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Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
What kind of PvP do you want for AoC?
Kubitz2
Member, Alpha Two
What is enjoyable PvP for you and what combat mechanics/systems do you like?
AoC will be a PvP centric PvX game with a hybrid combat system. I don't want to know, what these terms mean, as that is a totally different question. But everyone has his own definition of what good PvP is. What would you like AoC's PvP to be like?
Q: Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
This is the main destinction and I don't think, both is possible. Many combat mechanics designs will influence the answer.
Gear/level advantage: As there is a hard level cap, the level won't matter later. Do you want strong advantages with better gear or should you have a realistic chance against better geared players.
Time: Do you want quick battles, which you can decide with big damage combo, or a two man focus. Or do you want drawn out fights with strong survivability and defensive skills/spells?
Balance: Do you want the classes to be strongly balanced for duells and arena play? Do you want to have strong countermechanics in the tank/healer/dd trinity? Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
Invulnerability: Do you want i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells?
Maybe there are other mechanics, that are especially important to you. It would be great, if you have quotes/links from Steven/Intrepid that take strong stances on these points. But I'm mainly interested in what the community wants.
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I stopped BDO nodewars when one op-6er group could imprison a 20-30 above average PvP-guild in their own fort. Couldn't leave and defend at the same time and couldn't kill them, because of gear, level and meta party composition. I'm not talking about one specific group, or this specific scenario. It became the norm, that you could slice through whole armies with a powerfull group. Shouldn't happen, even if the only reason is skill.
- I want competitive pvp in the sense that if you take the time to learn the game and how skills interact you can be a force in PvP but I am not looking for action combat/BnS+ type combat where it is 100% reaction/twitch skill usage. That's what I play DOTA/Apex for. So what @NiKr said, High Ceiling/Low Floor
Gear/level advantage: As there is a hard level cap, the level won't matter later. Do you want strong advantages with better gear or should you have a realistic chance against better geared players.
- I believe in low/modest gear tiers. Specifically a fresh level 50 greens player will not get eaten alive and one shot, but where my multiple hundreds of hours of invested time translates to a tangible advantage (even if it is something like 5-15% increased damage agg.)
Time: Do you want quick battles, which you can decide with big damage combo, or a two man focus. Or do you want drawn out fights with strong survivability and defensive skills/spells?
- I believe fights between two even matched parties should be a drawn out affair and believe the 30 sec TTK+ might be too long between two DPS duking it out but in a team battle again drawn out battles (minutes) would be absolutely acceptable, but with good coordination within the group (CC healer, multiple people dropping burst damage for a big play and the enemy team not responding) will result in quicker kills but on long cooldowns so you aren't killing someone every 5 seconds.
Balance: Do you want the classes to be strongly balanced for duells and arena play? Do you want to have strong countermechanics in the tank/healer/dd trinity? Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
- I think classes should be balanced around arena play (as small form battles will probably be the higher % of activity and pulling DPS metrics from any large form battle seems nigh impossible), but balance should be reviewed from the lens of there being countermechanics in the Holy Trinity, and R/P/S balance should reflect that some classes will have a much harder time against others but that it is never impossible to win any given fight based on player skill/gear/etc.
- - For the coordination bit, I think there should be some level of balance between "Oh Nova_terra is holding the gate with his group that's definitely going to be an up hill battle" but also that if you employ solid tactics you will outplay some guy in Legendary armor that takes half the server to kill.
Invulnerability: Do you want i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells?
- I believe in a low amount of I-frame abilities (only a handful per person with modest CDs so you can't dodge roll every 2 seconds) and I don't believe in invulnerability skills unless it's something that is a flavor win like "Tank has a skill - you can't take damage for X seconds, but you pay 75% of your life" or something that feels like a Hold the Line ability on a massive cooldown.
Edit: Formatting
I think Classic WoW did a good job with two major exceptions:
1. Class balance and design. Many awesome classes were either boring to play and/or had no chance in pvp and I feel that, with a bit more work and attention invested, this could have been easily avoided.
2. If you wanted to PvP you had to pick engineering. No change to do anything else.
Also, the enviroment was kind of lackluster and the PvP scenarios few and limited.
Q: Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
There is absolutely a balance to be found, a ''sweet spot'' right in the middle where most people are satisifed, where the gameplay is fast and complex enough so that it feesl very engaging and dynamic but also slow and comprehensible enough that you can enjoy it even as a casual as as a pvp focused player who just came back after 10 hours of work & feels smashed.
One thing I would do is make it so that certain classes/builds are very hard to play but have a 5-15% better performance in PvP.
Gear/level advantage: As there is a hard level cap, the level won't matter later. Do you want strong advantages with better gear or should you have a realistic chance against better geared players.
Again, there is a balance to be reached where gear absolutely matters but where it's not an insurmountable element.
This is an RPG, not a lobby game.
The pleasure of finding good gear and having good gear is a core element of RPG games and heavily diminuishing it/removing it would be a huge mistake.
Time: Do you want quick battles, which you can decide with big damage combo, or a two man focus. Or do you want drawn out fights with strong survivability and defensive skills/spells?
I believe WoW Classic had the right balance where it wasn't too fast but also not too slow.
Balance: Do you want the classes to be strongly balanced for duells and arena play? Do you want to have strong countermechanics in the tank/healer/dd trinity?
Isn't the question already answered --> the matter decided, with the game will have a rock-paper-scrissors system?
Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
It's an objective reality that army coordination and discipline value more than individual skill & gear of the enemy.
I believe this state should properly reflect in the game. I can hardly see how this wouldn't be the case.
Invulnerability: Do you want i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells?
Yeah, absolutely.
Give me my Divine Shield, I'm a Templar for Heaven's sake.
q: I want PvP that is slower paced, similar to vanilla WoW, so far AoC looks similar and it is simple enough for me. I do not want hard core players to ruin game as they ruined many other games that I played (MMOs). I wish if there is some kind of system to keep these players under control or it will get messy. They will have huge power gap and numbers and no one will defeat them in PVE entrances or farming areas. (maybe they will have competition vs another PVP hard core guild, but then they will take this area and this go on and on)
b gear: I want sandbox gearing, similar to vanilla WoW, where you can buy expensive recipe at 40lvl and not replace this piece of gear until raids, I want sandbox yet casual friendly and simple crafting, which means for one piece of gear that is pre-raid Best in Slot I would be able to farm it in 3-4 hours. For raid crafted gear that is actual BiS it would need to be little more expensive and time consuming to craft, but I would like them to keep it simple and casual friendly.
b time: What they said in interview about battles I think they are doing good, I want group balancing and not 1v1 balancing.
b Balance: So far it looks good, I would want more CC on some classes though, at least 5sec CC from class to class or archetype. I would also like engineering profession to have some kind of utility bombs for CC (like Vanilla WoW) or rockets that deal dmg, or nitro boots that speed up your character etc..
If it is just me personally...
I'll take slightly faster version of this with more teamwork.
The remake (Predecessor) IS this, but all the clips are 'too long'.
Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
Don't care which, in conjunction with another point. See below.
Gear/level advantage:
If this is large, gameplay should be fast and skill based. If this is small, casual style PvP is better for me.
Time:
Literally wouldn't have backed the game if the TTK wasn't 30-60.
Balance:
I would like a 'modern fighting game' level of balance, and I believe the current fundamentals support this option, so that will come down to if the combat designers do NOT want that.
Invulnerability:
Non-spammable i-frames are fine with me, especially if they are not connected to high-mobility. I'd also be fine with i-frames that ARE connected directly to mobility if it was rare.
A strong focus on R-P-S would take away from the trinity system, imo. You could reframe the question this way: Should the focus be on a strong R-P-S system to allow for a balanced arena-style gameplay, or should the focus be on a strong counterclass system to allow for more specialized roles in large scale battles.
Full 8v8 proper balancing. Ideally 1 of each archetype in the party. Solo and party resurrection spells, which lead to 3++minute long pvps between equally skilled/geared groups.
Oh, and I couldn't give fewer shits about arena stuff. The only arena I care about is 1v1 intraclass one.
This makes PVP balanced and fair. If everyone is always on the same playing field as far as one set of PVP armor goes then its all skill based after that. Not omg I got wrecked by that guys tier 5 pvp armor. Just make it some sort of blacksmithing/tailoring recipe to make the pvp armor set so people can farm for it and have it made through the economy.
Only reason people want 5 tiers of PVP armor is to stomp lower tiered people and have an advantage and also to work toward something while pvping. So instead of that they should just make one tier of pvp armor and then figure out a lot of other things for the PVP players to work toward. One thing that is easy to sell on this is cosmetics for your pvp armor. Being able to add teeth or chains and other stuff to make your PVP armor stand out against other peoples armor. Or getting flags and stands to carry on your back into battle and so on.
There is just so much PVPers could work toward other than armor. Risk vs reward and skill and balance should be the goal. Not satisfying peoples need to have a huge advantage over others.
Nice. That really looks like fun. I always liked community organized PvP better, than anything a game system could provide. For anyone who sees this and feels intimidated. The point here is not necessarily the competition. I would have chosen a less aggressive music. I had evenings like that, where a few guilds came together and just had fun. It doesn't have to be hardcore. We always took some of the better geared/skilled guys and combined them with a loosing team. You can balance your teams, so that everyone has fun and goes home with some wins.
I think 8v8 "proper" balancing is very similar to 3v3 5v5 balancing (I'm sure we can debate this as it seems you do not agree) in that you shoot for classes to be operating within scope of all other classes in their job role. I agree wholeheartedly with the multi minute battles with equal skill/gear groups and it coming down to tight rotations/target swapping/CC etc. But Also it's rare to see this "equal playing field" and I'd expect my group of players running good gear with good comms to ravage a random group of 5 or whatever.
The latter is so common that if NOTHING else is considered useful to be taken from the MOBA Genre, you can at least take their metrics.
Most good ones now will literally not pair premades against randoms, and they will not pair doubles where one player is quite strong against any group less than THAT player's skill regardless of the skill of the other player.
This isn't just to avoid 'smurfing', it's because the gaps are that large. SImilarly, even though players can stretch out a match until 'all players in the system are near max level', they don't cap 'Gold' as this goes, meaning that whoever gets there first and optimizes their gold farm has 'better gear' and wins anyway.
This isn't a counter to NiKr's point, of course. Equally skilled/geared groups usually have a 'good time'. If only we had a way to cause those without flattening all the growth curves.
I'm waaay too used to having a constant group of people that I play with, who all have their own roles and play them well. And it's always a full group. And if I don't have such a group to play with, I'd rather suffer hardcore content by playing solo than group up with randoms. Yeah, I haven't been able to come up with a good enough solution to this problem w/o making the mmo into a ladder-based system, or just having complete and utter equalization of any and all pvp encounters.
Players are allowed to flag and initiate combat with other players in open world non typical pvp situations once per hour without penalty. Attacked players are allowed to defend themselves without triggering the 1 hour cooldown. I will be happy with anything Steven decides to do though, except for the possibility of losing your gear. Gatherables fine, but please not gear.
Not sure what games you have played in the past, but from own experience and what I would like to see, this would not work.
L2, a 1v4 might randomly occur, then a shout out and in 2-5min, there is a 5v4, then a give a few more min that escalates to 5v10. a few more 15 v 18... and some of the first initiators with already several kills and several deaths.
Above would keep pvp to one off round.. not much escalation.. limited drama / challenge
I dislike twitch based/action targeting PvP systems. Way too many issues when you factor in latency. I like group PvP, general don't duel much or care for it. 20 people is about the right size.
Q: Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
Low floor and high ceiling, non-twitch based. See above.
Gear/level advantage:
I usually prefer gear to matter but now that I'm older and less hardcore I'm not sure. I enjoy tweaking builds and theory crafting though, so definitely need to have build options.
Time: Do you want quick battles, which you can decide with big damage combo, or a two man focus. Or do you want drawn out fights with strong survivability and defensive skills/spells?
30 second TTK seems about right.
Balance: Do you want the classes to be strongly balanced for duells and arena play? Do you want to have strong countermechanics in the tank/healer/dd trinity? Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
Skill and coordination should always matter more. Some skills to counter large groups would be great, to discourage players from being a rolling mob.
Invulnerability: Do you want i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells?
Doesn't matter.
Not in any RPG MMO, would make me glad AoC being the first in any of these:
Many stuff I want are aalready in AoC
I don't care much about these:
Sacrifice corrupted players and they become Wraiths:
Corrupted players only become Wraiths, they fly.
Wraith doesn't suffer any dampening
Wraith's kills on purple or red will help clearing a bit the corruption.
Non corrupted players could be sacrificed too, on an altar too, the ritual is still kinda dark.
Sacrificing non corrupted players:
A system in which you can sacrifice people and turn them into something else is for the player driven content and for player as other things or simply being strategic.
If it's too complicated then Wraiths only, but why be the same guy everyday?
Can you imagine a Necromancer bringing tens of players in the forms of Wraiths for an attack?
This has never seen before.
Beasts like Manticores and others could be acquired by nodes through trading or quests.
These beasts could stay in cages or in the beast pens, they do not attack citizens from their own node, they attack everybody else.
Great for node wars.
Such beasts could be transported in caravans, just like circus cages for trading between nodes or node sieges.
The caravan could be attacked, the beast escapes and disapear.
The beast pens could have a lof of beasts.
Mayors and players with the role Beastmaster may transport, release for attack or set free the beasts.
Once realeased on attack or defense, they will fight and kill anyone except for citizens from it's own node.
After 30 minutes they fly away and disapear, so the beast is a consumable.
Q2: What combat mechanics/systems do you like?
Q3: What would you like AoC's PvP to be like?
A1: For me all forms of PvP are enjoyable, simple directly competing against other players is at its essence enjoyable for me.
A2: I Like combat mechanics that have stategic elements, precise timing elements, targetering elements, combo elements and nice amounts of counterplay.
As for systems, i really like systems that are generally rich in depth with multiple varying parts that constitute the whole of it, but most importantly, i like RNG systems that add unpredictability to combats.
A3: I would like the AOC PvP to have the mechanics/systems that i like, the majority of those systems are present in both Lineage 2 and ArcheAge combat, those 2 being the main inspirations for AOC makes me fairly confident many of them will be present in it.
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Q: Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
A: I do think both is possible and that MMORPGs need to provide both options of combat by providing an nice range of character customization options and possibilities to allow that.
But if i had to pick one or the other? I will pick competitive, fast and skill based any day of the week.
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Gear/level advantage: Considering the RPG context, Gear/level advantage are essential for meaningful Gear/Character progression, considering the MMO context it is important to properly balance those advantages between the players, as the level advantage has a clear cap in my mind it should be a bigger advantage than the gear advantage.
Currently gear is expected to represent around 40%-50% of a max level player overall power, which is a number i like those numbers because i consider Lineage 2 to be about ~60% and ArcheAge to be about ~95%.
Time: i like reasonably long battles which allows more room for strategy, i'm quite pleased with the current expected 30-60 sec TTK.
Balance: I don't expect a lot of individual balance in 1v1 encounters as AOC's balance is around groups(8v8) and this is completely fine for me as it was that way in Lineage 2.
Q: Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
A: In my opinion, yes! I'm a fan of Quality of over Quantity and in my opinion individual skill also encapsulated coordination and discipline.
Here is a small demonstration of what i mean, a video which i usually link as reference for this concept.
Invulnerability: Yes i do want to see the presence of i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells in AOC but they must be rare, few and far between with long cooldowns, small durations and big mana/resources costs.
Aren't we all sinners?
Player driven PvP, automatic systems like arenas are usually lame.
I gave many suggestions of player driven pvp content in the thread:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/54498/what-kind-of-pvp-do-you-want-for-aoc
Q: Do you wan't competitive, fast and skill based(git good kind) combat or do you want PvP that is enjoyable for casuals and PvEers?
The problem about PvP in fantasy games is that they are mostly predictable, there is no baiting, no surprise, no creativity. You see the other guy's gear, class and level and you already have an idea how the fight will be.
In Ultima Online if I was fighting a guy stronger than me I could snoop his bag during the pick and put 2 live Greater Explosion Potions in his bag and watch him explode. Thats good PvP, PvP you can win just by brainpower.
In EVE Online I can bring my main in a bait ship and have a cloaked alt by my side in a battleship and when the other guy comes I surprise him.
The MMOs in which you just grind for gear or get wrecked in PvP can be discouraging.
Gear/level advantage: As there is a hard level cap, the level won't matter later. Do you want strong advantages with better gear or should you have a realistic chance against better geared players.
Gear/level advantage: realistic chances, gear based PvP is frustrating if you dont farm for hours everyday. Let creative people have a shot
Time: Do you want quick battles, which you can decide with big damage combo, or a two man focus. Or do you want drawn out fights with strong survivability and defensive skills/spells?
10-12 seconds if the guy doesn't fight back to 1 minute when there's an actual fight
Balance: Do you want the classes to be strongly balanced for duells and arena play? Do you want to have strong countermechanics in the tank/healer/dd trinity? Should individual skill and gear level be more important in large battles, than army coordination and discipline (and numbers if you want)?
A soft version of rock paper scissors is the best, nobody should be completely safe but also not completely useless, the player has to know which kind of situations his character performs better.
In big battles what matters is knowing who has to be saved and who has to die.
In EVE Online there are tiny broadcast buttons for attacking, repairs, location, "follow", etc and you can actually turn the camera to the broadcasted object by holding a key and clicking the broadcast.
Invulnerability: Do you want i-frames and invulnerability skills/spells?
Yes, please!
The PvPers have a major reality check coming, that is even more controversial and divisive then the owPvP/no-PvE-servers check for the PvEers.
There is no sweet spot between enjoyable PvP for PvPers and enjoyable PvP for Casuals and PvEers. There can only be a focus on one of these poles, which you try to reach by adapting game design and mechanics.
The low entrance, high ceiling design is a lie to keep enough sheep playing for the wolfs to slay.
AoC will die, if it tries to please the PvP crowd and thereby compete with AAA-corporate games, that target that crowd. It won't convince PvEers to keep playing, if PvX just means, that PvEers will have to PvP.
If it's possible to wipe the floor with/ravage other groups because of gear/skill advantage, systems like caravans and open sea won't work.
I would like to know about which "AAA-corporate games, that target that crowd." you would be refering to.
I would also want to know the reason why do you believe that.
Aren't we all sinners?
Gear/level advantage:
Time:
Balance:
Invulnerability: