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

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You'd have to define 'fun'. For some people fun is coordination over a long period. For others it is 'reacting on a razor's edge to a specific dangerous thing happening and then going back to the DPS check'.

"When the turret is not strong enough, add landmines."

Kind of an old design philosophy, but it does result in the experience described.

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It'd be easy to build 20-25 encounters into Ashes at launch just with what they have now. The concept is 'top end raid', which is a bit more difficult because those require more testing and tuning. You could just mostly not, though, and trust the class design. Players always find a way. As long as the bosses aren't completely broken, they usually enjoy doing it, too.

Verra is a 'forsaken' world. That means powerful dark and/or territorial things have crawled into the recesses and corners. The question is moreso 'can we manage to continue making interesting Hazard Zone bosses'. Can't say there, their 'adaptive content' model will be the deciding factor in that. The base requirements are easily there though. Monsters that could reasonably have more than one similar instance so that everyone doesn't have to live in the same place, and a restricted number of class abilities and core concepts to balance around directly.

Spider, Animated Armor, Turtle, Gryphon, 'Terrorbird', Golem, Golem, Dragon, Dragon, Dragon, Troll, Warbeast, Ancient, Ancient, Ancient, Lich, Brood Queen, Gorilla Thing, Flangler 'Nest', Giant Macaw (sure why not), Ent, Warlord, Giant Scorpion, Immortal Shaman, Enchanted Raptor Pack Leader, and of course Giant Enemy Crab.

And those are just the ones with obvious conversions to 'Hazard Zone', with the 'hardest' being the Gorilla (I'll look up that creature's proper name later) and Troll.

But @Cypher , the point must be taken that as of now, the data we have is...

There will be between 12 to 15 raid bosses in the world.[7]

Maybe that means 'at launch'. But it's still true to say that 'raid guilds' are unlikely to find a serious home in Ashes as raid focused guilds unless something changes.

This isn't related to the difficulty or interest of any single piece of PvE content, nor the idea that hard/engaging PvPvE encounters are hard to design (they're not, anyone can learn to do it, coding and tuning it is where professional experience matters).

But in a huge world, even with Dungeon and World bosses popping up, 12-15 Raid Bosses spread out over the world is not likely to lead to 'raiding being a thing that people jump into Ashes for and stick to doing'. So the concept of 'there will be good raids, and difficult raids' must be separated from 'there will be enough raids for a guild to function primarily as a raid guild comfortably'. And PvPvE options increase the strain on that front.

If all one cares about is 'the quality of a single combat instance', there's definitely ways to do it without working too hard, though, so there's no reason to assume it won't be done.

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Which brings us back to 'mechanics', particularly 'Hybrid Combat'.

If I give you a giant Queen Spider to deal with, as a Mage, you have certain Action Combat related tasks and certain Tab Target related ones.

Action Combat use of Fireball to burn your allies out of webbing traps or remove them. Ground Target use of Black Hole and/or Meteor Swarm to gather up Adds or pull the Queen Spider down if she starts to climb a wall or just lift herself on silk. Run around to Prismatic Beam her face for one reason or another. Use your combos or just running with your preferred weapon on her feet as you pass, cleaving through any adds that are in your way for a little extra damage.

When the 'time trigger' for 'needing to do one of those things' isn't up, you can Tab Target through adds and blast them, or you can do Action styled attacks on them. There isn't a requirement for much here, you'd have to clarify what more you want. Spiders can probably leap, they can 'shoot' webbing at you. You could dodge the first, sometimes get lucky or be very attentive and dodge the second too.

But for bosses or raids to work, the idea would be that you can't 'expect your Action Combat evasion skills to save you from most of what is happening'.

The more that people talk about the matter, though, the more I suspect that the general populace doesn't care about this part, and just either want to be able to move at all, or just like 'being able to aim with a reticle or to attack in front of them'. If you make the expectation 'most people will take damage', add Intrepid's concept of 'only a small percentage of players can do certain content', and finally add the 'you will be expected to do some Action and some Tab', there's no problem.

Optimally I feel you should assume that people won't care about if Action stuff is added, as long as the game isn't tuned to the levels of damage that challenging Action Combat games normally have. And if people aren't likely to care about it, Intrepid has no reason not to follow through on their Hybrid Combat.

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I'm not sure if there's anyone currently still 'opposing Action Combat elements because of the movement requirements or design type', but if there are, it's probably important when talking to people, to clarify that. 'Action Combat' has a specific implication in lots of people's minds of 'dashing around madly and dodging most things' just as Tab Target has the implication of 'standing there doing your rotation'.

For any Hybrid to get past the obstacle of people's initial perceptions, at least in the planning stage, we'd have to move beyond 'talking about those aspects of it' as quickly as possible.

This thread seems to be past it now, though, so we can talk about things like blocking and hurtboxes.

One thing Monster Hunter does with its hurtboxes that I don't see any indication that Vindictus does, is the concept of 'weakpoint damage'. Example, slashing damage does more to a creature's tail, blunt damage normally does more damage to horns, head, or sometimes legs/claws. We know Ashes intends to have these damage types, so we can hope that they'll be applied to hurtboxes or specific adds.

I can't necessarily extrapolate from Vindictus' skills, if this is a thing in that game or not. Does it matter there?

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That part depends on if one doesn't consider precursor PvP to be part of the raid, or in some cases 'the entire raid'.

An open world PvP game solves this easily by having a designated spawn point for a 'raid boss' but no 'random spawn'. You do something to craft or gather an item that is capable of spawning the boss. The location where the boss would spawn becomes 'camped' by representatives from other guilds or groups... and you just fight and kill them. They are part of the encounter. One designated 'Corrupted Player' to finish them off is sufficient at that point, and this was going to happen anyway. Someone's got to 'camp' the Boss' location to 'see if it spawned' if it isn't popped by some item.

Gate the 'raid boss' behind 'how easily you can gather the spawn trigger item' instead of 'this boss pops this often', and additional content exists. Especially if it is not, in itself, top content, and something lower levels can do. You'll spawn guild wars over just the 'farm location' for the spawn trigger item or its materials instead of 'a constant war over the boss itself at its spawn location'.

But for various reasons there will also always be that. Fixable too. As long as the boss spawn is fairly far from a respawn point, then you've now created a 'winnable' PvP zone with all the intrigue or whatever you need. I won't claim to be able to guess how they intend to prevent people from throwing themselves at the winning group over and over, but once a team has control of the situation, they no longer need to be flagged as combatants generally, so there's some trickery to be done there too.

As for boss difficulty, as soon as you add 'fairly large bosses' and 'hitbox/hurtbox interactions', and probably Active Blocking, it's actually automatically more difficult to make 'easy' content than it is to make moderately difficult content. Ashes' Archetypes play into this. If your spawnpoint is far from the boss, you basically can't have your Clerics fall because you flatly don't have sufficient healing or resurrection otherwise (outside of items). If you have to hit the thing in the face, and all the damage comes from the face, or the face is only within your Tab Target range for a certain amount of time, the encounter difficulty goes up relatively without adding a single other mechanic.

Once again, all these things are already put in place. If they're doing this by accident, then they've won the design lottery and we just have to watch them 'spend the winnings'.

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This works in other games but will not work well in Ashes. "Blocking Ability" or 'the amount of damage reduced when blocking' can be weapon dependent only if weapons are actually more homogenous, which we probably don't want.

Basically, daggers don't offer enough to a player as of now (and don't seem likely to) for 'loss of blocking capacity' in terms of either ability to do it at all, or damage mitigation when blocking, to matter in itself.

One option is to make it so that knockback is less when using heavy weapons, this way their slower attacks aren't as limiting. You don't skid as far, assuming you skid at all from bigger attacks, and therefore can worry less about your slower weapon counterattack. Shields are a specific form of balance where you are giving up either 'whatever benefit a 2H weapon gives' or 'an offhand weapon' for the defensive option.

So in that sense 'choosing to dual wield daggers' would be a meaningful 'loss in defensive ability' over 'putting a Shield in the offhand', but it has to be 'defined' moreso as 'how good a shield is at it's task' than 'you chose daggers so you can't do this'.

There are multiple reasons why you don't want to give Rogues too many positional evasion abilities in a game like Ashes.