Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Yes, you're emotionally charged because the start of the thread went "I don't like action combat, and it could very potentially stop me from playing". While you did address that after by saying because you haven't played it so you wont draw any line yet, you still started off the conversation at an emotional level. You're a jerk because you said "if you don't like min maxing, I'm sorry but I have no idea why you play mmorpgs.". He never said he didn't like min maxing. He was implying how he didn't think using the same 6 buttons in a particular order was skillful, and being able to apply knowledge dynamically was a real show of skill.(at least how I interpreted it). He disagreed with you in a respectful way, he simply just disagreed with your point.
Action combat is how others and I see the direction of the genre evolving. Not only does action combat feel more engaging because of it's difficulty to learn, it makes the gameplay feel far more dynamic. In WoW pvp the only thing I need to worry about is my rotation, some positioning, and managing my cds according to my opponents. In action combat, you need to do all of those things to a higher degree. Worrying about my rotation now includes that I'm actually aiming and hitting my abilities on target instead of hitting a button and knowing it will hit. Utilizing my positioning relative to my opponents so that I can optimize hitting my abilities on them while also avoiding theirs. Using my environment to my advantage, if I'm playing a ranged class such as a ranger or a mage, how can I use the difference in elevation to make it so my opponent can't hit me; should I mantle that ledge and attack from above? All of this enhances combat and adds depth to an otherwise stale genre.
You touched on dodging devalues gear, which I partially disagree with. If both players are playing an MMO where dodging matters at a perfect level, then the person who out gears the other player will win. The only thing dodging does is make skill matter more, which should be everyone's goal for balance. If we dueled and you lost, but you out geared me and I outed skill you, did you deserve to win because you had better RNG or you put more money into your gear?
I'm sure when there is less for you to focus on you are able to perform better, what YOU think matters doesn't always resonate with others. Rotation/position/cooldown management are all important, but if you need it to be tab target for you to perform well you can always go down the tab target route in your skill trees. The game will allow players to be up to 75% action combat or tab target, but you cannot be 100% of either. After trying the game, if you still don't enjoy action combat for 25% of the time, there will always be games that cater to your wants and needs, this one just won't be it.
You could not have said that better, the entire time i look at my ability bar and not anything else its terrible. Part of the reason that it put me to sleep when I use to play City of heroes and SWTOR.
Who is the huge crowd that plays BDO that game is kind of dead? The fluid movements of bdo are good, super armor, iframe spam and cat and mouse one cc and one shotting someone is terrible gameplay. Also movements in BDO are crazy sporadic. Though what was shown today for ashes looks in the right direction by a lot.
I'm lucky enough to enjoy both if they're done well. I don't have a bias on one versus the other. My opinion is if they can do it while making sure the large scale fights still work well, then they should go more action oriented. Action combat is definitely "the future" compared to tab. If you look at recent MMOs they're basically all action (Elyon, Mortal Online 2, Lost Ark, New World). If you look at anticipated upcoming MMOs they're also mostly action like the Riot MMO for example.
When I play a tab target game. I will often set my action bar to not even be visible outside of raid content (if the game allows for that - which most do, because it is reasonably common).
People have an innate ability to sense time. if I tell you to wait exactly 10 seconds, you will probably be accurate within a second without having to think or count it out.
Most tab target games have an ability queue, where the game will queue up the last ability you activated while the one you are casting is still being cast (and you still have the GCD to wait through). They will also usually give you an indicator as to whether or not an ability you attempted to activate did indeed activate.
These three things (ability queue, notification if an ability didn't activate and a persons innate ability to internally measure small amounts of time accurately) are all that is needed to never look at your action bar. You should know innately what abilities are available to be cast, and if you attempt to cast one that is not yet ready, you will get a notification of this so that you can queue something else - and all of this happens while you are still casting the previous ability. Then, when the casting animation for your next spell starts (meaning the ability queue is empty), you start the process again, casting the spell you want that you think should be up, getting a notification if it is not, etc.
As such, there is literally no reason to look at your ability bar at all during combat - you should be able to judge when an ability is ready to use.
Now, if you don't have that innate ability to internally measure small periods of time, then I would agree, you probably need to look at your bar, and that probably has an negative effect on your opinion of tab target games. However, that is a shortcoming with you as a gamer, not an issue with tab target games.
Saying you don't like tab target games because of this is literally the same thing as someone saying they don't like action games because they don't have the reaction speed or accuracy those games need. It is simply a case of the player not having the skill needed to play that type of game.
This is an inherent issue with action combat. It works great for small scale combat (imo it is better than tab for up to three players), but from that point on, the more players you add, the worse it gets as a combat system.
You can't have a fluid looking game when everyone literally has to stand still and fight, and you can't have a game where 40 people are all trying to do backflips over the one encounter and still have it looking good.
Must've never played ESO. ESO has large scale PvP combat and it's very fluid.
Its not an action combat system. It's hybrid you will be able to play in tab If you would like and vice versa.
Have a nice day!
You saying you hide your ability bar makes 0 sense to me in a tab target game. Either you have played a old game for year and years where you dont have new abilities and memorized every single key 20-40 (not normal btw). You are right about the sense of time i can't do anything so im looking at the ability bar until my move is up and clicking it the moment its up lmao.
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This is actually crazy, there is no reason to look at anything but your ability bar most of the time besides when you need to move for a mechanic. Gtfo of here with short coming if you have like 20-40 abilities to go through between 3 or 4 bars. Tab target doesn't take skill you do your rotation and everything auto hits the enemy pretty simply.
Mashing your keyboard isn't judging when your ability is ready to use off world cooldown you are just mashing to try to do it as fast as possible. Or you have a floating ability that shows when you are off global cool down.
Again no reason to look off your ability bar and dmg charts 60-70% to the 30% when you look at the screen depending on the content since movement doesn't matter. And I'm not talking about weird instances where you need to move to avoid dmg because you aren't in a proper party with a tank.
Large scale with action combat is better as long as its balanced properly and aoes are in check. Larger scale tab target is very generic and very poor having to click a person and attack rather then being more intuitive and just attacking who you want without as much of a fuss and using auto hit mechanics where 0 skill is involved.
yeah i dont care how you wanna label it, it is what it is.
Some people have innate timesense. Perhaps others don't. You know where this will go if you try to do a bunch of arguments based on that.
Your point is that you don't need to do anything else, right? But in a game where you did need to do something else, then your point wouldn't stand up to it, and there are plenty of Tab Target games where there is a lot to do, you just happen to not have played any.
You really wanna get into another long banter with people based on the fact that you haven't played certain games, by all means continue, but I'll join the chorus of saying that you seem moreso concerned about something you might not have an ability to do, or you're not addressing your own point.
Now the question of 'whether or not Intrepid should do something for players without innate timesense' is different, but it doesn't need to be answered because we know the ability bar does show cooldowns.
While back in L2 we had narrow chokepoints in castle sieges and dungeons. And you had to pick and choose your targets appropriately out of 50-100++ people on your screen.
In a tab target game - literally every tab target game that I have played (and all action-ish games other than Archeage) - if you attempt to cast an ability that is still on cooldown, it queues the ability up to be cast as soon as the cooldown is up.
As such, if there is some reason why you want to cast that ability - and ONLY that ability - and it is still on cooldown, you simply activate it and wait. You do not need to sit there and watch that cooldown.
That said, I have also never played a tab target game where you would be in a situation where you only have one ability you would want to cast, that ability is on cooldown, and this situation was not arrived at by a player mistake (I have seen this situation many times in relation to players making a mistake, however).
What you are saying to me sounds like someone that has never played a tab target game, but is talking based on someone's description of such a game, with a number of assumptions thrown in.
Your lack of understanding of what a tab target game involves is also evident in your assertion that it takes no skill. Not only do tab target games take skill, but they often take different skills based on the specific class you play.
In EQ2 for example, the class I played the most was only able to be played at the very high end by constantly analyzing. There were things that would happen in combat, some of which were truly random, some of which were controlled by other players, some of which were controlled by me. Any combination of these things would alter what ability I should use next - often resulting in the best course of action being to NOT use the biggest ability I have available to me at the time, but instead to hold that until specific conditions are met.
However, if you played one of the rogue classes, you have your weapons auto attacking, as quickly as once every half second. However, these auto attacks wouldn't go off if you were casting an ability. As such, a player needs to time ability use to always fall between these auto attacks, resulting in the skill of a top end player of any of these classes was down to their ability to hold a rhythm, but a rhythm that was based on their weapon speed as adjusted by their attack speed modifier (also resulting in different people having a different upper level of preferred attack speed modifier, meaning there was no "best" gear for the class at all, simply preference).
Again, I am of the opinion that you have never played a tab target game, as your comments on them all display a total lack of understanding of them at even a surface level.
Even if you have played some, keep in mind that your understanding of them has led someone that has played them for 20 years to believe that you have not - that is how poor your understanding of them is regardless of if you actually have played any.
Large scale combat on a single enemy barely functions. This is why games like Monster Hunter have so few players present.
Rift, everquest, shadowbane, city of heroes, age of conan, WoW, Swtor. You do not need to do anything else. You look at your target, you attack it and it dies. The amount of time you need to do other things for mechs is not what I'm talking about with involved combat. Ie go stand at a point here and wait so a certain move doesn't kill you. That is just a normal mech type of thing but during the main chunk of the combat there is little to no reason to be looking anywhere else that involved constant focus. Having a general sense of what the boss is doing and the stages is good enough. Your main focus is attack the boss / mob as it stays in its general position with watching out for mechs every so often.
If someone says tab target is more involved that is not true when it comes to tab target. You can easily compare any tab target content IN THE WORLD, to a game that has decent action and its night and day.
One of the worst things you can do to yourself in a competitive game is to conclude that because you can't/don't do something, other people can't/don't either. It leads to all sorts of negative reactions without purpose, and you never end up trying to address it with devs if they are taking feedback on the matter.
Making noise about it in that way just makes you seem incompetent or, at least for some others, misinformed, about the intentions, designs, and capabilities of others. I'm just telling you not to make yourself look 'bad' in another long argument that's going to just end up with 'people realizing that you can't do something they can do'.
And so, for your education, whether you choose to believe it or not, I can sometimes get that 'timer' in my head so calibrated that I 'start casting Haste', which is a buff with a 3 minute duration in the game I'm talking about, and then start recasting it before it's actually worn off the target (it has 3 seconds casting time) and have it wear off the target while I am casting.
I have done this automatically while doing everything else. No timers, no UI. I would never suggest a game be designed so that a person HAD to do this, but crowing about impossibilty will just make you seem silly to everyone else who has either done this or seen someone else do it.
All you've implied to someone like me is that you're bad at Tab Target games if you play any classes that require you to do any analysis or adaptation.
The second you are in group content, it falls apart. When it gets to raid content, this comment is a joke.
If you are looking at your action bar during top end raid content in most of those games, you are wiping your raid.
I am not even arguing with this point - again though, only for solo content.
Action combat is, imo, MUCH better for solo content or PvP than tab target combat is.
Action combat just falls apart when you have many players going after one target (group and raid combat), whereas that is where tab target shines because the developers can make so much more varied content with tab target than they can with action combat.
Group content i where its easiest you do you role, tab target is not meant to be moving around all over the place, its pretty clear you don't need to be watching out for attacks and dodge them because that isn't the case. The nature of tab target is know mech, use skills and dps. Its not looking out for this attack and dodge it every second, its about your ability rotations which means there is nothing wrong to be looking at them as that is the focus since you don't have much threat to worry about as long as you are fulfilling your role properly with what the encounter includes. ie Dps boss, wipe mech starts look for ghost and dps, tank focus, healer heals and can do so without looking at allies but simply licking the members bar.
And that kind of interaction works at scale, from just a few parties fighting each other to ~150vs150 as shown in this video
Btw, the video also shows high lvl pvp in low lvl gear. I hope AoC's gear progression is similar to this, where pvp can be super fun at any lvl exactly because even the low lvl gear is at least viable at higher lvls.
Honestly what are you talking about, education lmfao you are wilding.
When you buff someone why would you need to look at them in game? You look at their buffs, you look at your ability bar and use it. There is 0 reason to look at a player to use a ability buff in tab target 0.
What are you talking about impossible, when I said impossible or near I'm talking about knowing 40 abilities and memorizing all of them in your head and not having any ui and having 40 different buttons set on your keyboards while knowing when they are all on cd or not. That is not normal, you aren't going to convince me it is for players to hide the whole UI, we can easy go jump into games and ask people and do a pole and seet what happens.
Funny you mention look bad in along term argument, you say actually going way out there with this one. In my eyes you are looking very bad right now defending this, and plenty of people would agree with me. All defends on the environment and forum and your points right now are very weak. Either you are just wanting to argue for the sake of arguing, or not understanding my own view point and wanting to argue with me.
What I've implied is that any normal player is not hiding their entire ui for key sets and remembering everything by memory for 20-40. What I'm implying is that there is more reason to be watching your abilities, party members over what you are fighting. Why is there more reason you ask, because there is nothing to dodge 90% of the time. At the point when you need to look is when certain mechs pop up so you can make sure you are on the right track.
Honestly you are giving me the vibe you have not played that many tab target games.
Alrighty then, please proceed.
I should however also tell you that the game I'm referring to does not have an indicator for what buffs are on what players other than yourself at all, and my class in that game has 20+ buff spells.
Maybe I indeed have not played enough Tab Target games.
And in L2 pvp you didn't stand in one place all the time. You'd be moving, flowing, changing targets while also clicking the ground to move, picking debuff targets from a crowd and so on and so on. And healers would have to do all of that at even higher pace, because they had to heal and constantly be aware of their positioning too. Yet people managed all of that just fine w/o seeing their skill cds.
You literally don't' need to look at a player to do that is my point You lick their name in your party, you click your easy. I just don't get why you want to argue with me over this....the nature of tab target isn't about dodge abilities because that is not something you can normally do in like 80-90% of the combat in tab target. When a mob hits you, you are getting hit no matter what you are getting a icon to dodge an ability or some marker like akin to lost ark or any moba game.
By nature there is less reason to be looking at what is going on your screen in tab target, depending on the content that can slightly change like pvp for example depending on the type of fight you are doing. For me I just view my abilities are more important then anything on screen as it doesn't matter "most the time".
The pixels to me on the screen are simply just pixels, that i have no influence over on dodging their abilities as they auto hit in tab target. There are things you can do to react at time like use your buff or do a interrupt and you can tell quickly when its doing something like that without having full focus on the screen of the enemy as they appear as bars to indicate or its just clear what they are doing based on experience.
And when I was in a party I'd be checking what others are doing just to be in rhythm with them, on top of the things I did alone, so it'd be even more stuff to check. And during high value high intensity farming, I'd be spinning my camera even more, because mobs respawned even quicker and the chance of someone coming to such a lucrative place were even higher.
And in all that time, no matter what class I played, I had no reason to look at my ability bar.
By default using macros is to make things easier, everyone has feelings on things but that isn't my point. Its about how important is it to see what a character is doing and how much does that influence gameplay. You can do content barely looking at the enemy and simply just use your abilities know exactly what is going to happen and tab between enemies.
PvP isn't as much as managing skill cds in tab target. There is more focus on positioning and making sure you are hitting the player so it would demand more screen space. But it doesn't take that much brain power to do it in tab target games. You follow the plan, deal dmg, heal, push with your group, focus targets and swap targets when you need to target the next.
You are getting stuck on a point about how I decide to play and what I view as important. I know you didn't try to insult me with it so nothing against you about it. But the point is me not having to pay attention to the enemy in front of me as gameplay wise I don't view that as something I can impact with play skill (ie dodge, blocking, etc) by a large enough amount that would make me need to focus on what it is doing as again I can't over all impact it in tab target.
I'm unsure how often you are spinning your camera and such, but if your focus can be on anything other then what you are fighting that is proving my point. Because the mobs you are fighting are not a threat you know exactly how they are going to react and there for you don't need to see them or focus on them that much to kill them. Be it looking to enemies that might pop up or when the next mobs spawn, or me I didn't need to worry about either of those. Perhaps more so at the start when i played shadowbane but having a group helps a lot having multiple eyes but I didn't feel overall stressed about gankers (while grinding) and spawns were predictable.
And the macros didn't add anything to make things easier. It was just a macro that said "/Delay /use skill ___". It was just a replacement of the skill icon with a macro icon that didn't show the skill's cd, so in this case it literally made things more difficult for the player. And I literally don't see how moving your camera a bit to the side requires more brain juice in action mmos. L2 didn't have gcd so its combat was super fast and you had to react to what your opponent was doing asap, sometimes even canceling your cast in order to do a counter move to your enemy's last ability. So it's not like I was just sitting on my ass for 2 secs while I waited for shit to happen, while in an action mmo I'd be constantly watching the enemy to time my dodge. And with most L2 pvp being at least multiple people on multiple people, you'd have to react and track several people at once. Yet when I watched a mass pvp BDO video, it seemed like it was just a ton of 1v1 (maaybe 2-3v1) fights in one location, instead of a truly huge swarm vs swarm.
Now I could be wrong in my observation of that BDO video, but BDO itself isn't really the best example of pvp party play, so I'd rather look at some other mass pvp action combat mmo, but I don't really know any. Would gladly be proven wrong on this topic if anyone has a good example.
I'm sure that my BDO experience has made me really biased against some action combat designs, but I'm not saying that literally all action combat games are the same. Though I kinda am saying that cause from what I've seen, they have been quite similar so far in their core design, so that's a bit hypocritical on my side