Am I the only one who doesn't want to play card game combat??

I don't know enough about card based combat to even have an opinion on this, I'll have to see it in real-time to
make any educated guess on whether it's great or not.

 

The Chaos Tree looks very interesting, high risk & high gain. Sadly, healers will be in short supply as in other games. It's going to be interesting how the dynamic deck works out, people who are used to card games of chance shouldn't have any problem

 

I would imagine more the opposite. With multiple decks of skills, I can play different roles (maybe not highly specialized). So, if my friends need someone to heal or do crowd control, I most likely have those skills already and will build a "healer" deck and "CC" deck. Heck, I'll build a "Undead" deck or a "water-based" creature deck. And swap things around as needed.

So many possibilities.

 

Currently it seems like if you has skill 3 in something you can place up to 3 cards of that skill in your deck.

 

Interesting thought. What I've heard is that the training level of a skill impacts its performance/power/etc. There may be an upper limit on repeat cards in a deck, but I really don't see the purpose since that would be a choice the deck designer would have to consider given the limited number of skill slots in a given deck. If you want to fill every slot with fireball, go for it but then you had better have a deep pocket of black pearl

 

It's my current belive that skill in

• Fire Ball - only will affect how many cards you can have in your deck
• Highly Flammable - will increase the damage your fire balls (and other fire spells)
• Fire Reach - increases range and radios of you fire balls (and other fire spells)

So would need to invest in all 3 skills to be a competent slinger of fire balls.

 

Would love to see it in action (curse you polish R6 release)....

 

Unless I miss my guess, you already saw some of the card effect in R5. Speaking of slinging elements around, I had only 'bought' one 'card' of Fireball, while I had 5 or 6 lightning cards. I cast a fireball to open up a combat once, and had cast lightning 4 times before the fireball icon lit up again, which indicates to me the "chance" of a skill becoming available.

Again... I could be wrong, but that was the impression I got.

 

Yes, this is pretty much what I'm getting from the dev videos, especially the deep dive one about combat. It reminds me a little bit of the system we had in The Matrix. There are differences of course, like changing when they're available on the hot bar, but the deck building part is similar. In the Matrix if your group had loaded, for instance, all martial arts kung fu, and a couple with machine guns, and no one had any healing loaded, that's no bueno. If you had any healing abilities you could just run to a hardline, jack out to your ship, load them up or a mixture of healing and other abilities, jack back in and off you went. No searching for a healer. I actually enjoyed that system very much. You still had to earn the abilities in the first place. You were just limited in how many you could have loaded at once.

I'm looking forward to trying the system they have in mind for SotA. I think it's going to give a lot of flexibility while getting away from the spread sheets and calculations of this equipment, with that skill build, with such and such rotation on a macro, equals X dps. Oh, and if you don't do X dps you suck.

 

I see this as a fun mechanic. Having all your skills out at once just turns into the rotation monster. The random element of the deck is a nice representation of a dynamic and changing battle. With that said, I most likely would have 1 or 2 abilities locked such as a quick DPS or Heal set for crunch times.

 

I don't think saying, don't play it then is a great response when someone says they don't like how something sounds.

However, I also think most people want to try it to see if it works. If we don't like it we'll let them know after we give it a shot. Keep in mind with locked abilities you'll have your wow hot bar style combat. The deck system is so you can get powerful combo effects, and possibly reduced resource cost. So yes, you can spam fireball and other spells with locked slots, if you want the combo you'll have to wait for them to come up out of your deck.

If you build your deck right you might not need locked skills, but like Doomgrin said, we'll all likely use a couple of necessary abilities in a locked state so we aren't hurting too bad.

Also, this isn't at all like building a deck or seeing cards, it's more like choosing how many of each ability you want to have. The deck is a metaphor so you can better visualize how it works internally.

 

I'm waiting to see how it pans out. Maybe you should too.


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Most MMOs are insanely predictable in their combat, even "action" based ones such as GW2 or Wildstar. With cooldowns and set skills, you know exactly what is going to come when. The boss shoudl be throwing X soon, get ready to dodge! Same goes for me... fireball 5 sec left, throw magic missile one, two three times, now fireball, throw magic missile one, two....

"deck" adds int he same random chance for opportunities in combat that are not always available. The math/RNG just happens to be more in your control than simply coding it into random events in combat.

My ONLY REAL concern is the UI will force you to watch the bottom of the screen for queues and combo rather than paying attention to the mob in front of you.

Lastly, I foresee a (personal) problem with muscle memory keypress resulting in a number press rather than action. I cannot teach myself a certain button is for dodge. Now that button is its number or letter which will differ from second to second in the battle. Concerns me a bit on learning the flow without becoming a skill-clicker. I am not the world's greatest typer. I will end up being keyboard turner and keypad.

 

Doomgrin, you bring up a good point. This system of random cards rewards players with fast reaction times. Like in luminosity or brain age, people will be able to react faster to the cards they are given real time and thus get an edge in battle. I don't think they intended for that to happen. Without specific training this would give avg younger players an edge vs avg older players (that is based off the reaction time and not intelligence).

I once played UO with a kid that was disabled, he could barely see and had to have the monitor magnified to even see the writing. He did play though and was able to run around moonglow with me. He wouldn't be able to adapt to the random cards imo. Although I believe he passed away young, I know he really enjoyed playing Ultima Online and the freedom it gave him.

 

They are dealt out pretty slowly, last video we saw was 2 seconds. (they can change that so combat feels paced properly). This isn't intended to be fast paced/twitch based. If you have 10 slots and one every 2 seconds that gives you 20 seconds to decide if you should use it or not. I don't believe they intend to make it so you have to decide right away or you'll lose the combat.

Also this will ramp up, start you off easy, so you wont have many skills to worry about and as things pile on you are used to them, so you aren't trying to figure out what ability this is and what it does, you know what it looks like and does and you have sometime to decide if you want to use it or wait for a combo or discard it.

 

You can also control the size of your deck by distributing your skill investments properly. That's important, too. Combat becomes less twitch based when you only have five cards.

 

hehehe some people just want another WOW-type game... but there are so many of them out there already... yet, they're still looking for it... weird...

anyway, like what they said in one of the videos... if the community doesn't like it then switching to WOW-type combat is easy and the WOW-type players of the world will be happy... ^_^

 

There is a reason WoW did things the way they did. It makes sense and provides a way for users to have access to all their abilities in a reliable way. Still, this is something new, and I'm not worried about knocking it until I've tried it. Even if it's bad, it won't be that bad, and like Kabalyero says, it can be changed pretty easily.

 

There is actually a deck minimum. If you do not load the deck at least to the minimum, you get no-action filler cards placed in.

 

You had access to all your skills, but needed no skill to play. Follow a rotation pattern and win. You had a ton of skills, and only needed a few of them to actually play successfully.