Archetype Roles... I swear I'm not crazy.

Well, you already know my perspective, I don't think you're crazy, I'm further than you.

I think everyone who believes that Ashes won't let you make relatively radical changes to certain skills through Augments is just wrong.

Outright.

So you can be 'generous' and say 'we don't know'. I'll stand here and say 'there is no reason not to do it, and nothing they've said (especially given your extensive research now) implies they won't'.

I really don't understand people who don't want it to be that way, nor the lack of imagination that doesn't see how even basic designs manage to do it. So I'll thank you for doing all the digging. My analytics don't work as easily/cheaply on video content.

As for this:

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

Maybe not alone. You could probably design it so it doesn't have to be. But to prevent a Fighter from being able to do this with 6 or so augments of the same type is moreso work than not. I'm moreso 'very interested and somewhat amazed and perplexed that people can't see that', than 'interested in proving it', but I'm down for any good-faith argument on it. More data for the data-munchers.

It's bafflingly simple though. If you play a Fighter/Cleric, you must have some desire to do Fighter things or you wouldn't have started with Fighter. So obviously 'Fighter' is at least somewhat 'the thing you do'. This only comes up because of some incredibly 'small-box' way of looking at MMO design (not you specifically, Nerror) in which people can't separate 'the main thing a class/Archetype seems to do' from 'the role of the class/Archetype'.

That's almost always the underlying problem with this. If you tell people 'This class holds attention and mitigates damage', the answer should be 'ok this class is a type of tank' (not Tank, just tank). If it does that by healing itself and others repeatedly while putting up barriers against attacks, then it's still a tank. It might be a Cleric.

These arguments always seem to focus on the one Archetype that is actually so simplistic as to come up with a problem issue. Tanks are the only 'conceptually inflexible Archetype in this GAME. The best you can come up with for the difference between Fighter/Ranger and Ranger/Fighter is that the first closes in to do big attacks sometimes and the other kites better.

This shouldn't even need to be something one has to discuss, or has to do work to convince others of, @SirChancelot , but I know how 'tempting' it is to try to break through walls of confusing perceptions on the internet.

Just think of it this way though. If you're wrong, somehow, that moreso indicates a specific intention to make sure it doesn't work flexibly, and if you're right, you've always been right, and every moment you spent trying to clarify it to whoever, will have been spent almost uselessly, beyond this point.

I'll just point people at this thread from now on, I think. I'd love to help out, but the fact that this is still a topic that even needs to be discussed gives me that feeling you get when you try to comprehend the incomprehensible, y'know?

Right, it's essentially a non-discussion, so aside from the semantics-lords, there's basically no reason to have it.

The 'definition' of Cleric isn't precisely 'This class is meant to heal', even according to Intrepid. We don't know which aspects of an Archetype cross over, only that they, by the nature of design, wouldn't be as strong as having the Archetype as Primary.

I'm personally not expecting 'If you choose something other than Summoner as primary and Cleric secondary, your healing will be so good that you will not need a Cleric and can handle healing the average party yourself', but that literally isn't the discussion.

I'm not expecting 'if you choose something other than Fighter you will get consistent gap-closing swift damage as one of your main action sets'.

I AM expecting 'if you choose Battle Mage you will get some consistent gap-closing swift damage' because Mages already have good damage and a gap closer. I'm expecting that if you choose Spellsword you're going to get some 'sudden magical burst damage' because Fighters already have sudden burst damage and you just have to make it magical.

I understand why Steven keeps giving the same example, honestly, partially because those are the two ability types that they're likely to be very certain will be in the game, and will combine in that way, but that's precisely why it's a good example, whereas the skills we've seen from the three Archetypes we have, which according to Steven might all change considerably still, aren't so good at being used for demonstrations, so you get lines like 'You will be able to offer some limited group healing' as a catch-all.

The idea that we even need better explanations before Alpha-2 is driven almost entirely by a few people arguing semantics and just repeating words like 'Role' when one might not be able to even pinpoint that beyond the really obvious ones, and we always end up arguing over the one Archetype where 'Role' is hard to understand as an exclusive thing .

"Tank' as a Role is, in any non-simplistic MMO, available to any class with sufficient Threat Generation and Mitigation. Threat Generation is a function of damage so any class with sufficient damage and Mitigation succeeds at tanking. The only reason we have 'Tank' as a singular role in MMOs at all is because a high mitigation class with high damage is 'the best' so they get abilities for Threat Generation instead of damage. Not to mention that higher level enemies often have some damage resistance which lowers simple melee damage further.

Sure, make sure that the average player or the MMO newcomer 'doesn't choose Ranger/Tank thinking that this is going to be a Tank outright', but why would one bother making it so that an experienced player who 'Does ranged damage with additional threat and mitigates by dodging around' doesn't work as a Tank on enemies they can do this against, rather than 'encouraging people to choose Tank by creating varied enemies that Tanks handle all of and leaving the situational tanking to the expert whatever'?

Surely no one is saying that, right? Ships in the night.

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

I don't define the role of a Fighter because Ashes isn't my game. My point is that defining a role can be specific 'We will make sure the Archetype does exactly this thing almost all the time', or open 'here are your tools that make you best suited for doing this thing so we expect you will normally do that'.

And my entire point is that I don't make these posts normally. But I don't want to sit around silently while people who have concerns end up feeling that they're standing alone.

Fighter is too easy so let's try Ranger, since at the moment the 'definition' of Ranger in Ashes doesn't seem to be as clear as Fighter.

Rangers do damage. They might also debuff. They are probably good at kiting enemies. Which of these is 'a Ranger's role'? Well, if they don't do decent damage most people won't be happy, but it's not an absolute requirement. If Rangers turn out to be heavy debuff kiters with subpar damage when most of their skills are taken, then what?

Most people won't accept a Ranger that isn't a 'ranged damage dealer', obviously. To many people that's their 'role'. Except if it isn't.

If you tell me that a Cleric deals life and death in equal measure then which one is the 'role'? To me, Clerics are DD because of that. If there is equality between the amount of healing they do and the amount of hurting they do, then the only reason their 'role' is 'healer' is that they are the only Archetype that heals. But that's not true. So if Bards heal, buff, and protect, but don't do damage, then what are they?

In the games where I play Rogue or some equivalent, their role is partially damage, but it's also misdirection, and a LOT of the time, the misdirection is the main thing I spend time doing. If you give me a Rogue without big damage, I presume their role is misdirection and play that way. Which one is Ashes? Will Rogue skills and augments give you stealth, misdirection, evasion, damage, or all of the above? And if you can choose to mix and match these, what is 'the role of a Rogue in a party'?

It is to be a Rogue, which means 'whatever is possible within the realm of what Intrepid provided as builds that achieve some actual effective result in some reasonable number of situations'.

DD Clerics are always welcome to join my Party. I will not ask you to directly heal a single person. Because that's not your role if you say it isn't.

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

Because that's an unnecessary intentional design decision.

You have to put serious effort into making sure that Tank/X is always better than X/Tank. Ranger is a simple example. If I can do damage enough to maintain the enemy's attention and use Ranger skills to prevent that enemy from ever reaching me to do damage back to me, skills that are primarily the skills of a Ranger, and my teammates are DoT and other ranged damage dealers handling the debuffing, you can't always make a Tank better at it.

This is particularly true if the enemy in question 'moves slowly but has a damage aura' or 'does knockdowns' or 'somehow hits much harder on single hits than most enemies'.

So to take the perspective of 'exceedingly rare' here would mean a full effort to homogenize enemies and lessen the number of strategies a group has to come up with, if you explicitly hope to make strategies where Tank/X is always the best.

I similarly don't understand why you would want the thing you're talking about to be 'so common that Tanks outperform exceedingly often'. That's my bias from coming from and designing games where Tanks are always 'capable' but not always 'best'.

I don't see why there would be any pushback on that. A Tank will almost never fail due to their innate Tank abilities, but why must they be 'irreplaceable' or even 'commonly preferred for single strategies'? (Any combination that outperforms a Tank consistently more than 60% of the time should be analyzed to figure out if they should be the new Tank or what's wrong with the overall design).

The act of tanking a single instance or single enemy type that your group is targeting should not, in my opinion, be construed as a failure of the Trinity system enough that there needs to be any effort to make it so that a Ranger or Rogue can't do it if the enemy suits it, and I also see no need to 'make sure 90+% of enemies in the game explicitly make it so the Rogue/Tank can't do it'.

Do you see a need for that? Is that important to you? Or to anyone? I'll make it as explicit as possible.

"Is it important to you that a Rogue/Tank explicitly does not have a subset of enemy types approaching 30-40% of enemy types in the game, where they are capable of outperforming a Tank/Rogue?"

This post is technically being made before whatever Dygz is saying, cause I'm about to leave, and would rather write it up and let it sit in draft because I'm arrogant like that. If it turns out to be irrelevant, great, it will mean Dygz's predictability was lower and I can update things and rejoice.

Clerics are the best Tanks vs Spiders as of Alpha-1.

Clerics can get Regen up to a level that handles the damage most Spiders do, while also performing all healing of damage done entirely on themselves, for the same mana cost as it would take to heal a Tank who was holding the attention of the spider, in relative terms, because of the way Spiders do damage.

The skills required to be used by the Cleric will be used anyway, with MP restoration and similar things backing it up. Any debuffs applied by allies makes this even easier, since much of the damage from Spiders comes from poison and not 'I hit hard now'. There is no need to 'provoke' the enemy, if it goes off toward someone else, because they did big damage, they get poisoned, but as soon as it turns back to the Cleric, and hits the Cleric, now any AoE heal will be good, even non-AoE ones.

Across the group, the use of MP balances out because of the way Tank abilities work, and timing. There is no need to spend MP to generate additional threat when the mitigation aspect is handled by the Cleric. MP can be conserved, and the Tank, if present, only comes into play at some point where the Cleric's MP finally runs low due to some bad situation. They're the emergency backup mitigation and you hope that doesn't occur. Instead, they use various skills for pulling.

In order to make this not work this way, a specific effort must be made such that Spiders have some way of doing enough harm to others, that you need mitigation on that specifically, and to make AoE healing MP-inefficient. Or you could make Spiders much simpler and less reliant on Poison damage. Or make Tanks take less Poison damage so that no one has to think about that sort of thing.

In fact, in the situation where the Spider uses a big hit and then roots the current target, then proceeds to run off to another, the Tank now has to rely on Javelin's cooldown whereas the Cleric just stands where they are and heals the new target in any way they prefer, with one of their many efficient healing options.

If I'm geared for mitigation and MP, as of now, I'm gonna complain if the Tank in my group says he is going to tank the Spiders. If Intrepid decides to solve this by making an effort to ensure that even if I wear defensive armor, even if I max out skills that regenerate MP and HP over time, and my group understands the plan, it's somehow still better to have my Paladin do this, then I'll hope it's because the augments make it so that Paladins are so good at healing that they can do the same thing.

But if Guardian outdoes me, I'll assume they changed the spiders to deny me the option. Which is absolutely a thing one could choose to do for your game design.