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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Toolbars enforce choice….and through choice… variety.
The last thing I want to see in an MMO is 1000s of clones.
Thats also why I am not too happy about the 64 class limitation.
[/quote]
Have you seen how Blade and Soul handle skills? You've got a couple dozen skills, but as you train up, you can switch the functionality of each skill. So Skill A can either be a CC and small damage or bigger damage but no CC. Or less damage and does AOE damage instead. If every skill has distinct choices like this, that would give you a ton of ways to customize your play style. There are plenty of ways to diversify a small skills set. Its become a lot more common in MMOs to have the ability to switch combat skills on the fly, to handle different kinds of fights.
Guild Wars stands out to me as a well balanced system, with great pve, dual classing, and about the only pvp system ive ever considered balanced. It also featured a large selection of skills for each class, and a large variety of classes to choose from. In GW, you would pick a hand full of skills from your skill book and run with those 8(?) skills in instances. This setup allowed people to express the intricacies of their playstyles to their fullest, resulting in more unique experiences overall.
Granted, this system of building a small skillset from a large library is nothing new, a la the first Everquest, and is not without its downsides. Having a large skill pool to select from is a lot of work for developers to balance, and will end up having redundant or niche abilities that will be under-utilized, and meta builds will come out that will crimp diversity to some extent.
The strength of this design lies in variety, and I enjoyed being able to swap out of one effective build for another, throwing in what skills were necessary to round out the group i was in, or adding things in response to potential counters / needs. If the party I was in doesnt have a healer, I could throw on the healer class and provide some healing / utility in a pinch before entering the instance. Each class was flexible, and encompassed numerous archetypes and playstyles.
Everquest 2 on the other hand, would just give you a large pool of abilities to manage. A brief breakdown of skill design for EQ2 would be that you had base abilities from your class, of which there are 26 unique classes. At max level you ended up between 15 to 20-ish. On top of those, you had a huge customization system, called Alternate Advancements, known in other games as "talents" or what have you. These would then provide another 20+ skills and numerous passives depending on class, spread across numerous trees and talent webs, some shared and some unique to that specific class.
This style of skill design is a well known classic, evoking memories fond or feared by veteran gamers, recalling half the screen taken up by skill bars. A good number of them being similar and / or redundant, involving smashing the same abilities in a row in a rotation. There is merit in boiling down these skills to a small set of skills to minimize UI and improve gameplay. Fully half of the skills you earned in EQ2 would be always on buffs and attack abilities, with the other half being specialized abilities that required some forethought as to their use. Some were enhanced abilities on a long cooldown, meant for emergency uses and surprise events that required fast reactions, and others were niche skills that acted as class defining abilities that acted on the interplay of class mechanics and skills to perform at their best.
When I distill this system down to what I liked about it, it was having a pool of skills that were used selectively, and in specific scenarios, in order to differentiate the skill of a newcomer and a veteran. A selection of skills that you could weave into a tapestry of skill to pull off something difficult, or to counter the unexpected.
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TL;DR
Those have been my experiences, and what I personally have come to remember about those games, and about MMOs in general. Boiled down, I like having a set of 6-10 skills that have interesting mechanics and can be used routinely and then another 6-10 skills that would be more specialized, something that has a weighted risk to use, but with a large payout when successful. I believe they should be active skills, having buffs,out of combat skills, and item actives / passives offloaded to a separate bar or abstracted completely.
Sorry for the long winded, rambling and jumpy nature of my ramblings, I wanted to explain some of the motivations and history behind my thinking. Some of it no doubt has been romanticized and is remembered through the rosy glasses of nostalgia but I felt like sharing ^.^
Chocmerc
Guild Wars stands out to me as a well balanced system, with great pve, dual classing, and about the only pvp system ive ever considered balanced. It also featured a large selection of skills for each class, and a large variety of classes to choose from. In GW, you would pick a hand full of skills from your skill book and run with those 8(?) skills in instances. This setup allowed people to express the intricacies of their playstyles to their fullest, resulting in more unique experiences overall.
Granted, this system of building a small skillset from a large library is nothing new, a la the first Everquest, and is not without its downsides. Having a large skill pool to select from is a lot of work for developers to balance, and will end up having redundant or niche abilities that will be under-utilized, and meta builds will come out that will crimp diversity to some extent.
The strength of this design lies in variety, and I enjoyed being able to swap out of one effective build for another, throwing in what skills were necessary to round out the group i was in, or adding things in response to potential counters / needs. If the party I was in doesnt have a healer, I could throw on the healer class and provide some healing / utility in a pinch before entering the instance. Each class was flexible, and encompassed numerous archetypes and playstyles.
Everquest 2 on the other hand, would just give you a large pool of abilities to manage. A brief breakdown of skill design for EQ2 would be that you had base abilities from your class, of which there are 26 unique classes. At max level you ended up between 15 to 20-ish. On top of those, you had a huge customization system, called Alternate Advancements, known in other games as "talents" or what have you. These would then provide another 20+ skills and numerous passives depending on class, spread across numerous trees and talent webs, some shared and some unique to that specific class.
This style of skill design is a well known classic, evoking memories fond or feared by veteran gamers, recalling half the screen taken up by skill bars. A good number of them being similar and / or redundant, involving smashing the same abilities in a row in a rotation. There is merit in boiling down these skills to a small set of skills to minimize UI and improve gameplay. Fully half of the skills you earned in EQ2 would be always on buffs and attack abilities, with the other half being specialized abilities that required some forethought as to their use. Some were enhanced abilities on a long cooldown, meant for emergency uses and surprise events that required fast reactions, and others were niche skills that acted as class defining abilities that acted on the interplay of class mechanics and skills to perform at their best.
When I distill this system down to what I liked about it, it was having a pool of skills that were used selectively, and in specific scenarios, in order to differentiate the skill of a newcomer and a veteran. A selection of skills that you could weave into a tapestry of skill to pull off something difficult, or to counter the unexpected.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR
Those have been my experiences, and what I personally have come to remember about those games, and about MMOs in general. Boiled down, I like having a set of 6-10 skills that have interesting mechanics and can be used routinely and then another 6-10 skills that would be more specialized, something that has a weighted risk to use, but with a large payout when successful. I believe they should be active skills, having buffs,out of combat skills, and item actives / passives offloaded to a separate bar or abstracted completely.
Sorry for the long winded, rambling and jumpy nature of my ramblings, I wanted to explain some of the motivations and history behind my thinking. Some of it no doubt has been romanticized and is remembered through the rosy glasses of nostalgia but I felt like sharing ^.^
Chocmerc
I definitely have to put my stake in the lots of skills camp personally. Ive put alot of thought into this in the past, when trying to pin down what precisely i enjoyed about the MMOs ive played, and what I feel is missing in the current offerings of the MMO scene. From my own personal ideal, ive come to think that having, at minimum, 12 skills is what im looking for. My personal range would run between 12 and 20 skills, giving room for a number of standard rotation skills and a number of niche, utility, and power skills. As a background, ive played a good few MMOs out there, though the ones I would point out as my most formative and enjoyable would be Guild Wars and Everquest II(dating my self a bit).
Guild Wars stands out to me as a well balanced system, with great pve, dual classing, and about the only pvp system ive ever considered balanced. It also featured a large selection of skills for each class, and a large variety of classes to choose from. In GW, you would pick a hand full of skills from your skill book and run with those 8(?) skills in instances. This setup allowed people to express the intricacies of their playstyles to their fullest, resulting in more unique experiences overall.
Granted, this system of building a small skillset from a large library is nothing new, a la the first Everquest, and is not without its downsides. Having a large skill pool to select from is a lot of work for developers to balance, and will end up having redundant or niche abilities that will be under-utilized, and meta builds will come out that will crimp diversity to some extent.
The strength of this design lies in variety, and I enjoyed being able to swap out of one effective build for another, throwing in what skills were necessary to round out the group i was in, or adding things in response to potential counters / needs. If the party I was in doesnt have a healer, I could throw on the healer class and provide some healing / utility in a pinch before entering the instance. Each class was flexible, and encompassed numerous archetypes and playstyles.
Everquest 2 on the other hand, would just give you a large pool of abilities to manage. A brief breakdown of skill design for EQ2 would be that you had base abilities from your class, of which there are 26 unique classes. At max level you ended up between 15 to 20-ish. On top of those, you had a huge customization system, called Alternate Advancements, known in other games as "talents" or what have you. These would then provide another 20+ skills and numerous passives depending on class, spread across numerous trees and talent webs, some shared and some unique to that specific class.
This style of skill design is a well known classic, evoking memories fond or feared by veteran gamers, recalling half the screen taken up by skill bars. A good number of them being similar and / or redundant, involving smashing the same abilities in a row in a rotation. There is merit in boiling down these skills to a small set of skills to minimize UI and improve gameplay. Fully half of the skills you earned in EQ2 would be always on buffs and attack abilities, with the other half being specialized abilities that required some forethought as to their use. Some were enhanced abilities on a long cooldown, meant for emergency uses and surprise events that required fast reactions, and others were niche skills that acted as class defining abilities that acted on the interplay of class mechanics and skills to perform at their best.
When I distill this system down to what I liked about it, it was having a pool of skills that were used selectively, and in specific scenarios, in order to differentiate the skill of a newcomer and a veteran. A selection of skills that you could weave into a tapestry of skill to pull off something difficult, or to counter the unexpected.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TL;DR
Those have been my experiences, and what I personally have come to remember about those games, and about MMOs in general. Boiled down, I like having a set of 6-10 skills that have interesting mechanics and can be used routinely and then another 6-10 skills that would be more specialized, something that has a weighted risk to use, but with a large payout when successful. I believe they should be active skills, having buffs,out of combat skills, and item actives / passives offloaded to a separate bar or abstracted completely.
Sorry for the long winded, rambling and jumpy nature of my ramblings, I wanted to explain some of the motivations and history behind my thinking. Some of it no doubt has been romanticized and is remembered through the rosy glasses of nostalgia but I felt like sharing ^.^
Chocmerc
> 1 - 2 -spam attack skills/3-4 attkack skills with med. cooldown/couple debuffs/few utility skills/1-2 ultimate abilities with long CD
> 1-2 spam spells/3-4 spells med CD/few debuffs-CC/curses/few utility skills/1-2 ultimate ab.-long CD
> 3-4 combat spells/couple debuffs/few heals/few utility + buffs spells(long duration)/1-2 ult.-long CD
>for bards- -3-4 combat spells /couple debuffs+ few CC/few buffs(long dur.)+ few buffs(short dur. - 20-30 sec. from melodies)/few utility skills/1-2 ult. - long CDs
+mb 3-4 for potions
Lets say you have a limited # of skill points. And a large skill tree or list.
Each skill minimum to unlock the next skill (if it's a skill tree) would be 5 skill points. But you can continue to pump skill points into it to reach a higher level, lets say 20.
Essentially you can be a 'master' or a 'jack of all traits' kind of skill build. Or somewhere inbetween.
You might ask, isn't a master always better than a 'jack of all'. Not quite. Example, for a mage, you can have really strong fire magic. But the drawback is when you fight against water-base monsters. Your magic will be useless! Vs someone who took both fire/lightning magic. He may not be as strong, but he can be useful against water-base monsters!
Other stuff can be like a fighter class. You can have a few powerful moves that deal more damage. Or many technical moves that gives you tactical advantages and crowd control. You decide!
Edit: There should also be passive skills too :)
People mention BDO, but BDO skill set is very small for some classes. Awakenings in that game use 6 skills w/ flows on from them that are added onto the attack. And most don't even use all the abilities. And if used non-awakened skills, its maybe 1-2 of them. Its not very in-depth, and for pve aspect, there is no skill to it. This game is going to need some skill especially with them mentioning animation cancels.
Wildstar did it great with the choice of what skills to take to fights, especially in PVP. Do you go more damage abilities, more CC abilities, more surviveability abilities. Even having different damage LAS could be you build your dps PVE rotations around having high burst damage vs having long sustained damage. Having viable damage rotation with less buttons to press or go a higher damage build but requires more buttons and tigher rotation which makes it harder to do. With having all your skills available, it takes away from choices. Also BNS did a good job also with how skills had different additions to them and it would change rotations a little although BNS was very small amount of skills you actually used but still allowed some leeway in what way you want to dps.
And add into secondary skills adding onto aspects to your main skills, there are going to be so many different combinations of skills out there that I don't see everyone having the same stuff on them. Will there be cookie cutter builds, of course because people are lazy and don't want to figure things out and just want oh this does alot of damage, let me do this.
Toolbars enforce choice….and through choice… variety.
The last thing I want to see in an MMO is 1000s of clones.
Thats also why I am not too happy about the 64 class limitation.
[/quote]
What do you mean 64 class "limitation"? Most (if not all?) MMO's have a class variation of less than 20...
On the first part I agree with you. If you can have 20+ skill on your bar, why would you group up with other people playing the same class? Less skills = more variety (as in diversity in builds), since you HAVE to <strong>specialize</strong> in the playstyle you prefer instead of having it all there.
<div class="d4p-bbt-quote-title"><a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/should-aoc-have-many-skills-on-their-skill-bars-or-should-they-be-limited/page/2/#post-17689" rel="nofollow">Rune_Relic wrote:</a></div>
If everyone has access to the same skills at any moment in time, how are they unique ?
Toolbars enforce choice….and through choice… variety.
The last thing I want to see in an MMO is 1000s of clones.
Thats also why I am not too happy about the 64 class limitation.
</blockquote>
What do you mean 64 class “limitation”? Most (if not all?) MMO’s have a class variation of less than 20…
On the first part I agree with you. If you can have 20+ skill on your bar, why would you group up with other people playing the same class? Less skills = more variety (as in diversity in builds), since you HAVE to <strong>specialize</strong> in the playstyle you prefer instead of having it all there.
[/quote]
I mean fixed class systems in general enforce a variety, but it is also a limiter.
They focus around only that X number of class builds being viable.
Veering away from the those classes into a hybrid, nearly always ends in failure.
Thus they stifle variety rather than encourage it.
I prefer a hybrid system from the outset.
Where archetypes define the boundary of hybrids and thus allow unlimted classes between the archetypal extremes.
Any system that doesnt have a default starting class that sits between the extremes, is not a hybrid friendly system.