"World Instances"

I want to discuss the currently planned 80/20 (open world/instanced) content split and the statement that instanced content will be non-repeatable.

I mainly separate bosses into open world and instanced. There's several mechanics to how you fight them or how you get to fight them, but at their core it's binary. Open world bosses obviously have to be easier than instanced ones, mainly due to the pvp potential. There's obviously gotta be way more of them in the world and they should obviously have several different mechanics of their appearance and encounters.

I come from L2 and its instanced bosses had a "world instance" kind of mechanic. Something that could only be beat once per its respawn cycle for the entire server and has instanced mechanics. Those instances also had 2 types: they either let in only one raid or had an open to anyone access to the instanced room but only for a short time window. Obviously there was a shitton of pvp for these bosses, because they were rarer than open world bosses (don't necessarily have to be the case in Ashes) and only one group of people gets to kill them, while the rest of the server had to wait for that boss to respawn again.

• here's an example of a "pure" instanced fight. There's a ton of pvp happening around the npc that let's you into the instance and the video's poster is the first one to enter (mainly due to server settings, cause iirc you shouldn't be able to enter with dead raid members, but that's beside the point)
• here's an example of "open door for a while". The video is inside boss' room, there's pvp between different people (the purple icon above people's heads means "one-sided war declaration") and anyone who missed the time window stayed outside and can't come into this room until the boss dies or everyone inside wipes.

In that second case, if the people inside all died, the boss would "fall asleep" for several minutes (might've been up to 30min-1h, don't remember exactly) and then the door would open again.

Now here's why I made this post. There's the "instanced content is only 20% of all the content and is non-repeatable" statement (in the context of dungeons of course). To me personally, the instanced bosses from L2 still felt like open world ones, because your right to their loot comes directly from open world. That is, if you didn't win in open world pvp (could be some pvp-including puzzle/mechanic in Ashes) - you didn't get to even try and fight the boss. So I'd be completely fine if top lvl bosses in Ashes had this "world instance" mechanic (and the volcano dragon from alpha1 kinda already did, though I think the "doors" didn't close). It would let Intrepid design the boss encounters with all kinds of intricacies and difficulties w/o sacrificing open worldness (again, imo). And considering Steven's statement of "we'll have bosses that only <10% of the playerbase can defeat", I'd assume that high difficulty pve is one of the goals for the game.

What do you think though? Especially those who consider themselves purist of Intrepid's design and sticklers of definitions. Would this "world instance" mechanic break the "80/20, no repeatable instances" promise for you? Do you think that the promise itself is silly in the first place, because you can't make super difficult open world pve and expect people to clear it while literally anyone is free to interrupt their farm? Would love to hear your opinions.

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From what I've heard of games with harder pve than L2's, open world bosses are either never beaten, or they get nerfed down until they are beaten. If you make a super difficult open world boss, even a single enemy player can mess you up. It can be a ranger who shoots you from a nearby hill, it could be a stealthed rogue who slips by your pvp protection, or it could be the usual enemy guild that just runs up to you and their mere presence makes the boss mechanics even harder and you wipe. And you obviously can do the same to them, at which point we're back to the "it's never beaten" issue.

I'd love for Intrepid to somehow succeed where everyone else failed (hell, that's the reason I'm here in the first place), but I'm not sure if this is the place where they even can.

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But there will only be a few top lvl legendary bosses (the theoretical peak of pve content). I'd assume they'll have a fairly long respawn timer so pretty much any guild from any node can prepare for the raid ahead of time and position themselves accordingly.

And this is mainly why I made this thread. Yes, there'll be a ton of world bosses with varying loot, difficulty and distance from any given high player concentration place. But those Legendaries will be the main goal of all pve (and pvp too, tbh) groups of players, so there'll be a ton of fighting around them.

And no matter how Intrepid sets up their respawns (purely prime-time or a floating one), there's always gonna be some hardcore nerd that's ready to mess up his enemy's raid. L2 dealt with this through the "world instances" that I described. But if Ashes decides to leave those Legendaries in the open world, while giving them insanely complex and difficult mechanics - I'd assume they'll never be defeated.

Now it'd be cool to say "Ashes has bosses that were never defeated", but I'm not sure if it'd be as cool for all the people who've spent months/years trying to beat said bosses, but always failed because they were super difficult and there always was a rogue that backstabbed their healer at just the right moment. And this is why I think that making them "world instanced" could still provide the open world pvp for the rights to even try the boss, while still keeping the boss mechanics at peak quality.

Hell, you could even give the ones who manage to enter the room 3 attempts (2 wipes) at the boss before you through them out of the room. This way people will at least have a chance to try and figure out boss mechanics, cause if the boss just wipes a group of people in the first 3 minutes of the fight and then that same group can't enter the room again because it's getting killed in pvp - we're gonna have a loooong time full of pvping on our hands before anyone figures out how to beat the boss. Though that could be a challenge in itself - who figures out the mechanics and manages to wipe the enemy guilds first

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I'd say it's not only experience, but the server economy Intrepid's trying to go for. If you can only have 1 boss a week (hell, even a day), for the entire server, that drops a particular piece of gear - you have a super demand on that piece of gear, because it's super rare. If you have the same boss in an instance that can be farmed by anyone who can clear it - you now have a mathematical dilemma of "how many mats should this boss drop in order to preserve the same gear piece rarity?" And if we assume that the instance can be cleared by, say, 100 groups of people - you'd have to make that boss drop 0.1% of a mat per death (if, for example, you need 10 mats for a craft).

And while you might enjoy the mere experience of beating that boss, I'm not sure how many people would be happy with receiving 1 material piece per 10 farms of the boss (at least 10 days if we put him on a daily respawn).

I of course doubt that this is the rate of gear acquisition Intrepid wants to have, considering that we'll have 10k people on a server, but still, the math equation remains the same. You'd have to downtune the drop rates in the instances to such an extent that normal people might not enjoy running those instances with those rates.

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I guess this is the main source of disconnect. I just checked very rough numbers on the gearing speed of the old times I preferred in L2. After roughly 8 months of a top possible gear tier being introduced to the game, maybe ~20-30/100 people had it in the video I watched. Video was from the point of view of a top guild on the server. So if the game didn't add newer ways to acquire that same tier of gear (it obviously did in later updates), the whole group of 100 people would've needed another ~1.3 year to fully equip themselves. From what I could see, their enemies also had several people in that gear, so this pace came from a contested source of gear.

Your example of 3 years to equip 40 people only considers the 4 instances. It doesn't take into account open world farming and trading. I'm trying to calculate a slowish pace of gearing that includes any possible sources.

If we assume that these 4 instances are the peak difficulty at their time, that would mean that the ones who can farm them already have best gear of a lower tier. If they have that, this means they should be able to fight off the general masses in ow dungeon pvp. Which means they can farm those dungeons. And would obviously be able to farm open world bosses that give you the same gear that the instances do (with, say, legendary bosses giving you legendary version of this tier, that's a step above).

If we assume that the 40 people can somewhat comfortably farm all of those things, the 4 instances equaling a rough 1/3 of the overall number of items seems fair to me. Which would put the overall pace of gearing at under a year for the whole raid (cause most likely you'll get more items in the non-instanced places). I'm not counting trade here purely because any other guild that's farming the same stuff would need it for themselves and wouldn't trade it.

To me, as someone who likes that old pace of gearing, this seems good. The frontier top lvl players gearing themselves with best gear (legendary stuff would be farmed, but you'd barely be able to get a full set together or upkeep it, so I'm not considering it rn) throughout a year. And then each year you add a new tier, while giving more ways to get the previous one, so that the overall mass of players could take a step upwards in their power.

This was in context of top lvl gear instances dropping a full item to the very limited amount of players that can clear said instance. If you build out a pyramid of gear tiers downwards, roughly doubling the amount of players and instances (still raid-sized and once a week) for each tier of gear - you'll have what I imagine as a good gearing pace.

The lowest stage gets t1 gear through quests/story instances. Then you have low lvl dungeons and instances that are really easy and provide ~80% of the playerbase with t2 within a few days. t3 for ~40% within few weeks. t4 for the 15-20% in a few months. t5 for the ~5% in under a year. The % are of people who put in time to do these things, from the overall server playerbase (considering rising difficulty of instances and competition in the open world). And the time - for how much you need to invest to get to the tier. The skill lvl of any given group would make this process somewhat faster, just because you'd be at the very top of the pyramid at each stage w/o any real competition in your region.

I hope that made sense If that is too slow for the current times, you could shorten it at all lvls by some amount, though I personally think that the power lvl growth of the whole game would be too fast at that point.

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We'll have to see how rogue's stealth works in practice. Cause it's easy to say "just defend the raid from everyone else", but as Noaani said, it's not always possible to do so, even from just a few people let alone potential full enemy raids or just trolls that have fun by messing up people's farming.

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I might be misunderstanding here, so correct me if this example is wrong. L2 seems to have had this progress. You'd have mobs and bosses as the first way of acquiring t3 gear. Then, once the next update comes out, you have a new tier of gear that drops from new mobs and bosses and now quests. And as addition to that you have new quests that give you more ways to acquire t3 (on top of those old mobs and bosses). And then pretty much rinse repeat with new updates.

Although, I just double checked and L2 gave out new gear tiers every 1.5 years, with a particular set of updates that went on for 2 years with the same maximum gear tier, but a ton of new and easier ways to get the penultimate one. Funny thing is - everyone still loves and cherishes the update period of those 2 years, because that was when the gear balance was at its peak.

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Yeah, it's quite possible that pve and pvp players have different skillsets so they prefer different content. Though I definitely wish for that to change and for everyone to really become PvXers, where they can do both

Ashes, potentially, might be the game that pushes people towards that, with the class and gear design. The main factor will be, yet again, the pve that Intrepid develops. Cause obviously L2 and AA had the "PvX" ideology, but with a subpar pve part. So Intrepid has a chance to really build on top of that and make pvpers do hardcore pve and the vice versa for pvers.

There's a tiny chance that TL might try doing the same too, but from that single trailer we saw - it doesn't quite seem that their pve is all that complex.