📊 Gear & Stat Tuning Feedback Thread – Help Shape Phase II Balance

Vaknar

Glorious Testers,

With this week’s patch, we’ve officially kicked off the first phase of stat balancing and progression tuning in Alpha Two. This update brings foundational changes to character leveling, gear stat scaling, mana/health regeneration, enchanting, and TTK (time-to-kill). These systems will continue to receive frequent tuning passes over the coming weeks as we dial in the pacing and feel of progression. AKA Don’t lose your shit, instead help us refine the results! - @StevenSharif

This is a multi-patch process, and your feedback will play a major role in shaping the outcome.

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🧪 Help Us Test

To support this effort, we’ve created a Google Form you can use to submit focused feedback directly to the dev team: https://forms.gle/oVkyogDxTVEpNyiy8

👉 Gear & Stat Tuning Survey

The survey walks through the areas we’re most interested in:

• How stat progression feels while leveling
• Whether gear bonuses and enchantments feel meaningful
• Regen pacing and combat survivability
• PvE vs PvP feel
• Any unexpected behavior or edge cases

It only takes a few minutes and helps us correlate your impressions with class, level, and content areas.

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🗺️ Testing Suggestions

If you’d rather leave your feedback here in the thread, please include:

• Your class, level, and average gear tier
• The content you tested (e.g. dungeon, PvP arena, solo mobs)
• What felt better or worse after the patch
• Specific feedback on TTK, regen, or gear stat impact

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🔁 Ongoing Iteration

As always, please be patient—balancing a system this complex takes multiple passes, and some back-and-forth is expected. We’ll continue reviewing both your feedback and internal telemetry as we fine-tune the feel of vertical progression.

Thanks for helping us forge something worthy of your time and passion. 🔥 – The Intrepid Studios Team

Ludullu

I dearly hope that the current implementation sticks at least until P3, cause from all the things I've read in the feedback so far - effective changes seem to be incredible.

Obviously things still gotta be ironed out, but so far it sounds that you're back on the right direction.

If the changes don't stick around till P3, oh well, I'll just test whatever they are then

Imnotkio

Your class, level, and average gear tier

level 25, average lvl 10 +10 epic gear

The content you tested (e.g. dungeon, PvP arena, solo mobs)

1v1s, 8v8s, asymmetrical medium-scale pvp

Feedback

Gear: Pretty boring gear implementation. Increased stats for rarity upgrades are not very interesting. I don't see how you can balance straight-up stat increases and rarity upgrades and not blow up power creep. Recommend looking into perks for gear heroic+. Don't like that every helmet now gives mentality either and every should con, etc..., it feels very streamlined. But I'm willing to live with it if it's better for balance.

Power upgrades and power progression curve: I think we are at a much better place than we were before. Some people will complain that the upgrades are not enough, gear is useless, and enchanting is not worth anything anymore, but they are coming from modern P2W mobile MMO design. Games that give 200% upgrades per progression step incentivize you to spend money to get stronger, to be able to compete. That's not a healthy design, and that's the reason games like ArcheAge do so badly.

In the golden age of PVP MMOs, like Lineage 2, the progression philosophy was: The deeper you are into the game, the more you need to grind, for less % gains. At the end, you were grinding literally hundreds of hours for like less than 1% power gains. This is necessary, otherwise no new player joins the game late and is able to participate in content with the already established players

Enchanting to +10 now gives an 8% power upgrade. That's huge, and you can bet players at endgame will enchant their items. Anyone saying otherwise doesn't understand MMOs and wants to be carried solely by gear in a low skill ceiling game.

Diminishing returns: Very good, necessary for allowing for building diversity. Without it, ppl will infinitely stack power (or their main stat). Hopefully, it's here to stay. It can be tied to char level or tier of gear.

Gear drops and crafting: Players engaged with level 10 gear crafting because it was better than level 20 gear that mobs dropped reliably. This is not the case anymore. With the future increase in level cap and mobs dropping gear in a future launch, players will completely bypass early-level crafting, rushing to max level by acquiring the gear they need to keep grinding stronger mobs by grinding mobs (self sustaining self contained loop, that is the most efficient progression path, this is not good). No systems in the game will matter before max level, no one will run a caravan, and no one will care about gathering low-tier mats unless it is to progress their profession. Players probably won't fight for it. This destroys the early game professions economy, increases power disparity between sweaties and casuals, and makes every single system in the game irrelevant until players reach endgame.

If low-rarity gear mob drops are removed (rare and below), players will have no choice but to engage with the economy and make crafters relevant for gear. They will be soft-locked into progression by node progression (and crafting benches), temporarily reducing the power gap between try-hard players and casual players. The incentive to rush to max level is reduced, because now you are in lower level gear, grinding inefficiently to reach a level that is meaningless because you won't be that much stronger than a guy that is just grinding 2 hours a day and the rest of the time engaging with all the other systems and enjoying the content. Players will have to gather, fight for resources, and run caravans even at early levels to get gear. You still have progression avenues like enchanting, increased rarity upgrades, gems, and all that in lower-tier gear, and sweaties won't run out of things to do. You retain some of that dopamine hit by substituting gear drops with valuable material drops that are used for crafting gear, and you still maintain that dopamine of dropping high rarity gear (heroic and above) without being reliable enough not to engage with the rest of the game.

In short: Remove rare and below gear drops from mobs past level 10 (or at the very least level 20 gear and above), leave it for level 0 gear since the nodes won't be progressed for an economy to exist.

TTK:
The improvement on TTK is incredible. It might be too short on some occasions (especially DPS survival), but overall, on the scenarios I tested (duels, group v group, old level 10 BiS enchanted gear), great start, it feels mostly ok.

I am worried tho, once elixirs and pots become more common, players adjust to the meta with the new level 20 gear, we are going to go back to some low TTK. Hope that doesn't happen.

I also worried about a larger scale. While on small-scale pvp feels ok, the highest TTK goes is 8v8s. After that, with increased DPS proportion on parties over support classes (and some support abilities being limited to party only, not stacking), TTK is going to go downhill fast. 2x the DPS numbers double the damage, but 2x the number of tanks doesn't double raid survivability. And in the current 8v8, it's not that high to begin with.

I hope for 40v40s and bigger, TTK don't devolve into press W and throw damage abilities again. But if it does, I believe TTK can be increased by increasing base survivability overall (except tank maybe), defensive abilities power, and increasing debuffs (wounds, shaken, volatile, etc) power to balance it so TTK is higher at a base value, but can be decreased by proper skill and coordination. I don't think this will make the smaller scale bad, and it could significantly improve the large-scale.

But that remains to be seen for now. I still think we should increase it a bit more until players unanimously decide "now it's too much," rather than stop at a place players are familiar with. Younger players are not familiar with old-school TTK design and won't know to ask for it.

Sobaloda

Me: Mage, 25, Maxxed out +10 Enchanted legendary tier Best in Slot

Tested: PVE - Group PVE - PVP - Group PVP

What´s worse and feedback:

First off, i just have to say what in the f. Working hard to truly max out a character to the point of breaking more then 10 pieces of legendary tier gear to get to the point of being about 5% stronger then having went with a common tier piece ?

__Gear is useless__

a world boss item crafted at the absolute highest grade possible, from the best crafter with the highest crafting skill and pure legendary materials, enchanted at +8, is giving my character 20 power. This makes no damn sense to me at all, it gives my highest % coefficient spell of mine a whopping 50 more damage having the weapon equipped vs having nothing in the slot.

This is just an example of what the hell is going on. Getting a brand new item with the current system woulden´t even feel like a reward, upgrading from a lvl 10 common to a lvl 20 rare weapon mob drop just for your spell to deal 5-10% more damage ?

The grind is already tedious and long - speaking as a degen gamer used to korean MMO´s to try and get high tier high quality items - there is nothing in the game that´s worth chasing if the literal best is giving you almost nothing.

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__Now gameplay__

Playing a Mage should make you feel strong and powerful - the spells themselves indicate the power as almost every spell you have is a charged ability, requiring time to load before it fires. Combining the elements to create deadly combos to shatter and combust the enemies.

At this power level the Mage have almost NO impact in a fight come PvP. All they have in their kit is heavily focused on combos of damage - specifically AOE.

Before the changes the mage could act like a bomb, they go in and get a big combo on a stack of players - then other mages would jump in and you all combo AOE them down together. Right now you try this and the players healthbars barely move, the power is completely and utterly gone and the only thing that matters is pure high single target DPS - which mages do not posses in comparison to physical classes.

For PVE, Mages are still mages - they´re the best AOE dps class so they will always be one of the pinnacle PVE classes - but changing all the power and keeping mobs defenses and HP the same does not sit right with me.

The incredibly HIGH TTK of starred mob in ashes has been a big pain always. Needing several minutes to kill one pack of monsters that barely reward you with anything loot or EXP wise is just not fun. The high risk high reward barely exists in Ashes and this change just reinforces the super slow and tedious grind while also making the incredibly rare item drops now also have next to no impact.

Getting +4 power from a legendary crafted scroll and +20 power from the literal best weapon in the game taking weeks of killing worldbosses and searching for the materials to gain is crazy.

__Overall__

the slower kill time in PVP feels good - but mages have no place in it at this moment. PVE just feels overall worse and every dopamine is now gone. Nothing is worth chasing, no drop is exciting, crafting and enchanting is a joke and the grind is SLOW.

RaspberryHeaven

• Cleric 25, a mix of level 10 and 20 gear
• PvE
• Everything including the player character takes forever to kill compared to 0.7.8
• This patch must be a late April Fools' joke because I can't imagine someone looking at the earlier TTK situation and deciding that instead of adjusting soft caps based on character level they should nerf everyone across the board by half, bloat the stat page, give each attribute 2-3 extra waterfall stats, use AI to generate completely arbitrary stats for each gear piece, make consumables with absurd values and to add insult to injury shields are even worse than they used to be (which is quite a feat!)

Evonyx

Aside from the ton of feedback all over the official discord, steven's reddit "gigathread" and the forum so far, i want you to remind you on the effects outside of direct-enemy-engagements: The Economy and Server Progession side.

Putting Journeyman enchantment scrolls in the citizen vendors pocket was a genius move. This completely motivated the whole server (im talking about Lotharia during Phase 2, Alpha 2) to complete buy orders. Lots of buy orders have been completed before the material cooldowns came back for the mayor. This enabled a market for the more PvE oriented players that do no get to spamming caravans or camping a legendary tree (this will change soon, i know.). The Economy on that part was super healthy, because people sought after enchantments. Scroll prices went up, PvP Oriented players did drive more caravans, more caravan-pvp happened - it put the server in a healthy state. But, i do agree, enchanting needed a nerf. It was unrealistig to give 600% value to items by just enchanting them to +8 (yes, this description does not fit every single item, but there had been some extremes that went this far)

With stats and how they work now, and also the strong differences between apprentice level 10 gear on legendary, and green level 20 drops from NPC's which do not require a bit of effort, the economy will be out of the box on another wipe/fresh start. People do not want to craft level 10 gear, because getting epic/legendary materials, processing it on different people, to wait for a node wide crafting buff and also paying a fee for service, to be outscaled by a green level 20 item that just dropped because there was an NPC attacking you while you chopped a tree - lets be real, a feeling noone wants to face.

Combine this with the extreme diminshing returns on both, physical and magical power, and you will most likely end up with following scenario
People will either not do buy orders at all, because crafting '10 gear will be pointless, and reaching Journeyman Status on the server (again, Lotharia, full EU on one Server) took more than 3 Months to reach.
Apprentice Materials on every gathering profession will be essentially worthless, unless the server somehow reaches journeyman status super early. Then the tool-materials for Journeyman tools will be valuable, and the Journeyman Gatherables will be very valuable - because the new system will feel like every other MMO. Just rush max level and dont mess with any crafting beforehand, because dropped items are better either way. Thats not what we want to see in ashes afaik.
Oh, and also - should not put the best, highest stats on Citizen Cloaks. "Crafters make the best shit" some wise guy once said. Citizen Cloaks should be rather cosmetic, to make crafting even more worth it, rather than just buying it off a vendor.