Ashes of Creation Mana Management, what is your opinion?

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Yeah, but in my experience lack of HP is the same limiter as lack of mana. I wouldn't attack a mob that hits for 20% of my HP if I only had 30% of it. And I'd either need a healer to restore my HP or I'd need to wait for regen.

And while Azherae is correct that a lot of games provide you with some ways of circumventing the mob's attacks, so your value of 30% HP goes way up, I'd imagine that mana's value is higher than HP's by default. I could be wrong in that assumption though and every ability use reduces your mana by ~20%, but then I'd personally highly dislike that design.

NiKr wrote: »

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Yeah, but in my experience lack of HP is the same limiter as lack of mana. I wouldn't attack a mob that hits for 20% of my HP if I only had 30% of it. And I'd either need a healer to restore my HP or I'd need to wait for regen.

And while Azherae is correct that a lot of games provide you with some ways of circumventing the mob's attacks, so your value of 30% HP goes way up, I'd imagine that mana's value is higher than HP's by default. I could be wrong in that assumption though and every ability use reduces your mana by ~20%, but then I'd personally highly dislike that design.

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

So you can 'spend time at lower HP' somewhat more safely and make MORE choices instead of 'well I am either basically at full health or dead' (Neverwinter).

So far, Ashes is this design type.

"Choose the enemy where when you run out of mana, you can probably still finish them before they tick your HP down."

As a healer I say this is more engaging for me personally as well. Big heals should cost big mana and draw big aggro, but I also shouldn't be NEEDING to use them, and I mean on nearly ANYONE but the most glass-cannon Mage or Rogue who should be figuring out how to not get HIT ever.

That's my opinion. Abilities take meaningful chunks of your mana but you don't need to use them that often if you don't want to. Again, this is already Ashes' design as we understand it now. If it changes much, I won't exactly be surprised, but this is the way it was EXPLAINED so I would hope it stays similar for all those 'unfortunate souls' like me who saw what we considered good combat design and went 'yes I wanna play that!'

As Steven always says, if you're not enjoying the combat, it's going to be rough.

Azherae wrote: »

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

L2's design warped my thinking too much. If I was solo - I had no buffs so any stronger mob would do a ton of dmg. If I was in a party - it was always a constant one with a healer and an MP manager. The "middleground" of those would be higher rated servers where you had a full buff w/o a party, but then you'd be fighting the same strong party mobs, so they'd still do pretty big chunks of your HP.

So yeah, if Ashes manages to step away from the L2's buff design and its utter REQUIREMENT for farm - the game would most likely be way closer to what you're saying. And at that point I'll just learn to play it the way it's meant to be played.

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None have been. Every game is disliked/hated by someone. And usually the higher the popularity - the more haters there is.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

You're actually thinking about that slightly backwards for a lot of the 'better' games.

HP restoration is low AND target damage is low.

Having lower HP restoration values makes it easier to balance PvP AND PvE. Mobs don't need to have massive jumps in damage, they hit for 5-10% of your HP and you spend your time 'figuring out how to make sure their big abilities don't go off' and 'managing your HP inflow'.

L2's design warped my thinking too much. If I was solo - I had no buffs so any stronger mob would do a ton of dmg. If I was in a party - it was always a constant one with a healer and an MP manager. The "middleground" of those would be higher rated servers where you had a full buff w/o a party, but then you'd be fighting the same strong party mobs, so they'd still do pretty big chunks of your HP.

So yeah, if Ashes manages to step away from the L2's buff design and its utter REQUIREMENT for farm - the game would most likely be way closer to what you're saying. And at that point I'll just learn to play it the way it's meant to be played.

A basic example then of the difference from my experience. Note that I'm VERY explicitly targeting 'a mob that has a design that only exists because they were trying to get a function, not a theme'. Not all FFXI enemies are this way, nor are they all as interesting, but you'll understand what I mean in a moment.

FFXI Goblins all carry bombs.

They don't hit super hard with their melee attacks. But the bomb TP move can. Otherwise it does decent AoE fire damage, approx equal to all in party nearby, it doesn't 'divide up damage'. But it's still not crippling. Nothing that a Tank wouldn't shrug off EVEN if taking damage normally. Have a White Mage with you to ward against Fire Damage and you're even better off.

But AoE healing is EXPENSIVE. And therefore if you were to 'keep pulling Goblins', eventually people's HP starts dropping into a range where it is dangerous. Why do Goblins have bombs though? What made THAT a thematic goblin concept?

It isn't. It BECAME one, but it's a mechanical thing they were going for and chose to put it on the 'first and most ubiquitious Beastman enemy' to make them a threat and teach you what to expect from damage based enemies in the game.

There's a second function to these bombs. They have a 'suicide bomb' mode. TP moves are random, and that version can be selected randomly. It DOES look different, but only if you're actually looking at the Goblin (they drop the bomb instead of lobbing it). It does damage by how much HP the Goblin has remaining. MOST of the time this isn't enough to kill you. If you were solo, this move is technically almost GOOD. The Goblin dies after using it, you get the exp, if your HP was high, you didn't die, even if you got low. If you did enough damage to it first, you didn't die because it's HP wasn't high enough.

But if you are in a party, and you aren't on the ball when the Goblin's HP is high, someone might die if you had been fighting Goblins before then and didn't top off everyone.

You don't think about 'how much standard damage a Goblin does' when fighting them if your tank is half-decent. You think about 'How much Mana it will take for your whole party to tank through multiple Bomb Tosses' and then play around them.

But you can't just go 'well we barely need a Tank then' because their OTHER move is 'Goblin Rush' which is like 5x melee strike damage (It's only 3-4 hits, so that's separate).

Relative to mana management and healing, therefore, you have 'a mob that doesn't do crippling damage unless you aren't paying attention but requires higher mana management skill (or lots of resting) to face', that STILL has the ability to just drop people if you aren't paying attention, and in a really strange way too.

Assume you pull one without full HP because you're confident that your healer is about to top you up before it even arrives, and your Healer suddenly lags offline. The immediate thing to do is 'nobody engage except Tank and even they should hold back' -> 'Mage puts up defensive spells that they normally don't waste mana on in a group' -> 'Mage nukes the hell out of the Goblin so it doesn't have enough HP for suicide bomb to kill everyone' -> 'Mage sits still while Tank pulls it off them' -> 'wait for healer to return'.

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Unless the private server that I played on at the time completely changed that mechanic, I think that by C4 it was already "only PKers drop stuff". I might be misremembering cause it's been over 15 years since I played that version of the game, but I think that's right.

But yes, early L2 was quite different from later updates and even more different from even later ones. And there's been several separations of the playerbase which all consider different version "the real L2". This is one of the main reasons why I was trying to find out which update did Steven stop playing the game at. Cause that would at least give me more context as to his experience in the game.

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Yep, I definitely hope that Ashes manages to design intricate and interesting pve content. As much as I love L2, its pve was definitely super basic.

We have not received permission from VekoKrava to share the quoted post.

Focusing on just this part. Sieges, especially as healer, can have many other forms and methods of mana management. I could see needing consumables in order to deal with the Siege Dragons as a healer, maybe, but there's no way to know precisely until we see Cleric gameplay again in a similar perspective.

I cannot imagine a level of change from A1 where a Cleric in a proper group situation (Elite or Boss fight with a group) should have access to or need 50% Mana restoration consumables. At that point the answer is 'bring more healers', and being able to get away with NOT bringing more healers, even if expensive, would just be strange.

We'll see in the coming months when the Cleric showcase drops (or not, if it's really basic and doesn't involve a 'bossfight' or 'grouping', but at that point I don't know what feedback they would ask for other than 'was this spell shiny enough?')

Having a consumable that bumps your effective mana up 50% (I'm assuming you mean over some period) is either 'required for any serious content' or 'not', in a PvX game, especially in Sieges. So whenever you see the Cleric showcase Livestream, you can probably give whatever number seems correct and we'd actually be able to discuss it.

We have not received permission from JamesSunderland to share the quoted post.

And from the opposite side I guess...

The original options:



Ticks for 3 MP every 3 seconds for a base total of 150 MP restored.
Casting Time: 5 seconds
Recast Time: 18 seconds
Affected Targets: Single
Base Duration: 150 seconds



Casting Time: 8 seconds
Recast Time: 24 seconds
Affected Targets: AOE, centered on caster
Base Duration: 120 seconds

Restores 1/2 MP every 3 seconds (Ballad 1 and 2), regardless of singing/instrument skill.
Stacks with other Ballad effects.
Equipment that grants "Ballad +" or "All Songs +" increases the MP restoral by +1 MP every 3 seconds and the duration of the song by 10% per +1 level.

Conserve MP
Obtained: Black Mage Level 20
Game Description: Occasionally reduces spells' MP cost.
Job Traits are always active.
Further Notes:
The Conserve MP job trait is equivalent to "Conserve MP +25".
With a base activation rate of 25%, Conserve MP allows you to retain approximately 7 MP for every 100 MP spent. The actual amount retained may vary.

Then when people got frustrated of all the strict grouping and build limitations caused by this and started just making everything '1 Healer 1 Tank 4 Rangers' just to not have to deal with it (except of course that the healer was still preferred Red Mage so they could Refresh themselves and the Paladin tanks)

Options were added to Summoner, playstyle requirements were tweaked for a few other classes, and Auto-Refresh (1 per tick) added to some, so that one's skill could overcome the limitation if necessary, while still keeping the same thing. When new classes were added (Scholar, Corsair, Blue Mage) they came with three different ways to assist. Corsairs were like Bards and could Roll the Dice for AoE Refresh, Blue Mages could get Self-target only at the cost of something else, and Scholars could manage their own and had access to



(enemies in FFXI have MP based on their Job Class so a few that don't actually USE it still HAVE it for you to take)

Never personally experienced the 'stressors' of that era since I am, again, a Healer who is friends with a Bard, but it was apparently bad enough to cause the devs to speak on the matter directly.

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Mana is not endless though? You still need to manage your use? Weird take imo.

NiKr wrote: »

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Mana is not endless though? You still need to manage your use? Weird take imo.

There is a subset of games where Mana amounts are tuned such that the player will always be left with nearly no Mana at what the game considers 'the end of a meaningful encounter'. The Encounter must end because the Mana must end. We experience the same thing in the old games, but with the mana management added for 'harder enemies that don't neatly fit into that schema'.

Imagine a game style where EVERYTHING fits into that schema. Action RPGs can do it by having longer fights have additional mechanics. MOBAs and the 'new PvP pseudo MMOs' don't need it, BDO style games recharge on hit or have "Augments" that do that so it's part of your build and you tune it to your preference.

It's correct to say that it's a throwback, I think, 'value addition' is debatable, but is usually connected to PvE imo.

Azherae wrote: »

Imagine a game style where EVERYTHING fits into that schema.

Dreadful. And I might've misunderstood, or maybe some other mobas don't require you to control your mana, but when I played dota2 (and it still seems to be the case, judging by the latest TI) - you had to keep an eye on your mana use at all times, cause you never knew when you might need a ton of it for the fight.

Mb Iskab was talking about the overall regeneration of mana and its speed? Then yeah, older games had slower regen so you had much more time between fights with full mana. But due to my L2 experience of all those abilities James posted, I'm very used to any given fight decreasing my mana drastically during the fight itself before it even ends, so it was always about proper control of use and mitigation of enemy burns against your mana managers.

And I'd personally prefer if Ashes had the same mechanics in pve too, because it'd just add a layer to said pve. Hell, if the game had the mob "control" features I suggested, you could trigger mob's mana burns while controlling its agro, so that you knew who'd get their mana decreased and could account for that. Which would also be useful in pvx context, under the condition that agro moving abilities exist in the game. You see enemy players approaching you while you're fighting some elite mob or a boss? Boost that mob's "TP gauge" in a particular way and redirect its agro onto the newcomers, so that the big mana burn hits them instead of you.

To me that sounds like a cool design

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Imagine a game style where EVERYTHING fits into that schema.

Dreadful. And I might've misunderstood, or maybe some other mobas don't require you to control your mana, but when I played dota2 (and it still seems to be the case, judging by the latest TI) - you had to keep an eye on your mana use at all times, cause you never knew when you might need a ton of it for the fight.

It is definitely meant to reward different skills.

From the MOBA side, the question is slightly different and should be tied back to Iskiab's point. If you have enough mana to use all your abilities in a fight, and then extra, the game is tuned around 'you using the extra'. The main "Between Lane Buff Boss" usually takes 2x and then if your opponents interrupt you, you use a Mana restore item or ability, but this doesn't take long.

FFXI and EQ PvE encounters of 'serious nature' last basically as long as an entire short MOBA match. You handle that by either doing what BDO does and making it so that Mana/Whatever recharges off risky hits (melee attacks for most classes) or making mana-management classes, or do what Ashes does (currently, subject to change) and sorta-tune it for both.

This is why the Cleric showcase will tell us a lot about the intentions for this game's style. Even if they show as little as the Ranger, we might be able to know if Castigation is still in, and how it works. If they fight a 'miniboss' in group (probably could manage this without giving away too much using Tank, Mage, Ranger, Cleric) we'd see any effect the Mage had.

Then its up to us to do our usual 'deconstruct the misconceptions of everyone who jumps to conclusions relative to it including ourselves'.

I'd say I'm looking forward to it, but I can imagine some paths they take the showcase style where I not only 'wouldn't be able to give feedback', I wouldn't be able to even think about it without forming potentially wrong conclusions.

Good therefore that James made this thread before the stream since I guess there's a CHANCE that this month's stream is in fact Cleric showcase?

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Well, for example, for healers this isn't true, and often for Mages this also isn't true.

Healers are given the option to 'burn through all their mana faster than they recharge it' in emergency situations, so we're not often actually limited by cooldowns, just mana.

Mages are often explicitly allowed to 'sit there with lots of mana and then repeatedly blast with shorter cooldowns and high risk options'. Kaaaa.... meeeee....

Anyway, can you give an example of an MMO or MMO-adjacent game you've played recently that doesn't do either? Or at least clarify if you generally play Mage or Healer or pay attention to their mana enough to know? Experiences may be different.

Azherae wrote: »

FFXI and EQ PvE encounters of 'serious nature' last basically as long as an entire short MOBA match. You handle that by either doing what BDO does and making it so that Mana/Whatever recharges off risky hits (melee attacks for most classes) or making mana-management classes, or do what Ashes does (currently, subject to change) and sorta-tune it for both.

Yeah, I'm used to 1h++++ "serious" encounters, so you'd usually go through waves of Invocation uses from the mana managers and keep the last wave for the last push on the boss (cause most bosses had heightened regen at last %s of hp, as I assume most of them do in most games).

Azherae wrote: »

Good therefore that James made this thread before the stream since I guess there's a CHANCE that this month's stream is in fact Cleric showcase?

Yeah, hope they showcase it this month and have some, at the very least, a semi-boss fight to show it.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Imagine a game style where EVERYTHING fits into that schema.

And I'd personally prefer if Ashes had the same mechanics in pve too, because it'd just add a layer to said pve. Hell, if the game had the mob "control" features I suggested, you could trigger mob's mana burns while controlling its agro, so that you knew who'd get their mana decreased and could account for that. Which would also be useful in pvx context, under the condition that agro moving abilities exist in the game. You see enemy players approaching you while you're fighting some elite mob or a boss? Boost that mob's "TP gauge" in a particular way and redirect its agro onto the newcomers, so that the big mana burn hits them instead of you.

To me that sounds like a cool design

Addressing this part, I love it. It would drive certain types of people crazy (because everything is mana-reliant, even Fighters) but from the 'cool mechanics and tactics' perspective, there could be some real benefits here.

One of the main ways that Intrepid could add abilities to bosses 'when you are killing them too fast' that would manage them quite well would be 'Mana Drain Aura' for example. Automatically slows down your output or means you have to bring more healers/mages, stops you from being able to burst them down too quickly, disrupts Tanking.

So a group doing WELL at the boss gets debuffed, but if that Aura affects everyone around and not just them, any group jumping in to attack them is limited as well, forcing them to bring people to handle some of the boss mechanics too instead of just 'jump in with 5 Fighters/Rogues and slaughter the people trying to fight the Boss for the lulz'.

In general, "you are killing this very fast" should probably hit 'Aura wall' of some kind instead of 'oh yeah well can you handle this big attack?' in my opinion.

This brings us back to this thread in a specific way that @Iskiab has indirectly pointed out. If Healer cooldowns are short-ish, the only reason you 'need more healers' is because the game's Mana regen is slower and smaller compared to the base. Otherwise the right answer would almost always be 'kill it faster and have the Healer use more AoE. That's my experience, anyway (incredibly simplified).

The more Healer bodies you have to 'put Mana restoration Over Time' ON, the better your survival chances, and that IS the sort of thing you can plan beforehand based on the boss. Auras only make you change your style of fighting a boss, they don't usually result in instant wipes, so they're a nice 'softer' PvE gate for raising difficulty.

Mana Drain is just a really obvious one in Ashes.

Azherae wrote: »

In general, "you are killing this very fast" should probably hit 'Aura wall' of some kind instead of 'oh yeah well can you handle this big attack?' in my opinion.

This is pretty much what I interpreted the "anti-zerg hazards" to be. And iirc alpha1 twins had those crystals that burned player mana. Forget if it was just aura-based or explosion after a time or some other mechanic though.