R18 Starter Level Combat Perspectives

A few observations from R18 starting character combat so far:

GOOD

- I really like the flexibility created by enabling glyphs to be assigned to certain skill bar slots. Great job!!!!

- I am having fun with the glyph system as is. It seems highly customizable. That is a huge strength for the game.

- I had more fun with entry-level melee player this build. The sound improvements help! But mostly I found that mixing it with magic was fun. After trying a few, fire seemed to be of the most utility to early melees.

BAD (well not really, but maybe there is something here to consider)

- Starting with a fresh character, I noticed an interesting reality of this system. At levels 5 to 8, having only four skill slots only open, the game only fills about one slot at a time typically. Maybe it is because of how I parsed out my skills into different slots, or maybe it is draw rate, but mostly at these levels I noticed that my skill bar is largely EMPTY as I waited for skills to appear. This may take some getting used to for those coming from other games where we are used to seeing skill bars fully populated. It may give the perception of there being no choices. Indeed, as I played, mostly my choice was auto attack or using the one glyph that popped up in one of the four slots. Sometimes I had two. Rarely three. Not bad necessarily, but I can see how it might be a little unnerving to newer players at lower level. As the game progresses with skill unlocks and more slots, I can see how the choices available at any given time will double or more. I realize that I can lock the glphys, so this only applies to newer characters starting off experimenting with the deck variability.

- I loaded all of my melee blade attacks into a single slot. Then I notice in my gaming that I didn't really care about which skill was actually up. My only concern was that the deck had finally dealt a higher damage blade skill for me to use. Which skill it was did not matter. Once I realized this about my play style, it concerned me a bit for the SOTA system. Does the deck system lead one to care less about what skills are actually being played, just that a skill is available to play? Dunno. Food for though. Perhaps skill visuals need to be embellished someone how to make the player care more about the individual styles or something?

UGLY (alas, yes)

- I had zero fun with ranged/archery using a royal founders bow. 22 arrows to take down a bear as a starting player, compared to about 12 whacks with a sword, while the arrows were expensive and the sword cost me nothing. This was with three points into added ranged accuracy and added ranged damage too. Instead of feeling that I was having fun shooting arrows, I found myself counting how many gold pieces I was losing with each helpless shot. The misses were one thing, but the notion of high cost per shot for no gain totally drained the fun out of ranged. I chalk it up to a future balancing need. But as is I couldn't be an archer.

Overall, things are looking up though. Nice work!

 

On the arrows, aimed shot gives a MASSIVE damage bonus.

 

About not caring about what skill appeared. I would say that is partially the starting deck speed. But I'd say it's mainly the fact that each combat skill could read "deals some amount of damage that isn't an auto-attack" and the description would be largely correct.

Thrust? Double Slash? Who cares? They both just do 1-10 damage.

Auto-attacks hurt this too, since they pretty much deal the same average damage as the skills, so the skills just seem like extra auto attacks.

imo, auto attacks need to go and skills need to have more reliable damage ranges and more obvious additional effects.

Thrust is a powerful attack? Then why did it just hit for 1 on the same unit it hit for 15 on a second ago? It has one job going by its description and it fails at it. Is it a powerful attack? "Maybe, sometimes, unless it's not."

Double Slash is so unremarkable I can't even recall what it does... I think it hits twice for pretty much the same overall random damage as Thrust. Literally nothing special about it. (or reliable)

So yeah, if I had one complaint about combat right now, it's that a large amount of skills feel like they do nothing other than act as extra auto attacks.

 

The embarassingly large range of possible damage is one of the things I like least in SotA combat.

I keep repeating when I can: having skills and stats and equip to improve your performance and seeing the same old 1-50 extremely random damage range is nowhere near being good.

 

We can't get rid of the auto attack in a random deck card system. It has to exist because you don't always have an attack available in the lower levels but your npc opponent does.

 

Then we need abilities to either occur on the next auto attack for weapon skills or extend the auto-attack time so the ability effectively replaces an auto attack, allowing it to actually deal more damage.

Right now it seems like my ability damage and auto attack damage is a 70/30 split. So.... most of my damage comes from doing nothing. I would prefer it if my abilities did the majority of the damage. For all I know, they might do, but it certainly doesn't seem like it.

 

Or we can just make it so that skills are actually powerful and distinctive with their own animations?

The problem here isn't the auto attack.

 

Did the new deck mechanic remove the ability to lock a glyph in place like in previous releases? Before this release, locked glyph is not subject to draw/discard during combat.