Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III Progression Feedback - Week One
The first week of Alpha Two Phase III is almost in the books, and we want to know how things are feeling! We are looking for feedback on the following: (Please be as detailed as possible)
- How did the pace of leveling feel from level 0 to your highest level (too fast, too slow, or just right)? What made it feel that way?
- Did your character’s power (gear, skills, stats) feel like it kept up with the challenges you faced? Why or why not?
- Were there any bottlenecks (quests, materials, gold, difficulty spikes) that slowed your progression? Please share details.
- At what point, if any, did progression start to feel grindy instead of fun? What specifically caused that feeling?
- What was the most satisfying and the most frustrating part of progression for you?
Do not feel limited by the list above. Feel free to share anything you’d like to as you’re testing progression. If possible, please share your feedback here by end of day Monday, September 1, 2025 as we will be compiling feedback for our development team on Tuesday.
Thank you so much for being part of our development journey.
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Comments
Well the biggest problem is that you had scrolls that put people wildly ahead in levels, added more PvP events, then nerfed the scrolls, and added back increased drop rate. With the mix of the new PVP toggle system with everyone accidentally flagging. lvl 15s+ with decent gear cause of increased drops can essentially 1v8 lvl 12s who are behind because of the huge deficit with the random patch in the middle of the game that benefitted the no lifers and nerfed everyone else. Everyone is not on par with each other. Add that with bugs and other features that are not ironed out. like post 2.5 changes that are completely borked. I would have been fine you delaying till November for harbringer update.
My gaming laptop is strong enough to handle Witcher 3, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Cyberpunk 2077 and many others games with fps 60+ on medium settings, but it's not strong enough to handle phase 3 of alpha Ashes of Creation. Fps drops down to 10-15 at lower settings, freezing all time so I couldn't do any testing. I think it's important thing because mostly people all around world have same type of computer as me. Mine is with gpu nvidia gtx3060
Well, intro is the same which is nice, pick up some glint, few pieces of gear and your steed. Few quests lock if your bags are full, even resetting, the dialogue locks and cannot be fixed on our end. Outside that, the cost of crafting is pretty high for Novice, but doable if you grind. Dislike that you've locked tools and such to particular crafters and force them to reach levels so we can make upgraded tools. Dislike we have options for mounts cosmetics and other cosmetics, have info on your site about 'bundles' and to be on the lookout but yet don't offer any to us in P3, so why have options we can't use, that makes no sense. Nodes shouldn't level from lions crafting areas unless all nodes benefit. Should be gathering/harvesting/killing in those nodes that level it and the crates system.
Honestly the game feels amazing for me. One of the biggest issue we run into was the PvP flag. Currently you have to either set it to always having to hold a button to attack an enemy. Or risk being bait fagged by someone and then killed. The toggle flag system was so so much better.
Thank you for all the work you are putting into this game for us, we forget sometimes how hard you all work, but we really do appreciate it.
I feel like a lot of stuff should have been ironed out on the PTR before P3. drops suck I hear static nodes are back so once again some people are way ahead of the rest of the server. Crafting is still not all that enjoyable, I got like 1 drop in 9 levels. And while hunting grem for 4 hours I got one green carcass womp Womp.
Pace - Definitely feels slower, though this time around I've done alot more crafting than last phases so this is mostly why.
Power - A noticeable decrease considering that we are forced to sit with cruddy gear until we find a crafter or get a drop (Which have been REDUCED, only just today have you increased some of them back up). Not having access to buy BASIC gear from vendors has absolutely slowed down everything.
Bottlenecks - Gear for the above reasons, and then how EXPENSIVE the vendor items are, specifically for Processing. They are at best double the cost of processing, at worse they can triple it. Alot of these weapon or armour recipes are requiring 4g+ of JUST vendor bought materials, not including any manually farmed ones like Copper, Zinc and etc. Absolute downgrade from before, barring making us need less materials from various other professions.
Grind - Grind is the game, doesn't really seem all that much different from P2 from what I can feel.
Most Satisfying -
- Actually being able to craft gear without NEEEDING 50 other people.
Least Satisfying -
- Tank as a whole, it's just bad and has gotten 10x worse since early phase 2 from what I last played. I quite literally have nothing good to say about the class beyond that it's just a slightly tankier Fighter. Even at end game with max gear you're still forcing tanks to be exclusively evasion tanks unless their Reflect is up. Tank just doesn't feel tanky, against Phy or Mag. Myself and other players don't want to play Dark Souls, otherwise we'd just play Dark Souls.
- Action cam healing, for the most part this is okay, but with Judgement specifically it's the most irritating skill to use to HEAL. Since you cannot simply untarget enemies in action cam mode, which often leads to me simply swapping out of action cam to use that heal.
- Being unable to bind Action Cam and Non-Action Cam actions to same buttons, this is nearly doubling the number of keybinds that I need, and without macros to fix this it's getting pretty abysmal since I'm FORCED to swap in and out of Action Cam because of several heals.
- F-Keys don't always align with the party/raid list. IE, Self = F1, Party1 = F4, Party2 = F3, Party3 = F2
- Action Cam's targeting defaulting to whomever is roughly infront of you is just painful and has gotten me killed several times, start casting a heal only to realize that the game force targeted some rando's horse 20yards away to be my defensive target.
2. Did your character’s power (gear, skills, stats) feel like it kept up with the challenges you faced? Why or why not?
3. Were there any bottlenecks (quests, materials, gold, difficulty spikes) that slowed your progression? Please share details.
5. What was the most satisfying and the most frustrating part of progression for you?
I enjoy the combat .
Frustrating- not having mats availiable to craft especially when not geting any drops. and not having level appropriate gear drop. I have only had 1 piece of gear drop. lots of recipies but no mats. I enjoy crafting but I dont want to spend 2 to 3 hours of grinding mats for 1 piece of gear that will last 10 levels. you got to pick which way to make it work drops or more mats. I like both because you can craft better. but it is nice to see a piece of gear pop up in the loot window
- So far, it seems pretty normal. I do a mix of artisan skills, quests, and grind, and it feels pretty good to me.
- I'm still lower level (10), but I made my own starter gear, and it feels just right.
-Coin is an issue, especially with artisan stuff. We're supposed to get to JM on 4 skills. I usually do 2 processing, 1 gathering, and 1 craft. With the amount of coin it takes to process materials, it will be SUPER hard for us casual(ish) players. This should be addressed.
-So far, so good. Grinding for coin is absurd, but when mixed with quests and artisan stuff, it's bearable. The grind for coin is a bit too much for sure.
-Satisfied with progression in general at this point...again, though, the cost of processing is way too high, especially for novice level.
Loved doing construction crates, by the way!
After that, I decided to change to fishing and carpentry. I thought to make fish oil, but that is nasty expensive, so I am just turning the common fish into fillets for a tiny profit to the vendor since no one wants that. For carpentry I am just getting into it by collecting the wood to mill, but I tried to turn some heroic basalt into something else by grinding it to sand, that worked well, but I think the price for that is a bit expensive....
Finally, the node (Winstead EU) does not have all the crafting stations. Just a couple are there, even though the marketplace is unlocked and it says novice stations are unlocked? It makes it difficult to craft when you have to run down to the different crafting outposts.
I don't know what I should do with my hour of game time anymore... I can't complete any goals in that amount of time because I have to run all over the place in order to craft the basics, and no one wants to buy the novice outputs anyway because they are all leveled out of it before anything is online. Why are the crafting tables spread out all over the place anyway? It's not that way over at the new starting point in the anvils... Theirs is all neat in a single location.
Thr best part is the ability to run wherever I please, and gather what I see, uncontained by level gates (I can be sneaky around the bad guys haha). I love the mounts, the views, the battles, and the vision. I am in general highly enjoying testing the environment!
By far, the most frustrating part is the current hunting system. When is that getting fixed out of the placeholder form?! It is icky, very, very icky. Just have the mons drop a carcass! Put it on their loot table, everything else can stay the same until you are ready to implement the next step of it.
- Were there any bottlenecks (quests, materials, gold, difficulty spikes) that slowed your progression? Please share details.
I think the biggest issue I have is that nodes not having the initial crafting stations around them making all nodes viable. The day 1 experience where nodes are patches of grass with nothing in them means everyone congregates around these crafting stations out in the wild and doing a full craft requires different stations far away form each other being very inconvenient.- At what point, if any, did progression start to feel grindy instead of fun? What specifically caused that feeling?
When I realized going anywhere in the game besides the crafting stations next to the two starter areas was unviable because nodes aren't independently viable to start leveling at. E.g. you cant go to a node in the turquoise sea and start building your character due to no crafting stations or vendors.- What was the most satisfying and the most frustrating part of progression for you?
Not being able to just go to any node on the map that I think looks interesting and start building my character like I can outside lionhold.