Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Let's TheoryRaid #5 - Tiamat (FFXI) vs FireBrand
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
This post is not feedback. This post is not even discussion of the Firebrand showcase. Please don't expect a direct discussion of FireBrand in the way you'd think of it. If you have feedback on FireBrand showcase, please give it here.
This post is mainly a continuation/rethink of the discussion here, as development evolves and the vision for Ashes becomes clearer (or muddier, depending on which type of faith you have). Reading that post is not required, as most of what was discussed in it doesn't come up in the FireBrand showcase.
There's not much to understand about Tiamat. In terms of her mechanics, she doesn't come too close to Firebrand, and the primary status effects she delivers don't match up to the inconvenience of Jormungand, particularly if you don't know FFXI as a game that well.
Today I'm just ranting about why the base mechanics of FF make Tiamat require more visible/understandable coordination than Firebrand for me. It's not really critique, because we haven't seen Ashes Summoner yet, and FF bosses change a lot when your Summoner is there, so there will be discussion of that. It's not really feedback, because I'm not asking for FireBrand to be different. It's just ranting. If the devs/Community Team judge this to be 'feedback', into the thread it goes, I assume.
First, a random Tiamat Video. This video is nearly no help whatsoever other than showing the battle location.
As you'd expect from this type of slower, older MMO, one of two things is always happening when it comes to bosses, because for the most part this is how MMOs work(ed).
Either the boss is forcing you to 'not stand in the fire'/threatening to oneshot you... or your positioning doesn't matter in the moment-to-moment gameplay until something happens to disrupt the tank, and the teamwork is based on understanding a constantly changing status.
Tiamat is mostly the second, positioning is 'trivialized' immediately by moving away from all the naturally-spawning things that could act as Adds, and then standing by a foreleg. I chose this comparison instead of Ouryu who can actually just summon Adds, because FireBrand's adds are just a DPS/position check whereas Ouryu's are tactical, so the comparison would be unfair.
Old MMOs: Raiding is Reading?
This certainly isn't true consistently, but the better your tank is, the more this is only solved/expanded on by 'don't stand in the Fire', in the old days. Bosses didn't have verticality to worry about much. They didn't often have a lot of motion because characters weren't allowed to have a lot of motion, and you needed the 'tell' of the boss' facing and movement direction to tell you who was in danger.
Other Old MMOs: Raiding is RedZones?
The other side. this is only solved by effects that you have to deal with, since RedZones that do damage and not effects are normally beaten by just superhealing and are really bottable, because they're entirely intended to make the challenge of the fight 'Don't Stand In The Fire' rather than 'sometimes you cannot get out of the fire in time or it's even worth being in the fire, someone else has your back relative to the problem'. The RedZone just replaces the 'tell' of the boss' facing and movement. You can look at the boss and its animations less, and just make sure you don't stand in the red.
Both of the above are exaggerations, but let's now consider FireBrand, our temporary 2024 MMO 'mascot boss'.
Even after a rewatch, FireBrand is half-and-half yet neither, and this is why it doesn't look like raiding (I guess I have to say 'to me', but the general response has been at least 'this is underwhelming' and I'm just doing my best to give information on why I experience that, without getting into the specifics of FireBrand or Ashes raiding).
Roles In A Tiamat Fight
First off, note that FFXI 'raids' are only 18 man, and parties are only 6, and some can reasonably lowman this fight even before the level cap raise that trivialized it. One of the important aspects of doing so is your Summoner.
The roles are fairly obvious for a serious attempt from people who haven't mastered it yet:
It's a very theoretically simple fight. Tiamat will blast you with fire, or bite you, or if you make her mad from anywhere in tail range, half kill you or worse, and everyone behind her. She has a wingflap that leaves the Plague status which drains your MP and TP gauge, just consider it to be slowing people down and lowering their burst damage options unless removed.
Sometimes she bites harder for a bit. Sometimes she Terrors the Tank and freezes their actions but otherwise no change, so if they don't get hate Reset, you still just keep doing the same thing.
So why does this require any meaningful coordination at all? TP Gauge. And this isn't a post about the wonders of the TP System. Tiamat is simple as soon as you remove it. But the cadence of everything that is happening is important, and here's where the difference from FireBrand comes through:
Barring Sleep (a viable strategy) and repeated Stuns (stun's natural recast timer in FF is 45s), Tiamat is always doing something and there is always a chance that you really need to care and plan a reaction immediately.
And the reaction is not as consistently simple as 'press button to counter' (or sometimes your button is very obviously on CD).
This is part of the 'benefit' of smaller raid numbers and the way FF handles the ability to affect a mob. As a whole concept it can't be said if it is good or bad for any given game, but limiting people who can affect a mob means you don't have to give it as much resistance to CC, particularly not softer ones. 40 man raids change the boss challenge from 'CC correctly and have alternate options for when you can't CC' to 'you aren't allowed to CC this that way/that often' and then 'Here comes the Fire/RedZone'.
When you remove the CC option, you reduce the amount of teamwork possible, but some games, Ashes included, can easily restore some of it by making the CC require more coordination instead.
Roles in a FireBrand fight:
At least one Tank to reduce the impact of consistent physical damage, probably with Fire Resistance. Stream implied the desire for a second (presumably if the main tank needs to Active Block any mechanics and runs out of Stamina by doing so)
Some DPS, probably as many as the CC-control options-before-resistance-kicks-in allows.
One Healer per Party(?), to push the HP bars back up (at the moment this is basically all Ashes Clerics do for this fight, even cleanse here is to avoid Burning)
One Bard per Party, to support the team, probably.
The difference is simply that because FireBrand is 'just' a mobile 'Don't Stand In The Fire', the main focus for any DPS should be 'being a character that can DPS without being in the fire'. Whether that's by being ranged, or having incredible awareness and evasion of mechanics (being ranged is probably easier, but not braindead). Because FireBrand's larger attacks are also cinematic/slow, and work primarily because players are also slow, ranged DPS is the superior option until more Synergies are seen.
This leaves no obvious intent for Summoners, but they're the flex role, so from that perspective, let's think about what the flexibility they're offering to this is...
At the beginning, we can see that FireBrand's attacks do decent damage in an AoE.but the backline don't take any of this damage, obviously. Burning is applied, though. The Cleric's role is clear. Heal. The Tank's role remains clear. Control FireBrand's movement. The Summoner could join the 'ranged DPS' by sending a summon in.
The Tank's role doesn't help as much when the AoE 'summon magma/burning circles' happens, so they would have to somehow contribute to a synergy. The priority is not synergy related yet, though, it's as advertised, "don't stand in the fire". Fortunately, FireBrand does have the ability to 'randomly' do aerial flamebreath strafe right after such a summon of Burning Circles.
This Aerial Flamebreath has a huge tell. Even if no one gets out of the way, a Cleric's obvious choice is to face wherever the attack is going, and anyone still caught in it gets healed. It also covers a large but predictable area, and takes a long time. The amount of time FireBrand takes just to get back into a position to be any threat to anyone, is more than enough time to regenerate some mana, get everyone healed up, etc. If this attack was an instakill, it would imo honestly still not matter. Even getting time to raise the fallen isn't unlikely.
The massive movement does allow FireBrand to outrange the ranged DPS, but what happens to a summon here? Do they chase after it? Presumably the Summoner keeps the summon(s) close, to apply any benefit or buff that it grants to their party. But a double breath-strafe takes so long that if one were to use a 20s CD heal on reaction to seeing liftoff, to help someone survive the first strafe because they were unable to avoid it, it would be up again by the time FireBrand returned to purposefully dealing damage to anyone. (I feel like Necromancers get the short end of the stick here, with their summons shambling off to try to mindlessly keep up with the dragon)
This delay leaves more than enough time to cleanse, get shielded... personally as a Cleric my response to this move if I trusted my group at all would be /sit.
The seven second expanding AoE with the roar tell, would endanger summons, and maybe even push Ranged DPS back far enough to have to stop doing DPS (spoiler: it does not), but at least Fighters could just leap right over every fire wave after the first to start hitting again.
But from that moment until FireBrand's next meaningful threat can be 20 seconds minimum, precisely because can just do two spectacle moves back to back. I guess if your Bards were CCed this wouldn't just lead to a Shielding Dance as the incoming flames sweep over (six seconds worth of that). That's about the same casting time as Tiamat's Firaga III, which is good, I guess, but it does 460+(x3 if you don't evade or roll) damage and doesn't even seem to leave burning on anyone. Spectacle moves are fine, but roles matter.
The roles shown here as a result of FireBrand's design are 'people who shoot it', 'people who stand in front of it', 'people who heal the people standing in front of it', and 'people who stand near the people shooting it' (because when FireBrand repositions to use Anti-Zerg Flamethrower, the Bard's best option is not to move and just shielding dance.
Others spend more time chasing after movement than people do against Nouver in BDO, and I say this as someone who can keep up with Nouver's movement on my character. The hardest part of this seemed to be 'finding who needed to be healed or raised'. Later on in the fight, we do actually get a confirmation that it is possible to shoot FireBrand from outside even Concentric Flame Rings range.
We do see Bucky fall at some point, but the reason for this is seemingly entirely random, a flame puddle appearing... underwater, right beneath his feet, after AZ Flamethrower. But he is redeemed! By his effortless 'casually walk forward into the burnt area before the next explosion' in Concentric Flame Rings. As everyone should. It prevents damage! Hopefully there will be a way to control summons precisely enough to have them do it too.
FireBrand not only does not require synergy, it neither truly encourages nor rewards it. There is nothing to 'diminish the effect of', there's very little ability to keep up with its movement or options, so there can't be any actualized 'challenge' there. It's a situation of the reverse of my pet peeve in gaming, it's a boss that mostly limits what players are usefully able to do (assuming their aim is to engage it).
As with Tumok, I have no issue with this boss existing. There is a benefit in an MMO to have 40 people get together and do their best to avoid standing in fire or randomly having the ground explode under them while a few Clerics and Bards try to keep them standing. Further if PvP is happening, as mentioned in another TheoryRaid. As a 'source of random damage in a PvP arena' FireBrand does a good job, and it is adapted well to be the tactical focal point of this for the occasional Tank, whether that's 'momentarily tanking it' or 'pulling an enemy into it'.
I'm interested to see the expansion of roles that occurs when this fight evolves through the addition of PvP and becomes what one comes to this subgenre of MMO for. FireBrand does not need to be more, just as Tiamat does not need to be more. Tiamat's value cannot be seen without understanding the TP Gauge's effect on it, nor can FireBrand's value is hard to see without understanding the PvP environment's effect on it.
If there is a part of this that I consider to even approach valid feedback that matters toward the potential goals of the designers, it is probably this:
"The reason this was boring for me to watch and I expect would be doubly boring for me to play, is simply that my only role here is to determine who took damage and hit the anti-damage button', and the pace of the fight would likely be so lenient on my cooldowns that I would never be truly unable to do that without interference."
I want to see this again, with but with opposition. Maybe in A2 I will be part of that opposition.
Now that I think about it (because I never really play games with the 'Raid Frame'), is this normally 'hard' because you lose the ability to just F1-F6 your own party? Also I hope it's clear that this sort of thing (without opposition) is super bottable... honestly moreso because of the raid frame.
That said, I congratulate Intrepid Studios on their first(?) Burning Circle Notorious Monster.
This post is mainly a continuation/rethink of the discussion here, as development evolves and the vision for Ashes becomes clearer (or muddier, depending on which type of faith you have). Reading that post is not required, as most of what was discussed in it doesn't come up in the FireBrand showcase.
There's not much to understand about Tiamat. In terms of her mechanics, she doesn't come too close to Firebrand, and the primary status effects she delivers don't match up to the inconvenience of Jormungand, particularly if you don't know FFXI as a game that well.
Today I'm just ranting about why the base mechanics of FF make Tiamat require more visible/understandable coordination than Firebrand for me. It's not really critique, because we haven't seen Ashes Summoner yet, and FF bosses change a lot when your Summoner is there, so there will be discussion of that. It's not really feedback, because I'm not asking for FireBrand to be different. It's just ranting. If the devs/Community Team judge this to be 'feedback', into the thread it goes, I assume.
First, a random Tiamat Video. This video is nearly no help whatsoever other than showing the battle location.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELHawYXOlfgAs you'd expect from this type of slower, older MMO, one of two things is always happening when it comes to bosses, because for the most part this is how MMOs work(ed).
Either the boss is forcing you to 'not stand in the fire'/threatening to oneshot you... or your positioning doesn't matter in the moment-to-moment gameplay until something happens to disrupt the tank, and the teamwork is based on understanding a constantly changing status.
Tiamat is mostly the second, positioning is 'trivialized' immediately by moving away from all the naturally-spawning things that could act as Adds, and then standing by a foreleg. I chose this comparison instead of Ouryu who can actually just summon Adds, because FireBrand's adds are just a DPS/position check whereas Ouryu's are tactical, so the comparison would be unfair.
Old MMOs: Raiding is Reading?
This certainly isn't true consistently, but the better your tank is, the more this is only solved/expanded on by 'don't stand in the Fire', in the old days. Bosses didn't have verticality to worry about much. They didn't often have a lot of motion because characters weren't allowed to have a lot of motion, and you needed the 'tell' of the boss' facing and movement direction to tell you who was in danger.
Other Old MMOs: Raiding is RedZones?
The other side. this is only solved by effects that you have to deal with, since RedZones that do damage and not effects are normally beaten by just superhealing and are really bottable, because they're entirely intended to make the challenge of the fight 'Don't Stand In The Fire' rather than 'sometimes you cannot get out of the fire in time or it's even worth being in the fire, someone else has your back relative to the problem'. The RedZone just replaces the 'tell' of the boss' facing and movement. You can look at the boss and its animations less, and just make sure you don't stand in the red.
Both of the above are exaggerations, but let's now consider FireBrand, our temporary 2024 MMO 'mascot boss'.
Even after a rewatch, FireBrand is half-and-half yet neither, and this is why it doesn't look like raiding (I guess I have to say 'to me', but the general response has been at least 'this is underwhelming' and I'm just doing my best to give information on why I experience that, without getting into the specifics of FireBrand or Ashes raiding).
Roles In A Tiamat Fight
First off, note that FFXI 'raids' are only 18 man, and parties are only 6, and some can reasonably lowman this fight even before the level cap raise that trivialized it. One of the important aspects of doing so is your Summoner.
The roles are fairly obvious for a serious attempt from people who haven't mastered it yet:
A Tank with some innate Fire Resistance gear, Paladins are best but they make you need more DPS from somewhere and you might therefore not bring one for each party even with the Hate Reset, sometimes the other parties will have a Warrior tank so they can act as/bring other DPS too. You usually need two, but specific compositions can manage with a DPS Warrior who has really good timing.
Some DPS, preferably at least one that helps CC-control Tiamat and one that is good at handling Adds because FF does not generally let a Tank survive too well for long periods when the Adds show up. Anyone who is capable of downing the Adds fast enough to actually help the Tank, is 'tanking the Adds' at that point due to the long mob TTK.
At least one Summoner, preferably two (you can't see who is the summoner in the Video but you can see their Garuda summons, glowy light green winged lady). Summoners are the other part of the 'flow control' team, and have among the harder jobs in dragon fights, so I'll bring them up again later.
One Healer per party, because the party AoE heals and Fire Resist buffs aren't targetable outside of it. Usually you don't need more than 3, but if you're lowmanning it, you might still need all 3 even with Paladin(s).
One Bard per party at least, because someone has to keep that mana up and control the flow. I would think some can do it with only two Bards even in a full 3-party alliance, depends on composition, but you're losing out on something if you do.
At least one strong debuffer, these are usually also capable backup healers and 'smoothers', Red Mages unite. In some cases they give up some backup healing ability to act as the CC-Control (in a relatively broken way, but that's not important to this).
At least one strong Ranged DPS. You can bring lots of them and this makes it 'easier' but you don't want to risk the Hate Reset causing everything to get flaky. They can all be in their own party with their own Bard and Healer, a good Bard will manage this well enough. Their lack of CC in this game means they're not the best against Adds, though, and can't easily fill the 'CC-control+DPS' slot unless they're mages, and Mages require mana as well as careful protection.
Some DPS, preferably at least one that helps CC-control Tiamat and one that is good at handling Adds because FF does not generally let a Tank survive too well for long periods when the Adds show up. Anyone who is capable of downing the Adds fast enough to actually help the Tank, is 'tanking the Adds' at that point due to the long mob TTK.
At least one Summoner, preferably two (you can't see who is the summoner in the Video but you can see their Garuda summons, glowy light green winged lady). Summoners are the other part of the 'flow control' team, and have among the harder jobs in dragon fights, so I'll bring them up again later.
One Healer per party, because the party AoE heals and Fire Resist buffs aren't targetable outside of it. Usually you don't need more than 3, but if you're lowmanning it, you might still need all 3 even with Paladin(s).
One Bard per party at least, because someone has to keep that mana up and control the flow. I would think some can do it with only two Bards even in a full 3-party alliance, depends on composition, but you're losing out on something if you do.
At least one strong debuffer, these are usually also capable backup healers and 'smoothers', Red Mages unite. In some cases they give up some backup healing ability to act as the CC-Control (in a relatively broken way, but that's not important to this).
At least one strong Ranged DPS. You can bring lots of them and this makes it 'easier' but you don't want to risk the Hate Reset causing everything to get flaky. They can all be in their own party with their own Bard and Healer, a good Bard will manage this well enough. Their lack of CC in this game means they're not the best against Adds, though, and can't easily fill the 'CC-control+DPS' slot unless they're mages, and Mages require mana as well as careful protection.
It's a very theoretically simple fight. Tiamat will blast you with fire, or bite you, or if you make her mad from anywhere in tail range, half kill you or worse, and everyone behind her. She has a wingflap that leaves the Plague status which drains your MP and TP gauge, just consider it to be slowing people down and lowering their burst damage options unless removed.
Sometimes she bites harder for a bit. Sometimes she Terrors the Tank and freezes their actions but otherwise no change, so if they don't get hate Reset, you still just keep doing the same thing.
So why does this require any meaningful coordination at all? TP Gauge. And this isn't a post about the wonders of the TP System. Tiamat is simple as soon as you remove it. But the cadence of everything that is happening is important, and here's where the difference from FireBrand comes through:
Barring Sleep (a viable strategy) and repeated Stuns (stun's natural recast timer in FF is 45s), Tiamat is always doing something and there is always a chance that you really need to care and plan a reaction immediately.
And the reaction is not as consistently simple as 'press button to counter' (or sometimes your button is very obviously on CD).
This is part of the 'benefit' of smaller raid numbers and the way FF handles the ability to affect a mob. As a whole concept it can't be said if it is good or bad for any given game, but limiting people who can affect a mob means you don't have to give it as much resistance to CC, particularly not softer ones. 40 man raids change the boss challenge from 'CC correctly and have alternate options for when you can't CC' to 'you aren't allowed to CC this that way/that often' and then 'Here comes the Fire/RedZone'.
When you remove the CC option, you reduce the amount of teamwork possible, but some games, Ashes included, can easily restore some of it by making the CC require more coordination instead.
Roles in a FireBrand fight:
At least one Tank to reduce the impact of consistent physical damage, probably with Fire Resistance. Stream implied the desire for a second (presumably if the main tank needs to Active Block any mechanics and runs out of Stamina by doing so)
Some DPS, probably as many as the CC-control options-before-resistance-kicks-in allows.
One Healer per Party(?), to push the HP bars back up (at the moment this is basically all Ashes Clerics do for this fight, even cleanse here is to avoid Burning)
One Bard per Party, to support the team, probably.
The difference is simply that because FireBrand is 'just' a mobile 'Don't Stand In The Fire', the main focus for any DPS should be 'being a character that can DPS without being in the fire'. Whether that's by being ranged, or having incredible awareness and evasion of mechanics (being ranged is probably easier, but not braindead). Because FireBrand's larger attacks are also cinematic/slow, and work primarily because players are also slow, ranged DPS is the superior option until more Synergies are seen.
This leaves no obvious intent for Summoners, but they're the flex role, so from that perspective, let's think about what the flexibility they're offering to this is...
At the beginning, we can see that FireBrand's attacks do decent damage in an AoE.but the backline don't take any of this damage, obviously. Burning is applied, though. The Cleric's role is clear. Heal. The Tank's role remains clear. Control FireBrand's movement. The Summoner could join the 'ranged DPS' by sending a summon in.
The Tank's role doesn't help as much when the AoE 'summon magma/burning circles' happens, so they would have to somehow contribute to a synergy. The priority is not synergy related yet, though, it's as advertised, "don't stand in the fire". Fortunately, FireBrand does have the ability to 'randomly' do aerial flamebreath strafe right after such a summon of Burning Circles.
This Aerial Flamebreath has a huge tell. Even if no one gets out of the way, a Cleric's obvious choice is to face wherever the attack is going, and anyone still caught in it gets healed. It also covers a large but predictable area, and takes a long time. The amount of time FireBrand takes just to get back into a position to be any threat to anyone, is more than enough time to regenerate some mana, get everyone healed up, etc. If this attack was an instakill, it would imo honestly still not matter. Even getting time to raise the fallen isn't unlikely.
The massive movement does allow FireBrand to outrange the ranged DPS, but what happens to a summon here? Do they chase after it? Presumably the Summoner keeps the summon(s) close, to apply any benefit or buff that it grants to their party. But a double breath-strafe takes so long that if one were to use a 20s CD heal on reaction to seeing liftoff, to help someone survive the first strafe because they were unable to avoid it, it would be up again by the time FireBrand returned to purposefully dealing damage to anyone. (I feel like Necromancers get the short end of the stick here, with their summons shambling off to try to mindlessly keep up with the dragon)
This delay leaves more than enough time to cleanse, get shielded... personally as a Cleric my response to this move if I trusted my group at all would be /sit.
The seven second expanding AoE with the roar tell, would endanger summons, and maybe even push Ranged DPS back far enough to have to stop doing DPS (spoiler: it does not), but at least Fighters could just leap right over every fire wave after the first to start hitting again.
But from that moment until FireBrand's next meaningful threat can be 20 seconds minimum, precisely because can just do two spectacle moves back to back. I guess if your Bards were CCed this wouldn't just lead to a Shielding Dance as the incoming flames sweep over (six seconds worth of that). That's about the same casting time as Tiamat's Firaga III, which is good, I guess, but it does 460+(x3 if you don't evade or roll) damage and doesn't even seem to leave burning on anyone. Spectacle moves are fine, but roles matter.
The roles shown here as a result of FireBrand's design are 'people who shoot it', 'people who stand in front of it', 'people who heal the people standing in front of it', and 'people who stand near the people shooting it' (because when FireBrand repositions to use Anti-Zerg Flamethrower, the Bard's best option is not to move and just shielding dance.
Others spend more time chasing after movement than people do against Nouver in BDO, and I say this as someone who can keep up with Nouver's movement on my character. The hardest part of this seemed to be 'finding who needed to be healed or raised'. Later on in the fight, we do actually get a confirmation that it is possible to shoot FireBrand from outside even Concentric Flame Rings range.
We do see Bucky fall at some point, but the reason for this is seemingly entirely random, a flame puddle appearing... underwater, right beneath his feet, after AZ Flamethrower. But he is redeemed! By his effortless 'casually walk forward into the burnt area before the next explosion' in Concentric Flame Rings. As everyone should. It prevents damage! Hopefully there will be a way to control summons precisely enough to have them do it too.
FireBrand not only does not require synergy, it neither truly encourages nor rewards it. There is nothing to 'diminish the effect of', there's very little ability to keep up with its movement or options, so there can't be any actualized 'challenge' there. It's a situation of the reverse of my pet peeve in gaming, it's a boss that mostly limits what players are usefully able to do (assuming their aim is to engage it).
As with Tumok, I have no issue with this boss existing. There is a benefit in an MMO to have 40 people get together and do their best to avoid standing in fire or randomly having the ground explode under them while a few Clerics and Bards try to keep them standing. Further if PvP is happening, as mentioned in another TheoryRaid. As a 'source of random damage in a PvP arena' FireBrand does a good job, and it is adapted well to be the tactical focal point of this for the occasional Tank, whether that's 'momentarily tanking it' or 'pulling an enemy into it'.
I'm interested to see the expansion of roles that occurs when this fight evolves through the addition of PvP and becomes what one comes to this subgenre of MMO for. FireBrand does not need to be more, just as Tiamat does not need to be more. Tiamat's value cannot be seen without understanding the TP Gauge's effect on it, nor can FireBrand's value is hard to see without understanding the PvP environment's effect on it.
If there is a part of this that I consider to even approach valid feedback that matters toward the potential goals of the designers, it is probably this:
"The reason this was boring for me to watch and I expect would be doubly boring for me to play, is simply that my only role here is to determine who took damage and hit the anti-damage button', and the pace of the fight would likely be so lenient on my cooldowns that I would never be truly unable to do that without interference."
I want to see this again, with but with opposition. Maybe in A2 I will be part of that opposition.
Now that I think about it (because I never really play games with the 'Raid Frame'), is this normally 'hard' because you lose the ability to just F1-F6 your own party? Also I hope it's clear that this sort of thing (without opposition) is super bottable... honestly moreso because of the raid frame.
That said, I congratulate Intrepid Studios on their first(?) Burning Circle Notorious Monster.
♪ One Gummy Fish, two Gummy Fish, Red Gummy Fish, Blue Gummy Fish ♪
2
Comments
And then a more personal question for you here. If you, as a cleric, had to track burning stacks on your party and had a tool to only remove a part of them (say a mage elemental augment, or maybe smth religious) - would that make this encounter (and any potential other one) more interesting to you? Or would that still be a bit too much of a bottable thing for you to value it highly?
As an additional thing here, what if FireBoi had a much much higher chance of turning and aoe attacking the people who have gone over a certain amount of stacks of burning.
And on the summoner side of things, what if Transfer Pain was the main resource of the archetype and would then have augments that would interact differently depending on the type of summon you're using.
Say, a sum/tank's TP would go up based on how much damage your summon absorbed by standing next to someone who's taking dmg (i.e. being in fire for the dps boost).
Sum/cleric's would grow based on the HP healed by the summon, which is done at the cost of summon's own hp (reducing the main Cleric's tasks to do, but also being less reliable cause summon heals would be obviously weaker, hence riskier).
Sum/ranger's could grow based on the additional points of dmg done to the enemy due to summon's Marks, which in turn eat away at its hp.
And stuff like that from other archetypes. In other words, make the summoner gameplay different based on their class. So, in stead of just "my summon is chasin the boss or gets out of the fire", you'd have a variety of actions, all of which require actions from both the summon and the summoner themselves.
I'd say 'a few' and 'successful', but not as much for Open World. Because that's just changing your composition. That's number crunching, for a dedicated PvE player. I don't have any opinion on it relative to FireBrand.
The FFXI equivalent is usually in gear, but there isn't a lot of really specific 'wear this gear and when under this bad effect get this good one' that also boosts damage.
The interesting part is entirely about 'why I am choosing not to do that as soon as possible'. If I assume you're talking about burning stacks from the previous paragraph, this is interesting to me, and probably good design because it also allows groups who want less complexity to just decide 'We're always letting it stack' or 'we're always removing the stack'.
Good for friend group content. Not so great for less organized Open World but I think it's fine if high level OW content requires organization, obv.
That's sort of just taking the choice away again. As well as opening a lot of options for manipulation of the AI. No strong opinion, depends on the skill of the encounter designers and the senior designers to predict manipulations.
That's both 'no opinion' and 'what about Summoner/Summoner though?'
I know I didn't end up going too much into the Summoner Role thing in that giant dragon of a post above, moreso 'expecting that any dev who cares also will read between the lines on it'. But my answer to this is that 'role' isn't 'gameplay' that often in complex PvE. In fact I'd say that one of the biggest fundamental gaps between people who like complex PvE (regardless of how good they are at it) and those who don't like or don't care about it, is their understanding of this.
In my experience, a huge relative subset of the people I know who don't like/see the point of complex PvE don't actually understand or like 'roles' in MMOs, because they are focused on 'gameplay'. Obviously 'gameplay' is important, but your role for a given fight guides that gameplay. If you meet someone whose response to a PvE challenge that forces them to change their gameplay is 'what's the point of this if I can't do what I normally do?' then that person has a fundamentally different wish from PvE than someone like me.
The role of a Summoner against Tiamat (in the basic strategy) is to be ready to heal if anyone messes up a CC, and to DPS whenever things are going well. The specific gameplay of this role is relatively different than what they normally do. Sometimes a Summoner chooses to focus more on the healing because of their team composition, or because the weather ingame is different that day, or because it's Firesday and Tiamat's spells hit harder. Their role changes slightly because of the day, weather, or team comp.
The suggestions you made would not be affected differently by those things except in an incredibly obvious way that I don't care about as much.
"You should sub /Cleric today because it's Firesday and the weather forecast is heatwave and you're going to have to heal more."
I wouldn't want it to be 'change your secondary today'. I would want the Summoner/Ranger to have the option to stay Summoner/Ranger and play differently skill-wise.
And I, right now, think that Sum/sum would be exactly what you want, but would simply not really stand out in any way. I'd imagine it'll have summons for several roles, but none of them will have specializations that other classes would bring to them. But sum/sum would be able to fill any role to a semi-competent lvl, with probably an ability to turn some augment nubs to make one of those roles slightly more pronounced.
Though I'm mainly pulling all of that out of my ass and the L2 summoner design, where I foresee Ashes' summoner to be a combo of everything that I showcased in that stream.
I think you know I have a napkin-schema for this, but the schema isn't important because beyond this, you don't have a way to distinguish Summoners from each other that isn't wildly and possibly frustratingly different from every other Archetype.
So it's almost 'obviously' a difference based on if you normally summon 3 things or 2 things or 1 thing, and for the '3 things' the question of whether it's '2, 2, 1' or '3, 1, 1'. Not because I 'want' it to be that, simply that your other option is just FFXI where you just get a linear progression in capacity and no differentiation.
I personally think it is okay for a '2, 2, 1' style summoner to go to Firebrand with the intention of being mostly Ranged DPS no matter what their secondary archetype is.
FireBrand's design 'tells you not to try to tank with this type of Summoner' to some extent. So even if that summoner normally fights in a group that likes to take on groups of enemies with the summons tanking for a bit, that 'role' is not available. But the 'gameplay' of 'position my summons, set them up to achieve my part of the goal of this fight', is. And if PvP appears, who knows, they might be the first person you rely on to spread out their summons and 'tank' some incoming enemy players.
A Summoner/Tank will do that better than a Summoner/Ranger no matter what their 'number config' of Summons is, if they have the skill, with reasonable augments. The specifics of their summons will matter too, but much more likely to be similar to the way Weapons affect a Fighter.
A 'single Summon' specialist is less likely to be effective as an off-healer/shielder for FireBrand, if they are Summoner/Summoner, whereas they might be really effective if they are a Necromancer (because their single summon won't necessarily be constantly getting brought down by FireBrand's attacks).
Stuff like that. FF does this differentiation by associating nearly every Summon with an Element, but it's a weak differentiation and by lategame, everyone just 'has all the gear for all of it'. But even this still sorta works. If you didn't have the ability to swap your entire gearset in one Macro in that game (i.e. like Ashes), you would still know that when you go to Tiamat, you should 'gear to enhance Garuda' if you wanted to DPS and Backup Heal, or 'gear to Enhance Leviathan' if you wanted to primarily backup heal, or even the rare 'gear to enhance Shiva' if you planned to spend most of your time controlling Air Elemental and Antlion adds.
Ashes has the ability to take this to the next level, true differentiation, by focusing the variety within Summoner on 'how many things you are good at summoning at a time'. We'll see..