Greetings, glorious testers!
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
You like to argue against your own made up "facts", when there's been no concrete info to support neither the argument nor the "fact".
This I can agree with if you keep dying constantly giving a buffer, before you have to spawn back at town. I tend to think more hardcore stuff but this would be more casual for those types of players akin to lives before you know your at your limit. And maybe at some more suspense in giving you a choice in what you want to do at your last life before you need to walk again.
There is a balance in a pvx game. We don't want pvp to overshadow pve or pve to overshadow pvp. There must be scope snd reason to do both and have all types of players.
Okay, sounds like you played a game with predetermined decisionmaking (because if there's a whole slew of skills that you can only choose one of every 2.5 seconds, chances are it will already be decided for you which skill is optimal when that GCD comes off, rendering all the other options useless for a while.)
And more importantly, if I'm reading your concerns about the raids/pve content correctly, it seems that the game isn't great at challenging your party as a whole, leaving you as the healer with only DPS to focus your conscious decisionmaking on.
It seems to me that you are deeply in need of picking up a PvP/RvR-centric game, or at least a game where raids lead to truly unpredictable, difficult-to-manage situations, so you can really feel what a healer's role is supposed to be like when things get stressful.
The fun in the healer's gameplay for me has never benefitted from being given little dps minigames to engage in during the fights that the party has control over. The fun always comes from using proper preparation on being ready for the moment when the party inevitably loses control over the situation, at which point I have to have my regular buff upkeep already managed, so that I can primarily focus on deciding what to prioritise in order to help my party members manage the problems we under and help them regain control more quickly, or stay floating until the fight is over.
Interestingly, without ever having played the game, I just looked up opinions about the FF14 healer on YouTube, and immediately found someone who pretty much exactly mirrored my opinion in the context of the game, except talking about the game as if it already plays like that.
Whether he's right that the type of content he gets to play in FF14 sufficiently offers that type of challenge is a detail that isn't worth discussing here. The point is: that's the kind of challenge a healer player can generally expect from good game design, and it has little do to do with the class balance itself.
Yeah, you completely disregard the role that healers have when damage becomes an issue. And if your premise is that dungeons won't be a challenge for groups and the whole point will be speedrunning, your vague criticisms so far aren't even a start to a solution anyway. You're the game design equivalent of a doctor expecting an amputation, and equipping us with a bandaid. Then this isn't a discussion of class balance, it's a rant about the consequences of bad dungeon design, taking up space in a class balance discussion, and desperatey digging for class balance solutions.
As a sidenote, I don't think this is how most games treat the term "global cooldown". In my experience, in most games GCD is essentially an animation cooldown (sometimes extended to 0.25 - 1s) that serves to stall the game pacing a little. On top of that, abilities have their own regular 5-240 second cooldown.
So I think if we're going to bring up this term again at all, I think we have to describe the effect we're talking about more specifically.
The way I see it, for the effect you are talking about "shared cooldown" would be a much more useful term, because it's each ability's only cooldown, not an additional global effect next to the individual cooldown.
I'm so not going to enjoy the months of Alpha-2 testing where I have to continually repeat to others the differences between FF14 and FF11, especially since I don't play the former for exactly the reason you described.
My head hurts just thinking about it.
Anyways just throwing in the usual contrast...
FFXI is about prioritizing your responses to multiple simultaneous changing conditions that limit the group's effectiveness. Some are also standard unavoidable damage mainly to add another condition, but actually, choosing not to heal because doing something else matters more is often the 'healer skill check'.
You don't have to agree with that point or play games I liked, it was a suggestion to open your perspective and offer you a more intriguing, positive MMO experience. What would be much more useful is a response to my points about healer gameplay and the appealing elements of it, which is the type of thing you should be ready/prepared to do, if your criticism of AoC's cleric is justified.
But we're discussing Ashes of Creation. You seem to enjoy switching back and forth between discussions of general game design principles and specific games' mechanics because it lets you criticise everything without defending anything you say, but that won't inform or influence anyone trying to draw a conclusion from the bigger picture of the dicussion. Being clear about what type of effect you're talking about, and which properties of it make you judge it the way you do, would help make your points more pertinent.
I mean, my guild will consist of citizens of a number of nodes, if we are killing a boss and a group or raid comes along and attempts to deprive us of our loot, they become our rivals regardless of what node they are from.
Wait, so, someone asks you what games you think had good healer mechanics, you reply with a game that has healer mechanics you don't like, and then you suggest someone else's thought process is seriously wrong?
Which is why I then continued to talk about how you jump back-and-forth from large-scale concepts to specific examples as it's convenient for your self-representation, but never connecting and drawing back conclusions in either direction. If it's unclear to you why I said "We're discussing Ashes," you set us up for this problem by talking about FF14's GCD without connecting it to the general question of intriguing healer/class design.
I know. I responded to those examples. Remember? The parts of my comment you ignored?
It's so sad, I really wonder how much more insightful your opinions and ideas could be if you'd just have the confidence to continue a discussion instead of just dodging any point that might reveal an inconsistency in your thoughts.
I responded to you because I think there's a possibility that your ideas about game pacing/class design might be more funcitonal for a modern game than mine. (Obviously I'm doubtful of it, as I am sure you are the other way - there's a reason they are my opinions. But I acknowledge the possibility.)
I know you're not here to convince me, but you should still be interested in showing that your suggestions/ideas can convince someone, no?
@Noaani ☠💀☠
< "baby-level mind traps"
I love progress to a fault. I just also know that not everything that's possible should, or at least needs to, be done. (Especially not by everyone!)
I'm not sure what mind traps you are talking about here.
If your position is well considered, others pointing out basically anything at all about it should be easy for you to rebuff.
From my perspective, you are saying that Ashes doesn't have gameplay for healers that you find enjoyable, yet you can't point to any game that has healer gameplay you enjoy, yet further you still seem to insist that healers are the correct role for you to play.
Again from my perspective, this means your perspective here isn't just a house of cards, it is a house of cards without the foundation layer - just sort of hovering in the air with no reason at all for existing in the state it is in.
The use of the term "GCD" had nothing to do with that. You're the one who keeps bringing that up. I made the sidenote at all because the term had recently often been mentioned before in this thread and others in relation to AoC skill design, and I wanted to help avoid future confusion.
You have all the space you'd need to advance the significant discussion points from any of their facettes that actually matter to the people in this thread.
I didn't like where our initial interaction led (presumably because I dared to object to that "forcing you to use AoE heal for single target" claim, and later question your experience with a certain type of healer gameplay?), so I'm trying a more understanding/non-hostile approach. If that's manipulative or underhanded to you, then by your standards, all communication is manipulative, and you might as well come to terms with it.
Actually, the whole discussion about GCD seems to have come from that poster clarifying what the term means in general. They were correct in doing so, as even if the term is misused in one game, that doesnt mean that misuse should be taken to other games.
You may well have been correct in terms of how GCD is used in the game you were talking about (even if the term is used incorrectly in that game), but they were still correct in stating the generally correct use of the term.
As a point of clarification, GCD is GLOBAL cooldown. If you have one for attacks and one for heals, it isnt global. A better term for that would be offensive cooldown and healing cooldown (OCD and HCD). Still not saying you are wrong in stating how the term is used in the game in question, just stating that the term is very obviously used incorrectly in that game, if the GCD in question is not in fact global.
However, the comments about the GCD were stated as being an aside, it is not an issue to do with your main point. As such, you have no need to discuss it.
You suggested a thing. People criticized your suggestion. But instead of explaining your suggestion better or arguing against the criticisms you dodged all of that and did the very thing you accuse me of doing - find every train of thought that was not about your suggestion and argued against that. This comes off as a huge indicator of lack of confidence in your own idea or lack of understanding of how it could be implemented in the game.
The best way to flesh out a basic idea in to something that actually could work is to have people with different perspectives point out flaws in it, and then work with them on ways to plug those flaws.
We've all done that a number of times on these forums. While none of the ideas have been directly bought in to the game (that we know of) various aspects of the problem solving have assisted Intrepid internally a number of times.
That problem solving is far more useful (and far more enjoyable) than the initial idea by itself. It is something anyone posting any ideas here should embrace.