Vaildez said:Combat is the most repetitive thing that will happen in a MMO...Whether you are hitting 2-5 buttoms less frequently or spamming 8-10 quickly neither of those things excite me. If the main reason you are playing MMO's is for the combat system you are doing something wrong. In EQ 1 it really depended on the class you played some were much more involved than others but I would hope it's at least more involved than Warriors/Rogues who literally press like 1 buttom in combat.
Unless you are soloing, combat is way more than just hitting buttons.
The interaction between the abilities of each group member, the timing of those interactions, the change in tactics in response to specific monster abilities and groups of monsters, progression through a sequence of encounters, etc, etc is the biggest challenge and fun in the game, if you are doing it right and if the game has gotten it right.
I enjoyed EQ, i do not want some arcade chinese MMO that hacks and slash at mobs. IF it is, it will be my most expensive coffee coaster ever.
I like change, but i like what EQ had then, and it is still running today. So why change what some of us really enjoy? Just saying....
Vaildez said:Whether you are hitting 2-5 buttoms less frequently or spamming 8-10 quickly neither of those things excite me.
I think we all want our combat choices to be meaningful instead of choreographed. Rather than a rotation of abilities we want to use our skills strategically. We want situational awareness to be important and I think VR gets that. I am pretty excited to see what they come up with.
Iksar said:Rogue said:No. EQ 1 combat is boring. Coming from a live launch player in 98, a p99 launch player to agnarr player now. It's boring. BORING lol. So boring and so one dimentional. I can solo a dragon on a shaman while watching TV. Don't even get me started on melee. It's not a matter of being creative or learning to play, once you learn to play your class or any class properly, the game just gets boring because it's simple. Even in running raids with skeleton crew guilds. There is a reason why people can box 6 toons easily and more with programs.
To be fair, modern MMO combat isn't much better and I can still watch Netflix while doing just about anything (especially as a DPS class).
Straight auto-attack is no good but spamming hotkeys/doing ability rotations is also tired and doesn't feel good or particularly skillful.
One thing I wish had been expanded upon with other MMOs was FFXI's skillchain system, where performing a sequence of skills in a certain order and with good timing produced different elemental bursts of bonus damage. I know EQ2 had something of the sort with Heroic Opportunities but from what I understand it was not fun, required no skill, the rewards were mostly useless anyway, and all around poorly implemented. The problem with these tend to be they become the requirement and people just do them over and over, group to group.
It probably isn't possible with a limited action set but I'd like to see some kind of skillchain system that perhaps isn't under much (if any) direct control by the player when it comes to starting it. So something like: Warrior gets a string a 3 successful blocks unlocking use of Shield Slam, warrior uses Shield Slam which dazes the enemy and opens use of Expose Weakness for a few seconds for the ranger, ranger uses Expose Weakness which opens up Exploit Weakness for the rogue, rogue uses Exploit Weakness for a high damage hit that ignores the targets AC. Or maybe a DPS lands a string of crits which gives the mob a debuff "Staggered" for a couple seconds, that debuff opens the tank to use Armor Break to lower the targets AC by x% for a few seconds for the party. Likewise you could have something a little more in the control of players along the lines of: Group fighting a mage mob land x successful interrupts in a row marking the mob with a "Shaken" debuff, this could open up something like Supress Will to a caster that then makes the next spell to hit the mob ignore all resistances.
To me combat is more exciting/engaging when I feel like my button presses matter for more than just lowering the HP bar. Well timed interrupts/clutch CC, having to pay attention to and reacting to what the mob is doing over just mashing a rotation or couple hotkeys over and over. So here is to hoping Pantheon has complex mobs with often unpredictable behavior.
The skillchain system from FFXI was pretty awesome. I played EQ2 for about 5 years and will admit that the heroic opportunity feature they used was pretty bland. It basically served as one more button to press (You would add a hotkey to your bar that opened the HO) and then there was a variety of ways to continue the HO with the group. It was mostly a spam fast. Every now and then you would see a "window of opportunity" where a fighter had to use a "boot" ability. The boot was a "kick" ability that all fighters had. The main issue with it is that the window only lasted 3-4 seconds and it was quite possible that the ability would be on cooldown due to a player actually using it for it's designed purpose in combat. Kick was used as an interrupt. So players had to make the choice ... do I use my interrupt ability to interrupt an attack? Or do I use it to advance this chain, that may or may not be completed, depending on how other group members are managing their own cooldowns?
Most of the HO chains ended up being worthless anyway. I think there were a couple of them that were semi-useful early on (T5) that granted a decent temporary buff but they were pretty rare. At the end of the day, the entire HO system felt extremely gimmicky. If there was an HO going, and you had an ability that could be used to advance the chain, it would literally blink on your hotbar, encouraging you to use it. The kick example is just one of many. You would see clerics smiting mobs with no rhyme or reason, scouts using tricks, blah blah blah. I honestly think that most good groups added the HO initiator to their combat sequence and when the full HO chain ended up being completed, it was looked at as a small bonus ... but it really wasn't wise to go out of your way to complete them as in most cases, you could blow CD's that served a greater purpose than completing the actual chain anyway. Interrupting an ability with kick was more worthwhile than extending an HO chain with kick.
Skillchains in FFXI, on the other hand, were much more tactical. You used TP (a resource that would charge while you participate in combat) to initiate, extend, or finish a skill-chain. Each class had a variety of TP abilities they could use depending on what kind of weapon they had equipped, and they could charge up to 3 levels. So a warrior could initiate the chain with a T1 shield break attack OR a T1 fire ability if they were using an axe ... but generally they would use this ability at a moment where it actually made sense to do so, not just to initiate the chain. A melee class could extend the chain with a high DPS attack of their own, and then a caster could execute the chain by using a powerful nuke. Depending on the actions used in the various stages of the chain, the more overall bonus damage would be applied. Either way, there was a rhyme and reason with what abilities you used, and what order you set up the chain.
Here is a page that provides some more information on how the skillchains actually worked. It was an awesome system, and really complimented the XP chain feature that was also utilized: http://ffxiclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Skillchains
It's important to note that FFXI combat was much more similar to original EQ than it was EQ2. The combat was slower paced and executing a skill chain was much more an exception than the rule. With EQ2 you could literally spam the HO key as often as you liked, sometimes even cancelling out an already ongoing HO chain. In FFXI, they were used tactfully. Sometimes you would want your rogue to initiate, sometimes you would want them to finish. In EQ2, it was just a button mashing event that would actually hamper your combat effectiveness if you put any extra weight into the HO's beyond just randomly using the trigger and seeing what could happen with a groups standard ability rotation. Additionally, there were a lot of elemental bonuses applied to the skillchains in FFXI ... so if you were fighting something weak to fire, you would try and utilize a chain that applied bonus fire damage. If you were fighting something weak to ice damage and had high evasion, you would try to use a skillchain that applied bonus ice damage and lowered the enemy evasion.