Gear progression

In-game achievable sword and polearm רינדור תלת מימד.

Power creep is a balance issue... When it comes to gear progression specifically, the idea is to create an open market that is not heavily dependent on soulbound items; and having many item sinks and gold sinks within that economy that allows for the potential degradation and loss of assets within that closed economy; and not introduce items from the market that companies put in from a pay-to-win perspective or from a pay-to-convenience perspective that undermines the economy that players have built. That is a huge mistake that companies have made in the past and that lends to the imbalancing of what designers maybe have actually balanced well. – Steven Sharif

כלי-נשק have their own progression paths.

• Each type of weapon has its own skill tree that grants passive skills and proc effects and other status conditions.
• The weapon combo system determines special effects that proc based on weapon progression.
• Ancillary effects proc based on enchantment types.
• שיפור ציוד (power stones) can be applied to add elemental or energy types of damage.
• Dual wielded weapons will have its own progression based on weapon type.
• Weapon proficiency (based on length of use of a weapon) is not a planned feature.

Ashes of Creation is all about providing many progression paths... The reason why we don't like the term endgame is because with the amount of progression that's available with the amount of diversity and player agency that impacts the world... We want the weapon system [to] add an element of that as well... You can determine special effects that proc from currently the combo system; you can determine ancillary effects that proc based on enchantment types; you can power stone weapons to add different either elemental types of damage and/or energy that play rock-paper-scissor with player defenses ... and then you can skill tree out how those effects that are granted ... you can make them better you can branch them off into a different direction. – Steven Sharif

Combat skills

אלפא-2 greatsword weapon combo animation.

Whenever you get stab hits on the third and the fourth hit, those are actually procs. So, if you connect with the second hit of that proc hit you'll receive the additional effects, but you actually have to connect with a monster or player to receive the effect; and I think the proc rate is at a static 25 percent right now. We're looking at other ways to scale that. Maybe it scales with a stat, or maybe it scales with additional nodes, but right now it's kind of low. – Brian Ferguson

A weapon combo system (also referred to as Weapon use combo, Weapon attack combo, Weapon combo, and Weapon use ability) is utilized instead of a traditional auto-attack ability in Ashes of Creation.

• The combo system consists of a sequence of combat animations based on the weapon type, referred to as a combat animation montage.
  • Combos are triggered by performing basic weapon attacks (default Q or left-mouse-click).

Let's say for example you're using a two-handed warhammer or something and you have a number of weapon combos that play animation style based on how many combos deep you go into an attack with that warhammer. So the first is going to be like a forward swing. Second is going to be a back swing. The third is going to be swing down and the fourth is going to be some twirl that you do; and that's what we call the combo animation montage. – Steven Sharif

• The number of steps and passive effects that trigger during weapon combos can be customized in the weapon skill tree.

We wanted to have a combo length progression available to players so that certain builds could have longer weapon combos and other builds can have shorter weapon combos with more passive effects.; and this has been the result of our exploration. So, when you start out you've got a pretty quick four-hit combo, but whenever you unlock the additional hits you get the fifth and sixth hits, which are at approximately 50% to the overall combo length. But we found that that gave a pretty satisfying floor and ceiling to how long the combo can be. – Brian Ferguson

• Depending on class skill choice these effects will have synergy with the combat montage.

Depending on what your class skill choice has been those are going to have synergy effects with the weapon skill tree. So my skill called spin-to-win might do 30 additional damage on a staggered target. So I see when my proc occurs with the stagger effect on my first swing, like for me as a player I might be only interested in landing that first swing, so every now and then I'm gonna swing once and then I'm gonna use a skill and then I'm gonna come back and swing again because that'll play my first swing montage, because it's been interrupted. So I won't move to the second one because I'm really just wanna hit that stagger effect. So that's going to be how my rotation lines up. However I might have some skill that on a stun target it might be an immediate cast and it's like some power you push or power hit; and that does- it knocks back a stun target. So if the target's stunned when this skill plays, it has an added effect of knock down and now they're gonna get knocked down for an additional two seconds. Now I might spec into that and as a result I want to finish through: swing, swing, and then knock down. So I get my chance at stunning that target with that weapon skill. – Steven Sharif

• Weapon progression such as set bonuses may change at what level any proc effects occur and therefore enable different combo rotations.

You may have items or set bonuses that change at what level those proc occurs. So I may have a full set of battle armor that changes all third hit combo procs to second hit requirements and now I have a chance not only on my second hit to land that tapering slow but I also have a chance to land my one second stun proc because I have the full set that changes my weapon progression. So that's the way itemization works with your weapon skill tree, is you can enhance when those weapon skill trees become available in your combat montage and that can be a relevant factor in how your skill rotations come to play; and mixes with your weapon attacks.

• Weapon skill choices and rotations will vary based on whether the player is more focused on PvP or PvE.

Right now some people might just say, "I don't care at all about my weapon attacks. I'm not going to invest a lot of points into that. And if I do, it's going to be primarily PvE focused where I'm more comfortable using just swinging my weapon, and I may not use them as much in PvP. I'm just going to be focused on skill rotations." That's okay, but the reason for those skill montages- back to your question- is they have a very relevant role in when certain procs come online from a weapons skill tree perspective. – Steven Sharif

• Using a skill/ability other than a basic attack will in general reset the combo.
  • The developers are considering specific abilities that might be able to be used without resetting the combo system.

It acts similar in the sense of the core loop of what an auto attack is so to speak; where typically your other skills have a cooldown period, they have a rotation or whatever: Our combo system is a repeatable skill effect that you can continually attack with but it's a little bit more involved than what a traditional auto attack is; and it has components from a from an advancement standpoint when it comes to the types of procs that your weapon can have during that combo system... It's not going to have the quick time event that you guys saw early on in PAX and gave great feedback on, but it is going to have development with regards to the power of the weapon the type of weapon you're using, the additional proc effects that you can skill into: Those types of things are going to make it a little bit more complex of a system capture. – Steven Sharif

Gear enhancement

שיפור ציוד are possible both during and after an item is crafted.

There is a combination of systems that take an item to its max potential. Players will need to contribute in a certain number of these systems to reach max. Some of the systems are an either/or situation. – Kory Rice

• Crafting recipes can be enhanced by adding higher rarity or different crafting materials into their selectable crafting slots at crafting stations.

• Enchantment scrolls and tempering allow gear to be enhanced post-crafting.

• The bulk of a weapon's power comes from its crafting recipe and the materials used in its construction.

The contribution of materials to crafting an item results in advancing the rarity of that item. Now, that doesn't exclude players who don't have the legendary or the higher quality contributed resources from progressing their common item up the rarity tree through enchantments such as scroll enchanting or through tempering the gear. Both of those can affect the quality and the rarity of the gear that you produce, but by contributing the resources during the crafting process you are getting a head start with the higher quality item and now are less dependent on those other avenues to achieve that, which might be again a different vertical space of progression that you don't have as good of access to. – Steven Sharif

חלק מהמידע הבא לא אושר לאחרונה על ידי המפתחים וייתכן שלא נמצא במפת הדרכים הנובחית של הפיתוח.

• Runes/Power stones are a potential methods for enhancing weapons.
• Enchantment stones are potential rewards for performance over six month PvP seasons. These grant temporary PvP-focused benefits to gear (via a socketing system).

Enchanting

Enchanting is not an artisan profession in its own right. Scribes create scrolls that can be utilized by different professions to create enchantments relating to that profession.

• Enchantment scrolls can be sold on the open market.

• Enchanting does not increase an item's level requirement.

You don't really push a particular item's level requirement or the identity of that item. You can enhance it, you can add enchantments to it, but it's still the item it is. – Steven Sharif

Power creep

The developers intend to limit power creep via item sinks, the lack of gear binding, and the absence of pay-to-win or pay-to-convenience in Ashes of Creation.

Meta

A goal of Ashes of Creation is to emphasise micro metas that work for specific encounters, and de-emphasize macro metas that work for everything.

What we're doing with this approach is we're de-emphasizing a macro meta and instead emphasizing a micro meta. And the difference between the macro/micro is that on the micro level you have metas that might form based on each individual type of encounter or experience. And in those senses, yes, there's going to be a most optimal: There's going to be a best in slot. There's going to be whatever that pertains to that particular challenge rating. But there won't we there will not be an overarching meta that says from a macro level, hey, if you got this shit, you're good to go for everything. That's boring, that's unfulfilling, that is not interesting; and it is just something that that dumbifies the experience. – Steven Sharif

• The effectiveness of classes, skills and gear is going to depend on the adversary or the encounter. There will be optimal builds for different challenges and difficulty ratings. This design aims to avoid any obvious meta or "cookie-cutter" builds in Ashes of Creation.​

• Different challenges are presented dynamically to players based on node progression and destruction. Situations that are based on a rock-paper-scissors design will inspire a horizontal gear chase. These dynamic challenges will change from month to month, causing a shift in demand in the economy as different builds are required by the new content.

• Increasing difficulty ratings inspire more of a traditional vertical power progression that is common in other MMOs.

Oftentimes you just have a very vertical power scale and that determines chase, but when you have a variety of relevance across certain types of adversaries and that variety changes over time because of player activity- and then that affects the economy and the crafter system and who was producing what for what demand- and everything gets shaken up. That's a very fun environment to exist in. It presents a more dynamic situation rather than a quote-unquote cookie-cutter type selection. – Steven Sharif

• The intricacies of how nodes interact with predicates in the world means that it may be possible but difficult to achieve meta server builds.

Q: Do you have any concerns on players eventually discovering a meta server build with nodes due to players heading to specific nodes and regions because they find that content more enjoyable; and if so how would you go about getting players to shift around the world to break up the meta?

A: I think it's interesting if players have a concerted effort across a server to interact with one another, learn from their actions, mistakes, successes, and effectuate that on the server. That's interesting, but I don't believe we'll see a meta form. I think that the intricacies are too great when it comes to how predicates are formed in order to elicit world state changes. – Steven Sharif

See also

• ציוד
• התפתחות
• קרב