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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.
Let's TheoryRaid #10: Ouryu vs Aridus/'Hivemind' Aridus (Anti-Zerg Mechanics)
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
A combination of three things led to this one. First was 'chatting with a guild member about game challenges, and watching some of the videos of players lowmanning Firebrand', secondly 'going to Aridus in Throne and Liberty', and thirdly 'thinking about how little engagement Ascended Aridus would be in Dominion Mode.
The most reasonable FF11 mob to compare Aridus to is Ouryu, a dragon I've mentioned in passing in some other post of this type. Nothing to compare to in Ashes yet that I know of, but it's not time for that content type yet probably and maybe I just haven't been keeping up.
We compare them because of their Elements and their 'mechanics'. They're both 'Earth Mages', one is a Lich that summons Wasps, the other is an Earth Wyrm that summons Earth Worms (and elementals). This helps me keep the post shorter because if you've read either Tiamat or Jormungand comparisons, it's another Wyrm so... mostly the same.
In fact, the 'big special ability' Ouryu has available is just 'Invincible', so literally nothing special to worry about except the Adds and being able to cast Breakga (Petrify). Aridus is basically the same. Some AoE, some breath attacks, and some Adds that are so 'weak' that I can't even technically tell you what they really do. Hence the foray into yet another Hypothetical glow-up for the Lich, which I will refer to as "Hivemind Aridus" or H.Aridus for simplicity.
That lets me jump straight into the thoughts from the discussion:
"What exactly is an Anti-Zerg mechanic?"
Is it a mechanic that kills more people the more people are there? Is it a mechanic that punishes disorganized groups? Is it a mechanic that prevents additional people from being effective even if they are there?
The problem with all of these is that in a PvX game, they're all abusable, but more importantly they're abusable in ways that aren't usually fun. There's no 'give and take', it's often too binary. But Ouryu's adds, the Ziryu (worms) are more interesting, and slightly better, than that, because they are 'binary', a different type of 'binary'.
Worm mobs in FF11 have Knockback, Silence, Attack Down, Accuracy Down, and MP Drain (all separate abilities). They also cast relatively powerful Earth Magic (both AoE and single target). Ouryu summons four of these. Adds with AoE are surely already disruptive, but they're also a thing that most games let Tanks easily weaponize against their enemies. Get aggro, run into enemy group, pop all defense buffs and 'wait'. Massive bonus if the battlefield is chaotic and the enemy group doesn't realize that the tank is the casting target, made even 'worse' in PvX because the Tank in question would probably have a pull, and could drag enemies into the attack.
So while this is obviously as 'Anti-Zerg' as any other bombardment of AoE, it's not really solving 'Zergs', it's just changing the fight a little, giving Tanks something to do in PvX. In the case of it coming from Adds though, we can't really call it 'Anti-Zerg' because if there was no competition, the answer, especially in Ashes, would be to treat it like an Execute. Have the Tank somehow get aggro from all the Ziryu, and then turtle up super hard when they cast, making sure no one else is near.
The useful thing about Ziryu is that if the Tank lost hate in that moment (possibly due to Ouryu's Horrid Roar), the Ziryu will all disperse to whoever was healing the tank, if you were trying to lowman this. And Worm mobs move by 'going into the ground, disappearing, and resurfacing', so they aren't susceptible to certain problems. This can be dealt with by coordination, but it would at least be tough to do.
Aridus' Wasps could do the same in the sense that they are flying mobs and therefore theoretically don't need to respect 'collision' or 'elevation'. But they're still just Adds, and they don't even strictly speaking 'have AoE' (or I just don't know what it is and never needed to care). To stop a 'zerg' you must break their 'formation' and 'plan', especially in a game with Resurrection. To stop a Zerg using Adds something must happen whether they die or not.
Hivemind Aridus therefore needs three things to achieve something close to an 'Anti-Zerg Mechanic':
If H.Aridus could summon 'walls' along with Wasps, but the Wasps did not respect the Walls as obstacles whereas players had to, the battlefield would have to change to become more chaotic, allowing the Lich to wreak more havoc for longer. If the Wasps had an Anti-Healing effect on those they hit, and those near them when they died, they can still be 'weaponized', but it's harder to do it by having a single Tank go into 'defense mode' or a bunch of 'sacrificial' DPS grabbing aggro. The players are incentivized to spread out, just as with other MMO bosses that do the 'if you stick/stack together you all die together', but with even reasonable health values on the Adds, most 'soloer' classes in MMOs wouldn't actually be able to easily win against something with Heal Block while a Lich is tossing their power around.
Aridus, like Ouryu, has a powerful 'breath attack', which sadly doesn't have Collision properties, but for H.Aridus it would, because Knockback is a powerful component in the arsenal of building up good Anti-Zerg mechanics. Normally all it does is stall and burn player resources, making the fight a slog that often isn't fun, because it's used as a stalling tactic and not part of a combination. H.Aridus could use 'Grave Breath' to slam players into summoned walls, stunning them, but instead of it just being a delay, it now affects positioning relative to the Wasps (the guildie I was talking to offered 'that the walls should also contain more Wasps and they come out if players get slammed into them').
This mirrors many of the situations you see with Ouryu, where the Tank is 'guaranteed' to be subjected to a danger they can't ignore and that their team must help with, but where the danger itself can be mitigated or avoided through Tank skill, and it's only the aftermath that must be handled by others.
Anti-Zerg that can just be healed through, tanked through, or 'burst down', doesn't discourage players from just bringing more targets, and in fact, part of the reason I thought about this in terms of those games was the fact that Ashes' range means that it might sometimes be outright too difficult for a boss to apply any Anti-Zerg mechanics from the range they would be at relative to the army of 'Zerg DPS' (and AoE methods do much less when everyone has a lot of radial space to be in).
Well, just another MMO PvE rant to entertain mostly myself while trying to find Alpha-2 boss battle videos, so I won't bother coloring it.
If any reader has any interesting A2 boss fight videos, please drop them in the replies.
The most reasonable FF11 mob to compare Aridus to is Ouryu, a dragon I've mentioned in passing in some other post of this type. Nothing to compare to in Ashes yet that I know of, but it's not time for that content type yet probably and maybe I just haven't been keeping up.
We compare them because of their Elements and their 'mechanics'. They're both 'Earth Mages', one is a Lich that summons Wasps, the other is an Earth Wyrm that summons Earth Worms (and elementals). This helps me keep the post shorter because if you've read either Tiamat or Jormungand comparisons, it's another Wyrm so... mostly the same.
In fact, the 'big special ability' Ouryu has available is just 'Invincible', so literally nothing special to worry about except the Adds and being able to cast Breakga (Petrify). Aridus is basically the same. Some AoE, some breath attacks, and some Adds that are so 'weak' that I can't even technically tell you what they really do. Hence the foray into yet another Hypothetical glow-up for the Lich, which I will refer to as "Hivemind Aridus" or H.Aridus for simplicity.
That lets me jump straight into the thoughts from the discussion:
"What exactly is an Anti-Zerg mechanic?"
Is it a mechanic that kills more people the more people are there? Is it a mechanic that punishes disorganized groups? Is it a mechanic that prevents additional people from being effective even if they are there?
The problem with all of these is that in a PvX game, they're all abusable, but more importantly they're abusable in ways that aren't usually fun. There's no 'give and take', it's often too binary. But Ouryu's adds, the Ziryu (worms) are more interesting, and slightly better, than that, because they are 'binary', a different type of 'binary'.
Worm mobs in FF11 have Knockback, Silence, Attack Down, Accuracy Down, and MP Drain (all separate abilities). They also cast relatively powerful Earth Magic (both AoE and single target). Ouryu summons four of these. Adds with AoE are surely already disruptive, but they're also a thing that most games let Tanks easily weaponize against their enemies. Get aggro, run into enemy group, pop all defense buffs and 'wait'. Massive bonus if the battlefield is chaotic and the enemy group doesn't realize that the tank is the casting target, made even 'worse' in PvX because the Tank in question would probably have a pull, and could drag enemies into the attack.
So while this is obviously as 'Anti-Zerg' as any other bombardment of AoE, it's not really solving 'Zergs', it's just changing the fight a little, giving Tanks something to do in PvX. In the case of it coming from Adds though, we can't really call it 'Anti-Zerg' because if there was no competition, the answer, especially in Ashes, would be to treat it like an Execute. Have the Tank somehow get aggro from all the Ziryu, and then turtle up super hard when they cast, making sure no one else is near.
The useful thing about Ziryu is that if the Tank lost hate in that moment (possibly due to Ouryu's Horrid Roar), the Ziryu will all disperse to whoever was healing the tank, if you were trying to lowman this. And Worm mobs move by 'going into the ground, disappearing, and resurfacing', so they aren't susceptible to certain problems. This can be dealt with by coordination, but it would at least be tough to do.
Aridus' Wasps could do the same in the sense that they are flying mobs and therefore theoretically don't need to respect 'collision' or 'elevation'. But they're still just Adds, and they don't even strictly speaking 'have AoE' (or I just don't know what it is and never needed to care). To stop a 'zerg' you must break their 'formation' and 'plan', especially in a game with Resurrection. To stop a Zerg using Adds something must happen whether they die or not.
Hivemind Aridus therefore needs three things to achieve something close to an 'Anti-Zerg Mechanic':
- The ability to manipulate the terrain or mobility options of the players (he IS an Earth Mage), walls are fine
- A way to 'protect' his Wasps a bit while they do things to take advantage of this
- An effect on the Wasps that can't easily be controlled in its timing or effect by either 'Tanking it' or 'killing them fast'
If H.Aridus could summon 'walls' along with Wasps, but the Wasps did not respect the Walls as obstacles whereas players had to, the battlefield would have to change to become more chaotic, allowing the Lich to wreak more havoc for longer. If the Wasps had an Anti-Healing effect on those they hit, and those near them when they died, they can still be 'weaponized', but it's harder to do it by having a single Tank go into 'defense mode' or a bunch of 'sacrificial' DPS grabbing aggro. The players are incentivized to spread out, just as with other MMO bosses that do the 'if you stick/stack together you all die together', but with even reasonable health values on the Adds, most 'soloer' classes in MMOs wouldn't actually be able to easily win against something with Heal Block while a Lich is tossing their power around.
Aridus, like Ouryu, has a powerful 'breath attack', which sadly doesn't have Collision properties, but for H.Aridus it would, because Knockback is a powerful component in the arsenal of building up good Anti-Zerg mechanics. Normally all it does is stall and burn player resources, making the fight a slog that often isn't fun, because it's used as a stalling tactic and not part of a combination. H.Aridus could use 'Grave Breath' to slam players into summoned walls, stunning them, but instead of it just being a delay, it now affects positioning relative to the Wasps (the guildie I was talking to offered 'that the walls should also contain more Wasps and they come out if players get slammed into them').
This mirrors many of the situations you see with Ouryu, where the Tank is 'guaranteed' to be subjected to a danger they can't ignore and that their team must help with, but where the danger itself can be mitigated or avoided through Tank skill, and it's only the aftermath that must be handled by others.
Anti-Zerg that can just be healed through, tanked through, or 'burst down', doesn't discourage players from just bringing more targets, and in fact, part of the reason I thought about this in terms of those games was the fact that Ashes' range means that it might sometimes be outright too difficult for a boss to apply any Anti-Zerg mechanics from the range they would be at relative to the army of 'Zerg DPS' (and AoE methods do much less when everyone has a lot of radial space to be in).
Well, just another MMO PvE rant to entertain mostly myself while trying to find Alpha-2 boss battle videos, so I won't bother coloring it.
If any reader has any interesting A2 boss fight videos, please drop them in the replies.
One of the most enduring 'fantasies' of the human spirit, is to either always have people willing to help... or to be strong enough to never need any.
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So, let's say the boss uses an aoe that covers the entire location and leaves an outer circle indicator on the ground. This aoe chooses 30% of players present in that location and puts a debuff on them. This debuff shows up as a circle on the ground around the player that's filling up from the center. At full coloring it "explodes". If 2 explosions overlap - an add spawns. If 3 overlap - 2 adds spawn. And so on.
Adds would not be aggroable by tanks and could have whatever skillset fits the encounter.
If a player with with the debuff goes outside the indicator line - 2 adds spawn, but now they're aggroed onto the player that walked out and are way more agressive and dmg-dealing in their skillset usage.
The more players, over the raid limit, are in the location - the higher the chance for the boss to use this aoe.
An organized raid can avoid these adds relatively easily (depending on the boss abilities and other environmental hazards of course), while a zerg would be immediately pushed out or overwhelmed. And obviously this should be on top of the supposed "environmental hazards become more active" anti-zerg mechanic, so dispersing itself would be even harder for a zerg.
And without the parts that I did focus on, it doesn't work anyway, PvE MMO players generally have a pretty good mastery of positional teamwork of that type, as it's the (I think) the first thing that the better ones moved to for 'group coordination' back when the PvP players were merging in, in 2004.
The problem with the Aura Debuffs is back to the thing mentioned about radial space and range, but that's not to say 'this isn't good' or 'that wouldn't work', just 'I skipped over mentions of how the Adds should be spawned to focus on what they do'.
I generally assume that those things are avoided in TL because they're trying to keep the open world PvE at the 'below-average' skill tier, since it will take some more time to build up their reputation as 'having PvE' and tbh most PvP players I meet in that game outside the top guilds really seem to need this, they can barely manage to survive Ahzreil.
Skill gaps are the bane of MMO Devs' existences.
Another idea is with Ashes we have player collision if they had a chase mechanic through certain terrain unless the group is organized there could be some bad road blocks and traffic collisions.
Sure but the question is 'how' to change it.
Also ofc I assume you mean that the boss 'counts' how many enemies are near it or within a certain region, but that's all basic stuff that applies to any game, so I skipped over that sort of thing too. Same for Player Collision.
The reason those mostly don't solve the problem that I understand players to mean when they say 'Zerg' for this type of MMO is that the 'Zerg' is just a bunch of artillery units in a spread-out line.
I also skipped over it in the OP but the 'standard' practice for beating Ouryu is to have one of the three parties (6-man) just be 6 Black Mages.
Hell, I'd love a whole variety of archetype (or even better, attack type) responses from mobs/bosses. Even fucking L2 had some plain mobs use an ultimate defense ability if they were attacked by ranged characters a bit too much.
And in a more recent example there's Magu Kenki from Genshin, which autoblocks ranged attacks if the boss itself is not currently in an attacking sequence. (4:14 in the video)
I'm not saying that some bosses/mobs should have the same autoblock vs ranged attacks, but I'm sure there's countless ways to design around the cheese strat that everyone thinks about when farming ow bosses.
Because note that Aridus does have a Ranged counter (that I just didn't describe), and H.Aridus would automatically have a stronger one (walls). Ouryu can just Invincible, and it actually is a Summoner so it has other, separate Adds to deal with that (an Earth Elemental and a Water Elemental, summoned separately, constantly resummoned if killed, resist Sleep after a bit).
This doesn't actually discourage players from artillery spread, because it's just too difficult to make other options 'better' for standard play.
If additional hazards on the field and the threat of "you cannot bunch up when the hazards push you around, and you can't leave the circle or the adds will get you" don't dissuade people from zerging a boss with ranged units, then imo the entire damn encounter has to be rethought.
And while I udnerstand that you're closely tied to the examples you gave, I'm speaking in mostly general terms and for whatever potential Ashes could have, for this is a discussion about what Ashes COULD do, with direct examples of what others have tried doing.
Imo bosses then should be separated by "standard play" type. If you have a ton of ranged chars in your guild/raid - go kill bosses meants for ranged classes. If you have more melees - kill melee bosses. There should still be a few mechanics that could address the opposite side of attack types, especially if somehow Steven keeps to his word (THIS ONE GOD DAMN TIME) and the finallized party balancing will, in fact, be around "one of each archetype" - but ultimately I think there should be targeted encounter design and if some group comes to that encounter trying to bruteforce it with the opposite type of approach - the design should account for that and, potentially, punish that attempt effectively.
And from the perspective of Ashes' PvE design being decidedly worse at the moment towards actually preventing any of the standard cheesing options, I leaned that way.
In a game where 30m is the base engagement range for ranged characters, any boss that spends any significant amount of 'time' scattering 'environmental hazards' at that range will either be 'distracted' by basic tactics, or the hazards would have to be targetable at melee, meaning they would autostack on melee if one didn't have enough Ranged.
That's what I'm referring to, most counters to ranged that are implemented at the tier of content I'd expect, are so much more punishing to melee, particularly in PvX, that Ranged would still autowin. That said, your point stands, it's just a 'currently known issue' that they will presumably address.
Boss does it's own thing, while hazards simply exist throughout the fight, in ranging volume/strength/scale.
Dont really care that 600 players want to group to kill 1 boss that will drop 2 items that they need to split.
There needs to be PVP anti zerg mechanics!
We need things like "living bomb" skill. Where you put to target, after few seconds the target explodes, and hit all players around him, they also become "living bombs" and after few seconds they explode also.
" Inquisitor?! This Man there!! He is an Agent of Chaos in Disguise!!! lol "
Oh wait, wrong Universe.
This is actually so hilarious i would love to see it only for the sake of it.
Anti-Zerg Mechanics sounds cool in Theory. But imagine a City/Node(Settlement)-Siege where both Sides can use such a Mechanic ... ...
It will be the Meatgrinder of all Meatgrinders.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
Ok but what's your definition of a 'PvP Zerg'?
Because normally on these forums I've seen this defined mostly as 'they have more people than us' followed by 'we want AoE to murder them all'. (In my experience this is just complaining by certain types of Melee users but I'm very biased since I get to roll with players who have actual tactics, all the time).
My definition of a PvP Zerg is very specific:
"An undefended large group of ranged AoE users with no inherent tactics or survivability plans beyond maybe some AoE healers standing behind them."
I use this definition because this group type doesn't need to be good at selecting targets, coordinating, positioning, or usually adapting.
For the record I'm fine with this topic shifting towards discussing 'PvP Zergs' as long as people can define what that is, for them, to avoid it turning into the usual ships-in-the-night semantics. I might still bring up the OP simply because of the third thing that made me post it. Ascended Aridus would probably be one of the easiest mobs to 'zerg' either in PvE or PvX because it generally has such weak mechanics and nearly no influence on the battle situation.
It's surrounded by long falls into lava, so there's that... Maybe that would be enough to fit Ludullu's wish relative to it, but in the end I would still assume it would be all about 'getting the Artillery to the win condition position and then just throwing out damage at the boss whenever there weren't players to throw the damage at'.
As for 'Living Bomb', is that a ranged skill in your mind? Because it seems kind of busted if it is, and I already kinda 'know what happens' if it can't just be used from super far away because TL already has this skill as an Augment to a specific skill from Dagger users. Admittedly, it requires skill and timing to use, and doesn't just automatically kill/delete the target (but if you do get a kill you can recast it immediately on the next nearby target). I'm quite familiar with the version of this that isn't 'ok I touched you so you die' because I'm usually the one in charge of applying it, but I wouldn't call it 'Anti-Zerg', not at my skill level/the attack's potency, anyway.
PVP zerg for me is both organized and unorganized group of players that group in masses of hundreds in order to beat more skilled and better players than them, with the numbers of the zerg.
For the living bomb - the skill can be considered as AOE, so the base dmg of the skill would be on the low side. Meaning if you hit a single target with it, it will take him like 5-10% of his hp. Can be ranged, but with cast time.
The power of the skill is that after the initial hit, the second wave of explosions can be 60 players, that if someone get hit by more than 15 explosions = instant death.
Just make it so if players that are combatants and are not in the same group, then they can hit other players that are combatants and cant heal them or help them and ect.. Simple as that and bum zergs are gone.
So this would mean guild mates are not with "friendly" status if they are not in the same group. Ofc for guild wars/sieges and such they would be put as friendly and it will be special cases. But in the open world zergs will be gone.
And thats how it should be - big scale pvp should be something rare with sieges and wars and ect. This will keep the big scale wars as something enjoyable and not something that happens often and gets boring with the time.