Combat Discussion

Ok, new page, new Compilation iteration:

1. Sideways and forward animations for the Q/LMB to add variety and evasion ability, along with chase options, while either neutral Q/LMB or S+Q/LMB prevents any forward movement while attacking.
2. A Brace option that reduces damage and blocks CC unless the enemy has 'Overwhelm' on their ability. Some stamina cost here.
3. Possibly a small stamina cost for some versions of those directional Q abilities so we can have movement but not eternally.
4. Gated strings with different attack animations (we already have a combo attack like this, but some posters have asked for more variety)
5. Limitations on the usability of certain skills when the enemy is out of its attack cone, regardless of your Tab Target.
6. 'Sticky reticle' behaviour to enhance targeting, possibly assisting with the Tab Targeting itself, but not requiring it, to make the transitions between Tab and Action easier
7. Ability to dodge twice before Dodge Cooldown fully triggers (Dodge retains a stamina cost). E.g. Dodge once and it 'recharges your first dodge' but you have another you can always use. Dodge twice and now you can't dodge again until recharged.
8. Some telegraphs of the attack vector or cone of abilities (especially those that can be varied through augments)
9. A stamina cost tied to jumping (perhaps only when weapons drawn). Note, not universal, this has a dissenter in this thread, and others that don't want it without some equivalent of #1.

Unrelatedly, is it just me or does Q seem like an odd Keybind for this? Why is Interact, a thing one hits in non dangerous situations, on E, but attack on Q? I know other games do this and I've never understood it.

It's pretty irrelevant if they open up keybind edits soon, but it may be hard to get unbiased data this way...

Anyways, let me know how this one is. Reasonings aren't included today.

Before I do a full assessment of that @Littlekenny21 , do you think you could also clarify some examples of 'which ability to use' in terms of importance? Should this be 'obvious but involve some prediction of the opponent' or 'not so obvious because it relies on your own plans'?

Here's an example, this does not use any abilities currently in the game, so just take these at face value, you don't need to look anything up.

Let's assume Fighter has 6 abilities:
1. A Leap that closes onto an opponent in front of them with an area knockdown, but the Fighter's recovery time is not much faster than the opponent's time to get back up. Mostly a gap closer.
2. A big hit that lowers the opponent's movement speed temporarily
3. An AoE weapon swing around themselves that has knockback and interrupts abilities.
4. A close range 'lifting slam' that powerbombs the opponent over their head and behind them. Similar to the leap, the Fighter doesn't recover much faster than the opponent
5. A Somersault Slam similar to their leap but which can be done backward, to get out of some attack ranges or get to someone who is behind them
6. A 'Berserk' ability that raises their attack at the cost of some HP.

I have purposely made all these abilities as different as I generally could, to make the point.

At any given point in the battle, for most players, it is 'obvious' which one of these to use. The situation is fairly reactive. use the Leap to chase, the Speed Break to prevent classes that benefit from running out of range, the AoE Swing when the opponent's position is unclear or there are multiple enemies, the Bodyslam for close range interrupt, the Somersault Slam either when the Leap is on cooldown and you need to close in, or you want to get over someone behind, and Berserk when you get a chance and don't think you will get hit soon.

It's definitely enough to be reactive, it's definitely enough to test your timing and thought processing, but even with higher mobility, it's not going to lead to 'planning ahead' a lot. You can 'read your opponent's next move' in the moment and possibly get some big advantages, though.

Is this ok, with 'utility skills and buffs' covering the 'planning ahead' part? Or did you mean something else when you were speaking about more ability options?

(the first four parts of this were drafted before any response to the prior post involving hypothetical fighter abilities)

@Littlekenny21

1. You would prefer that full invisibility not be combined with burst damage that makes the defender have to 'play catch-up'
2. You prefer a TTK of about 30 seconds in a duel, but are fine with being able to defeat an afk player in 10 seconds or so (implies evasion, defense or mobility to avoid damage can result in 66% less damage on both sides)
3. Would prefer more mobility and positioning to complement abilities, but don't need positioning damage to matter.
4. You prefer if spatial awareness is a relatively large part of gameplay
5. You would prefer to have more abilities that share some, but not all of their properties, in order to have more choice in your own plans.

Got it, thank you. I have another thread somewhere within the first two pages (as of this posting) that goes into Rogue stuff, but there might be some clarification eventually required there, since I've been told that the wiki entry for Rogue may be inaccurate currently.

Balancing for more abilities overall has two issues. The first is that it's 'harder', the second is that it's homogenous/stale. As always, unrelated example.

I've dabbled in Trading Card Game design a while back, and found that depending on the structure of the game, there are only so many things a player can even be allowed to do, with a single card, and the game remain balanced. Sometimes new abilities just don't make sense at all.

One designs the obvious stuff first. Draw more cards. Assist in battles. Destroy/remove enemy monster/hero. Monster/hero stronger in battles.

What happens is that after about... 360-400 cards, either you've run out of things to put in that aren't copies of others, or your game gains complexity, new keywords, or 'prefab' archetypes.

So, would you be okay with it if your Weapon Skills made up a lot of this space? Basically, getting skills that probably don't give mobility, or at least, that focus in a specific way, instead of class abilities.

The reason this would be easier is simple, you probably have to specialize in a weapon, which allows another balance 'layer'. You can choose many abilities for your class, many augments, and they have to make sure that most or all of these are good synergy.

There's no need to promise or build for this when it comes to weapon skills. A 'Spear' fighter can be restricted to 'not have bleed, because it would make them overpowered to have bleed + whatever else spears have + Fighter abilities + one of 64 augments'.

The weapon skills might grant short CC, but probably not very much mobility, or maybe either/or for a given weapon. This is the easiest design path, and within the realm where I can still mostly simulate the whole fractal in my head, which usually means a full team can do it easily.

Therefore, a question to all, not just @Littlekenny21 :

If your ability bar is generally padded out with weapon skills that are 'different ways to do damage with different debuffs' and 'either small CC or small mobility but not both', is this enough? Would you prefer that the team put more effort and time into unique class-specific abilities, or can they take this 'easy route' without compromising your probable enjoyment?

(example: 'Fan of Daggers' isn't a Rogue ability, it's a Dagger ability)

It's easily possible to build Cleric as a pure healer as they are now within the Alpha. I don't mean design, I mean 'as you play'. The current system in the Alpha-1 may change, but right now, I can skip both the Judgement ability and Castigate (the whip) if I want to, while leveling.

I have 'reverse engineered' a lot of the probable augments based on the class names in another thread, as mentioned (somewhere on page 4 of tanking). In short, don't worry about Cleric too much, I'm on the 'I like to do damage too sometimes' side of that, but I can see how the other side will probably work, to the point where I'm worried for others who want to get that chance (my group will let me do whatever).

On to your precise opinions on the important thing: Combat

The 'max' for unique class abilities according to my calculation based on only what Ashes uses now (HP, Mana, Cooldowns), is 12 each (16 for Clerics, Mages, 14 for Bards).

Beyond that there will be some significant overlap. At 20, you'll have enough overlap for it to start affecting balance. I'll avoid writing another essayworth on that.

That said, the overall takeaway is that you'd prefer they spend more time trying to 'get to 12' than that they 'settle for 8-10 and switch to working on weapons'. So you're now 'king of the hill' in that regard, in that you now have the only specific opinion in the thread (I don't care either way, and my group's members aren't likely to either).

Since that opinion is about 'where resources should be spent', and not directly about balance, I'll only correct any misconceptions brought by others who have different opinions, to see if they end up agreeing with you. Other than that... you may need to defend your hill.

Request for other posters, if you disagree with that, better @ to summon Littlekenny21 when ya do.

That seems unlikely based on the design concepts.

Assuming that every ability is just held as the equivalent of (or directly as) JSON or YAML entry with the correct attributes set, and the modularity of attributes can be read by the underlying parser to convert (this is the way my team has recently built all these), it will just be a matter of which Augment is tied to the ability by the player in some UI. I can check what the performant options would be for this (the issue is moreso transmission of the data for the attacks of those around you, than anything on the client side, and you could load a player's schema easily before they are even doing anything)

The fact that one by necessity gets abilities before you get your secondary archetype would lean into this as well. I'd expect that it will be just one or two lines to indicate that the ability should occur a certain way. Of course, once it's loaded into server instance or shard memory, it's probably little more than a bitfield, which would accelerate performance enough to maintain the numbers of players they want to see.

Basically, it's easier to tie the Augment directly to the ability than to any Passives, which is why I expect we will be able to attach Augments to Abilities individually and not as a whole thing. Performance-wise it's almost exactly the same, so there's no reason to limit the player's agency and build choices except for balance, and I foresee no balance issues with Augments on Class abilities.

Possible Augments on Weapon Abilities, I haven't simulated, that could be an issue, and I can see it lessening build depth for a lot of classes, but only if Weapon abilities are augmented by Secondary Archetype. Augments from other sources would just be the same thing.

Ok, I actually hadn't seen notes one way or the other on that, and didn't want to jump to any conclusions. I figured it was possible to go to a specific organization to get an Augment on your Weapon Ability.

Some sort of 'Lancer's Barracks' to get a small additional effect on your Spear Weapon Ability, for example.

News from other thread
is that the 'jumping using stamina' debate has resurfaced, but we're past that, so anyone can go jump on there, either to clarify the situation relative to jumping, or join the debate.

So far, the consensus appears to be 'add stamina to jumping and make it the same as the one for rolling and sprinting', so I may end up adding that back to the Compilation after all if the schism is debated out.

We have very few examples of 'themes and styles of augments' from those, unfortunately, so it makes more sense to consider combat from the perspective of them being very similar to each other, simply because there are not sufficient balanced mechanics that can be put into what is currently known.

In general we have not received enough information, to the point where I know people that wouldn't want to join at the moment because they can't be assured of anything regarding even simple Class/Archetypal things that they are used to.

In some cases it is literally 'hey, tell me when you know for sure that the classes will be good'.

Broad statements are unfortunately where a lot of recent MMO projects have faltered. We have a lot of clear information on some very appealing things, but classes, balance, etc are not in that pile. So it isn't unreasonable to feel the need to say what one feels is important.

Edit: Removed due to pointlessness.

I believe that part of the reason we do not have enough information is that the Devs not only want to try new things or multiple things (they have said this directly, repeatedly) but also because they want exactly this type of feedback.

My hope is to give them something clear to work with, from all the people who feel strongly enough about it and have a clear idea of what they want. The faster they get into the 'iteration' stage, the better. Having to tear down the whole thing and start again, repeatedly, is, I feel, a 'dangerous' flow for a game that intends to drop NDA soon, even if they say that they are not expecting to have a full working combat until Alpha-2.

On the other hand, they also said that they were already partway through a combat revamp, which many people are inclined to wait for. I'm just arrogant enough to look at the systems they have, and what they said, and think 'there's no need to wait, and it's bad to wait, we should clarify as much as we can for them now'.

So, as a Cleric, I can say what I want to get personally, and what we seem to have, since the Compilation is fairly far along, and it affects me so little.

I like that Clerics only seem to be planned to have a few direct damage abilities so far, and the others are largely DoT. I personally enjoy solo as Cleric. It's never fast, it helps 'availability' and allows me to learn about enemies before joining a group to fight them, or even to lead the group to do so. Practicing healing on yourself is decent practice. I don't mind having to beat (in other games) or stab (hopefully in this game) things to death over long periods, but I don't like the feeling that Cleric should be anything other than the lowest overall DPS.

If you tell healers 'you have to backline', as far as I know, about half of players willing to play a healer bow out because it's often not fun for the majority of the content (leveling).

Ashes' design goals can basically only lead to 'specialization by target activity'. A Cleric build for Siege warfare isn't likely to be the same as a Cleric build for PvE, and not the same as a Cleric build for World Boss/Raid level content, and this is just based on your points in Cleric skilltree.

But this is fine, because you can just tell people upfront what you are. When people go 'we need a Cleric to run this dungeon', you can tell them 'well I'm a Castle/Node defense specialist, so this won't be as efficient'. When they need to down a Raid Boss and somehow you have to fill in for their regular group Cleric, people should be able to be aware that you 'are normally a Leveling specialist' and might not have built enough power into your heals to do that without some extra assistance/focus on their part.

I'm not actually ever sure why people 'want their Clerics to be just healers', maybe it's a holdover from all those games where they 'try to give everyone healing' and 'try to give Clerics enough damage to keep up with DD'. I know that can force people who really just want to heal, into having to learn more about damage. But that's not what I see now. I see 'pure healing being very acceptable' and a higher likelihood of pushback from people for 'healers that spend mana on other things'.

Those 'other things' are situational and can be mistimed, but the 'fallback' for a Cleric who doesn't understand a situation is 'just heal' and complaints should be minimal.

I'll be Cleric Tanking some World Bosses, of course. Our battles will be legendary.

Added the 9th point, the jumping one, to the Compilation further up the page, based on the discussion .

Currently see no specific need to put Time To Kill stuff into the compilation, since it is already in Intrepid's plans and so far, no one has shown any concern about the 10s for afk, 30s for duel, parameters for TTK.

Most other threads currently active seem to be philosophical, but if I missed anything, please let me know, as always.