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Favorite and least favorite mechanics to face in PvP
Wandering Mist
Moderator, Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha One
When making a multiplayer game it's important to think about mechanics that are fun to use, but also fun to play against.
With that in mind I'd like you to list the mechanics you love to play against, as well as mechanics you hate to play against.
I'll start. I love to play against positional-based abilities and terrain-based CC. For example, abilities that have different effects depending on if the target is facing towards you or away from you. For terrain-based CC, this is something quite common in games like LoL but rarely seen outside of it, where you have some kind of knockback ability and if you knock someone into a wall, they get stunned.
I hate playing against any kind of invisibility or stealth, especially when there's no visual indicator that someone is invisible near you.
That's it for me, so what are YOUR favorite and least favorite game mechanics?
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT making this thread as a member of Intrepid Studios and nothing in this thread is meant to provide feedback to the developers. This is purely for fun and an interesting discussion point.
With that in mind I'd like you to list the mechanics you love to play against, as well as mechanics you hate to play against.
I'll start. I love to play against positional-based abilities and terrain-based CC. For example, abilities that have different effects depending on if the target is facing towards you or away from you. For terrain-based CC, this is something quite common in games like LoL but rarely seen outside of it, where you have some kind of knockback ability and if you knock someone into a wall, they get stunned.
I hate playing against any kind of invisibility or stealth, especially when there's no visual indicator that someone is invisible near you.
That's it for me, so what are YOUR favorite and least favorite game mechanics?
DISCLAIMER: I am NOT making this thread as a member of Intrepid Studios and nothing in this thread is meant to provide feedback to the developers. This is purely for fun and an interesting discussion point.
3
Comments
I know stealth is a very popular mechanic to use, but do you enjoy facing stealthed characters?
i dont really mindit. there are ways around it. i also dont like if there is an indicator that there is someone stealthed near you or if they are too easy to detect. it ruins the mechanic.
probably the thing i dislike is when there is a character that can perma kite and hit from 496785675 meters away and i cant reach them lol
I like when there are options to give your class limited use of something that's not in its skill kit by default. Engineering in WoW had lots of those weird items that would do that. Mind control helmet, explosives, jump cables (could resurrect), etc.
Hate very long fear effects (victim running away in the directly opposite direction from the attacker w/o being able to do anything).
Definitely agreed on the hard CC - nothing worse than being CC-locked to death with zero counterplay.
Would you extend that to all hard CC, or just fear mechanics specifically?
Mobility for sure with classes and good defensive actions so it has a element of skill involved. Ability to react is important to have good skill ceilings with the right balance of speed / cooldowns.
What I dislike is when people can stay in iframe or link lingering forms of protection and that becomes the gameplay loop. Which is important to have the right balance of CC and not too much where you feel the need to add other mechanicals to balance it out like linger protection that does not allow you to be cc.
I guess combining fear with a slow effect would resolve my issue, but then it's a question of balancing a double-effect ability vs other, potentially, single-effect ones.
I don't like playing against cancerous amounts of CC that have no counterplay. I remember back in AA there was this mage build that everyone used which would CC lock you for over 30 seconds paired with high burst damage channels in between. To my knowledge, the only way to get a CC break was from a special item that was bought from the store. Luckily Ashes will have both diminishing returns and CC breaks built into the classes.
L2's +30 cost Curse of Fear was definitely an unbalanced abomination
I love RNG Mechanics in PvP that makes players properly make extra plans and adapt on the fly to unpredictable possibilities and outcomes.
I hate spam of extended iFrames and/or spam of ultra defensive mechanics with no counterplay.
Aren't we all sinners?
This is why I hated it
That particular version of skill required a toooon of resources to get though, but even the base version wasn't much better imo.
I like jumps, rushes, blinks, warps, etc. It's fun to take advantage of your mobility against heavier targets or simply fly across the battlefield between them.
that wasnt the final duration. still long enough to lose a 1v1 but not long enough to matter in group play, unless u were the healer and got feared xD
For me it's:
- RNG elements. Any class that would trigger 1/6 options for instance, or have hugely varied damage just ruins it for me.
- One-shot abilities with little to no counterplay.
- Unfair Resource starvation. Running out of x resource with zero way to recover making you useless in a fight for an extended period of time when you otherwise couldn't have ended the fight earlier anyway.
PvX OCE/SEA Guild
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Intrepid's intention of a 30~60s TTK for pvp is one of the highlights for me, even tho A1 and last stream the game still has a 5s TTK like most MMOs
What I dont like is gameplay focused solely on just chain stunning the enemy until it is dead. PvP designed around hard CC is just bad.
My multiplayer pvp experience began in gw1 when the game launched, and I stayed there for years because of how great the team based pvp experience was. Hard stuns existed, (like 3s or 4s knockdowns), but they were very expensive, and spamming them exhausted the character, removing them from the fight for a minute. The team play relied on 1 or more characters setting up or pressuring specific things so the rest of the team could score a kill.
GW1 pvp has never been topped in group play pvp in almost the 20 years since its been around (2005 I think???) I look back on those years the game was alive and wish any game would even try to approach that level of group play.
Dont look at GW2, GW2 pvp is a dumpster fire that is on trash and smells bad.
Which means that there aren't realy class/weapon playstyles in PvP, just the same rotation pattern with different flashy colours across all classes. There is no action and reaction, no strategy against different opponents, no situational skill usage.
It also males largescale PvP a blind, no-need-to-pick-targets zergfest of AoE button mashing, whether heals, CCs or dmg, whilst following the leader.
Favourite mechanics:
Counter attacks. Encountered only in Tera Online.
There was an ability on the Warrior class that when used while your opponent was about to land a hit with a direct attack, you could interrupt and stun them.
You couldnt spam counter attack and wait to turn the tables on your enemy.
If you used it against the wrong types of strikes it wouldnt work and you'd put the counter atk skill on cooldown (a big waste).
Such designs make you pay attention and when executed correctly offer big payout, both in gameplay and in satisfaction.
1. Stealth. Whether it's been in Dark Age of Camelot, or WoW, or anything in between, it's been a shit mechanic for PvP. It has zero real counterplay. Someone sits around in stealth until they find someone they can gank and burst down easily - usually someone who's relatively undergeared compared to them. The amount of work involved in trying to proactively deal with stealthed enemies isn't fun, it's disproportionate, and it's unrewarding. This has been universal across every game with stealth in PvP. Stealth generally isn't an issue in group PvP environments because the risk of a stealthed character attacking someone is much higher unless they plan ahead properly with their own friends/allies, and in that case a successful attack by a stealthed character is something that requires skill and coordination, which is good. But most PvP in this game is going to be small scale, realistically, with large group PvP being relegated to particular situations. So it has been in games like ArcheAge. I'd rather characters be designed to have a toolkit that's pretty generally useful and contributes to fighting actively in a team setting (as opposed to something vague like "scouting" as your contribution to the team), than a toolkit which in reality is orientated around solo ganking - which is what stealth classes ultimately end up being reduced to.
2. Crowd control. CC is good because it stops another thing I dislike, which is endless kiting. But getting chain-CC'd means that there's no counterplay and the encounter is solved before you press any buttons - it's easily resolved by having cleanse effects also give you a buff that stops you from being CC'd by another player again for a few seconds, at least giving you time to CC them back or run away.
I hate those two dynamics roughly equally.
Things I like;
1. Gap closers and gap makers. Being able to leap/teleport/whatever to an enemy for a melee class, and away as a ranged class, is good. It creates a sense of dynamism to the combat that feels engaging, and it's satisfying for players to have useful mobility options that have to be used carefully and with awareness of your surroundings.
For CC, since that’s a broad category where many different things cause the CC, the risk would need to match it. Most games have just relied on cooldowns and giving the opponent options for CC cleansing.
For stealth, design needs to provide uncertainty for the stealthy character to know the other players can’t see them. Meaning they are either walking into a target completely unnoticed or just crouching in plain sight, making them an easy target. Also think stealth in the open without any cause for stealth is just silly. Perhaps if everyone is in first person view and you were attempting to reduce the noise of an approach to get a jump on the character, then that would be OK, but this is a third person POV game.
Most obvious solution for kiting is the risk of tripping, slipping and falling. And when falling there should be a good likelihood you drop your weapon or worst case, damage it depending on the type. Nothing worse than tripping and having your quiver empty out on the ground.
But what I realy hate from global point of view:
- All types of Equalized PvP (equalizing of characters stats/gear), including equalized arenas
- Battle pets (class skill-based summons is fine)
- Ability to use 20 different consumable buffs like food or alchemy to strengthen in PvP (consumables except of HP/MP potions should be only PvE-oriented)
- And the worst one: ability to disable PvP on character-level (click button = you are not available to be attacked) and peace zones without possibility to PvP
damn someone has dota ptsd 💀
That works really well in games like Dota 2 because the arena is small and defined, in MMOs it's just a shiftfest. I think if invisible enemies was something people had to deal with regularly in PvE it might not be so bad because preparing for invisibility would then become part of the routine, so ganking wouldn't be so easy to do - but that in of itself can be horrific PvE gameplay. Really would rather stealth be designed for PvE and then have players have some sort of truesight where they can see invisible enemies within X meters of their position, and just make stealth classes useful outside of being stealthy for PvP.
1. cc chains, no counterplay, no interaction, anticlimactic
2. insane burst damage, limited to no counterplay, circumvents any mechanic that takes time, anticlimactic
Enjoyable:
1. lots of health points, lots of counterplay, possibly the most room for interactions, satisfying, more time for interaction, rich in fantasy
2. buffs, room for counterplay, predictable interaction, rewarding of interaction, synergy, combo potential, rewards teamwork
Not inherently problematic:
1. Stealth, can generally lead to a favorable initiation, if paired with problematic mechanics then it may be annoying, thematic, can be climactic
2. Healing, can create room for interaction, if done wrong will turn the game into a cc burst fest, counter mechanics like stacking buffs, debuffs, mana burn, and anti-healing make healing more interactive, healing should remain somewhat restricted