Combat. In-depth and specific. Present your ideas.

ArchivedUser

I know combat is a very talked about subject on these forums but I'd like to narrow it down to the specifics and what mechanics each of us would like to see. I know a lot of the discussion is about tab-targeting and action combat but since ashes of creation has been said to be a bit of both I think any mechanics we like from another game or one you've come up with yourself can fit into this game.

Here's some things I'd like to see.

<strong><em>Animation Cancels</em></strong> - I'm sure a lot of you know about this mechanic that exists in mostly action combat games but what it means is that you shorten the animation on an ability to make it get off faster in a number of ways, most often by using another ability, that allows you to play faster than you would otherwise. To put this into very clear terms abilities are made up of 3 portions usually. Start-up, active, and recovery. Animation cancels get rid of either the start up, recovery, both, and very rarely the active part. Animation cancelling different parts of a certain ability can create different results and make combat feel very creative.

A random example would be some ability allows you to upper cut and jump off the ground and come slamming back down. So this ability can be broken down into more than 3 parts. Start up (rising), active (uppercut punch), more start up (falling), active (slam), recovery (a period of time after the slam your character can't do anything). Depending on where you animation cancel this ability you can get vastly different results. You can animation cancel the recovery allowing you to combo off of the slam into abilities you perform on the ground. You can animation cancel after the uppercut to allow you to do an air ability or jump up a cliff that you wouldn't normally but able to jump up. Etc.

<strong><em>Movement abilities that do not alter the state of your character</em></strong> - What I mean by this is what is mostly teleports that allow you to be mobile while casting or an ability is already active. Examples of this is mages casting while using Shimmer in WoW or the number of teleport combos in gw2 like backstab -> steal on thief or churning earth -> lightning flash on elementalist. Often used with abilities that have a large start up and then you teleport just before the active part of the ability goes off.

This is can be more fun and have more applications than having the movement and damage ability be 1 ability. Again like animation cancels this allows you to get really creative with your combat. If you are against an opponent and you have a teleport up they have to be aware of what you may teleport into them with at any time. Some really cool applications can be with chain abilities. Don't care for the first 2 attacks of a chain but the 3rd one is juicy damage? Use the first 2 from range and teleport with the 3rd one. Heck it's even extremely telegraphed for the opposing player if they know to look for that. It just creates really cool gameplay I think.

<strong><em>Abilities create a large portion of your mobility</em></strong> - At least for some classes! I'm playing Black Desert at the moment and It's a really cool feeling to have my movement be such an active part of my game play rather than just holding strafe or forward for my movement. In almost every game there is at least a small portion of combat or out of combat time spent using abilities for your mobility and I'm saying I prefer it to be a large portion.

So these are my 3 things. Comment on my ideas or suggest some ideas for combat you'd like to see!

ArchivedUser

First of all you can just say feints not animation cancels. Secondly feints only work well if you do it right. Otherwise it will be abused like bashing in For Honor. A prime example of this is that you prepare a large charge attack with warrior so the enemy uses a attack with a lesser charge time to try and stun you before you get it off in that case the warrior can feint and rush the enemy. You could say the enemy could do the same but that kind of attack you probably cant feint with unless you want to put feints in all skills.

ArchivedUser

In my humble opinion, feints are a good idea but are not the kind of combat u want to see in an MMORPG with large scaled open world pvp.
You can either make the combat really quick and totally action oriented like in black desert, or you aim for a more reactive style like in tera... the next possibility is soft/tab targeting which hopefully is not the style they aim for.
if u choose the fast paced combat u will have to implement a combo system like in black desert, and even tho this is a lot of fun, to me its mostly button smashing and facerolling... only in the higher levels when people played their class a lot they would start to understand how it works and with 64 possible class combinations and say each class with a variety of only 20 skills in their repertoire, we would talk about 1280 different skills.... no one can memorize that...
I would preferr a Tera-ish combat system... where we still have action combat but can't do 10 different skills in 1 second...
I would like to have feints, but with a little time penalty before using another skill. maybe just 0.5 seconds. this way some1 can react and its physically more accurate.

<a href="https://www.ashesofcreation.com/forums/topic/solo-experience-character-creation-and-progressionwhat-about-goldsellers/" target="_blank">Solo experience, character creation and progression?What about Goldsellers?!?</a> view this Link for my thoughts

ArchivedUser

I've never played Tera my self but the pvp looks great. The amount of mobility I would want would be no where near Black Deserts. Probably somewhere around what GW2 often had. I just enjoy it to be a very active part of what I'm doing and in gw2 it was often use 2 MASSIVE mobility moves to get half way across the spvp map and then walk for the next 30 seconds. I think its more fun to have maybe 4 to 5 movement abilities with shorter ranges on 5-8 second cooldowns allowing you to move in evasive and unpredictable ways.

I prefer to say animation cancels. Animation cancel is self-describing, so great for people who don't know what we are talking about, and a much more used word across the gaming community. I think it describes a slightly broader range of things that can happen than feint does.

A big reason the 3 ideas I posted appeal to me is because I'm someone who really enjoys the challenge in games mechanically. And if the mechanical challenge is not just "Can you hit your 70+ keybinds" and much more about controlling my character in a way that makes me faster or more evasive or do more damage in a fun way then I'm sold.

ArchivedUser

I think we have beaten Combat topics to death on this forum. For now we need to wait and see. We know they are going with some form of tab target but not the traditional tab target. They also have a form of combat already done so let's wait and see.

ArchivedUser

I would like to see a more action oriented tab targeting system. I think there needs to be a good amount of movement and evading so that it is not static. Also casters should be able to move while casting spells.

ArchivedUser

If your PvP is skill based, rather than gear based, you have a winner for the Western market.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=7428]If your PvP is skill based, rather than gear based, you have a winner for the Western market.

[/quote]

^ This.

This x 1000

Though honestly it should be a bit of a mix. Gear should help you, obviously if you've earned the gear, you should have a slight advantage. But if you go the way of some mmos where gear is everything. You'll lose a lot of people in the western market. Imo. That's not to say you /won't/ still have a huuuge player base who are okay with gear grinding~

ArchivedUser

I've kind of mulled over combat systems before on games I have played, and I think a mix of maybe League's and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning if implemented right, could make a really good combat system. In KOA, the game itself didn't do well, but the combat was amazing, having a system designed with a really good balance of fast paced combat, while still maintaining high cool downs on abilities so that each one felt meaningful. For example, you could start off with one ability that would turn into a combo, it would look badass and feel fast, though it would last for a couple of seconds. Once you finished that combo however, you would have to change to your other abilities as the combo had a longer cool down. The reason this works I feel is that, like in League of Legends, you only have four abilities yet dueling someone is very fast and reaction based, where one missed ability could throw it all. Even though this is a mmorpg, the system League and Amalur uses could be implemented in AoC as both systems fulfill in letting players have fast paced yet skill driven combat, while not feeling like your are mashing your face into the keys. Just for reference KOA was a RPG games so there was no PvP in it, and League is soley PvP, yet they both have amazing combat imo, so put together maybe?

ArchivedUser

The first two suggestions made above account for 90% of cheese in MMO combat for a good portion of the communities and is a large part of not being able to retain players with slower connections or lower tech rigs. I've provided my own suggestion with the response to the two points.

<strong>Instead of Animation Cancelling, Have Varied Versions of a Single Skill</strong>
Animation cancelling makes no sense thematically or physically/metaphysically. It would be far better to allow light, medium and heavy versions of each skill attack that can be selected and dropped in, with less response and more efficiency for heavy versions and more response and less efficiency for lighter versions. That's a better setup and negates timing/connection/lag as a concern to get the same effect.

<strong>Moving shouldn't cancel skills, but should change the efficiency of the skill.</strong>
Moving should diminish efficiency and response as well. It's the same as trying to shoot at a target while on horseback versus being still, and even more so if your target is moving. Tab targeting already makes that an issue with 100% accuracy in hitting, so to convey that, there should be a cost to trying to do two (or more) things at once. A solid stance should convey focus on actions taken while standing, and active movement should translate to wilder actions (e.g. A moving attacker attacks a moving defender: The attack damage is reduced, but so is block chance; A fixed attacker attacks a moving defender: The attack damage is increased, but evade chance is increased; A fixed attacker attacks a fixed defender: The attack damage is increased but the block chance is higher; A moving attacker attacks a fixed defender: The attack damage is reduced but the block chance is reduced.)

ArchivedUser

@OP

No on anicancel (or most properly known as ani-cancer). It's a stupid mechanism that originates from buggy games. It also breaks balance everywhere.


[quote quote=7428]If your PvP is skill based, rather than gear based, you have a winner for the Western market.

[/quote]

See For Honor? It's skilled based, and yet people aren't satisfied, despite the combat being pretty damn decent. Gear SHOULD always count in pvp, you work for your gear, and there's absolutely no point in having imba armor just to be equal to some slacker in farming shoes. :P

ArchivedUser

Yeah, animation canceling is pretty annoying, but it does require actively learning the combos to perform unless it's just super easy to. Honestly, instead of using animation canceling as a way to make fast combos and getting into places you usually couldn't, wouldn't it just be easier with actual skill combos with hit boxes? So then the skill would come from placement and timing of skills, while animation canceling seems at least to me, to be something that just allows the users to cheat out skills faster than those who don't know how to ani-cancel.

ArchivedUser

Good things in my book:
- Combos, lot's of them, preferably ones that branch/merge
- Dodging
- Blocking
- Trade-offs (well that's just generally good game-design)
- Interruption windows
- Pacing (i.e. there's a time to go fast and a time for taking it easy) in regards to both encounters and skill rotations)
- Varied weaknesses, maybe even an elemental weaknesses/resistances
- Aaand despite the negative sentiment in this thread, Animation Cancels, because they provide a fun thing to master, and they speed up combat for those who are good at them. (Not feints, but when you use two abilities in a combo and one of them cancels the recovery of the previous. Similar and also a good thing, is when one ability speeds up the next ability in a combo)

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=9303]Good things in my book:
– Combos, lot’s of them, preferably ones that branch/merge
– Dodging
– Blocking
– Trade-offs (well that’s just generally good game-design)
– Interruption windows
– Pacing (i.e. there’s a time to go fast and a time for taking it easy) in regards to both encounters and skill rotations)
– Varied weaknesses, maybe even an elemental weaknesses/resistances
– Aaand despite the negative sentiment in this thread, Animation Cancels, because they provide a fun thing to master, and they speed up combat for those who are good at them. (Not feints, but when you use two abilities in a combo and one of them cancels the recovery of the previous. Similar and also a good thing, is when one ability speeds up the next ability in a combo)

[/quote]

I agree with pretty much all of those. I just don't want there to be like two long rows of icons so I have to hit anywhere from 1-0 and F1-F12 to execute skills. That kind of layout has always been daunting to me and honestly not fun because I'm always more preoccupied on interacting with my keyboard than the game. Plus, as someone who doesn't have a game mouse, I can't move my character around and do skills at the same time if I have to rely on the number keys.

I'd prefer it to be like a mix of BDO and B&S. I don't like floating mouse cursors on the screen because it's not immersive.

I'd also like there to be personal events with danger specific to that enemy. Like a wolf might leap and pin down your character and you have to have some sort of mini event where you have to activate a skill to break free. Failing the event means the event starts over so you can possibly die altogether, or you lose a big chunk of health. Allies could also intervene if they deal enough damage or deploy a knock-back skill. I'd like to see this kind of thing across all enemies because it helps sell the realism and danger, especially later on.

Like if I'm max level, I should theoretically be able to commit genocide on low level mobs, but if I get pinned down by one and all of the others circle around me and I'm taking damage from 12 wolves at once, maybe that is something that could kill me because I'm in a vulnerable state in the quick-time event.Probably too big of an idea to realistically expect though for every enemy, maybe just the higher level ones.

I would also like to see high level skills or high level combos have extra events built in for them to execute as well. For example, let's say you have the swordsman class. You can do your basic attacks and small combos, but you can chain together really long combos if done correctly, but the further into the execution it gets, the harder it is to execute because you will start getting visual cues from your character animation as to when a good time to hit the button, and this time is variable each time you start the combo.

And this might stray too far away from tradition, but take another example like with a mage. Let's say late game you have access to some sort of "ultimate devastation" spell that will consume like half of your mana and has to be executed within a certain window of time. You start executing, and magical stuff starts appearing around you (like a magic circle starts to form, or something that visually denotes how much time you have left). For these ultimate magics, you need something like words of power or a completely artificial language that the game developers make that's just for magic. To learn these words, you have to delve into dangerous ruins or complete quests that only appear in a region from like level 5 or 6 onward. Complete one, and you learn the word for 'water.' Complete more and you start building a vocabulary. Things like: push, ,circle, protect, fire, lift, wall... And once you learn these words, they have to be strung together quickly in an interface that appears when you start the complex magic. Then you can create dynamic ultimate magic based on your current character progress, making veterans more versatile on the field that can react creatively in battles. So if my guild goes to war and I see that there's a platoon of enemy mages using tons of fireballs, I might start my magic and string together the words 'fire' 'circle' and 'protect'. At the end of it, I have a large scale AoE circle that I can cast on my allies that will add a fire protection shield to each person for a window of time, or pop up a huge bubble shield that blocks fire projectiles from only enemies. At the same time, this chant might last 10 seconds and can be interrupted and you still might lose the mana.

I'd also like there to be some sort of survivalist combat mode, where the damage is more realistic. Like getting hit with 3 arrows will kill you. Receiving a couple of good slashes will kill you. A fireball will kill you. I want like a Tom Clancy Rainbow Six seriousness survival mode where you have to play very carefully and strategically instead of whittling down a health bar and following a generic fight style that we see for each archetype across all MMORPGs. Something that requires finesse.
Something like: You have a mage, knight, and a ranger. The knight could hold up his shield and crouch, and that would block damage from the ranger, but leaves you immobile and a fireball could come flying your way. The Ranger has to always be on the move because he doesn't have protection and has to keep distance, or can take cover in bushes and wait. The mage also has to keep distance but his chants root him in place or very much slows him down. They could be in a forest, trying to find each other and use trees as cover. There could be an interesting balance of give an take if such a mode exists. Maybe in some sort of Colosseum format where you can have spectators watch.

I'd also like the environment to be a factor. Playing in a desert or snowy regions depletes stamina more quickly. Casting ice magic on a pond would freeze it, killing everything inside. Being able to push enemies off of cliffs or lure them into quicksand. Rangers being able to attach traps to trees so enemies can be caught and held up in a net while the ranger fires into it. Wind in a region might actually impact arrow flight. Sprinting through the woods can actually make you fall and lose balance and take damage as opposed to sprinting on the ground.

That's all I can really think of for now.

ArchivedUser

<strong>Progression:</strong> I cannot stress how important gear ceilings are in games to alleviate grind. Gear progression should be relatively quick with the gear endgame being largely cosmetic. This makes open world PvP much less scary, as those who have gear cannot continuously pk those without gear, as well as preventing there from being a mile high gear-based entry barrier to PvP such as in Black Desert.
I would like to see a gear scaling system in open world where after a hard-cap of certain stats, gear gives diminishing returns e.g. any agility points over 200 are counted, but with only 5-10% efficacy (or less), while in PvE (against NPC's) stats are counted at 100% efficacy with no diminishing returns. This allows for a feeling of PvE progression, gives PvP focused players a minor incentive to access PvE content, and prevents gear from being overpowered/useless in PvP.

<strong>Lag:</strong> As to the objections for animation canceling and other faster paced combat mechanics causing players with worse rigs or internet connections to be at a disadvantage, I would urge you to consider the alternative, being that the combat would be unbelievably slow paced, and far less skill/reflex oriented. I don't believe it's possible to design a real time combat system where players aren't punished for lag (brain or internet) that isn't a snoozefest.

Evasion: For the love of god no passive blocks or evades please. Nothing is as tilting or immersion breaking like watching arrows and sword strikes pass through someone while having "Miss" text pop up. Passive evade opens doors for players to both attack and defend at the same time which leads to uninteractive gameplay(~3 second duration is okay). Active dodges that give i-frames, and blocks that are treated as channels are more than find with me, as long as they are used in moderation with clear visual tells, and not spammable.

<strong>Ass Kissing:</strong> It's nice to see a Gw2 PvP pro (OP) offering their thoughts on an ideal MMORPG combat system. As someone who plays Guild Wars 2, which in my opinion has the best small scale and large scale pvp combat I've seen in an MMO, I'm honestly hoping for a system that is somewhat similar in Ashes of Creation.

Sorry for the wall of text, but these are the fundamental mechanics for MMO PvP that make or break it for me.