Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Gear adjustements are MUCH BETTER now! (but still not enough)
Liniker
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
All the nerfs to gear are definetly a move in the right direction! 100x better then before patch... but its still not enough,
PvP TTK is still 2 to 3 seconds between DPS classes, and PVE is still way too easy because offensive stats are way too strong compared to defensive stats, we ran Tumok and Firebrand today with no issues at all, no one has legendaries its all green and blue pieces, we killed the bosses quickly enough not to worry about most mechanics, items are just way too powerful especially for early levels and the same issue will CONTINUE to scale up unless the team reworks the offensive stats and how strong item scaling is,
I want to refer to this post I made back in Oct all the reasons and arguments why I feel like developers should decrease character powers even more are there especially for PvP https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/61517/last-try-developers-please-consider-a-ttk-balance-pass-before-25th#latest
PvP TTK is still 2 to 3 seconds between DPS classes, and PVE is still way too easy because offensive stats are way too strong compared to defensive stats, we ran Tumok and Firebrand today with no issues at all, no one has legendaries its all green and blue pieces, we killed the bosses quickly enough not to worry about most mechanics, items are just way too powerful especially for early levels and the same issue will CONTINUE to scale up unless the team reworks the offensive stats and how strong item scaling is,
I want to refer to this post I made back in Oct all the reasons and arguments why I feel like developers should decrease character powers even more are there especially for PvP https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/61517/last-try-developers-please-consider-a-ttk-balance-pass-before-25th#latest
![img]](https://i.ibb.co/P6QSfh4/oficial-baner.png/img])
Recrutamento aberto - Nosso Site: Clique aqui
11
Comments
the problem is not change, because they neft atk and defence stat, so you have less defence than before so you die near in the same time.
they must calibrate again, but they must find solution also for the crafting system.
CLICCA QUI PER UNIRTI ALL'ORDINE
this was their original intention that was previously mentioned, I'd love that... unfortunately, they went for 500% lol
Obviously, there are people who prefer this style of combat, but it’s not something that fits the proposal of Ashes.
An open-world PvP game where you lose part of your resources upon death, along with gained XP, is not the right setting for combat where someone can be killed using just three skills.
I deeply appreciate the new update to the items, but I kindly ask you to pay special attention to the combat mechanics.
Right now a legendary piece is ~90% better than a common gear (i.e. almost double the stats). It was lot more than that before this nerf. If you think of a scenario like 6~12 months into the game launch, players will be max level with a bunch of legendary gear, he will be what? 20x stronger than a guy that just reached max level and got all white lvl 50 gear? How will he be able to compete? When will a new player be able to participate in PVP content alongside older players?
Not to mention the offensive vs defensive scaling. Right now, the game trends towards an even lower TTK. Players with legendary lvl 20 weapons can kill a guy with blue legendary gear in like 5 seconds. A lvl 25 with legendary gear will one shot lvl 19 players that didn't equip lvl 20 gear yet. This same lvl 25 will participate in a node war where the lvl 19 has no choice but to fight this lvl 25. How will this work realistically? What will be new players' retention rate when they are just one-shotted or killed in 3 seconds every time they try to fight in an open-world PVP event scenario (caravans, node wars, node sieges, guild wars, etc)?
On the PvE side, I don't think the issue is the power scaling or the TTK. I think TTK in PvE is fine. I think the biggest issue is the 0 to 100 pve design where mobs don't do any damage at all to the party until they do a mechanic that one-shots people. It's a weird scenario where you're on autopilot for most of the fight and from time to time need to react to a big mechanic and go back to autopilot.
My suggestion would be:
Decrease base HP stat for 3-star mobs, decrease offensive stat scaling on gear so you keep PvE TTK around the same but increase pvp TTK, and then make it so mobs are more of a constant pressure encounter rather than a 0 to 100 scenario.
For the gear power issue, I would add more situational benefits rather than just a straight-up base stat increase. Something like "this weapon gives 20% extra damage to targets that are bleeding" instead of "300 more weapon power", or even something like BG3 and dnd itemization like "10% chance of proccing X buff, while this buff is active you can cast one spell for free with max benefits regardless of resource or cooldown. Once you do you can't receive this buff for the next 20 seconds". Stuff like this increases your situational power and adds a skill ceiling to your character without doing ridiculous power scaling
But aside from all that, I think intrepid is on the right direction with this change, and I just think you need to keep going that direction. Great job!
Higher TTK is much better.
Higher TTK is much better.
If you look at a mix of green/blue it probably is closer to 40% from the median.
Gearing full legendary is exponentially more effort than a green/blue.
If the players don't accept that crafted should be the baseline than they haven't been reading the writing on the wall.
As far as the TTK, what classes? Before nerfing gear further might want to make sure that every dps class is killing each other in 2-3 seconds.
If not equally geared, who cares? It's an mmorpg not an esports title. You have to grind for gear, it should be good.
PvE focused: WoW / FFXIV / Lineage II
Sandbox: Ultima Online / Darkfall / Mortal Online
Big Influence: SNES Fighting games / Starcraft / Diablo II / Smite
I'd prefer to see TTK around the 10-15sec mark.
Grouping and partying with greens and blues the combat felt great, it was engaging, you felt like you could do much more than what you can do now. A bad pull was salvageable.
Now, if you aren't wearing the high end crafted rarity gear, you don't get any of that feeling. That gear isn't' on 90% of the player base. So this feeling has been removed from the majority.
Did the rarity power spikes need adjusted, yes. But I think the lower end gear was good were it was at. IMO, tighten the gap on the heroic thru legendary gains. The leveling up process is supposed to be fun and engaging. It is no longer that. Everyone decided to log early and call it because no one was having fun. This coming from someone that has well over 100+ levels in this alpha so far. It's a bit concerning.
Then, it’s true, before the scaling of item was too high, in most of the game, to increse the ttk the damage in pvp is reduce, you must balance pvp and pve. The pg has less life of the moster you can’t have a balace between pvp or pve, if you nerf all the damage the poeple can’t even more make pve content. I think the reduce damage in pvp can be a good solution.
Now there are a new problem, the difference between the quality of the items is very low tha give no meaning to craft them. A green lvl 20 weapon is more strong of any legendary weapon of lvl 10. We can’t craft lvl 20 items, even you don’t wipe we need another month or 2 to can craft lvl 20 item because we must upgrade all the building.
There are no reason to craft, player can found more fast better item. Why spent weeks to craft item that anyone will use bacause the found better? No meaming and not tell is a end game part i tell no, how i can pay all the craft if all the stuff i craft are useless?!? With the wipe the city will start at lvl 0, when the city will be lvl 3 most of the people will be lvl 14/17 and you can craft only lvl 0 items, to creatr apprendice station will ask another month and most of the people will be 20/25, and now you can craft lvl 10 item useless, if there are no reason to craft except mount or food or potion maybe most of the gather and crafter will no spend time to build the city and also the time to evolve the city will be more long.
You are try to resolve the problem of the pvp but for now because you reduce the damage, and you redure also the defence the ttk is always too low. But sure the think that you have done is destroy the crafting comunity.
CLICCA QUI PER UNIRTI ALL'ORDINE
you shouldn't be wasting VALUABLE legendary mats to craft lvl 10 or 20 gear regardless
just because you CAN it doesn't mean you SHOULD and it definetly doesnt mean it should be viable either, it makes zero sense... "but why allow it if its not worth doing"
Ashes is a game of decision making... you CAN play a tank with cloth gear using wand as a weapon.... is it viable? worth it? hell no, but you still can make that stupid decision if you want to lol
find out the min maxes, plan your crafting, be smart, start with greens at lvl 10, purple for lvl 30, and save mats for end game thats how the system should work
or just waste legendary mats doing lvl 10 stuff..
just dont expect it to be worth it it would be impossible to balance
no lol I like that the option is there, but I 100% expect it to be silly and a waste of rescources to make
\i see you know 0 from the crafting so before talking try the crafting. The material for lvl 10 item are different from mat for lvl 20 items. WE CAN'T CRAFT LVL 20 ITEM, after the wipe we will can do lvl 20 ITEM after about 4 month, when all the city will have all the journey workbench , after 4 month all the player will be at max lvl and most of the people will have rare o better item.
Before came to talk about thing you never try spend 80 hour on crafting and you will see how many time you need to craft. So there are no waste of resource because the material is different this show again how much you don;t know about the crafting and you only play to kill monster.
CLICCA QUI PER UNIRTI ALL'ORDINE
It is the combination of both. But that doesn't mean the stat nerf was bad. You're talking about this from a PvE perspective, grinding elites. Elites are now an even bigger damage sponge and take longer to kill, which is bad. But for PvP the stat nerfs were necessary, and for world bosses designed for 40 people the bosses are still easy and you can ignore mechanics and complete the bosses without losses.
This game is designed to work with 1 stat system for every type of content. When changes in this stat system occur, it will affect all PvP and PvE content. It doesn't mean you need to reverse the change when 1 of the content type becomes bad because of that stat change. You can fix the elite issue without reverting the stat changes. But you can't work with PvP with the way stats were before (they aren't even ideal yet with the changes).
I mean to be fair alot of the LVL 10 legendary gear mats won't be used in high end legendary gear, what else would you use it for
No you don't
People who want "higher TTK" really don't want that, what people want is higher TTK when 2 DPS fight, which is not solved by lowering relative damage output. It should not take a DPS less than 10 seconds to kill an equally geared player, otherwise with any heals NOBODY is dying as soon as a healer is involved. If it takes 10 seconds and a healer can heal atleast 30-40% of their HP bar with 1 heal, thats another 300%+ HP you'd have to mow through in that 10 seconds to secure a kill. they'd be healing enough so that 4 DPS would have to beat on them for 10 seconds to kill them. If it was 10 second TTK for dps on dps, then a single healer and DPS could fight probably 4-5 non-healers comfortably and win.
If you really want to change the TTK for DPS on DPS, you solve this by having meaningful defensive CDs. having a 30-40% damage reduction CD adds more depth to CD trading, and gives people a moment to survive and come up with a gameplan.
The other reason trying to increase TTK is bad is that it actually allows for SIGNIFICANTLY more mistakes. Mistakes are recoverable because it doesn't kill you, and if it's survivable it comes down to a healer mana problem before it even mattered. Games with this low TTK end up being dpsing on each other's meatbags and CD trading to try to OOM the healer quicker. It's not interesting, it's not fun, it's not exciting.
And last but not least, it makes it far to easy to simply run. Plenty of carebears would love to be able to safely run away from anything outside of 2 dps all the way back to town, with virtually no fear of dying - but imagine for a moment, you aren't the aggressor... some punk tries to gank you when you're aoe farming, and you actually fend them off, only for them to just run away from you all the way back to town.
Suddenly, very little risk involved in PvP, as if it's not going you're way you simply walk away from the encounter and there's next to no chance they can actually kill you before you walk away.
That said, I'm currently a cleric, so by all means, make me the most overpowered class in the game by increasing TTK and I'll tank 4 of you at a time while I emote my way back to town and then remind you at the gates standing behind the guards to look back at this thread, because I told you say.
and no, 50% healing debuff is going to be annoying at best. 2v2 might be hard, but 1.) it can be taken off and 2.) they just have to survive long enough to kill 1 player and then it's back to easy street. And sure you COULD try to make pvp like a 75% healing debuff, but then this applies in pve/pvx - so now all you have to do is tag a tank in an outdoor dungeon and the mobs will kill them because it's like the pull was quadrupled. Doesn't sound like a good game play either.
Long story short, a shorter TTK with respectable personal defensives makes for engaging gameplay where someone can be fended off from a gank and beaten, as well as timing/CC/positioning allowing people to still die in PvP with healers involved. Still makes it so mistakes are punished. Some of you haven't pvp'd in enough games in enough time periods and it shows.
PvE focused: WoW / FFXIV / Lineage II
Sandbox: Ultima Online / Darkfall / Mortal Online
Big Influence: SNES Fighting games / Starcraft / Diablo II / Smite
I don't think you should be comparing commons to legendaries. You should be comparing whatever gear is obtainable with some small investment but not too much investment to stats of legendaries. For example when you hit max level in any version of WoW you're really not in all common gear, you got green and blue pieces from questing and dungeon grinding, you generally don't start from 0..
Lets look at an example of two handed maces from original vanilla WoW and how much they scale. I'm organizing these by highest ilevel and not including caster two handers but ones used to fight. I'll also try to keep it all within the same raiding tier because otherwise we have a case where an epic beats a legendary.
Common: War Maul requires lvl 40
32.45 DPS and no other stat
Uncommon: Brutehammer requires lvl 58
48.97 DPS, comes with random + stats
raw dps Increase in %: 50.9090
Rare: Hammer of the Titans
53.82 DPS +15 str
raw dps Increase from uncommon: 9.904%
raw dps Increase from common: 65.85%
Epic: Earthshaker requires lvl 60
62.57 DPS chance on hit aoe knockdown, equip +22 atk power
raw dps increase from rare: 16.25%
raw dps increase from uncommon: 27.77%
raw dps increase from common: 92.81%
Legendary: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros requires lvl 60
80.41 DPS, chance on hit fireball 273-333 fire dmg + 75 over 10, +12 str, +12 stam
raw dps increase from epic: 28.51%
raw dps increase from rare: 49.40%
raw dps increase from uncommon: 64.20%
raw dps increase from common: 147.79%
Two points:
1. You need to realize that just by the virtue of playing the game grinding or doing whatever chances are you will not end up with a full common gearset at endgame unless you do some sorta challenge to not equip any rarity items.
2. You need to evaluate the true rarity of items, how hard is it to get those upgrades, I assume legendary would not be easy to obtain. Thus you are looking at the median of players equipment not the start and end of the bell curve on the graph for comparison.
The game isnt balanced around 1v1
TTK should be higher because this is a game that heavily relies on social aspect, including social / group / team pvp. When they can balance things properly once ALL THE CLASSES HAS BEEN RELEASED for a 8v8, you'll begin to see the nerf adjustments for healing and all that jazz.
granted, I am also in the camp of - pretty much every ability cleric has, has some type of healing into it.
I think overall the class abilities designs is very FLAW and extremely bloated.
This might drive off the big numbers go BRRRR crowd, but the game should reward players with strategical and tactical acumen and a variety of playstyles - low TTK only benefits high burst classes and the Ungabunga Bros, which are fairly easy to find. Lately this industry caters way too much to Ungabunga bro playstyle and not enough to cunning gameplay.
Waterfall stats have a lot of bloat tied to each main attribute, that is a design choice that needs to be addressed in itself.
More gameplay styles and options, the strategical and tactical ceiling goes up, that involves with bringing up the TTK.
1- TTK need to be longer still
2- Mob dropped gear needs to be nerfed a little now so crafting gear is worth the effort to push for personaly i would make mob only drop white quality gear or no at all but that i guess it up to the devs what they go with here. personaly i think mobs should drop Glint/Emblems (Crafting resource) Recipes and named mobs drop unique recipe and the item used to craft their specific recipe. Mobs drops need to feed into crafting economy aka the gold to purchase thing in the form of glint and resources used to craft with not bypass the crafting system al together with pretty decent mob drops items that only slightly worst than crafted version which they currently are
Tbh you are looking at this from the wrong end of the stick in my opinion. Bosses MUST be made more difficult to kill, not by nerfing gear and average gameplay but by increasing mechanics and difficulty on the bosses.
Hard to craft gear must be INCREASED in strength to make it even remotely interesting to craft for it. Right now the drop of is so hard many just do not see the point in crafting any more, if the power difference from green to legendary is insignificant to the point of ****.
Only thing I do agree with is that time to kill in PvP is too fast, and needs to increase, but that can be solved in other ways then nerfing the hell out of the gear/PvE system.
the issue is PvP TTK and crafting gear vs mob dropped
Personaly defence stats need to be increased on gear across the board to extend TTK in pvp or offense need reduced across the board on gear to increase TTK (PvE will need to be rebalanced around where ever gear falls anyway so that doesnt apply here)
and mob dropped gear need to either be removed or dropped all the down to white only quality so crafting still matters.
Either way see where the go with Phase 2 i guess
or they could just make all players take 25% less dmg from other players and leave the gear as is
Absolutely, TTK needs to improve dramatically to make this resemble more an oldschool PvP experience that many long for.
I personally think dropped gear should still matter to motivate people who enjoy killing mobs as well. As few restrictions as possible was always my focus on games. It should just be super rare to get something good, and crafted should always have the edge.
I have also been adamant that making defence stats on gear enhanced would go a long way to solve the challenges vs crafted weapons and gear. The monsters hurt like a bitch sometimes, and I find myself gravewalking quite frequently. I did that before the nerf as well, but now I get those "oh fuck" moments more frequently than before.. Balancing and nerfing is such a modern thing frequently born out of jealousy and spite, and not out of need.