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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about 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.
Raids, Dungeons, Release Dates. Etc
LegendKillerOne
Member
So been keeping an eye on this game via email for a while now but am I am not part of beta or anything. I wanted to see what the plans where for end game raids, dungeons, etc? I am so tired of WoW and having to run keys to gear up and the gear from crafting being worthless. Cant take it anymore. Any insight on this?
Also do we have an actual ETA on release date so I can be there on day 1
Also do we have an actual ETA on release date so I can be there on day 1
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We know we will have raids and dungeons, most of which will be open world. Crafters are capable of making the best gear in the game but it will require materials from high level pve content.
No release date yet.
Another thing I'd love to introduce you to is the node system of Ashes of Creation. This is one of the central focuses of player endgame and progression. The server and world of Verra is living, much like a character. This means it'll constantly be changing and evolving. The content you do throughout your time playing the game will in turn also be changing and evolving. This means players will be able to unlock different dungeons, raids, and world bosses depending on how they interact with each other and with their environments! You can read more about nodes here
One last thing - The dungeons and raids in Ashes of Creation work a bit differently. 80%~ of them are open-world and 20%~ will be instanced. This means PvP will be a factor in most dungeon and raid content
Please feel free to ask any more questions about endgame or how the game works compared to other MMOs and myself and the community will do our best to explain ^_^
Digs is slang for verbal roasts in my area. I wonder what came first, dygz or digs lol.
I'm assuming you are just meme'ing at this point. However, on the off chance you are not, or on the off chance that someone else would read your drivel and believe you;
Your original assertion that Ashes will not have an end game was always incorrect. It was based off Jeff answering a question that used WoW's end game as a framing device (specifically about content becoming stale, iirc), and Jeff started off his answer by saying that Ashes will not have an end game in that style. He never said Ashes will not have an end game - the end, he said Ashes will not have an end game in that style.
He followed the above up by saying that because Ashes content will change, the end game content will not become stale.
However, even if we assume the above is incorrect, it is now old information and we have newer information that Ashes will indeed have an end game (source for that to be found here...) With this new information (assuming you still want to hold on to the notion that your old information was true - which it never was), when Intrepid say "here is information on what we intend end game content in Ashes to look like", surely even you can't then say "Ashes won't have an end game" and not just be doing it for the memes.
Inb4 the inevitable "wait and see" comment.
And yes, there will be an end game. There invariably is. Question is whether or not it'll be interesting enough to keep people playing.
Instanced PvE content just isn’t going to be an emphasis in Ashes, @Bonfield.
The earlier you prepare yourself not to be let down, the better you’ll be in the long run.
Fighting other players for content gets pretty boring, pretty fast. The greater the disparity between the sides fighting - which is a state that is inevitable - the faster it gets boring. On the bright side, the greater that disparity, the shorter the time span is until one side just doesn't bother to show up any more.
When this happens, you are left with sub-standard mobs to fight against, with no opposition to challenge you.
Basically, with open world mobs, if you and your guild are actually good, you end up having a totally shit time playing the game.
I've also pvped people for 12 years and it never got boring. The only reason I stopped playing Lineage 2 was because the class design went to shit in the later updates so I had to play the older versions, which at that time scale does indeed become boring because there's literally nothing new when you know the game from A to Z and you play with the same people over and over again.
PvE, when done right, is far more of a challenge than PvP could ever be.
I've had mobs in PvE that I have pulled literally 2,500 times and only had a small handful of kills with. I've played games where some mobs were literally not killed in the content cycle at all.
Yet in PvP (1v1 PvP at least) there is always a winner.
PvP is absolutely better than shit PvE. You'll never hear me say it isn't. However, even the best PvP doesn't hold a candle to the best PvE.
And I'm glad that you find fighting the same mobs for 2500 times w/o killing them, but to me it's way more interesting to fight people where I never know whether I can win or not. Your example just shows that there's mobs that are too ez and you know you gonna kill w/o a problem and then there's mobs that require you to increase your skill by so much that they might as well be impossible to kill.
And yet both of those skill bars won't move (unless you add some randomness to each mob), while a human enemy might become stronger themselves while you try to catch up to them.
I hope there's enough content for both sides of the preference spectrum, but to me mobs will never be interesting.
But there are also other players that are too "ez" and you know you are going to win.
The thing is, in PvP, you are ignoring that fact and only talking about the parts of it that you like. If you were honest with yourself, you would see that in this regard, PvE and PvP are literally identical - both have times where you know you are going to win, and times when you do not know if you are going to win or not.
That said, if you spent 12 years playing L2 - you haven't seen any PvE content in that time that is any more than base level trash in an MMO with actual PvE. The game isn't exactly known for it's PvE - as I am sure you will agree.
You could say that it's the same with mobs, but if at max lvl you still have mobs that you can easily beat - that's an even worse case than I thought. And I'm not talking about lvl20 mobs that you can destroy at lvl50. I'm talking about a thin dumb AI that you almost oneshot.
Oh most definitely, L2's mobs are pretty much non-existent. But I've also played Terraria with its bosses, Elden Ring with its mobs and have seen a ton of videos about WoW's and FF14's raids. And all of those things are just scripted fights where the only thing you need to learn is the pattern and the timing. Is that difficult? Yes, I'd assume top lvl raids are quite intricate (that is if you don't look at WoW and its fucking addons that tell you what to do). Is that still boring to me because it's the same shit over and over until I just learn it? Also yes.
When I do raid mobs that are in the same tier as me, I never know whether I will win or not.
First, FFXIV has group content that they mislabel as raids. It has no actual raid content. For group content, it is fairly good, but it is not raid content. However, we can look over that.
So, I have to assume you know what is wrong with the above.
First, looking at videos is like looking at someone's social media profile and thinking that is a fair representation of their entire life. It is forgetting that they are only showing you the bits that they want you to see.
If I watched videos of some top end PvP'ers in MMO's, I would think that MMO PvP was easy, because they only show the parts that make them look good.
This is what you have made your judgement of MMO PvE on. The parts of it that people want you to see so that you might think those people are really good. People that know what they are doing make the thing they are doing look easy. It is only really others that know what they are doing that fully appreciate what it is they are looking at.
To your last point about it being the same every time - no it isn't. Depending on the game and the encounter, different pulls of the same mob can be as different as PvP against different people of the same class. Sure, they are likely to use the same abilities, but not necessarily in the same way.
Again though, if all you have done is played L2 and watched some videos of FFXIV group content and a few WoW raids, you are still totally unaware of the effort that goes in to even getting to that stage, let alone what is needed once there.
You glanced over Terraria and Elden Ring bosses, which afaik are considered somewhat difficult and usually require several, if not countless tries to beat.
It took me ~4h to beat the Tree Sentinel as my first mob in a Souls game (not counting the boss in the starting location). I figured out his pattern of moves on maybe 5-10th run and figured out the timing of dodges soon after. The only thing I needed then was the good execution of my own moves to survive the fight. The fight itself wasn't in any way more exciting than any pvp fight from the L2 days.
And I had the same experience with the Fairy or Moonlord in Terraria. They both took a few dozen tries, but the exhilaration from beating them wasn't any higher than from defeating an opponent in L2 that I had lost to 10 times before.
But in both of those games I knew the mobs' exact limits of animations, moves and overall AI thinking. I knew that if I moved in some particular direction, they'd most likely make a particular move. And by watching FF14 videos I see that bosses do exact same moves and usually even in the exact same patterns.
Like I said, I realize that defeating those bosses requires skill and knowledge of the game, but a finite battle is not interesting to me. I can't predict a human's movements. Because if I could, I'd be the undefeated pvp champion, but sadly I'm not, even after 12 years of trying. But I'm damn sure that it wouldn't take me 12 years to clear AI bosses or mobs in mmos, because unless their movesets are completely randomized - you can always see the way to beat them.
Could you give an example of such games. I'll gladly be proven wrong, because that'd mean that there's still hope for me liking pve in mmos. But if those examples are just based on randomizing movesets, then I'd just prefer fighting people because you can build relationships with them, based on your pvp history, while randomized mobs just give you something difficult to grind and nothing else.
PVP content is more variable than PVE because its not scripted that is the only argument i need for PVP content to be fun. More fun the PVE? Who cares, they are both fun.
Talking about them in regards to MMO PvE content would be like me saying I have experience in MMO PvP from playing Civ 6 multiplayer. If it is not an MMORPG, it is not relevant to the discussion.
Could you give an example of such games. I'll gladly be proven wrong, because that'd mean that there's still hope for me liking pve in mmos.[/quote]
In most games, if you come up against a player of a given class, you know what their opener is going to be. You can usually pick their first three our four moves just by knowing their class.
In some MMO's (note; some), when you pull a mob, it engages the timers of the abilities the mob has at a random point. These timers also often have variation of +/-5 seconds (or more).
What this means is that not only do you not know what the first attack made by the mob will be, but you don't know when it will happen. On top of this, it gives mobs the ability to occasionally do something that players can never do - which is to use two abilities at the exact same time (should the timers line up).
Developers also have multiple ways of adding randomness to mobs. One simple method (and keep in mind, this is only one method) is in having a pool of add types that can spawn at either set or random intervals. These adds could have all sorts of properties - whether that is only being able to be damaged by a specific class, applying CC to members of the raid, dealing different damage types, healing other mobs in the encounter, what ever.
The different in fighting the same encounter that spawns 2 sets of healing adds in a row as opposed to when the encounter spawns adds that can only be damaged by healers and then a wave that can only be damaged by tanks is actually massive.
In games like WoW, they are more concerned with the same encounter every time. This is fine as a game design decision. However, not every game designs raids in that way - or not every raid at least. Some games literally just give encounters abilities with built in randomness and then unleash them on players.
PvE content as a whole is more variable because developers can give abilities to mobs that they can't give to players.
I agree that fully scripted PvE encounters are less variable that PvP, but not all PvE encounters are scripted like this.
That highly depends on their class, your own class and the overall ability design of both. I had probably 5+ starters for 1v1 pvps in L2 and then ~5 more for party pvp. And that's just starters. The action tree branched out quite a lot after that.
You forgot to give an example here, so I'd like to ask again.
So one of the ways to make PvE better is literally making it like PvP - as in, adding more variables and opponents to the fight, which is the base of any party vs party pvp.
But even outside of that solution, just as I said, if the PvE's solution is just "make it more random", then I'd rather have the same randomness but against humans, because that is more fun for me.
If I gave you some examples, the first thing you would do is go and look up videos of them. The problem is, in actual competitive PvE games, guilds don't post videos of PvE kills because the method with which they kill the mob is considered guild IP. People get booted from guilds for sharing this information.
Even the wiki for such games are incomplete when it comes to top end raid content - 10 or more years after said content released.
So, really, all I can do is rattle off a few names of mobs that you are then can't do much with.
However, the examples I did give (in relation to adds and AoE timers) are from specific mobs.
You could look at it that way, but only if you are a PvP focused player.
The major difference between PvE and PvP (if we are talking about large scale) is that in PvP you are fighting against multiple entities. In PvE, it is you and 19, 23 or 39 friends all with the objective of killing one entity. This different means that even if there is that randomness added to PvE, it is still a drastically different experience to PvP.
Just to be clear here, you are stating you have a preference of PvP over PvE while not having played any games with PvE worth discussing.
And I have no way to see/check what that even looks like. You argue against my point by saying "you haven't experienced shit so your point is mute, yet you're not even presenting a single example of what shit I'd have to play to be able to argue against your point.
I am a pvp-focused player, except in L2 that pvp had a background of grinding mobs, so there wasn't really a separation between pve people or pvp people. We just killed each other while killing mobs.
Yes, and I find that boring. I don't want to work with other people to kill just one thing. I will if I have to, as I did in L2, but even there I'd have to first go through a few hundred people before even having the chance to kill that one entity. Ashes will be very similar, if not the same, which is why I'm interested in it.
So I guess you consider Elden Ring (and all souls games at that) non-pve games that are not worth discussing? They require 0 skill and are a useless example when arguing about "what mobs you've killed in games", is that right?
As I've already said, I understand the difficulties of gathering a ton of highly skilled people that then have to work in perfect coordination to kill a mob, but I have 0 interest in doing just that. Steven promises to have bosses that only 1% of the playerbase can kill. I'd imagine that'll be an open world boss, so once I manage to kill it, I guess I'll have the right to tell you that I still prefer pvp over pve.
p.s. I'd still like that example.
I am somewhat curious though, how you plan on killing that mob that only 1% will be able to kill if you are not a part of one of those groups of highly skilled people working in perfect coordination.
I mean, who do you think will be killing those top end mobs?
You do have occassions when a top raid guild from x game will become the immediate top dog in a new mmo. However, you have to remember in each MMO there is more than one top guild, then there is more than one MMO. In effect, if the New MMO is great enough, there is no telling how many people will compete. World firsts can either be routine or random.