Melee are incredibly weak

Hello,

I have been playing for a little over month now and I am at the oracle chain now going to the colossus', but I just can't help but feel my character is incredibly weak all the sudden, even as I lvled i never really had much of a problem playing a subterfuge light armor blade user, but even with the mobs being green to me I just cant do much against the melee mobs, everyone is telling me that the archers are the bane of melee, on what planet?
The stunning 2h mobs are just the Blastoise to my Charizard, but this is ridiculous, they are green mobs to me, I am supposed to kill at least 12 in 1 pull (gauntlet) and I can't do anything to beat it, I am just thinking of giving up on the character because playing melee is my favorite, I have decent bow skill but just don't enjoy playing it in games as much, but the point is, I know melee dps are incredibly underpowered, all you have to do is go to a town and see everyone is using a bow or playing a mage to see. This might be it for me with this game because my prefered mode of play is seemingly underpowered AF, and thats not really cool to me considering how ridiculously OP some spells, *cough* meteor shower are.

I can't seem to do enough damage anymore to dispatch mobs quickly enough, and thats a problem cause there health has gone up by a large margin, but my damage is nearly the same. By all accounts that is a scaling issue that needs to be resolved this is not a L2p issue, i consider myself pretty damn adept at MMO's and have played most major ones. I'd like to see this stuff balanced because it could be a hell of a game.

Oh and also the way stealth detection works needs a massive overhaul its absurbly random and unpredictable for the life of me i cannot figure out why i can stealth right past the front of some mobs and others see me from 15 ft away, even extremely low level mobs.

 

My melee damage is great but that is at higher level... With good armor and weapons I get 600+ thrusts and mixed with a body slam I can kill many mobs before they get a chance to attack.

Maybe it is just weaker at lower levels... how many points do you have in your main melee tree?

 

There are quite a lot of factors to this post and the scenarios mentioned. So take all this into consideration...

1.) Just because a mob is green to you does not mean it's easy nor does it mean you can tackle many without danger. There are plenty of mobs green to me at a natural (no buffs to adv level) adventure level of 101. Yes they will take me out if I don't take them seriously.

2.) A mob that cons green only means its below your adventure level. There is a huge gap between Tier 1 level adv zone mobs and Tier 10+ mobs that may con green to someone. Generally you can tell by their hitpoints per archtype (melee/archer/mage) as to their general Tier/adv lvl as well as their color con.

3.) The newbie zones may spoil people as they lowered the hitpoints and difficulty of the mobs there so new players would have an easier time of it while you adjust to the game's mechanics.

4.) Depending on your various builds (always keep an alt-deck setup to fight stuff that is normally hard for you in your other deck build if you're exploring), mobs will be more difficult vs some skill trees/builds. For example, if you primarily went death magic or death/blades, you're death magic effects will have little to no effect on undead or constructs, so you'll have to use something else to deal with them adequately or swap to another deck build entirely to take them out. Just depends on what your skill focuses are atm. Higher level players with larger experience totals will be more flexible as they would have many more skills leveled up than lower adv lvl players who don't have nearly as many.

5.)As a new player, I would recommend you focus on getting primary skills to 60, then 65 and take them to 80. The xp cost to get most skills to 80 isn't that much at all in the grand scheme of the game. After 80 the costs to level up go up exponentially, especially for passive skills. So set your sights for 80, then when you have most of what you need for your build. Push to 100, then 116, then 120s for your main bread & butter skills. For weapons, your base skill you start with to raise in a tree also influences the damage you do with other weapon related skills, so you'll want to make that one of your highest level skills in the long run.

6.) Archers are very good in most situations. If I had to recommend a playstyle for any new user, it would be to take Archery and whatever fits their fancy (but light armor, air, life, would be solid secondary choices for damage, synergy, and survivability). They have really good direct damage and decent AoE dmg as well which can be boosted depending on secondary choices of skills. Mobility is their things, so usually they have the benefits of light armor and air trees to boost move speed as well as attack speed. Their base auto-attacks are great too and fire rapidly. A good DEX will boost the crit/hit rates as well. With that in mind, I would tell new players to try that, then use that build to build up experience pools to eventually level up other areas and just use your archer build to earn all that xp to skill up.

7.) As a heavy melee users, there are different skills to use against various mobs that effect them better than others, just gotta learn which and what tactics to use. Like polearm skills are good vs shield users. Shields are good vs ranged combat users & damage mitigation. Blades are best for poisons, bleeds (if you add in combos), and killing blows (coup de grace).

8.) Tactics - A couple of things here. In this game, terrain elevation does matter. If you can stand above your enemies, they will do less damage to you and you will do more to them, be it vs. archers or a named cabalist boss. Also, line of sight matters too. If you get too many ranged combatants on you, lure them around corners. Go out of sight and wait for them to come to you... if they stop and stand infront of a doorway/tunnel, move to the other side of hall/tunnel and they'll come in for you. Get them grouped if you have decent AoE skills and take them out. I would not recommend chasing them down 1 by 1... or standing in the opening trying to fight them as they all scatter like roaches and peg you every step of the way. Bad way to fight unless you have a serious level advantage over them and good defensive skills/gear to boot.

9.) Also, just remembered after posting about tactics, watching your focus is important too... does you no good swinging a slow bludgeon weapon on auto-attack and you're out of focus... It's stupid slow and does little atm. That's another reason why archery is good as well as it doesn't use that much for auto-attacks and you can concentrate certain shots on mobs and still be good on focus and kill pretty fast. As a bludgeon user, I have to keep focus potions on me for when i run out, especially in big battles otherwise im just a lame duck with no focus and cant use all those nice skills under my belt. Some skills and skill trees are more focus intensive so you have to factor that into your build/playstyle as well.

10.) For mages, magery can be really good if you focus your skills for it. May be expensive for new players, depending on how you get your reagents and what gear you use (some increases usage dramatically). But... the attunement factor is different for mages that the other skill trees. Attunement is factored in by taking the top 10 skills in a magic tree, totalling those 10 skills and dividing by 10 for your base attunement level. The HIGHER your attunement, the better and more powerful it makes ALL SKILLS in that magic skill tree. Additionaly, Air skills are also increased by Dexterity and Earth skills are increased by Strength as well... stacking with attunement's increase to power. Then factor in Intelligence. The more INT you have the more focus, more spell crits and spell damage you do. So it's a good archtype to focus build as well if melee isnt your thing, but you just need to find a decent way to make enough gold to resupply reagents as that will be your primary money sink.

11.) Going back to your playing where you seem to be not doing as much damage, make sure you're in the right tier zone and even in that zone fighting the right tier mobs (bc you can find dragons or tier 10 mobs even in a tier 3 zones, they scatter some bosses) or even just the "right kind of mobs" with the "right kind of setup", like some ruins will have a bunch of mages/archers, which may be good for some AoE builds but not vs 1 on 1 builds that risk getting swarmed or not being able to shrug off so many ranged attacks. Providing that all the above is good, then get back to the basics and make sure you're keeping your primary skills leveled appropriately. You may have to go back and simply grind easier stuff until you have enough exp pooled or applied to skills that will help both: Attack damage with your primary combat skill set & some forms of defense. I recommend getting damage avoidance up, damage resistance up decently, and if you use light armor, dodge. You'll eventually want magic resists, but thats another thing.

12.) Resistances - You'll eventually want to up these for various parts of the game. Fire used to be the go to skill tree for all npcs. It still does have heavy play so you'll want to have that resist up for most of the game. Early on you can get gear with bonuses to resist, which is great for new players. However, as you get to advanced stages of the game, you'll want to replace those for other more beneficial skills as you can generally get multiple stacking resist skills/buffs to help you out there instead of wasting it on gear properties. Resistances from magic skill trees: Your resistance is HALF your attunement level (look for lil gold buddah icon on magic skill trees for your attunement). So if your Fire attunement is 80, then the fire resistance from just that is 40. Fire skill tree also has the fire proof (fire resist skill) that boosts fire resist as well. The moon tree has a buff that helps with spell resists as well. All these stack, so if you have a lot of problems with fire type mobs/damage, then focus on these skills and buffs that help reduce that (like Ice Shield as an example). The bonus to resists works for all trees, so 100 attument in death is +50 death resist. It really helps out in higher level areas.

13.) For Stealth issues, so much here... they keep working on it but... you can STACK your stealth to get it to 95% chance or better i believe, but it still involves your skill, gear, and other factors. Not sure if light matters anymore as some light producing effects have been displaced when going into stealth mode, but will have to see what heavy stealth users say or devs say they're doing to it. I do know itll get better and that just because you stealth doesn't mean it was a good success or high enough of success to fool a lower tier bear. Try skilling it up more and stacking (locked glyph, hold down till it stacks to your current max... like 5 stacks at 80 skill, +1 additional stack if you specialize that skill tree to 80).

Hope these things help,
Good luck

 

Maybe it's because he's wearing a LIGHT armor, when your experience is with HEAVY armor, who knows ?

 

Swords is actually one of the best and most powerful things to play in the game right now. Keep playing with it, it'll come around for you.

 

Let's be clear : what you describe here is not an archer but a mage using a bow. By NO way archers have decent AOE in the ranged tree, even if multishot is not as bad as it used to be.

The precision is useful because people could think that archery is a competitive build in Novia, when it's not.

Also, you could have summarized all your post this way : train every passive and magic skills.

 

Well true... it is limited on AoE by itself, but I did say as a recommendation Archery AND "whatever fits their fancy", with some choices as examples. Also, stacked multishot is still pretty good depending on your skills and gear. It has a large range on it and you can do it on the fly, kiting... so there is some pros/cons to it all. If you want more AoEs, you're going to have to go outside the Archery tree and add what you like to your build. That's just the way it is currently. Not saying it's right or wrong. I wouldn't mind seeing every combat tree having and equal amount of AoE type skills just with different effects and tailored to the combat mechanic of the skill tree.

As far as competitive, I'm not entirely sure what you mean... like pvp competitive? Or just in general? Because just in general is a pretty dang good skill type to use in almost all situations. Seen it, done it, still see it. Everything has it's ups and downs. I cannot solo most dragons, not even sure if I can do the weakest ones now after all the changes in the past 6 months or so, but I know archers can. Again, depends on build and how many skills you have leveled up to back up your build.

Having more skills leveled up will generally be more advantageous in most scenarios, which makes players who have 107+ adventure levels worth of xp pretty powerful. Don't think you can do much with only 1 or 2 trees skilled up, because you're going to have weaknesses somewhere from it. No defense or not enough offense, or maybe not enough healing, debuffs, etc or whatever it is for your build.

My wife is an archer/life user... she's always outdamaged me. Kills stuff before i can even get to it, does silly high damage on aimed/piercing shots, does great on AoE, especially when it crits everything, but I outshine her in close-quarter combat AoE attacks with my build, which is limited for me. I have to pick and choose special areas to farm to take advantage of it... chasing stuff down running from me in plate sucks, especially 6+ mobs... I use focus up quite fast in my build, so getting them all bunched up and take them down as fast as possible is the key to my current build. Long fights suck for me because of it. That's why she usually accompanies me most other places because she helps balance out what I lack. And she's been doing much more damage than me ever since she picked up a "shoddy bow" and started using it on mobs back when Sequanna Colossus zone had bandit camps and corpions and the undead with T6+? lich in the middle. That's not an exaggeration. She wanted to try archery and skill up and she was pulling aggro with a friggan shoddy bow and just the newly acquired skills, so please don't play like Archery is weak. It is very powerful and very good and if it were not so good, then you wouldn't see so many players using it.

 

As far as PvP goes, I think Vespers got me yesterday in 1 sneak attack using swords for 860 damage, then again with 1 Rend attack that I couldn't heal through. He hit me with the rend attack (and probably poison?) then just stopped fighting because he knew that's all it would take. In both situations he attacked me from stealth using a heavy armor build...we all know heavy armor stealth builds that 1 hit players are the norm in RPG's... not. I'm not sure if this will ever be balanced because in this combat system I guess you're just supposed to switch to another deck to counter your opponent's deck. I've been 1 shot several times so far at adv lvl 98 and I'm feeling less inclined to flag. So far I'm not having much fun in PvP.

 

Depends on your build, health, etc... ive seen stacked aimshots non-stealthed hit for that and one of our guild mates hits for over 1100 on crits with bow, so yeah its all possible. You're talking about attacks from stealth which get a bonus and that's not even including any other damage modifiers, like say backstab, if you are flanking them. (edited, had it backwards for some reason)

Best way to deal with pvp damage is to reduce the amount of damage that is done from players to other players, in this style of game anyways, where you can actually have some combat time, even if you know you're going to lose. Have it where even low skilled players will do a base damage/to hit etc and high end players a bit of reduction so the combat of pvp isn't out of whack. There would still be positives to skilling up high but no so much that everything feels like a "headshot" going up against these players with larger adventure xp expenditures.

 

That's one of the worst problem with this game actually. This game is struggling to find a true identity. When you are watching Travian's presentation video, you see a melee warrior, a mage and an archer. The archer in this video use ranged skills, while in reality it is clearly a play style that tends to become completely nonexistent in Shroud, at high level.

It's a good build for most situations, but not all, like every other build. But the reality is that it will take you two to three times longer than the others to get the same result if you are confined to being an archer with ranged/life skills. I don't know one classical archer build who can solo dragons. Most people who do that use a lot of magic spells or die.

I fixed this for you.

I almost strangled myself at the mention of piercing shot . And now what ? Use an air/ice shield, heals and every single defensive skill and spell you can use, and she will be no challenge for you. Now think about that : I get the same damage output as @Sara Dreygon myself. Of course, she has a higher level than me. But when she can do 600+ damages up to 2 or 3 targets, I can only do 600+ damages to only one target. That's a fact. It's not my interpretation.

Archery is NOT weak, but the problem is that it's a pain to train it and for not any better result than everything else.

The PvP population in this game is almost non-existant. After six or ten months of ranting about combat being a mess with all the possible combinations of skills, we are still at the same point with only specializations which are far from what those should be now. Combat doesn't feel dynamic, it feels like playing cards ; and now that the movement speed has been further reduced to alleviate a problem that is mainly caused by magic attunement and artifacts (again), besides cover and elevation, you don't have to care much about movement ; dodge is based on randomness and not (much) on player reflexes. You have to train magic in order to resist magic, but an heavy armor user can be as stealthy as a light armor user. And people wears white shrouds along with cabalist hoods everywhere (edit : oh, my bad, now nobody uses the shroud anymore, only cabalist hoods). Are there still people here to wonder what's wrong with us ? How long will it take before everyone understands that it's not fun to spend as much time casting buffs as fighting ? Seriously, did you look at the last telethon livestream ? Pvp was just about buffs and sneaky one-shots everywhere. How long will it take before people realize that many people enjoy dynamic fighting more than placing AOE, tanking and abusing skills ?

Here is an exemple of what dynamic fighting can be :

Here dodge is based on the player input, and the success of the skills are based on target's placement, not on stats. I don't mean to say that TESO is a better game (I could list some things that SotA do better than TESO, objectively), but its combat system is relying more on actual player skills than on randomness and experience progression. It's a nice (and very effective) soft cap in itself.

Now, why, when we have tens of different zones and an open mode, people prefer to go to Upper Tears in party mode ? And when will we finally be able to perceive the overall coherence of the virtues/anti-virtues system, factions and all related political intrigues?

Don't get me wrong. I love many other aspects of this game. I know that Portalarium has to fight many battles simultaneously to improve it. I feel almost schizophrenic, because when I have the opportunity to talk to them, I try to send them the message in the most sympathetic way because I understand how difficult their job can be. But it seems to me that it's a battle we are about to lose. I probably invested 50 or 100 times the average spending for it, myself. But I have to make a reason. I see people leaving this game, including some of the most supportive people, and I don't see much people coming in. Instead of trying to make the new user experience enjoyable (it's too late for that, we are after the release now), maybe the most urgent thing would be to get a balanced system, a proper high end content, maybe pvp factions or things like that ?

So to come back to the OP @Maliced , the problem is that light armor is ABSOLUTELY useless when it's not for casting spells. Go for heavy armor or train your magic trees or both. Become one of the numerous clones we have in this game. And when you'll have the proper level, come to see me and buy the proper cabalist hood you will need.

 

Hey Hornpipe, help clarify this for me please, if you will:

The first part of this ^^ reply... are we talking one on one? You said something about using air/ice shield, heals, etc and "she will be no challenge for you". Is this referring to pvp? I'm not one of those people who get hung up on pvp or think that pvp is simply 1 on 1 duels or gank situations. She can do a lot of stuff that I cannot actually or do it better. I was just saying for new players, taking archery + something else to back it up is a very good route. It's a solid build with lots of flexibility and pretty powerful with low difficulty on playstyle.

Also, in that section of the reply you talk about Sara Dreygon doing "x" dmg to more targets. Sure, I understand that. If you "choose" a build that doesn't have many AoE options, then yeah, when you are battling groups of mobs the "overall" dps compared to someone who IS using multiple AoE skills, then yeah the dps will be higher for the AoE'r. But that's been that way since the beginning of MMORPGs... and perhaps even true to tabletop games if such things were recorded or cared about (higher level wizards casting fireballs and such). But there were still limitations. Archers were still usually higher direct damage overall. You could get rogue/assassin types that focused on single target damage to come close or better, but those were usually the top single target damage types. I mean, an archer deals a hell of a lot of damage... throw in it's speed, even with current nerfs, tack on any additional speed and +attack speed boosts, like from Light Armor tree, Air tree, gear and gear ehancements, plus crit damage and speed of base attacks and it's a killing machine even if you're not spamming attacks. Throw in the fact you can severely reduce the speed of major mobs while kiting and it gets even easier. Has been for a while now and still is. Not sure what the problem is here other than it doesn't kill big groups as fast as a melee person tanking and spamming aoes? Most trash mobs are hardly worth the effort as you will kill them effortlessly, but big mobs/higher tier mobs get shredded by archers. Lets add in the other helpful factor that even if you get rooted/snared or if mobs run from you, you dont have to move at all and kill em off quickly. This isn't an exaggeration. I see it all the time. From The Rise to Lost Vale to Sieges, to city-side of K'rul near the Clockwork Dragon.

Next thing that I'm not clear on is when you said, "it's a pain to train it and for not any better result than everything else". Are you saying it's difficult to train archery? It is probably the easiest skill to level out there. That and for not any better result than everything else? Are you saying it's equal to everything else? Or it doesn't seem any more special than anything else?

Im with you on the stealth and I don't know what will make it balanced other than overall reduction of damage for players to other players. I can understand why giving plate users the option is out there though, it already has so many limitations that you're really just gonna be annoying plate users by restricting that. Would probably be better to offer something for the otherside if they didnt focus light armor in subterfuge skills. Have a thug/brute line perhaps, as it is now, yeah not so much for them and yeah does seem a bit odd stealthing around in plate/chain no matter how well oiled & noise-proofed. I'm sure it could be to some degree, but never to the extent a Light Armor user could take it.

Yeah I put in a wishlist for types of pvp actions that would help the game as well and make it where its not what it currently is. Quite a few people around here think that fun pvp is just ganking someone, ambushing someone, or even only 1 vs 1. Hell, have teams of 4-6 with different builds and lets see support users shine for pvp as well... or teams of 4+ rogues vs teams of 4+ archers, etc. I'm all for battlegrounds where teams are made of various player distribution and boosting of lower skilled players for multiple objectives. Won't see that for a while but would be more fun that what's currently available.

Last point, you say that light armor is absolutely useless. I have to disagree. Depends on what you are stacking on your Light Armor (gear-wise) and what you're doing with it. Bonuses to movement speed and attack speed are great light armor, especially archery and blades, well technically all weapons, but blades has additional boost to attack speed as well that stacks. *EDIT try #3 lol - I see where you pointed out its better for casting, I just want to reiterate is good points vs heavy/plate* Light armor also gives you a hell of a lot better casting ability than heavy. Sure, you can do the odd chest piece and various other pieces to offset the fizzle rate and keep some of the skills, but you miss out on the set bonuses. Guess it depends on your build and what you want. I use Obsidian plate for the lowered fizzle rate (still cant go too heavy into left side of magic sphere skill trees due to high fizzle rates), as well as the +20% damage reflection from physical attacks... in addition to the base defense it offers. Still it's slow as all hell, esp with movement decreases and when you're in combat with any archers at all, the first thing the do is nail you with a snaring shot so you're moving like a sack of potatoes. Quite annoying. Which is why i try and pick fights in areas where I can bring them to me otherwise I just dont bother anymore. Too frustrating to chase everything down. My archer wife can clear the mage room in The Rise np, kill by kill, one after the other, while I'm still trying to chase down and smack mages if I fight that way (which is something i do not do anymore). I just aggro pull to hallways and around corners and smack them as they bunch up when they round the corner or teleport near me.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but it seems like you are posting that an archer should just be an archer and stick to archer only skills and be able to do everything (content-wise) in game, solo if need be. I've seen others on these forums with similar feelings, not sure if that'ts how you feel as well. I would like to say that I do not feel that should be the way it is. I think that regardless of whether you want to choose to do it or not, that there will always be builds that do better in various situations. Not all archers types are magic free... going all the way back to D&D, there has been mixtures, creating all kinds of archer-type classes. I think ultimately it's up to you whether you want to do it or not. Do I think there could be more added for non-magic users, sure. But I feel its ultimately up to the player to choose whether or not to do it at this time. We have to use what we have available atm.

I feel I complain about similar stuff with speed and plate armor... crawling around like a bundle of flailing knots isn't much fun, especially in groups where people and mobs are scattered. But that's on them, im not running all over creation, bring it to me or deal with it is my current mentality. And it's my choice to still go plate... probably should go back to light armor, but I've made the choice to stick to plate and just hope it gets better over time. But I still complain as well I'm truly thinking about going back to primarily (blade or polearms) and back to bow as secondary... even in plate, just because so many times and scenarios stuff runs and scatters, there is nothing around for me to LoS them with, or things are chasing others (and they have all the aggro). Yes aggro still needs working... i can have archers with mouse rings and me with troll lord belts, taunt, attacking a few minutes before, stacking DoT's etc, and archers STILL PULL THE AGGRO OFF ME! Omg... so annoying. But, that's with me using Bludgeon, lack of speedy attacks other than spam attacks and lack of overall "power" to those attacks on say, a dragon, daemon, or such boss. So yeah, all combat and skill trees still need work/polish, but archers are definitely NOT weak at all and are pretty powerful. Definitely a good start for new players.

 

Both PvE and PvP, using every defensive skill will improve the time you have to concentrate on offensive attempts. To give you an exemple, when I was almost pure archers, I had to withdraw multiple times from most of my fights in order to heal, many times. I just summon a water elemental now, I can run in the middle of the fight and I don't care.

Except that in many games AOE are a total damage spreading between the targets. Here in Shroud, you put your AOE at your feet and the more enemies you have on you, the more damages you will deal. It's the same with cleaves. That's a BIG design mistake because you allow some people to virtually mulitply their damage output just by using every possible defensive skills and staying right in the center of a melee.

I don't know what you think I play. I have been an archer for two years in Shroud. I know the strength and the weaknesses of this build. I never told here that archers damages had to be boosted. But there is still a big balance problem. Many people can simply get 1 million experience in 10~15 minutes in this game. I'm relatively high level. I have many skills above 120, 130 and even 140. I don't even reach the million in one hour.

No it's not. As long as you have to manually charge every attack, as long as you can't run from your enemies anymore, as long as you don't use AOEs who deal automatic damage everywhere, it's painful to train an archer. But of course, you can train as a mage and up your archers skill on a dummy.

Thank you for the good laugh. Obviously, people discover Sprint, Flurry and Swiftness just now. Maybe they will discover in a near future that you can have all the same bonus just with ONE skill (who is mandatory when you are wearing light armor by the way) ?

I say that every play style should be able to manage to be almost as successful as the others in a very wide range of activities. Or this game will never have a larger public. I'm ok with people who want to play archers with spells. All good for them. But I should be able to perform the same with a pure archer build, which is NOT the case.

 

Light armor physical dmg chars have always been lacking because Heavy Armor enables you to get way more STR. Dex isn't as helpful to dmg as it should be. If you are heavy armor polearms you just one shot people in plain sight.. mo need to hit their back.
Leather armor needs a lot more love than it has now. Would help archers as well as all melee types chosing light armor.

 

Nice vid and isn't bad for some users. But.. and that's the catch, some users wouldn't like it that way. My wife loves to just stand and nuke... stand and heal... stand and shoot... notice the pattern? She likes the simplicity and not having to move all over the place. Don't get me wrong, she did all that crazy stuff for World of Warcraft back in the day and was in the #1 guild on Kel'thuzad (PvP) and was consistently the #1 and #2 healer on the server... and those of you who know how those crazy raids are you usually have to do odd movments at various cues in the boss battles. She just likes it better when it's simple, not that she can't do it.

Then you have the various lines of thought for a FPS game where it's usually more about a player's "reaction" skills than an RPG's being based on "skill levels", character stats, gear stats, etc, which goes back to the tabletop/PnP line of play. So I'd be torn on it. Maybe an option for both to use whatever. But that would still probably bring up arguments of one side saying the other was "OP".

 

If you wife can't or don't want to do that, the heavy armor and tank buids are for her. You don't necessarily have to confront two worlds here. And no, TESO can't be named as a FPS game, really. By the way, a lot of MMOs go this way. TESO, but also Black Desert, etc... And they have considerably more players than we have here. So maybe we should humbly consider the options they have considered before it's too late.

 

Depends on build, you can still get STR buffs from other areas but the bonus to hit and crit, combined with speed of attacks should matter as well. I see most people comparing pvp 1 on 1 in these scenarios and shouldnt be. Should be some damage meters in place to actually see whats going on over time for people. Practice dummies should be adjustable (statwise/armor/skills etc) and be used with some damage meters to see this stuff.

 

Stylewise for combat is more in the vein of FPS types, where its reactionary based rather than RNG for rolls on your skills/stats, etc

 

That's what a RPG game is about. Initialy, we only had stats in RPG because it's hard to simulate a situation without dices and stats when you play pen & paper RPG. When computers were used to play those games, we didn't have the technology to create reactionary based game. Now we have it and RPG is still about to completely embody your character. MMOs who rely on more dynamic content have millions of players. Maybe it's time to give it a try.

 

Yeah I agree pvp should be more than what it is, especially since so many compare what they can do to how it relates in 1 vs 1 pvp. I put a wishlist thread up a little while back with such things that are incorporated well in other games:

"I believe we need some of the things seen in other games that offer instant action or enhanced interaction & fun to the game.

Examples are:

1. Group "Lakes", regions/spots within current and future zones that allow for group/mass participation. A lot of the ones in other games do not even make you group, if you're in an area and say a special encounter spawns or a special object starts, like fend off the invaders, put out fires, save villagers, etc... while you're in that sphere of influence. A mechanism keeps track of everyone in the sphere of influence during the time of the event, even if they leave, and records the contribution. Points are awarded for a variety of factors and you could do the same so it's not just a "most damge dealt" situation depending on the scenario. Heals, kills, saves, turn-ins, rebuilding, etc etc all things that can go towards an event reward situation (like rebuilding a town, or saving a town from a dragon attack and putting out fires, finding lost children, saving goods, etc). Then have a list of rewards give out to those in the top as well as some randomly given out to participators. You could even reward a special pool of contribution points awarded that could be used to buy special goods like a lot of games have. I would recommend this only be available in Multiplayer mode in these zones.
   
2. PvP hubs, battlefields, scenarios. Would be nice to jump into instant action matches where you have at least 2 sides (perhaps more or even NPC factions/mobs joining in to cause a 3 to 6-way battle). You could use the traditional, skirmish, capture the flag/hill/, destroy base, gather resources, defeat "x" npc, etc for the "TYPES" of pvp battles. As far as where, for now, you could use the existing Shardfall hubs, but they would be instanced only to those participating in "that" battle. Meaning, if I didnt sign up for the match, i couldnt go into any of the modes (multiplayer, party, single player) and see or interfere with the matches. They would all be instanced to the participants of the match that way you could have multiple matches going on in the same areas. ALSO, depending on type of match, there would be different structures and things added to the map for that type of match, like 2 sets of fortified bases for the base destruction match as an example. ALSO, the matches would randomly choose a shardfall location (or future designed maps). Like the above idea, you could have rewards handed out to top players as well as random participants, as well as a special pool of points for purchasing special prizes.
   
3. Similar to the PvP match idea, make this a party/co-op scenario. You join matches and you get random zones (already existing zones), where you have to solve a delimna. As stated in the first idea, it could be a dragon attack you help fight off with the town's militia or it could be saving a town in danger of being razed to the ground, or fighting off waves of cabalists, or an undead invasion. Same as the others, offer incentive rewards and a special pool of points to buy prizes from.
   
4. Old MMO's like Horizon's had areas with the community had to help solve/fix a problem. In Horizons, they would have stretches of land across the map that was "infected"/ plague lands where usually the former inhabitants were killed, pushed out, and their buildings, towns, bridges were destroyed and it took the community to help donate materials, gold, etc to fix a problem and/or push back the plagued area. I believe this could be implemented as well as maybe monthly events and it could affect the world for a while. If players fail, something negative happens and the region is affected and vice versa if they succeed. Participation rewards and incentives should be added as well.

With all these ideas, if implemented, I would keep the prize pools/rewards seperate as to give incentives to do them all. This goes for both handed out rewards as well as the list of prizes/stuff you can choose from for your amassed points for that type of event. This would breathe A LOT of life and excitement into the game."

 

Hmmm I have to disagree with you on "thats what a Role Playing Game is about". You have two very different ways of playing and its not because we couldn't do dynamic fighting, it just isn't what the game was about. It very much was about the stats, the skills, the experience levels, etc. As different as Real Time Strategy is to Turn Based Strategy, just a different way of doing things and people enjoy one way or the other... or both.