AoE Caps and why Intrepid should absolutely lean on none at all.
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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.
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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Comments
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
The only downside I know of is uncapped AoE increasing the efficiency of hackers who vacc everything to one spot and set it all ablaze. But that's a risk I'm willing to take.
That said, how effective AoE will be on a larger group will likely depend on exactly how collision is set for player characters as much as anything else.
As far as I am concerned, caps on total damage or total target numbers are only really necessary in games without collision. As soon as you add collision to the game, the number of targets you can hit (and this the total maximum damage you can deal) is automatically limited by the radius of the AoE.
This should be enough to design and balance around.
I both agree and disagree with you here on this one @Noaani (Surprise surprise).
I think there should be both collision and uncapped AoE. The only acceptable capped bit of AoE in my eyes is the actual built in radius or cone of the ability as you and Margaret mentioned during the dev stream.
Anything at all possible to discourage zerging and encourage smaller guilds and/or groups is a good thing in my eyes. Would you agree?
I'm confused as to which part you are disagreeing with, to be honest.
As I said, in a game with collision (this game), there is no need for any limit other than radius. This limit builds in everything the developers would need to balance abilities around.
Ah apologies. I must have misread. We are in complete agreeance here.
What made that interesting was a gladiator could be a force to be reckoned with only when multiple players chose to engage at a time. The kit mainly revolved around aoe's and just a few single target skills. Too many and even a gladiator would be overrun with ranged abilities and damage it can't steal from multiple opponents.. Too few and there wasn't enough health to drain to self sustain the gladiator's attacks. They were a nice asset in pvp wars as they could lead the front charge and immediately CC the crowd without dying right off the bat. The aoe range was pretty big too but it did have a cooldown, you essentially did a spin that hit multiple times, and 3 knocks on the ground and anything that crit from the first spin's 20 hits to the 3 floor smashes, it had a chance to knock down(so it was VERY often). I feel like one of our classes could be something akin to this, maybe tank + fighter or fighter + tank idea.
Anti zerg classes are amazing since they lack most solo capability but they're an absolute monster when against the right odds or with a team like most support classes(and yet this was a battle class, not at all support by any means).
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton
In the Moba League of Legends terminology, that is call being outplayed and poor positioning.
Like, if you manage to be in a place to eat 3 heavy aoe worth, you kinda deserve to be anihilated
I assume not every skill does 9999k damage, no casting time, huge aoe.
Agree with the diminishing return.
Tab targeted skill could be much softer in CC, while action/aiming could be saved for the heavy ones.
Not being there.
I would be ok with friendly fire, honestly. It would push the skill ceiling up.
The role of aoe bodyguard juggernaut has a historical arquetype in real history and in fiction.
800 CE
Berrserkers, housecarles, Jarl's bodyguards.
They would serve as household bodyguard, aoe bodyguarding with shield and 2H axes.
They acted as personal bullies and champions for duels.
The berrserker of Stamford Bridge, aoe locked the bridge so his lord could escape.
1000 CE
More nordic berrserker as juggernaut bodyguards for the Byzantine Emperor.
1100 CE
More aoe control/spacing
1400
Berrserker phylosophy
Helmet of "Garde du Corps" of Louis XIII of France
Dude had tactical black knights with big greatswords making aoe whirlwind to displace enemies
Berrserkers had Dane axes.
Big weapons = Aoe deterrance, juggernauts = Awesome
who needs magic when you have a huge fuck off sword
One of the more recent streams that Steven did that showed off the tab/action targeting actually addressed this and EVERY class melee will do AoE damage which scales by weapon type - essentially the cone will adjust by weapon/swing type as I understand it.
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
If I recall, Age of Conan did this. Longer/bigger weapons had larger arcs, but slower attacks.
My fingers still ache, from Age of Conan. 😋
This way, smaller numbers could have a great tool to fight against great numbers.
In Archeage guilds would put out a call to arms and get hundreds of people online to do massive trade pack runs of hundreds of packs at a time. I'm assuming you will be able to work the caravan system in Ashes in a similiar way. If the best strategy is to run caravans with hundreds of people, possibly over a thousand with an alliance tied in. How would you fight this situation without turning into a zerg yourself? If you run away from every zerg and the entire caravan meta turns into "Bring as many bodies as possible" because zergs are king will nobody fight over caravans anymore? Nobody wants to see the game turn into a mindless zergfest where warm bodies are the key to any and all victories. There needs to be tools in place to cut down massive groups of lower skilled people for those who don't take the mass recruitment approach.
Also something that I don't think it got mentioned is having a cap on how many AoE abilities of the same type can hit you at the same time. For example if you are against a zerg of 100+ people and half of them can use let's say the AoE spell explosion only a limited number of those casts should hit you not everything, it's not fun insta-dieing from a zerg because they spam easy to hit AoE abilities on anything they see moving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mobs also have collision, which prevents this.
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 :-)