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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
I mean, by the way the game is heading, zergs seem unavoidable. The only things that will keep zergs from happening is if the game makes it feel bad and inefficient to zerg. And the only other solutions I could think of are to map out everything in tight corridors for fights, create a debuff if too many allied players stack together, or just enable ways to fight zergs off (such as with no AoE caps_.
Im not suggesting for an arsenal of AoEs for every class. I just want it to be viable as a small group to be able to drop bombs on zergs. I loved zerg busting in GW2. It was like something that feels illegal but isnt. It would almost disappoint me if there werent zergs to bust in this game, it was so fun. And they had the same abilities but with many more numbers, and yet the guild I ran with smashed 60 to 80 player zergs in WvW with only 10 to 20 players
I will agree that your argument for not creating a game revolving around AoEs is reasonable, I want a healthy balance of several types of abilities. Im not Action andy or anything so I personally am not concerned with action combat abilities vs tab, I simply want fluid, balanced abilities and combats, several variations and types, and the ability the erase zergs with enough tact and unrestricted firepower.
Zergs are addressed with meaningful guild progress quests. Nothing else.
This second statement is blatantly wrong, because the first is clearly true.
In the same way you rightly pointed out that attempting to use AoE's to assist in defeating zergs simply hands those zergs stronger AoE's to zerg harder, the same is true with guild progression. Anything you add via guild progression will be available to those zergs just as it is available to you.
The only thing zergs have in common is that they have a lower over all player skill level than most more organized guilds. Thus, the only thing you can add to the game to deal with them that isn't also simply handing them more tools to be a better zerg are things that require player skill to make use of.
If it doesn't require player skill, zergs will just use it against you.
I thought I made it clear that some kind of anti-zerg aoe ability wouldn't apply to all AoEs but in fact only be a handful of abilities and/or even just items you had to craft that were particularly effective against a would be "deathball" zerg (mines, bombs, grenades)
It wouldn't be the same thing for the larger geoup if there were options for scaling AoE abilities that did more damage beyond a certain target threshold though!
If an ability began doing more damage beyond 10 players for example, the group of 30 in your scenario would actually have to think twice before trying to simply steamroll the group of 10. The group of 10 might be prepared to try and inflict a painful scaling AoE to the group of 30.
That's the kind of AoE ability we've been debating about and NOT just having everything be AoE or everything be uncapped, etc.
The point is so that there is SOME abilities (or even items) that could be used against zerg deathballs mindlessly relying on numbers. The point is that tactic should have a potential counter (if used correctly).
This seems like something that isn't all that well thought through.
Zergs have healers. This means any AoE damage intended to take out a zerg needs to be a lot, and fast.
Lets say you have a small number of these increased damage AoE's available - all that means is that you need a lot of people near that zerg in order to all use them at the same time (or near the same time). Basically, you need to zerg the zerg.
This means that the best defense a zerg has against this kind of this potential massive AoE damage is them dealing massive AoE damage to their would be attackers. If only there were some AoE's in the game that the zerg could use that dealt massive damage if used against many targets...
Do you see why this just doesn't work yet?
If you want to defeat a zerg, you can't hand them more tools. Since the only real things a zerg usually lacks are communication and player skill (not wasting a cooldown is not player skill), that is where anything aimed to prevent zergs needs to be focused.
The zerg wouldnt have the same tools actually, that's the point. The larger group/zerg simply wouldnt be able to leverage a mechanic like this because theyd literally be fighting a smaller number of targets and hence couldn't leverage any hypothetical target # damage scaling. Refer to my comment above yours.
Imagine they deal an average of 15% HP to a player. That doesnt mean you need 7 of them to kill someone - that means you need 14 to be able to assume 7 of them will be used before the person is dead, you will need a number of healers to keep people up, a few tanks to keep the zerg from just running over you with melee, and probably a few others that would be Ashes specific.
If we are talking about each attack dealing 15% damage, you are looking at needing 22 - 24 players in order to have a reasonable assumption that you can get 7 off close enough together to make it impossible to heal through - if we are assuming a partially competent zerg.
As I said, you need to zerg the zerg to make this work.
if you are assuming each attack would deal more than 15% of an average players HP in damage, and to an unlimited number of players within the area of effect, then I'm just going to go ahead and say nope.
On top of all of this, there is the need to consider what this kind of AoE would mean for the games PvE.
Im not following your example. In my example the group of 8 going up against the group of lets say 16+ could leverage some kind of scaling AoE ability to deal 30% (an example) more damage to the group of the 16+ but the group of 16+ couldnt leverage that same mechanic against the group of 8 (because there arent enough potential targets to scale off of.
The pve concern is an easy fix. Just dont enable it for pve.
Factions will not solve your issue either. WoW Classic had CROSS FACTION CARTELS. You farm next to some ppl from your side and suddenly rogues from the other side jump you, kill you and ignore the others on your side. That, is called "zoning out" in gangster terms. I like to call it "Stalinian Marketing" personally.
Please do provide your dissertation on how to stop this kind of cartel from happening, I do need a good laugh.
Majority of my games i play are large scale seige based PvP MMO of varying quality and out of all the ones ive played the ones you have the highest chance to fight larger number groups is as followed
1 - Uncapped AoE
2 - Friendly fire
3- Where tactics actually matter
4- High skill ceiling (I personaly dont like this one though since it can be demorilising for less skilled players watching 1 person roll 12 people is not good for gameplay since those 12 end up quitting :P and u canabalise the game to a degree of it playerbase)
Edit: Ill add guild politic/espionage as well since effective use of these things can bring down and dismantle zergs guilds fairly well which we did in archage when our 20 man guild made enemies of a 100 man one. Constant hit and run tactics on trade packs aswell as spies alts infiltrating and stealing tradepacks constantly off there plots kinda made there leadership implode and start kicking most people from the guild (didnt get the spy account though haha)
The more of the above 4 things are in the game the more chance u have at winning with smaller numbers. We wont have friendly fire and we wont have a high skill ceiling which leads to Uncapped AoE and tactics which i think you can probaly win fights if used well against twice your numbers.
Trust me aswell Guild/node politics will play huge role in the game much like in darkfall when people make mega alliance everyone else tend to come together to crush it then split apart again when threat gone. Happen time and time again in that game one alliance gets to big and after a month or 2 they get crushed and split appart.
Well organised smaller groups syncing up aoe on a cluster at once can often kill anyone in that spot before healing even occures if timed well too when you start getting into 20+ player territory and larger the group more players who get caught into it since it harder to spread appart.
Edit: If i were the devs i would make aoe heals only heal party members and AoE dmg spell hit anyone in range of the aoe, which would make sense since the game is being designed/balanced around 8 man groups.
Or have AoE healing capped to X (Lets say 8 players) amount of players and dmg no cap lets face if if 20 people being caugh in a single AoE then your doing something wrong and the group who catches 20 players in their aoe deserve to be rewarded for it :P
Its an interesting topic for sure.
agreed, the only acception i would say is ground based healing can hit anyone however they need to either have a max target cap or they heal for a maximum of x amount (lets say 1000 for the example) but it get divided up by the amount of players in the aoe range so 5 players would get 200 hp each and 10 players would only be 100 hp each. Would make the placement of circles important then cause u wanna hit people on low hp and need the healing
player dmg AoE spells/skills shouldnt have a cap because thats your own fault if ur stacking up and 20 people get hit by a single aoe cause ur stacked ontop of each other like idiots :P
Well the difference between AoE healing and AoE dmg is
AoE requires both sides to be effective caster need to time it right to hit most targets and defenders need to be sily enough to allow it by grouping up, if they never cluster up then they cant effectivly use AoE dmg skills
Where AoE heal is pretty much use it when a couple people are injured which will be most of the time in combat unless the attackers are super good at focus targeting a single person at once.
wont happen makes thing to hard for peopel and then u gotta take into account of corruption and griefing, do u flag if u friendly fire, do u get corruption if u accidently last hit an ally, if not well can i trust people in my party not to grief me. It wont work in this game with how it currently developed and to late to change it at this stage. So u wont see friendly fire.
I understand that it won't work, but it would make for some really crazy battles lol. Like a battle Royal lol.
***edit:
Being that we will have instanced arena's, maybe they could have a toggle on for friendly fire. would make some interesting competion matches. You would have to watch your AOE's for sure
Do you know what line of sight is, cause I think you might be unaware how it works???
Seems to me you are discussing a bunch of facerollers, fighting another bunch of facerollers, and your solution to the mindless, off-time spellcasting or nuking, is nerfing the healer, instead of "getting good". Like, what is your solution to an organised group that will melt you within a long CC chain, nerfing the bard?
What is your solution to shield healer builds? Or healers focused on raid wide damage prevention? The tank absorbtion field? What if 3 tanks rotate those fields, should we nerf tanks? Ban thrm to the shadow realm? What if there is a steel battery build (healer that absorb damage to them like masochists).
What about Spidertanking Healers. Should healers be unable to heal other healers?
The list goes deeper. I have no clue if the cleric/rogue can lifesteal, but if they can, what is the solution to Siphoner healer builds?
Buffers and healers should only work within their party, not for a whole damn raid. This is not WoW.
I agree with Veeshan's point that ground target heals can heal more people, but they should just have a pool of health on their healing, so people would only get a limited amount out if it.
And yes, focusing the healer will always be the first action of any self-respecting pvp group, that goes w/o saying.
1. LoS works different in every game, Sometimes ground AOE will go through LOS sometimes it wont, Sometimes heals goes through LoS sometimes they dont.
2. AoE Healing/shields and buff need to be kept within the party if you can heal/buff an entire raid its becomes stupidly stong and causes the death balling to occur especialy where games AoE gets target capped, even in PvE raids there no reason for aoe healing/shield should effect raid wide the game being designed/balanced for 8 man parties which might seem like a strange number until u relise there also 8 classes so clearly his intention is that you want pretty much 1 of each class in each party for a balanced comp.
3. healers are primarily there to keep there own group alive and has the ability to support other people with their single target heals if need be but i see no need/reason to ever need the ability to aoe heal/shield the entire raid. Bosses mechanic uses raid wide AoE, cool there 1 cleric in each party to cast the aoe heal/shield to get everyone up dont need everyone to heal everyone.
also since u bring up archtype chances are the 2nd class will simply give you a 3rd talent tree to put points into (Weapon/Base Class/Archtype)thats how im expecting to work and the UI kinda supports this to a degree because there clearly room for another tab in the skill tree section however i could be wrong in that regards however with the info given it seems to point that way atm.
If that is the size you are thinking this.kind of thing is for, then I change my opinion from "it won't work" to "it won't work and it isn't needed".
A zerg is 50 at a minimum. The 30 in the example above was enough to point out that it wouldn't work, but 30 is still less than a fill raid.
If you have 8 and are going uo against 16, the appropriate solution is to get more people, not to expect the game to provide you with leverage.
Hard nope on that one.
If something works, if it deals damage, it should function the same in PvP and PvE.
So yeah, aoes will already be anti-zerg, because hitting 30-40 people out of 500 with a single aoe that will cost maybe 1/20-1/17 of your mana pool would already be huge, considering that your side would have at least 100 people who can do the same thing - all several times.
And with proper positioning and zerg baiting, environmental design, tactics - that's more than enough to deal with at least somewhat dumb zerg. And if the zerg is not dumb - they deserve to win.
New World had 3 forced factions at launch. They were arbitrary and degenerate, and took the choice of neutrality straight out of the player's hands. Later on the MSQ has you create a shadow faction that has operatives from the existing 3 factions putting their differences aside for the greater good, but it is all words and no real action, you can't actually shed your arbitrary faction to be a protector of the land. The game seemed zergy as hell and that made it absolutely joyless to participate in big battles, doubly so when not at max level and you're filling "we need anyone" empty gaps.
The thing with this idea as a means to fight against zergs is that it makes no real sense in games with good player collision. In games without it, you could stack 100 player characters on the same spot, and encircle yourselves with perpetual AoE fields that would kill anyone that enters. In situations like this, you can't even easily target a specific player - you click on the stack and kind of just get who you get.
This is the kind of situation an AoE like is being discussed here makes some sense.
As soon as you add in player collision, that group of 100 players suddenly takes up a lot more space, meaning they can't get even close to maintaining that AoE field.
I will say, if we can hit 30 players with a single AoE, either the collision box is too small, or the AoE area is too large. IMO, 12 - 18 player characters should be the most that can fit in the area of an AoE, and that would only ever happen if you purposely pack people in like sardines.
Exactly !! 👀
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
to be fair a zerg is dependant on the difference between the 2 groups like 16 people killing 1 person would be considered a zerg for that 1 person :P a 1:2 Odds however isnt a zerg thats a difficult fight :P
if you bring 40 people to kill 10 people then yeah u would be zerging them
Most likely they will do an algorithm that if you exceed a numerical quantity of player targets the aoe spell is reduced, that would also reduce the meta of spell cleave pvp raids, dungeons, farm spots.
Notice, SPELLCLEAVE, not actual melee cleave.
Also, while we do not know how subclasses work, if the Cleric/Mage (Oracle) is not a shield healer build that allows the cleric to play by changing cleric barrier to lesser mage Shell, I'd be thoroughly bummed. Good shield healers are practically able to see the future, like when you see the Rogue going into the fire and you put a shield on them.
9/10 shield healers get grey hair by the age of 30, spread awareness.