Tanking

I love the overall archetype class design that they're going for, and I know they have said that a tank archetype will be able to tank no matter what secondary class he chooses.
But does anyone know if any other classes if they choose a tank secondary will be able to tank?
For example a rogue/tank being able to do a Dodge evasion type build for tanking. Or a summoner focusing on tanky summons?

Or will the tank primary be the only tanking option?

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Azherae

It may be temporarily more helpful to think of this as a system where having two /Tank in a party is equivalent to having one Tank/X.

This particular thing has been done before at least twice, FFXI being the main example. However, having just one /Tank is much less useful and generally not sufficient for non-specialized content.

This can be done. It's not overwhelmingly difficult, give a sufficiently talented designer a spreadsheet and a clear goal and they can do it.

The question will be balance and meta, since the way in which players will complain is likely to lead to convergent evolution back to something similar to the other two times it has occurred in a full MMO.

At the end of the day, the deciding factor will be the willingness of any particular group to make the effort to understand 'the method by which their Tank/X functions', with the 'easiest to understand' probably being the most meta unless one of the others is 20% more effective or higher.

Dygz

Right!
Although, we will still have to see how desirable the Primary Tank Utilities are because the Secondaries won't have those.

But, I am curious to see what it will be like to have a group with 5+ Secondary Tanks.
Or a group of 5+ Secondary Summoners.

Azherae

Allow me to demonstrate then.

First assume that Tank Augments come in three forms, possibly the ability to choose one form for each primary ability of your class, "Damage Mitigation", "Threat Generation", "Enemy Repositioning".

The compatibility of certain main archetype abilities with these will not always be good for tanking, sometimes a player might even choose /Tank to get something for soloing or bounty hunting. Let's look at Ranger, because there is no current Ranger known except what is on the wiki now and that is probably going to change.

Ranger/Tank can use Bow's Combo. This ability is basic and can take any of the three augments.
Damage Mitigation causes the skill to reduce enemy Attack Power for some time.
Threat Generation does what it always does. More Threat to the Tank.
Repositioning causes the enemy to be staggered backward a little bit, giving the ability to knock them away from teammates and disrupt conal attacks.

By contrast, Power Shot isn't as good for a Ranger/Tank because you have to charge it up, but...
Damage Mitigation might still just cause Attack Down. This is decent, you could build the tank around keeping a ton of 'attack debuff' uptime on an enemy.
Threat Generation, same as always.
Repositioning, could be a much bigger knockback based on charge time, or even a knockdown.

I'd expect a Ranger/Tank who normally works in a group to take Damage Mitigation on Bow's Combo and Power Shot too. I'd expect a bounty hunter to take Damage Mitigation on Bow's Combo and Repositioning on Power Shot, making them a less effective tank by a small amount, causing them to specialize more if there are enemies that can't be knocked down.

Then it lists Snare. Still no real differences here, except that if you're slowing/rooting an enemy, you probably don't care as much about damage mitigation right then. Still...
Damage Mitigation - Even more attack down? Why not? 100% uptime here we come!
Threat Generation - This might be good actually, respond when it goes for the squishy people by Snaring it, but now it will probably head back to you and the party won't have to go chasing it. Also a good way to control adds better.
Repositioning - Either pull them in (unlikely) or just strengthen the effect outright.

Again we have a choice where a ranger whose goal is to maintank might add Threat generation, a 'person who is more aiming to offtank' is likely to choose even more Damage Mitigation. A Bounty Hunter Ranger/Tank goes for Repositioning, because he who cannot catch you cannot kill you. Synergy with Repositioning on Power Shot.

I could go on. We just have to complain about what augments each class actually gets, and they're not hard. I design this sort of thing all the time for projects. I expect the Ashes designers are at least as good as me. And if they're somehow not, I'll yell at them for everyone?

RocketFarmer

Sounds to me that functionally, If you want to tank, then roll tank. Then later on you could add some flavor with an augment, but that would not really be a different class. We will have to see if the augments are worth the time or not.

Nothing wrong for initial release to have eight classes. If they work. Got a ways to go for them to prove that out.

If the augments for all of the classes are basically the same, then meh.

The issue with the class/augment design approach is for each new class you introduce you have a multiplier for the augments. It all sounds cool on paper and in interviews, but implementation will be a pain that only gets worse the farther down the development path you go.

The idea of using a matrix during the early stages of concept phase is to have one axis cover the role you want players to have and the other represent how they do it.

So for instance the role is tank. One “how to” option is meat shield with some CC via taunts. Another might be by using magic or summoned creatures. Yet another may be a wider variety of CC from range, not necessarily magic. And let’s say a fourth is the unseen attacker using maneuvers and avoidance that can reposition opponents into positions more favorable to a party and less favorable for the target.

Each of those role/how to intersections is essentially a potential class. You would then go through that list of classes and down select into a manageable set based on the time and resources you calculate that it takes to fully flesh out the class. Some combos will be disregarded because they are dumb. Others may have some degree of technical limitations you aren’t able to produce.

From there you need to spend the time to determine the skills/abilities for each class where there is a relatively equal expected value of outcome with respect to avoiding a dominant strategy, and progression that scales well through all of the levels with the goal of having a smooth upward curve versus being good at one level only to suck at the next. Players need to be able to select skills/abilities where there is a real choice rather than just false alternatives.

Then there’s more time in class development beyond just the functional things. This is where you can let the creativity run wild. Some variations of a class have more to do with nonfunctional things, especially for support classes.

All this gets worked out in detail before you write a single line of code. A lot of designers will pick class concepts from a selection of known games and then try to figure out how to make them work while they code, thinking they are saving time. That will be a very difficult and frustrating endeavor. While you thought you saved time on the concept, you really haven’t saved time. You may spend far greater time in reworking and recoding the class over and over. But I guess if you have unlimited time and money, more power to you.

The other risk is less time spent on the class could produce classes no one cares about. Augments could just be a band aid for overall poor class design in an attempt to make them interesting through distraction.

There are systems that attempted to be classless and instead opted for an open skill tree for players to create whatever character they want. While in theory you might expect them to have a wide variety of builds, in actuality the players gravitate to the best combinations resulting in a much more limited variety in characters other than the superficial.

I happen to have a tremendous appreciation for a well thought out, well designed class. I just hope that Intrepid isn’t setting themselves up for failure with their approach on class design. I will not be surprised at all if they decide to pull back and rethink this or at least acknowledge they have a significant amount of work to produce 64 meaningful classes.

Dygz

Well, this is where semantics come in:
Ashes terminology is Primary Archetype and class (class = Primary Archetype + Secondary Archetype)
D&D Terminology is class and sub-class.
In D&D Terminology, it's 8 classes and 64 sub-classes.

I don't know what can be meant by " if the augments for all of the classes are basically the same".
Each Secondary Archetype gets its own 4 schools of augments with which we can choose from. So...they are not all the same augments.

Azherae

RocketFarmer wrote: »

I happen to have a tremendous appreciation for a well thought out, well designed class. I just hope that Intrepid isn’t setting themselves up for failure with their approach on class design. I will not be surprised at all if they decide to pull back and rethink this or at least acknowledge they have a significant amount of work to produce 64 meaningful classes.

It really just isn't that much work though. 8x8? That's like a week, tops, for me, if I only have to do it through Augment theory.

And before anyone asks I am a programmer, have been a relatively senior programmer, and still assist with certain indie stuff. Yes, the coding is hard sometimes, but it's always little fiddly things that you needed to do anyway.

The programming structure for how to do it, especially if they're moving away from UE4's Actors for abilities and such, as clarified in the last stream, is relatively simple once you have the base done.

There will definitely be things that don't work, but you need to look at it a different way.

Ranger/Tank might be Augmented to become closer to a True Tank against single targets with many smaller hits. Because that's what that Ranger player chose to specialize in hunting, and can guarantee to their party 'I can tank this'. That's different from 'Here is a swarm of adds'. The build would have to be more specialized for that.

But the player didn't decide 'I want to tank anything!' when they chose Ranger/Tank. They probably chose a semi-roleplay concept of 'what they can tank well' and built for that. And if your group, or your node, involves a lot of 'multi hitting single targets', then the Ranger/Tank who lives there... is definitely a tank. Just because random people from the Castle don't believe in them, doesn't mean that they don't get what they want out of the game.

Azherae

Here's an example of what I mean. This is not what I think the augments need to be or even should be. That can't be true because we don't know how most of the classes even work. I'm doing this from just reverse engineering the names of the classes, and using them to fill in the blanks. If a name exists, and there's no Augment that would allow that name to make sense, I made the appropriate thing. I think I hit them all (some names are not well defined in other media, obviously).

Mage Augments:
Meteoric Impact - Mostly makes skills AoE or increases AoE, even healing
Dimension Slip - Movement skills, add teleport. Attack skills, increase range
Lingering Element - Burn (or whatever)! Or put up an element shield, enemy takes damage on hit
Mana Control - Draining enemy mana on attacks, transferring mana on buffs/heals

Cleric Augments:
Lifeforce Control - Attack skills, causes Castigate's effect. Def skill - Healing increased.
Holy Ward - Attack skills lower enemy attack, buffs and such raise defense
Life's Passing - Attack skills add DoT, much more special stuff like Necromancy
Linked Fate - Causes health absorb on hit for attacks, mild healing for those around for buffs

Bard Augments:
Rhythm Emotion - Increases damage of combo attacks for a period after a skill.
Enchanting Voice - Various smaller debuffs based on the ability attached
Rallying Call - Various small buffs based on the ability attached.
Tale Weaving - Weird custom stuff based on how long something is held or channeled

Rogue Augments:
Misdirection - Debuffs enemy accuracy or drops hate/threat
Nimbleness - Buffs evasion or increases certain attack range
Seeking Eye - Crit bonuses, backstab damage, on-hit effect chance up, etc
Shroud of Darkness - Shadow stuff. Lots of shadow stuff. Sometimes similar to others

Ranger Augments:
Keenest Sight - Accuracy bonuses or range extensions
Trap Master - light CC augments, usually slows, sometimes rooting
Disruption - more light CC, moreso knockback, bleed, etc
Flicker - Adds backward movement to certain skills while they are happening or similar

Summoner Augments:
Externalization - depending on class, summons a wisp/weapon or something for a bit after a skill
Copy Form - sometimes 'shadow clones', sometimes summoned weapons for damage or lingering DPS
Spirit Call - Depends on environment, still summons something short lived, might depend on area or class
Soul Cage - Obstacles and containment, causing enemies to need to leave, or things like DoT Crystals

Tank Augments:
Mitigation - Lower enemy attack or raise own defense
Threat Generation - it's on the tin
Armor Boss - CC resistance usually during the augmented skill, a few others
Repositioning - Yank or push the opponent depending on the skill

Fighter Augments:
Martial Master - Increases weapon proficiency or STR/relevant stat during skill use
Charge! - Gap closing, some knockdown, some 'charge past/through' augments
Critical Eye - Raised critrate on skills (yes this is probably the meta)
Berserker - Sacrifice HP instead of/in addition to MP to empower skill

From the programming side, I can tell you that only 8 of these, at maximum, have any obvious problems or conflicts with skills. About 12, when combined with likely or obvious skills, are unbalanced (in the sense that they're the obvious meta choice for that skill). About 40 skill-augment combinations would be considered 'useless' by the community, guessing at obvious skills (having no use in nearly any form of content).

The thing you have to ask though, is, if you're a Bard/Summoner and you have a 'performance' skill and you choose to put Spirit Call on it instead of Copy Form (duet!) what made you feel that was necessary? It's usually not that the player 'wants to do the thing that ends up happening'. Most of the time they're just 'suffering from a compulsion to be original', or they wish that the Augmented skill did something different, and if it's useless and no one cares, they can easily ask for a change to it.

In all arrogance... this is easy. I'm sure that they have these already mostly blocked out, given those Class names, and if they don't, the great Intrepid team can have anything they want from the above list for 'free'. All ideas in this post are either already, or hereby transferred by me to be, the property of Intrepid Studios in perpetuity.

Have faith. It's fine. You might have to wear some really 'interesting' gear, but most X/Tank will find different ways to 'tank'.

ThexBlackxKnight

Dygz wrote: »

Changes may be made, but the devs are not going to be balancing the secondaries to be on par with the primaries.

You don't know what the final build of the game will even be before launch , it could be that way or be very different then what you expected. Most of Steven's design plans have not even been tested by players yet. Devs are making the game for the players , not for themselves.

SirChancelot

RocketFarmer wrote: »

Sounds to me that functionally, If you want to tank, then roll tank. Then later on you could add some flavor with an augment, but that would not really be a different class. We will have to see if the augments are worth the time or not.

That's what I was trying to get at
From everything that's been said so far the secondary archetypes won't change the play style of a tank.
If you take rogue or mage as your secondary your charge becomes a shadow step or teleport... Cool
That changes the appearance or the flavor but that's not changing the playstyle of I'm a tank I'm going to charge in... That's not a different style, that's not a different class, that's not going to play any differently, it will just visually look different.
And if all the tank utilities that the primary tank are type has are still available in the same way (which dygz keeps pointing out that the X/tanks won't have) then every tank will have the same oh shit buttons and respond to things in the same way...
If the only thing the secondary archetypes do is change the flavor then it's not changing the play style of that role, and all tanks will feel the same.

This would mean having X/tanks being able to tank would be the only way to get a different playstyle of tanks. Sure they might not have the best defense (like a guardian would) or the same cooldowns, or they might be more difficult to play (risk v reward aspect) such as the summoner micromanaging his pet, maybe they will need a different style of support or healer.

But from everything I've seen right now augments either will be minor effects and won't change tanks enough to make them feel like different classes
or will have major effects which could lead to changing the archtypes enough to allow them to fill the role...

Songcaller

I would rather have 8 options than 1 option, even if those 8 options have minimal changes. So far, you haven't seen all tank skills available and I do believe we will build tanks the way we want them. I'm not convinced about hybrids in general let alone a hybrid tank.

SirChancelot

RocketFarmer wrote: »

.

The idea of using a matrix during the early stages of concept phase is to have one axis cover the role you want players to have and the other represent how they do it.

So for instance the role is tank. One “how to” option is meat shield with some CC via taunts. Another might be by using magic or summoned creatures. Yet another may be a wider variety of CC from range, not necessarily magic. And let’s say a fourth is the unseen attacker using maneuvers and avoidance that can reposition opponents into positions more favorable to a party and less favorable for the target.

I would agree with this but the thought process breaks down once you get to the secondary of tank and cleric

As far as primary goes tanks tank and clerics heal, everyone else does damage or some sort of support
Saying the secondary changes 'the how they do that job' I would buy that until you get to the secondary of tank.

The mage deals damage and how he does that is by tanking?

The rogue deals damage but he does that by healing?

That doesn't seem like a smooth thought process there...

So.... As I said before
Opened a can of worms that we don't really have answers to until we get more details on the augment system and how secondary archetypes affect the primary

And before dygz says we do have details and uses the mage examples again... Specifically on how the tank secondary affects primary archetypes because there's no information on that one anywhere...

Azherae

Tanks do almost precisely two things.

Mitigate damage. Maintain more hate/threat than anyone else in the party more or less consistently.

The tank abilities themselves, interestingly, so far, are not strictly based on 'tanking' at all.

That is, the actual ability does not usually do this, it just usually 'naturally generates more threat'. There are some good damage mitigation ones, but what if, for some reason, that's not what you need, or what if someone else is providing that, and you're free to not do so?

In FFXI, the Ninja class and Monk class are 'not supposed to be tanks (specifically Ninja). The playerbase just 'found a way to mitigate damage and still maintain threat' and then they became so. The main class considered to be 'Tank', the Warrior, actually got relegated to DPS because their main way of tanking doesn't mitigate enough damage and still keep up the DPS required to have hate at the same time, for a lot of content.

Tanking is often a lot more about how supportive your team is of your method of doing it, than about the class choice. Obviously there is one that is 'the best', but sometimes 'the best' is overkill and giving up a benefit you could otherwise get, at the same time.

Also, a point that i think isn't clear for those who haven't played the Alpha. You don't just 'instantly have the listed abilities when leveling' and you're not even intended to be able to learn all of them.

So Tanks have entirely different styles before you even start considering archetypes and augments. You can spec into holding hate via DPS and wearing heavier armor to keep your defense up, or you can spec into holding hate by damage mitigation and augment your DPS. You don't even have to unlock every ability, you can, in the current system, save your points for maxing out something you like more.

The current tank abilities are moreso the 'easiest' way to do things rapidly, and they're currently quite rudimentary. I'm assuming you've seen the Tank Class preview so far, right? "Hit thing" "Hit multiple things" "Hit this thing, but differently". I'm reasonably sure that at least Rogues and Fighters can handle that, the only difference right now is 'generate additional threat' and all that takes is one Augment.

Saedu

ThexBlackxKnight wrote: »

Biccus wrote: »

Clearly I was right.. It's all semantics with you as usual. I'm sure many people could read the examples I put in and understood what sort of changes I was implying I would like to see.. Not get hung up on the words real and actual.

I'm sure adding a healing AoE to a ground slam (to most people) is a "real" and "actual" change to the ability.

He really likes to beat people over the head with notebook a of dev design plans like its a bible in multiple posts when people talk about changes in the game they would like to see , then play semantics when people counter his arguments. Truth is if a lot of players are not happy with the tanking options , the devs will make changes.

Well said. Let's hope the devs are reading this feedback and understanding how critical it is that augments be powerful enough to allow classes to switch roles. That is meaningful choice. A game where each class can only do one role is going to significantly reduce the replayability amd longevity of the game. People can hate on WoW as much as they like, but the role switching of a class and how they do "hybrids" in modern wow is probably the number one reason so many people still play it.

The best part, if the devs do listen to this feedback, it doesn't break any of the games core philosophies. It actually enhances meaningful choice and risk/reward philosophies. It makes people more invested in their main character as they can explore more meaningful changes within their character over time. It gives groups more options to try out ranther than being locked in to always require a specific archtype. It's undisputably more anti-meta.

There is sooooo much good with a augments being able to shift the archetype's primary role approach and literally nothing bad with it (well maybe balance is a little bit more complex, but that's okay. I'd rather have a fun game than a perfectly balanced one and it won't be perfectly balanced either way anyways).

Songcaller

I am hoping tank will get a taunt or goad or shield weapon tree gives a goad or taunt. It is better regulating threat with a taunt or goad than it is with a trickle of threat generation. I'm also not keen on losing threat generation or damage through augments. I'm not a fan of increasing threat with guardian because threat has no bearing on PvP. The quandary remains what tank I will settle on because I don't want to be pigeonholed into a narrow prospective.

Sathrago

Biccus wrote: »

Yuyukoyay wrote: »

Summoner is excluded from the augment only penalty as their secondary archetype influences the class of their summons to some extent. So how they turn out is completely unknown, but if any class can be a main tank as a secondary archtype. It will be them.

It'll take a lot of micro management to main tank with a pet. looking at the recent boss vids, I'm not sure how they'd do main tanking when I'm seeing mechanics that need active avoidance. (like that jumping mechanic)

Give summoners the ability to fully control the pet via a channeled spell. So their main body is much farther away and protected.

Alternatively there could be summoners where they work like dva from heroes of the storm. A creature or magical suit of armor that is worn over our character that gives special attacks and abilities that you have to maintain from the inside otherwise it is destroyed and you are left defenseless.

Theres so many ways to flavor this too so it could be a roiling swarming insects, a magical suit of armor, a symbiotic plant that grows off you, etc.

Sathrago

On the subject of augments for tanking, these augments need to keep the spirit of the original spell but still provide its base mechanics to some degree. A good example of this would be if the ultimate defense spell used a rogue augment it became evasion, increasing movement speed and chance to dodge targeted attacks. This is what I expect from the augment system and I hope they can start to move in that sort of direction when they begin implementation.

Songcaller

Yeah I would hope that most augments add effects rather than all augments change effects. Depends what Steven means by 'radical. The issue remains I would like a main without alts.

Dygz

ThexBlackxKnight wrote: »

You don't know what the final build of the game will even be before launch , it could be that way or be very different then what you expected. Most of Steven's design plans have not even been tested by players yet. Devs are making the game for the players , not for themselves.

Yeah... you can think that if you want to. That only goes so far.
You get to think the world is flat if you want to, too.

ThexBlackxKnight

Dygz wrote: »

Yeah... you can think that if you want to. That only goes so far.
You get to think the world is flat if you want to, too.

There is going to be so many changes from now tell launch , you are not some guru of the game that you think you are.

Dygz

There will be some changes. I never said there wouldn't be.

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