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

I disagree, the premise of having a card system means that whatever comes up must be at least SEMI effective because otherwise its "roll to see if you instant deathed". That means that skills can't be planned to be tactical because they all have to be almost as equally effective. What this card system does is actually LOCK IN the 1,2,3,4,5 style combat compared to something like Baldur's Gate where each spell COULD be unique because you had all of them to chose from. Now you might not have all of them available all the time, you might be going to the plain of fire and therefore not worry about protection from cold, and fire spells but that was your CHOICE made based on planning and for the most part you should be going with an even balance of spells. If you go with all fireballs and no cone of cold and you get stuck fighting fire elementals that isn't the RNG killing you, its your own stupidity

As I said in another thread, I have only just managed to get this working on my computer and so I am using the initial skills at the moment and you know what? its EXACTLY 1,2,3,4 repeat combat because none of them has any variety in it

 

...which encourages min-maxing further as well as limiting competitive builds (defeating the whole classless-based system), which is in direct opposition to the design of card combat to begin with.

It's like everything that card combat and the skill system was designed to do, does the exact opposite and then some. Who's in charge of pink slips around here?

 

You know, I was curious what the polling looked like for the overland map that people were clamoring to have replaced. Curiously enough, if you match up the results form that 'unofficial' poll, they look kind of similar to this poll as well. Reading through the thread, no one is demanding that those who aren't playing but dislike the map be removed from consideration. 72 votes to return the map to the original rooster teeth map, 48 to keep it as it was. Port took notice too, they made responses and within days of the poll, they reversed course. No stipulations validating backers opinions by forcing them to play something they may actively dislike so their voices could be heard. Here though, dissatisfaction is left to linger around the forums. Those who bother to stick around at this point hoping to get things changed are eventually accused of being trolls. and its a reflection of how sad this community has become. Dissent is to be ostracized and marginalized, those reasonably arguing the objective systemic failures of the combat system are accused of being scolds unwilling to compromise a feature that compromises the game's own stated goals.

Man this can be a depressing place sometimes.

 

That is where the deck-building aspect of the system comes into play. If you have an all-fire deck, and run into fire-resistant or immune creatures, yeah it's probably going to be instant-death if you don't run. Right now though, for better or for worse, I have never yet ran into a situation where my entire deck has not be "at least semi effective."

I'm sure that is your experience, but from my experience is does not lock in the 1-2-3-4-5 optimized damage rotation. The system is very open and every player's experience can be vastly different depending on how you set up your deck. For example, if you have a very slow draw speed, you are probably using skills immediately as they come up. If you have a very high draw speed, the skills pile up in your hotbar much faster than you can use them, which creates the situation where you do want to save your big heal spell for later in the fight, keep a root handy in case that creature in the distance aggros on you, etc. I can definitely see where two people can experience two completely different combat experiences with this system, all because of the freedom we have in tweaking it.

You are also absolutely right that the skills don't seem to have much variety in them. I hope that as monsters get more unique attacks, and skills get more polished that will change. For example, we have a number of skills that reduce damage for X seconds. Imagine a monster that has a telegraphed, massive damage hit. Now you'll want to keep that damage reduction skill waiting on your hotbar until the big attack comes (or you'll want a dash skill, or roll, or push the bad guy out of reach with Gust, etc).

 

@Dewderonomy I had attempted in my writing to portray the amount of energy and exasperation I felt during the ordeal. I'm hoping my writing portrayed this. Should I make a video which shows a virtual keyboard of me smashing so many keys at once while running after elven archers to prove just how insanely silly this mechanic could be? The damage numbers are glorious though ... 90 damage hits on just one of the quadruple slashes is quite impressive.

You know that I can control my deck right? I literally just posted saying that I can absolutely control it and predict my deck. It is just a lot of micro management for a game mechanic...

Not necessarily. I could swap decks mid pvp with you and change my fighting style entirely. I can swap mid fight with the press of a button and become an archer. But I'd probably pass out from all the blood rushing to my fingers to combine glyphs.

I blame the poor choices of skills and the requirement to dabble in every school of thought (IE Blades, Light Armor, Earth Magic, etc). High strength based weapons currently function >> low strength based weapons as an example.

There isn't any diversity in the actual glyphs to choose from because most players are forced to pick abilities based on survivability. Or they level incredibly slow. In fact, I met someone in game who was 50 levels higher than me. I'm only 10 behind now and he has played for a long, long time. At first he followed just my weapon choice. Now, he follows my entire build.

 

Btw this made me chuckle. So perfect.

 

But as we all know, nothing is balanced. What'll be interesting is when this is all balanced with weapons, armor, stats, spells and skill results. If the combos aren't strong enough, no one will bother with them; if they're too powerful, then it's just a race to who can combo fastest or first.

Likewise, my response was just my reaction to card combat. It's needlessly complicated. People who support card combat don't like button mashing, hotbars or twitch; you just showed how it involves constant button mashing, dependence on watching your hotbar, and a helluvalot of twitch.

Except you have 1/3 of your points invested in Focus, and you can't be an archer as well. That's the thing: so many points are invested in the deck combat system and the UI that this whole classless based character creation is meaningless. You don't get enough points to really dabble in more than two or maybe three trees effectively, not with the amount of points you're given and how many innates you have to invest in to be competitive.

A 100% DPS-based combat system will do that.

 

Having come to an opinion over years of interest, discussion and gathering of facts, is not the same as being unwilling to change my mind. Your argument is basically "I disagree." There's no attempt to make me look at something differently, or provide some new angle with which to view it. And there's no harm in that. It's good that everyone gets their point of view out there if only because it's important to look at the thing as a whole.

So, while I, personally, am glad for your feedback (and no doubt the devs are too) it isn't enough on it's own to really make a change. Does it change your mind when I say "I've played the very same game, found no tactical impact of my choices, and feel completely disconnected from the game world while playing?" Of course not. You can provide feedback based on your experiences, and, if an overwhelming number of people gave me the same thing, I'd have to look at myself and say "it must be me." But I'm not seeing that either.

MMmmmm.... I'm going to go with this.

Specifically:

What you're doing on the bar is not really related in any meaningful way to what's happening with your avatar. The choices coming up aren't because you did something tactically. It's because that's what came up. Holding on to cards? Even with a long delay, it's not like you're making any longer term plans. You're just going through this moment, and that's it. Stack or not. Combo or not. Use or not. There's really not a lot of anything that feels connected to the battle at all happening.

And lets talk strategy... the supposed other benefit of this. I'm not actually coming up with a strategy for given situations, that I'll then deploy tactically. I'm coming up with a generic strategy that I'll hope will fall into place mostly that has nothing to do with what I'm up against, but instead with what deck I built.

"Oh, but you can chose your decks" I can hear you say... yeah. If I happen to have a custom deck for every one off situation. But we really won't, will we. We'll have a main deck, and a couple specifics, but really, nothing that lets us deal with a new situation on the fly because of our own tactics.

If you want to keep me engaged in battles, make battles engaging. Make the enemies behave in interesting ways. Messing with the UI isn't doing that. It's at best a distraction to what's important, and at worst the worst possible thing you can do in a UI, detach the player from being involved and at the same time, mess with their input so it isn't intuitive. Make the UI the star, not the game.

They're cleaning it up, they're making it better... but they can't take it away if decks are the design.

 

This. This right here.

Major cogent point, and I gotta chime in.

I make NO tactical decisions of merit at any point in my current character design. I pick a large number of skills because the system makes me, and because I don't want to be based on any one attack just in case I find something that is immune. I then walk out into the world with my abilities sorted into categories and find things to fight, at which point I stand and spam. There is NO change in my "tactics" regardless of whether I am fighting undead or wolves, spiders or bandits. I just shoot the ranged button at the ranged things, the melee buttons at the melee things, and the aoe button when there are more than two melee things. I hit the heal button when I am low on life, and for all that I could be playing Candy Crush or some other pedantic browser based sorting game.

The cost buff encourages me not to move, the random deal system prevents me from planning out any kind of special moves, and I don't even need to care what I'm fighting, either my barrage of random mystic energies will kill it or, every once in a while, I will go looking for an ankh. When my inventory is full or my harvesting tool breaks, I go back to a town and refit. Now, I know this is only pre-alpha and all that jazz, but this is not likely to change. With this system, combat will be fairly boring even at it's utmost. The adventure of pretty graphics and skilled human opponents, smarter AIs, an engaging story, neat music, all that will help. But WHAT it will help, the WAY it will help, will be by mitigating the monotony of playing a simplistic matching game while my character supposedly fights for his or her life.

 

I know what is going on here , they just misspelled RPG with RNG.....
Is kinda interesting how most of our efforts as players is directed to reduce randomness as much as possible.
We are now Randomness Managers .

 

@Borg it is the way of the human existence. We do it every day in our lives. Examples include driving to work, attempting to eat healthy, keeping a schedule, planning our finances, etc. What I don't expect is to have to perform this in an RPG RNG. I definitely do not want to do this in a game, unless that game is specifically designed to do such a thing. Blizzard made that card game ... It is RNG. They provide cards which reduce the RNG. The game itself isn't a mechanic. It blows my mind that anyone would accept this system as any sort of legitimate combat system. I suspect you feel the same.

@dewderonomy Good, then my writing exemplified the chaotic nature of the deck system and the absolute silliness of having to perform the actions. Mission successful.

I would akin his definition to something closer to the following. I am intimately familiar with SA as I served in southwest asia for many years. Which the current card mechanic absolutely detracts from. I am sure I could easily prove how the card mechanic detracts from SA through the use of a few types of game players by recording their key strokes and receiving feedback from the user.

As far as tactics go, I believe Freeman nailed it here:

I personally see a game developer attempting to create a system which detracts the pain from a players choice. Meaning they aren't punished by following a tree. They are rewarded for not following a tree. Which is absolutely counter intuitive to the tree. Take any game that has trees and people rush to get to the end because the best spells and skills SHOULD be at the end. Not having forward thinking to see that, worries me.

 

YES


CHANGING THE SUMMON SPELLS SO THAT THE CASTER ONE WITH THE SPIRIT OF THAT ELEMENT/ENERGY OF THAT PARTICULAR TREE AS IF THEY ARE BECOMING ONE WITH THAT ELEMENT OR FORCE PRODUCING INCREASED RESULTS OF THAT ELEMENT OR ENERGY.

If we can take elemental/Energy form for a spell tree path instead of summoning it could be used not just as an offensive weapon but it could be used to increase the potency of the spells we cast within that tree while we are in the form of the focused element.

The summoning spells are currently are weak because while the elemental can blow away a single target, they are in big trouble when we have a bunch of opponents and those elemental just get eaten alive and are a waste of a spell.

If the spell caster takes the form of the elemental then we don't have to worry about the elemental getting eaten alive in 2 seconds because you and the element are one... which could lead to these benefits below...

LICH FORM
What if death magic (necromancer) could become a lich? Still able to summon ghuls though, but the spell caster could attain lich form which should make death magic more potent while they would have a defense weakness against life magic banish undead and maybe fire. So summoning ghouls would be a great thing while in lich form to distract monsters and keep attacking from afar and summoning more ghouls to keep the the enemies busy fighting this sickening creature while you sap the life out of them from afar.

PHOENIX FORM
Sun magic could take the form of a Phoenix. How cool would it be to become a Phoenix, and fly over water instead of swim? Maybe they can still cast spells over the water because they aren't swimming unlike other casters. Also maybe it could have the extra bonus of restoring one hitpoint after receiving a killing blow, requiring a second killing blow.

CHAOS SUMMON definitely summon
Don't change chaos's summon spell.... I'm not sure what the chaos magic summon demon will be like. Although this demon should be very durable so they don't die really fast if fighting only 5 red spiders for instance. It should be a serious threat to caster and foe a like. Maybe it needs massive hit points, or just remain active till the spell ends.

FIRE ELEMENTAL FORM:
Has the fire elemental auto attack against our targeted foes increasing our DPS, while enabling us to enhance our fire spell offensive powers (DOT duration, and speed of casting each spell). Comes with the nice touch of doing some fire damage to those who attack us with melee, but is extra susceptible to ice/water damage.

WATER/ICE FORMS:
the water elemental could be the form (so the caster becomes the water/healing auto attack) and increase water healing spells while in that form. Maybe have improved protection from fire dots too. Weakness could be freeze attacks from other water mages, especially the slow effects!!!
The ice elemental form as a second option and move slower but have some physical defense bonuses or something, but subject to extra fire damage due to melting effects. The ice elemental can increase damage spells and slowing effects from our spells while we are in that form.

Air Elemental Form:
The Air elemental form ought to give the caster energy based auto attacks like an air elemental, and increase movement speed and dexterity, but lower a person's strength perhaps??? Increased damage of electrical spells.

EARTH ELEMENTAL FORM:
Increase Strength, Damage resist, and Damage avoidance, but decrease speed a little bit. It could also come with a considerable boost to the stone fist spell while in that form. Essentially you become the hulk, and can smash stuff.

WISP FORM:
All lunar spells could increase duration while you cast it in this form. It could automatically have night vision and magic resistance spells active while in this form.


EDIT: I know this isn't help to fix the deck system, but I believe it will fix spell trees by making it lucrative to invest fully in a particular tree. So I created a new thread for this because I believe it is an incentive to max out a single mage skill tree.

 

I will now prove how chaotic this system is by simply fighting some monsters. I'll show my keystrokes on screen as well as to record the footage of me fighting. I'll prove how non tactical, toe to toe and absurd the requirement is to achieve the highest DPS possible... Let me just remember where my streaming software is located.

 

@Isaiah While it may not directly be about the deck mechanic. It is about combat, trees and the deck mechanic. In my opinion no suggestion should ever turned away. Suggestions should just be examined, have loop holes revealed and the logic reviewed. Like a vetting process. As share holders and testers I personally think we should be voting on features to follow the scrum process and close feedback loops.

 

Ok so here is the link to the video. It may not be uploaded yet. But, give it time.



This video works in conjunction with Envy's deck building guide or it stands alone. It simply showcases an overly complex version of most other MMO's hotbar.

 

The most depressing thing about the combat system is how much it forces you to think about ugly glyph cards coming up and not focusing on what's going on in the combat world.

I guess I should expect that people have already figured out how to game and min-max the system; that's human nature.

But for me it really does take a huge amount of fun out of why fantasy games are fun to play.

 

I couldn't agree more. I HAD a clip of me accidentally aggroing 2 red spiders and I nearly died because I was so focused on combining glyphs. But of course FRAPS didn't record it... It was so perfect. In that particular instance you would have seen my fingers FURIOUSLY combining glyphs, timing my cooldowns for the self heals while FURIOUSLY combining the glyphs. I'll see if I can recreate that scenario...

I'm clearly fighting monsters in this video where I don't have to think ... I could probably go get a drink and come back and have won the fight.

 

I created a separate thread for it here

I think it is more of an incentive to max out the tree if the top spell enhances the rest of the lower spells, and also the elemental won't be subject to instant death from mobs because you are one with the elemental spirit... no AI needed.

 

I saw your link and already voted I was just about to provide my personal feedback.