Is 64 classes still a good idea?

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When seriously playing a game like Ashes, particularly in PvP, your goal is not often to understand either of those things.

Let's ignore the tracker part of this. A Mage's concern in group PvP generally should not be 'highest damage output' or 'saving their mana' in a non-simplistic game. The Mage is probably trying to work out 'exactly how much defense they need to survive long enough for their cooldowns to come back up again' in a certain situation.

For the eight mage Classes in Ashes, this will be different, and then it will depend on their party. And the effectiveness of their party will depend on which class they are, changing their goals. A Mage/Tank might have survivability from Augments but not as much cooldown/mana cost reduction. A Mage/Ranger might be able to apply defense reduction debuffs to enemies, but then be concerned about having survivability from their gear and not care about saving mana at all OR doing their own damage.

Or, because of their party composition, none of that will be true and the Mage/Tank will use their augments in some unconventional way, becoming 'a Lockdown Spellstone build' instead of a 'Disruption Spellstone build' because that's what their team needs.

This is the thing that people do on-the-fly, sometimes twice per hour, in other games. You now seem to be at the point in this Classes discussion where you are saying you just don't want people to be able to figure out how to play their class well, in general. Is it that you somehow value 'people having to struggle much more to understand their class'?

I am not really challenging your desire here, but if 'me getting good at my class' is the thing that leads to 'speedrunning of content' and you're against it for that reason, then isn't your goal to 'artificially inflate the time spent on the game' for some reason?

Arguments like 'people will be less social', 'people will kick others/be toxic and elitist', and 'people will use data wrong and create drama' are all related to trackers, yes, but what you are targeting now doesn't really seem to be about trackers, it's moreso an 'anti-skill' argument...

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Actually yeah I'm happy to pivot to that too, at least, since I can at least relate it to classes.

Let's discuss this as JUST Combat Logs, and what we can and can't do with them, because strictly speaking, we're getting to the point where you ( @Depraved) and Mag are kinda arguing against combat logs (or basically telling people that you aren't good at these games, I wish I had a different way of seeing it but it is what it is).

The parts that a combat log doesn't show are the parts you should have actual memory of, physically. So what's the deal here? Are we expecting people to 'look at the log and then entirely drop the memory of what was on the screen at the time in the log timestamp?

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

Yeah you just suck or are trolling. But you've irritated my group enough that I'm shifting the usual way, have fun with them instead today.

Anyone who thinks that people who use logs/replays to work out stuff are less social and more toxic, can't be counted on for much in tough games.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

You've never been on the internet if you think a group of people can all look at something and agree what happened. The whole point of the log is so they can put in the work .

Otherwise we just get more of "you claiming nobody else knows what they're looking at".

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

Oh, so you are against combat logs and such. That makes so much more sense now.

I admit to being entirely foolish enough to think that somehow you were making a real argument that logs are fine but trackers are bad, but you just don't like people having data .

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

And to bring back the thread at least partially...

If Intrepid doesn't want to bother with 'people doing things in testing environments' they should probably take the BDO/Quinfall route and simplify builds to have less variety.

Obviously, players just 'create their own testing environments' in some way otherwise. You read too much into Xeeg's post, too.

Note this part:

"Once we understand how the game works, we can design builds and arrange tradeoffs. Without this knowledge it is all guesswork and likely wrong."

The thing that is happening isn't 'this is telling me what to do', it is 'I have a goal and I want to check if my goal is achieved with this gear setup, against a consistent situation'. Without this, the game turns into 'everyone of this type trying to go out and find their one simplistic consistent mob to do the same tests on'.

I don't care about Training Dummies vs not, but Intrepid would have to change the design of the game to be much shallower if they 'don't want to bother with it', or so complex and dynamic that the people who don't do this, won't even want to play (for many reasons).

So, if Intrepid somehow actually had a goal of 'making it a bad idea to parse their combat log and use training dummies or mob equivalents of training dummies', then having 64 classes is definitely a bad idea, even before any consideration of the high freedom allowed in builds, weapons, and augments.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

"People shouldn't wear glasses, it makes it faster and easier to see the stuff on screen." It doesn't automatically problem solve to have transparent information about enemies. It doesn't even really make it 'easier' unless we count 'putting glasses on' instead of squinting making math or tactical problems 'easier'.

I am glad modern designers have moved towards data transparency. Less time wasted on arguing with otherwise reasonable people who just forgot to put their glasses on. Less toxic.