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Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
On "rotations"
pgt1027
Member
I keep seeing the word "rotation" thrown around and that has me a little worried.
If all that's meant is that abilities are meant to be comboed to together with other abilities, I have no problem with that. It's a good thing.
But more and more often these days, in the context of MMORPGs, this means the creation of a system where you play a Simon Says game with 50 different buttons that all do the same basic thing. For instance:
I really just see this as game-ifying the spamming of attacks. If in the old days attack spams took 1-3 buttons, now they take 10-12. It's false difficulty.
Different abilities should have different mechanics attached to them. You shouldn't have one or two ability bars full of abilities that all do the same basic thing. It's actually fine to have only 1-4 basic "do damage" buttons, for instance. The rest of your bar should be dedicated to actual mechanics.
If all that's meant is that abilities are meant to be comboed to together with other abilities, I have no problem with that. It's a good thing.
But more and more often these days, in the context of MMORPGs, this means the creation of a system where you play a Simon Says game with 50 different buttons that all do the same basic thing. For instance:
- Do damage
- Do damage except more with a wind up
- Do damage except more with a cool down
- Do damage except less, but it gives a debuff (that does more damage)
- Do damage except more when there is the aforementioned debuff
- Do damage except less right now, but more over time
- Do damage except less, but it generates a resource
- Do damage except more, but it costs the the aforementioned resource
I really just see this as game-ifying the spamming of attacks. If in the old days attack spams took 1-3 buttons, now they take 10-12. It's false difficulty.
Different abilities should have different mechanics attached to them. You shouldn't have one or two ability bars full of abilities that all do the same basic thing. It's actually fine to have only 1-4 basic "do damage" buttons, for instance. The rest of your bar should be dedicated to actual mechanics.
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That's good, but not really what I was talking about.
Though having one button which does damage sucks.
If you break MMO abilites down, there are really only four things you can do.
You can deal damage to an enemy, you can repair damage done to an ally, you can increase the damage you or a friend does to an enemy, or you can reduce the damage an enemy does to an ally. You could be really facetious and break it down to two categories - deal damage to enemies and un-deal damage for allies.
Literally every single combat ability in literally every single MMO can be reduced down to being one or more of the above. Even things like teleport or other movement abilities are used to enable one of the above four basic functions. CC is simply a way to lower the damage output of an enemy.
I seriously challenge you to define any other in combat function in any MMO. You wont be able to, because in an MMO, in combat, all that matters is getting your enemies HP to 0 before you and your allies HP are at 0. Anything that doesnt further that goal along isnt wanted or needed.
If you are going to complain that different abilities that deal damage are just more of the same, then you, my friend, need to find an MMO that allows you to have just four abilities - one for each of the above.
Superbly written response.
The limitation of MMO combat is indeed the push-and-pull of the HP bar (that's me agreeing with the OP).
I have no idea what can be done to diversify combat away from the tug-of-war on HP bars, but some innovation in this area would be welcome!
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I suppose completely different win conditions could be defined for combat, but that would just be a new health bar. IE avoid getting 10 poison stacks while gathering 100 apples to gain the title "Eve" or "Adam", but you have abilities that remove poison stacks (heals) and you have abilities that gather apples (damage)
"Most abilities in modern MMOs are just variants on 'do damage except more' on a fixed Simon Says rotation" isn't a gross oversimplification. That's literally how most modern MMOs these days work. There's nothing interesting about these abilities that I'm glossing over (like saying that CC or movement abilities are damage avoidance). That's literally all they are.
It's moreso that the definitions and complaint you gave in your OP might not be successfully expressing your true concern.
I can say from some experience on this forum that not everyone understands what the alternative would even look like, so you may need to specify what it is that you want to be 'different'.
There are lots of ways for it to be different, and 'being negative toward rotations' is not always clear because of this.
Could you give an example of what you consider 'actual mechanics'? I, for one, can ignore the part of the OP where you gave the explanation of the Simon Says game, and note that for the most part, I agree with you, but the details get pretty important in this specific type of discussion, I think.
There's a lot of things I would consider genuine mechanics, but to name a few.
Threat management
Mana and resource management (and not just ways of generating more mana and resources, but monitoring your consumption of said mana/resources)
Mechanics surrounding various magic and damage resistances
Stealth and stealthy actions
The ability to detect stealthed characters, traps and/or hidden rooms
The ability to scout ahead (either through the aforementioned stealth mechanic or through various magical "far sight" abilities.) This is admittedly completely redundant in your static capital city chat room MMO with unchanging (and often unchallenged except for the boss) instanced dungeons and raids, but is a lot more useful in the context of open world dungeons that scramble themselves each time they open up and hold the possibility of another group waiting to jump you right around the corner.
The ability to detect nearby enemies or points of interest (such as treasure chests)
Setting traps
Various types of support abilities such as buffs or the ability to remove certain debuffs (such as disease, poison or curses which may each require their own specific cure or freeing your allies from crowd controls place by the enemy)
Crowd control
Movement, to an extent
I could go on, but I think you get the idea
I don't think you understood what I said overly well.
If you are going to put this list of ability effects here
in to the bracket of "just more of the same" because they all just deal damage, then perhaps games like this are not for you.
This is because there is literally nothing else that abilities can do. They can deal damage to enemies, or un-deal damage to friends. If all the abilities that deal damage to enemies are "just more of the same" to you, and you are not happy with that, then honestly, what is it you are after?
Again, feel free to describe an ability that isn't just "dealing more damage to enemies", or "un-dealing damage to allies".
To me (and perhaps other players), an ability that has a 6 second cooldown, 1 second cast time, uses 10 mana and deals 100 damage is a VASTLY different ability to one that has a 45 second cooldown, 4 second cast time, uses 100 mana and deals 750 damage.
Not only do these two abilities both fit in to your "more of the same" list above, but they are actually both within the same entry on that list (Do damage).
If you aren't going to look at abilities like the above two as being VERY Different abilities, then MMO's in general are probably actually just not your thing.
If you compare a combat system with one melee attack and no other active skills, compared to a combat system with melee and ranged attacks, a dodge and an active block- yeah they both boil down to the same thing, but one has more mechanics to interact with and is more engaging that just watching numbers move and saying "both are just health bars moving so they are the same thing at the end of the day"- they are the same in terms of end goal, but not in terms of how those goals are achieved, which i think is what hes getting at.
Detect traps
Mana regeneration aura
Abilities to conjure items
Abilities to reduce threat
Abilities that generate additional mana or resources
Stealth and a lot of stealth abilities
"Far sight" type abilities
There's lots, actually.
Yes, that's the light attack and the heavy attack. Almost every game that has combat has some variant on those two abilities. It hardly constitutes mind boggling complexity. I'm not saying there should only be one attack button, but at a point having a huge number of buttons that all do the same thing gets silly, and the resulting "rotation" Simon Says game only serves to obfuscate the fact that the devs stripped out most of the mechanics and the game is mostly now just about mindless attack spams outside of boss gimmick mechanics.
I have no problem with having niche attacks that make attacking more interesting, but that's a bit different from "rotation" meta. Ideally, your attack buttons should be used in particular situations, not in a optimized combo that you use basically all of the time. That's just making spamming the basic attack button take ten buttons, if you catch what I'm saying. Attacks beyond the basic ones should be built around unique mechanics for specific situations to be used in those situations, not to be folded into a "rotation."
Detect traps is un-dealing damage to allies. A trap that is disarmed deals no damage.
Mana regen is a form of healing.
Reducing threat is un-dealing damage. The mob will attack the tank rather than the character that reduced their threat, and the tank should take less damage.
Generating additional mana or resources (in combat resources are the worst mechanic in MMO combat) is again a form of healing.
Stealth is a form of un-dealing damage. A mob that doesn't see you can't damage you.
I can't comment on far sight or sense enemies type abilities in MMO's, as I have never seen a valid implementation of them in any MMO.
There really arenot as many as you seem to think.
The rest is still a pretty big stretch. Yes, all combat in all games ultimately boil down to reducing your enemy's HP to 0 before they reduce your HP to 0. However, it's silly to compare finding traps technically boiling down to the basic "damage avoidance" mechanic with having a bunch of very generic "do damage" abilities that are meant to be folded into a "rotation" meta.
I mean, literally none of the things you listed above would break up the issue you are talking about - and that is ignoring the things that you listed both in your original list of things you consider boring, as well as your second list just above.
No, those were a list of actual mechanics, not things meant to break up the rotation meta. The way to break up the rotation meta is simply what I said. Don't have 10 abilities that all do the same basic thing. If you don't have 50 "deal single target damage" abilities, you have no room for rotations. Keep maybe 1-4 same-case abilities and you have no room for rotation gameplay. Rotation gameplay has to be more or less intentionally implemented by overloading the ability bar with an unnecessary of abilities that do the same basic thing, often withing the context of not having to really worry about mana or resource management so the "game" ends up getting boiled down to what order you press them in to get optimal outcomes. In my opinion, this is just spamming with style.
Literally anything will be put into a rotation, as long as there's any kind of variance in the abilities. You either have a game with literally a single dmg ability, a single defense ability and a single heal - or you have rotations.
The quantity of those abilities does the exact opposite of what you're saying. It makes people strategize about the best use of their abilities and their mana and the cds and everything that might be involved in combat. Obviously there'll be people who just copy someone else's rotation, but that's not the game's problem.
I really don't think this counts as the same thing, does it?
Rotations exist in almost all games, they're the simplifications of the flowcharts/First Order Strategies, yes.
Same for the so-called 'meta' builds.
But the issue is the simplification of them by games that 'saw people simplify things for players who aren't constantly thinking and changing', and wanted to make the games more accessible (in total) so they made 'doing just the rotation' a success condition.
The outcome of 'just doing a basic rotation' in many games is that you lose/die. And this probably isn't popular. If we start calling the complex adaptation space that you find in things like BDO PvP/Boss Combat/etc 'rotations' in the same sense, just because there's an optimal order, the conversation becomes impossible to have.
But I think that's the issue with this convo from the very start. Maybe the OP played some really shitty games, but I can't quite imagine how several attacking abilities with a wide variety of effects and differences (even if done in the correct sequence) can be discarded as bad. And that seems exactly what OP is saying.
Actually, for the longest time, a specific class on WoW had the optimal rotation of (resource builder, resource builder, resource builder, resource user).
Literally 1, 1, 1, 2.
Your idea that fewer abilities or combat resources break up the notion of rotations is an incorrect assumption on your part.
A song as the cast time, cooldown and damage values of an ability are consistent (or are within the control of the player), a rotation WILL be the optimal way to play the class.
Literally the only way to make it so rotations are not the optimal way to play is to make it so that one or more of the above variables are out of the control of the player.
If you ro this, you will have non-rotation gameplay with 4 abilities, or with 50 abilities.
Without reading any of the responses, do you mean a sequence in which damaging abilities that are done?
Proactive/Reactive gameplay?
Genuinely would like to answer you but given the way you wrote this it's rather hard.
I don't have any problems with combing abilities together.
I don't have a problem with the specific types of abilities I just listed.
My point was that those abilities all do the same thing, single target damage, and many modern MMOs are designed around of having an unnecessarily large number of these abilities that all do the same thing as a replacement for complexity, mechanics and decision making in the rest of the game. this design is unnecessary in a game that has a solid base of mechanics.
The first solution is simply to not have an inordinant number of mechanically redundant abilities. The second solution is to have mechanics that discourage spamming, like threat and proper mana and resource management.
Once again, as I stated in the OP, I have no problem of using combos of like abilities and if that's all you mean by "rotation" I don't have a problem with it.
If you are in a raid as DPS, your only job is to deal as much damage as you can.
No one wants you to make any decisions other than those that pertain to your damage output. The more players present, the more focused your specific role is.
If you are in my raid as DPS and you decide for what ever reason to start CC'ing mobs, as an example, you will be told to stop it or find another raid. If I want mobs CC'd, I'll dedicate someone to that task - your task is DPS, we agreed on this when you joined the raid as DPS.
Once again though, when you have abilities where the damage output, cast time and cooldown are static, there are no decisions to be made. The only way decisions can be presented to a DPS player in a setting of group size or larger is if these things are actively changing.
If your role is DPS,abilities that do other things are not only unwanted, but are a detriment.
Yes. And that's a problem. A problem that shouldn't be actively encouraged and even pandered to by the dev team. The dev team should seek to break that attitude if anything.
Gotchya I see what your saying- yeah basically in that context a "rotation" you are talking about is just a single situational response/action that requires multiple inputs, because you will always use that rotation in that situation, so its basically no different than something like multiple manual inputs for a single move in a fighting game.
As Nikr and Azherae eluded to, every game is going to have a "rotation" by simply optimizing your strategic flowchart, but within each situational response/action you can either have basic inputs for that action, or multiple inputs for that action (which in this case is a series of automated actions for a given situation)
It comes down to how much technical skill/execution you want in the game.
Are you actually talking about raids though?
People use different specs/builds and different strategies for different types of content.
You're specifically also saying that 'specialization should be a negative even at the raid level'?
If by specialization you mean rigidly only doing one thing over and over (boss mechanics notwithstanding), yes. It's not the worst problem, and it's an old one indeed, but I don't like it when devs fully lean into it and make it worse. Which is what most modern MMOs have done over the years. I don't mind people being specialized into doing damage, but I think an effort should be put in to keep gameplay dynamic, even in raids. This is made worse when you remove mechanics like threat or mana management, so the only dynamic parts of the fight are the boss's gimmick mechanics and keeping up with a long list of rotating abilities.
I realize this is an old problem. Back in vanilla WoW all warlocks did with their extensive kits was spam doombolts, but I don't think the solution to the problem was making spamming doombolts take 10 buttons instead of one.