AoE Caps and why Intrepid should absolutely lean on none at all.

Hello AoC community and Intrepid dev team. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my question on your latest dev stream. You have made a lot of old school MMO gamers that I know very happy with the answer of heavily leaning on no hard AoE cap. So let’s talk about why they should not have any cap to AoE damage abilities at all and how it helps YOU beat all these big ol silly zergs.

Focused AoE is the number 1 way for a smaller group to beat a group that is much larger than themselves in mass group PvP. Zerg busting meta has always been a mix of high amounts of CC, Focused AoE, and overall tankyness to the group as a whole to dive in and out of a zerg. This has rang true in 90% of the PvP MMORPGS over my last sixteen years of playing MMOs, with a few exceptions here and there obviously. Building a coordinated group towards focused AoE let’s you slice off chunks of a zerg a piece at a time with swiftness and precision with a heavy focus on group movement to counter much larger groups and their own uncoordinated AoE abilities.

Ashes of Creation should absolutely not cap damage-inducing AoE abilities in group PvP. Between uncapped AoE and guild buffs many of my guild members and myself feel that zerg busting will be a very real possibility in group PvP. The type of situation where a coordinated group could kill double or triple, or many more times their numbers in a fight if they use coordinated AoE, coordinated CC, heavy group movement, and positioning for maximum potential damage using terrain such as chokepoints. Zergs should be punished heavily and something like a chokepoint or a narrow switchback should be extremely deadly to a massive group of people pushing through a small area. 64 different archetypes allow for a large amount of possible group synergy to play out on the battlefield if the devs do a good job in balancing, which I have the utmost confidence they will.

I agree that CC should have diminishing returns in PvP. I am really hoping that CC abilities will last a decently long amount of time in PvP. That way diminishing returns wont be as painful. Games I’ve played that had longer CC abilities that required a healer to cleanse you have always been more challenging to me personally. This gives a greater need for higher group interaction and a higher skill ceiling in my eyes if the group needs to actively monitor and call out for cleanses to be applied. Either way as long as damage is uncapped I can work around CC diminishing returns.

There should be all the opportunity for smaller guilds to succeed in Ashes of Creation. Anybody who has been apart of a smaller group can feel the pain of getting zerged down by quadruple your numbers and being unable to do a single thing about it. The ability to have uncapped AoE will give one more small tool for smaller groups to succeed through focused AoE and heavy movement in open field fighting. Recruiting as many warm bodies as humanly possible should not be the most viable strategy in Ashes of Creation. There absolutely needs to be tools in place for smaller guilds to succeed. Uncapped AoE would simply be one small piece to the balancing puzzle.

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uncounted

Dolyem wrote: »

uncounted wrote: »

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I see where you are coming from my dude but this would directly screw small groups fighting zergs. It SHOULD be implemented to CC abilities by applying diminishing returns. But as soon as you apply that to damage AoE's, you take away the small pvp groups ability to utilize choke points against zergs by bombing them when they are vulnerable.

I don't think it will on the contrary it will help the smaller group's tanks. If you try and hold a chokepoint with uncapped AoE damage with your small group the zerg will just AoE all your frontline into oblivion before you even manage to do anything and even if you manage focus fire you AoEs.
Who do you think will run out of bodies to throw at the chokepoint first the small group or the zerg ? What can the healer do if his group tanks get instantly dropped by the seer amount of uncapped AoE from the zerg ?

And I am not saying just getting hit by one AoE at the same time what I am saying is being hit by multiple AoE of the same type so you can still get hit by other types of AoE.
For example if they use fire damage AoE 10 players you will get hit by only 5 of those at the same time but if 5 of them hit you with fire damage and the other 5 with poison damage you will get hit by all of them. You will still be able to drop people very fast it just requires a little better organization and communication and also makes it more difficult for zerg guilds running standard cheesy AoE builds.

Of course all these assuming you can't have 100% uptime (or anything close to it) on the AoE abilities (imo you should not anyway). Because if that is the case all my points are moot. You just get comfortable at a safe position and spam AoE to your heart's content at the empty chockepoint and lure the zerg there.

Lastly I would like to add that in my opinion you should not get diminishing returns in CC abilities instead you should get an immunity to that type of CC for a few seconds, you get stunned you get a few seconds of stun immunity, you get rooted you get a few seconds of immunity on all roots etc... They should be some exceptions to "soft" CCs like slows where the slow duration and effectiveness will be capped at some reasonable point.

Bricktop

uncounted wrote: »

Dolyem wrote: »

uncounted wrote: »

....

I see where you are coming from my dude but this would directly screw small groups fighting zergs. It SHOULD be implemented to CC abilities by applying diminishing returns. But as soon as you apply that to damage AoE's, you take away the small pvp groups ability to utilize choke points against zergs by bombing them when they are vulnerable.

I don't think it will on the contrary it will help the smaller group's tanks. If you try and hold a chokepoint with uncapped AoE damage with your small group the zerg will just AoE all your frontline into oblivion before you even manage to do anything and even if you manage focus fire you AoEs.
Who do you think will run out of bodies to throw at the chokepoint first the small group or the zerg ? What can the healer do if his group tanks get instantly dropped by the seer amount of uncapped AoE from the zerg ?

I disagree on this take. In my experience a quality chokepoint doesn't let a zerg coordinate their entire blobs AoE through the choke. Typically the entrance to a throne room is a long hallway, castle gates are chokepoints etc. They might get SOME abilities in but there wouldn't be enough room with collision to get the full 250 person spike of damage in a siege scenario. Range would typically come into play for everybody besides the first handful of people at the entrance. There just isn't enough room to fit everybody there. The damage a zerg can typically fit through a chokepoint is mitigated quite easily by your healers, abilities, and buffs. This is just my past experience in other games and we all obviously need to get our hands on the alpha and betas and test.

You don't let a blob dump a coordinated AoE on your group in the open field where they DO have room to do so. You run away and try and string the zerg out, or you find a chokepoint to utilize, etc. This is where a coordinated group uses heavy movement and positioning to find the correct engagement (or none at all). Zergy guilds typically don't put heavy thought into group composition, ensuring ideal builds and coordinating AoE. They typically just gather all the warm bodies up with their individual glass cannon specs and off they go. The more numbers the better in their eyes and actual strategy is an afterthought.

In my opinion uncapped AoE only helps smaller and/or more coordinated groups.

mcstackerson

A coordinated group can also make sure they aren't stacking redundant AoEs where the zerg wouldn't care. The AoE cap also doesn't have to be 1, it can be something that allows aoes to be stacked up to a limit so a small group can maximize but an uncoordinated zerg can easily waste damage.

Littlekenny21

I disagree that uncapping AoE skills will help the smaller group and I think it will benefit the zerg more as a couple of people have said before. My anti-zerg experience is entirely in GW2 though so there may be other elements of other games that make this work that I'm unaware of.

The problems I see are that with the sheer number of players in a zerg:
It would be possible for the zerg to accidentally focus enough damage to melt the smaller group.

If the smaller group goes in melle to get a small group of out of positioning players, the zerg only needs a small portion of their player to react by dropping AoE on them.

If cc is uncapped with no way to prevent it, see GW2 after the stability change (easy to die without making a mistake).

If AoE healing is also uncapped then the zerg has way more sustain(separate topic).

IMO, the key parts to GW2 large scale PvP working are; stability, dodge roll, AoE damage limit, uncapped static cc(e.g. a line), capped pulling cc, water fields and blasting. Also downed state and rallying helped a long when it came to taking down zergs.

Bricktop

Littlekenny21 wrote: »

I disagree that uncapping AoE skills will help the smaller group and I think it will benefit the zerg more as a couple of people have said before. My anti-zerg experience is entirely in GW2 though so there may be other elements of other games that make this work that I'm unaware of.

The problems I see are that with the sheer number of players in a zerg:
It would be possible for the zerg to accidentally focus enough damage to melt the smaller group.

If the smaller group goes in melle to get a small group of out of positioning players, the zerg only needs a small portion of their player to react by dropping AoE on them.

If cc is uncapped with no way to prevent it, see GW2 after the stability change (easy to die without making a mistake).

If AoE healing is also uncapped then the zerg has way more sustain(separate topic).

IMO, the key parts to GW2 large scale PvP working are; stability, dodge roll, AoE damage limit, uncapped static cc(e.g. a line), capped pulling cc, water fields and blasting. Also downed state and rallying helped a long when it came to taking down zergs.

The 5 man cap in guild wars 2 encouraged zerging by making the best strategy to mitigate damage to stack as many people as humanly possible in the same place since there wasn't even collision. A coordinated group isn't going to let a 100+ man blob dump full AoE onto them. They are gonna hopefully use their smaller numbers and coordination to outmaneuver them.

Edit: Additionally, the zergs in GW2 got tankier, burstier, and better/more coordinated as time went on and the meta game was defined for them. Most of the casuals stopped playing WvW pretty quickly and dedicated WvW guilds were for the most part all that was left. For the first six months or so of GW2 it was open season before everybody started building tanky and copying all the smaller better groups and it was nothing but coordinated WvW guilds left. You won't be fighting super coordinated groups in almost every fight like you were as GW2 went on. There will be a mish mash of all kinds of different groups and guilds in an open world setting as opposed to a dedicated WvW type situation. True zerg guilds in Ashes won't have as easy as a time adapting between the gear grind and if they have segregated rosters for PvPers and PvErs and all that other fun stuff that can come with the territory in this type of game. If they want to try and develop some better strategy for PvP they could find they have a bunch of members who don't wanna change specs or be able to do heavy coordinated stuff since they recruited hundreds and hundreds of people with basically no vetting process. This would lead to some of these zergs cutting members who don't want to play ball and becoming smaller more coordinated groups themselves.

Rallies were another piss poor mechanic that hurt the smaller group. Anytime we would have ONE single random person tag along with our WvW group we had a free rally for an enemy group to use. We used to refer to everybody that wasn't tagged up and/or in voice comms as rally bots. We had to do fake initiations and pull back at the last second to get all the randoms killed so a zerg wouldn't be getting rallies the entire fight. I had a lot of fun in GW2 for a small period of time but it had a lot of glaring issues in WvW. I mean the zerging got so bad in GW2 that they had to introduce culling to try and improve WvW performance and you ended up fighting invisible blobs. Glaring issues in that game. That's why a bunch of old name PvP guilds that have been around for years and years and years quit the game in the first little while of lifespan. Don't even get me started on arrow carts and the meta of quickly plopping down open field arrow carts everywhere right before a fight started that some zergs adapted.

GW2 mass PvP was massively flawed is the problem. Largely in part due to the 5 man cap and no collision encouraging zerging/stacking IMO. I can absolutely promise you that your smaller zerg busting guild from GW2 would have had way more success than you already did with no AoE cap and no rally mechanics.

Dolyem

No AoE caps would also make large zergs question how they should move throughout a battlefield, instead of just B-lining from point to point. A good example was in GW2 WvW, where things like switchbacks could be a deathtrap if a small coordinated group decided to sit at it and wait to just bomb a zerg running up it. Basically it makes many choke points and the environment in general much more important in terms of positioning, because if these large groups get caught by a capless AoE bomb it could lose them that fight, even if its against a smaller group. This in turn will make map designs important and likely very fun.

Irohnic

no aoe caps+player collision=fun time in large scale pvp. I just hope on the PvE side of things you don't end up with what you have now in classic wow with mages being able to solo dungeons of 300+ elite mobs due to their uncapped aoe and npc pathing abuses.

On a side note with reference to what was mentioned of polearms and berserker type build: I really hope a viable strat in group pvp becomes some sort of tank shield wall with long-reaching melee classes lined up behind the tanks like in the movie 300. This would require some of the weapon types to have enough range to attack through/over the head of your allies.

Dolyem

Irohnic wrote: »

no aoe caps+player collision=fun time in large scale pvp. I just hope on the PvE side of things you don't end up with what you have now in classic wow with mages being able to solo dungeons of 300+ elite mobs due to their uncapped aoe and npc pathing abuses.

On a side note with reference to what was mentioned of polearms and berserker type build: I really hope a viable strat in group pvp becomes some sort of tank shield wall with long-reaching melee classes lined up behind the tanks like in the movie 300. This would require some of the weapon types to have enough range to attack through/over the head of your allies.

Maybe a mechanic that can distinguish NPCs from Players and their summons? That way there can be a cap preventing dungeons from being farmed easy mode like in WoW while still enabling awesome large scale pvp combat and tactics. I do like you point though because dungeons being farmed solo is always annoying to me, even though I doubt it will be a huge problem since they are mostly open world after all.

Noaani

Irohnic wrote: »

no aoe caps+player collision=fun time in large scale pvp. I just hope on the PvE side of things you don't end up with what you have now in classic wow with mages being able to solo dungeons of 300+ elite mobs due to their uncapped aoe and npc pathing abuses.

On a side note with reference to what was mentioned of polearms and berserker type build: I really hope a viable strat in group pvp becomes some sort of tank shield wall with long-reaching melee classes lined up behind the tanks like in the movie 300. This would require some of the weapon types to have enough range to attack through/over the head of your allies.

Mobs also have collision, which prevents this.

anotherone

I agree too here. Collision should be balance this itself. I disliked the cap in gw2 because if your target got any dmg from a 3rd party and your cast/hit/whatever just doesnt count... Thats ridicoulus balancing in my opinion.
If im able to spike or bomb a specific spot/player then i have to get the feedback from the my dmg/cc/whatever. I know thats hardcore on the counterside if you get outnumbered but it looks like thats the way the game is heading :-)

Medrash1

@Bricktop

I don't think that the solution to big numbers of people is to make AoE spells op. If the Aoe was the meta in almost all the games you played it's pretty bad, as game design, for the tactic component.

Of course AoE should give some advantage, but not capping them it's a problem, and will easly kill all zerg tactics, leading to a boring and unfair meta. If you are less people of course you have a disadvantage, your strategy was then bad. In every game scenario should be advantageous the number of people and the big groups, if the are skilled and coordinated.
A good game design gives big skill cap, allowing few people to outclass with SKILL big number of weaker peoples, and not just an Op aoe skill that will lead few people to always win fights.

The way you can win against few people is by traps and preparation, strategy ... not overpowerfull spells.

Dolyem

Medrash wrote: »

@Bricktop

I don't think that the solution to big numbers of people is to make AoE spells op. If the Aoe was the meta in almost all the games you played it's pretty bad, as game design, for the tactic component.

Of course AoE should give some advantage, but not capping them it's a problem, and will easly kill all zerg tactics, leading to a boring and unfair meta. If you are less people of course you have a disadvantage, your strategy was then bad. In every game scenario should be advantageous the number of people and the big groups, if the are skilled and coordinated.
A good game design gives big skill cap, allowing few people to outclass with SKILL big number of weaker peoples, and not just an Op aoe skill that will lead few people to always win fights.

The way you can win against few people is by traps and preparation, strategy ... not overpowerfull spells.

Just for giggles, explain how the zerg meta is fun?

Bricktop

Medrash wrote: »

@Bricktop

I don't think that the solution to big numbers of people is to make AoE spells op. If the Aoe was the meta in almost all the games you played it's pretty bad, as game design, for the tactic component.

Of course AoE should give some advantage, but not capping them it's a problem, and will easly kill all zerg tactics, leading to a boring and unfair meta. If you are less people of course you have a disadvantage, your strategy was then bad. In every game scenario should be advantageous the number of people and the big groups, if the are skilled and coordinated.
A good game design gives big skill cap, allowing few people to outclass with SKILL big number of weaker peoples, and not just an Op aoe skill that will lead few people to always win fights.

The way you can win against few people is by traps and preparation, strategy ... not overpowerfull spells.

Zerging isn't a good meta game in the slightest bit.

MrScrewtape

Zerging is the bane to all skill based PvP.

Spread out, use tactics, avoid choke points, or even go through choke points in smaller groups to bait out AoE bomb then sprint through.

Tactics = fun
Zergs = rage and no skill

As for PvE and AOE farming, that is easily handled. Seen several games where there were areas that AoE farming lower level mobs was the way to go. While other areas you'd fight fewer, yet stronger mobs with single target (higher dmg) attacks. The Xp/loot evened out as the higher level mobs xp/loot equaled the same as many lower level mobs.

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