Let's settle this once and for all. Card combat, Good or Bad

That seems like a bug, and I expect that they'll make sure that all assigned glyphs must be assigned to a certain slot.

Personally, I think that the combo mechanic as it is currently implemented does a disservice to the deck system. It allows a player to essentially keep more cards "in his hand" by stacking (your 5xQuad Attack is the equivalent of 10 cards). Being able to store that many cards in your hand leaves fewer cards in the deck to draw from, making the randomness less, or non-existent.

I would prefer that combos are not something that you build in advance, but rather are opportunities that come up during battle. For example, when you hit with Thrust, there is a % chance that you put your opponent at a visual disadvantage, allowing you to follow up immediately with a Double Thrust (skill lights up) to deal extra damage (and if you have Double Thrust and Fire Fist on your hotbar, both light up allowing you pick at that moment which combat to execute - quad slash or fiery shiv). I think its important to have a visual cue on the mob itself to let you know to quickly check your hotbar for the other half of the combo. I can focus on the actual combat a little bit more, and when I see the mob start to stagger, I know that means that one of my skills in my hotbar will do more damage, so I can take a quick second, locate it, and execute.

I also don't like stacking copies of the same skill. That seems to put a huge focus on keeping your deck as small as possible in terms of variety of skills. Having 5 copies of 5 skills seems way better than having 25 different skills.

 

But then you only need 5 active glyphs which really limits the entire game play. Many people may be debating the words strategic, tactical, etc ... But if 25 is the requirement and I can limit the randomness by using 5x5 ... Well there goes tactics and strategy.

But then you have a near random system which I believe most players would not like either. You could be a paladin and become unable to heal your companion simply because you are waiting for the ability to pop into your hand? You are forced to take skill points to lock the spell? The poor purist paladin. I use this as a specific example because majoria couldn't ress me during my first few hours of the game because she didn't get lucky enough to pull the ability and forgot to lock it.

The sounds more like an action oriented combat style and differs from the alternative random style entirely. The action oriented style shouldn't rely on randomness (unless many possibilities for combos were present) and would be more focused on the user being able to press the keys in time to meet the combo criteria. I believe dew covered this topic earlier.

I'm not trying to downplay your opinions. Simply playing devil's advocate. I think you've hit on what the developer is attempting and seemingly failed. I'm not sure because I don't know how the mechanic is intended to work. Unfortunately, due to Envy's deck building guide being placed on the front page I'd suspect it is working as intended. Which is terrible for us all.

 

That's true (especially with skill stacking). But I believe that the enemies will start to become more complex so that you will want to have more than 5 skills. Right now I don't see much use in having interrupts, dashes, crowd control and specific damage types because all the monsters feel roughly the same. The combat is really watered down right now when you think about some epic raid bosses in other games. Once you start having to have all these alternative effects, I think the 5-glyph deck might become obsolete...I hope so at least!

As opposed to not being able to heal my companion because I'm waiting for the skill to come off of cool-down?

If I have 1 heal in a 25 card deck, and my companions are getting grumpy because I'm not healing them effectively, that's more on me than on the deck system. I could create a deck with 50%+ healing spells (similar to dedicated healers in other games), or have a locked slot or two with emergency heals.

Its actually an old mechanic in the MMORPG world. LOTRO had a few classes with "reactive" skills that functioned just like this. If a Burglar got a critical hit, it would unlock a previously greyed out skill. When you used that skill, a few other skills would open up. It did break up the damage rotation a little bit but was only present on two or three classes and the combo chains were not very deep. I am really missing any sort of reactions in combat right now beyond looking at my health bar and hitting a heal, so I might be biased here. I miss having to interrupt, crowd control, dodge, etc so I might be looking at combos to become reactive instead of waiting for combat to get less watered down. I'll give you that

 

I got one shot because I didn't have the passives

Hey that isn't a bad idea. But the affects on the deck building

 

i have spent none of my adventuring points in the combat tree, no actives, no innates, nothing, nadda, zilch, 500 something points all in magic.

 

For me it comes down to this... Is the card system fun? No. Not at all. All it does is over complicate a system that should be simple and smooth. The UI is not the place to make the game difficult. I understand the need for randomness, but that is easily achieved with crit/hit/miss/fiz/ect from the RNG. Im just sick of arguing with the card system.

At least give us a standard hotbar to fall back on & don't penalize us for using it. If the card system is so great then people will use it because they like it, not because they have no choice. Right now it's - use the card system, or don't compete.

Let us spec into decreasing the global cooldown and focus penalty of locked glyphs all the way down to normal. Figure out a way to include combos also. I know I would give up some str/dex/int for it.

 

Anyways I think some of the main issues with combat are that it isn't radical enough.. Abilities are good representations of oldschool rpg spells and that is not good enough in this day and age. To survive you have to have more interesting abilities and more complex/harder to win by using extensive rulesets. I think the foundation is here but there is not enough form to it as far as flashy mechanics. It just has the feeling that it was made without very much creativity and that is what is showing ATM.

Please understand I don't try to hurt the guys who excel at using the existing combat in all it's functional features but I just want to try and push them for more. I am sure I will still get my ass kicked either way so.

I don't like how stances are getting build into the Cards either.. I feel this is kind of a bad thing for each and every combat role type. Also I don't like who the focus is tied to abilities, it seems ironic don't you think? If focus is supposed to be the spell requirement then why not have another mechanic for physical movements?

Why not add some fancy things to the GUI so that they know when they are holding Iolos "BFG" magic crossbow there is going to be some carnage at hand?

 

The only 2 thing i dont like, is how stacking work and combat animation/hit deteciton.

I think the stacking mechanik is a good idea, but it takes to much attantion away from you surrounding since you have to look allways down what you get.
For me stacking would be like, i use a spell or get ready to smash so i concentrade, and for each second pass my skill get stronger.
This is a great idea, and i realy like the ideas for combos as well. But have the same skills stack automaticly would way more helpfull.
Let only Combos have to be managed by the player. (i know many see this different thats my personal taste)

Combat animations

I will explain this with an exampel me fighting a bear.
Edward faces a bear. The bear starts his huge atack with his claws. Edward rolles back but even still he is 1-2 meters away the bear hits him. (combat rolling exept for doging 1-2 spells in the game is usless right now)
Taking he hit animation from the bear he shouldnt had hit me. but the game says when the atack was triggered you where in range so you get the hit no mather what.

I realy hope in the futur this might change and the atack animations count and not only the math system behind.

 

Over the past few days I've messed with blades, blunts, and polearms with reasonably equivalent weapons and there is almost zero difference in kill speed or survivability.
I've tried fighting things with 58 strength and then jacking strength down to 0 and seen no noticeable difference in damage or kill speed, unless I go find something really big where attack skill means something.

This could be because I'm doing it wrong - as I can't stand the 'icons hopping all over the place switcheroo' system so tend to just use a locked bar (and probably will forever). If that's the reason why I'm experiencing the above, well, then yeah, it sucks.

I tried playing a mage - it isn't viable
I tried playing an archer - it isn't viable

In both of the above scenarios you have characters who don't necessarily depend on strength (assuming stats actually do something other than raise attack skill and carry limit because that's the only noticeable change really), both of whom have to carry extra weight in reagents/arrows just to fight, not to mention the cost of those reagents vs. the amount of money you could reasonably farm leads me to the conclusion that only melee is currently a viable choice unless you just enjoy struggling for roleplay purposes. Fizzle rate just adds insult to injury for mage types.

Once I got to adventure level 40 or so I went and made a custom gear set mix of gear and went and trained various different magic builds and while yes, some were 'playable' but for the amount of hassle and effort it was there was no benefit whatseover. Casters/rangers weren't doing more damage, kill speed wasn't any better, it just cost all of your loot to keep yourself restocked (if you could even afford to) and survivability was poor.

Again, all of this is using locked decks, because I find the iconhopping of the rotating decks to be a bit dizzying. I think its the way they bounce and jiggle off the screen. I think I'd be ok with the 'you can only hit it when its lit up' phenomenon if only it wasn't moving around so much. However, that being said, with the exception of the skill that hits everything, I found almost no difference between using different skills with melee. Sure, rend adds a minimal, barely noticeable dot, and various bludgeon skills may debuff and knock things around, but the effects of these are so slight that they don't seem worth bothering with.

All in all, I found the combat experience to be first extremely frustrating until I slapped on platemail and got a 2hand weapon, and now its repetitive and there doesn't seem any way to make yourself any better. Hopefully this will get addressed with gear, as atm there's nothing higher than base dmg on starter weapons with perhaps a few mods that add .1 dmg or a base dmg increase - again, barely noticeable.

Overall, I think combat has quite a few problems with the deck system being only one of these potentially, or perhaps my above experience is because I'm bypassing it (because imo its awful) and that if I just played properly with the hopping, seizure-inducing icons that are moving around, then I'd find my dps was so much better. I don't think so though. I mean, I tried to do it, but got a headache in about 10 mins. =/

 

Hello. First post on here so I'm sorry if my thoughts have been articulated before.

I thought I would add my 2 cents on combat. My problem is the randomness of it. It really breaks the immersion.

If I am a high level wizard and I see a fire, I don't have the know how to cast a rain spell on command. I can shift my pose a little to maybe increase my chances of casting rain, but I might just cast a conjure flowers spell instead. I don't know what I'm going to get, only an idea of how often. Despite my years of magical training, I am no different than Presto on the old D&D cartoon or Orco on the old He-Man cartoons. The only thing I can do is wave my hands and hope, like a little kid with his master's magic wand. The same argument could be made for a master swordsman, which would die rather quickly if they were only randomly making various attacks. The only benefit to gaining is power is able to randomly throw out more powerful spells.

"I'm sorry King Arthur. I would have killed the ogre, but for some reason all I could think of from my 20 years of magical study is a heal spell, a summon bunny spell, and my mom's recipe for muffins. By the time I remembered, it was too late."

I think card combat as a system is fine, but this shouldn't be a card game. I think card combat for an RPG game focused on immersion is a bad idea. The randomness may make sense for Chaos magic due to its uncontrollable nature, but that is all. Yes, I am aware there is a nonrandom option, but why should my wizard be able to cast less spells (punished) just because he can actually cast rain on a fire when he needs to? This also removes a lot of skill from the game and replaces it with luck. I feel the system should stop being salvaged and should be redone with something better. I don't care if it takes longer. I'd much rather wait 30 minutes for a good meal than 5 minutes for a microwavable one.

I want a system where I can call on specific abilities when I need them. My character wants to be Garreth the master magician, not Garreth the master of random chance.

Thanks for listening to my thoughts.

 

Agree 100%, and I'd like to toss out an observation from this current release. It's happened to me three times, and I gotta say I hate it. In an effort to use the current random system, I sorted my abilities onto category keys, as did everyone. I worked the system.

I put all my heals, into which I've invested not a few points, on one button, and I've noticed that I've always got a heal up when I DON'T need it, but right when something comes along that starts overwhelming my defenses and my death magick and my tactics, THAT moment is when the heal key goes blank (slowest possible discard speed, fastest possible draw speed, yadda yadda...) and I die without ever casting a heal to save myself.

Very irritating.

 

What I do is keep healing Grace and a healing touch locked, with a couple of healing touches mixed into my deck. Works pretty well that way.

 

I feel like it simply works better because you're moving closer to having control of your abilities and removing random factors.

 

Which then brings in the locked deck penalties.

 

There is a skill in the focus tree which reduces that

 

Key word is reduces. In what scenario, aiming for immersion, does randomly dealing out your skills work better than choosing them, unless there is a penalty in place? Thankfully dentistry isn't an profession in New Brittainia. I need to clean the patient's teeth. Lets see what skills came up...drill, pull tooth, attach braces, and root canal level 3. Well I guess I'll use drill...although the root canal is high level. Glad I went to school all those years and learned when to use these skills.... I guess I could just lock in my two most used skills instead..."ask question at worst possible time" and "apply toothpaste."

I'm sorry for complaining. I just want a game I will talk about for years to come. I don't want to have to tell my friends to play the game because the story is absolutely amazing, the community is amazing, but you will just have to grit your teeth and deal with the combat being immersion breaking and tedious.

 

As I pointed out at various points on these forums,
A) that talent does not apply only to locked skills, and thus I already have it in my RANDOM build, and subsequently get no further benefit from it's existence.
and B), the talent does not fully compensate for the penalty in and of itself.

Therefore, while the talent exists, it does not truly mitigate the penalty. The penalty never really goes away, the mitigation talent sucks up more points to reach it and more points to get it, and oh, hey, I had to pay talent points to GET locked skill slots, didn't I? Joy.

The way the trees work now, almost every talent that benefits locked decks ALSO benefits randoms. A good random build might already include the locked talents for their own sake, BUT the penalties for going locked will as a result hit with their fullest possible force. It really does make locking talents very irritating.

It's counter-intuitive and illogical, as @Metlore points out again above, and costly, and rather irritating.

When a simple change to a few numbers in a database could ease this effect, that makes it even more of an irritant.

 

If the whole game-play behind the deck design is to make the randomness not matter, or at best matter less, why not skip to the end game, and just have it not matter at all? Every person backing the deck system keeps saying "you can do things to reduce the random" and "it feels less random" when they fix something. If less random is the goal of all the fixes, perhaps removing the random is ultimately what we really want. Right?

 

The problems with the deck combat system in Shroud of the Avatar are simple, obvious, and basic. It isn't a matter of fine tuning the system. No matter of time involved "improving it" will "fix" it, because it's inherent flaws involve it's most basic concepts.

Shroud of the Avatar is a roleplaying game. All of it's basic systems- crafting, home decoration, combat, exploring the land, should facilitate the basic concept of you the player living the life of your character.

This really can't be argued or debated. It is a core point of all of RG's past games. It is the reason RG has a fan base.

Everything that is counter or opposed to roleplaying your character ought to be avoided- if some system tends to yank you out of character, by forcing you to pay attention to stuff outside of the gaming world, it is a bad idea.

I've worked in gaming for 20 years. I love RPG's above all other games. The above is simple, basic, straightforward game design logic for any game where you want to stay immersed in a world, where you want to believe in your character.

There are games that use clever conceits and tricks that work around this most basic of foundations by removing you out of character when you are "checking your stats" or "planning strategy or tactics"....but these things do not ever occur while live combat is happening. They either happen when you are doing nothing else important, or, when the game is paused and combat temporarily is ceased. (Like Fallout 3's V.A.T.S. system). You are "in" character, running for your life, when combat is actually going down.

The reason they do not happen while combat is live, is because the most exhilarating feelings of caring and nurturing and protection one's beloved character happen whilst some ugly beastie is trying to gnaw on you. You have to believe. You need to be involved.

When you, in effect, take away the "reality" of the apparent antagonist by introducing a much more abstracted card game into the mix, it is inevitable that you destroy the illusion of immersion.

This, all by itself, showcases just how horrible the flaw is in the idea of introducing the deck into Shroud of the Avatar.

It is similar to deciding to paint a lovely landscape in a realistic manner, and then arrange the composition of the painting with the house dead center in your picture and a bright sun exactly above the house, and one tree on each side of the house with one bird on each tree.

No matter how much time you spend meticulously crafting that painting, how realistically you paint the bricks on the house, how wonderfully you make the glass in the windows seem real, this painting will suck....because the basic design....the placement of the house, sun trees and birds, are boring, tedious, terribly unnatural.

You do not roll dice to see where you place your chairs and table in your character's home....you place them like you would place real furniture. You wouldn't want to mine ore in Shroud of the Avatar by playing chess...you would take a pickaxe and wack at the rocks.

And when battling a horrible fire breathing drake in Shroud of the Avatar, it would work best if you used a sword and shield and actual logical movement, so you could look at, and concentrate on said beast, rather than for some reason, sit down to a more boring, arbitrary, chancy game of cards.

In the end, the deck is not as much fun as a dragon....or even a skeleton. Card games are a vague abstraction of war. Game combat ought to be better - because it can be much less abstract.

And having both welded unnaturally together wrecks the fun, the immersion, the entire point of an RPG.

 

Well said!