DPS Meter Megathread

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

My logic was based on your "20h of raiding a week" suggestion. I guess EQ's instances work differently or maybe I misunderstood how they worked in wow/ff14/l2, because I'm used to "instance" being a thing where you enter it, clear it and you're done. You could then repeat it immediately for more loot. And you could repeat it ad nauseam, until you get literally all of the possible gear from it.

And yes, those would be the party-centered instances, so they're usually way smaller in scale and difficulty (though not necessarily). I haven't run raid-sized instances in wow or ff14, but in L2 you'd have epic bosses (that you needed a raid to beat) with respawns ranging from 36h up to 11 days. And when NCsoft added pure instanced content meant for 36+ players, it reset on wednesdays and saturdays.

Both of those raid-type contents gave you top tier gear or epic uniques, so any amount of time spent on them was worth it. But if we exclude the pvp from the encounter, the farm itself would at worst be 5-6h, with pure instanced content being on a timer of no more than an hour (iirc). So none such content could provide you with 20h of raiding content, unless you were the top guild on the server and was clearing literally all the bosses.

Yet you're suggesting having 20h of raiding content a week. But, if it's instanced content, it wouldn't give BiS, so, in theory, it shouldn't be as difficult as the top lvl EQ raids you love, because I'd assume way less than 10% of pvers would even attempt it due to shitty rewards for a huge time investment.

And then comes my issue with supposed economy breaking potential of instanced content. Like I said, I'm used to associating instanced content with "reruns until you get everything you want", so I was mainly talking about that kind of thing ruining economy (everyone runs them w/o any interruptions, gets all the gear they'd ever need and all the mats from said gear, and can keep getting it again and again if they want = broken economy imo).

If we take only raid-sized instances that you can run only once a week, then I'd assume you have to get a ton of gear out of them, right? Because you're asking for 20h of gameplay from 40 people w/o a repeatable acquisition of gear from the instance. And a ton of gear that anyone can get w/o outside interruptions leads to broken economy. Any self-respecting high lvl guild would be running this weekly instance on all their members because they need to get the maximum value from the instance, no matter if it's a pvp guild or a pve one.

If you don't give out big quantities of gear and you don't give top quality gear for those 20h, then I must ask, do pvers really only want pure content w/o any tangible reward? Because I'd be completely fine with having some uber difficult instance raid that gives you some cool cosmetic and/or a title. Go and enjoy it for countless hours until you can beat it.

But as Steven says in references for this page , instance content will be mainly group-based and story-related. And any gear you get from it would probably be some basic "works for your level but far from the best"-type deal. I think the main source of confusion for you, when Steven says "raiding content", comes from the difference in the meanings of that definition.

I think you mentioned playing AA. I haven't played it, but I've heard that most if not all huge bosses there are open world, is that right? Cause if it is, then I'd assume that when Steven says "raiding content" he just means a huge boss with a ton of people fighting it. Now all the EQ devs at Intrepid will most likely push ow boss mechanics to their limits, but from all the info that I see, the raiding will still happen in the open world.

But you seem to be stuck on the idea that "raiding content" (or at least its best version) can only happen in instances, so when you hear Steven say that he wants raiding in Ashes, you immediately think that they'll appeal to your most desired type of content. And this is exactly why I said that Intrepid should distance themselves from being a raiding game (what I should've said is "a game with raids"), because, just like you, I'm sure the masses would also think about wow/ff14 raiding when they hear that classification for Ashes. And they'll be sorely disappointed.

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

As far as I know that is the usual thinking when people hear "instanced dungeon". And the gear connotations that come with it. Which is why everyone who dislikes that mechanic is so against it.

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

I'd personally be fine with that. All we have to know now is whether all the masses that played wow/ff14 and enjoyed raiding would be fine with that, cause afaik raiding in those games gave you BiS, so I'm not sure if our oldschool preferences (cause EQ2 is most definitely oldschool at this point) would match the current mmo culture.

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

When it comes to raid dungeons, I'm pretty sure Steven was always relating them to L2's Antharas' Lair or smth similar. Think the volcano dungeon from alpha1, but even more intricately laid out. You'd go through increasing difficulty of mobs and then have a huge epic boss at the very end. L2 had a semi-instance room for that boss and Ashes could definitely do the same, considering they already had a Portal gate to get to the dragon.

As for tiered Boss content within a dungeon - that's definitely smth I wanna see too, cause I'm very curious how they will design that. I have a few personal ideas of how it could be done so I do think it can be done, but for now I'll just wait and see what they have come up with.

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

Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of this kind of line of thinking: "There are instanced raids in this game but they don't give me BiS like I'm used to. I dunno if like that". In my eyes not having some feature is better than having a gimped one. I hope most people don't agree with me on this and they'll be fine with getting non-BiS gear through weekly instances, like how your circle of players would.

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

I could see the discouragement for that being anti-zerg mechanics that start their effect from the outskirts of the boss location rather than under the boss. This way any incoming players would be the first ones to get hit by them, which would at least partially deter them from trying to interrupt a farm (cause they have lower chances of winning the pvp because of said mechanics).

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

I wish Intrepid had some way to engage lowbies in high lvl raiding too. Mb some turret-like things that have their own mechanics that lowbie players can operate. Or maybe low lvl mobs that would put strong disabling debuffs on high lvl players, while lowbies can kill them freely.

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

I think this could be done with player markers that then activate new spawns in certain locations. Say your party A kills boss 1 in room A1 in 5 minutes. Now this party has a 5min marker on them. If you go to room B1, the next mob spawn in that room would be a "5min" spawn (or could be a boss). In order to get the next marker you need to kill these newly spawned mobs (you could add some visual/audio/quest-based indicator for this). Say you kill them in 4min. Now you have a 5/4 marker and room C1 would now spawn a boss instead of mobs (or the other way around with B1) because you did better.

And you could have all kinds of interconnection of this type. And people would probably want to optimize the hell out of these runs, so you could maybe randomize marker-giving mechanics. Bosses would have different drops, mobs could have different quest ties with different node hooks. All kinds of shit. And it all would be party-dependent instead of being purely location-based.

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

The boss could maybe account for "zerging". So if it's a one-party boss, yet it gets attacked by 2 parties and gets its anti-zerg mechanics enabled, the markers could be asterisked with a "anti-zerg was enabled", so if the system that's tracking the markers sees that only one group has gone past some point of the dungeon, it would then lower the difficulty a bit. Obviously this kind of stuff would have to be properly designed and remain hidden so that people wouldn't know how to exploit it immediately, but I still think it could be possible.

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

And L2 had bosses at lvl 20, right after your first class specialization. I'm not saying to completely remove low lvl content. I'm just saying that you could have both. Low lvl mobs should be on a fairly short respawn timer cause there's gonna be a ton of low lvl players at the start and in the first few months so they should have great content right from the get-go. And they'd outlvl those bosses fairly quickly too, so I don't think that quick respawns would be much of a problem.

But I think that having some low lvl content around high lvl raids/bosses would not only bring hardcore and casual players closer, but would also provide proper guild training for all the newcomers. Instead of just being "that one newbie that's gonna be leveling alone for several weeks while everyone at the top is having fun" have it be "that one newbie that can mount a turret during the raid and help out with a particular mechanic". Now the new player can enjoy even more content, can see what's in his future (a cool huge raid) and would already become a part of the team. I see this as an absolute win.

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

This is another gimping of the system that will just push away anyone who prefers instances and their usual design from other games. It's the same as "owpvp" in opt-in games. Any person who enjoys real owpvp will spit on that kind of implementation of the system because why have a shitty version of the system, when you could've just avoided having the system at all and not alienate all the people that came to the game for said system.

If you say "we have instance raids with good gear in them", people will come to your game expecting the usual "everyone can try the instance. Maybe not everyone can beat them, but you can try" instead of "participate in pvp in order to get a chance to enter the instance". That type of thing only works on pvp gamers, like those from L2, because at the core of the feature there's only pvp.

Or if by "open world event" you don't mean "there'll be pvp there", then you're just creating unneeded complications for people to enjoy the content.

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

Boss' abilities and environmental hazards will scale with attackers' quantity. I called that anti-zerg, but iirc it's just an intended mechanic to counter 2 groups from the same guild fighting a one-group boss. The same mechanic would apply when 2 groups from different guilds are present in the boss location.

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

The markers would still help with countering this gameplay. Mark each group with separate markers. Track those markers not only within the boss location, but only in Boss' aggro list.

If on the second boss one of the groups didn't even enter the location, lessen the difficulty and then readjust it in future boss stages if the group comes in later on.

If the group entered the location but didn't start attacking the boss, ramp up the environmental hazards to make them move way more. If they continue to not do anything, ramp it up even higher on future boss stages. And this would be on top of already heightened "anti-zerg" mechanics.

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

And this is why I still think that L2's semi-instances would achieve this goal w/o much changes to the overall system or "risk vs reward" ideology.

We could still have an instance that rewards mid gear once a week, but for all the other content I think semi-instances would work. But we'll have to see what Intrepid comes up with first, in order to give proper feedback to whichever exploits their system might have.

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

Well yeah, any system will get gamed sooner or later. It just depends on how much it can be gamed and how fast.
It could be a pseudo-instance rather than an actual instance, but it is still a requirement that for this mechanic that Steven has talked about to work, there needs to only be one raid present.[/quote]
Which is why I wanna see Intrepid's system first to know how exactly they plan to realize Steven's designs.

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

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Raids#Raid_target_markers
"There may be environmental hazards and AoE effects that cause more damage based on the number of players present.[72]"

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

And I'm not saying they should. You can still have variety and unique encounters. All you need to do is have a range of Boss abilities and environmental mechanics that work well in a situation where there's more people that the boss design was built for.

If you don't have such mechanics on some bosses, those bosses will just be stomped by zergs.