Adding depth to "card-based" combat

First of all, I will assume combat in SotA will be "card-based", since it certainly isn't set in stone yet

So here is my idea : the cards/runes should have 2 levels of reading.

The card would have a primary effect, like a sweeping blow, a buff, a heal, any regular ability you may think of.

Then the card would also have a secondary/minor effect, like for instance :

(all numbers are here for the example's sake, please don't call me out on them )

offensive effects :
- healing effects on target reduced by 50% for 5 seconds
- 10% extra damage
- enemy's damage are reduced by 5% for 3 seconds
- etc...

defensive effects :
- buff duration extended by 15%
- damages received are reduced by 5% for 5 seconds
- 20% bonus fire resistance for 5 sec
- etc...

And here comes the really interesting part : the secondary effect would be random !

I think it adds 2 things to the system :

- It makes you pay more attention to the cards you are "dealt" :

even after you've played with the same "deck" for a few hundred hours or so, you won't quite be able to instantly recognize any card popping in your possible choices​

- It adds strategy in your choice :

Of course, the main effect would still be the major factor of decision ; you need a strong single-target burst ? You need an aoe ? The main effect will decide of that.​

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But if for instance you see an orc shaman has just joined the battle and is about to heal your target, you might want to mitigate those heals on the orc captain you've been hitting for a minute.​

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Or you might consider that attack that happense to have an added silence to give you just the time to burst the captain with a lucky +20% damage on your most powerful attack.​

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Well that's it, this is my idea and I hope I explained it clearly enough Discuss !

 

I don't fully understand the concept of card,s as it's a mechanic I just haven't seen in games. This is my interpretation so far.

A card represents a flash of intuition and an opportunity. If a certain card comes up, it may that I notice that my opponent doesn't have a firm grip on his sword. Executing a parry move right now stands a really good chance of at least a temporary disarm. Or perhaps he's just moving a bit slow and I can try for a finisher right now. Perhaps dodging left will put the sun in his eyes.

I have to assume my opponent had cards on me too. And I assume the game isn't about who can hit the right button faster. Maybe there's a small flash when someone uses a card and the counter is either dodge, interrupt, or block but I have to pick the right one fast.

 

They way Chris explained it in the interview with Markee Dragon (youtu.be/Aqh4FW1BT2E?t=15m30s) it sounded more like the Cards or "Runes" would be more secondary. I took this to be that combat will contain a lot of traditional elements and you could go through an entire combat session without using a Rune at all.

Runes would be like decks of cards. You would be able to build your deck somehow before battle. During battle "hands" of runes would be dealt out. Runes will only exist for a limited time after which they will be discarded. When you use a Rune or it is discarded more Runes are drawn. The Runes available to you will be based on your available skills.

I did not take this to mean your skills would be Cards/Runes or would be specific moves. Its more like, as a Swordsman, you can have Runes for different swings and based on the Rune you choose your next move would be a Downward Swing or Side Swipe which may have its own bonuses and setbacks.

The more the Devs talk about it the more it is difficult to comprehend. However, it sounds like Runes/Cards are not the bulk of combat but more like adding flavor and unpredictability to it.

 

I hadn't seen this video before posting, and the assumptions I make are certainly far from the actual system we will get to experience

But I still get from the video that you will only get a basic attack (auto-attack) and that the runes will cover both your special abilites and items. From my understanding, the hotkey bar we saw during the last dev chat would be empty when out of combat, and as soon as you begin to fight, you would get a random draw from your deck.

But yes, the one thing that seems somehow strange is Chris saying that some players would just "put some heal potions and some defensive attacks" (nice oxymoron there ), because from what I get, that would mean only automatically slashing your sword and occasionally healing, which seems like the most basic combat there is.

I guess there are not many suggestions we can make to add more depth to the combat system as long as we have no precise idea of what the system is This kind of talk will make more sense with the alpha out, though I thought it couldn't hurt to throw out ideas and see what came out of it.

 

Well, I hadn't seen that either, and it was mostly informative. I heard one phrase in the description though that set off massive alarm bells in my head. When the runes pop up on your bar, their location will be random.

So, you're telling me that if I'm say, main tanking a raid boss (or really, just deep into a long fight at a really exciting and difficult part of the solo story) and I need one of those runes to tip the balance, I have to look away from the UI and scan my [ten?] buttons to see if any of them are useful? I kinda like being able to blindly hit a hotkey and know what it's gonna do, and yes that includes the emergency once every 30 minutes to 3 days buttons that I only use rarely.

 

Hey, blanket party me if I'm wrong, but does that sound problematic to anyone else?

 

You're not wrong MalakBrightpalm, it's a serious cause for concern. It removes control from the player, and forces the player instead to "fight the interface" instead of "fight the monster" or "fight the combatant".

There are many debates on these forums about exactly what you've highlighted. Those that have a little more faith in Portalarium than others believe whatever they produce will be fun.
Personally, I'm far more skeptical. I don't want to fight the interface. I don't want my decisions made random. I don't want my hotkeys to be random.

And finally, I don't want to endure an ultimately ineffective anti-botting measure (which this strongly seems like it may be) for my entire time in New Britannia.

 

I'm hoping this situation will become clear upon playtest. It sure looks like a bad bad idea.

And the sad thing about this as an anti-bot measure is that the botters wouldn't be phased. Programs like Macroquest
(excuse me while I cleanse myself) ... these programs would just read video memory and would know what icons were
visible in a millisecond.

I too like to be able to use my interface without spending a lot of time looking at it. A glance is fine. But I don't want to
play 'whack-a-mole' with the GUI.

 

If you every played Magic The Gathering, you might see how something like this may work. I think this "randomness" already happens in RPGs in the form of dice rolls and skill checks. This may just include some special actions which you can think of as situational. Maybe a rune comes up for a special strike which symbolizes an opening in the combat that doesn't always happen. Are you quick enough to see the opening and take advantage of it?

If you have control of building the cards/rune in your deck then you have more control over the odds than you think. Sure you could get a bad draw (like getting a charlie-horse before entering combat) but if you are prepared you should never feel cheated. I think this adds some extra strategy to combat beyond a wild click feast or a mind-drolling gambit of activating skills.

 

Correct. Bots would, in fact, play such an interface far better than a person ever could, with very little development effort.

Personally, I can't come up with a better ... misguided intention? Of why Portalarium would put such a bad idea in arguably the most controversial portion of the UI, that being combat. I would be happy to be "enlightened", though, as to the real reasons behind such an idea.

And Umbrae; You're already fighting the interface with phrases like "If you have control of building the cards/rune in your deck then you have more control over the odds". That right there is the entire problem with the idea, in a nutshell. You know what's better than trying (and failing) to control the odds? Pressing the key that activates my skill. That I have. Right now.

Also, "this "randomness" already happens in RPGs in the form of dice rolls and skill checks" ? Nope. That, in fact, is an entirely different thing than randomizing the UI for the controlling player. From my perspective, you're rationalizing a bad idea with ancillary familiarity. If the in-game combat, per encounter, was a determinable random set of challenges? Great, I'm all over that, awesome idea, put it in SotA immediately. Not a random UI.

 

Well I wasn't specifically targeting the randomness of the UI. That's hard to comment on because we haven't seen it. Showing a deck of cards isn't what I would think of an randomizing the UI. A deck of cards is an understood convention. Not being a fan of sports I think this would bring a level of strategy into real-time combat that has not been done, but I would be happy to trade it all for turn-based combat.

It is a hard conversation to have without examples. *raises a glass hoping for a early alpha*

 

I like knowing which key is going to perform which action without thinking. Perhaps I decide that the '0' key will be for healing myself. In the middle of combat I can hit the 'o' key (or target myself and hit '0'). I'd rather spend more effort keeping track of whatever is trying to sneak around behind me. At the end of a long day, I'm looking to avoid significant effort. (But I don't want to turn autoattack on).

Now if the runes/cards or what have you are grouped into classes, and the next healing-type fires when I hit '0' I would probably be OK with it. But what I'm hearing still sounds a bit like whack-a-mole. When an ability pops into my bar (when a cooldown expires) whack the button.

I'm not all that concerned about multiboxers. I kind of think that most people would rather play with friends. And I think the multiboxing playstyle was more of a symptom of low populations. Another cause was long camps (it is hard to get your friends to join you for a 70-hour camp). Although, come to think of it, I have done such camps with my friends in the past.

 

I very much agree with this. But many games, e.g. WoW, I can't do this due to procs and cooldowns. So I have many buttons which all really mean "attack" and I'm just looking for the most efficient one. It does really feel like "fighting the UI" as @vjek mentioned.

That's why I've suggested a small number of buttons which basically always work, but can be situationally overridden. e.g. my normal "counter attack" becomes a "stun" or "disarm". Same basic function, same button. I'd like to see the cards as ovverrides or upgrades of the basic dance of attacking, dodging, blocking, etc.

I'm willing to have some "wild card" in there, that fits into no category, but it should be very rare. And this makes be a bit nervous because generally some RNG proc deciding a battle is undesirable. Perhaps it simply has a greatly reduced or different effect in PvP. No one's going to complain that they one-shot a wolf.

 

@ Umbrae The really major difference between a combat UI in an MMO and Magic (which I played and loved) is that in Magic, unless you are playing a variant or have a real jerk for an opponent, you can sit back and think for a few seconds before you begin your turn, and you can play your cards in precise order as you see fit. In an MMO, you react in realtime to something, someone, or lot's of somethings and someones who are trying to smear you, and you push those buttons as fast as you can. No thinking, no planning, and above all, no saying "wait" and playing some interrupt at just the right moment.

 

So if i enter combat i have every time to pick available cards before actually entering combat?

And with these cards coming up both for melee and magic what about the flow of combat?

 

Little is known for certain, @Ara. The understanding *I* have garnered is that some, but not all, of my skills will be in this "deck" that I build. I build it when I set up my character, before leaving town, and can change it later by returning to town. While out adventuring, I only have what I put in the deck in town, plus those powers which are not part of the "random" setup. During combat, a set of ten buttons will pop up on the UI, periodically having "cards" from my "deck" dealt to them. These would be single use casts, immediately replaced with another "card", and every so often expiring. So your hotkeys are constantly shuffling through the "cards" that you selected for this very purpose before setting out.

 

I doubt we are going to wait around while people sort through a deck. We probably build out deck and use it once we enter combat. Sort of like memorizing spells, or equipping armor.

 

Yeah i sure hope so.

Having to wait for a spell card or have to choose a not decired spell cause it isnt available would remove flow from the combat system and same time remove any twitch skills from the game. Sounds more like a strategy game if you would have to wait for cards to show up.

Spells or melee skills should be placed on a certain hotkey and stay there until you decide to remove them.

 

It's plausible that if we stacked enough of certain skills, the "deck" would just keep renewing the same skills over and over. So, if we are allowed to do it, we will remove the uncertainty at the cost of variety. Of course, that presumes that the dev's don't put in a limiter like commonly shows up in actual "build your own deck" card games. Say, you must have a minimum of 30 skills but you can only have any given skill twice. That would FORCE us to have an unreliable but variable skill set. Of course, if they DON'T put limits on it, I could make a "deck" of ten cards. Then they would sit quietly on their hotkeys, with nothing to replace them, they could replace themselves. There are infinite tricks that could be played out for and against, they could require a basic set of limiters, we could hunt down powers that were very similar to each other to get more cards of a certain type in, etc...

What occurs to me is that I haven't seen anyone say that they like this. I'm honestly wondering if anybody likes this idea.