.
Also: Cleric classes are the only classes that can fill the role of a primary healer.[9] Classes with Cleric as a secondary archetype will have self-healing benefits as well as limited healing benefits to other players.
NO ONE IS GOING TO FILL THE ROLE OF A PRIMARY HEALER OTHER THAN THE HEALER ARCHETYPE; but there will be secondary class options that you can select, which will provide you with some level of sustainability under restoration, most of that will be centralized to yourself, especially in the case of a Paladin
This is per the AOC WIKI. So i am pretty sure that you wont fill Main role as summoner. you will be supporting role that fills the gaps and help where its needed.
And no summoner wont be useless even as such, because even tho during a single boss fight you wont do enough dmg as dps, nor heal as cleric nor tank as tank, or support as a Bard. You will be doing all 4 at the same time (or 2 or 3 of those things). So if main healer has 5k heal per second, and main dps has 5k damage per second, you as Summoner may have 2k hps and 3k dps (just example).
That's bad design. If a class is utterly undesirable in high-end content because there's always someone better at that role, the class is going to feel bad to play at high levels because it's literally just a worse version of something else you could be playing. For all that Ashes of Creation is trying to avoid catering to everyone, the eight archetypes are a core pillar of the gameplay space. If over 10% of your gameplay space feels bad, you have an inadequacy of design. There are three ways to tackle this problem.
Option 1: double down on the versatility inherent in playing a summoner. Summoners get three pets, as far as we're aware; a healer, a DPS, and a tank pet. If you want to lean into the versatility offered by being able to swap like this, you need to lean on a stronger ability to swap on the fly - if the tank goes down, you can hot swap to a tank pet and give the healers some breathing room to rez the tank. then once the tank is doing their job again, you can swap back to DPS, no muss or fuss. That's a good position for a "versatility" class to be in.
The problem with Option 1 is that if you have a good team, a solid Static group, a group of people capable of high-end content? They don't need a summoner. Never did, never will, because they don't flub their roles, so they don't need someone to hot swap and fill in. The healer won't die, so the summoner won't need to be a pseudo-healer to cover for them. The healers and tanks will be good enough to not go down or run out of mana. And if all the summoner is doing is DPS, then it's better to just bring along another DPS, since the summoner wouldn't have good enough damage output to replace a more dedicated DPS class.
Which leads us to Option 2: Specialization. If You cannot expect the "versatility" playstyle to work adequately within the framework of Ashes, specialization is the next best bet. And it's already structurally supported; choose cleric secondary to get more healing ability, choose tank secondary to get more aggro management and tankiness, choose Fighter secondary to get more DPS, and so on. The problem with saying "it won't be as good as a dedicated archetype" is that that creates the position where there's no reason to do it. You need two tanks for this boss? Just bring a pair of tanks, a Summoner/Tank is useless for that. You need more than one healer? No reason to bring a summoner when you could grab a pair of clerics. you want DPS? There's many options, no need for a summoner. That means that if a summoner wants to be a contributing member of a team, a specialized summoner needs to be capable of operating on the level of output that other classes within that role are putting out, or else there is, mechanically, no reason to ever have them in your party in high-end content.
And it's not like you can just hot swap your class. If you could swap your secondary archetype any time you're out of combat, it'd create a meta of having two or three different "builds" that you how swap between whenever an encounter calls for a change. We need mobility? Everybody swap to mage secondary for the teleport effects! So if that can't happen, if you need to head back to a node to swap your secondary archetype as has been implied, then a summoner is stuck in whatever role they've specialized themselves for for the duration of the dungeon run. That means, mathematically, they need to contribute as a full member of their role, or they'll be ditched by every decent content group, and pick up a stigma for being a trap option for new players who aren't mechanically inclined.
And then there's Option 3: Solo Play. Petmaster classes have, classically, been a better option for solo adventuring in video games because their displaced health bar and ability to heal their pet create a tank/healer dynamic that effectively allows you to play with a companion despite being alone. Even if you can't hit the highs of other classes in a given role, you're capable of operating on your own much more consistently, with far less of a hazard from PvE enemies.
The trick with this option is that Ashes isn't being designed to cater to solo play. It'll be allowed, you'll be able to do things while playing solo, but it's not something they want to go out of their way to encourage. Making it so that one of your only eight archetypes is specifically built for that would be a truly bizarre choice for the directives they've laid out.
So what's the answer? Frankly, I'm absolutely certain that Intrepid has written themselves into a metaphorical corner with the summoner. The structure of the class system means that they have already chosen Option 2; a summoner gains the ability to specialize at level 25, the same time every other class gets a secondary archetype. If the summoner can't match the output of a dedicated archetype, the summoner will be unwelcome in high-skill groups, and therefore it'll either be a mechanical necessity for players to pick Summoner/Summoner and thus double down on the versatility of their summons (thus running afoul of the problems of Option 1 and still being unwelcome in high-end groups) or they have to math up and make the specialized summoners actually capable of output that matches their role.
The alternative is a mathematically broken game, and something tells me they don't want that. Steven can say what he wants about the intention for the Summoner, but what he's saying leaves summoner in an undesirable position from a game development standpoint.
I think they are going for option 1 based on the info we have.
And to put your mind at ease imagine the following situation:
Your group wants to do some Boss. The boss spawns mobs every 1 min that do big dmg (but not bigger than the boss). So what will your group take? 2 tanks? Or main tank + summoner. What is the difference? In 2 tanks case you are certain that the second tank will tank the mobs great, but thats all. In summoner case the summoner can summon his tanky pet every 1 min to off tank the minions for 10 seconds. Then when the minions are dead he swap back to off heal or off dps. The result? Summoner will be much better.
Or even if the boss requires 1 tank and 1 heal in the group, You can still make the raid not WIPE because of some minor mistake as summoner. For example the Cleric gets stunned or trapped by prison or smth like this. Instead all of you dieing coz of this mistake, you can take his role for small amount of time and hold the group alive.
I think the summoner will have his place in the world, BUT i agree that he will need his uniqueness. THats why in the initial post i wrote that maybe summoner and bards should be the only classes with cleanse. Or the DR stuff i wrote about and ect.
Also dont forget that "jack of all trades" also means that the summoner will be able to fill partially the bard role as well. So even when you are off tank you may still be able to buff the dmg of the allies, or smth like this
Are you at all familiar with the Ninja class in Final Fantasy 14? There's actually a major design flaw it introduced into the game that's warped the structural meta of FF14 around it, called Trick Attack. Trick Attack is a unique ability that imparts a damage vulnerability to all types of attacks while it's up, and is capable of being applied for 20 seconds once every 120 seconds.
This initially resulted in high-end players screwing with their rotations to ensure that their burst windows all line up with Trick Attack's application, so that they can benefit from the increased damage, and every high-end group would bring a ninja so that they could apply Trick Attack. It created a very strange metagame where combat priorities were about holding onto your attack patterns instead of actually using them the way the devs wanted you to, and made a couple classes an absolute nightmare to play because playing them optimally meant a truly absurd rotation that reached into dozens of unique timings to ensure you got the most out of everything.
Eventually, the devs for FF14 decided to simplify the classes in question, and since everybody was already running on a one minute or two minute long burst window anyways, it wasn't hard to align the various classes to match that 60 or 120 second structural window. And since all the classes were now running on that paradigm, bosses started to specifically be designed to cater to the one or two minute burst window timers. It's not unreasonable to state, straight up, that Ninja has defined the meta-mechanical structure of Final Fantasy 14 for years, because it was given a single unique skill that the devs were reluctant to take away. Every class in the game is now either designed to support Trick Attack timings, or they're a healer.
I'm not saying that would necessarily happen in Ashes, but if your answer to "why take X class?" is "Just give them a unique ability to FORCE players to take them along" you're going to create perverse mechanical incentives and create friction with your intended gameplay space for anybody that isn't catered to by that ability.
Tank would definitely has a lot less dmg than summoner. For solo content tank will build all his offensive abilities which will prevent him from tanking anything, but will do fine in solo. But when he tanks his dmg will be significantly less than summoner. Also The game will be balanced around group content. so you can remove the "solo plays" from what you are looking at.
The cleanse will be unique mechanic no matter how you look at it. Tho atm i think the Cleric is designed to have the spell, i just propose to swap it on summoner and bard (which are 2 different classes, so you may need just 1 of the 2 in the group)
Let's assume the same pattern holds for Ashes. If we want a summoner to have better DPS than a tank, but worse DPS than a DPS, then you're looking at a summoner being roughly 15% weaker than a DPS in damage output to put it between the tank and DPS roles. Problem: that extra damage over another tank is not enough to justify abandoning the safety net that another tank provides to you. Taking a 15% damage hit on a single party member to keep your group from wiping if the main tank makes a mistake is an easy trade, even for very good groups. Especially in areas that risk PvP, where the uncertainty means you want the safety net available in case some jackass comes to gank you while you're standing in front of a dragon.
Sure, but cleric gets it specifically because they're the class that's here to watch allied health bars and make sure they don't drop too low, while smashing monsters in between heals. That means that skills and abilities that focus on the health bars other players have and what's causing them problems is the gameplay directive of the cleric to worry about, which makes cleansing a thematically and mechanically appropriate thing for clerics to have.
Bard is a mixed DPS and support class, here to fight enemies and provide buffs, which is about skill use and positioning; it is NOT thematically or mechanically appropriate for them to be heavily concerned with watching the health bars and debuffs applied to all of their teammates when they should be focusing on positioning to ensure buff coverage and stabbing a monster in the ass.
Proposing to give Summoner instead of Cleric cleanse is actually even worse, because it necessitates that the ability is tied to their healer pet, which creates an incredible layer of clunk. Let's say a monster applies a debuff to one of your teammates; a cleric with Cleanse targets them, hits the cleanse skill, and everything is good to go. A summoner with cleanse tied to their pet abilities - which it would be, as all summoner skills are used through their pets as far as we're currently aware - then a summoner needs to enact a summoning to call up their healer pet, target the ally, use the cleanse, and then swap back. And that's on top of the fact that it's not typically going to be a summoner's job to keep an eye on the HP bars and debuffs afflicting their teammates, because as you've said, they can't fill the role of a healer, so presumably you have an actual healer whose job it is to do that stuff. As a result you're interrupting the flow of their gameplay to take twice as many actions, which take significantly longer most likely, to do something that a dedicated healer should be capable of in the first place. That is a painful amount of clunky design. There's a reason healers are the characters with cleansing ability in MMOs, and that's because it fits their job in a team.
Actually, there's also a further problem with picking hyper versatility as the summoner specialty, and that's gearing. You cannot have gear for every role you might want in a fight. If you want to optimize for DPS, you gear is going to have DPS stats and bonuses. If you want to tank, you'll have gear for tanking. Assuming your pet inherits your stats (which seems very likely, because the alternative makes for a horrible mechanical snarl), then when you're wearing your DPS gear you won't be able to properly tank in the first place even if you swap to your tank pet, because it won't have the stats to actually eat hits. And if you're wearing tank gear to be able to handle an incoming add or whatever for the tank, as you stated in your example, then your damage is going to be abysmal; better to have a dedicated tank character that just has a DPS outfit for this fight, because they'll have the skills and base stats to eat hits for a while while they do DPS and wait for the main tank to save them. So, once again, if Option 1 is selected, then summoners are not acceptable in high-end groups because the niche they serve can be better served by a dedicated player character of another class.
You have a good point about the cleanse.
For the tank dmg - Tank having 30% less dmg than dps is insane. This seems like a broken sh*t that no game should have. Like you can just run whole group of tanks and still do massive dmg.. this is ridiculous.
If a dps does 80 dps, then tank should be around 6-8 max. and summoner will be around 50.
Tank can have some dmg, but it should not be dps dmg. It can be big cd skills that deals great dmg but then till you wait their cds, the total dps is total sh*t.
And about the gear. I would assume that your pets get stats from all your stats. So no matter if you build intelect, stamina, agility or whatever, the tank pet will get tankiness from all of your stats. DPs pet will get dmg from all your stats, and heal pet will get healing from all stats. And the difference will be for spells cast from the summoner (not from the pet, and there will be such spells, even tho most will be used from the pet).
And also will benefit the Weapon Attacks. SO if you build tankiness your weapon attacks will do no dmg. but your character (not the summons) will be tanky. And if you build dmg, you do more dmg, but you are more squishy.
But if you are correct then this all will make no sense. And summoner will be useless class indeed
That's why I hold that the only available option is Option 2, in which summoners get the math they need to match more specialized roles. If they don't, nobody will bring them along in gameplay. I'm hoping that Intrepid's testing shows them how necessary it is.
I never heard Steven wanting to mimic FF14 tho. And FF 14 is probably the only game (maybe there is some other not that known) where tanks do that much dps.
In PVP the tank role is not to stick on a target and deal dps. He can go to target use his 3 big cd dmg skills take 40% of the target hp, then he has no more dmg so he use the wall to protect others, use some ally dmg mitigation skills and ect. Not sure why you are so hung on tanks being a dps class tbh
Also, WoW uses the same kind of "Tank DPS" paradigm, because it makes tank players happy to contribute and makes aggro management way easier on both the player and dev sides. There was actually a point where shield warriors were stupidly strong due to shield bash being overtuned, so they were dealing more damage than a DPS, despite the fact that they were in a practical sense supposed to be 30%-40% weaker in terms of damage output than a DPS class.
If the two truly big MMOs on the market are running this setup and have been for years, I have to expect that they have a point.
The issue with this idea is that players are expected to get into 1v1 combat scenarios due to the way the gathering and resource structure is designed. While it's acceptable for certain classes to have a bad matchup - I expect tanks would really struggle to close the distance to fight a ranger - having a combat paradigm that makes you a sitting duck when your cooldowns are dead is a Bad Feels gaming experience.
First of all Wow tanks are nothing alike ff14 tanks. In wow Aggro is not dependent on dmg at all. Aggro in wow is some non existing BS tbh. The tank uses some mass spell that deals 10 dmg, then the dps hits spells that deal 10k dmg and you can never take aggro of the boss from the tank. But the tank total dmg is really low. Tho in pvp they give the tanks more dmg and less tankiness (some system bs) that makes tank deal a lot dmg, but die faster also.
And for your example of tank vs ranger. If the tank have 3 big dmg spells with long cd they will have a lot more chance to fight a ranger than if they are dependent on dps. Why? because if you gap close to ranger for 2 seconds before he disengage, in 1 case you will use 2 of your big dmg spells, in the other case you will deal 2x 50 dps.
but again you talking about 1v1.. AOC WILL NOT BE SOLO GAME!
The 1v1 matchup isn't really the point here. What you're describing sounds intensely horrible. It creates a gameplay loop for the tank where the optimal position to take in a fight is... not to fight. It's to run away constantly until your cooldowns come up, slap someone silly, and then run away again. That's frustrating for the other player, frustrating for the tank player, leads to alpha strike combat scenarios (especially in large-scale group pvp) and would completely warp the meta around burst windows. A problem I literally just explained a few posts ago.
Even in the past, tanks in wow had no dmg. Which is not particularly true, because you would see those prot wars that put full armor pen and dmg, with 0 armor, 0 dodge and stamina. that deal masive dmg but are more squishy than a dps. But such tanks wont tank in pve for sure so lets not talk about them. Threat generation is usually not based on dmg for tanks. There are skills that generate high threat even tho they dont deal high dmg.
You can have your own opinion, and i have mine which is that every design where tank deals comparable to dps dmg is insanely bad
But that's the point; if designed properly, tanks don't deal comparable damage to a DPS. They deal around half, maybe a little more. It's good balance for there to need to be two tanks to match a DPS's damage output. Going less than that in favor of big cooldowns changes it into an ambush class, of all things, which is ridiculous when the class fantasy of a tank is to be the warrior that never wavers when taking hits from the big bad guy.
they had some good mass dmg against multiple mobs, but single target dmg vs bosses was sh*t
Tho the sunder armor was helping dps by reducing boss armor
Just jumping in to point out where you guys might be missing each other. wow has had many interations of tanks. The early versions of wow had tanks that did little damage. they used taunts, shield bashes and stuff like that to keep agro. The later versions, cata and after the tanks have the highest dps of the party many times and the dungeons turned into sprint races to the end. So just wanted to mention that you could clarify which version of wow you guys are arguing about.
No, you are taking the role of healer and assuming that will get split up in to two roles.
What I am saying is the role of support doesn't exist on WoW, not that the role is merged in to that of healers.
It isn't a case of taking the responsibilities of a healer from WoW and splitting them between two classes. It is a case of creating new responsibilities for the support role.
Jack of all trades means you can do the thing, but not as well as someone specialized in that role.
There absolutely will be times a summoner could tank fir a group. It may mean the healer needs to focus more on healing and less on debuffing, it may mean the support needs to buff survivability rather than DPS, and/or it may mean the DPS need to start off slower to give the summoner time to build hate. However, it can be done.
Same with them being a healer. If you have a good enough tank and no primary cleric, a summoner may well be able to fill in, but the support may then need to focus on buffing the healing ability of the summoner as opposed to the DPS and their damage output.
In his situation, a summoner and Bard working well together may even be able to provide a group with better tanking or healing than a tank of healer without a Bard (though obviously the summoner and Bard take up 2 spots in the group).
That's the key thing in terms of group content. A Bard in a balanced group adds DPS to those that specialize in it and so allow the group to run content faster. However, in a group that is missing a tank or healer, they allow a jack of all trades to fill that role to a fairly good degree.
Edit to add; I feel it worth pointing out that the entire concept of an off tank is essentially limited to low skill situations. It may be low player skill, or it may be low teamwork (ie, people not used to working together).
When you get in to high skill with both of the above, off tanks become something of a meme.
As i stated above - Cleric is the only PRIMARY healer in the game, and TANK is the only PRIMARY TANK in the game. Summoner can tank some easier dungeons, but when you need a tank for raid or some harder boss, summoner cant do it no matter if the healer is trying harder or not,
Off tank is the tank that gets aggro of mobs that the boss spawn, or maybe in some phase the boss split into 2 and the tank cant hold both bosses, or something like the boss puts stacks on the tank and at for example 10 stacks the tank dies, so the off tank has to take aggro for 10 seconds, then the main tank taunt again.
There have been games with boss mechanics that there are 2 bosses at 1 fight and if the bosses are close to eachother they dont take dmg. So GL clearing this with no off tank
I guarantee we will see summoners tanking some harder group content at some point. I have zero doubt about that. Yes, and in such cases you don't have a tank and an off tank, you have two tanks.
Same with adds. Either you have adds that can just be dealt with by DPS, or you have a need for a second tank. There is no scope for an off tank - you need either a tank, or you need two tanks.
I have seen raids in which 4 tanks are needed - none of them are off tanks. None of them are sub-par tanks as you are suggesting.
Your point was that a summoner couldn't be a tank, but could be an off tank. if you do not need a full tank to take on adds, deal with different phase changes, aggro swaps etc, then you also do not need an off tank. If you do need a second tank to deal with these things, then you need a second actual tank, not an off tank.
Again though, I am not talking low skill play here. If I were a WoW player running pickup raids, you had better believe I would always want an off tank.
Guess you didnt read what i posted. ..
Q: When it comes to tanking, will it be primarily the tank archetypes that will be able to tank, or can other people tank?
A: Other people can tank. It really depends on the setting. If we're talking high-end raiding or dungeoneering and playing in these areas that require a main tank, that role and responsibility lies to the Tank archetype. Now tank archetypes can obviously take secondary archetype selections and they can hybridize across different roles. That'll give them a bit of horizontal utility or horizontal progression to the augment system; and the best tanks are going to be the tanks that double down in that role.
Also: Cleric classes are the only classes that can fill the role of a primary healer.[9] Classes with Cleric as a secondary archetype will have self-healing benefits as well as limited healing benefits to other players.
NO ONE IS GOING TO FILL THE ROLE OF A PRIMARY HEALER OTHER THAN THE HEALER ARCHETYPE; but there will be secondary class options that you can select, which will provide you with some level of sustainability under restoration, most of that will be centralized to yourself, especially in the case of a Paladin
This is per the AOC WIKI. Its not my conjecture, Its what Steven has said.
However, we are not talking about exclusively the hardest content, we are talking about things in general. In general, a summoner can tank.
Feel free to point out where I said summoners could be raid tanks, or could tank the hardest content in the game. The most I have said, and I am VERY careful about my word choice, is that they could tank some harder content.
Not hardest, just harder.