Mob/Boss Combat Interaction (plus a compromise for hybrid combat)

It's not like encounters are hard to build when you have a known system.

If a game builds around tanking working strongly through primarily the tank you get the common Tab Target result. It isn't necessary.

Ashes can just make tanking a 'team effort' and that will be more in line with all their stated philosophies if big bosses have hurtboxes.

The Action part for the tank is mitigation. For everyone else it is juggling 'damage' and 'their contribution to tanking'.

Also helps prevent Tankx2 Healerx3 FOTM DDx11.

That is also a definition thing maybe? I don't mean that they get hit. I mean that their debuffs and such are required to prevent the tank taking big damage. It is baked into their system. Limited primary archetypes allows you to balance this in this way with much less effort.

Then assume Ashes will make it a thing? Community is one of their goals. And they set the expectations up front. You will need a Cleric. Not just mitigation and 'some healing'. You will need a Tank. Not just 'can hold hate and not die'. They're tuning by abilities not classes. Not common but should be.

To expand on that, it's hinted all through their design schema. If they are doing this by accident or coincidence, that's amazing and good for us as long as they keep listening.

The game offers options for builds, but at the same time, most Archetypes have one or two 'signature' style abilities, that no one would really expect someone who wants to play as that class, to not take. Tanks will take Ultimate Defense 90% of the time. Clerics will take Radiant Burst unless they have an AoE augment from somewhere. Mages will take Black Hole or more likely Meteor Swarm. Other Archetypes are also each likely to have something like that. And if you somehow chose not to take that? Y'know, that's alright too, you might have a specialization that helps in some other content and just be expected to tell people you don't take it.

Limiting us to Primary Archetype abilities allows them to design encounters where 'one of each' is optimal. This was somewhat directly said by Steven (at the 19:00 mark) in



but I suppose it may seem like a stretch to interpret it that way, for some.

These 'signature skills' allow them a lot of clarity in design. You can make it so that if there's no Tank with Ultimate Defense, some appropriate mechanic will make the group's life really hard . ( @Vhaeyne this part is more for @Ugoogee than for you, I'm sure you're familiar already)

Hybrid Combat is also not guaranteed to be 'everyone will accept the style of play you use', just that you will be able to play it and succeed. And hurtboxes on enemies, that move around, allow you to make it so that Tab players do what they expect to do; 'mostly stand in one place and wait for an opportunity', and Action players do what they expect to do; 'get into position and aim their attacks'. This is another reason why we were told up front that players will 'have to' take 75-25 split. You have to become familiar with things, because balance is going to involve you 'moving toward doing at least a little Action Combat', and optimization is going to involve you 'taking advantage of the speed of Tab Target' (usually for defensive stuff I'll assume).

Designers also don't have to work that hard, given the Archetypes that we have. Clerics can do damage, but not a lot of 'high sudden damage to specific hurtboxes', so you can't necessarily just bring a ton of Clerics. Tanks are also slightly limited in this, so 'All Tanks and Clerics' would might manage but it wouldn't be easy. 'Almost all Fighters' has a different problem. Even if they are built tanky, Bleed and Poison and a few other things don't care about this, only Ultimate Defense meaningfully does. And Fighters probably don't naturally get much if any strong debuffs that are likely to work well on raid or even single-group bosses. It's more likely that their 'signature move' is the gap closer, and their role is actually damage. It's unlikely you'll need to worry about Fighters finding spots, but if you fill everything with them for 'more damage', you don't have 'enough' control. They have to stay 'below the hate line' established by the Tank, but they're not helping the Tank 'avoid losing hate to keep that hate line high' in most cases.

Which brings us back to the 'Rathalos'.

Poison. Burn AoE on the ground, relatively powerful bites (it's a very 'output heavy' enemy generally). You want this blinded. Maybe you want it Paralyzed so that it sometimes fails a full strength Fireball breath. You need someone (probably just the Tank though) to put the 'damage mitigation' on it. You probably want a Bard to keep the Tanks in a specific buff state and Summoners and Rangers to help keep the enemy in a specific debuff state (don't overwork your Bards!). Rogues and Fighters bring the damage, handle Adds of either the PvP or PvE variety, and target vulnerable hurtboxes to change the fight or disable enemy mechanics.

And you need the Mages (or certain Summoners) to stop it when it flies . If you don't have a Prismatic Beam to blast at its head, or a Black Hole to pull it down, then you have to 'endure' the flight stage (or hope your Tank or Cleric is good at hitting a moving head with some Flash ability) and the 'crash down' threat or whatever else. You could treat it like the Poison Dragon in Siege, and just have everyone 'be perfect and avoid the touchdown damage', but if it's now out of reach of melee and still fireballing and similar, the Tank now has to play much more Action. They're not doing damage (probably still have a Threat ability but maybe fewer that reach) but lose threat as they take damage. Augments help Tanks when their abilities can actually hit. Ever wondered why Tank doesn't just have a 'use this, get Threat unconditionally' ability yet? I don't.

If someone isn't on point, danger increases rapidly, and that gets 'worse' if the party comp isn't right. Or maybe not quite 'worse', because you could just, again, balance it. Fighters might just 'not care as much' about what is happening when it is flying, but they still lose some effectiveness. The fight takes longer, the group uses more mana to reach the same point as a more balanced group, etc. You can make do with any 'Trinity' combination, but you have a reason to at least seek out one of each, and even if that one doesn't have every ability you expect, they probably have something.

This isn't just 'a Rathalos thing'. This is a formula, it's why Monster Hunter works. I can do this for basically any enemy because Ashes is built for it.

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

That depends on your definition of 'hard'. But the HP Pinata really isn't a necessary baseline, even in a PvPvE game. That's also a design relic.

Most games design open world bosses as a literal Tank. It takes a lot of punishment, swivels around its turret, and fires big shots or sometimes AoE shots. The 'correct' way is to make the boss into a moving Hazard Zone. When fighting in one group, your goal is to mitigate the Hazard. When PvP breaks out, your goal is to pull and knock the enemy INTO the hazard while staying out of it/not dying yourself.

And they already design things like this. The Ice Dragon (Father of Tundra) in the Alpha is basically only a threat in terms of it being a big 'hazard zone'. And sure, it has a lot of health, but not 'this is my only method of standing against you all'.

So if PvP happens, it's a scramble to reorient relative to the hazard space.

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

It's moreso that I'm saying 'that's how they already designed it'. I'm a Cleric so, to me everything is already a 'reaction based encounter', or maybe, again, it's just that FFXI and FFXIV are so different that I consistently overestimate the state of MMOs these days.

I've heard that WoW is heavily scripted like that and as a result never touched it. I've seen indications that FFXIV is so too (which is what spawned the Rathalos discussion to begin with, I'm still amazed at how lame the FFXIV side of that crossover is).

But I'm just not used to it. Endgame FFXI is at least 80% 'crazy reactive nonsense' and I play Monster Hunter because it is just the 'Action Combat evolution of that'. Dial some of that back and you get to where Ashes design is targeted.

If it doesn't turn out that way, complain, I'll be right with you.

Or another, far more arrogant way to put it... based on what you've seen would you play what I design? If you remove 'Intrepid' or 'Ashes' from the equation and it's me in Steven's place telling you 'this is how I want to build something, gimme Kickstarter money' (with the current 8 class thing), what, if anything, would make you 'stick to' the reaction of 'not expecting things to be interesting or hard'. What 'part would you be skeptical, that I couldn't do'?

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

You could say that I am 'mainly' that player type. I don't play FFXIV or WoW. My friend who got into FFXIV after we stopped playing FFXI for a while told me not to bother, it was casual. I followed the debacle that came before the Realm Reborn, and just never bothered after that because they continued to tell me 'nah don't bother.

If you mean my posts outside of this thread, they're not required for the question. I only mean the ones in here, and even those just 'the ones after Rathalos is mentioned'.

Monster Hunter, FFXI, Elite Dangerous - AA+ games

Skyforge, Onigiri, Paladins, Paragon, SMITE - if they matter.

EDIT: Actually if you don't read my posts generally it's an irrelevant question and you can consider it retracted so as not to waste your time, you asked about reaction based encounters so I assumed you had. Shouldn't assume so much.

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

I actually don't have a problem with the difficulty, I just can't get into either game enough to get all the way there, and obv there's only so much time to play MMOs. That's kind of my point actually. 'Difficult' doesn't often mean 'interesting' to me. I should have separated it. My friend told me early on that the game was pretty casual and easy (again, before RR), then later on told me 'yeah it's better now but you still probably shouldn't bother'. I guess because they know my expectations.

The reason for mentioning the Rathalos was on the 'Hybrid Combat' front. Rathalos is disappointing in FFXIV not because it's necessarily easy (and since I have no idea what that is in FFXIV to a sufficient level, I wouldn't be able to tell), it's because a really dynamic monster got reduced to 'a big turret', based on every video of it I've seen. The 'Extreme' version did the opposite and tried to make the conditions of the battle 'exactly like Monster Hunter' but didn't change the monster (and apparently didn't understand that they needed to keep a specific part of the hate mechanics, or maybe none of the videos has anyone who understands 'hate' in Monster Hunter).

If WoW mastered the 'cool scripted raid' then we can hope that Ashes masters the 'Hazard Zone Free For All'.