My theory to balancing AOC

Most of this would work for a different game (Ashes has some breakpoints that cause two of your 'assumptions' to falter, before we even start to think about the actual mechanics of their combat).

idk if you value my experience much, but at the very least, you can bounce stuff off me.

If you want to 'consider balance for Ashes' though, as we understand it to be, you would have to drop the concept of assigning a balance-able value to CDR because of the way that works in group play, and start from the 'outcomes desired' side for that one.

Similarly, remember that even if you turned their Augments system into a pure skill-point thing (which at the moment, it actually is explicitly NOT), you would have to account for Social Orgs and similar Augment rewards, which doesn't work as cleanly. Right now, being able to think of it more like 'slots' is the 'safer' method for the 'Augment'/'subclass' part of the spec.

Finally, there would need to be a diminishing return or rising cost on the concept of assigning the same debuff type to every ability in your kit, even if it didn't stack for this to work as an MMO balance scalar. This isn't usually obvious because MMOs are actually the ONLY competitive game type that usually seem to require this due to their high number of available abilities.

Overall, (in all arrogance) you have a solid understanding of the starting points you'd need to get good balance on something, but you're lacking some fundamentals that take a while to learn without getting to actually test your concepts on a live 'audience'.

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Before I try to explain this with way too many examples OR way too much prefacing...

Have you played any MOBAs? Particularly 'things other than League'?

As for the social orgs thing, it's actually an extension of something you already noticed.

To be honest this last part I could not figure out, does this need to be exponential with 1 being perfectly in the middle and the rate of change (regarding CD/Mana/Dmg) increasing the further from 1 you go, or should it be linear? Probably exponential but I am truly unsure. I am unsure if it matters either way, I feel like it does but can’t put my finger on why.

The WAY one applies the Augment will matter if there isn't a hard-set 'order' for which way the multiplication is done, but as soon as you apply that hard-set order, you'll end up limiting the Org augments themselves. Whereas you could get a stronger thematic concept out of those generally. They would also 'break' any limitations you have on which ability types are allowed to apply which things, or upset players when their RP target and their Abilities don't gel (a common problem across many games that work like this) leading to an annoying type of meta.

But I suggest you attempt to crunch such numbers yourself, don't take my word for it here. I'm just letting you know that my experience from balancing games LIKE this leads me to give this advice type.

In general when a character has the ability to augment all skills with the same type of thing, they will go past the 'general balance state' of the game. Basically, the reason why Min-Maxing is usually a response people have is simply that it's hard to BALANCE a game that has both 'Max Builds' and 'Hybrid Builds that are good'. This one isn't a set rule, it is just 'really hard to avoid it happening without making the game flat/uninspired', and in my opinion not worth it.

Your method solves that in a 1v1 or 2v2 game, certainly (except card games because in card games you're moreso 'controlling a collection')

CDR Balance

The reason CDR has to be balanced differently in a group game is that the 'secondary cooldowns' do not usually matter in a GvG situation. Here is why.

Any ability with a short cooldown is almost always just healing, knockback or DPS. Shortening your cooldown for this ability is equivalent to simply increasing your damage output, simple enough.

The Majority of abilities with LONG cooldowns are situational and are set up for their success (or buffs with an intended ratio of downtime/uptime, in which case, usually, see above). They may or may not be 'very powerful' in other situations. They're usually powerful enough for the situation they intend. Otherwise they're definitionally just bad.

When playing 1v1, the 'purpose' of a cooldown on a situational 'powerful' ability is almost always 'to limit you from using that ability every time the situation comes up'. Otherwise it might as well have no cooldown at all. This is where the problem arises in GvG situations and why teamfights in MOBAs tend to devolve into randomness and ability spam at low levels of play-skill.

If player A in any 'lane' did not need to use their longer cooldown ability in a 1v1 before the teamfight, then the cooldown does not matter. It will almost always be available. The fight, even if it lasts long, would have to contain 'a second instance of them wanting to use this ability, but being unable to', for the CDR to be helpful. Either it 'would be helpful because this often happens' (the situation is easy to set up) or it 'would be unnecessary because this doesn't happen more times than the player has the ability available'. That's just 'facts' though, it isn't the answer to why you have to do it separately, so bear with me a bit longer.

The specific thing I was 'concerned about' though, is 'assigning a balance-able value to CDR'. It isn't that I think there should be no CDR, or even that I think CDR is either 'always useful' or 'always useless'. It's that CDR is 'tuned' differently than the rest of the benefits you can give your character, in group play. If you outnumber your opponent, you don't need it usually, they die. If you are outnumbered, or suddenly put in a bad situation, you might benefit a LOT from it, or you might benefit precisely NOTHING from it.

Min-maxers (such as myself, though it's not my PLAYSTYLE, just analytic style) will look at how to tune their CDR to the ratio/frequency of the encounter, in a MOBA (basically change it according to enemy team comp in a match). In an MMO you would not have this option. CDR is very binary, in that sense for longer abilities. Either it is 'helping a LOT' or 'not helping at all' and the difference between those things can be any arbitrary amount of additional CDR, depending on the situation.

Therefore you can't reduce it to a SCALE, because if I pay 2 points to get X amount of CDR and it is not enough on average (and this curve is not a normal distribution), then I am paying 2 points for 'nothing'. I then pay 1 more point for Y CDR and suddenly due to team comp or whatever I am getting FULL benefit. Similarly if I gain enough CDR to do a 'killing amount' more damage through any means, I am always getting full benefit from THAT even if I don't actually succeed at the kill (you could tune it to be equivalent to damage output from similar choices, but then you'd still have to figure out how to factor for the longer Cooldown Stuff).

You also can't reduce it to a MULTIPLIER, because if I have to pay more points to reach a threshold and then 'giving the ability a different effect with a higher multiplier' puts it out of my build reach, then every ability's cost has to be balanced around that precise potential for min-maxing and a meta will form, (people will just pick the least 'counterable' option, which is what they always do when you increase the cost on something good).

This applies regardless of how exactly the CDR works (though percentage based CDR is generally 'worse' and more swingy because the efficacy distribution is basically a Poisson distribution, on the 'did the situation happen' side which is then sorta 'multiplied by' a binomial I THINK don't quote me on this one it's an aside and I haven't had to do this one in a WHILE).

Obv I'm making a lot of assumptions here and drawing purely from my own experiences, but hopefully I am making all the same ones you are based on what I read from your post. Happy to address something like a more specific skill+augment suggestion/concept if you have one.

All who see flaws or mistakes, please point them out.

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I believe that IS has already done the balancing on Cooldowns, and I would support a version of the game with no CDR at all, due to their other designs.

Your base logic is entirely sound.

"The base logic being that if you separate every ability and its defining factors, assign a value to that then add it up and multiply by its constraints (CD/Dmg/Mana) and make every ability equal the same number you should be able to have an easy way to balance the game forever"

The difficulties come in three points in most genres, and MMOs add a 4th one MOST of the time.

1. Players with a specific intention will min-max and then not go back because the psychological profile of most min-maxers will cause them to stay the same 'out of fear of losing when they go back on their build'.
2. Players experience their own concepts of balance very differently whether they are winning or losing (which basically means that a perfectly balanced game does not FEEL perfectly balanced to a LARGE subset of its players)
3. Without a lot of experience with the 'edge cases' of why certain numbers don't work, you will either make a lot of mistakes (resulting in imbalances) or end up under or overcomplicating the numbers to the point for your specific game, to the point where you're just rebalancing and upsetting (most of) your players all the time.

4. MMOs in particular tend to use RNG, and RNG is streaky even with true randomness involved. It is also extremely difficult to find bugs in your RNG quickly, and this balloons into a huge problem in complex, memory-optimized games (new languages and frameworks do not help here, because optimization takes place at the machine code/assembly level, and BOY is that fun and good at causing fail conditions). On top of that, RNG affects all three of the first things I noted, and in the case of #3, it then throws a wrench in all your balancing of numbers forcing you to do actual statistics just to determine if the numbers are right for actual balance.

But the base methodology you mention is how this 'should be done', and as a result, you can actually learn to 'see' the underlying values in new competitive games by trying to figure out the scales they are using, for practice. You can even 'learn to predict which things will need to be fixed and patched' or 'which things will be OP' before the game even goes live, and watch to see if you were right or not.

It's pretty good practice. I'm currently working on Predecessor (MOBA) but it's really hard to do the second part because their balance is so good. However that makes it a good starting point for people who want to learn to do it, because you wouldn't end up spending as much time 'wondering why this number looks wrong' and then having to wait 4 months for the Devs to gather enough statistical data to prove you right. You can just 'learn it with fewer wrong numbers'.

I, in my arrogance 'already have the numbers for Ashes' based on what they SEEM to want, and yours are very close to right, but note that I don't actually know what Steven/Combat Lead REALLY wants for a specific thing because I haven't seen their PvE, and to me, their base stats are flawed (basically it's a sort of copy-paste from L2, applied to a game that doesn't use the same structure, so I'm hoping it changes).

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To expand on this (for Voxtrium moreso), I'll repeat a specific thing I always say. In this case I will frame it as the REASON why the R/P/S Voxtrium outlines is correct.

Tanks lose to Support because Support tend to have DoT and Attrition style damage that 'ignores most things about the Tank other than their HP pool', while buffing themselves against the Tank's relatively limited damage /mobility.

'Support' lose to 'DPS' because they tend to be less HP and defenses and are quickly overwhelmed and can't escape.

DPS lose to 'Tanks' because they apply all their energy and don't manage the kill due to whatever mitigation is built into the Tank that allows them to be considered Tanks at all.

It is my constantly-repeated perception that this is really a 'Mitigation/Attrition/Burst' form of 'R/P/S' and even though a Tank will almost always be Mitigation first, they could choose to either double down on that, add Attrition, or add Burst Damage, to help them against their 'natural predator'.

In GvG, the distributions of these, combined with the understanding and cooperation styles of the players, would then tend to balance it out if you could adapt fast enough. So, while 'Support >> Tank >> DPS' is generally correct, it's correct because of something underlying that can be used to make a more interesting game overall without having to be concerned about 'overall balance problems'.

Basically, at some point, if a Mitigation Archetype decided to throw ALL their effort into becoming a direct Attrition character, the balance would be maintained because they would 'change form', they would give up so much Mitigation that they would go from Mitigation-Primary With Attrition-Secondary to Attrition-Primary With Mitigation-Secondary , but this wouldn't necessarily indicate a failure of balance. There would definitely be a person who might complain 'I use stacked DoT I'm supposed to be able to kill Tanks before they kill me' when they find one SPECIFIC Tank that kills them first, but this wouldn't imply that the R/P/S balancing was broken.

We normally end up arguing about 'whether or not we will be able to conceal our builds' though, so Intrepid might unfortunately be forced to 'make all Tanks only be able to function as Mitigation Primary' just so that you can never be 'fooled'.

Still, if they get past about 30-40% 'freedom' in build options (almost guaranteed given their gear system, but who knows), it should always be enough to at least make the fight 'even'.

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If tanks do less dmg to mobs than dps, everyone will just play dps.