[Feedback Request] Alpha Two Caravan PvP Preview Shown in January Livestream

I thought Ashes was going to go beyond this.

I started to doubt, when I heard we probably weren't getting Weapon Focus anymore. I doubted more when I saw the changes to specific aspects of Cleric, and Ranger.

You know my opinion on Glint, and the current way commodities and even materials are being handled. I have a poor opinion of Caravans.

I did my best to trust that somehow, this was going to be the stream that pulled everything together for me , dispelled all those doubts and showed me something amazing, where the experience was far more than the sum of its suspicious looking parts.

It's far worse than the sum of its suspicious looking parts.

I know this isn't really useful or detailed feedback, and honestly, it's kind of hard to give feedback on, other than to say I didn't like anything about this. And not because I don't like the ideas behind the things shown. I just dislike the execution of those ideas at every step, right now.

It's also tinged with a further loss of faith. I 'wanted to believe that this wasn't what we were going to get, despite what we've been shown in the past'. That's a domino effect for me now, though. There's a lot of other stuff where I'm hoping 'ok well they probably know what they're doing', and I now will end up questioning if you really do or not. I was trying not to 'extrapolate without knowledge' before, but today, at least 6 of my extrapolations were not only proved to be right, but 2 of them were considerably worse than I expected them to be.

Overall disappointing. I hope you can do better during and after Alpha-2, Intrepid.

Okay, so it can't possibly actually be this bad right? I'm left feeling confused and uncertain. The first thing I felt was "I can't even track this" and "this is a zerg rush...", and nothing really improved from there. I got to see caravan mechanics, and how to pick up loot, but the actual combat was... just flat seeming? I didn't even get the impression it was hard to track because of depth. I'm used to depth. This was just chaos.

I think the first thing I saw that really made me 'comment' on the mechanics itself was when those 3-4 thunderballs were all just floating down the plain creating a sort of 'blockade' for the incoming forces. Like... It's not a bad tactic, but the fact that it seemed like it was such flat gameplay isn't great. I didn't see anything else like it though. That was the only real 'positional tactic' in the whole thing. The TTK and gameplay didn't allow much else. The rest of the combat was just various forms of 'waves crashing' and commingling 'duels'.

It... just didn't seem like there was much more to it than 'slightly interesting zerging'. I mean, come on. I know I have high standards. I play fighting games, Predecessor, FFXI. But honestly, even my time in FFXI's 2002 PVE-only-game's PVP arena was far more interesting than this. I don't think the TTK serves strategy or tactics when combined with the style of mechanics and abilities that we've seen. I can see how this could work with some tweaks in a PvE context, but-- ugh, no. I'm just imagining a higher TTK environment (a big PvE boss battle). *sigh*

This is just hard for me. Particularly as an Aspiring bard, your TTK and 'tactics' shown leave me no reason to be excited, particularly if I'm not just 'buffing people and then hiding'. I understand that this is WIP, but then, why show it? It just demoralizes me and doesn't inform me of anything good. I can't imagine a form of bard songs that both feel like bard songs , and actually have any real function in this environment and don't just get me focus killed immediately.

I gotta ask Azherae to break this down for me. I hope she can dispel some of this, and it's not as bad as it looks. I'll edit if she changes my mind.