Last night Ashes of Creation held a community AMA, though the community in question was made up of specifically selected influencers. You might think that would generate nothing but softball questions, but in fact there were some solid questions and some generally good insights offered.
Several questions were focused on game’s attempt to blend PvP and PvE, particularly in the case of dungeons, raids, and boss fights. According to creative producer Steven Sharif, most of these encounters will be in the open world and range in size to accommodate large or small groups, each with differing loot tables, and all designed to encourage “natural friction that occurs when scarcity is a real thing.” However, there will still be some party, boss, and raid encounters that will be instanced.
As for countering the risk of PvP for these open world encounters by simply zerging them, Sharif explains that rewards are finite and arranged for loot master distribution as opposed to every participant getting something shiny. “The more people you take, the more slices of the finite reward reduces the reward structure. Therefore, if you reduce the risk, you reduce the reward,” he says.
Finally on the PvP side of things, Sharif says that an average time to kill for equally leveled and geared single targets is currently between 10 to 30 seconds depending on archetype, meaning that smaller groups should have success against stronger targets if they focus fire. Assuming that equal footing is actually a thing, of course; this reads like FFA PvP without stat normalization, after all.
A few questioners asked about guild matters, with Sharif’s answers discussing a selection of passives that can be applied to groups within the guild and boosted with points (which ideally means smaller guilds can be competitive with larger ones), confirming that guild freeholds will let members enjoy pastoral pursuits even if they don’t own a freehold themselves, and talking up several guild tools like the ability to text members while they’re offline or see individual player performance in events or activities.
Regarding the node system — aka the major hook for AOC — Sharif talked about how players can engage in node wars to force those depleting resources into PvP, once more talked up the benefits of being a node citizen in terms of crafting table access and reduced crafting fees, shared the difference between market stalls and market boards, and confirmed that Alpha 2 will only have election-type nodes available regardless of the kind of node that players develop.
Finally, some answers about classes:
- Players will not be able to trial secondary archetypes, but they can change them easily if they so choose.
- And as for secondary archetypes, that’s where most of the build diversity will be available, particularly for tank and healer classes.
- Rogue and Summoner will not make it to alpha 2’s launch, but they’ll be in a post-release update.
- A universal skill tree was confirmed and will be accessible by all archetypes, which is where active blocking and dodging can be unlocked.
Those who would like to read the full synopsis for themselves can read this handy summary, or you can watch the full livestream in the embed below.
