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.
Comments
Never been more excited for a higher TTK, more builds, more variation, higher skill ceiling and requires higher strategical and tactical acumen on all fronts.
Completely delusional. PvP has been reduced to deathballs baiting the other deathball and wiping them in one AoE root/stun. Again, you would have known that if you played the game.
Take a break from posting on the forums to update your client and see for yourself instead of waiting for P3.
But from all the feedback I've seen so far, this has been literally what I've wanted from the game. Even your description to Solvryn here supports that.
Yes, defense and heal abilities should be made better, but it's way easier to made them better from this point, rather than from P2's point of "you die in 1.5 hit".
That was literally what it was before lol. That may still be the case on a larger scale (which is why we need to keep increasing TTK), but on a smaller scale and party vs party, that's not even close to true anymore. And even if some low skill players can't spot the difference or think no one dies now unless players run out of mana, I'm sure the devs will be able to spot the difference and filter the feedback appropriately.
Hopefully, we end up with stronger defensive abilities, interrupts, buffed defensives and counter-offensive debuffs to increase the skill ceiling even further.
You mean all the things they could and should have done instead of scrambling gear stats and making mobs unkillable. You are this close to understanding why the patch is so hated.
None of the defensive and the like stuff that we had mattered before, and adding more wouldn't make a lick of difference without increasing the base TTK. Healing was already strong enough to get players from 1 HP to max health in one ability, you thinking adding stronger healing or shields or anything would make a difference is pure cope.
Also, the game is not a ranked lobby game. Gear disparities exist, players get ganked, stealth, camouflage, open world PVP. Making a game that rely on microsecond reactions when you are not expecting to be hit for fights to last longer than a second is making a dead game
Deathballs? There's barely anyone playing the alpha and TTK was one of the biggest complaints, try not to be hyperbolic.
TTK has been studied and there's a curve to where TTK is too low or too high, we've been currently on the low side. It has to be raised-in order to achieve waterfall stat balancing and to implement 64 varied playstyles. Its no ones fault that low TTK cultists have zero PvP acumen but their own, choosing over-powering their enemies instead being a better strategist and tactician.
All the feedback and explanation of the current balancing say that this now only exists when several people assist-shoot a single target, which is EXACTLY what I've always wanted from the game.
My preferred balance is "8 party members in full legendary should not be able to one-shot a dude in grey gear of the same tier, given that those 8 players are one of each archetype". And then the balancing can go up from there, with heals, deeper mana gameplay, defensive abiltiies from tanks, counter-healing effects, growing dots, etc etc.
All yall "I want pvp to be one-shots cause I'll just grind gear and do nothing else" people can leave now
I swear if I see another casual parroting "muh low TTK" I'm gonna flip. The reason TTK was low is not due to people running around with 500 power rating, it's due to the fact that you can ignore SIXTY F-ING PERCENT of enemy mitigation just by leveling a weapon to 25.
Cleric has a grand total of 2 abilities capable of doing that, both are single target, have long casting times and cooldowns while enemy skills do not. Also wounds are a thing, especially in mass PvP. I guess you forgot about tank but I don't blame you. Refer to paragraph 1.
Okay, and? You seem to be under the impression that I am vouching for arena shooter gameplay in Ashes while I am trying to bring attention to the fact that defensive builds weren't worth squat. Ranger casually hitting a mage with a point blank Bear Mark + Snipe for 4217 damage is entirely justified because it's a crit, the mage has shit for defenses and can vaporize the ranger in the time it takes him to complete his sniping animation. What isn't okay is that same ranger hitting a tank for close to 4k damage without changing his build. You don't get to complain about scissors winning when rock is missing by design. Unless of course you are arguing in bad faith and I have been wasting keystrokes all along.
We get it, you really like to say acumen. Doesn't make your point valid when they could have nerfed people above 400 power (or 300 if you feel really carebear-y) instead of nerfing everyone. 0.8.0 apologists will do literally anything instead of admitting the heavy-handed gear changes were pointless and could have been replaced with soft caps based on character level.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I think I've wasted enough time explaining color theory to the blind. Have a good one.
Yeah, and in any content higher than 20v20 he died before he could use the second lol. Wounds did absolutely nothing because good healers were healing for over 8K and before you could do 2 stacks of wounds you were dead lol
bear mark + snipe crit = 4217 LMAO, our vines were critting that. Bear mark + snipe crit were hitting over 8K. You can still kill clerics with a snipe crit + power shot crit out of camo, by the way. No player should be dying in less than 6 seconds unless he is afk or they just came out of the initial portal, and you're max level camping the gate.
This is also Hilarious. They adjusted the power curve to reduce the power creep, nerfed healers, otherwise nobody would die as they were healing over 8K in one spell, and buffed the survivability of tanks. People who ask for a 50% damage reduction of damage in PVP are completely clueless.
The entire system was broken before. No one cared about anything other than power, strength gave both power and penetration and the str to power ratio was completely broken, making players build for a base stat, getting a shit ton of power and penetration and then enchanting that and making it even worse.
As of this patch:
1. Other stats besides power are valuable and build diversity increased. Players need to either go for pen or dex asides from str and power if they want to have high penetration and bust armor.
2. Tanks are now tanks.
3. TTK is longer, giving players a chance to react, defensive abilities still being important, and debuffs like wounds now worth using and even important (at least for smaller scale, we need to increase even further base survivability). Not to mention, it's more fun when you actually use half your spells in battle rather than jumping, pressing 1 or 2 buttons, and killing/dying.
4. Power creep has been reduced, and enchanting has been properly set up to be the end-game progression system that it should be, with big efforts for small gains.
So yes, this patch has been a godsend and absolutely in the right direction. I think they should keep going that direction, improving base survivability even for DPS and increasing defensive abilities power and availability, while increasing the strength of the debuffs used to counter those defensives to balance it.
Ive seen healing touch heal for 17k dont think any amount of wound gonna do a whole lot there, yeah it melee heal but they do have the wings of salvation to fix that
cleric also have cleanse that removed the debuffs too sooo there that aswell
This needs to be a thing for Phase 3. There is no reason why gear should from mobs, even from vendors in the cities.
Except weapon trees exist so you are never pressed to build for penetration unless you are exclusively dealing with raids of mitigation capped tanks.
Tanks are building piles of of HP because mitigation is still useless, see paragraph 1.
Cool story, have you actually played since the patch came out though?
Everything that comes out of your mouth undermines stat revamp apologists so please don't stop posting.
Even if we ignore the fact that 17k from healing touch is mathematically impossible, you would be blowing your sole mobility/CC break spell to move to the front line and get immediately focused like any other healer.
As for removing wounds, it takes the enemy a single rotation to apply 8 wound stacks while it takes you about a second to purify 3 of them.
Pretty much the only people making excuses for this update are those who don't play the game or only participate in 1v1s and 2v2s which are completely irrelevant to the meat and potatoes of Ashes like GvG and raiding.
me see big numbers, me smart. lol
That 200 extra magical power rating can be anywhere from like 4 to 1 increase in magical power, depending on how much power you currently have lol. So yeah craaaaazy power creep mate. totally bigger than what we had before. Players with 600 power would have been deleted by that legendary power increase in that ring lol.
I've played, I know the mitigation formulae, I know the DR formulae, I have tested mitigation, and it is working as intended. Weapon trees only give penetration to weapon attacks outside of the perks, not abilities, and the penetration perk can only be chosen once now. Currently, there is a bug in which if you already have more of the penetration perks, you keep them, but once you change it or reset it, you can no longer pick more than one of each perk, so that only accounts for 2.5% penetration.
Tanks are building HP because mitigation is easily obtained for them from other means, like base stats, heavy gear, and tank abilities like grit and fortify. Any tank that is not reaching 70% mitigation is completely clueless.
Try not to explain statistics or waterfall stats too much to the kids they'll get confused.
you know they changed weapon tree right??? reset it and try stacking penetration good luck doing that
Ok, now I know you're trolling.
Ok now I have to ask because the back-and-forth is starting to be hard to track...
Is this a situation where something got implemented in a way that a person would logically expect to be better when they read about it, but doesn't do what it says it does?
I actually don't play enough for various reasons but I still care, so...
But it’s not. It’s just become a sustain battle with weird replenish breaks. If you hold your spells and just pick at them as they blow mana you can just roll over them when they hit OOM. Which they could just reduce mana cost of many spells to combat that. Current PvP state is funky.
But even letting your enemy run out of mana, while you're still fine is an indicator that your pvp skill is higher than theirs, because they allowed this to happen.
Unfortunately your response doesn't really imply that the previous quote is not true because of how competitive players interact with games.
Basically all you actually said in that person's perspective is "I/most people aren't good enough to kill by any other method than making people run out of Mana".
We'd need thousands of hours of data to get anything other than 'feelings' from the general playerbase, unless Intrepid specifically sets up prebuilt loadouts for PvP testing.
I mean, there are definitely a few balance passes and meta adjustments to be had. Players were used to smashing their heads on the keyboard and getting a kill, so now, from the fights I've seen, people are not yet accustomed to proper coordination and use of all the tools at their disposal.
The only real issue I've noticed is that mana sustain is indeed not keeping up with the longer fights. Especially in situations where you're in a fight with players that keep ressing and coming back, not giving the other players time to rest. IMO they should buff Bard's ability to regen players' mana. Pots are now useful too, ~500 mana for a common mana potion is something that is now valuable.
From the fights I had, I think simply focusing damage is enough to kill a DPS in the highest TTK in the game (8v8), but it needs to be very precise coordination to blow up a person like that. Other tactics are stacking debuffs on the target (wounds, shaken, volatile, mark from ranger, etc) and with all that a DPS can die even without precise timing on damage. You can also use the tank's grapple + wall along with ranger vines and other abilities to separate the other group and get a quick kill. Rogues can also mana drain clerics, allowing for a kill opportunity. For killing tanks, stacking penetration is a good solution. Using your defensives and allowing the enemy to use their burst and take it, and then use that window of opportunity of low mana/no cooldowns to strike sounds like a good alternative too.
This is to say that we now have plenty of different ways to eliminate a target, all of them requiring either very precise coordination or proper teamplay, unlike before, which revolved solely around going forward and doing damage.
If the adjusted meta results in truly never-ending battles, we can always increase debuffs strength to counter healing/defensives more effectively and give players more tools to counter defensive power instead of nerfing the base survivability of players and going back to the low skill ceiling, low ttk gameplay we had before.
reset my weapon tree the other day shortbows and swords cant stack the same bonuses anymore they grey out when there slotted in one spot already and wont let you put it in. So you can only take one of each. im assuming other weapon tree are the same