Ashes of Creation Mana Management, what is your opinion?

Love it and definitely want to see every archetype having some form of mana gameplay and some augments providing ways of soft restoration of mana through different means. Weapon procs could help with that too.

I greatly enjoy the challenges of complex mana management, though I wouldn't say that I think of most designs I know as 'harsh' so I can't say directly.

I like having the option to use Mana Potions but only as an emergency due to an error (prohibitive cost and longish cooldown).

I like when classes have to think about 'when to activate abilities to restore theirs for maximum effectiveness.

I don't like when one or two classes are 'expected' to restore mana to others and content ends up balanced around that because I feel the lack of those classes leads to 'less gameplay' and the stigma around the situations that arise leads to multi-boxing and other negative outcomes, particularly since many support players seem to prefer their classes to be easier mechanically.

In this age of high-level botting, I would want the mana restoration to be split between multiple classes, or less required overall (as a function of how much mana is generally restored or available compared to the totals that a group has when in peak condition before a battle).

I also think this would be better for balance in multiple situations.

Overall, challenging mana management is a positive for me.

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If anything, the healer's a much worse thing, because you can't really farm effectively w/o him at all, while you could farm stuff w/o a "mana manager" but just way slower.

NiKr wrote: »

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If anything, the healer's a much worse thing, because you can't really farm effectively w/o him at all, while you could farm stuff w/o a "mana manager" but just way slower.

Agreed, but the issue with this is, games that don't stick to EXTREMELY rigid trinity setups will often have backup healers, different mitigation options, or different target options. They do 'more things' still, just differently.

It's equally frustrating to be unable to find a healer if you just want to run 'basic content', but the game arguably can, by your choice, become MORE interesting if you can't find one (again, in a game where Trinity is not SUPER strongly enforced).

The thing about Mana restoration abilities is that unlike healing or DPS or even buffs, you can't just 'go around giving these to everyone' in the balance whiteboard the same way, so it is often very limited, and then, such is any other class when you can't find one.

There's also a subtler problem in SOME games.

Good Healers/Refreshers can be selective AND get boosted up quite fast exp wise. You don't 'get to keep them'. They log in some weekend with the goal of getting 10 levels in one day, and whoosh, they're gone. They want to play in a way that's suboptimal to your group? Tell them no, sure, then wait around for the next. Don't 'manage to prove yourself' to them even if you do keep up with them in exp? Can't be bothered with you.

There is a reason this is ALWAYS a problem.

Now apply this to 'mediocre Refreshers', because in most games, they don't have to be very good if the Refresh is strong enough and limited to them. The good ones REALLY aren't going to 'bother with you'.

This is my argument for 'Mana management good, focusing it on one Archetype bad'. Making a single class a COMMODITY for other people that they have to compete for is slightly different than 'Hey that DD was really good we should party with her again'.

EDIT: Clarification of contradiction, you can't give STRONG effective Mana Restoration to everyone, especially if it stacks, you create a very different game at that point and Trinity stuff breaks down altogether sometimes.

Azherae wrote: »

This is my argument for 'Mana management good, focusing it on one Archetype bad'. Making a single class a COMMODITY for other people that they have to compete for is slightly different than 'Hey that DD was really good we should party with her again'.

Yeah, we agree there. That's why I wanna see different ways of mana restoration for different classes. There could still be a mana manager class who's the strongest and most direct with its mana restores, but all archetypes should have at least some way to manage their mana if everyone uses mana as the main resource for abilities (and potentially even running).

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

This is my argument for 'Mana management good, focusing it on one Archetype bad'. Making a single class a COMMODITY for other people that they have to compete for is slightly different than 'Hey that DD was really good we should party with her again'.

Yeah, we agree there. That's why I wanna see different ways of mana restoration for different classes. There could still be a mana manager class whose the strongest and most direct with its mana restores, but all archetypes should have at least some way to manage their mana if everyone uses mana as the main resource for abilities (and potentially even running).

I am really impressed with the foresight shown in the Mana Restoration options already in Alpha-1 and I hope they don't change.

Having Castigation do that is genius. The themes I see around Mage are also great. If they make the Augment Schools similar to what I expect them to, it'll probably be amazing to see all of the synergies people come up with, though I'd expect to just see everyone going 'Oracle Plz' for healers at that point, for the same reason.

Ofc this is just me speculating a LOT based on my own expectations, but from the code side, reusing what they already made in different ways is safe AND good design, so I feel it's heavily weighted toward that outcome.

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Imo not really? When your hp ends - you die and suffer consequences. When your mana ends - you just wait for it to regen. And if the content is not dumbeasy, I doubt you'd be attacking mobs when you're at 10-30% hp, while you could definitely attack with that amount of mana unless every ability literally ate up 20% per use.

NiKr wrote: »

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Imo not really? When your hp ends - you die and suffer consequences. When your mana ends - you just wait for it to regen. And if the content is not dumbeasy, I doubt you'd be attacking mobs when you're at 10-30% hp, while you could definitely attack with that amount of mana unless every ability literally ate up 20% per use.

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

Obviously it is true that when your HP falls you are no longer playing the game. But this is about planning, and choices, right?

The Mana Restorer has to choose whose mana to restore, or it's not really 'management'. The Healer similarly chooses who to heal, but the difference between these two is simply that if the Healer 'chooses not to heal you', things change VERY fast, but many classes would have a way to mitigate this themselves that, again, leads to MORE interesting things (such as all the drama related to complaining about the healer, but more reasonably, defensive abilities, someone else noticing and pulling hate, etc).

When your Mana Restorer goes afk or drops connection randomly, now, IF the game is designed to 'need' this person for the content you are currently doing for that function, you just do LESS things in most games. You 'consciously choose to play less of the game' if you want to live. In a healing situation this is very short term and an ally can step up and do something about it, even if that something is just 'go all out so that you aren't taking more damage'.

What does an ally do to resolve your situation when you are out of mana and 'can't apply abilities anymore', on a non-Tank?

Azherae wrote: »

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

But my whole point was to oversimplify it, in that particular context. I agree that under certain designs having no mana would be pretty much same as having no mp. Hell, L2 was pretty much exactly that, because in a mage group, if all 2-3 of your dps mages had 0 mana, the group couldn't do shit, so their absence of mana was effectively the absence of hp for all party members.

But in those situations the party gameplay went from a "mage party" to a "benny hill party", where the remaining members would just run around kiting the mobs until the mages regened up at least a bit of mana to finish them off. If they had lost their hp - the remaining members would either have to run away completely or just die too.

Majority of parties rarely had those kinds of situations because they knew how to manage their resources, but my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just its players' mentality and logic, but those are the exact reasons why Ace's comment didn't make as much sense to me as it seems to make to you.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

It's oversimplistic to say 'when your HP ends you die'.

But my whole point was to oversimplify it, in that particular context. I agree that under certain designs having no mana would be pretty much same as having no mp. Hell, L2 was pretty much exactly that, because in a mage group, if all 2-3 of your dps mages had 0 mana, the group couldn't do shit, so their absence of mana was effectively the absence of hp for all party members.

But in those situations the party gameplay went from a "mage party" to a "benny hill party", where the remaining members would just run around kiting the mobs until the mages regened up at least a bit of mana to finish them off. If they had lost their hp - the remaining members would either have to run away completely or just die too.

Majority of parties rarely had those kinds of situations because they knew how to manage their resources, but my oversimplifications just addressed the core premise of "any hp amount lets you play, but not any mp amount does".

I've seen waaaay more situations where a party didn't attack some target because they were low on hp than situations where they didn't attack because they were low on mana. Now that could've been due to L2's design, or maybe just its players' mentality and logic, but those are the exact reasons why Ace's comment didn't make as much sense to me as it seems to make to you.

Same principle as always.

I don't see it as NECESSARY to make it less fun in this way. The 'Benny Hill party' isn't a requirement for good gameplay to me, not even as a tradeoff.

For the DPS it's an adaptation. For the mages it's 'not playing currently', which is fine with me as well, I'm used to 'downtimes'. I prefer them to be 'have to wait for mob respawn' rather than 'have to wait for MP', and the thing is, this is ALSO Intrepid's last known stance, explicitly. I can find the stream where they discuss it.

They don't want players to GENERALLY need to rest up, which to me implies a hope of design that puts responsibility entirely on 'target selection'.

If that isn't how this works we're gonna get 'Manaburns' and I don't want that again. Frontloaded Mage damage (or any frontloaded huge damage classes really) are the bane of Trinity MMOs.

Also to add to that, a recent clarification just this year (we're getting deep into my speculations again, so bear with me).

"Players receive skill points as they level. These can be used to level up skills (increase their rank) within their active, passive or combat/weapon skill trees. You can learn more about skill points here, on the wiki! There are no plans for players to use their skill points for Augments. That's a seperate system, and you can learn more about what we've shared regarding Augments here." - A Vaknar answer to a question here .

This is much more in line with my design expectation for many reasons I won't get into, and if you want I can tie it back to 'why this affects mana management' but the short version is related to 'how we respec' and 'what players are able to consider important/reasonable to ask of other players'.

So this 'change' makes me more 'confident' because from the design perspective, I could not see a good reason why Augments would require skill point requirements, only level requirements for some. And that's what we see now.

Having free augments of specific types allows for MUCH greater build flexibility and also allows them to make more complex combat types while pushing specialization into gearing and playstyle a bit more. They could still make individual skills Augments very granular (my posts on this matter aren't actually trying to suggest 'hey make these things all similar regardless of skill') but being able to Augment skills freely would allow for mana management options to the player that don't force metas as hard.

Azherae wrote: »

Having free augments of specific types allows for MUCH greater build flexibility and also allows them to make more complex combat types while pushing specialization into gearing and playstyle a bit more. They could still make individual skills Augments very granular (my posts on this matter aren't actually trying to suggest 'hey make these things all similar regardless of skill') but being able to Augment skills freely would allow for mana management options to the player that don't force metas as hard.

Yeah, they just have to balance it all properly so as to not create those metas. Balancing all the possible hundreds of augments from all the different schools and resources would be a huge pain, I'd assume.

And when you put some potential augments school of "lets you restore some mana on use" against a design point of "almost every class has some form of mana burn" - the players would be pushed towards that kind of school, rather than some school that just gives them a higher CC chance or some elemental dmg or whatever else.

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And to add to this, though I don't think NiKr is the type to make this specific counterpoint so I'm moreso pre-empting ... certain other individuals...

Having LIMITED mana is gameplay because you are 'thinking and choosing'. Having INFINITE mana is not gameplay sometimes because you are rotating or as Arya likes to say 'bot aspirant'. Having ZERO mana is not gameplay because again, you're not choosing (it counts as gameplay if you chose to put yourself there and are now dealing with the consequences).

To me that is what 'Mana management' means. The closer you are to either Zero OR Infinity in game design, the less harsh I consider the system to be, even if that 'infinity' is the result of someone else's actions.