What is good gameplay, tanking and threat, and balanced player options.
I can see a few issues with this game and a few things it is promising to do very well. I have no doubt the social systems in the game to be well thought out and require players to come together to overcome difficulties in the "pseudo-factions" of sharing the same node (homebase) or guild and competing for scarce achievements in the game. What I see an issue with is the moment-to-moment gameplay where most MMOs have fallen short historically, perhaps due to the same idea of collective experience being such a big part of the game that the individual experience is secondary. I will use two examples of successful games, albeit in different genres: Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) and League of Legends, in which I have much experience at this point to elaborate on why the threat mechanic, the holy trinity, and player option balance will be major issues for players of Ashes of Creation.
The tanking and threat mechanic is an issue for player versus non-player-controlled enemies in combat because it removes player satisfaction from the victory, player options during combat, requires managing an invisible number, and creates bad tank design. Having a threat mechanic into the enemy AI is likened to having a lenient dungeon master in tabletop roleplaying. For example, you send out the character built to take hits and the DM chooses to be nice and attack that player's character. This hurts the ability to suspend disbelief in the fantasy roleplaying game because the enemy is not acting in their best interest, but in yours. It doesn't give the players any satisfaction because the only option to beat the encounter is usually designed to use this threat system. BG3 gets around this by adding competent AI that targets the player that they have the MOST chance of hurting, not the least, and reducing the overall level of optimization required to compensate. This means that even with a low-mid optimized build the players can use creative solutions to overcome the encounters and feel like the enemies are actually acting in their best interest, thus getting satisfaction from the victory. The AI in BG3 will make positioning errors to target lesser armored or weakened characters, which the players can exploit through line of sighting much like most MMOs, but they will never target the tank simply because the tank has abilities to make them target them. For games with a threat mechanic, the player's victory is typically assured as long as they manage the invisible threat number (visible usually only with add-ons) appropriately to keep the monster targeting the tank. If these tank skills are a 1 to 1 transfer into a PvP space, they take all player autonomy away from whoever the tank uses the abilities on, and this usually requires all tank abilities to be designed once for PvE and again for PvP for them to have any viability in PvP without causing an imbalance issue. A fantasy MMO without threat would allow for the AI to feel more intelligent and tanks to use body blocking, tripping, pushing, grappling, and putting themself in harm's way to control the front line in cinematic ways, that also make sense for the character archetype. This puts more emphasis on positioning and clever teamwork on a party as a whole and allows for creative solutions rather than manipulating the same system for every encounter. This leads us to the holy trinity system itself.
The holy trinity system is an issue in most MMOs because of the differential requirement of tanks and healers and their player base. For instance, tanks are 1/3 of the trinity, yet the Tank class is 1/8 of the player options in Ashes of Creation. The cleric's numbers look the same. Doing away with the trinity, would allow players to complete content with creative strategies utilizing characters that they actually want to play. Healing is a part of Baldur's Gate 3, but not necessary, or even optimal. Finding ways to not take damage based on your positioning and tactics is much more of a successful strategy that requires forethought. Is there room for a tank and healer fantasy? Yes, there is, but engaging tank gameplay does not look like having these abilities that manage an invisible number to keep the monster mad at you by screaming. Think of any tank in League of Legends and what they do to actually protect the team. Braum jumps in front of you and holds up his shield, Alistar headbutts the enemy away; Maokai roots the enemy and punches them back. These are cinematic and exciting animations that are way more engaging for players than abilities where your character screams at the bad guy, so they keep hitting them. If the holy trinity is to be adhered to, why are the player options not presented in an equal ratio? Why don't we have 9 Classes with 3 flavors of tanks, damage dealers and healers? Intrepid is setting this MMO up to fall into the same pitfalls of others historically that bottleneck group creation around the forced trinity system where 2/3 of the required classes are not represented in that same amount in the actual player base. Finally, let's talk
about balanced builds, metagames, and PvP options.
Steven has said that the game will have micro-Metas based on the PvE experience around your node and depending on the dungeons and raids you are facing. However, PvP is a different beast and if there is any class that can chain cc with a high time to kill, it will be sought after. The wiki says that the game will not be balanced around 1v1s. This means that there will definitely be this low time to kill with high CC builds through some avenue that are not being balanced around. Large scale PvP may be somewhat less dependent on specific player builds and more focused on coordination of the groups as a whole, but avoiding balancing 1v1 builds is a mistake. League of Legends does balance very well, most of the time. They rely on data that shows the win rates of every champion and every build, and they hone it all to be as close to 50% as they can get it. This means that you actually have to be better than your opponent at the game mechanics, and not use some cheese cc assassination build. This is why PvP games like Chess and Esports titles are known to be the best PvP games, they are balanced. I expect Intrepid to follow their word and not even try at balancing the builds and this will leave outliers that are known to dominate PvP in all of its forms. If effort is not put into balance in the beta test periods with open PvP arenas and data collected on win rates, most player builds will tend towards the same solutions that have disproportionately high win rates. This means that your player options are further constrained than having PvE be based around the holy trinity alone. It means you are just looking to build a character that fits into the PvE trinity and is unbalanced in 1v1 scenarios.
Its old design, and its bad design as far as the player options go. The social systems are what intrepid is good at and they are hiring people who are also good at that, but they really should contract with some people from Esports games (Riot Balance Team) for PvP and Co-op games (Larian Studios encounter design) for PvE to find ways to allow players to play the character they want to play instead of following meta-build guides that will inevitably produce the best results with these outdated design philosophies.
