Are safety spots good for the game?

Xeeg

There are alot of spots in the game (blood vines, cliffs, etc.) where monsters can't attack you and lose agro when you go there. It seems pretty standard procedure to use them to reset monsters and get safe. As far as I can tell, this is a legit tactic in the game.

But should it be? Should there be safety spots sprinkled around at each boss or grind spot, effectively rendering the dangerous path to the boss simple and easy to bypass? Just run past everything, jump up, reset the monsters, and then get into your grind.

Or would the game be better off if you actually couldnt shake agro until you outranged them? OR back when the mobs would teleport up to your spot, those were way more dangerous. I actually liked that better. The way it is now just makes the game too easy.

Ludullu

I think these spots should be located right over the edge of the maximum leash distance of the closest mob. So they're safe in the way of "no mob will attack you here", but they are not spots where you can just reset mobs endlessly if you want to.

Lark Wyll

Teleporting mobs to your every random location is 0/10 game play.

Play the way you want and worry less about how others play as long as they aren't cheating. A lot of people seem to be under some odd fallacy that a group's ranged dps standing on any object and shooting mobs from an elevated position while their group tanks the mob below is somehow cheating the game and a ban-able offense for breaking ToS.

This game is designed with jumping puzzles, parkour everywhere for POI entrances, quest item locations hid within jump puzzles etc. Relax and enjoy the game. The dev's obviously designed the game with these elements intended to be utilized. They show them off in their own streams and content updates.

Moving around every POI from Sephillion, Carphin, Steel Bloom are all parkour locations where the dev team designed the layouts to that end.

Vhaeyne

I think it's unintended and the result of poor level design.

In older MMORPGs, players and mobs had the same movement capabilities. Anywhere I could move or stand, a mob could do the same—sometimes even faster.

Now, players can climb ledges and jump over obstacles that mobs can’t, and the impact varies depending on your class. While this adds to the fun of exploration, it creates major inconsistencies in mob pathing.

So, to answer your question: no, I don't think we should have any safe zones.

I also believe the developers need to address the fact that they've given players the ability to exploit terrain in ways that mobs can do very little about.

Azherae

This is just another of those annoying outcomes we get because modern game design of the type Ashes is, insists on high freedom in games people also say should be tactical grouping.

Since the only solution is constrained level design, we're probably stuck with this in MMORPGs indefinitely as long as you can jump/mantle at all.

As long as mobs either don't have mantling or can't just ignore the issues players have when running up or down a slope in their pathfinding, we're gonna have these.

Intrepid made such a relatively 'big deal' about their jumping, mantling, etc, that I'm reasonably sure that we're stuck with the 'teleport you to the mob' and/or 'mob disengage-resets' outcomes. There's no way they're going to take that out now.

So I think the question's a little different, personally. 'Is being able to jump and climb onto most things good for the game?', and maybe 'is having PvE that isn't just mowing down bags of exp good for the game?'

If insufficient players would be willing to play a game where you can't do those things, then it's 'good' in the same sense that it always is.

"Modern MMORPGs are too niche and too reliant on long term players to do without this."

People want jumping puzzles in caves but also don't want people to cheese mobs? Then we get teleported. The mob holding aggro on you just opens up other bizarre problems though.