Let's talk about combat!

Well as boring and just dull combat has become in many MMO's I'm willing to try just about anything to bring back some fun to combat. March huh? That's not too far away.

 

Really interested in trying the combat system, but I don't want skills fading out during combat... I'm fine if spells disappear after use, and a new skill hops in its spot though. It'd still keep things interesting, and have you pay attention.

 

If it ends up happening that we have to fall back on a more traditional method for spells, why not allow the player to still select spells and hit the space bar to execute them. The reason why I say that is you don't have to create a spell combo icon. Why not allow for the spells to be selected and then hit space bar and allow the combos to be made up of the selected spells just like they did with the deck system. So the same spells make up the same combos, but they won't be governed by the deck system (and won't be random).

 

Sure, I could see that happening if they still wanted to retain combos of some sort. But that's no different than spamming 1,2,3,4 from your hotbar in any non-combo system. Instead now you hit 1,2,spacebar,3,4,spacebar. You end up with players putting skills to execute combos only and that's fine as long as it's balanced. But it's just not inetersting at all to me as combos aren't special any more.

 

It would be more meaningful if there were something to the combo other than hitting '1'. Age of Conan had a system where a mob would indicate where the next blow would come, such as an overhand slash, or a strike from right or left, or low. In response, you could counter with a block high, low, left, or right. If you observed that a mob favored low blocks, you could feint low and then strike high. If the mob mostly used overhand attacks, you could stack your defense to counter that.

The problem was the interface was distracting. To indicate high, low, left, right, they displayed intrusive curly brackets { }. Nice idea, poorly executed.

I notice in Skyrim that mobs really telegraph their attacks. There is no doubt they are going for an overhand smash, for example. Unfortunately, there is only a single block response, so there is a wasted opportunity for a better tactical response from the player.

 

I don't care if it is different than spamming some numbers. I think it's fine at least we can cast any spell we want at any given time, and not a random spell system like magic the gathering which doesn't seem real at all.

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Also instead of using cooldowns let focus be what limits the use of skills. No need for a cooldown when you expend focus each time you use a skill.

 

I agree with this. It is much better to have a real resource for the character be the limiting factor.

 

I don't think cooldowns are all that unrealistic. Consider boxing. If you throw a jag, you expend energy, but you still have plenty of energy left. There is a finite amount of time that has to elapse between throwing one jab and another jab. Two jabs can be thrown instantaeously. You throw one, retract, and throw another one. Throw twenty left jabs in succession, and fatigue builds up reducing speed and power in each subsequent left jab, but your right might be ready to go nearly at full power, although you might be a bit winded from throwing 20 left jabs.

So it should be with attacks, be they melee attacks involving stamina or magical attacks requiring focus or mana, or whatever. The cooldown represents the amount of time required for recovery between one attack and the next. Long cooldowns aren't particularly realistic, because whether it's a boxing jab or a sword thrust, the recovery time is pretty quick. Some attacks do require significant recovery, though. In Karate, if you do a flying drop kick, that is pretty much a max effort attack, and once you finish it, it takes time to recover your stance and balance before you can do much of anything else, and if you screw it up and miss, your recovery time is even longer.

 

While the example you give justifies things like a global cooldown, preventing us from throwing Jabs as quickly as we can spam the button, it doesn't justify longer cooldowns, which is what I suspect was being referred to. Why should one of my powers have a 5 minute cooldown. No, NOT a spell. NOT a reagent consuming power. I'm talking about a physical maneuver, such as lifting my shield to a fully defensive position for a short period. I've seen such a move in other games, on a non magical, non spell casting character, have a 30 minute cooldown. No logic whatsoever.

I think that having a resource and a basic speed limit on how fast we can launch attacks, with the attacks themselves needing to actually finish happening before we can launch another, is more than enough to give realistic limits on our combat ability. If some esoteric magicks require time itself as a resource, such that we cannot spam a self haste spell, but have significant time between casts, that's a balance issue, but I don't want to see long cooldowns as a default limiter on all abilities.

 

Exactly.

For quick attacks, I would assume animation and execution delay would suffice as a realistic means of limiting attack speed. Then for the stronger skills, we have focus drain, bigger casting/execution time, reagents.. There is plenty of more immersive features to limit skills in combat, besides illogical cooldowns.

 

The cooldowns are to compensate for the lack of an active defense. The game just isn't as twitch as boxing is. It's hard to simulate seeing a hole in the defense or how far a missed right hook keeps you out of position. Single player offline fighting games (or two people on the same xbox) can model this much better without the same kinds of deficiencies.

If you look at the progression of games made in the last 4 years or so, they're getting more twitch defenses and have to rely less on cooldowns. You've probably heard me talk about Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! More modern games look more like this every year. (gw2, tera, neverwinter, and other games) I certainly don't want the game to come down to ping or 100 millisecond decisions. This is about making a decision every second or with some "do the right thing but recognize my intent" filling the gaps. e.g. if you throw the hook, the person will get roughly .5 seconds to see it and decide to dodge / block / counter assuming he's not out of stamina or incapacitated

 

In a fight you have the option to exhaust all of your energy really fast by throwing all kinds of wild punches, but if you don't knock your opponent out you will be gassed. There is nothing in real life to prevent you from throwing the same punch/kick over and over again, or try the same takedown over and over. What does limit us is stamina. So don't waste your focus all at once unless you're sure it will finish off your opponent.

I don't like cooldowns. I think you should be able to do the same move as many times as you want till you run out of gas.

 

While I can agree that the PURPOSE of cooldowns is to simulate realistic fighting, with openings and opportunities, the PURPOSE of America's TSA was to make it's citizens be and feel safer when using airports.
The RESULT of those implementations, however, has fallen far short of any respectable goal.

Just because something is well intentioned doesn't make it a good thing. Some ideas are just bad.

 

It's what I've been saying about warm ups not cool downs. You should build up focus then launch attacks until you can't.

That said, each consecutive attack should get a marker that dings their accuracy and defense for a minute since spamming an attack in real life becomes predictable and leaves obvious openings in your defense.

 

Sure, like I said that would be fine to do for a traditional hotbar since it's tied to the traditional combat system. Whether it uses cooldowns or focus doesn't matter since those are both time-based factors that are impacted. It's all the same. As none of the Focus skills apply currently since those are all deck managing skills and not Focus attribute modifiers, then we're good. If they add Focus attribute modifiers to the Focus skill tree, then I would say if your traditional hotbar is active, then your Focus skills are deactivated. Trade off for using one system over the other.

 

Someone just needs to create a simulation of what the current combat system might be like today. A stand-alone HTML5 app with a simple UI mockup and some timing rules, sample Decks, etc. Don't need much in the way of visuals for combat, just enough to know when an auto-attack happened, or when an active skill is used. Plus you can make up your own combos for people to figure out. (No player or enemy movement, lots of hitpoints for both for long fights to see how things work out, etc.) Eventually modify it to handle various focus skills and combat bar sizes.

Any Front-End Web Designers have some spare time to throw something together before the relevant alpha releases?

 

The problem is as long as you're clicking skills to activate, you're using a hotbar system. If your definition of a WoW clone begins and ends with a hotbar and you don't see any other differences, then even the card system is a WoW clone (PSA: Freeman does not agree with the previous comment, only stating that drawing the line there creates that issue.)

The only way to end that is to go to active offense and defense, DDO or AoC style, and they've said they don't want anything that twitchy.

 

My idea of a wow clone is a game that the only way to advance in the game is through following quests that you gather from NPCs by clicking the icon over their head, and you can only be a combatant.

There is nothing sandbox about a WoW clone.


User interface doesn't make something a wow clone in my book. UO had icons that represented each spell that you could organize on your screen. WoW didn't invent that.

 

Yep, and I don't think they will go that far and make it twitchy combat. This gets back to what "traditional combat" means, so I simply fell back on the existing hotbar we have now so it can be reused for "traditional" combat in whatever ways. Anytime you want to plate spin, swap your hotbar.

 

I am excited to see how this turns out. It will take some getting used to it. But I think this game will be worth it. Lord British has never really let me down yet. So I will wait impatiently for him to finish the game to see what the final product turns out to be.