Beyond Ultimate arts - Inaugurations

Suggestions
Beyond Ultimate arts - Inaugurations
effort 4.5 2 quality 3.5 2 reasonability 1.0 3
1

Additional Powers

As the game continues to introduce stronger combat tools, such as waterproofing magic, tougher enemies, and other ways to expand combat. We will eventually need new abilities that can keep up with the increasing power level.

Inaugurations

An Inauguration is a special combat technique designed to enhance a player’s power against NPCs.

I would suggest making Inaugurations unlockable starting at Level 225. Once the player reaches Level 225, they could encounter a tutorial for Inaugurations through one of the main quests. This would introduce the mechanic naturally and give players a chance to learn how it works rather than simply unlocking it without much explanation… Like most of the other tutorials in AO…

Inaugurations would significantly increase the player’s damage against NPCs, making them extremely useful for PvE and future power scaling. However, they would provide little to no benefit in PvP, preventing them from becoming another source of PvP power creep.

How it works

An Inauguration can only be activated while the corresponding attack is on cooldown.

  • You use the attack normally, putting it on cooldown.
  • While the attack is on cooldown, press the same attack button again to begin preparing the Inauguration.
  • Starting the Inauguration consumes a small additional amount of energy, adding another cost to preparing the empowered attack.
  • Once the Inauguration has been activated, you are free to move and continue fighting normally.
  • When the skill becomes available again, the next time you use it, the attack will deal a significant amount of bonus damage to the NPC it hits.
  • After the empowered attack is used, the Inauguration is consumed and must be prepared again.

The main drawback is the setup time. The player has to use the attack first, wait for it to enter its cooldown, and then prepare the Inauguration. This prevents the bonus damage from being used immediately and creates a meaningful trade-off between time and power. Also prevents it to be constantly spammed.

This would make Inaugurations particularly useful against stronger NPCs, especially dragons, where players can afford to plan around their cooldowns in exchange for a much more powerful attack.

Class Prefixes

To make Inaugurations more unique to each class, each class could have its own prefix when performing one. The prefix would reflect the class’s primary or combined stats.

Pure Classes

  • Mage (Pure Magic) | Arcane Inauguration
  • Berserker (Pure Strength) | Furious Inauguration
  • Oracle (Pure Spirit) | Divine Inauguration
  • Warrior (Pure Weapons) | Masterful Inauguration

Hybrid Classes

  • Warlock (Strength/Magic) | Unbound Inauguration
  • Warlord (Strength/Weapons) | Conquering Inauguration
  • Juggernaut (Strength/Spirit) | Unyielding Inauguration
  • Conjurer (Magic/Weapons) | Enchanted Inauguration
  • Paladin (Magic/Spirit) | Silent Inauguration
  • Knight (Spirit/Weapons) | Sacred Inauguration

Savant

  • Savant (Any 3 or 4 stats split) | Hidden Inauguration

These prefixes would be purely thematic and would not necessarily change how the Inauguration functions mechanically. They would simply give each class its own identity when using the ability.

Additional Notes

  • Players may prepare multiple Inaugurations at the same time.
  • However, each consecutive Inauguration prepared will require more energy than the previous one.
  • This means that while players can invest more energy into preparing multiple powerful attacks, the increasing energy cost prevents them from doing so indefinitely.
  • Players would therefore have to decide whether it is worth spending additional energy to prepare another Inauguration or saving that energy for other abilities, which is especially significant mid-battle.

Example of how it might look:

  • {MinerXen}: Fire arrow!
  • {MinerXen}: Begin! (Or honestly… Vetex can just choose a word to begin setting up the inauguration that might sound cooler)
  • 10 seconds later after using other skills
  • {MinerXen}: Hidden Inauguration…
  • {MinerXen}: Fire arrow!

Note to self: remember to correct your grammar stuff before posting. ✓

2

don’t think it’s really needed, we can already beat npc’s plenty above our level (mainly rivals as an example, with minimal effort honestly)

3

I like the idea a lot but I am struggling to figure out how this would be meaningful. I mean yeah its a more powerful ultimate art but tbh ultimate arts dont really need upgraded forms cuz they are already upgrades. This is basically just making an upgrade of an upgrade which most of the time isn’t really needed unless implemented well but its fundamentally very similar to ultimate arts so theres not much of a reason to do this as I said before. Heck we already have a lot of things that can basically upgrade abilities anyways such as aura and lost knowledge.

4

Eh… I’d propose a complete rework to ultimate arts entirely instead of merely adding something beyond it.

5

Because, I was thinking.

Vetex intends to add harder and harder boss fights which would mean that normal enemies would get buffed more and more as we get new abilities. It’s fun to fight a random NPC mage who has something like Ray, or even like a whale boss that can strike your ship down in 2-3 hits. Eventually we will hit the point of power creep. And it’s going to be potentially needed.

Take for example dragonlords. Apophis is apparently the weakest one and most people are going to struggle fighting her. Tiamat is supposedly stronger than her. It isn’t exactly unreasonable to want this.

6

However, you also have to note how people are currently beating enemies multiple times our level, i’d say “adult/T3 dragons”[1] might be the average skill level for solo, while “powerful/T4”[2] and up are for the crackheads/potion & bug users

Imagine how easy some of those fights will get when we get to the end game

and Apophis, is over 4 times our level, almost 5 times, but by the time we reach the max level, she will be like, only 40% or so above our level[3]

If we are already able to beat enemies more than twice our level, whether solo or in a group, then when we actually reach similar levels to those enemies we will not need the extra power boost cause our base stats are already closer to those enemies

Don’t we also obtain the same exact abilities npc’s use? along with things that npcs do not have access too?[4] as npc’s get stronger, we get more powerful in the same way AND other ways, and are able to beat enemies more than twice our own level (an i’ve honestly felt the max level/rival npcs as fairly easy recently despite the level gap)

The normal/“basic” enemies are not being buffed any more than we are as the player. If anything we as the player are being buffed more than the basic npc;s are, they are not getting strong enough for us to need this whole other ability level

  1. roughly x2 our current max level while having been intended as a “raid boss” ↩︎

  2. more than twice the player level ↩︎

  3. based on the lower end prediction for our max level of 600 ↩︎

  4. potions, dragon blood ritual, profession boosts ↩︎

7

I’m also kind of treating it more like a fail-safe because balance team loves to constantly nerf our base stats to oblivion. So being able to keep up with our damage that isn’t so nerfed against NPCs would be great.

I’m also doing this out of the consideration of players who aren’t as skilled.

8

It’s a well made idea but I don’t really get the point. It’s extremely similar to ultimate arts and is only useable against NPCs, which are already fairly easy. It’s basically just ultimate arts but you do the charge up and attack separately unless I’m misreading.

9

Maybe my rival is just abnormal or something because I struggle a little too much against him.

10

I’m not saying the idea is explicitly bad… but I really didn’t understand why. Why do we need this.

Because at this point you could suggest a free power boost for anything with no justification, and it’s kind of the same thing. It’s not really particularly interactive or cool either, it’s just kind of there. There’s no particularly good outcome.

  • At worst, if it’s too good, it’ll just unbalance PvE further and give an unneeded buff to players.
  • At best, if it’s genuinely ‘necessary’ to keep PvE balanced, then on the long run it does basically nothing except force players to hit spell keys twice per attack to constantly use inaugurations. Because PvE will now be balanced assuming you are always using those, which therefore means we are back to the start just with more spam. An unnecessary step.
11

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