Ashes of Creation Mana Management, what is your opinion?

A recent comment exchange with @Azherae in another thread, inspired me to create this discussion as i feel it might be very important for Ashes gameplay as a whole.

Lineage 2, one of the games AoC draws alot of inspirations from, had one of the harshest Mana Management systems in any MMORPG i've ever played, where there were no mana potions, were mana costs were steep and there was 2 essential classes almost completely dedicated to the management of mana of their party and that every 9man-party would wan't atleast 1 of them,
then there is a clue we got by considering Alpha 1 mages had a specific mana recharging skill.
Those pieces of informations makes me believe Mages will not only be a DPS class but will also play the role of the "Party Mana Manager" in Ashes and that Ashes will have an "harder than average Mana Management system.

With all that in mind, in this thread i would like to know people's opinions and experiences in other games and their expectations for Ashes regarding this topic.

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Comments

Ace1234

@Goalid
Sorry that was a bad way of explaining what I meant. You are 100% right in that example you gave, it is same thing in terms of the group jobs, and I am okay with that- I meant something else and I didn't take enough time to properly communicate my thought.

I am fine with relying on others to get the job done as I said originally- My point was in regards to not having your "gameplay" hindered and reliant on someone else, which (originally pointed out by azherae) I was trying to say is usually tied to the mana system.

So I moreso meant that "I would rather the team compositions focus on how good each person is at doing their own job (even if that means helping you do yours), rather than relying on other people to be able to actually "play the game" as you try to do your job (such as not being able to perform actions and make decisions due to a lack of mana that your teammate isnt managing properly).

That would be different from your healing example, because you can still play regardless of what amount of health you are at until you are dead, wheras a lack of mana can prevent you from doing anything so i would rather each individual be responsible for the management of their own mana.

Hopefully that makes more sense when I put it that way.

Ludullu

Ace1234 wrote: »

That would be different from your healing example, because you can still play regardless of what amount of health you are at until you are dead, wheras a lack of mana can prevent you from doing anything so i would rather each individual be responsible for the management of their own mana.

Hopefully that makes more sense when I put it that way.

Imo not really? When your hp ends - you die and suffer consequences. When your mana ends - you just wait for it to regen. And if the content is not dumbeasy, I doubt you'd be attacking mobs when you're at 10-30% hp, while you could definitely attack with that amount of mana unless every ability literally ate up 20% per use.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Ace1234 wrote: »

That would be different from your healing example, because you can still play regardless of what amount of health you are at until you are dead, wheras a lack of mana can prevent you from doing anything so i would rather each individual be responsible for the management of their own mana.

Hopefully that makes more sense when I put it that way.

Imo not really? When your hp ends - you die and suffer consequences. When your mana ends - you just wait for it to regen. And if the content is not dumbeasy, I doubt you'd be attacking mobs when you're at 10-30% hp, while you could definitely attack with that amount of mana unless every ability literally ate up 20% per use.

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

Obviously it is true that when your HP falls you are no longer playing the game. But this is about planning, and choices, right?

The Mana Restorer has to choose whose mana to restore, or it's not really 'management'. The Healer similarly chooses who to heal, but the difference between these two is simply that if the Healer 'chooses not to heal you', things change VERY fast, but many classes would have a way to mitigate this themselves that, again, leads to MORE interesting things (such as all the drama related to complaining about the healer, but more reasonably, defensive abilities, someone else noticing and pulling hate, etc).

When your Mana Restorer goes afk or drops connection randomly, now, IF the game is designed to 'need' this person for the content you are currently doing for that function, you just do LESS things in most games. You 'consciously choose to play less of the game' if you want to live. In a healing situation this is very short term and an ally can step up and do something about it, even if that something is just 'go all out so that you aren't taking more damage'.

What does an ally do to resolve your situation when you are out of mana and 'can't apply abilities anymore', on a non-Tank?

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

But my whole point was to oversimplify it, in that particular context. I agree that under certain designs having no mana would be pretty much same as having no mp. Hell, L2 was pretty much exactly that, because in a mage group, if all 2-3 of your dps mages had 0 mana, the group couldn't do shit, so their absence of mana was effectively the absence of hp for all party members.

But in those situations the party gameplay went from a "mage party" to a "benny hill party", where the remaining members would just run around kiting the mobs until the mages regened up at least a bit of mana to finish them off. If they had lost their hp - the remaining members would either have to run away completely or just die too.

Majority of parties rarely had those kinds of situations because they knew how to manage their resources, but my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just its players' mentality and logic, but those are the exact reasons why Ace's comment didn't make as much sense to me as it seems to make to you.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

But my whole point was to oversimplify it, in that particular context. I agree that under certain designs having no mana would be pretty much same as having no mp. Hell, L2 was pretty much exactly that, because in a mage group, if all 2-3 of your dps mages had 0 mana, the group couldn't do shit, so their absence of mana was effectively the absence of hp for all party members.

But in those situations the party gameplay went from a "mage party" to a "benny hill party", where the remaining members would just run around kiting the mobs until the mages regened up at least a bit of mana to finish them off. If they had lost their hp - the remaining members would either have to run away completely or just die too.

Majority of parties rarely had those kinds of situations because they knew how to manage their resources, but my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just its players' mentality and logic, but those are the exact reasons why Ace's comment didn't make as much sense to me as it seems to make to you.

Same principle as always.

I don't see it as NECESSARY to make it less fun in this way. The 'Benny Hill party' isn't a requirement for good gameplay to me, not even as a tradeoff.

For the DPS it's an adaptation. For the mages it's 'not playing currently', which is fine with me as well, I'm used to 'downtimes'. I prefer them to be 'have to wait for mob respawn' rather than 'have to wait for MP', and the thing is, this is ALSO Intrepid's last known stance, explicitly. I can find the stream where they discuss it.

They don't want players to GENERALLY need to rest up, which to me implies a hope of design that puts responsibility entirely on 'target selection'.

If that isn't how this works we're gonna get 'Manaburns' and I don't want that again. Frontloaded Mage damage (or any frontloaded huge damage classes really) are the bane of Trinity MMOs.

Azherae

Also to add to that, a recent clarification just this year (we're getting deep into my speculations again, so bear with me).

"Players receive skill points as they level. These can be used to level up skills (increase their rank) within their active, passive or combat/weapon skill trees. You can learn more about skill points here, on the wiki! There are no plans for players to use their skill points for Augments. That's a seperate system, and you can learn more about what we've shared regarding Augments here." - A Vaknar answer to a question here.

This is much more in line with my design expectation for many reasons I won't get into, and if you want I can tie it back to 'why this affects mana management' but the short version is related to 'how we respec' and 'what players are able to consider important/reasonable to ask of other players'.

So this 'change' makes me more 'confident' because from the design perspective, I could not see a good reason why Augments would require skill point requirements, only level requirements for some. And that's what we see now.

Having free augments of specific types allows for MUCH greater build flexibility and also allows them to make more complex combat types while pushing specialization into gearing and playstyle a bit more. They could still make individual skills Augments very granular (my posts on this matter aren't actually trying to suggest 'hey make these things all similar regardless of skill') but being able to Augment skills freely would allow for mana management options to the player that don't force metas as hard.

Ace1234

@NiKr

my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just

I agree that you can have those situations- thats why I clarified that "usually" your gameplay can be impeded by lack of mana- but it depends on how the combat is designed. Regardless, even if you can still "act" with badly managed mana, you still have much more limited options, otherwise mana shouldn't even be a thing if it doesn't affect your options. So, you have "more" gameplay with more mana, so thats kind of my thought process for wanting to have control over its management, rather than hoping someone else does it right so that way I have the most options available to me as often as possible.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Having free augments of specific types allows for MUCH greater build flexibility and also allows them to make more complex combat types while pushing specialization into gearing and playstyle a bit more. They could still make individual skills Augments very granular (my posts on this matter aren't actually trying to suggest 'hey make these things all similar regardless of skill') but being able to Augment skills freely would allow for mana management options to the player that don't force metas as hard.

Yeah, they just have to balance it all properly so as to not create those metas. Balancing all the possible hundreds of augments from all the different schools and resources would be a huge pain, I'd assume.

And when you put some potential augments school of "lets you restore some mana on use" against a design point of "almost every class has some form of mana burn" - the players would be pushed towards that kind of school, rather than some school that just gives them a higher CC chance or some elemental dmg or whatever else.

Azherae

Ace1234 wrote: »

@NiKr

my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just

I agree that you can have those situations- thats why I clarified that "usually" your gameplay can be impeded by lack of mana- but it depends on how the combat is designed. Regardless, even if you can still "act" with badly managed mana, you still have much more limited options, otherwise mana shouldn't even be a thing if it doesn't affect your options. So, you have "more" gameplay with more mana, so thats kind of ny thought process for wanting to have control over its management, rather than hoping someone else does it right so that way I have the most options available to me as often as possible.

And to add to this, though I don't think NiKr is the type to make this specific counterpoint so I'm moreso pre-empting ... certain other individuals...

Having LIMITED mana is gameplay because you are 'thinking and choosing'. Having INFINITE mana is not gameplay sometimes because you are rotating or as Arya likes to say 'bot aspirant'. Having ZERO mana is not gameplay because again, you're not choosing (it counts as gameplay if you chose to put yourself there and are now dealing with the consequences).

To me that is what 'Mana management' means. The closer you are to either Zero OR Infinity in game design, the less harsh I consider the system to be, even if that 'infinity' is the result of someone else's actions.

Ludullu

Ace1234 wrote: »

I agree that you can have those situations- thats why I clarified that "usually" your gameplay can be impeded by lack of mana- but it depends on how the combat is designed. Regardless, even if you can still "act" with badly managed mana, you still have much more limited options, otherwise mana shouldn't even be a thing if it doesn't affect your options. So, you have "more" gameplay with more mana, so thats kind of ny thought process for wanting to have control over its management, rather than hoping someone else does it right so that way I have the most options available to me as often as possible.

Yeah, but in my experience lack of HP is the same limiter as lack of mana. I wouldn't attack a mob that hits for 20% of my HP if I only had 30% of it. And I'd either need a healer to restore my HP or I'd need to wait for regen.

And while Azherae is correct that a lot of games provide you with some ways of circumventing the mob's attacks, so your value of 30% HP goes way up, I'd imagine that mana's value is higher than HP's by default. I could be wrong in that assumption though and every ability use reduces your mana by ~20%, but then I'd personally highly dislike that design.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Ace1234 wrote: »

I agree that you can have those situations- thats why I clarified that "usually" your gameplay can be impeded by lack of mana- but it depends on how the combat is designed. Regardless, even if you can still "act" with badly managed mana, you still have much more limited options, otherwise mana shouldn't even be a thing if it doesn't affect your options. So, you have "more" gameplay with more mana, so thats kind of ny thought process for wanting to have control over its management, rather than hoping someone else does it right so that way I have the most options available to me as often as possible.

Yeah, but in my experience lack of HP is the same limiter as lack of mana. I wouldn't attack a mob that hits for 20% of my HP if I only had 30% of it. And I'd either need a healer to restore my HP or I'd need to wait for regen.

And while Azherae is correct that a lot of games provide you with some ways of circumventing the mob's attacks, so your value of 30% HP goes way up, I'd imagine that mana's value is higher than HP's by default. I could be wrong in that assumption though and every ability use reduces your mana by ~20%, but then I'd personally highly dislike that design.

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

So you can 'spend time at lower HP' somewhat more safely and make MORE choices instead of 'well I am either basically at full health or dead' (Neverwinter).

So far, Ashes is this design type.

"Choose the enemy where when you run out of mana, you can probably still finish them before they tick your HP down."

As a healer I say this is more engaging for me personally as well. Big heals should cost big mana and draw big aggro, but I also shouldn't be NEEDING to use them, and I mean on nearly ANYONE but the most glass-cannon Mage or Rogue who should be figuring out how to not get HIT ever.

That's my opinion. Abilities take meaningful chunks of your mana but you don't need to use them that often if you don't want to. Again, this is already Ashes' design as we understand it now. If it changes much, I won't exactly be surprised, but this is the way it was EXPLAINED so I would hope it stays similar for all those 'unfortunate souls' like me who saw what we considered good combat design and went 'yes I wanna play that!'

As Steven always says, if you're not enjoying the combat, it's going to be rough.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

L2's design warped my thinking too much. If I was solo - I had no buffs so any stronger mob would do a ton of dmg. If I was in a party - it was always a constant one with a healer and an MP manager. The "middleground" of those would be higher rated servers where you had a full buff w/o a party, but then you'd be fighting the same strong party mobs, so they'd still do pretty big chunks of your HP.

So yeah, if Ashes manages to step away from the L2's buff design and its utter REQUIREMENT for farm - the game would most likely be way closer to what you're saying. And at that point I'll just learn to play it the way it's meant to be played.

Ace1234

@NiKr

Yeah, but in my experience lack of HP is the same limiter as lack of mana. I wouldn't attack a mob that hits for 20% of my HP if I only had 30% of it. And I'd either need a healer to restore my HP or I'd need to wait for regen.

And while Azherae is correct that a lot of games provide you with some ways of circumventing the mob's attacks, so your value of 30% HP goes way up, I'd imagine that mana's value is higher than HP's by default. I could be wrong in that assumption though and every ability use reduces your mana by ~20%, but then I'd personally highly dislike that design.

I guess thats the point we disagree on- I think that the hp maintains its gameplay value much more than the mana does. Mainly because as long as you are alive, you have access to all of your tools, even if you don't utilize them you still have that choice. Wheras, the lower your mana, the less tools you have available, which kind of removes that choice- assuming the mana system functions as intended and is there for a reason.

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

I don't like when one or two classes are 'expected' to restore mana to others and content ends up balanced around that because I feel the lack of those classes leads to 'less gameplay' and the stigma around the situations that arise leads to multi-boxing and other negative outcomes, particularly since many support players seem to prefer their classes to be easier mechanically.

To me, the game that has best addressed mana regeneration is EQ2.

The game has similar regeneration to EQ, but only in combat. As soon as you leave combat, regeneration of both mana and HP is exponentially faster. They did this in part to address the need to bring an enchanter along with every group, but also just in part to speed gameplay up.

This left mana management as skill a vital skill in the game still though, and there are 4 classes out of the 24 that assist others with it.

However, since you only really need to consider mana management within the context of a single pull (or a single chain pull), it meant it wasn't essential to always bring one of these classes with you. It would be better on a lot of content to bring an additional DPS - though any of the above four classes were always welcome to come along. Sure, you needed to bring these classes with you on content that was expected to take more than 10 minutes per pull, but this content was designed for organized guilds, and so meeting the requirement for specific classes to be present was considered a part of meeting the requirement for the content as a whole (you wouldn't form a raid without an appropriate number of tanks and healers, adding support to this acceptable).

In comparison to other games, mana management in EQ2 was quite varied. You had your in combat regen rate, which was boosted by some gear and support classes, but also via some gear effects (for a while, a boost of 7 mana per second in combat was the effect on the best caster robe in the game, and when paired with 5 on a set of quest boots, was basically god tier).

But then you also had your out of combat regen, which was boosted via beverages. At the level range in which a 12 per second increase to mana in combat was considered god tier, the standard player made drink would increase out of combat regen by 60 per second.

On top of those two different regens, you obviously had your four support classes who were able to boost in combat regen, but also cast essentially mana heals.

Your glass cannon caster classes all had a small ability to convert some HP to mana on themselves, as well as a slow casting ability to heal some mana on a target (which could be themselves). Then you had two Summoner classes that had the ability to an item in to the inventory of anyone in their group, and when activated, this item would boost their mana by an amount (one was a direct mana heal, the other a mana heal over time).

Then you have items such as manastone which was a quested item that would restore a small amount of mana when used (around 300 from memory - using the above regen numbers for context on that). This used a small amount of HP, but had a cooldown of 45 seconds as This was able to be upgraded later on to providing a flat 5% of your mana back to you (300 mana at level 90 was not enough to cast a single spell).

There were also a few other items to boost mana - I had one that you could use once per 24 hours, that would just replenish your mana back to 100%.

Then there were potions. The game had two types of potion to restore power per level range (instant and over time), and had two rarities of each potion. At the same level where 12 mana per second on gear was god tier, the common potion to restore power instantly was restoring 295 power (the rare one was just over 400). The mana over time potions restore mana every 3 seconds and last for 30 seconds (meaning 11 ticks of the potion), and the common one was regenerating 26 per tick, while the rare one waws 36. Potions had a cooldown of 165 seconds per potion type (so you could use one instant and one over time potion every 2 minutes and 45 seconds).

These potions were useful enough to buy, have and use, but were by no means a substitute for a class and/or gear that could regen mana.

Then the game also had various items that had a chance to proc a mana heal on you based on various triggers.

So, all up, EQ's mana management system was complex, and I would go as far as to say it was also quite deep. In practice, if you were not raiding, all you would do is set your stack of drink to auto-consume and consider mana to be managed - you may consider using a mana potion if you are out soloing and mismanage things a little.

If you were raiding, however, you would need to make use of all of the above - not only were you in situations where you would be in combat for 30 or more minutes (you would exhaust mana in about 2 minutes without any regen), but there were encounters that would wipe the raid if a single member of said raid had their mana go 1 point outside of a specified range. Fortunately there were not many of these encounters - they functioned as a gatekeeper to ensure you didn't have any morons in your raid, but were not fun. Since they were gatekeepers though, once any given character had killed it once, they didn't need to do it again.

As a final point on mana management in EQ2, my class had an ability called manaburn that would use up all mana I had left, leaving me with 0, and would convert that at a 4/1 ratio in to damage on my target. I used this ability right at the start of many raids so that the tank could then use an ability to put himself 1 hate point higher than the person at the top of the mobs hate list, meaning the tank was essentially able to generate a million points of hate in a few seconds where most others in the raid were only able to generate tens of thousands of damage (basically, the tank had an insurmountable amount of hate on that one target). This meant that I was very often 8 seconds in to a multi-minute raid encounter with absolutely no power - but the game provided enough tools for this to not be an issue if everyone in the raid worked together (I had those items from summoners, I had the other glass cannons sending me some power, I used my manastone for it's 300 power, and I had the bards and chanters all doing their bit as well.

While I am sure there are games out there with mana mechanics akin to EQ2's in terms of depth and complexity, I've yet to see them.

Myosotys

JamesSunderland wrote: »

A recent comment exchange with @Azherae in another thread, inspired me to create this discussion as i feel it might be very imporatant for Ashes gameplay as a whole.

Lineage 2, one of the games AoC draws alot of inspirations from, had one of the harshest Mana Management systems in any MMORPG i've ever played, where there were no mana potions, were mana costs were steep and there was 2 essential classes almost completely dedicated to the management of mana of their party and that every 9man-party would wan't atleast 1 of them,
then there is a clue we got considering Alpha 1 mages had a specific mana recharging skill . Those pieces of informations makes me believe Mages will not only be a DPS class but will also play the role of the "Party Mana Manager" in Ashes and that Ashes will have an "harder than average Mana Management system.

With all that in mind, in this thread i would like to know people's opinions and experiences in other games and their expectations for Ashes regarding this topic.

I hope the system will not be a copy past of L2 and will be something different. I also hope there will be potions.

I know many people are nostalgic of L2 but according to me it wasn’t the best MMO of all time.

Ludullu

Myosotys wrote: »

I know many people are nostalgic of L2 but according to me it wasn’t the best MMO of all time.

None have been. Every game is disliked/hated by someone. And usually the higher the popularity - the more haters there is.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

L2's design warped my thinking too much. If I was solo - I had no buffs so any stronger mob would do a ton of dmg. If I was in a party - it was always a constant one with a healer and an MP manager. The "middleground" of those would be higher rated servers where you had a full buff w/o a party, but then you'd be fighting the same strong party mobs, so they'd still do pretty big chunks of your HP.

So yeah, if Ashes manages to step away from the L2's buff design and its utter REQUIREMENT for farm - the game would most likely be way closer to what you're saying. And at that point I'll just learn to play it the way it's meant to be played.

A basic example then of the difference from my experience. Note that I'm VERY explicitly targeting 'a mob that has a design that only exists because they were trying to get a function, not a theme'. Not all FFXI enemies are this way, nor are they all as interesting, but you'll understand what I mean in a moment.

FFXI Goblins all carry bombs.

They don't hit super hard with their melee attacks. But the bomb TP move can. Otherwise it does decent AoE fire damage, approx equal to all in party nearby, it doesn't 'divide up damage'. But it's still not crippling. Nothing that a Tank wouldn't shrug off EVEN if taking damage normally. Have a White Mage with you to ward against Fire Damage and you're even better off.

But AoE healing is EXPENSIVE. And therefore if you were to 'keep pulling Goblins', eventually people's HP starts dropping into a range where it is dangerous. Why do Goblins have bombs though? What made THAT a thematic goblin concept?

It isn't. It BECAME one, but it's a mechanical thing they were going for and chose to put it on the 'first and most ubiquitious Beastman enemy' to make them a threat and teach you what to expect from damage based enemies in the game.

There's a second function to these bombs. They have a 'suicide bomb' mode. TP moves are random, and that version can be selected randomly. It DOES look different, but only if you're actually looking at the Goblin (they drop the bomb instead of lobbing it). It does damage by how much HP the Goblin has remaining. MOST of the time this isn't enough to kill you. If you were solo, this move is technically almost GOOD. The Goblin dies after using it, you get the exp, if your HP was high, you didn't die, even if you got low. If you did enough damage to it first, you didn't die because it's HP wasn't high enough.

But if you are in a party, and you aren't on the ball when the Goblin's HP is high, someone might die if you had been fighting Goblins before then and didn't top off everyone.

You don't think about 'how much standard damage a Goblin does' when fighting them if your tank is half-decent. You think about 'How much Mana it will take for your whole party to tank through multiple Bomb Tosses' and then play around them.

But you can't just go 'well we barely need a Tank then' because their OTHER move is 'Goblin Rush' which is like 5x melee strike damage (It's only 3-4 hits, so that's separate).

Relative to mana management and healing, therefore, you have 'a mob that doesn't do crippling damage unless you aren't paying attention but requires higher mana management skill (or lots of resting) to face', that STILL has the ability to just drop people if you aren't paying attention, and in a really strange way too.

Assume you pull one without full HP because you're confident that your healer is about to top you up before it even arrives, and your Healer suddenly lags offline. The immediate thing to do is 'nobody engage except Tank and even they should hold back' -> 'Mage puts up defensive spells that they normally don't waste mana on in a group' -> 'Mage nukes the hell out of the Goblin so it doesn't have enough HP for suicide bomb to kill everyone' -> 'Mage sits still while Tank pulls it off them' -> 'wait for healer to return'.

tautau

This is a great discussion, thank you all who have contributed to it.

For us old L2 vets who cherish some or all of that game, some comments in various threads got me wondering if it might be helpful to sometimes refer to 'Early L2' as compared to 'Late L2' since the game evolved and changed over the years. It also had some significant differences on unofficial servers.

I played L2 starting a few weeks after release for about five or six years. If you remember, at the beginning when any player died you could drop equipped weapon, gear and anything (except gold) out of your inventory. This applied to both death from players AND death from mobs regardless of your 'color'. In other words, you were dropping a lot of stuff frequently as a new player. If you were with your friends or guild, they would hold your items for you. If you were solo, you would have to run back and hope to find it before someone else did.

IIRC, it was then changed to dropping only inventory from your deaths, then changed to Red players were the only ones who dropped gear and weapons on death. It took several years for these changes to take place. Please correct me if I am wrong in specifics, but I recall things being quite harsh at the beginning and slowly easing up over time. This is just one example of 'early versus late L2.'

Back to the topic...as @Azherae implies above, a system where a smart and experienced player can figure out the interactions of circumstances, differing spells, equipment and other factors is an interesting system to play. I have high hopes that AoC will deliver this. I anticipate that it will be good in Alpha-2 and even better upon release.

Ludullu

tautau wrote: »

IIRC, it was then changed to dropping only inventory from your deaths, then changed to Red players were the only ones who dropped gear and weapons on death. It took several years for these changes to take place. Please correct me if I am wrong in specifics, but I recall things being quite harsh at the beginning and slowly easing up over time. This is just one example of 'early versus late L2.'

Unless the private server that I played on at the time completely changed that mechanic, I think that by C4 it was already "only PKers drop stuff". I might be misremembering cause it's been over 15 years since I played that version of the game, but I think that's right.

But yes, early L2 was quite different from later updates and even more different from even later ones. And there's been several separations of the playerbase which all consider different version "the real L2". This is one of the main reasons why I was trying to find out which update did Steven stop playing the game at. Cause that would at least give me more context as to his experience in the game.

tautau wrote: »

Back to the topic...as Azherae implies above, a system where a smart and experienced player can figure out the interactions of circumstances, differing spells, equipment and other factors is an interesting system to play. I have high hopes that AoC will deliver this. I anticipate that it will be good in Alpha-2 and even better upon release.

Yep, I definitely hope that Ashes manages to design intricate and interesting pve content. As much as I love L2, its pve was definitely super basic.

VekoKrava

I would make mana management important and old-school, and on top of it I would give consumables such as mana potions (that are hard to craft) and runes looted from all kinds of mobs (for example dungeon or elite farming area or something similar - the harder the better - the more social it is), basically because these consumables would add game within a game, you would have to farm them daily if you are healer (especially) and prepare for upcoming sieges or raids. I would not give infinite mana due to these consumables, but I would make them work same as vanilla WoW - some 50-60% more mana during fight, which would mean if you were healer, without them you would not do well in raid content vs bosses.

If there is no need for grinding and preparing yourself then I think that is poor taste of RPG game, which revolves around preparation and progression. Having infinite mana just because you waited 10 sec in raid without casting is bad.

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