MMORPG.COM - Release 9: More Combat, More Everything

MMORPG has a great article up on Release 9!
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/935/feature/8821/Release-9-More-Combat-More-Everything.html

Looks like we have a new Tactics skill line:
"The skills once housed in the medium skill tree have been revamped into the new Tactics tree.

Check out the article and discuss below

 

Great article, the idea of finding out how the combat system is broken by letting the players abuse it is perfect. People will always find what is broken

 

The new tactics line is an interesting addition to the skill trees. It will be interesting to see the new slime AI and how it will be transitioned to existing NPCs. team combat will be interesting as well. Overall I can't wait to see how this all comes together for R9.

 

Well, it looks like it's replacing Medium Armor or simply being renamed to Tactics? The article talks about Trip as being a new skill but it's always been there. I wonder what changes were made then to the existing Medium Armor skill so that it's now called Tactics? For one, I'm guessing it implies there are no gear requirements to use these skills?

Also, there are other "tactics" like skills in the other Armor skill trees, especially Light Armor.

Medium Armor: Best balanced armor between protection and minimal penalties.

Active:

• Glancing Blow: Causes next attack to glance off armor
• Trip: Next attack on caster has chance to do a knockdown attack on target
• Step Through: Caster is able to ignore any defensive moves of target
• Brawl: Next weapon swing also gets a punch, pommel hit, etc.
• Grapple: Next hit on caster has chance to either root the attacker or render equipped weapon ineffective for one attack

Innate:

• Deflection: % chance to deflect% of damage + Increase Defense
• Agility: Increases Glancing Blow, Trip & Step Through + Decrease Medium Armor Penalty
• Aggression: Increases Brawl and Grapple effects
• Focus: Focus regenerates % faster + Decrease Med Armor casting penalty
• Field Repair: Armor damage regenerates% of max X min after last combat

 

It's possible that they have renamed the medium armour tree, but I can't see the eliminating it entirely. It doesn't make sense to make a tactics tree, which is likely to be available to everyone, and have two of three armor trees. I assumed when reading it that there would still be three armor trees and a tactics tree, just that medium armor would be empty for now until they could find appropriate skills to fill it out.

 

If they rename it or remove it entirely I don't see the problem. Maybe it could just fit under heavy armor, but have less penalties (slugs). Really the only skill I really liked in that was the field repair. The rest of the skills I wouldn't pickup except for the innate skills. I'm just being honest. The heavy armor skill tree is much more useful in my opinion. Maybe they could transfer a few of the more useful skills out like to heavy armor.

 

Nice positive informative article.
Also, I'm pretty sure most of the skill trees got reworked, not just medium armor.

 

They must have been really busy with this short month to get R9 ready with one less week to work on it. They didn't even mention the change at all in Dev+. Normally they give us a heads up.

Medium armor aside... a tactics skill tree sounds totally awesome! I'm looking forward to finding out the details of it. If it functions similarly to the focus skill tree, in that all players regardless of the types of skills they pick they can choose skills from tactics to determine basic combat statistics like our ability to hit and to defend in combat.

After reading it again, it also keeps the trip skill and possibly others that was once the medium armor tree, so we aren't losing anything. In fact it means trip won't be limited to only one armor style. Light armor people could use it, and so could heavy armored people. This really sounds like a good move in general.

 

Never Read The Comments applies doubly so here

 

did you finish reading the comments? The last one by spiritnhonor says it all. It is the only one that lays it all out, and says why the game is going to be good instead of just a few people that grumble for the sake of grumbling.