PvE difficulty or a lack thereof
ThevoicestHeVoIcEs
Member
I expect a range of opinions on this.
I personally stopped playing quite a few MMOs because of how brain-dead and risk free their PvE experience was. In multiple of those titles you can literally auto-attack mobs to victory with no risk of dying.
One of the reasons why I recently tried The Lord of the Rings Online, and enjoyed for quite a bit, was their attempt to address this issue with the optional Landscape Difficulty. In case you aren't familiar that system basically allows you to set personal difficulty for the open world PvE experience. Mobs are tougher this way, and you are encouraged to use your skill rotations properly.
Mind I'm not asking for a Landscape Difficulty system, I just hope the PvE experience won't be mindless and devoid of any "challenge" outside the group content. As our characters progress and receive more skill points, the general combat should set the expectation that you learn how to play your class properly. When fighting groups of enemies, champion/elite style mobs you should not only be expected to know appropriate ability rotations, but also exploit ability synergies and mob weaknesses to your advantage.
Otherwise, what's the point of the character progression, and all those abilities on your toolbar, if you dont have to use them?
I personally stopped playing quite a few MMOs because of how brain-dead and risk free their PvE experience was. In multiple of those titles you can literally auto-attack mobs to victory with no risk of dying.
One of the reasons why I recently tried The Lord of the Rings Online, and enjoyed for quite a bit, was their attempt to address this issue with the optional Landscape Difficulty. In case you aren't familiar that system basically allows you to set personal difficulty for the open world PvE experience. Mobs are tougher this way, and you are encouraged to use your skill rotations properly.
Mind I'm not asking for a Landscape Difficulty system, I just hope the PvE experience won't be mindless and devoid of any "challenge" outside the group content. As our characters progress and receive more skill points, the general combat should set the expectation that you learn how to play your class properly. When fighting groups of enemies, champion/elite style mobs you should not only be expected to know appropriate ability rotations, but also exploit ability synergies and mob weaknesses to your advantage.
Otherwise, what's the point of the character progression, and all those abilities on your toolbar, if you dont have to use them?
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You need to craft gear to completent you class to respond to all enemies, and succeed in it's dual function, eg mage, dps while killing mobs and bosses, nuker when targeting players.
The difficulting setting of PvE is a false premise if you dont take in account the chances that you would face hostile players and so you need to conserve your MP and skill cooldowns.
The joy perhaps that AoC is aimng for isnt whether you have fun killing mobs with a fun rotation but rather if you and your group master the game and achive your goals, and impose your will on none allied guilds and nodes.
Dont expect the challenge and satisfaction of games that sell currated instanced encounters full of intense mechanics like wow and Tera, dont expend Souls Like mob complexities and dont expect Tekken like combat seen in ESO and BDO.
Those games lack in the variety of things that mmos should design well:
Adventuring questing
Raiding
Sieging and guild wars
Duels and small scale encounters
Crafting and economy
I am adamantly against content that won’t let players lose even when they’re acting stupid.
I agree, but that really doesn't have to get in the way of difficult PvE. My favourite open PvP MMO ever (Dark Swords) had players grouping to traverse through hostile areas full of aggro monsters 40× their level, in order to reach other areas where they could grind XP fighting monsters 20× their own levels, and still ganking and constesting territories through PvP were the daily norm, especially for higher-level players.
It was easier to design because it was 2D, but you can absolutely apply the same principles in a 3D game.
That being said the open world dungeons should be able to facilitate the more challenging mob content since chances of players running into you mid boss fight is alot lower and if a fight breaks out between 2 groups down there winners will have enough time to rezz the dead and do some boss attempts before the first group fights there way back down there.
AoC is meant for group content, though if you make a good build and have the gear you can approach the group content as solo, which im sure will have all your challenge there. Unless you are meaning something else.
Also if wea re talking about ability rotations that sounds very pve on using the same rotations. Using skill rotations isn't really making cany content challenging that is when things are brain dead. So unsure why this is even in your point? When you go beyond doing rotations and talking about more reactions be it with your movement and how skills work to reduce dmg, dodge or stagger the motion of a enemy. This kind of thing happening again based on reaction and you not being stuck in the cycle of doing the same ability rotation over and over again is when a game becomes more challenging.
It was the group’s first time taking it on, so yeah they would have and that’s fine, but it wasn’t a difficult fight.
Some basic strategies to use in attempt 2:
- don’t stack so much, which reduces the fire breath frequency and impact when it happens
- Stop running around so much. There was a lot of New Raiders tuned Headless Chicken aspect to it when there didn’t need to be. If nothing is hitting you and you’re in range to deal damage, stick to a small area of motion.
- Healer arrangements in the formation should cover the tank and maximize group coverage with AoE for the large scale attacks, similar story for the bards though they would have to be more mobile
- They should prioritize a set amount of adds rather than split damage on all of them. If ten is the enrage threshold and it summons fifteen adds, the group should only bother focusing damage on 6 of them
- There’s no need to retreat all the way to outside the third circle of fire and interrupt your damage, just hug near the dividing lines and shuffle in after the inner one has already popped (also don’t just eat the damage expecting to heal through it, that’s annoying a good way to make sure your healers let you stay down)
In my opinion this is healthy, fun, competitive game play that encourages people to strive to be better without going full blown dps meter/boss mod mode.
In regard to the subject at hand, I have yet to see any sort of organic difficulty in what I have seen of ashes so far. I disregard any game play I see as soon as any god mode or similar is used as useless. I also disregard any game play that may look hard simply because the person streaming has no idea what they are doing.
Hopefully we start moving away from employee and content creator streams as A2 approaches so we can see what actual game play looks like.
I have been raiding for 20+ years. I'm not hyping anything. Steven has been talking about AI for mobs and I took little note till we got that dragon raid to watch. I saw some Behavior I have not seen from a raid mob before. It seemed to react to what the raidiers were doing. If I see more of this. Ashes will end up being the best place for PvE. I get this is a PvX game. With no mob boss add on and the AI lives up to what we saw. I'm gonna be very happy here.
This is a entery raid. Level 25. It was plenty hard. It's ment to teach people what a red dragon can do. Wait till you see an elder red
So, a healthy average would be fine. Not every pig should be a 3min fight but also no 3sec one.
Regarding the open world dragon we‘ve seen: Thats fully ok. That was for sure not to hard (than you probably didnt play other MMOs with open world raid events) but also not idle mode - it was average with some scripted mechanics. If they can handle it like this later on its fine. That instanced boss fights will be more intensive should be clear, but random or open world content needs to be average or slightly above to hit the average player base.
'AI' in the gaming sphere has been used to refer to NPC programming since time immemorial. It's all hardset coding of NPC behavior, and thus it's only as smart as it was programmed to be. The dragon is not an intelligent entity and it's flawed to think of it as such.
Also, what mechanics have you not seen before? It was all stock standard behaviors from what I was watching.
Ok so you agree it wasn't a difficult fight by design. Glad we're on the same page.
LOL love forum warriors. I never said that, don't put words in my posts.
You said a lot of words that don’t really fit together.
‘Entry level raid’ is mutually exclusive with ‘hard content’, so you’ll have to pick which of the two you want to claim the dragon fight was.
I found it to be a straightforward, basic dragon fight, which is why I asked what aspects of the fight you’d never seen before
I know we're in testing and all that, but my main feedback is "make it harder, while making it even more pvx".
Agreed reducing healing output by 60-70% so things will be super hard.
That isn't how you make raids hard. Altering healing output effects *everything*, and so you only do thst if you want to effect *everything*.
If all you want to do is make the raids harder, you make them hard via the content.