Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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 Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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
Hell, there's an entire stat sheet worth of things that you could work with and build around. Why limit yourself just to 1 pair of stats?
And on the pvp side of things the person with more progression would still have an advantage, because they'd have the access to more tools, but they wouldn't simply have an "I win" button (though obviously skill power would still probably be higher, so there's still that).
We've discussed this before. You're used to a muuuuuch faster pace of gear volume increase. So far there's 15 tiers from 0 to 50. In order for this to become hundreds, the numbers would have to be inflated to all fuck. I've always been against that.
If two rogues of the same lvl and wearing the exact same gear can kill each other in 3 seconds - ya ain't changing much there if you change their gear (well, you'll always change it for the worse).
But if that same situation has them at 15-20s of TTK - now gear change can be looked at and balanced, because you have more space to balance in.
Horizontal progression doesn't keep people in games like Ashes.
When your greatest threat is ither players, the focus of your time and effort is in getting better in relation to other players.
Since we are talking about gear upgrading from level one to level 50, and then a perpetual gear mountain after that, the number of upgrades alluded to in my above post is - if anything - low.
It is a lower number than Archeage would have had with the above taken in to account, and there are more lower level gear upgrades with what we see of the game so far than Archeage had - so expect more.
Keep in mind, as I have said a few times, gearing in Ashes is going to be more like Archeage than L2. If anything, Archeage will be more of a mid-point between where Ashes looks like it is heading gear wise and where you talk about L2 being.
If the same was applied across the weapon types as well - the amount of build combos would be crazy.
Then it'll just be a yet another thing I dislike in the game. At least this particular part is nowhere near as egregious as the fucking lawless bs, so I can live with it.
Sounds quite vertical to me.
The point is, players will decide if an avenue of progression is worth it or not based on the impact it has when they are fighting their greatest threat - other players. It doesn't really matter what form this takes, because if one player is significantly further along on this progression than the person they are fighting, it will be one sided.
And then if you additionally have buffs/items that can add that elemental attribute to the weapon/character - you can close the gap between the weapons or make it even bigger if you stack attributes together. While defenders could try and address your elemental power with different resists.
The underlying power of the weapons doesn't change, but their overall power can be higher or lower. And people are free to go for whichever weapon they think is the best, be it due to some sort of meta or due to their own preference in a build.
And this progression could stlll come from character stats, skill lvls, augment investment, etc.
One-sidedness could be averaged out with builds and a tighter scaling on gear. It just never will be, for the exact reason you pointed out:
[quote="Noaani;c-509460"Horizontal progression doesn't keep people in games like Ashes.[/quote]
People want to dominate, so they'll refuse to play a game where domination can't be accessed by simply grinding harder.
We don't have any difference in a lot of the choices available. Like a spear doesn't do pierce damage it still just does straight damage. The only thing that changes between weapons is the skill tree's which are pretty copy paste between each other. I just think you lose a lot in the current available choice because of this.
As for vertical progression They made this whole convoluted Tier and Grade system but don't use it terribly effectively. Here's a chart someone made of a single weapon type's power scale-
https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/1nfzvcb/i_wanted_to_get_a_better_feel_for_power_break/
They essentially made it a pretty standard graph that higher grade is mostly better, within grade the better the Tier is better and within tier rarity is better. Paired with the difficulty difference within tiers being worse than grade difficulty the whole balance is off.
They could use the current system to a lot better effect but it is so barebones it has no real impact right now.
Oh, I fully understand the notion of the system you are talking about, my point is that it has no potential positive outcome for the player complaining about people have better gear than them.
If I have better gear than you have (proverbial you, not you specifically) at this specific point in this specific alpha test, it is because I am able to farm gear better than you. This could be that I spend more time in gsme than you, or thar I spend ky time.more efficient than you. It really doesn't matter - other than to understand that I am getting good gear faster than you.
If I was not getting that good gear faster than you, the notion that I am beating you i PvP due to my gear falls apart very quickly.
So, if there then becomes an option to have heat and cold variations, you should assume that I am then getting them faster than you as well. If I get a heat weapon and you do not get heat defense, then I am dealing more damage to you. However, by the time you get a cold weapon, the assumption should be (due to me getting gear faster than you) that I have cold defense.
You could say that people can swap and change their different gear to find a weakness in the opponent - but this then literally just becomes a battle of who has the most variety of gear. the person able to farm gear faster will win that battle every time.
It could, but that wouldn't prevent the issue people are complaining about, it would just become another factor.
People need an avenue by which to progress their character - to make them better at fighting against other player characters. Some people will be further along in this progression than others, and a number of those that are less far along will always complain that progression shouldn't be a substitute for skill.
It *really* doesn't matter what form that progression takes.
Give a level 1 some level 10 gear and see how fast they level compared to a level with no gear. And throw in a level 1 with no gear being followed by a level 25 cleric. I'd be carious to see who leveled faster assuming the opertunity to kill an equal amount of mobs. The start of A2 I passed some level 10 gear to a level 1 and it was night and day different. Completely throwing the progression pace off. Not saying this shouldn't exist, but it should have some restrictions and limitations on what items can be given over, beyond just level requirements.
The point is to create less gear in the economy to give more value to crafters. The BOE can still be broken down or sold to be broken down. You can still help your friend, it'll just take some effort. You can still pass none BOE items.
True, this will help if enough is put into it and if the value of OE is worth the effort and cost. I think this could help some, but still not a silver bullet to the gear saturation issue.
What do you expect the catchup mechanics to be, say, 6 months into the game's release? Or do you want all newbies to be behind the oldtimers by several months at all times? Cause imo hand-me-downs are just a natural catchup mechanism, w/o having to add some quests that boost you through lvls.
In a way it shows the progress of the world. Cause in a world where an excavator exists, why dig a massive whole with a shovel if you have a machine for it. And it'd be even stupidier to dig that whole with a shovel when literally everyone else around you is using an excavator.
And this logic is exactly the reason for me always pushing guild-based mentorship programs, so that it's not just "I have a high lvl friend, so I get to boost through lvls", but instead a "I'm a newbie and guilds want me so fucking bad that they're fighting over me" type of deal. I've seen this in practice in L2, which is exactly why I think it can work in Ashes.