Supporting PvE Raiders in Ashes

NiKr wrote: »

So in my experience I cannot recall a single player who'd just go "ay dudes, I gotta regen my mana, so yall keep fighting at a number disadvantage while I sit on my ass for 5 minutes or so"

This is also the reason why I kept telling mag that I want pvp to completely use up your resources, in that resurrection thread. I'm used to pvps going not only till you run out of mana, but sometimes even beyond that, if the dps from either side dips below the rare party heal from the healers (a rare occurrence, but still).

And this is also why I want deep, extensive and complex mana gameplay between all archetypes. And I want the same in pve, which would bring both closer together class-balance-wise.

And yet there's no reason this couldn't happen. Because if you have tactical combat in smaller scale or well-organized larger scale, then the magic users on either side are doing their best to 'last longer than the other before they have to fall back or start considering it'.

Basically, if the Mages on both sides run out of Mana at similar times, then there's no numbers disadvantage if they go to try to regain it. They're 'both at reduced capacity' anyway, so choosing to try to fall back and rest/take no action is at least a reasonable consideration.

At least 50% of Sevarog teamfight skill/FFXI PvP WHM skill is 'knowing exactly when to disengage to get a few more MP back so you are over the threshold needed for the next key ability'. I'm not saying (nor expecting) this level of depth from Ashes, just pointing out that with sufficiently tight design, you can have 'tactical retreat for Mana regain' which affects both sides somewhat equally.

Azherae wrote: »

Basically, if the Mages on both sides run out of Mana at similar times, then there's no numbers disadvantage if they go to try to regain it. They're 'both at reduced capacity' anyway, so choosing to try to fall back and rest/take no action is at least a reasonable consideration.

When mages run out of mana melees kill them. And if there's no melees on the field at that point - someone has failed in the bigger control of the fight.

Don't remember if I've ever experienced a moment where both sides were purely mages and both ran out of mana at the same time, but that's probably due to mages being quite op in L2 and support classes being melee dudes, so either one side managed to wipe their enemies before mana ran out or the melee supports cleaned up the manaless mages.

We don't know how AoC's archetypes will be designed, but considering that everyone can use whichever weapon, I'd assume that manaless fights will just turn to full-out brawls, but I personally don't expect good pvpers to ever let their enemies "just disengage and regen mana".

Though again, that's an assumption that mana takes a fair bit of time to regen naturally (Steven's beloved "sit in a circle to regen" kinda implies this will be the case?). Obviously using some kind of ability that boosts your regen, but requires you to not be hit for several seconds, is a whole different ballgame and would simply require very good positioning and enemy zoning, but that's a discussion for a waaaay later day.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Basically, if the Mages on both sides run out of Mana at similar times, then there's no numbers disadvantage if they go to try to regain it. They're 'both at reduced capacity' anyway, so choosing to try to fall back and rest/take no action is at least a reasonable consideration.

When mages run out of mana melees kill them. And if there's no melees on the field at that point - someone has failed in the bigger control of the fight.

Don't remember if I've ever experienced a moment where both sides were purely mages and both ran out of mana at the same time, but that's probably due to mages being quite op in L2 and support classes being melee dudes, so either one side managed to wipe their enemies before mana ran out or the melee supports cleaned up the manaless mages.

We don't know how AoC's archetypes will be designed, but considering that everyone can use whichever weapon, I'd assume that manaless fights will just turn to full-out brawls, but I personally don't expect good pvpers to ever let their enemies "just disengage and regen mana".

Though again, that's an assumption that mana takes a fair bit of time to regen naturally (Steven's beloved "sit in a circle to regen" kinda implies this will be the case?). Obviously using some kind of ability that boosts your regen, but requires you to not be hit for several seconds, is a whole different ballgame and would simply require very good positioning and enemy zoning, but that's a discussion for a waaaay later day.

But how do you kill them? If my mage runs out of mana in a Pred match, and I'm the tank, I'm stopping you from killing them by any means I can manage. I'm setting up whatever the situation that will let them regain their mana is.

Or I'm making it so that you TRYING to hurt them to disrupt their mana regeneration is a death sentence for you. Is L2 combat so simplistic that this isn't possible? I know this can be done in FF and AA, at least, and I've seen a similar thing done in TL (it's not the same exactly for many reasons).

To put some really precise numbers on that, in a full serious combat, I expect a mage that falls back to be able to remain unhurt for around 15 seconds if the fight has reached the point where their mana is low.

Ashes claims to have a TTK of 30-60, but unless that gets linearly reduced by focusing down one person, teamfights must last around 2.5 minutes total. A Mage could definitely find a gap or two.

This is slightly a derail so to connect it back, if you can very easily disrupt Mana Regen (tactically, not mechanically) in Ashes, then the PvE part of the PvX, particularly on big bosses, will be trash. This is technically how I know about it/where you see it in TL. TL's boss PvX involves 'being protected in this way'.

Azherae wrote: »

To put some really precise numbers on that, in a full serious combat, I expect a mage that falls back to be able to remain unhurt for around 15 seconds if the fight has reached the point where their mana is low.

This kinda comes back to the speed of mana regen. Yes, you could step back for roughly that amount of time (potentially even more), while also being protected in some way (CCs on attackers or heavy def buffs on you), but at that time scale your regen is utterly meaningless, especially considering that L2 had a "combat stance" that took several seconds to come out of, so your non-combat regen time would be even shorter.

You might gain enough mana for a spell or two, but the longer the ttk - the less those would matter. And like I said, if there's an ability that lets you regen way faster if you're "out of combat" - I'm totally fine with that and definitely expect high lvl players to utilize this to the best of their abilities (while enemies try their best to disrupt that of course).

Azherae wrote: »

This is slightly a derail so to connect it back, if you can very easily disrupt Mana Regen (tactically, not mechanically) in Ashes, then the PvE part of the PvX, particularly on big bosses, will be trash. This is technically how I know about it/where you see it in TL. TL's boss PvX involves 'being protected in this way'.

L2 had a separate "mana support" for this kind of thing. Mage parties would have a default proper healer and a mana support (who has some weaker healing abilities) to give the party as much mana-time as possible. And this class had the very ability I was referencing (the main healer had it too, but that was mainly used as a last resort or if mana sup could sustain healing).

The "ManaHealOvertime" being 3 seconds is I thiiiink a mistake, cause iirc this ability regened you throughout the full 30s, so the full regen was x10 of what this says in the rightmost column.

If mages will have mana supporting abilities in Ashes, I fully expect mana-heavy party builds to have a full mana support mage, who'd be hanging waaay back and would be able to make the overall mana gameplay more balanced.

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

A full gear change would be at the lowest possible limit of what I would consider a "respec". I've kinda done this in L2 as well in certain situations, even with its limited gearing options.

If we will have super varied and super customizable gear in Ashes (which seems to be the direction rn) I do expect people to carry multiples sets of gear on them at all times. But then it's gonna be a question of when can you change it and whether you can change it mid-fight.

Cause if we can't - it won't be a pvx setup. We'll have pve sets that pvers wear to the boss farm and we'll have pvp sets that potential attackers wear to remove those pvers from those boss farms. And neither side will be able to benefit fully, cause pvers will lose to pvpers, while the latter won't be able to finish the boss. And I feel like this will either lead to "unkillable" bosses or to the simplification of them.

And that's why I want mobs to be closer to players, when it comes to their skill-/type-set. Though this mainly comes back to my unreasonable desires for all players to be pvxers and to always fight back when attacked, so I doubt we'd ever see this in practice, even if design allows it.

And this is the difference.

The way to get mana back in FFXI is to '/heal', literally, there's a command to enter a resting stance that gives you mana every X period of time (it's long to start up because it's a PvE-mostly game). But the only requirements for you to /heal are that you are not currently taking damage and that your weapon is sheathed.

There is even gear and food/abilities to increase the MP regained from one 'tick' of /heal time.

In Predecessor, if you're Jungler, then 'leaving lane to enter jungle' has similar effects, you just duck through the fog wall to regenerate MP based on missing MP, and again, there are abilities and items to increase the number.

It's a tactical decision to figure out 'when you can afford to do those things'. In Ashes PvX around a boss that doesn't just spam AoE, then any similar thing (even just 'stand still and channel to increase MP regen') would be fine.

Up to devs if they care about that sort of thing or not, I'm just used to it myself, even Armored Core can make me 'drop back to regain generator power' (in the old games, not so much the current one).

Azherae wrote: »

The way to get mana back in FFXI is to '/heal', literally, there's a command to enter a resting stance that gives you mana every X period of time (it's long to start up because it's a PvE-mostly game). But the only requirements for you to /heal are that you are not currently taking damage and that your weapon is sheathed.

How fast would this regen you to halfmana (let's say with food)? If speed was class-specific, then what it was for mages. And then, how fast would you go through that mana if you were actively using your usual cycle of abilities?

I'm just thinking in overall terms of encounter pace. I'd imagine Predecessor is faster paced (especially given the "based on missing mp" part), so you would both go through and regen your mana relatively quickly. FF11 seems like a way more methodical game, so I'd imagine the pace was quite slow on both sides.

L2 was more of a bursty game, with super slow regen but real fast usage.

I'd personally prefer if Ashes was somewhere in the middle. And so far it seems like it might be, with the weapon passives and basic attacks mattering, and the long ttk as well.

Azherae wrote: »

Up to devs if they care about that sort of thing or not, I'm just used to it myself, even Armored Core can make me 'drop back to regain generator power' (in the old games, not so much the current one).

I'll finally go back and finish AC6 once I'm done with my current Starfield grind.

Want to make 2024 the year of finished games

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

The way to get mana back in FFXI is to '/heal', literally, there's a command to enter a resting stance that gives you mana every X period of time (it's long to start up because it's a PvE-mostly game). But the only requirements for you to /heal are that you are not currently taking damage and that your weapon is sheathed.

How fast would this regen you to halfmana (let's say with food)? If speed was class-specific, then what it was for mages. And then, how fast would you go through that mana if you were actively using your usual cycle of abilities?

I'm just thinking in overall terms of encounter pace. I'd imagine Predecessor is faster paced (especially given the "based on missing mp" part), so you would both go through and regen your mana relatively quickly. FF11 seems like a way more methodical game, so I'd imagine the pace was quite slow on both sides.

L2 was more of a bursty game, with super slow regen but real fast usage.

I'd personally prefer if Ashes was somewhere in the middle. And so far it seems like it might be, with the weapon passives and basic attacks mattering, and the long ttk as well.

Azherae wrote: »

Up to devs if they care about that sort of thing or not, I'm just used to it myself, even Armored Core can make me 'drop back to regain generator power' (in the old games, not so much the current one).

I'll finally go back and finish AC6 once I'm done with my current Starfield grind.

Want to make 2024 the year of finished games

That's a long explanation so I'll take a bit of time to try to tie back to the thread. The first thing to remember is that FFXI has 3x the TTK of Ashes, because of TP and other things meant to get around the 'dump damage and then wait for cooldowns'.

Slower PvE games tend to be like this because bursty high damage stuff is extra work and not the goal of their design space. So if we have proper PvE 'raids' in Ashes, let's say a max level strong boss takes at least 10m to fall even to a full raid (we can reference the A1 Pyro Dragon for this, etc), the entire point is that you cannot and should not 'just throw abilities at the problem' even if you had enough of them to do so.

This would mean that Mages in Ashes would have periods where they are 'not actively blasting', instead repositioning, waiting for cues and Synergy, etc. If we don't get at least that much, it will be the equivalent of 'going into a fight with full TP on all characters' in FF against a lower HP enemy. Everyone just 'unloads damage up front, then pops defense skills, then unloads damage again when Cooldowns are back'.

If this is all we get, then it doesn't matter. If we get the other type of thing where the encounter isn't really about 'combat' but about 'knowledge' (another thing that happens in bursty/high damage games trying to improve their PvE) then the conversation doesn't matter at all (but I can't imagine this in a PvX game being fun).

So a PvE raid approaching a mob in different game types matters a lot. In Predecessor, if I 'go to take Fangtooth' solo but not as Jungler, I care about my HP more than my MP, but it depends on build. When my opponents show up, I have probably just enough MP to use the few abilities that game gives. But I don't. Someone in the group is meant to tank or disrupt enemy position.

What happens is, one enemy gets disrupted, and you decide if to spend lots of MP to shred them with the hope of killing them. If you succeed, you're at advantage, but only if they didn't get to use their abilities to do a lot of damage to you. You 'removed a person with MP from the fight before they could convert it to damage'.

If you fail, you now have a target that is hard to reach without opening yourself up, who has low HP but lots of MP. HP doesn't matter if they are attacking opportunistically. Etc. I'm sure you're reasonably familiar.

FFXI tends to work exactly the same way, but with the additional factor that MP can be treated similarly. A character that has time to regenerate MP is now 'a target that you must prevent from returning to a state where they have converted time into power'.

So, for example, it's a good idea to kill certain Junglers in Jungle teamfights in Pred because if you fail the kill, they will use their MP to make your fight hard without actually being in danger (Sevarog, Countess). Whereas there are certain ones where you should not care and focus on killing everyone else because you will fail and spend too much MP on them (Khaimera, Greystone). And in turn, you 'counter' Khai and Greystone by 'making sure you regenerate your MP in some way while suppressing and luring them', all standard PvP stuff.

Pred fights between people who don't understand tactics are very brawly with little need for MP regen. But even the actual brawlers of the game have to care about it in an even fight, whether it's because they need to prevent the enemy from doing it, or because they need to ensure their own team manages.

This is what I expect to see, with the current MP regen rates. And to finally answer your question directly, regenerating 'to full' is not very relevant, as neither game is super 'high numbers big heals'.

For additional clarity, my largest single target Cure spell costs about 1/12th of my MP, and it would take over 30 seconds, for sure, to get enough for just that spell, if I ran completely dry, and used /heal, even with Clear Mind and food.

Sevarog Subjugate (root then slow) costs about 1/12th of my MP in midgame, and would also take 20-30 seconds to get enough for just that ability, if I ran completely dry. The main thing here is ofc that 'one more Cure V' and 'one more Subjugate' are game changers, whereas 'anything else I can do with no mana' may not be.

If I ran out of mana, and my HP is not needed to sponge up enemy mana, I'm best served leaving the fight if I can.

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

I should've made my point clearer.

On the scale of "not a respec at all" to "a complete respec", full change of gear is at the "I would consider this the most basic lvl of a respec" point for me.

My main class in L2 could be a CCs support, a mage, a rogue, a purely buff remover (majority of players were this) a combo of any of the above. All of that on top of changing your elemental attack attributes, skill enhancement paths and gear choices.

My initial point was this. Ashes won't let us change augments/skill lvls/class/node benefits/religion on the fly. But it will let us change gear. And as I just said, to me, changing gear barely counts as a respec.

So when you said "pve and pvp should have their own specs", to me this reads as "you gotta substantially change your character for either of those modes". And considering that we can't do that shit on the fly, this would not be pvx, because you'd have to have a complete reset of the entire encounter if you wanted to switch from pve to pvp, while to me a pvx encounter is the same character doing both (with a potential gear change on the fly).

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

And this is the difference between our povs. The content I want is pve+pvp. But if I need different specs for that - I can't have that content at the same time, while being optimally built for both. And running to "the right location" and back would mean, potentially, 5++ minutes of time. And at that point I would not have only lost my farming spot, but also 5++ minutes of my preferred gameplay.

If we get smth like a full skill lvls respec on the go, then, yeah, I'd consider the game to be closer to a pvx one rather than a "pve and pvp" one. Though at that point the respec better be cheap (if not free) and with loadouts, cause I ain't learning clicking patterns for 20+ abilities while my PL yells at me to go defend the healer

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Like I've been saying for a long time now, I want pvxers. People who excel at both pve and pvp at the same time. And if they're doing it at the same time, I'd prefer if they had gear that can do the same. Which is why I'd prefer if pve design had player-like attributes in it, so that both players and gear would be able to pvx.

PvE would still be mechanically more difficult, cause scale/pace/power of the mobs/bosses can be boosted over any given pvp encounter, but the underlying design would be player-like. And it's not as if I'm asking for something unheard of, considering that FF11 pretty much had this already. I'm just asking for the difficult task of applying the same design principle for a game like Ashes.