Combat Discussion

Cypher

I would actually prefer to keep the weighty combat style for melee, but tweaked. The basic attacks should have multidirectional weight, instead of ALWAYS forward. If you hit A or D while attacking you should do a sidestep and slash. If you’re backing up while attacking you should do an upward swing. Only force the character to move *forward* during an attack if either pressing no other directional keys or if pressing W.

In addition to the attack/movement differing based on your input, I would also prefer to not move so comically far. I think that’s the primary reason people are complaining right now. If it was a STEP forward, or to the side, rather than a lunge I think people would feel a lot better, myself included.

Denahi

Azherae wrote: »

Denahi wrote: »

I think the way to go is to prioritise action combat rather than tab targeting. Tab targeting is super tedious (imo), and tends to quickly deteriorate into combat that is linear and hardly engaging.
As already noted, if the action combat is to properly give of a sense of engaging combat perhaps you should look towards games like dark souls, monster hunter world or even new world. The enemies actually react accordingly with what has hit them, a hammer should be capable of pushing small enemies around and make larger enemies like trolls brace for the impact, a sword cut would result in the enemy flinching at its sting, an arrow could have an enemy stumble backwards, whereas bosses woulden't actually need to have these more complex reactions since they are tough enough to shrug of any attack.
What I am trying to get at is that, for the action combat to feel more alive and enaging it has to BE IMPACTFUL, depending on what hits the enemy and what size it is and its usual behaviour it should have reactions to different attacks.
That's partly why the action combat feels dull, it lacks realistic reactions from the mobs.
Short summary: Make action combat more impactful by giving mobs live and realistic reactions to what kind of attacks hits them.

In your model, does your character also have this sort of reaction when the mobs hit you?

Yes ideally I think that some minor animations on the player's part, would make it feel that more immersive and modern. Things like stumbling backwards, falling over, or getting thrown, etc. however what I consider to be pivotal is that these animations are fleixble, meaning that if a troll bashes a small player with a hammer from a right angle, then realistically we would be send tumbling to our left ans not backwards or forwards. Although these animations should be shorter and brief and shouldn't interfere too much with combat, because otherwise it would ruin the flow of the combat. I still think that this would be more immersive and add some much more needed challenging elements for PVE in this game, as every enemy would actually reflect to some degree what it is capable of.
I really really hope that they won't be lazy and hopefully implement this to some extent.

Azherae

I was going to pivot this discussion to the A/B test, but given the attack cones in the build we got, I prefer not to. I'll go the other way and address @Denahi's direction instead.

Earlier in the thread we mostly hashed out the reasons why Ashes might be better off without any 'hitstop' on either side for basic melee, even in Action Combat mode.

Cooler animations with reactions are more likely to come out of the Weapon Skill trees, but if those get Hitstop, it would probably have to be 'instead of doing significantly more damage', because it would be an obvious optimization to 'make a build that just gets in close and then chains Weapon Skills until their mana is gone'. Maybe that's an intended Fighter build, though.

Originally Ashes was going to use a 'Focus' system, a meter you built up similar to the TP Gauge in FFXI (pretty sure that Jeff Bard was drawing a parallel, from the snippets I read). I have an obvious bias here, I can't ignore that. TP based Weapon Skills and the resultant 'Skillchains' are some of the most dynamic and obviously engaging/balanced MMO mechanics ever made. So much so that my bias is 'literally every game should have this, always, there is no superior system'.

And because of that, given the purpose of my contribution to this thread, I cannot discuss it, and this is going to limit my 'help with feedback focusing' for Weapon Skill related things.

That's why I didn't really respond before. I was sure that other people would explain about the Weapon Skills, and I basically 'can't' join in.

Because Skillchains are the Best. Thing. Ever.