Sleep is OP

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Just to clarify, we don't know if we can hit our mates currently. Steven said that we can't flag on them, but there might be a tiny chance that we'll be able to hit them if we're already flagged.

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No CC is OP as long as there's a way to cleanse it. Sleep should be cleansable by your mate hitting you or, if Intrepid want to forbid that action, there should be some item that can remove sleep (mb a rock that you can throw at a person to wake them up). And there should be at least 2 archetypes who have a general cleanse (probably cleric and bard), which would require the party to keep those 2 players apart to avoid aoe CCs. This would also allow Intrepid to have more hard CCs across all archetypes.

NiKr wrote: »

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No CC is OP as long as there's a way to cleanse it. Sleep should be cleansable by your mate hitting you or, if Intrepid want to forbid that action, there should be some item that can remove sleep (mb a rock that you can throw at a person to wake them up). And there should be at least 2 archetypes who have a general cleanse (probably cleric and bard), which would require the party to keep those 2 players apart to avoid aoe CCs. This would also allow Intrepid to have more hard CCs across all archetypes.

This isn't true, actually. Knockback and Knock-Up can be made OP because it's not cleansable in any meaningful way, it's just a setback that is usually non-reactable.

Some might argue that knockback is not a real CC, but Colossal Blow disagrees with those people and they can die under tower.

You could similarly argue that if you have enough chance of resistance, no CC can be OP, and I'd agree there, but then you're getting back into the 'CC isn't technically OP but it is certainly not fun', and it can get to specific situations where it is reasonable to consider it OP if the situation that follows even the cleanse is too ridiculously disadvantaged to the target.

I don't know if Ashes would have the type of esoteric CCs I'm thinking about that cause that reaction, but MMOs don't usually shy away from them, so overall, I disagree with you here.

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We can't flag on pretty much any mate, so unless we're talking the situation that tautau described - right now we might not be able to wake our mates with a hit.

Azherae wrote: »

This isn't true, actually. Knockback and Knock-Up can be made OP because it's not cleansable in any meaningful way, it's just a setback that is usually non-reactable.

This is where my lack of outside experience shows itself. What do those 2 effects do? I assume knockback just pushes you in a direction and knock-up throws you upward for a few seconds? If those are the case then yeah, I'd say that knockback is a CC only in the most literal sense of CC (as in, you're Controlling a part of the Crowd). The melee showcase had those rock mobs that pushed the character back with their hits. Would that be considered a CC then too? Cause that might mean that we could potentially have weapon passives with that effect (cause the effect itself is already in the game).

And if knock-up is what I said then yeah, that'd be the biggest CC in the game and I guess it could be seen as OP. But I'd definitely dislike it then, cause there'd be no counterplay to it. But I said as much in my original post. No CC is OP as long as there's a counter .

NiKr wrote: »

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

We can't flag on pretty much any mate, so unless we're talking the situation that tautau described - right now we might not be able to wake our mates with a hit.

Azherae wrote: »

This isn't true, actually. Knockback and Knock-Up can be made OP because it's not cleansable in any meaningful way, it's just a setback that is usually non-reactable.

This is where my lack of outside experience shows itself. What do those 2 effects do? I assume knockback just pushes you in a direction and knock-up throws you upward for a few seconds? If those are the case then yeah, I'd say that knockback is a CC only in the most literal sense of CC (as in, you're Controlling a part of the Crowd). The melee showcase had those rock mobs that pushed the character back with their hits. Would that be considered a CC then too? Cause that might mean that we could potentially have weapon passives with that effect (cause the effect itself is already in the game).

And if knock-up is what I said then yeah, that'd be the biggest CC in the game and I guess it could be seen as OP. But I'd definitely dislike it then, cause there'd be no counterplay to it. But I said as much in my original post. No CC is OP as long as there's a counter .

I don't really understand people who use this sort of reasoning.

For something to be 'over-powered', it only has to be 'outside the standard power scope of the rest of the system', not 'unstoppable'. If a tactic shuts down 90% of opposing strategies to the point where they stand no real chance and then when you put in all the effort to counter it, you've devoted so much energy to it that the rest of your flow requires you to play perfectly while your opponent basically 'hits a button and waits for you to do a lot of hard work to overcome it', this is 'OP' to me.

I know that you don't play a lot of games that make you personally care about balance (and also that you don't really care about it much yourself), but I'd hope that you could come to accept that in this world of competitive games, people will (correctly?) use the term 'OP' to refer to something that is just by its nature (not by its tuning) so much work to counter that you might as well give up or resort to using it.

There are many mechanics that I've personally removed from games or seen developers remove from games for this reason. Then again, I basically 'went to war' over this before and that took years so I guess there will always be holdouts who insist otherwise.

The problem in that situation came from the fact that once 'I removed the OP thing from the game', the population of people willing to play the version where it wasn't removed fell to basically nothing.

I still disagree with you, therefore, but I'm definitely familiar with your stance.

If you find yourself very precisely defining the semantics of 'a counter', there's no need to explain it to me, because the entire problem with balance in games is that people don't agree on what 'a counter' is.

Azherae wrote: »

If you find yourself very precisely defining the semantics of 'a counter', there's no need to explain it to me, because the entire problem with balance in games is that people don't agree on what 'a counter' is.

Wouldn't "a general cleanse ability" be broad enough not to be considered a convoluted solution that requires a ton of work though? Like, if " a button that requires a ton of counter action" is considered OP, then wouldn't any stun, paralyze, sleep, be completely and utterly OP? Or is that your point and you'd remove all those effects from the game?

L2 had all of those, which is why I'm completely used to playing against them, but it also had a full cleanse on the healer class and a race-specific cleanse on a particular race of characters (that race didn't have healer classes), so imo all those effects weren't OP because there'd always be a solution to them on hand. It was a button that countered a button, no more work required.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If you find yourself very precisely defining the semantics of 'a counter', there's no need to explain it to me, because the entire problem with balance in games is that people don't agree on what 'a counter' is.

Wouldn't "a general cleanse ability" be broad enough not to be considered a convoluted solution that requires a ton of work though? Like, if " a button that requires a ton of counter action" is considered OP, then wouldn't any stun, paralyze, sleep, be completely and utterly OP? Or is that your point and you'd remove all those effects from the game?

L2 had all of those, which is why I'm completely used to playing against them, but it also had a full cleanse on the healer class and a race-specific cleanse on a particular race of characters (that race didn't have healer classes), so imo all those effects weren't OP because there'd always be a solution to them on hand. It was a button that countered a button, no more work required.

For many others, that gameplay type is a bit shallow, and similarly, there's a subset of players who don't even experience that type of gameplay because the games that utilize it don't make it through their 'filter'.

It's actually because of this that you're probably going to see a lot more of these topics as we continue. Steven comes from the 'old days' of MMOs and L2 in particular, where that would be considered acceptable gameplay, but there are some that will not tolerate that anymore, hence the thread.

Some games DO remove those entirely given their design goals. I'm not saying that Ashes should or should not, and maybe I'm overstating the point here, but just consider one specific thing. Is Javelin a CC if you can't do anything during it and can only go in the direction the Tank pulls you with it?

You probably don't need to devote any time to discussing this with me, I'm moreso just pointing out that your definitions might not be the 'common' ones anymore. I can't say that with certainty either, I guess.

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In MOBAs since the game design direction is different, I generally don't have a problem with most CC.

MOBAs are hard to compare because:

1. Respawns are easy
2. The number of possible opponents is limited to 5.
3. The number of tactically correct opponents is limited to 3 in most situations (basically if a 5v1 is happening and you stall the 5 long enough as the 1, you're winning fairly hard)
4. Their TTK on the Bruiser and Tank characters is often quite long, upwards of 30 seconds for the first to fall in a 3v3 even as some people get focused down, sometimes.

So I'd say it all comes down to what the team wants Ashes to feel like. Their basis and constraints are quite different and I don't envy them at all, having to balance 'having multiple hard CC in a game with 8+ expected enemy combatants at a time'.

Fortunately I expect that the groups that build a lot of CC will be the ones that suffer, not the ones who 'forego it'. I hope it's fun for them still.

CC is a great way to add dynamism to things with the right limitations and cooldowns, it's just hard to apply those to MMOs in a commonly enjoyable way, I think.