Asherons Call: Orion (with a little Huxter) Q&A

Turin-Turambar states (long post, poorly summarized): Orion has made comments in defense of non-hybrids and how "playable" they are. However, for a melee type to be a pure tank (in order to have the max offensive and defensive skills) we have to start 10/10. Of course we will then need to spec arcane since we don't have an extra 90 points to stick into Endurance to gain the "natural" protections. (Someone please explain why a "natural" protection disappears when a Life Spell is cast.) Specing Arcane forces us to divert many millions of exps into it to be able to wear those Life6 jewelries and clothing. Ok - thats a burden we all bear to a certain extent....
Orion_Turbine: I certainly have made some bold statements about non-hybrids, or flat melee/archers and their playability. I've just finished reading and re-reading your post and I wanted to speak to some of the issues for a little more clarity.

1) Spec Arcane: It's cheap, it's effective but not as effective as the level 7 spells that can come from being a mage/hybrid. You get the added benefit of 24 extra credits if its trained. (This is to mimic the ability to use item/creature/life magics on weapons/armor/clothing/jewelry that you may find against the cost to train those skills.) If you specced Arcane then you end up with 46 skill points. (Again this mimics what it would cost to learn those schools to the same level.)

Now for a skill that costs 4/2 do you expect that it would equate 100% to the other skills? I certainly hope you wouldn't. Arcane does exactly what it should, it gives you the edge you decided not to take so you could be a tank to deal out damage with your weapon of choice, while not getting hit by creatures. Instead of spending millions upon millions upon millions on three magic schools you instead spend a much more reasonable amount of experience on a 4 credit skill that mimics the abilities of magic schools to a certain point.

2) The Past vs. The Future: (This section speaks to your statements that death comes quickly with level 5 protects vs level 7 vulns)

Most of the correlations that you are drawing are from the past/present. Again I must turn to the statement of the month, "wait and see" but I'll expand this time. In the future creatures that are out there are going to be a lot more reasonable about the levels of spells that they cast. In the past they were a little out of control and had magic skills that were wholly unattainable by players. (ex. Umbris Shadows had a skill of over 400.) I revamped all of this because we have the ability to circumvent the spell casting failures that creatures would have without setting their skill so incredibly high. This means a couple of things:

a) Magic Defense should appear to be more useful in PvM. You should see some change if you dedicate a fair portion of your experience into this skill. If you are a mage then you will see more of a bonus because your base attributes will naturally be higher. But the skill levels necessary to see a 10-20% resistance rate at the extreme levels should be managable.

b) Creatures will have fewer level 7's amongst them. They don't need them. They have the advantage of numbers.

One area where this will NOT be seen is in the VoD. Here you are expected to be hunting in groups or to be so incredibily self sufficient that you don't need the benefit of someone healing you, tanking for you or drawing the creatures to you. These creatures will remain the epitome of their races and they may even be joined by some new faces.

3) 7 Slots for Life Protections:

This is true. There are only 7 positions that you can place the most typical appearance of life protections. It is also true that Dual and Triple spell items are rare, and have a higher skill requirement. But refer to statement one before you complain, because that hybrid spends 3x as much XP as you to get to the point you are. There are also some items that supplement the 7 slots fairly well you named the majority of them.

4) Along comes the Aegis:

"A shield that APPEARS to be at least partially based on what the tank melee has the least of (Focus & Willpower) and that presents us with the wonderful choice of getting a reduction in War damage at the sacrifice of the ONLY thing that makes melee viable - a shield. "

No. What makes a melee viable is ability to deal out damage while remaining unharmed. Melee Defense does this. A shield supplements the amount of damage that the melee can absorb. If they have a shield that is buffed to the gills or even just a fair shield like the diamond shield they fair very well in a crowd of creatures, provided they can keep the group in front of themselves. The shield sometimes becomes unnecessary because those magic casting creatures have lower melee skills or hand damage that is miniscule copared to the spell damage they can yield. The Aegis is a choice just like any other. You don't need to use it, and while its use in PvM may appear limited it was developed to be more of a PK boon.

5) Goals!

The goal is to make the non-hybrid viable. This rebalancing is being done to help players not hurt them.

"Non-hybrids have NO advantages in AC as it exists today"

To this I say their advantage is not worrying about buff times, not concerning themselves with mana management, components and similar headaches. At the same time they lag behind the hunting curve because they see the hybrid walking out into the fray with level 7's on every piece of armor and covering their skin in magical splendor. But they don't worry when suddenly they realize their buffs are dropping and they are surrounded by tuskers. Cause they know as long as they keep their stamina up they have a good chance to survive because they've been raising that Melee Defense all along. The current state of AC certainly favors the hybrid in certain situations. But the future looks to swing the pendulum to offer the non-hybrid the chance to survive without the level 7's all over them.

Again (if you are still reading) wait until you see the changes in action next month. you might find that these changes accomplish what we are setting out to do.

videian asks: small request, repeat attack for mages please. With the introduction of 5000/10000/100000/2000000 mobs, could you possibly make it that mages could repeat a spell in a similar fashion as melee/archers repeat attacks?
Orion_Turbine This is not likely to happen.

1) Do you really want to get locked in to casting a spell on a creature that is going through a death animation. Talk to Melees or Archers that are used to this.

2) It benefits only those that are hunting in VoD for the most part. Though I will agree that there is certainly a vast amount of content out there that mages don't one shot.

Fong_the_Librarian asks: My question is, what would you sacrifice for better gameplay? Personally i end up reducing the graphics levels anyway to get more speed. Would people come to a great game if it lacked in the window dressing dept. What are the most important aspects of the game to you??
Sean_Huxter: Let's break this down.

Lag is the time between when a command is sent, acted upon by the server, and returned to the client and you see the result. Lag happens when servers are busy, or when internet connections are slow, or when there are a LOT of messages being sent and received, (ie: when an area is overcrowded.) Framerate is how many times your screen refreshes its image. A good framerate is anything above 10-15 frames per second, but with video cards today, AC can run at hundreds of frames per second on a good machine, and when there isn't too much being drawn on the screen. In rare circumstances, framerate can drop to very low rates.

Graphic quality has zilch to do with lag. AC is designed to run on very low-end systems. You can turn your texture quality down to reduce the memory size of the images in memory. You can set degrade levels to always draw low-polygon models. None of this has anything to do with lag. Of course the more things and people you see on-screen, the harder your computer has to work to draw it all. The result will be a reduction in framerate. But not lag. Not directly. However, the more people in your immediate area means more and more messages are being sent to and received from more and more clients through the server.

This can cause lag.

Consider this. Two people are in an immediate area. Those two people are sending positional date, and perhaps chat messages, etc. back and forth. So you get two messages per event. However, double that. Now you have four people. Suddenly each person is sending to three others and receiving from three others. So for each event, 6 messages are being received.

The more people in the area means more messages being sent back and forth to all others. You send your events to all 50 people, and receive events from all 50. This adds up. In areas with lots of people, you can get a significant decrease in speed of the game. This is lag, as it requires all of these messages to be sent to you and all others in the area via the internet, through the servers.

This again has nothing to do with your graphics quality as all of the graphics information is stored on your computer only, and operated on by your computer only. The AC servers are very smart about crowding. They hand off load to other servers in the farm when they are overtaxed.

Hope that clears things up a bit.