TTK and Power scaling can be easily fixed.

This gap is necessary in Ashes because if it doesn't exist, the skill expression will be too high relative to the gear chase, for what the game is designed to be.

In other games without this, what happens is that very skilled players don't need gear chase and get to save a lot of time and money (and I mean a lot ) just by how skilled they are.

Ashes does not have a 'Gear Score' system or any other system that helps to equalize this effort disparity, so it gets tied to the economy, the thing they can control.

I'm not saying they shouldn't nerf it, but if they do, it will create other problems with bottlenecks in the leveling phase and those absolutely matter with the game's current design.

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To be clear, I was referring to the gap between tiers of weapon power.

I'd support increases in Armors and PvE complexity/difficulty while leaving the weapons gap as it is.

I'd also support a more wholesale change to stats and the economic design of the game so that the benefits of the skill gap go into exploration and 'soft power' instead of being linked to the gear chase.

TTK is being adjusted soon, so maybe we will get those things, I'm only saying that if they divide the gaps between weapon strength in a way that actually matters, other issues will pop up.

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Just so I'm clear, do you care about the PvE impact of these changes at all?

Here's my classic bias Fast growth at early lvls, but then smaller and smaller growth the higher you go in gear tiers (pic read by column top to bottom, left to right).


Add enchantment on top of this (ease of it decreasing with tiers) and you got yourself a fairly equalized battlefield, instead of whatever the fuck we've got now.

Rarities can provide non-enchanted growth within steps of gear tiers, especially if enchantment is tied to rarity rather than being universal. This way hardcore rich players would still be slightly ahead, cause they got both rare and enchanted, but more casual players would still be able to enchant their basic stuff and not be toooo behind.

As for pve, that shit can be balanced 6 ways to sunday. Figure out your pvp side, so that players don't leave because a single guy can fucking oneshot several groups of people and then balance your pve around the scaling of player power that you landed on after having figured out your pvp.

Thanks for the response, I'll disengage, based on that one.

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But the game is barely built right now, right? We barely have one full biome, and even that is not completed because we don't have nodes up to lvl6, which means that all the mobs that we do have cannot grow up to max lvl.

Doesn't this mean that Intrepid are barely 5% into their PvE development? And then, considering how much of an issue PvP balancing already is - wouldn't it be better to figure out PvP NOW and then build the entire PvE side on top of that figured out PvP?

Or do you think that Intrepid will just do a "x5" on mob stats when those become higher lvl after a node lvl up? Because if you believe that, then OP's suggestion would fit right in, because it's also just a multiplier on stats.

Ludullu wrote: »

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

But the game is barely built right now, right? We barely have one full biome, and even that is not completed because we don't have nodes up to lvl6, which means that all the mobs that we do have cannot grow up to max lvl.

Doesn't this mean that Intrepid are barely 5% into their PvE development? And then, considering how much of an issue PvP balancing already is - wouldn't it be better to figure out PvP NOW and then build the entire PvE side on top of that figured out PvP?

Or do you think that Intrepid will just do a "x5" on mob stats when those become higher lvl after a node lvl up? Because if you believe that, then OP's suggestion would fit right in, because it's also just a multiplier on stats.

Ok I think I started a derail actually in the usual way so I should clarify what I actually meant.

For various reasons, some of which can be mitigated by 'just changing multipliers' if the PvE is simple enough, when you offer a wide range of potential power ratings for players, what will happen is that skilled players will have zero economic incentive to engage with the 'subsystems' for power gain.

This creates some basic problems, but since Ashes' enchanting is currently ... not finished, I'll briefly reference BDO and TL.

In BDO I can upgrade defense gear and use a jank/weaker/underleveled weapon to save money. Some areas even have direct AP caps but require 'higher skill' to get the drops. This was necessary to prevent the 'no-lifers' and 'whales' from trivializing the content, a consequence of using Enhancing systems in a game at all, really. In Korean MMOs this is the point because 'culturally' this is 'appealing'.

Throne and Liberty has to solve this by doing what WoW does and adding 'Levels' to PvE dungeons but that's the only content that actually gets this treatment. The result is that Moderate Enhancing effort + High Skill will clear the content without too much difficulty (and for some, myself included, more fun) but fully Enhanced players absolutely trivialize it and have to go for the 'Mythic Plus' equivalent. If you want PvE challenge in Open World (or even most Abyss dungeons) for some reason, you have to be significantly below even basic gear-score you could achieve. I'm talking about 'sitting on potentially hundreds of Enhancing mats just so the game isn't bot-tier difficulty'.

When the numerical gap is smaller, the number of 'holes', the number of ways players can find to mess with the difficulty curve, increases for various reasons. This can be solved by rebalancing everything, but I wasn't talking about balance. I was talking about incentives, how people feel and how they treat each other.

TL doesn't allow players below a certain level and gearscore to participate in Dungeons of specific tiers, but this is absolutely not because they couldn't clear them. I know this because my group, who generally don't bother going meaningfully past the requirement in Gear Score, can 4-man them and probably could do it with 3 if trying 'harder' (bringing someone who actually does go past the GearScore requirement).

The reason for this is to prevent the confusion. If 3-4 skilled people at the required GearScore is all you need to clear the content, then 6 skilled people below it, would probably clear it similarly. But this destroys communication and PickUp Groups, y'see.

You can't tell if the person with the half-Enhanced secondary weapon and blue tier Armor is skilled-build, new, or overconfident, and TL doesn't offer either DPS meters or the ability to see damage numbers of other people in the UI , a thing that people will absolutely also want as an option in Ashes and I bet Steven will grant and encourage.

This also spills back over into PvP but this post is already long. Let's leave it as "The PvE players this affects were not going to benefit from any changes."

tl;dr Big power jumps in gear are related to discouraging average players from mixing with high-skill players without either side realizing that's what's happening. In a game with no DPS meters and simple PvE, this is among the only ways to do this.

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr Big power jumps in gear are related to discouraging average players from mixing with high-skill players without either side realizing that's what's happening. In a game with no DPS meters and simple PvE, this is among the only ways to do this.

I know it's been a huge fucking ask from me, but this is exactly why I've kept asking for cross-lvl interactivity in encounters.

Those same tools could be used for cross-power interactivity. The game sees that a mob was aggroed by a group with high enchantments? Now this mob has a different reaction pattern, a stronger buff effect and a faster enrage. The game sees the same mob attacked by a group with underpowered people? Now this mob calls upon his weaker friends that mainly attack the underpowered dudes (if there's still someone of an equal power to the mob in the party).

And sure, Steven has never been a pve guy, so I highly doubt anything like this would ever appear in Ashes (cause even other mmos don't do this shit), but a man can dream...

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr Big power jumps in gear are related to discouraging average players from mixing with high-skill players without either side realizing that's what's happening. In a game with no DPS meters and simple PvE, this is among the only ways to do this.

I know it's been a huge fucking ask from me, but this is exactly why I've kept asking for cross-lvl interactivity in encounters.

Those same tools could be used for cross-power interactivity. The game sees that a mob was aggroed by a group with high enchantments? Now this mob has a different reaction pattern, a stronger buff effect and a faster enrage. The game sees the same mob attacked by a group with underpowered people? Now this mob calls upon his weaker friends that mainly attack the underpowered dudes (if there's still someone of an equal power to the mob in the party).

And sure, Steven has never been a pve guy, so I highly doubt anything like this would ever appear in Ashes (cause even other mmos don't do this shit), but a man can dream...

No, the mechanical solution to this is much easier. Like, incredibly easier, but again, it's about stroking egos.

It's not worth derailing this thread with (I'm happy to make a Splinter if we end up starting to) but the main thing people need to accept is that MMOs that don't stroke egos don't generally draw big crowds, for obvious reasons.

Older MMOs didn't have to compete with WoW, and generally were trying to draw audiences that wanted to experience a (personal) story and perceived this to be related to challenge. Even WoW was this for a while, but eventually they got the usual 'why can't you tell me the story without all this difficult game-playing?' and everything since then has had to figure out how to get investors to understand this.

Games made by those who have become used to this also automatically drift that way. But all hope is not lost yet. New World started with nearly no ego-stroking (but unfortunately also went full PvP in a way that made no sense) and TL is learning the 'separate it from the gameplay and discourage people from talking about it' technique. Ashes will find its own way, I think. Steven has experience in what it takes to change from being one type of player into another.

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Well, they've already started on some of those things, mob changed included, so we'll see where it all ends up.

And I say keep that hardcore grind, but make it fucking harder. Right now it's the easiest damn thing in the world. People who have a ton of time should spend infinitely more time to get an infinitesimal increase in power.

Separate substats from the main enchantment effect and make the substat enchantment insaaaaanely expensive/difficult AND rng-based. Only a select few on the entire damn server should be able to get to the peak of power and only after having spent months of their time and guild-based effort/money.

Ludullu wrote: »

And I say keep that hardcore grind, but make it fucking harder. Right now it's the easiest damn thing in the world. People who have a ton of time should spend infinitely more time to get an infinitesimal increase in power.

Separate substats from the main enchantment effect and make the substat enchantment insaaaaanely expensive/difficult AND rng-based. Only a select few on the entire damn server should be able to get to the peak of power and only after having spent months of their time and guild-based effort/money.

What this achieves in the end is to make the game 'dry' and more like FF14.

A WoW+L2 hybrid can work, an FF11+L2 Hybrid can work, but an FF14+L2 hybrid cannot work.

I base this opinion on the fact that whenever I do see complaints about changes in direction for Black Desert Online or lately Throne and Liberty, it's been from the type of player who wants FF14 style gameplay.

Those players play long enough to do the story, faff about in a new guild for a month, or try out a new weapon or something. They like the novelty and being able to achieve it , they're not here to hone anything. The problem is that Ashes' approach to gameplay doesn't hold them.

Ofc, the fact that the current stat design is (imo) somehow moving even further from being effective at the thing it needs to be is not going to help, making it harder on top of that would just be building its own coffin.

No matter how much I also like games like this, I have now concluded that they do not work without a much more complex approach to this feeling.

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That is approximately what I said when I first heard about this. I had some questions, obviously. I do not think I will be testing this particular update, myself.