Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
LOVE the PVX potential in this game
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
Well i figure that I spend enough time bitching about this game I might as well offset that with some things I LOVE about this game.
For example, the PVX fighting over 8 man grind spots. This is probably my favourite activity in the whole game. The first few weeks of this wipe I spent most of my time doing 8 man grind spots with teams and mob training onto other groups to get them out of our spots. Using red spots on the ground, golem aoe cones, melee cleave monsters against other teams while trying to dodge them yourselves and still getting top DPS on the monsters for the credit was soooo much fun!
Would be great to see this style of play improved, incentivized and have good options in the mid/late game. It felt like that gameplay had a time window in the beginning and outside the time window it stopped making sense. For the past month I spent most of my time on caravans, gathering, travelling, or trading. Which is fine for some of the gameplay, but it just felt like my time spent ratio of "PVX" to "other" was too low.
Perhaps things like wars could introduce PVX objectives with groups of mobs designed for these kinda of fights, getting kill credit on the monsters gives war score, etc. Some clever devs could create some interesting encounters suitable for different level ranges so that more people can contribute during these events.
For example, the PVX fighting over 8 man grind spots. This is probably my favourite activity in the whole game. The first few weeks of this wipe I spent most of my time doing 8 man grind spots with teams and mob training onto other groups to get them out of our spots. Using red spots on the ground, golem aoe cones, melee cleave monsters against other teams while trying to dodge them yourselves and still getting top DPS on the monsters for the credit was soooo much fun!
Would be great to see this style of play improved, incentivized and have good options in the mid/late game. It felt like that gameplay had a time window in the beginning and outside the time window it stopped making sense. For the past month I spent most of my time on caravans, gathering, travelling, or trading. Which is fine for some of the gameplay, but it just felt like my time spent ratio of "PVX" to "other" was too low.
Perhaps things like wars could introduce PVX objectives with groups of mobs designed for these kinda of fights, getting kill credit on the monsters gives war score, etc. Some clever devs could create some interesting encounters suitable for different level ranges so that more people can contribute during these events.
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Comments
Please please Intrepid don't let the 'standard' gameplay at least slip in the direction of pleasing the bored PvP whiners either (e.g. making all Field/World boss areas automatically PvP zones).
I know player incentives are difficult, but if you need my group to help 'even out the complaining', you have my (wif'e's) axe, etc.
And I fully agree with Azherae's plea to not make zones "lawless". It was a dumb idea with the seas, it was a dumb idea with the current A2, and it'll be an endlessly dumber idea for the full release.
Figure out mob AI, figure out player abilities, figure out ttk, figure out PK/BH balancing, figure out proper node/guild wars - and you'll have yourself a perfect PvX world. And I know that all of those figures and outs are far from easy, but that's just the reality of trying to make this kind of game and succeeding at it.
We all followed this game exactly because yall said you'd at least try to succeed.
To solve both the 'player mob power gap' and 'PvX battle situation' the answer is not to introduce more danger or more enemies.
Give mobs more strong area debuffs/auras and strongish self-buffs. Mechanically this is the easiest form possible. Even better if the buff/debuff can be dispelled but not too often.
Solves:
1) Players stacking up way too many mobs at once
2) Solo DPS trying to leech or easily swipe mobs (because they lack dispel)
3) Disruptive assassins being able to easily kill off party members (they enter the aura and lose damage, the main party can cleanse it)
4) Certain TTK issues (even if you pull a debuff Aura onto another group, all you've done is 'created a PvP zone where the TTK is higher')
The reason I don't want Field Bosses to be FFA PvP though, is because bored PvP players will absolutely just gatekeep the boss just so they can PvP, often punching down. This is 'fine' in something like Throne and Liberty where you can just get your guild and go clear the instance instead, but for an example/reminder of what the common/average PvP-flow ends up being like...
"Players found it too difficult to kill the bosses in the allotted time(50m) while also fighting for the boss in the 36v36 (minimum) instance, so we had to weaken the bosses and then add a whole DoT debuff to them."
Note that we are talking about bosses that in some cases can be beaten with 6 people working together within the same timeframe. Yes. Six.
72 competing people sometimes can't down a boss that can be killed cooperatively by 6-12, so they had to patch the bosses so they die on their own (technically their health ticks down until it hits 10%).
This would be, for example, why TL would absolutely not want to introduce the easy answer (buffs and debuffs) to most bosses. Because PvP players will realize that they aren't dying or killing, focus on the PvP, and the boss would go back to 'not dying' in the time limit.
Honestly, being MPKed at King Behemoth was probably more fun.
Yeah, this will most likely always happen with any time-limited encounter.
And here my bias wins out against an objectively better approach. I loved suuuuper long fights over bosses. Either the fully stronger side wins (politics included), or the more resilient and free-time-having one does. And I know that this kind of resolution to the situation is bad for pretty much everyone else, especially when you consider that most of the time those 2 groups are the same damn group
And this is also why I've been suggesting mob-control tools. Let the players use the powerful boss to win out against the enemy. And I know that designing this kind of feature in anywhere near "balanced" way would be real damn hard, but I feel like it'd be a real cool mechanic to have, to truly make the game pvx rather than just "a pvp game with some pve in it".
And my general ideas about respawn points also go towards the endless fights over bosses. If a poorly coordinated group of people can come back to contesting the boss before their opponents manage to clear it - either the respawn point was way too close or the boss is way too fat. But considering that boss fatness is usually related to its encounter mechanics/difficulty, I lean towards respawn points.
Also, there's of course the "cage" (semi-instanced) mechanic that simply separates the e from the p, after one group get a decisive victory within the cage. I've always been a proponent of "pvp should be for the rights to content and not for its results" (damn you player loot), so this would be the basic classic resolution to most of my problems, even if definitely not the best or most preferred.
100% agree, the PvX design is what really sets Ashes apart.
I love how your choices as a PvE player can still affect the PvP world, whether it’s through gathering rare materials, advancing a node, or helping defend a caravan. And the other way around too, PvPers will depend on a strong PvE economy and crafted gear.
It really makes the whole world feel alive and interdependent. No more "choose a lane" like in other MMOs, here, you’re part of something bigger, no matter how you play. That’s the dream.