This is exactly what SOTA combat should NOT be like

You make a really good point here. Casting a fireball should really FIX you in place for a time while you're completing the spell. Casting time needs to be a part of all this, otherwise it's just a six shooter disguised as "magic". But if we're going to do this, the fireball really needs to be fairly powerful and feared. Also, it needs to hit friends the same as it would foes, making it not a very easy spell to cast in all situations.

D&D 2nd edition rules did a very good job with this part of combat. There were many other flaws to their turn based system, but the strength and risk vs. reward of a fireball spell wasn't one of them.

 

If I was in charge, I'd start PVP combat with a realistic baseline...something like this:

Notice how there's no MATH in this video.


I really like how they talk about "finding the gaps in the armor" as a way to attack plate mail. They're not really concerned with "hitting them in the head" or "doing enough damage" for example. It's all about where is the weakest part of your opponents defense. That's what I want from SOTA, finding that weak point and exploiting it when you can, but more often just attempting to defend yourself using whatever makes sense for the situation. MMO's today are almost entirely about DPS, attacking, and initiative. I think having the ability to defend is the key to innovative and balanced combat.

I can almost picture a system in my mind where no one does "damage" and instead people "find gaps". Imagine it, no numbers, no DPS, it just doesn't exist in SOTA. So what you're left with is, BLOCK, PARRY, ATTACK (you score a hit when you find a gap). That seems much more sophisticated than fireball, fireball, fireball!

 

This is really just a function of holy trinity, instanced PvE (meaning fixed number of players), and gear based progression. If you don't have these things, then games aren't balanced around dps.

PvP is always about defense, cc, and well timed burst. Games like GuildWars2, without holy trinity, have much more defense in PvE. You become responsible for your own ability to avoid damage, rather than the tank and the healer stacking stats and dps just pew pew pew.

 

Please explain to me the defensive side of GW2? Because when I watch youtube videos like this "beginners guide to GW2 PVP" I can't tell the difference between Archeage. There may be significant nuance to GW2 that I'm missing, but when I look at this video I just see pew pew pew, a bunch of crazy junk all over the screen and fast paced spell spamming.

 

Active dodge, cc/interrupts, placement of combo fields and timing/stacking of combos.

 

Archeage has all of that too. Why is that fun for anyone?

PrimeRib I'm not singling you out here.

The internet is inherently unbalanced in one very important way - timing is different for everyone. So why in the world would you want to play a game where timing is a key factor to success, it's completely random! For all the people that cry about the deck system being random, it seems like they're perfectly fine with the random results of network connectivity. That seems so incredibly backwards and ignorant to me.

SOTA can do so much better.

 

The videos don't work for me.

But I never said the combat in archage was bad. Bad AI is bad AI, it's not really the combat system's fault. I never said it was good either. I haven't played it.

If mobs are really stupid, the combat system can't fix it. WoW had all the silly cooldowns and rotations to PvE to try to make it more skillful. But it was more or less adding a worse combat system to make up for the fact that the AI was bad. Instead of just making the AI good.

 

Yeah, I don't see AI making up for a poorly balanced combat system. Combat is the act of attacking or defending. In GW2 and Archeage, I don't see any defending going on (it might be there but I sure don't see it). It would be like if you played tennis and instead of returning a serve you just hit as many balls over the net as you could. AI is going to simulate what the rules of the combat system allow...if the combat system only allows you to mindlessly spam offensive attacks at your opponent, then that's all you're going to get from the AI.

It's the base system that needs to be balanced, and that's why you have to have a viable defense for every offensive skill or spell.

 

Again, GW2 is a defense first game. You will get completely crushed by one mob if you face tank it. It is not at all like WoW. You must dodge, you must cc and kite or circle strafe. And the mobs scale up to your level so that at 60, you can't just ignore level 7 mobs. It's gotten nerfed a bit from the betas because people cried, but you do have to think, even in low level PvE areas.

 

Dodge is a great example of a defense.

But CC and Kite? Those are not defensive actions. I would say Kiting is more like AI manipulation, and CC is really just a precursor to an attack.

The modern day MMO mentality is not really something that helps this discussion. Those games are all about attacking. What you're calling being defensive is just nuanced spam.

To defend is not a passive activity either. You have to block, dodge, evade or otherwise disable the attack that is coming at you.

One of the things I noticed about Archeage is that there's no counter to stealth. If you read their forums, there's no spell or skill that will keep someone from hiding (turning invisible), and there are no useful passive abilities that allow you to detect a stealthed player.

This is another example of a game having offensive skills and powers that can't be countered. How does GW2 handle stealth? Is there a spell or skill that makes all hidden players visible? I know SOTA lists a Sun Magic spell called Reveal that is likely to do this. But that's a rarity, and most skills and spells in SOTA do not currently appear to have counters. Although of course this is just pre-alpha and the spells and skills we know about are basically place holders.

 

I will attach a White paper to my screen so i can only see the bottom combat skills.

If i can do all fights that way without a Problem, then they have a serious Problem with the battle System and pvp System.

Currently the battle is just spam the 123. Nothing else.

But i of course understand they are in development. so no complains.

I would love to see what the enemy is doing and react to it.
Oh he is doing a fireball - dodge
Oh he is casting a CC - I need to cast dispell
He is doing mana drain - use a man potion

The hole react - counterreact thinking .

 

There's basically 3 ways to stop an attack: dodge (be where the blow isn't), block (mitigate the damage), and cc/interrupt (offensively prevent the attack).

I don't know why you think you can't kite players of that cc isn't an important, active part of defense. It's 1/3 of the picture.

I agree that gw2 could have gone farther. ESO has a built in block and interrupt as well as dodge.

 

When it comes down to it you have a bunch of basic abilities much like what we have in game already. Basic attacks that are found in just about any game out there like sword attack, fireball, fist punch.

One way to expand that system is to make 20 attacks which are variations or different moves altogether.

Real time or not there needs to be a rule set that makes it more interesting and limited so that players can't devolve into using the most damaging ability repeatedly and movement is a part of the picture because it involves positioning for attacks and defenses as well as group fighting technique.

Abilities like block and shield usually use a modifier to 'negate' all other attacks which is pretty much a bad idea in concept because for attacking players the only concern for their strategy is to find a way to 'not get blocked' in the first place. I like the holy trinity concept I find it fun when you have a group of players that work well together you will have to work to find new ways to defeat other real players which usually involves group building and character progression. Fighting specialization will probably what Sota develops which is based around several fighting styles and 8 magic groups (9 including chaos).

It may be a point to try to get a better definition of what each fighting style or magic type will hope to achieve and whether or not there should by ANY real statistical factor that separates each style. I think it might be a good idea for abilities to not even have any bonus whatsoever from the gear that you are wearing. That will be the only way I can think of to get away from the whole MMO combat style from the OP's video and pretty much all other PvP games that I know of.Break it down to it's real basics and stop making gear spec'ing a contributor. We are already way past that point with the preliminary concepts.

 

Let me give you guys a example of a current experience I had with MMX (might and magic 10).

It's all turn based and old school but those factors alone did not succeed to make the combat actually good. What it took to make it actually good was somebody who carefully thought about specific battles and specific tactics in order to build a fight that required thinking and that made it fun to me.

That game is pretty much not a really deep fighting game, it has a semi-developed combat system of a fairly standard type. Several archetypes which basically boils down to close combat fighters, ranged healers and ranged casters. Just about every fight in the game is the same with the exception of a few fights. Attack spam heal ranged attack spam heal... over. Figure out how to not get killed and that will work.

That was most of MMX until the expansion level which was developed by somebody else (afaik) and in that place was on a complete different level not because the game changed but because each battle was tailored very well to be entertaining and challenging. At that point a few new strategies were revealed and that in turn made me try to think about how to defeat the next mob.

In one fight I was easy to see that physical damage would be repelled and that only magic could be used to not 'take damage back'. A simple strategy but when thrown in unexpectedly will disrupt a spammers routine.

Then there is the opponents that just heal through anything you dish at them so then you have to try to interrupt or silence them and then try to burst down one enemy.

I actually kind of wish that Sota could be entirely PvP and not have to worry about PvE encounters, but I guess there is a bit of a art to them and that when making fights there are a lot of good examples out there I am sure some people could make very good ones if that some encounters could be built by 3rd party developers or good designers from home.

 

I agree with you about making everything PVP because it would be easier to balance players than it would predictable AI. But since we all know that's not really an option, I won't spend any time walking through that logic.

Instead, I'll just point out that I think if the base combat system can be balanced correctly it should scale to the PVE AI well enough that people think it's better than most other games. Things like "kiting" are not really applicable to players, so if that could be translated to PVE mobs, I think that would be a great start. Honestly, if I were a PVE monster and I saw a player...I'd run forever, I certainly wouldn't stand around in the same spot waiting for someone to "farm" me, and I would never trust players to "fight fair" by being a similar level to me.

 

I agree with the sentiment of the opening post. Combat can be both a science and an art. We might say that crunching numbers to see who has the highest DPS to burn something down the fastest is just the science. I think there are many who want to also savor the art of it - the clever aspects of blocking, countering, avoiding, parrying, nullifying, reflecting, etc. that truly create a memorable moment, other than just one-hitting someone.

 

Too much going on on the screen. I really dislike it. Spell casting should be simple, like in the Ultima games. All those bright colors, numbers, flashing lights and icons all over the screen ruin it for me.

 

I totally agree. I don't know why people even need the numbers on the screen. I think if people really need to see the numbers, they should be able to collect them in a log file, after the fact, and then make as many spreadsheets as they want to, but it shouldn't be a part of active competitive play (for anyone).

And I don't mean this as an elitist gamer trying to tell people how to play the game the way they want to. I'm saying that all those numbers and all that flash CLEARLY isn't helping anyone in the moment. So why do it in the moment? Just have the data sent to a log file and keep it off the screen of what would otherwise be a beautiful looking game.

 

Yeah, the example like in the first post is really what takes all the fun out of CRPGs these days.

Maybe I'm just old but that is not fun, all that min/maxing. It's just not what RPGs should be. Sigh.

 

I totally agree with you about mechanical combat styles. However I don't expect much for Release 8 other than testing the pace of combat. Anything above and beyond that is icing on the cake. I would rather the devs calmly and coolly develop the combat/PvP&PvE over time.

That being said, one thing I would really like to see developed by R8 would be DODGES. We have dodge left, dodge right, and dodge backward by double tapping the A,S,D keys. If we can use the dodges to actually avoid being hit in R8 that would be awesome. That would be a good foundation for strategy without having a really complex combat system in place YET.

In R7 we could dodge but the monsters still hit you even though you rolled out of range. It would be nice if they miss, unless they are using a ranged weapon, or a pole arm with reach. This will allow us to beat most PvE encounters one-on-one without having great armor. It would also be handy in PvP, but I think timing will be important because somebody constantly rolling might become predictable. (it would be nice if we could roll the same direction as the guy avoiding our attacks by anticipating where they will dodge so we can still be in range to hit the guy).