On "rotations"

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I don't personally have much experience playing WoW, certainly not later in the game (never liked it for basically this reason).

Your concern is a common one I've seen from people who played a lot of it, and then moved on to games 'similar to' or 'trying to be equivalent to' WoW.

I think Ashes is moving to be a bit more like WoW, but they've specifically said that they would like to have dynamic gameplay and less reliance on rotations at some point. Even if Steven uses that term.

However, this might have changed recently with the shifts in the development team, but you can always ask for a reaffirmation in the next Q&A.

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Do you have any ideas on that? Cause unless I missed it, I haven't seen a suggestion as to how to fix this. You provided a few things that you don't quite see as "rotations", but you didn't give an example of how those abilities would work in a raid/pvp environment. Or at least how they'd be any different from just doing a boss mechanic while managing your 20 rotating buttons.

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I see, so that just sounds like a shitty game and I definitely hope Ashes is not shitty. I consider resource management and tool variety as a given. Guess that's not the reality in other mmos.

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Mainly because that "support role" comes in the way of avoiding boss mechanics, which in turn help healers not waste more mana, which then helps those healers also do some dps.

And obviously we'll have class augments, which will give us the exact secondary role that you're talking about. Except it will have no real impact on the "rotation" side of things, because classes won't give you new abilities, so you'll still be going through your main stuff.

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It kinda is though. Your perfect rotation would account for your swing/movement speed, in order to maximize your output.

And yeah, as long as there's literally any kind of variance in abilities - there's gonna be rotations, because it's the most optimal way to play.

As the resident "I want people's gameplay to be influenced by other players" nerd, there's the simplest solution for rotations for pvp (which I'd love to see in pve as well).

Just have abilities that break up the stability of someone's rotation. As discussed above, rotations depend on timings and resources. Just give people abilities that reduce/increase mana usage (or other resources if they're added), reduce/increase CDs on physical or magical skills, put silences on either or both of those, swap CDs around between the last few abilities used (especially cool if there are in fact the big 60s++ cd abilities).

All of that stuff can be thrown into mob skillset as well, which would make pve not only more interesting, but also harder, especially if you put in some good situational triggers too.

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Yeah, we definitely agree on this. Though there can definitely be group/raid-sized rotations, because you should be working as a single unit and the game should allow you to do that and some content should encourage that kind of lvl of coordination.