New Suggestion to Improve Glyph Combat

(For the purposes of visibility I post this here, since if I post it in R16 it will get deleted soon.)
After watching the R16 post-mortem, I have come to realize that while people are still voicing complaints about drawing glyphs, focusing too much on the hotbar, and randomness of drawing, nobody's suggestions have resounded with the team (ie Chris).

So, here's a new one in an effort to kickstart more ideas about improving combat.

I suggest a new skill in the Focus tree. This skill will permit the player to set a designated glyph slot to always draw a skill of a certain type specified by the player.

This skill would be fairly expensive and is probably maxed fairly low to limit the amount of "modifiable" glyph slots.

In example:
A player has learned this new skill and raised it to level 2. Let's assume this player specializes in Bludgeons and Life.
In this player's deck window, he has the option to set a certain glyph slot to a certain glyph school. He chooses slot 1 to always be a Bludgeon skill, and slot 2 to always be a Life skill.

This means that during combat, whenever a glyph is drawn into slot 1, it will be a random skill from the Bludgeon skill tree that that player has learned. The glyph drawn into slot 2 will be a random skill from the Life tree. The glyphs in slots 3 and 4 will always be completely random.

Note that while this gives an advantage to the player in allowing them to sort their deck, it does not interfere with other deck mechanics in any way.
-Slugs will still be drawn into designated slots.
-Glyphs drawn into designated slots will still discard normally.
-Glyphs will be drawn completely randomly into undesignated slots (they still function normally).
-ONLY the designated glyph type will be drawn into designated slots.
-Glyphs are still drawn left to right at the beginning of battle.

This gives the player several advantages:
1. Less staring at the combat bar. Players will know and be able to decide themselves what numbers on their hotbar are dedicated to which school of skills, allowing them to use skills peripherally and recognize skills at a glance by screen location.
2. Adds a slightly more strategic element to deckbuilding. Players can designate slots in an attempt to set up combos - e.g. two slots designated as Blades slots in slots 1 and 2 are much easier to get a combo for. This still permits the randomness the devs want and still makes sense in a real-world scenario: a skilled combatant would know which moves(/spells) would be better off used at the beginning of combat, which are best used in succession, and which are best kept in reserve.
3. Permits players to customize their skill rotations, giving them the freedom they desire. While rotation-based MMOs are not my favorite, they are the norm, and players coming in from games like WoW are going to complain about the randomness of the glyph system. Being able to designate skill slots suddenly allows the players to create their own rotations that suits their individual characters.

Possible disadvantages:
-Players can specialize in a low-glyph slot build that is entirely designated to specific skill schools. This might create balance issues with stacking decks, though it would actually make a low-glyph slot build viable (which it currently is not).
-Might give players who take this skill a big advantage over other players in PvP.

Let's get some constructive feedback going!

 

or use a static bar so you have all of your glyphs are available.

 

Nice idea but, Nope.

sorry the system is fine just not what you think it should be

move the glyph bar to the middle of your screen and then you can look at it and run all over the place and see the fight and cards all at a glance.

 

Unfortunately that's about the response I expected.

 

I think this idea has merit. It's a constructive attempt at a modification and not an overhaul.

There needs to be a backup plan when new players leave the game not having grown accustomed to a combat system over numerous releases.

 

I really like this idea. Although I can see one way that it might be "abused" or taken advantage of. I'll use blades and fire schools as example. If I maxed the first blade skill (forgot the name) and exclusively added all those glyphs to the deck. And did the same with the fire skill (urgh, forgot the name again... the first skill?!). Now you're guaranteed to always draw those exact glyphs and are able to always build your combo from that.

I know that the devs specifically didn't want us to be able to build combos from locked glyphs; would they then apply the same restriction to this or how would you work around the possible abuse?

 

I like that you are coming up with ideas tekkamansoul. So whatever helps to keep our eyes on the opponent verses the hotbar. For me I don't really like the way the hot bar looks and works. I am clicking away on some skill to get it to take and I think it should be more responsive for one thing. I also don't think it should look like a hotbar, and should look so much neater. How it should look I do not exactly know, but if I ever get the picture in my mind or find a good example I will definitely post it. I do believe the system we have needs some work. I'm not saying I don't like some things about it, but I think the UI on it needs improved. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some changes in the next months. Chris did make a comment in the Dev Hangout but not much to go on, just said it needs work.

 

Tekkan is really the one of awareness about SotA combat system big flaw. (= Hotbar grabs all our attension all the time)
Current combat UI is a just untidy rather than random.
That's why it demands a unnecessary process for making combo glyph or glyph stack.
It's fully dependent on player's mouse handling and it do not contributes any immersion into game world.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys.

More than "hey devs, use this idea", I wanted to jumpstart discussion on changing the functionality of the combat hotbar.

 

To help solve Jynx's identified problem of having perfectly matched combos perhaps you could tweak the categories.

To have a glyph slot you must have 10? cards from a glyph school allotted to a slot or perhaps no more then 3 of anything?

Might become a combat style between the fixed bar and the fully open random bar.

 

I've seen several ideas similar to this one.
Lets do a search...
yupp
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...stem-work-for-some-players.14314/#post-238619
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-the-mega-post-combat-system.3656/#post-62667

Hmm. There was another one where they wanted "red" glyphs seperate from "green" from "blue" etc. So that offensive skills would go into one set of keys, buffs into another and so forth. Can't find that one though.
Maybe @Bowen Bloodgood remembers?

 

Sorta illustrates the point that people are trying to like the combat system that they don't necessarily care for.

It works in PvE right now because it's pretty irrelevant what a mob is doing at the moment. Nothing to block and next to no area of effects to avoid.

 

They could simply have it so new cards appering was added to the left if offensive and right if defensive
(if was a empty spot there)

 

I appreciate someone coming up with new ideas for the glyph system. Takes a lot to sit down and try to figure out how to make sense of this abhorrent system and come up with better ways for it to work. Some responses have added in things like glyphs falling in a certain order or being color-coded, but it still forces you to constantly look down at the hotbar to see what fell in where.

I won't poke holes in those, but did want to bring up the idea you had about a "skill" to fix the hotbar. You have to now invest points just to organize your glyphs better. This is an argument for locked hotbars and switching decks; the problem is once you invest all those points into Focus, you don't exactly have much wiggle room to really benefit from the half-ass flexibility afforded by two locked hotbars. Your overall template is hamstrung by the fact you have a third of your points invested in the UI. So putting points to lock slots by "skill" doesn't really help because one of the few things this game is offering (skill/template freedom) is further castrated by being forced to invest points so you can actually play the game effectively.

Then consider you lock several slots for Bludgeon. They are specific to Bludgeon, yes, but there's more than 1 Bludgeon attack. Now those three slots are still randomly bringing up glyphs. You still have to look, just at those three slots instead of the other 7. It also means that you draw 3 Bludgeon cards you don't want and the other slots are filled with Life or something irrelevant to what you need at that moment. Now you're waiting to do something. Throw in slugs or whatever else and, well, those points invested in the skill-specific slot-lock would be better used on innates.

In the end it doesn't actually solve the problem, it's just another way to use the system, and unfortunately, requires more skill points to make it work. I don't mean to post this to be a jerk, I really meant it when I said I appreciate the effort. The combat system is a problem and it needs to be fixed. I just don't think this will work to accomplish that task. Furthermore, if nothing else, I think this illustrates just how difficult this system is to balance and make enjoyable for different playstyles (what they marketed to with the non-class restricted skill system), especially when skill balances come into play.

 

There are some very interesting suggestions out there they simply got ignored.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...ase-turn-off-auto-deal-for-deck-combat.21465/

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/new-deck-combo-stacking-hud.21177/

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...tacking-comboing-mechanics.21221/#post-316760

 

I realize my idea is similar to yours, so what do you think?
1: what if while the deck system is drawing cards for you, rather than placing them in a row in the order they are pulled left to right, they pop up on areas of your hot bar according to the color/type of glyph? So, 1-3 are reserved for normal attack glyphs, 4-6 for support glyphs, and so on. They still come up at random, but come up in their spots. Even better if we could assign colors to numbers. So if you want to be able to see more attack glyphs at once, you can assign 1-5 rather than 1-3. Or you could assign red to 1-4, yellow to 3-6, blue to 5-7, etc. Again, it would not change the way/order cards are currently dealt, just where they are placed when they are dealt. This is similar to your idea, just not quite so specific, all attack glyphs versus bludgeon, and it wouldn't be added by a new focus skill, it would replace the current system entirely.

I would also place combos above the hot bar, usable once created by [shift]1-5.

2: make stacked glyphs, once they are created, stay on the hot bar until you use them or dismiss them. This should alleviate the frustration of building them up only to have them disappear.

Again this would be a permanent change to the current system, keeping everyone on the same page with no unfair advantages.

 

This seems overly complicated, though generally thinking in the right direction.

All that's really needed is the ability to preset a hotbar slot to a specific glyph in your deck so that all glyphs of that type that are drawn are automatically stacked in that slot.

I find the whole idea of including skills that allow you to customize your UI to a more playable state idiotic. It just further enforces the absurdity of a system where the biggest challenge to your gameplay are the controls. No game should ever make you spend levels on making the controls less annoying.

 

Kudos to the OP for presenting a positive suggestion to advance things along vs. just dumping on the game. Good job.

I thought it was an interesting idea. Another version of it might be to be able to designate a 'glyph type' in a particular skill bar. Imagine being able to right click on a glyph location on the skill bar, and choose from a menu of 'melee' 'life magic' 'water magic' etc. The ability to do this could be controlled by some investment in the focus tree that enabled more glyph locations to have their type specified. The advantage of this is that it would be a compromise between the extremes of all skills being random, and locking skills. The bar could still be totally random, but you could have 6 random melee skills in 3 melee-designated glyph locations, 6 magic skills randomly appearing in 2 magic glyph locations, and 2 random healing skills, in slots selected for healing for example. Sounds terribly complicated perhaps, but would make the system even more highly customizable with random skill rotations, while also focusing where the types of skill glyphs appear.

 

Valid, unfortunately that's how the Focus tree already works, by expanding the number of glyph slots you have and what not. I figured this is a way to work with it inside the system.

Possibly. The thing about this is that its worth the skill point investment to some people and some playstyles but not all. As for not taking your eyes away, I disagree, you are only looking at specific skills when trying to form combos. And unless there is the green highlight (visible from periphery, this can possibly be enhanced with a flashing effect) you aren't going to try to combo, you're just using skills to 'attack', or 'defend', or 'heal' (which you can do blindly with this idea). It also helps with the problem of stacking combos. Depending on your setup, you'd be able to tell which keys youd have to press to form a combo.

True, that's what I openly admit it to being. This way it's a part of the system, not a ground up reworking. And no offense taken, I appreciate the feedback.

Yup that's pretty similar. That would actually make mapping the control scheme to a controller a lot easier. Hmm...

Lawl XD
This idea isn't bad either. Now that I think about it, what's the advantage gameplay-wise of manual stacking of glyphs? It's just a bunch of needless clicking and dragging.

 

What about color blind people? Some people even have trouble distinguishing some colors in peripheral although aren't fully (or technically) color blind themselves. It's a huge topic in the industry right now, what with all the color coding there is in video games.

Also, you can't use those skills "blindly" because you don't know what they are. Sure, you know it's an attack, but is it Thrust? Double-Slash? Riposte? Off-Hand? Are you going to then further color code abilities so you can differentiate them "at a glance"? I'm curious because these are the types of ideas that would be used to "make it work".