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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.
Skill Animations Are Extremely Fast
Blindside
Member
For PvP, the animation times are way too fast for people to react to. At 18:08 into the tank showcase, the shield charge barely has any travel time and acts as more of a teleport than a charge. Right after, the stomp that knocks down the enemy looks like it's around 1/4 of a second.
Most animations should generally be around .5s, .75s, or 1s long as they give .25s, .5s, and .75s respectively for the average person to see and react to. With the current combat, the likelihood that you get hit by a skill the enemy uses is extremely high unless you have a combination of inhuman low reaction time, extremely low ping, are out of range of their attacks, or can chain defensives for long periods of time.
The safest option is going to be to create distance the instant the opponent approaches into their attack range because you won't have enough time to tell what skill the enemy is using, much less be able to figure out what you want to use to counter it. This is insane fast-twitch levels of combat that you would see in a fighting game. I noticed this for the ranger showcase as well where the arrows moved so fast I assumed they were hitscan (also evidenced by the fact that arrows seemed to travel through terrain, so the projectile trail is likely just for show.)
The flipside is if you're the melee attacker and the enemy dodge rolls backwards once, you miss 3 skills cause you can cast half your bar in 2 seconds.
https://youtu.be/DwWK9HJNJRQ?t=1088
Most animations should generally be around .5s, .75s, or 1s long as they give .25s, .5s, and .75s respectively for the average person to see and react to. With the current combat, the likelihood that you get hit by a skill the enemy uses is extremely high unless you have a combination of inhuman low reaction time, extremely low ping, are out of range of their attacks, or can chain defensives for long periods of time.
The safest option is going to be to create distance the instant the opponent approaches into their attack range because you won't have enough time to tell what skill the enemy is using, much less be able to figure out what you want to use to counter it. This is insane fast-twitch levels of combat that you would see in a fighting game. I noticed this for the ranger showcase as well where the arrows moved so fast I assumed they were hitscan (also evidenced by the fact that arrows seemed to travel through terrain, so the projectile trail is likely just for show.)
The flipside is if you're the melee attacker and the enemy dodge rolls backwards once, you miss 3 skills cause you can cast half your bar in 2 seconds.
https://youtu.be/DwWK9HJNJRQ?t=1088 13
Comments
Attacks and abilities in general are too fast.
Too flashy.
And choppy with unnatural and inproper body movement.
There's a lot to improve until Alpha 2.
It's gonna be an unbelievable mess. While I do agree that slow combat probably wouldn't quite work, I do think that earlier lvls should be slower than what we saw, so that they could ramp up to a good fast pace at top lvls with top gear and buffs.
Aren't we all sinners?
Sadly we currently don't know if Attack Speed stats will exist in Ashes to speedup skills further, but if they exist i would definitely agree with the skills being currently too fast.
There was Magical Casting Speed in A1 tho.
Aren't we all sinners?
Simply put, the attacks just don't look believable and give an uncanny valley type feeling.
My fix would be to smoothen out movement, slow auto attacks according to weapon type, and try to make things more weighty and visually clear. They are creating such an immersive fantasy world yet the combat is a bit arcadey in its current presentation. After that skills can be seen as either clear or not.
Even though WoW is a different game, but the earlier expansions paced combat really well.
I personally am not a fan of long animation abilities unless they have a cast time, but I am a fan of having the point where an ability deals damage being towards the end of the animation unless it is a multi-strike kind of ability. This leaves room for cancelling the ability (assuming the caster can interrupt it with dodge/block/whatever) but having the downside of cancelling being dealing no damage. Or the enemy can interrupting it with CC and avoid the damage.
IMO the worst kind of animated attacks are ones where damage is dealt early on. The attacker is now stuck in a long recovery animation after seeing/hearing the ability connect. No counterplay, damage was too fast. The likelyhood of someone figuring out animation cancelling becomes very high
Some skills should be balanced to *not* telegraph for very long (IMO), but they should be off GCD and balanced accordingly. Another option is to have abilities with varying "GCD". IE, animation windows of 1s, 1.5s and 2s. Then those abilities can be balanced according to their GCD time.
My main takeaway is that their current direction is popular with a certain target audience (so far seems to be only 40% of posters here, but nothing says 'sampling bias' like a forum used by hardcore players of a game).
I don't know if Intrepid 'understands' that they're at the point of making a real choice here, or if they hope to 'think outside the box', but I'd like to assume that they know enough math and gameplay principles to know they're at a choice point.
For others: I personally doubt they need explanations of the effects of their choices, at this point. So, my question is, what can we still give them? More importantly, if a given person ends up in the camp-not-chosen, how can we focus feedback helpfully anyway?
90% of what they even could make is 'defined mathematically' every time they make a new 'real choice'. If they need us to tell them 'hey your math is wrong' at this point, we have other problems.
tl;dr Nothing's supposed to be reactable/particularly counterplayable, the animations are consistently too fast for this to have been a design goal.
(Random numbers)
For example a fighter has a attack speed ratio of 1 and cast ratio of .75 a mage cast ratio of 1 and attack ratio of .75 (Each class at level 1). As you level up your stats increase with level so maybe at level 50 a fighter has a 1.5 attack speed ratio and 1.1 cast speed ratio and inverse for the mage. Then you can stack AS and CS buffs as % of the ratio.
Just a thought though, not entirely sure if it would make the game more fun.
It's still kind of janky like this, but the animation speeds aren't as egregiously fast as in normal speed. Guess it could be a good example of what the combat could be if it had better readability.
I certainly don't want to slow down the gcd because animations look fast. I'm sure ppl also wouldn't like if animations get cut off constantly.
Basically the fast animations are a good sign imo.
It's more than that. If there was no gcd you could spam 1 skill after another and there would be no time to animate what happened.
I think that just semantics of the name. You could be right but, I'm referring to gcd as simply the minimum time you must wait between inputs.
But GCD refers explicitly to a 'Global' Cooldown, and those things are entirely subjective because cancels and cancel windows are explicitly encoded in certain games.
Animations do not have to match any 'GCD', the animations define it.
Some games have animation locks some do not. Not having any animation lock is why ppl complain about how eso combat looks. But it does have a gcd of about .9 sec to limit input. (More to it than that but it's irrelevant).
What I'm saying is you take all these factors put them in a pot what you come out with is a minimum time between actions. It could be longer in some instances but I'm calling that minimum time your gcd.
Beyond that it's just semantics of how you lock animations (or not) and combine it with a gcd. Either additive or overlapping. Etc. Etc.
Basically all to say having faster animation is a sign that the game will play faster than only one input every second.
I don't care if you call it the father of time, somewhere exists a way to stop skill spam. In games I played it was specifically the gcd. I don't care what you call it from the game you played. It's besides my point anyway.
Grit is specifically an off gcd skill. Which being called that actually solidified my terminology. You notice that it is just an aura with no animation there is a reason for that. Nicely done.
The devs could put a GCD of 10 minutes into the game and the animations would still be too fast.
What I'm saying is that the animations being that fast might just be an indicator that they are going for a faster time between skill inputs. If you had 1 second animations then unless they were okay with it being choppy you are probably looking at 1 sec between inputs. I'm am perfectly happy with the faster animations if it means we can get say 0.5s between inputs.
The devs like flashy, elongated animations and then try to have the rapid deployment too. Either you animate for speed or you animate for elaboration. Mixing speed and elaboration causes fidelity issues which have been highlighted numerous times.
If the animation are just fast for being fast and not helping the speed of actual combat then I have no issue with slowing them down. I'm not set on the visuals of faster animations alone.