Multiclass Friendliness & (Alt) Progression

Blindside

From what I understand:

A player chooses their primary archetype at the start of the game and cannot change it afterwards.
Progression is vertical up until max level, at which point it transitions to horizontal progression.
Secondary archetypes do not grant additional skills, but instead grant different ways to augment your primary archetype's abilities.

So, for those that enjoy playing multiple/all of the different classes and combinations of classes in games:

Is leveling and gearing going to be a tedious process?
Are there going to be easy ways to level and gear alt characters?
Are alternate methods of progression going to be available such as PvP-only progression, gathering/crafting-only progression, and/or PvE-only progression for players that may want to focus on a particular niche in the game?

Following the lead of the official discussions:

How do you feel about alt progression?
What aspects of the alt progression are important to you?
Are there examples of alt progression in other games that you feel are done well? If so, in what ways?

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Depraved

1- yes, and you learn your subclass at 25, that's where the augment system starts, which can also give you horizontal progression.

2- mostly, yes

3- yes

1- tedious is subjective. crafting will be hard and take time as steven has said. it wont be something that you can do in a couple of hours of farming

2- people will most likely discover that. but there will be multiple leveling paths.

3- yes. adventure class progression is different than gathering and crafting progression. but afaik everything will give you experience, so at some point, you will probably end up with at max level adventurer even if you just do crafting/gathering

Veeshan

I kinda hope once you get a max level character the 2nd or 3rd character leveled slightly quicker :P considering it spose to take quite some time to level

Dygz

Blindside wrote: »

A player chooses their primary archetype at the start of the game and cannot change it afterwards.

Progression is vertical up until max level, at which point it transitions to horizontal progression.

Secondary archetypes do not grant additional skills, but instead grant different ways to augment your primary archetype's abilities.

1: Yes
2: Adventurer progression is both vertical and horizontal. Horizontal progression begins at least by Level 25, when augments and Secondary Archetypes become available, but... we may have Racial, Religious, Node and Social Org augments before Level 25. For certain, we don't have to wait until max Adventurer Level to have horizontal progression.
3: Secondary archetypes do not provide new Active Skills, rather they provide diverse ways to enhance the Primary Archetype... mainly via the augments applied to Active Skills.

Blindside wrote: »

So, for those that enjoy playing multiple/all of the different classes and combinations of classes in games:
Is leveling and gearing going to be a tedious process?

Are there going to be easy ways to level and gear alt characters?

Are alternate methods of progression going to be available such as PvP-only progression, gathering/crafting-only progression, and/or PvE-only progression for players that may want to focus on a particular niche in the game?

To me, this question is...odd.
I have alts because I wish to play different characters.
And that's going to include different races and different genders and different personalities and interests besides just different classes. My alts will have different Religons and Social Orgs. At least two different guilds and will probably support different Nodes.

1: How tedious leveling feels is partially subjective to each individual player.
2: I expect Ashes gameplay, including progresson, will be more hardcore than casual. Alts should not inherently be easier to progress. Each character is its own character.
3: Trying to reach max Adventurer Level by focusing on Artisan progression will probably feel tedious. Same for focusing on PvP. Quests are designed to be the quickest path to leveling. But, Artisan quests provide xp for Artisan progression and Adventurer quests provide xp for Adventurer progression.

Blindside wrote: »

Following the lead of the official discussions:
How do you feel about alt progression?

What aspects of the alt progression are important to you?

Are there examples of alt progression in other games that you feel are done well? If so, in what ways?

1: I love alts. I typically have a bunch of them.
2: Diversity
3: I'd say "alt progression" is not really a thing. It's just character progression. If the individual race, class, and artisan progression paths feel good, the alt progression will feel good. Only aspect of alts that can be a pain is if you can't easily trade items between them. Most MMORPGs from the past 15+ years allow mailing items between alts, so that's really mostly a complaint about Vanilla EQ.

Azherae

How do you feel about alt progression

This depends on the purpose of leveling in the game. Ashes appears to use leveling for three things:
World Mob 'diversity
Social funneling
Sense of Progression as a character

And appears to be solving the issue of 'the process being tedious the second time' by making the WORLD more dynamic. So if a person 'only plays other characters for the class' main gameplay' I would expect it to be annoying, and those who play for any or all of the above, probably won't care.

What aspects of the alt progression are important to you?
None. If Nodes work as advertised or even half as good as Elite Dangerous' star systems, Alts will be a distant second in my mind. I generally don't have them. If anything I'd selfishly want others to NOT be able to quickly level alts so that I don't have to deal with people 'disregarding the effects of their choices' by using their multipliers.

But this is only because Ashes allows for non-leveling progression and for characters to share 'more important' things such as housing, probably storage, and so on. So I guess we can say that 'the ability to trade, share housing, etc' is something I consider important for alt progression.

Are there examples of alt progression in other games that you feel are done well? If so, in what ways?
I don't generally play games with much of it, and I don't use it when it is there.

When a game has the 'locked path' progression type, i.e. you can level all 'class choices' on one character, but the 'gameplay' part and main quests are shared, it's fine, but I believe some people 'roll an alt' because they WANT to experience the story/etc again.

This really comes down to the leveling experience and purpose so we're back to the first part of my answer.

tl;dr if I had an alt it would be to re-experience the story, earlygame and progression. Ashes will allow for this basically perfectly without changing anything about their system, it seems attuned for their goals, so it has full support from my end.

Fenixz

Quite sure there is an established notion, leveling your main character will be a long long long journey, thus making alts a multi-year investment.

Most players will have tons of mule-alts or crafter alts as the current MMO climate is more or less focused on self-sustain.
If I recall correctly we're talking 6+ months of non-hardcore gameplay to reach max. And that's only leveling, outside of gearing or crafting and endgame content.

Cultured

Blindside wrote: »

From what I understand:

So, for those that enjoy playing multiple/all of the different classes and combinations of classes in games:
Is leveling and gearing going to be a tedious process?

Are there going to be easy ways to level and gear alt characters?

Are alternate methods of progression going to be available such as PvP-only progression, gathering/crafting-only progression, and/or PvE-only progression for players that may want to focus on a particular niche in the game?

Following the lead of the official discussions:
How do you feel about alt progression?

What aspects of the alt progression are important to you?

Are there examples of alt progression in other games that you feel are done well? If so, in what ways?

1. I personally will not find leveling and gearing an alt tedious, but I do expect it to take a fair amount of time and resources.
2. I expect that help from friends/guild will make leveling an alt easier the second time around, also having a better knowledge of the game in general after leveling a main character. Same with gear as you will be able to feed materials/gear to an alt.
3. The whole game is kind of a Mashup when it comes to progressing. So trying to only focus on one niche, probably won't be ideal, although it could be entirely possible.

---
1. For me alt progression means being able to experience the game again, but through a different type of gameplay. It keeps it fun and fresh for me as a player.
2. As stated above, but also I do like to patch up any holes I might have in professions with an alt. So say I have a gatherer main, I'll have a processing alt.
3. As long as I am able to trade items between characters like in Path of Exile or ESO, I'm fine.

Dolyem

Alts are just another character. Whether or not those alts progress depends on the amount of time you put into them. Want an alt that is on par with your main character? Then you need to put in a similar amount of time and effort.

The only shortcuts an alt should be provided are the options to skip tutorial and cutscenes that you have already completed. Otherwise, everything else should be the same, no bonus experience or fast-tracking other than your own knowledge of content and ability to provide gear and currency from your main character.

This game is being designed as a hardcore MMO. So you'll need to play extra hardcore to have 8 different max leveled classes completely geared out.

Tarrith

In a different game, there's a system of player reincarnations which could be done once a player acheived level.
Class Reincarnations which would give bonuses to a particular class depending on which class was the majority during the life. Each class past life could be done three times for stacking bonuses.
Once all classes were done once the player became a completionist gaining a +2 to all stats.

Then there is also Racial Past lives which gave various bonuses per life. The first past life in each race gave a small skill bonus, then an attribute bonus, then a Racial Point bonus.
When all racial past lives were achieved the player would then become a Racial Completionist ageing a stacking +4 to all attributes.

Completionist bonus's was applied at the start of each life, so you can see why it was a big priority and took a long time to achieve when there's a lot of classes and races.

Tarrith

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