A couple of words on combat

First of all, by the time I post these SotA had released R97, and indeed a very good release, I’m so excited to point to out a few highlights which I really like:
- faster switching (without animation) between scene is NiCE! Hopefully entering/ exiting POD building also can be as convinience.
- 60fps on my Radeon RX Vega M GH Graphics, unheard of, good improvement.
- 1st person view gameplay on world map, in adventure scene/ dungeon, town, works quite well, begin to feel a bit like M&M X style, more enjoyable.

Enough of the feedback, hope all these good improvement are here to stay.

I want to talk about my long observation on the game’s combat or attack mechanism, in short is SoTA is taking all the fun part of combat away and making them automatic (dull).

Let me explain further, imagine Monster Hunter taking away the manual targeting and slash, and replace the attack with auto-attack, do you think anyone would care to buy this game anymore?
There’s no skill to be power here, because everyone else is auto attack, this is just another mmorpg farming boring game!

Also for the bow and arrow/ magic, do also consider manual targeting, it should be more fun than auto aim and shoot.

Not to mention our very unfair enemy who, run around like “The Flash”, and ridiculously far attack including mage. Every attack will be 100% hit (even no obstacles, real people would miss, arrows and fireballs are not missiles), that’s not very realistic, if you are fast enough you should be able to dodge an attack. And enemy shouldn’t take 1000 arrows to kill, if you added another layer of difficulty, e.g. aim and dodge.

I believe these are the few things which might improve the game play.

Just a few recommendation, brain storming, nay-ers don’t critic me … just something to think about or try to make the gameplay more fun and addictive, less boring.
Cheers!

 

The way the combat system currently works allows those with physical disabilities to play while also allowing more hardcore players to do more DPS through unlocked decks. There's also the problem of being able to actually see the target while in a large group.

 

And to add to that, games like Monster Hunter are usually single player, or VERY LIMITED multi-player, with little to no lag/desync, meanwhile could you imagine having to aim your arrow at a target that a. Is small, b. Sometimes moves faster than the speed of light and c. Is probably not where it is in reality?

I disagree with OP, there are much better ways to make the combat system engaging, and Dynamic decks is it for Shroud, manual targeting is clearly not the answer for Shroud!!!

 

best way to make combat more engaging, is to make reactives glow/highlight when their reaction effect kicks in(note that i havent seen a reactive like riposte 'highlight' when a parry triggers... scratch that, while holding a 2h sword i should have parry, not just by buff or dw).
skill interactions to do with logic/physics:water + lightning = bonus/guaranteed crit lightning damage, nocturnal type enemy blinded(stun/interrupt, next skill becomes unblockable/undodgeable).
@Violet Ronso dynamic decks are just randomization slots for chosen skills... and co- co- combo.. skills... ya, thats just to bypass cooldowns to keep focus cost down. wish combo skills were hidden skills instead of use rng bar.
@ngavarta the thing about comparing to monster hunter is capcom was making action games for ages, and monster hunters been an online game since early ps2, they refined the netcode for 20~ years(or bought an unreal/unity one and rebuild one of them), and technically you should compare new world's ranged combat for fps style ranged weapons.

 

It might sound stupid, but I feel like, and actually enjoy the fact that, this games combat system feels like a card game system, with an added Gaming rpg system with online play. You can play it with locked cards and what not, but at the same time, you could play it like a card game, you get to chose slots the cards can get drawn to, and plan your deck of cards, or deck of Glyphs, and actually build stacks and combos, all while also considering that while I'm planning on using a Cone of Cold stack on my enemy, that enemy is actually trying to get to me and I have to react to him and my environment.

I agree though, being able to react to things is important, most boss fights have that, but do not include the highlighting of the attack. Fighting trolls has you jumping over a shockwave that will knock you down and confuse you, he hurls a huge stone ball at your face after taking the time to pick it up and you can only hope to Dodge (unless I don't know other ways to avoid it), he tries to kick in front of him, you need to move to the side to avoid it. These are "big red circles" to me.

 

It's good to hear different opinions ...

However, allows me to further elaborate, @Violet Ronso I think the card system is a good idea, just it's overly complex to operate, whereby it can be simplified some more, e.g.: to play the game with an X-Box 360 controller, and swap through cards flip buttons, reduced 10 slots to 5 whatnot (some times less is more, Diablo only give you 3 quick spell).

Also about the manual/ auto-attack, that's not the real pain I'm complaining about, I play single-player mostly, and I turn on auto-attack + archery mostly, only because my enemy does that, and that gives me a sense of fairness.
Most of the time enemy return to base with super-human speed (#1), and the way the Pheonix sprint, it's a bug to me when I see that in real-world; in-game they are being ridiculously out advantage me.

Then the idea of manual attack is an option, we can have both, what I really mean is, when an enemy shoots an arrow, it should miss and fall on the ground behind me if I'm constantly moving; not following me and hit me like some kind of auto-pilot missile (#2), and this affects the gameplay.

For sword or polearm etc melee combat, that's something called the collider box (#3) in game design, which means the enemy is not supposed to stun/ hit me when I'm 2 feet away from him, so this kind of experience added together is a very bad combat experience, and what I called no skill required, instead of calling the card system a spell system, the card system is the only skill you can control over & to me it's ridiculously difficult to use (#4). A human mind can focus on 3 or 4 things simultaneously, but not 10x2 items + movement + aiming.

Even decided to use an auto-attack design still, we can add some logic to increase the miss rate, stationary target vs moving target is harder to miss.

When the target is harder to hit, then we can reduce the enemy health also, instead of setting large hitpoints for the enemy.

Also, something which not balanced is, the number of ranged/ magic attack enemy, will define the level of difficulty for that area (same or higher level area), simply because their attack is n x 100% hit, which means no matter how skillful you play, you can't adventure there alone because ranged/ magic attack is undodgeable. So this sets the difficulty level I know, but it's annoyingly difficult because of the design, and very fast people will give up on this kind of combat!

And yes, please add in dodge (#5) in control but not in spell, or should be a passive skill if you want to make it simple.
Attack combo (#6) is also a good idea, attack highlight(#7) as well (e.g. bleeding).

NOTE:
Well some of the things like manual attack, I suggest them because if you play it in 1st person or even VR mode, that'll make a lot of sense.
The control simplicity suggestion is because I always dreamed to play it with a game controller, and the current combat mode is one of the blockers.​

Cheers, boys & girls.

 

Auto attack is lame in games where it accounts for almost all of your damage and you just run around standing in front of things, but SotA isn't really like that. Most melee damage comes from active skills, and auto attack is mostly just bonus damage or something to do when out of focus. There was a time when ranged auto attack was completely ridiculous, but that was scaled back quite a bit, and now active skills are much more important to ranged than they were. You can kill stuff with just auto attack, but you're gonna do a lot less damage that way, so I don't really see it as an issue right now.

Imo ranged targeting should be somewhere in between full aim and full auto. SotA isn't an FPS and it'd be pretty hard to hit moving targets from a distance. OTOH, you shouldn't be able to just launch something out into the night sky and get spun around towards a mob that you were nowhere close to hitting. Something in between seems best. Its been a long time since I've played any ranged, so for all I know it might already be something in between.

 

I turned off my auto attack and I played a little, I think it's kinda what I want, but ...
Let me rephrase what I really mean I'm looking for, yes SoTA kind of allowed auto and manual attack, ranged or not but not actually manual.

My point is to make the manual really manual, and make it "hit something" (non-enemy target), that'll add in the FUN FACTOR (e.g.: following manual archer gauge is good, but aiming still fully auto).

For example, arrows will disappear after 1 or 2 minutes, then you can actually make some arrow-art by shooting on a wooden wall, etc, also because sometimes it's harder to aim, so you can increase the damage of archer and don't need as many hit to kill an enemy (which is boring and uninteresting gameplay from my opinion). When you do the physic right, you'll know what I meant when you see an enemy poked with 100+ arrows and still not dying ...

Another example is, if you are good enough with your aiming+calculating (arrow travel path should be a curve rather than a straight line, of course, it'll be affected by the archer power and leveling), it's actually easier to hit further enemy rather than firing in the air which is kinda stupid & waste of arrows.

Of course, the balance should also be needed to have some kind of aiming-miss from the enemy AI/ physics too, else it'll be unfair and unrealistic.

 

@ngavarta based on distance from anything we can hit, arrow curve is unnecessary, the speed of basic drawn bows are almost guaranteed to be 150+mph, point blank single target derp skill shots in eso are always curves to.... 75 degrees.... in new world draw and fire curve(or lack thereof) is realistic, and we dont shoot at anything near the range needed to get a curve, so not coding is the way to go.

now about getting 'ray' spells to hit across map, that could work>

 

You see if the mechanic is in place, there's much to play with, if I felt bored, I can sit there, shooting at bottles, animals at far, breaking them or hurting them ..., place a vase on the ground in my room, and try to make the arrow fall into it , this I think is a really sandbox game.