How to balance tab vs action abilities

Potato Basket

Do you think this could work?

Risk vs reward principle should apply to combat

Tab target abilities = team effort = coordination
Action abilities = individual effort = skill

Tab targeting requires less aiming skills so there's no risk involved since you virtually can't miss, therefore the reward should be proportional.

Meaning the effectiveness of the individual should be lessened but compensated with the help of others as a group which should require coordination.

In comparison to action abilities it's the opposite.
Since the risk of missing your ability has punishing consequences and hitting the mark requires skill, the effect should be more significant and rewarding.

Let's take healing as an example

If Healing a target with an action ability should heal with 100% effectiveness
The same ability but as a tab targeting should heal with less % effectiveness, let's say 30%.

Bottom line is what players can't achieve with skill they can compensate with numbers; more players.

I believe this also works in scale.
Based on A1, In large scale battles it's harder and less likely to rely on action abilities therefore the majority will use tab targeting which should be coordinated to be effective.
So numbers do the talking.

On a smaller scale, action abilities are more viable so skill should do the talking.

Just an idea I thought would be interesting to discuss

No hard feelings
Have fun 😊

Mag7spy

NiKr wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

View point on the toxic part about asking for the mechanics is its fine to ask as not everyone will know everything. I wouldn't expect people to laugh / be toxic or elitism on raid content if you are running with people you know.

I think you concentrated too much on the toxic part of that comment. Azherae was talking about the complexity of the encounter. And the complexity was so damn high that explaining it completely could be laughable. If there's 6-7 things that have to be tracked at the same time and those 6-7 things come from a pool of potential 20 things and the can have random triggers and order - you ain't explaining an encounter to a person. At best, you could explain what the things themselves are and what you need to do when they happen, but that still doesn't magically solve the issue of having to track several of such things at the same time, while doing your perfect rotation, while being prepared to switch up your actions because another group of 6-7 things could happen in the very next moment.

And then you scale this up to the size of a full raid and the question from some dude in the middle of the raid of "what do I do here" would definitely get a few laughs from the regulars. Because the chances are, if someone's gotta ask that in that kind of raid - you've wiped already.

And in all the cases of all the players knowing what needs to be done in certain moments, we come back to the issue of "not everything in the raid can be called out, so you need to know your own amount of info to properly react to your surroundings". And in action games that amount is lower than in tab games, which directly influences the design of the encounter itself.

I feel there is some exaggerations with tab and tracking, this is why i need example but no one will give them and its not a good sign if you can't provide a single shred of evidence.

In what tab target mmorpg encounter are you as a single player tracking 6-7 at the same time as you are dealing dmg to the boss? What are the reasons for each player needing to track this 6-7 things at the same time? What are these 6-7 things that you are tracking?