Deck system strategy

Is it just an adaption of their online Poker game, were they have just changed the deck of cards to fancy looking glyphs.

 

Lots of good ideas getting thrown around!

Sunsword - "eyes are focused on the card bar". I 100% agree, I have found it harder than expected to maneuver and effectively "use" the skill bar to manage my Cards. Don't know if that's intentional or just because it's beta. I hope that later there will be improvements to help with this.

I like the ideas of a "combo modifier" key. Eg. to enable auto card combos (or something along that lines). Although I am also a supporter to make combat less action intensive than it is and slightly more strategical (somehow??)

Prospero - "combo chaining" this is a cool concept, I think it's a viable means to get more (or special) use from the currently available Abilities. Once you get started with this sort of thing you can really get creative with new off-shoot ability effects and ailments.. E.g. a ability that spreads to other players OR a requirement to use another kind of card.

Auto-combos is something that will probably come and it could be awesome and help to redefine the combat system. Some ideas for this could be:

Cards that are combo-enabled can become highlighted somehow after being used that there is a combo "available" (you have to use the next "right" ability to get a new effect). I am imagining some graphical elements to this to the Hotbar area. E.g. certain combo-enabled abilities can "hover" after being used??? what do you think?

Other feedback...

I love the stacking of abilities and that is a really important thing to consider going forward how to handle this better with the interface (ie managing with the mouse is too hard, perhaps a "auto-stack" key?

/later

 

Here is a thread on this subject https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...r-need-for-progammable-macro-sentences.13542/

 

I find it almost impossible to do any combat, Completely impossible to do combos, I have never yet done a single combo. There is never more than 1 usable glyph available. A lot of the time i'm just standing auto attacking waiting for a glyph & not a slug to come up. I'm level 10. I just don't get the combat system, why is there slugs on leather, why is there slugs at all?

 

For what's its worth I gave this a try yesterday evening. Adjusting thr frequency of the cards and slowing discard frequency helped improve the experience for me. I think I'm averaging another card available at any given time... I think this is a solution I can live with. Somehow though I'm not sure all these knobs to adjust the basic interface are a good thing... Personally I think the issue of slugs, combos, number of cards available, locked cards, frequency of cards dealt and discarded, needs to be simplified into less knobs. Also wish SotA was skill based and not level based, but almost isn't worth mentioning since that's likely to not change.

 

After more Dynamic deck testing I'm pretty disappointed with it. I couldn't find a comfortable way to deal with slugs, and creating combos is really annoying. Forcing the player to stare at his Deck rearranging and removing slugs in combat is not good. I'm not against the whole thing, all I say is that they have to find a better way dealing with slugs and creating combos, making it a fun experience, what actually isn't.

 

I like the deck system, but right now I'm far from mastering it. I play heavy armor and bludgeoning, so slugs aren't really a problem. I guess I could increase my DPS if I could always have a viable attack at the ready. In a 1v1 fight I'd say I have a useful attack about 80% of the time and I assume I can up this percentage later when I get a better understanding of deck building. However, as far as my effectiveness as a combatant, I fee like my knowledge of building a deck has contributed the least in my advancement of my effectiveness.

Right now, when you press a button with a slug, it turns red indicating you can't use it. It would be more fun to be able to hit the key more than once to "break" the slug for another chance for a card to pop up. Perhaps there could be a skill to decrease the number of clicks to break the slug, I think there should be more skills to offer strategy for building a deck and dealing with slugs or fizzling. I think we should make deck building a whole other tree and remove it from the focus tree. The deck building is a big thing about making the game different and more exciting. We need to emphasize deck building more and make it more important to construct a good deck.

When you are in battle there are roughly 6 major factors that determine the outcome. Gear, Level, Character Skill Selection, Player Skill, Your Enemy, Your Deck. To me I think those factors should be relatively balanced as to how they decided the outcome of battle. Right now, it seems level and skill selection are the biggest part to determine the battle outcome, followed by gear, enemy, your player skill, and lastly your deck. I think the deck you are using should be just as important with what skills you are using.

 

I'm not sure if you knew this, but you can remove a slug by right clicking it.
Good stuff by the way, I like the idea of having a skill tree dedicated to deck building.
Making your deck more important to the outcome of a fight seems important.

 

That's cool. I feel like controlling the camera, the direction of your character, and selecting things is already a lot to do and clicking on individual slugs to remove them is to unintuitive and awkward. It would be much better if you have a slug in skill 5 to press skill 5 a few times to break it. Combos also seemed very daunting to attempt even at lvl 26. I really feel like the deck building needs to be refined more instead of tossed aside. It's cool to use a deck instead of a static hotbar.