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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
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The base stat system seems fundamentally broken. Can we get a comment on this?
SmileGurney
Member, Alpha Two
This has proven with Phase1 rare quality weapons damage scaling and in Phase2 damage base stat stacking. I really disliked the player power gap these issues create, however in my opinion the Phase1 weapon rarity "fix" made many stats on weapon and armour make little sense.
Can we know what is your position on this issue, do you perceive this as unintended? If so, what's the plan to address this in what timescale?
I understand this isn't part of the main development cycle, but combat balance seems to be one of the main reasons behind player retention issues in our group of misfits. Just after the state of content and natural player burnout.
Now, I bet there are different opinions in the community regarding this issue, I know that Intrepid doesn't want "solutions", but how would you like as a player would like to see this issue addressed, IF at all? I like the idea from Elden Ring with soft/hard stat caps. Would you want this addressed at all? I would imagine some people like the idea of having a massive stat advantage over other players.
Can we know what is your position on this issue, do you perceive this as unintended? If so, what's the plan to address this in what timescale?
I understand this isn't part of the main development cycle, but combat balance seems to be one of the main reasons behind player retention issues in our group of misfits. Just after the state of content and natural player burnout.
Now, I bet there are different opinions in the community regarding this issue, I know that Intrepid doesn't want "solutions", but how would you like as a player would like to see this issue addressed, IF at all? I like the idea from Elden Ring with soft/hard stat caps. Would you want this addressed at all? I would imagine some people like the idea of having a massive stat advantage over other players.
My lungs taste the air of Time,
Blown past falling sands…
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Semantics aside I don't know what you mean. The str, dex, dam, physical, magical power stats? I am curious what you mean if you could explain it a bit more, maybe an example.
The game plays more like a beat em up than an RPG in this respect. It's just simple, not as simple as "gear levels" but not much more than a step away from that. I assume this is by design to make it easier to balance since it's a very pvp focused. But really the character progression and player agency of the character as it grows is really shallow.
I don't really want to get into the whole argument how this destroys the RPG aspect of the game, so you barely utilise your class kit really, prevents any discussion of balance between existing archetypes and basically results in pvp encounters which often end with kills which need 1 or 2 good hits.
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One of my very first impressions of the game was surprise at how much damaged players start doing so quickly.
On my level 13 fighter I’ve Crit for almost 1k.
That just doesn’t seems necessary and I don’t know why the game is designed like that.
I feel like they should scale damage pretty much as close to classic wow as you can get and that would solve a lot of issues.
Agree, if they change the meta, players will just find something else, however the " what are we actually testing" comment comes up alot, I would guess they are just gathering data behind the scenes, but my main issue is I have reported countless bugs, and things that I have been reporting since the start of p1 are still in the game and broken, so much so that I don't even take the time to /bug anymore due to it feeling like feedback for the most part is just ignored
I'm not even talking about archetype/class balance, I'm talking about the fundamentals. Stacking through gear, and enchanting base character stats such as strength, intelligence and dexterity (what you stack depends on the class) results in a massive increase to damage output. The remaining stats, especially the defensive kind, and armour don't make such impact. This results in an extremely low time to kill (TTK), and people (whatever geared or not) dying in 1-2-3 hits in many cases, and very few skill being used. This gives people little to no time to react, whatever to retreat, dodge away or to get healed. Classes like tanks and fighters suffer the most as a result, as tanks feel like they are made out of paper atm, and fighters have to build up their class resource and close the gap to become a threat. On other hand, classes like mage rule supreme, as they have a lot of high damage ranged abilities with relatively short cooldowns and cast time. I would also bet that the current damage output of players / TTK prevent Intrepid from seeing the real picture around the current archetype balance, as engagements end really fast and mostly at range.
The current stat meta, and the state of the nodes on all servers, also result high level gear (lvl 20) and associated POIs fairly irrelevant as until recently there was no way to enchant that gear. You can currently obtain grey lvl 20 enchanting scrolls from the commission rewards, but the cost is really high (500 or so commission tokens?). Also stacking stats make gear set bonuses irrelevant as you always want gear pieces with your class damage stats. In general impact of enchanting feels too strong. I personally also feel that 20 levels of enchanting, the whole RNG build into system, the cost is simply too much. I would also rather see enchanting providing you with different gear build options instead of raw power. So ability to change stats provided by the gear, including base stats, but also stuff like evasion, lifesteal, block chance etc. All should be counter-balanced by soft and hard-caps.
Intrepid knows the combat balance matters even at this stage. Quite a few patch notes so far included adjustments to both. My point is that they should address the fundamentals before they can focus on class balance. The combat experience on a <300 phy/magic power character and 400-500 is like playing 2 different games, and only one makes sense in the context of an MMORPG title, especially one where mass pvp, or even small scale, is a corner stone of so many game systems. Archetype mechanics and skills often don't have to be and in the case of lets say tank or fighter, cannot be, really utilised in the current state of combat.
Combat was one of the few enjoyable game systems so far, especially after the 25 lvl rush has finished. Everything else is half broken, or in pure placeholder state. Now even combat makes little sense.
I want those people who don't participate in the power rat race to feel like they can do something in combat or we will bleed even more playtesters. Also I want people who are geared, actually utilise their skills and react to what is happening on the screen, so its less about who shot first.
Then there is the whole matter of weapon auto-attacks and finishers which are supposed to matter in combat, and how certain classes cannot do much or are too powerful with the current combat power "meta".
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Or are you not actually talking about access to stats as a whole, but specifically access to damage stats as opposed to defensive stats, and complaining that the latter ones are less effective to stack?
Weird take. One because it has been selected; we've had clear promises and demonstrations on TTK in the past few years, and they have been very consistent.
Two, because even IF there are classes that can one- or two-shot opponents, this is a Trinity fantasy MMO. So if your melee can blink at my archer and insta-kill him, then as a consequence your health and armour should be so low that my tank can pop you in three to four hits in return.
With sufficiently punishing specialisation these sort of dynamics can be fine, but we just don't usually see the consequences of that specialisation in the other direction.
I really want Ashes to build pvp around that player skill aspect: understanding of class skillsets, good personal and group coordination, positioning, group communication, bigger and smaller strategies etc. Stuff like people 's gear score should be always secondary, and mainly provide them with NEW ways to play their chosen class, be that evasion based tanks, tanky fighters with a lot of block/constitution, mages build into full on lifesteal monsters etc.
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Server performance, client performance, and looking at if the systems work at a fundamental level ie I put a put in the talent tree it gives me said skill and the skill does what the tooltip says. The changes to the stat system could come within a few months but there's really no point to do that as the entire system has to still be built for moving up to level 50. Using dev time to fix an issue now is a waste as they will have to spend additional time fixing it when all the 50 stuff is complete.
I would expect major changes to the stat system to come as all the archetypes and secondary classes come online.
So they need 2 change the system from +1 to all stats to like % gain instead per enchant lets say 20% gain this will maintain gear balanced since your increasing all stats uniformaly from there non enchanted state across the board reducing power of stats and increasing secondary stat powers since there a higher number on gear so your get more of a gain by % increase.
For examples let used a piece with these stats
Base gear...................... current enchant system +5..........0% gain per +1 at +5
Str + 1...........................................6 str...........................................+2 str
Crit chance + 5...................10 crit chance ............................10 crit chance
Power rating + 15.............20 power rating.............................30 power rating
This change would maintain the balance gear has at +0 enchants aswell as making secondary stats more valuable on gear atm all gear without primary stats are useless and not an option to use will makes like 80% of gear in the game useless and this would fix that