Where is the Action Combat?

Greetings fellow adventurers,

As an avid follower of the development progress of Ashes of Creation, I cannot help but express my concerns regarding the direction of its combat system. While the game showcases remarkable progress in various aspects, particularly its stunning visuals and immersive world-building, the emphasis on tab target combat in recent updates, notably the Node Wars update, raises questions about the game's combat experience.

While tab target combat has its merits, catering to a specific subset of players, I worry that prioritizing it over action combat might alienate a significant portion of the player base. Action combat, known for its dynamic and engaging gameplay, holds immense potential to elevate the gaming experience, offering a more visceral and responsive gameplay style.

As we eagerly anticipate the release of Ashes of Creation, I find myself pondering whether the combat mechanics will shine as brightly as the rest of the game. Is the development team fully aware of the community's expectations regarding combat? Have they considered implementing a true hybrid combat system that seamlessly integrates both tab target and action elements?

While I remain optimistic about the game's future, I believe it's essential to voice our concerns and aspirations as a community. Let us engage in constructive dialogue and collectively strive for a gaming experience that truly resonates with all players.

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Comments

Laetitian

Sethz wrote: »

When I see this, I get worried about the combat system - I liked BDO's combat system the most, followed by GW2 and ESO.
Having to use 27 binds for combat alone is not what combat should be in my opinion.

I agree it's not action combat, but it's essential for good tab-target/locked-target style combat. It allows you to have to think about what to do when, instead of just being a braindead repetitive rotation smashing. I did a whole thread on this, I won't contribute more here after this comment.

Essentially, if you want to do a hybrid game, you have to give enough depth to the tab-target portion, or it will just be braindead button mashing on top of the action combat features; and if you give enough depth to the tab-target portion, you can't do insane action-combat mechanics, because people wouldn't have enough hands to do both; fast aim & instant reaction speeds, and pressing 30 different buttons.

But I just want you to think about how much more strategy there is to having to think on-the-fly about which skills of your 20-40 skills to use in response to what your enemy is doing, compared to being restricted to the same 8-12 abilities, where regardless of what situation comes up, the most efficient answer will always either be to put everything you have on cooldown, or spam one bread-and-butter ability 10 times in a row.

Swifty00

The real problem is that if you make a mix of tab targeting and action targeting you have to incentivise the action targeting by making it do more damage so that you compensate for it being able to miss.

This becomes more of a problem with ranged abilities as the chance to miss increases. If you don't incentivise it enough, then it isn't worth using.

Now this is great for the highly skilled top 10%? of your customer base, but rather like the unathletic not being terribly keen on sport, it is essentially upsetting more people than it is making happy. It is very difficult to balance and very possibly impossible to balance.

My thought is that action targeted stuff should be multi-target/AoE so that accuracy is less of a thing, and that if you do have a single target ability it is long cooldown and/or has a channelled component for maximum damage, so it isn't game-breaking, and can be interrupted.

You wont see much action combat until the end of A2, because the difficulty is in the balance not in implementing them, and it would be a huge distraction during initial testing.

If you are pro action combat, I would remain hopeful though. Intrepid seem to be creating a tight bond between PvPers and PvEers that encourages the PvP players to defend (their own) PvE players, like you would villagers in Age of Empires. The better they achieve this goal, the more skill based abilities and bonuses you will see.

Arya_Yeshe

nice chatgpt thread post bro lol

also i gotta say, i am tired of having a "i am concerned" thread every week, since when we are getting those? whe i first came there there were posts like that already

Mag7spy

Sethz wrote: »

When I see this, I get worried about the combat system - I liked BDO's combat system the most, followed by GW2 and ESO.
Having to use 27 binds for combat alone is not what combat should be in my opinion.

BDO actually has more button combinations than that, the key is setting buttons up to use multi inputs Shift+E Shift+F, Shisft+mouse click, etc

Solmyr

Swifty00 wrote: »

My thought is that action targeted stuff should be multi-target/AoE so that accuracy is less of a thing, and that if you do have a single target ability it is long cooldown and/or has a channelled component for maximum damage, so it isn't game-breaking, and can be interrupted.

As far as I've seen, this is already the plan. Just about every spell they've shown is either a tab target aimbot or a cleaving AoE/template ability.

Sengarden

I do personally wish the game was able to be entirely action based. But it would alienate a large portion of the playerbase which Steven is trying to target - old school style MMO players. Action combat in a large MMO space is also not perfected yet - there's a lot of room for latency issues and targeting errors.

As for the hybrid concept, a true hybrid of the two systems would be impossible. If you make it so that any class can be played as either tab or action, you inevitably end up with a system where players who're capable / willing to train action combat skills will ALWAYS outperform tab players. Because tab will always be easier than action, you'd have to make it that way.

Action combat introduces opportunities for error where tab does not. So you either have to make the performance ceiling at the level of tab, then force action combat players to always be at the top of their game in order to compete, or you have to make the the performance ceiling a shared space between tab combat and the average action combat player, whatever that intangible means, ultimately resulting in the average action player being just as good as the best tab player and the best action players being better than the best tab players. The whole concept is just a mess.

The only other option for true action/tab combat is to make some classes action only and some classes tab only, but I'm positive that would just make people riot. I wouldn't want it either.

The solution Intrepid came up with was a faux-action / tab hybrid. The 'action' system the game has now is essentially a soft-lock auto-target tab combat system with a reticle in the center of the screen instead of separate mouse and camera controls. So it feels snappier, but it's also less precise, since people can more easily body-block your targeting, where tab combat allows you to target past groups of people. I really don't see their 'action' combat system getting much use, personally.

It's disappointing, but I never had any expectations for Intrepid to actually produce a good full-action combat system in an MMO when even the 'big-dogs' in the industry haven't done it that well yet. Not trying to throw shade, but Intrepid has struggled over the past several years putting together a decent tab combat system, and it's still not fully there yet. Now you're asking for true action? Sorry, it's just not gonna happen.

hleV

Sengarden wrote: »

The only other option for true action/tab combat is to make some classes action only and some classes tab only, but I'm positive that would just make people riot.

This, but for abilities rather than whole classes. Basically it would be like this:
- a lot of melee abilities are action and don't require a target;
- a lot of ranged abilities are tab, however you may hold a key to "free aim" them if needed.
So you don't end up with aim contest and the ranged abilities actually hit, meanwhile in close range melee you just cleave without worrying about the target (most of the time). Not only does this make it a fair "hybrid" system for both close and long range classes, but it's way easier to balance because you don't need to think of two separate ways (action and tab) of using the same ability, and you don't need to consider player's mechanical skill (aim) that much.

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