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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.
Melee Classes Survivability in Group PvP Needs Addressing
SmileGurney
Member, Alpha Two
...and I seem to be unable to find any acknowledgement this issue is being looked at. Based on our experience so far with class and pvp balance, stat stacking, past TTK issues, I'm frankly a bit concerned about the general problems we keep running into at this stage.
The first issue I see in the group setting is that only 3 out of 8 base class archetypes are melee centred, and 1 of those 3 is built around stealth. That means melee users are almost always outnumbered and out kited.
If you ever played MMOs with a decent grasp atm melee - range balance and compare them to Ashes will notice straight away that group pvp plays out differently. The line of contact between opposing groups is really limited, and usually just consists of a tank or few tanks fishing for easy chain pulls. Everyone else is just waiting for someone to get out of position so they can be punished for it, before they rotate and wait for major cooldowns. Coming from something like Return of Reckoning or even GW2 WvW, this feels really weird and undercooked on the fundamental level.
From the competitive pvp perspective it got so bad that any guild interested in pvp is quite likely to refuse you if you want to run a fighter or rogue in large pvp setting.
This isn't healthy for the game, pvp balance or gameplay variety.
Melee class survivability in large group setting seems to be the core issue. For obvious reasons melee classes cannot just be granted flat damage mitigation buffs, as this would negatively affect balance in 1v1, and small group pvp settings.
Potential solutions have been discussed multiple times across different social media channel.
I personally like the most the idea of introduction of passive talents which conditionally increase melee class physical and magic mitigations. This would work as a multiplayer, so basically 1 enemy player would increase mitigations by 5%, but then 5 in certain range around the player would increase it by 5% * x, where x is the number of enemy players in the engagement range (lets say 30 meters). I'm sure a lot of us have seen these ideas in other games, not even necessarily just MMOs. Numbers here are obviously nothing else but placeholders. This stuff should be crunched and balanced by the actual game designers.
Other approach I have liked would be far more time intensive as it would require melee archetypes to get far more ranged based abilities.. So these classes can play more of melee/ranged skirmisher role, but with all this ranged damage pressure I doubt this would be enough by itself.
It's just sad looking at fighters and tanks basically auto-attacking in group fights and waiting for that one perfect opening.
The first issue I see in the group setting is that only 3 out of 8 base class archetypes are melee centred, and 1 of those 3 is built around stealth. That means melee users are almost always outnumbered and out kited.
If you ever played MMOs with a decent grasp atm melee - range balance and compare them to Ashes will notice straight away that group pvp plays out differently. The line of contact between opposing groups is really limited, and usually just consists of a tank or few tanks fishing for easy chain pulls. Everyone else is just waiting for someone to get out of position so they can be punished for it, before they rotate and wait for major cooldowns. Coming from something like Return of Reckoning or even GW2 WvW, this feels really weird and undercooked on the fundamental level.
From the competitive pvp perspective it got so bad that any guild interested in pvp is quite likely to refuse you if you want to run a fighter or rogue in large pvp setting.
This isn't healthy for the game, pvp balance or gameplay variety.
Melee class survivability in large group setting seems to be the core issue. For obvious reasons melee classes cannot just be granted flat damage mitigation buffs, as this would negatively affect balance in 1v1, and small group pvp settings.
Potential solutions have been discussed multiple times across different social media channel.
I personally like the most the idea of introduction of passive talents which conditionally increase melee class physical and magic mitigations. This would work as a multiplayer, so basically 1 enemy player would increase mitigations by 5%, but then 5 in certain range around the player would increase it by 5% * x, where x is the number of enemy players in the engagement range (lets say 30 meters). I'm sure a lot of us have seen these ideas in other games, not even necessarily just MMOs. Numbers here are obviously nothing else but placeholders. This stuff should be crunched and balanced by the actual game designers.
Other approach I have liked would be far more time intensive as it would require melee archetypes to get far more ranged based abilities.. So these classes can play more of melee/ranged skirmisher role, but with all this ranged damage pressure I doubt this would be enough by itself.
It's just sad looking at fighters and tanks basically auto-attacking in group fights and waiting for that one perfect opening.
My lungs taste the air of Time,
Blown past falling sands…
Blown past falling sands…
2
Comments
I've never seen a game that comes even close to having an even spread of its classes.
If there are issues with melee as you are stating (I have no reason to assume there are, or to assume there are not), starting off your post with such a poor comment does not help your case.
Fighter - melee class
Rogue - melee (but stealth based) class
Ranger - ranged class
Mage - ranged class
Bard - ranged class
Cleric - ranged class
Summoner - we dont' know, but as its a pet magic class, its likely going to be another ranged class
That's 8. Which part here is misleading?
Blown past falling sands…
You are missing the fact that there isn't an equal number of players playing each class.
If you want to make comments like You need to be talking about how many of each character type (ranged vs melee, in this csse) is actually being played, not how many options there are for each.
There could be 100 ranged options with 1 player playing each option, and 1 melee option with 100 people playing it. This would be the same amount of melee vs ranged, even though there is only 1% of the melee class options with this hypothetical than there are ranged options.
Since generally players look first at the type of gameplay they want (tank, healer, caster DPS, melee DPS etc) as their primary consideration for selecting a class, the spread of melee vs casters is a reflection of the playerbase.
The annoying thing is that you may well have a valid general notion here, you are just introducing it with a false premise - as opposed to many other posters that post nonsense introduced with a false premise.
first of all: i agree with the OP
second: tanks are generally in mmos a underplayed class. you have a bunch of fighter lovers as well as rogue players but at leats the same amount of players loving their mages and rangers.
then you have the clerics. more played than tanks but less than dps often.
and then we will get summoners. with the leaks and the info i got out of my: why summoner should be a melee archetype, post im certain its similar ranged as mage is.
combining this imaginary numbers leads to more range players than melee. hence the post/concern
third: if you comment on someones post. try to be constructive and not condescendingly. we all want this game to become something great so lets not hurt each other for no reason.
much love
Imagine you have a job where you have a very limited amount of time to scour the forums to find points worth mentioning to the team at Intrepid. You do not have the time to ready every threads OP, let alone every post. With that in mind, you come across a moderately long (more than 3 minute read) OP for a thread that starts off making an obviously false point. You would absolutely be forgiven for just skippng the rest of that post and move on to the next one, knowing that you do not have the time to read them all anyway.
The rest of your post reinforces my point. You are saying different numbers of players will play each base archetype, which is what I am saying. I make no claims as to whether that means more or less melee players, as that is (as I said) a reflection on the playerbase.
However, both of us are saying that the statement in the OP that we are discussing is factually incorrect.
In competitive pvp you see barely fighters/rogues at all. This is very apparent to anyone who takes part in these activities or at least pays attention to the current "meta".
Blown past falling sands…
As the OP says "the line of contact between opposing groups is really limited" meaning, IMO, that melee is not viable so PvP is less interesting than it could be.
I do not mind how many classes are melee or how many people play those classes, but I do know that I have not seen a guild or group use melee often or effectively. Is it at all possible? I suspect not.
PEW PEW for the yawn.
Well that is clearly an issue of how many melee vs how many ranged classes there are in the games design!
I hope you understand how little sense that actually makes.
In a competitive PvP setting, the meta can and will change due to something as minor as the addition of one item, or it will change based on someone coming up with a tactic or counter-tactic that requires a different mix of classes. This is just how it is in this genre.
I am not saying there isn't an issue with melee in the game right now, I am saying (and have only said) that the notion of there being fewer melee classes vs ranged classes is nothing at all to do with it.
That is the false premise, and you essentially opened the thread up with it.
They are here to "win", not here to test.
The notion of them trying to exclude their guilds testing of a class that they themselves consider broken in an alpha test is disgusting. Again, they should be removed from the alpha test.
The class ratio comment is a side observation, and a possible source of extra pressure on melee users, beside their clear survivability issues in group pvp content. I have nothing else to say on this subject. I'm happy for you to disagree.
Blown past falling sands…
If it was a side observation, why did you specifically state it first?
Take a look at Archeage. Every character was able to be any class, yet ranged was still significantly more common. That is just what people want to play in a PvP setting.
If there are issues with melee survivability, that is its own issue. It has nothing to do with how many players are playing ranged vs melee, and nothing to do with how many ranged vs melee classes there are. Getting these things conflated does no one any favors, makes any feedback we may have harder for Intrepid to understand (if they even find it), and makes discussion on it harder as people that know what they are talking about need to ignore factors that are unimportant yet others think matter.
Everything you said here are some of the big reasons I avoid PvP in MMOs most the time. Most MMOs are PvE first than PvP second. Ashes seems to be shaping up as PvP first PvE second. Ignoring the different types of players and just focusing on the abilities, skills, and load outs they use they are much different. A Tanks role is to hold threat and soak damage. Well there's no threat in PvP. They could make taunt work on players, which would a fair use for it. Get the grapple working well. But even that wouldn't be enough for a Tank to be relevant in PvP. Popping fears or shouts, staying in the group to stun rogues, ect, is really the most they can. Really in PvP a tank takes on a support role. The MVPs are the dps and the healers in PvP. And maybe it should be that way. Also tanks could wear light armor to protect against mages if the other group is heavy mage, or switch to medium. I don't really like the armor setup in Ashes. Why is light armor better protection against magic? It makes no sense... Either way you're making yourself weak against something else. Warriors have the same issue as tanks but with the ability to do more damage.
I don't like the idea of giving melee classes more range abilities, I think that's a cheap way out. I'd argue a better solution would be enhancing the skills from the tree to have different affects on players than on mobs. This helps so you're respecing for PvE to PvP to PvE all the time for one. And secondly you can adjust the skill as needed to balance either PvE or PvP without throwing the balance of the other off. PvP and PvE gameplay is just so different.