Combat Feedback for R5

I am very disappointed in the combat changes.

Some problems I experienced:

- About everything kills you with 2-4 auto hits, while you need to hit like 10-20 times to kill something with a weapon.
- The only way to actually win a fight is with fireball or its different colored friends. But after one fight you are about 50% down on mana.
- Mana regenerates very slowly, sometimes not at all. I dont see the pattern yet, but I have just waited 10 minutes for my mana bar to fill up. And it was only at like 50%. Maybe its bugged?
- Health does not regenerate either, unless you die. I have seen my health bar move, but right now it has not moved in about 10 minutes.
- Healing is completely useless. Healing heals like 20% of your health while a single skeleton hit can normally cost you up to 75% health (I have been onehitted by some skeleton and obviously the Lich almost all the time).

So with these problems, the game usually goes like that:

You start in the crypta, hit the first alley. Two skeletons spawn. There is no way to kill them without dying, as they will kill you in about 2-10 secs when you get close. You fireball them until you die.

You wait until you get back up, then fireball one to death and start fireballing the other. Then you either die again or he dies. Mana empty.

You now wait 20 minutes for your mana to fill back up (if it ever happens). Because without mana, there is no way to fight anything.

Healing is pointless as in the time of your heal spell you take more damage than you heal, also you empty your mana, and without mana you cannot fight at all, even with shield and armor.

In short, there is way more downtime than playtime.

For every mob I kill I have to wait like 2-3 minutes average. Its so incredibly boring that I just ran through the dungeon and killed them with the traps, cause thats the only sensible way to kill anything.

Seriously, I fully realize its alpha, but I dont think its too much to ask to get out a calculator and realize that its a bad idea if a skeleton does 50 damage on auto attack and the player 10 damage with a fully leveled fireball. And then realize its even a worse idea to then spawn 3 skeletons, where one is a mage which casts fireballs as well.

If you dont want to do the math, just have players and mobs all have the same health and damage, then its at least roughly balanced. And yes, obviously a heal spell needs to provide more health than a mob can damage for.

This is in the feedback section because I believe you have not even looked at balancing at all, so I wont declare that as bugs (although the mana/health regen hopefully IS a bug).

But please, if you want us to test combat, there needs to be at least a mathematical balancing before that, there is no way yet to even start talking about balancing and combat, because its a complete mess right now.

Also, dont get even the idea to implement ANY death system before you fix all that, its bad enough as it is because the only way to go through a dungeon is by dying through it.

If at least it was possible to play smart and avoid damage.... but skeleton mage fireballs hit you anywhere, always, as soon as its fired. You cannot do anything against enemy autoattack, it will just rip you to shreds, so you can never go into melee range either.

So its pretty much bunny hopping around stairs so they can never hit you, fireballing everything, and then comitting suicide to refill the health bar and wait for mana.

Oh well. Lets see what R6 offers.

 

Sounds like first patch will be coming up soon

 

Um....you said it in your post...alpha....I'm sure they are trying to get things in there but fun is probably an afterthought at this point.

 

You are mentioning - experience issues - not tech ... if you have better armor and weapons the fights go more smoothly ... in fact a little too smoothly for my taste.

I like getting owned by mobs once in a while - and I had the same experience you had when I started testing r5

things to remember is that we don't have health potions yet ... you could get the "life drain" skill on your hot bar and it regenerates you while you attack

 

Im sure R5 has had no balancing, and its again just they have it working and letting us have a go. Which is fine with me.

The only think i don't like with regards combat testing at the moment is the regen time for health and focus/mana. It is so slow its like waiting for paint to dry. I know later we can effect this im sure with potions and food, and infact i dont want it like any other game where 5 seconds out of combat you totally regenerated health/mana, but for testing and having a fiddle please let us have out of combat fast regen!
And wolfs are tough, bears not so

 

Fun is a bug.

 

I assume it's just early. Yeah, I just get owned in combat. It's either tuned wrong or I don't understand it at all.

If it's progression based, I don't understand where the easy mobs / better stuff is.

 

I hate alpha's. I am just going to listen to Iolo's lute music in a quiet corner of the village.

 

I'm able to kill elves fairly easily with just autoattack, but once I try to use any combat skills I get owned. Hmm, maybe autoattack stops when you use a skill, that would explain the discrepency.

 

BTW, I am in full plate mail by now with like the best weapon that can be bought in game.

However, its still not fun. At all.

I could live with that for an alpha, but then it should at least be exciting.

I don't know. We really should be able to avoid damage after the enemy has started hitting/firing. I do not see yet how this will be any better with the combat deck system. With static skills you could have some "interrupt" skill and other reactive skills that make combat interesting, but with random skills... err.... not working.

I do not see yet how the combat system will be designed to be fun if this is the base for it. With random skills... you can never be sure that you have a root effect or other interactive skills to cast, so there is no way combat will be predictable. So what do you do if you have three skeletons charging you and your random deck has 5 different versions of "Rot Flesh"? Run away? To where? How do I play an archer if I can never be sure I get more than 1 arrow off? How do I stop the enemy to get to my archers if I have no way to ensure I have a skill that stops them from charging the archers?

Currently I have very bad feelings about where the combat system is going. If combat is supposed to be fully working in 6 months, then it should be basicly working by now and at least completely designed.

Oh well.

 

I was surprised they gave us so many skills to play with. And theres about another 140 to come. Im sure there's been no balancing or anything and at this very early stage they would be silly to do any with only 35/170 or so skills in the game. It would be wasted time, best just to see if damage gets taken and animations work etc and let us have a fiddle.
But again please.....faster regen!
Does sitting down increase it?

 

You have to find weapons through exploration / and getting killed .. lol at first (there are some basements in kingsport that have weapons) ... also in the dungeon are there is a hidden chest - but won't spoil it for you and you could always go back to where the 1st linch is at ... chest is still there off to the right side

 

The deck system interests and worries me. They would have been better trying to put a new fangled combat system out to a younger audience, not generally middle aged gamers like us stuck in what we are comfortable with!

But i will give it a go, they have said if it doesn't work out they can back peddle, i at least am open to seeing what they have planned. I do like innovation.

 

I'm sure they know what they are doing - if you think about - they already have the set up to give you - your standard mmo type of combat system

 

They added the concept of locking skills in the hotbar to address this specific complaint, although there has not yet been any way to test whether it was necessary. I'll wait until the decks are in before worrying too much about it.

 

Yes, and I personally hate it. WOW clones do not work anymore.

I want to be able to throw a fireball whereever I want, maybe at some torch to light it up.
I want to be able to shoot an arrow at a tree or just off into the wilderness.
I want to be able to see an enemy archer shoot and raise my shield to catch the arrow.
I want to see a skeleton swing his axe and duck under it and roll to the side.

(Note that this can even be done with a "click" style interface.)

But I am currently completely missing any sort of interaction in combat. It feels like WOW on release. Thats fine in this alpha state, but has anyone heard of a greater gamedesign that will be coming soon in the next releases? The only thing I have heard is that skills become random, which will make the system even worse than WOW.

I am really excited (and worried) about what kind of combat system they will come up with. I see a lot of emphasis on housing and not a lot on gameplay. I understand that housing brings in money, but the gameplay is what will make or break this game.

 

They definitely need to improve the intelligence of monsters, like awareness if someone is in the area or has attacked another one of their group. You can throw a fireball at elf, and if the AeO misses an elf a few feet away from him, that elf will just go on minding his own business like nothing happened. That's something I hate in MMOs, because it makes combating large groups of enemies unrealistically easy and makes it feel grindy, since you can pick out enemies one by one.

But they haven't talked much about their plans on monster AI and combat, so its not clear how our input can help on this right now. Its something I'd like to see them get in greater detail on.

 

have you tried the strike, and slide??? As you are running use a weapon skill, and when you finish the strike you slide 5 to 10 paces past the enemy. Then you can fire a spell and do it again. It will still hit you when you come in range though. So i don't know if it helps.

I'm sure they will patch the strike and slide, but who knows maybe they will keep that feature or make a skill out of it. It's kind of cool.

 

This is one of my biggest concerns! ... the AI at the moment - if they are not "looking at you" you don't exist - and you can whack them from behind and they don't react

 

I have to try that!