Gear progression and power creep

Ashes is going to have an (even bigger) issue in the future with power creep.

A level 1 fighter has 68 total base stats, 13 physical power, and 36+20 armor+magic resist.

A level 25 naked fighter has 340 base stats total, 65 physical power, and 180+100 armor+magic resist. A 5x increase in stats, just for leveling, no gear.

Now, I have regular green equipment. I have level 10 shoulders and earrings, and I only have a 5/8 blood runner set bonus and a 5/8 medium set bonus:

I have 417 base stats (80% gained by leveling, 20% by gear), but I have 279 physical power (23% leveling, 77% gear) and 480+407 armor+magic resist (32% leveling, 68% gear). If I had a full 20 blue gear the percentage of stats coming from gear would be even more ludicrous, not to mention higher rarities and enchanting. So while the base stats come mostly from leveling, the waterfall stats provided by gear are way too high compared to the base stats gained from gear. Of course, these were the main stats I built for, and the other stats that I have not acquired will have way higher contributions from base stats.

PS: this is all post rarity nerfs.

EDIT (31st of January, 2025): With a bit more insight from the gearing system, I think the main issue at the moment is the power rating given by weapons, which increases damage done by a ridiculous amount. Right now I have 60 physical power naked (level 25). When I put all my gear except weapons, I get 190 physical power ( ~3.2x bigger. Pretty big difference already). When I introduce weapons (rare Dunzel greatsword, heroic Cindesinger) I go to 394 (2x bigger on weapons alone). This is such a huge power creep, that a guy that just reached level 20 (5 levels apart) will be one shot by me. If this trend continues, you won't be able to engage with any of the PVP systems (wars, caravans, sieges, open world PVP, etc etc) unless you're max level and geared out. This is essentially death for a game with long progression and that relies so much on unavoidable PvP.

Issue
1. The power creep design is too high at the moment and it will spin out of control in the future.

Reasoning
Every single power step (level, gear, enchanting, rarities) gives you a simple stats increase.

This makes it hard to balance. You have levels that give you power increases, then you have gear levels that give you power boosts, then you have gear rarities that give you more power boosts and extra stats on the gear, then you have set bonuses and rarity on set bonuses that give you more stats depending on the rarity of the gear in the set. On top of all that you have enchanting that increase every stat in the weapon. And this is only what we have currently. From guild buffs to social organization buffs and other buffs from other systems, the power creep will skyrocket.

Even if you do small numbers per step, there are so many steps that at the end of the day you will have a huge power creep.

We are already experiencing a small fraction of this power creep. A level 19 with regular gear will not dent the armor of a level 20, because the gear disparity between level 10 gear and level 20 gear is enormous. This will only get more out of hand when you add further systems, longer leveling, and higher max level.

Suggestion

I would suggest, aside from making the power steps smaller (leveling, gear steps), using a different type of itemization than just straight-up increasing damage mitigation or damage dealt. Take itemization in games like Baldur's Gate 3, DnD 5e, and Pathfinder. These games have power progression and you do get stronger as you level, but it doesn't always come straight from your items increasing your damage or defensive status, but added mechanics that can be used for your advantage.

An MMO that did this perk well was (believe it or not) New World. Here are some examples of good perks that can make gear stronger without just a direct increase of power or defense.

These types of perks can make creating a build more fun, reduce power creep, and add an element of skill by creating new mechanics that players need to adapt to and play around to optimize their gameplay. Legendary and artifacts could even have active skills that would be powerful but have a big cooldown (Ex: an artifact chest piece that gives you the ability to fly for 1 hour and a 24-hour cooldown or something like that) that could be very powerful but also situational and doesn't just give you free always on damage stats like a physical power increase.

Side note to the "its just an alpha crowd": I know the game is not currently balanced and this is one of the things that will change in the future, I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that this design of itemization will either create a boring gear progression where gear upgrades almost don't matter, or it will create a gear progression where if you don't have the strongest gear and are at max level on the server, you will be useless in any type of content.

A different itemization design can make upgrading gear interesting while not completely breaking the balance of power progression.

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Comments

Punkte

While venturing out on a new character, I came across two items.

One was a green ring that had the same exact stats as a white ring.

And I also got a green chest that had 1 more physical crit than a white chest.

This feels bad and makes getting green gear at low levels not exciting.

Def need some work done on making it exciting to actual obtain a green item.

Shoklen

I noticed the same, Whites and Greens are identical and the rare Green being +1 to a Stat... I'm sure there will be more gear passes. My Epic Ruby neck went from +15 to +10 Crit... I then had to use enchanting to get it back up to +15.

Punkte

Even the blue variants at low level have like 1 attribute difference. I wonder of the legendary have like 3 lol. Reeeeeeally needs a rework.

Azherae

I'd also prefer a different itemization direction.

I'm in the camp of 'just patiently waiting, confident that it's coming', but just in case it needs to be said, I find the current itemization direction to be terrible and am entirely assuming it's placeholder.

I wouldn't necessarily want the New World style as 'my optimal', in a game with a long leveling phase and no fast travel, but I absolutely don't want what we are seeing now, under those conditions, either.

Looking forward to your actual efforts, itemization team.

Tenguru

It would be nice to have the character level make up more of a character's total power level, but I'm also pretty used to games where gear simply is where all the power comes from.

Personally, I'm more concerned with if the power increases become smaller and smaller until basically leveling out or reaching a plateau. I don't want to be a level 50 in all blue gear, fight another lvl 50 in all Heroic gear and me not have any chance at all at winning. I want those gear differences at endgame to be much much closer than the differences in early game.

So, sorry to say but I think I'm on board with the whole gear progression thing as long as the steps become smaller and smaller the further up you go.

A lot of what you're suggesting does seem to fall under the "horizontal progression" that I know Steven's talked about wanting in all kinds of places in Ashes though, both in gear and character progression. So hopefully this post gives them some more concrete ideas to run with when it comes to all of that.

Azherae

I'll simply add a quick note without 'holding back due to my bias or tempering my arrogance' for this one though.

I 'told you how' to do this, Intrepid, but that wasn't 'hey I think this would be super cool I'm so good at this'.

There are a lot of boilerplate-tier design things I've said over the years here, not because I'm super confident that I'm some incredible designer, but because after a while you learn how to avoid some mistakes, you learn what needs to be done.

Throne and Liberty has done it all. It is just 'the sensible way to do it' most of the time, emergent from 'yeah we know why it doesn't work when you do it the other way'. I don't think you have to do it exactly like them, but I'd appreciate a bit more focus on making sure to do the obvious ones, even if just for my sanity. Maintaining faith through all this 'experimentation' is hard...

"Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it."

Azherae

EDIT: Shifted around some stuff and added a quote due to a thread merge (made my head spin for a moment)

Punkte wrote: »

While venturing out on a new character, I came across two items.

One was a green ring that had the same exact stats as a white ring.

And I also got a green chest that had 1 more physical crit than a white chest.

This feels bad and makes getting green gear at low levels not exciting.

Def need some work done on making it exciting to actual obtain a green item.

Bear in mind that we(?) were originally expecting itemization to basically have few if any gear drops in the open world in the first place.

It's probably just the result of having the time to do a mass rebalance of things, but not time to also curate/fix all the loot tables.

They might also need to do the correction on the enchanting ranges, but my question to you would be:

"If they switched to mostly not having gear drop from mobs at all, just Materials (but with 'good' Material droprates), would that also ruin your experience?"

Imnotkio

Azherae wrote: »

Bear in mind that we(?) were originally expecting itemization to basically have few if any gear drops in the open world in the first place.

It's probably just the result of having the time to do a mass rebalance of things, but not time to also curate/fix all the loot tables.

They might also need to do the correction on the enchanting ranges, but my question to you would be:

"If they switched to mostly not having gear drop from mobs at all, just Materials (but with 'good' Material droprates), would that also ruin your experience?"

I think it's necessary. The mob grind loop can't be self-sustainable; otherwise, people would never do anything else while leveling and would not engage with the systems at all.

If all you get good gear and exp from the same source, then all you need to do is kill mobs to get gear to kill stronger mobs to get stronger gear until you're max level. It doesn't matter if crafted gear is stronger, because you won't need the strongest gear to grind mobs, and you'll level up more efficiently by getting average mob gear and going with that instead of stopping to craft gear that will be obsolete in a few levels down the road.

So you get gear and exp from the same source, you don't need to transform your glint into gold (caravan becomes worthless), you don't need to engage with the professions system or the economy, and there is less player conflict. Players don't see a reason to start wars, and it's a waste of time since they could be grinding to max level.

So now players are stuck rushing to max level doing nothing but grinding mobs for 200+ hours. Even the most enthusiastic grinders will eventually burn out from that.

You need to distribute rewards so players need to interact with the systems. Mobs give the best exp and mats. You then use the glint to make gold, and you either use mats to improve your professions or you sell it to buy gear. You also do quests and interact with events, because they are a good source of hard-to-find mats and node currency, and some hard-to-complete quests even give you some rare gear. But these events are sporadic and you can't just do them non-stop so you go back to doing other stuff. Meanwhile, hopefully, you get some wars and sieges going from player drama or just the benefit of your node.

If the design is long progression and long leveling, you need to make it so players either need or are heavily incentivized to engage with the systems before max level, to disassociate the idea of level rushing and endgame systems from this game in the minds of the players, creating an environment where the game starts at level 1 and not max level.

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

Looking forward to your actual efforts, itemization team.

If it turns out that what we are seeing is actually close to the intended low level itemization, this comment cuts deep.

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