For the first time since anything combat related has been announced... I like the direction. This feels like something I'd expect to see in an Lord British game. A nod towards realism, with a new game mechanic. A couple notes on that comment: 1) It needs polish in the animation department. Something with the animations to feel like a wind up. It's not a huge deal, but will make it far more interesting to play. 2) It is one more thing to try and juggle with cards. If this is a direction away from them, YAY! Keep this, iterate, and make it happen. If this is intended to be Free attack PLUS cards... I don't think it will work. It's too much stuff. All in all, great start of an idea. Keep it going.
Agree completely. The free-form combat would of been best all along. As it stands now, the two systems completely muck each other up.
Tried out the new system without an auto-attack. Personally, I like it A LOT better, but I do agree with Freeman's point. The charge-up attack needs to have a different animation. I also found that I had no time, and no inclination, to make combos out of the cards. I either am going to be focused on the battle, or I'm going to be focused on stacking cards. One is going to be sacrificed to some degree in favor of the other, and I think that once monsters have big attacks that you have to roll away to avoid, players are going to want to focus on the battle. Nobody wants to die to a dragon's AOE because they were looking at their cards to stack up a couple of thrusts. My wish list right now would be: 1) Get rid of same card stacking (players can wait a few minutes outside of combat to intelligently stack, taking all randomness out of the system. This defeats the purpose of random deck, and creates unnecessary downtime between battles) 2) Get rid of combos from Card Combination. Make combination dynamic in the battle. If I hit with Thrust, give me a visual cue that if I use Double Thrust I'll do something cooler. I'd prefer combos be something that we react to instead of something that we plan. We have A LOT of pre-battle planning right now from the skill-tree, deck building, and deck-breaking via stacking. 3) Implement a Right-Click to Block. Both buttoms to perform a push: shield smash if you have a shield, or kick if you don't. My longer term wish list (and this is long, apologies in advance): Somehow integrate the deck system with that mouse-attack system. Deal out cards to the mouse-button "slots" and left use the mouse to perform skills. A rough example off the top of my head would be this: 1) In additional to the quickslots 1-10, add four additional "slots" for "left button" "left button combo" "right button" "both buttons" 2) Attack skills will randomly populate the left button slot, and are executed when you hit the left button. If the slot is empty, it does a normal auto-attack basic attack. 3) Left button strong will usually be empty in combat, and will function as a heavy damage basic attack. However, if your left button attack is the start of a combo, the strong left button slot may fill up with the 2nd half of the combo. If I hit with Thrust via the left button, there is a % chance that Double-Thrust will then appear in the Left Button Strong slot. If I hold down the button for 2 seconds, I will then execute the combo. 4) The Right button slot will give a small defensive buff when empty, but will populate with damage-reducing skills like Deflection 5) The Both Button slot will populate with utility skills. If empty, performs a push (shield bash or a kick). Quickslots 1-10 will be used for consumables, heals, buffs, crowd control, as well as other skills that are dealt when the mouse slots are filled up - sort of like an overflow.
Can someone please run down the changes? My time is limited with signings at shows this month, and I can't seem to squeeze in playing. I would most appreciate a description of how this freer form play works. I've always thought that the card deck system might work if it could lose the random aspect and be limited to use outside actual combat. In other words, you set yourself up for combat before going in for anticipated foes. I don't mind at all planning in advance- it's the "in game" action mechanic dragging me out the experience that drives me nuts to the point I can't even play the game when combat occurs. Please fill me in!!!
The current change doesn't affect how glyph combat works. Instead, its an optional replacement for the autoattack system. By turning off autoattack, your left mouse button can now be clicked to perform a attack, or clicked and held to "charge" a stronger attack. This seems to work very well for ranged, magic, and perhaps even slower two-handed weapon combat, but (at least to me) is not as effective for standard melee due to the need to click often. You cannot currently reassign the attack key either, so you lose mouse movement and it is difficult to trade between attacks and glyphs. As a work in process, however, I like it, at least in concept. As it becomes more iterated, I think it will eventually replace autoattack, although I hope it has some means of more quickly attacking for melee.
I like where you are going with this, but if you remember that different players will want different keys to use this method (I for example have four actual buttons on my mouse, and would choose to keybind some of this into the 1-10 keys) then what you are really asking for is the ability to slot combos into certain buttons the way we can currently slot cards in. Again, I like this, but realize what this would do to the random deck system. Bye bye, random. Hello situationally reactive hotbar.
Dynamic combos would perfectly fit with Deck random system making random aspect more user friendly,and I'm sure it will sooooo fun to play. It would allow players to have multiple choices as different skill combinations would deliver different results, making game more dynamic. A single glance to your deck would be enough to plan your next movements, reacting to different combat situations with different actions, depending on your draws. It will certainly remove most of the distracting nature of the actual click and drag or R+hotkey system.
I have been thinking that an additional bar, perhaps 3 slots that is your combo bar. It would automatically fill up with combos as they become available in the combat deck. To control the choice of combo, this bar would be cycled via a select key through all the combos available. Combos available, of course are those that can be assembled from glyphs available at the time from the combat bar.
Good point. I'm hoping by release we will be able to rebind keys to match everyone's playstyle. About the random deck, we don't have that right now. Players have been able to game the system by starting combat very early, stacking up all their cards to deplete the "draw pile" and are able to predict exactly what card comes up next. The combo/stacking system has effectively removed randomness from the situation except for players who don't know how to game the system, or don't want to spend all the time gaming it. For example, if you have a 20 card deck that consists of 5 copies of 4 different skills, you can start combat early and stack cards as they become available. You stack skills 1-3 into a stack of 5, and then you know that your next 5 draws will be skill 4. Combos are a cool idea, but I don't like what they've done to the deck system.