Best examples of Action Combat? Starting to Feel Like Tab > Action

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The Action used for Healers is explicitly designed in NWO to mimic Tab Target healing EFFECTIVENESS without coming out exactly the same way.

In fact, almost all healing works like this in MMORPGs of the last few years, with only two Innovative methods that I am aware of. I personally consider the innovative ones to be better suited for Action MMOs. So, from the perspective of 'could a player who is used to healing in a Tab Target game effectively act as a healer here while still experiencing some Action', the answer is yes.

From the perspective of 'could this have been done better or in a way more suited to improving the gameplay from the Action perspective', the answer is 'very yes'. That said, I think it's usually better for games to make healing 'easy and similar to tab target' since adding mechanical skill to healing is a barrier to entry for a reasonably large portion of the healerbase.

People already struggle with targeting and healing allies with Tab Target, particularly in mobility situations where they must get out of central attack cones/blast radii.

I think I can explain this directly, actually, so indulge me.

Healers are designed archaically in almost all games that are not Battle Arena shooters or specific MOBAs. Whether or not one likes the design, there are some factors that come up due to it.

Why are Healers a low mobility class?
Now, this isn't true in EVERY game, but consider it the other way. Why aren't they EXPLICITLY a high mobility class that heals from close range?

The answer is basically because it would be a type of challenge that most players in ye olde days that wanted to play 'as Healers' wouldn't want, and therefore we got 'stuck' with this sort of 'I magically call upon my Divine Power/Deity and that Deity knows exactly who I am pointing at and heals them' while I safely stand over here'.

But it would make much more 'sense' to at least have a type of Healer that is VERY mobile but heals at close range, whether they do that by 'magic' or not. In an Action-y game, a mobile Healer gets to experience the challenge too, of getting in and out of their healing position while avoiding damage. They wear light armor anyway in most games (and have no true justification for why they don't wear heavier armor other than old D&D tropes).

The class normally is in the backline 'because it's easier to not take damage there', but in an Action heavy game, where both the enemy and the tank/DPS are moving around quite a lot, this guarantee falls very quickly, yet the Healer remains static. The Healer just 'sits there and hopes that no one messes up and pulls the enemy to them or causes them to end up in an attack cone/circle'. But why? A healer could simply... be mobile... and react. If limited to closer range healing, and with longer 'recovery times' after certain mobility skills for using self heals (assume for example that a fast teleport-like dash up to another player to heal them, only works on OTHER players, because MAGIC), then the complaint of 'I can't catch the healer to kill them' changes too.

The Healer must come into RANGE to heal the person you are hurting, and therefore be in danger. As opposed to now, where other people have to devote focus and dedicated effort to catching the healer, making balance more difficult.

Action MMORPGs may someday stop doing this, just as some MOBAs and Shooters have done. And maybe then, 'Action vs Tab' will be less of a consideration...

Orrrr... a bunch of people will complain that they just want to heal and not have to move around all the time.

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That would essentially be the idea, yes. Ground AoE heals are a pain in a game with even medium mobility. Tab Target allows you to 'just lock and track' the ally, but results in 'becoming a heal turret', and designers then focus on 'how can we make your heals different or stronger?' instead of 'how can we challenge your skill in movement or targeting the way we are doing for everyone else?'

It results in Healers playing a relatively different game from everyone else, and then ALSO being relatively unable to defend themselves when placed into danger other than... standing still and healing themselves even MORE (which in turn again requires that their healing is even stronger).

This of course leads to the dualboxing epidemic soon after 'serious' or 'good' players realize that they could be more effective with a Pocket Healer instead of relying on a whole separate person that they have to communicate with.

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Sorry, I don't play those sorts of games.

I only play high-focus games with actual group mechanics, aim, etc. Not to knock what you're saying at all, I just am... 'above' that experience, to be frank. I've played too many better games, maybe the sort of games you're talking about, to even put any thought toward those simplistic/restrictive ones.

I just want to know if Ashes will end up being another simplistic/restrictive one, so I'm waiting. If it is, thankfully I have a backup, since I'm not in the 'No Cash For Ingame Advantage EVER!' crowd, so I can play Korean MMOs with less misery if the dynamic gameplay is good.

I'm fine with the Trinity system. I see no reason it needs to evolve away from that. But again, I play better games. Quite frankly the definitions and explanations I get for how that system works in most games just seems pathetic to me, but I don't have any negativity toward the Trinity system itself because I don't PLAY those games. I play ones where it works.

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Like I said, I don't think about any of these things. You're describing a world that I 'don't live in', to me.

Every time I hear about RPGs other than the ones I play and maybe two others, I think 'I'm so sad that the rest of you have to play this crap and form all these half-opinions, but I can't help much'. There's two options here.

1. All the games I hear about kind of suck.
2. All the people who explain the games kind of suck at them.

And it really doesn't matter which is true, to me. All that matters is that EITHER Ashes is great and not just another one of those same games, OR that Throne and Liberty is.

I appreciate your passion, but y'all up here talking about 'Action' and 'New Tanking Dynamics' and I'm thinking 'Is Rogue gonna get some equivalent of SATA Dancing Edge so my friend can dump Enmity onto our Bard when our Paladin needs to take a breather because all his mitigation skills are down, and if so, what options will the Bard have for kiting assuming she used her strongest Evasion buff performance?'

I'm sure that other games have some equivalent of stuff like this, but it's nearly never what we end up discussing around here.

tl;dr the MMOs I play ALREADY play like MOBAs (or whatever, to me it's just 'play like interesting games') and I'm just looking for the next good one because the 'fantasy' one I play is old. If Devs have stayed stale with it, I'm really sorry to hear that, but I don't care enough about the 'crusty inbetweens'. I have seven great games to play and I just wanna rotate out a slot to 'replace it with' something modern of at least reasonably equal quality.

But I'm not gonna talk about 'How good Seris or Corvus as healers' or 'How much fun it is to play healer/debuffer in space battles in Elite Dangerous' because that's just gonna summon Dygz unnecessarily. If Intrepid cares, I'm sure they know where to find my data posts.

So uh... yeah... I'll care when you and Dygz and whoever else get past the 'Action vs Tab', 'Trinity vs Innovation' or whatever stage of discussion, if that ever happens (depending on who you engage, it usually doesn't).

Good luck though, no sarc.

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That whole explanation makes me wish mmos split into "pvp and pve" subgenres instead of "tab and action or hybrid" subgenres. Because that sounds like a great pve design that is utterly useless in pvp. At which point, if you wanted to have pvp in the game and make gear variability important there too - you'd have to make a separate set of gear for that.

And I feel like if at least a few companies risked a good pvp game back in the WoW days, where the world would stay persistent, while player power would be semi-equalized with longtime hardcore players being a few steps above newbies but w/o utterly destroying them - the genre would've been better off because of that. But I guess that risk came in the form of mobas and fps games instead of big worlds that progress through time. The cheaper choice always wins

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L2's pve was the biggest gearcheck though. There were pretty much 0 gameplay mechanics to do while fighting, so it was just a dps check which came from gear. And later on even when there were some mechanics, the boss itself still was just a thiccque HP piñata that required you to have as best of a gear set as possible so that you wouldn't die due to running out on mp on your supports.

And that was mainly done because L2 gear was universal so you'd use it in both pve and pvp. Adding pve mechanics to that gear would introduce the "I gotta have a dozen different gear pieces" issue (as it did in the later updates where attributes were important), while having both pve and pvp versions would make that shit even worse (was also the case for any and all top lvl Oly champs, because they needed to counter the enemy att). And that's not even considering the augmentation on gear in L2. That shit added even more required gear to pvp.

And having a cool pve experience that interacts with your non-boring gear, while also supports the potential of there being some pvp around that pve experience, where you'd also need the same non-boring gear (unless you go for separated sets) - all of that would require a ton of great design and balancing from devs. And I guess Intrepid's trying to do that. Now I don't know how well they can manage it and whether it's even possible, but I sure hope it is cause it'll just prove that all the previous mmos just didn't even try to do that, for one reason or the other.

Yes, skill should be important in both pve and pvp, but I do agree with those saying that RPGs have usually depended highly on player's gear to define their power lvl. And the best representation of good pvp gear balance (imo) was L2, where you still needed good gear for pve, but weaker gear still worked just fine in pvp. But I can definitely say that the gear itself was super basic and usually had very similar stats on it, with higher gear tiers just having those stats higher.

I've heard that SWG had some good pvp and had an amazing crafting/gear system, if Intrepid manages to combine that system with L2's balancing - I feel like we might have one of the best gear systems in mmos. But obviously they'll have to prove that, so only the time will tell.

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Have never even heard of it in my corner of the internet. Did it flop so hard that no one else even attempted to make another mmo in the same "genre"?

edit: looked into it. Looks like it suffered the usual fate of old mmos w/o billions of dollars of support. Concept seems great and looks like Ashes will have some similar mechanics of player agency. And as one of the steam reviews pointed out, Ashes will also have one of the biggest issues with such a game - days/weeks/months of work can be destroyed within a day. So we'll see how Intrepid manages to avoid the game's death because of that mechanic.

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I dunno how DAOC was, but from all the other pvp mmorpgs I've seen they usually suffer from bots/p2w/exploits/etc on release and then rarely fix it. And even if they do fix it, it's usually too late. I'm not saying that they'll ever have more players than smth like wow or ff14, but as you said yourself, there's at least a million people ready to try out a mmorpg (even if they didn't call it that) with pvp in it. And even NW got killed by the same issues as all those other older pvp mmos. 20 fucking years, yet nothing has changed. Big sad.

NiKr wrote: »

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I dunno how DAOC was, but from all the other pvp mmorpgs I've seen they usually suffer from bots/p2w/exploits/etc on release and then rarely fix it. And even if they do fix it, it's usually too late. I'm not saying that they'll ever have more players than smth like wow or ff14, but as you said yourself, there's at least a million people ready to try out a mmorpg (even if they didn't call it that) with pvp in it. And even NW got killed by the same issues as all those other older pvp mmos. 20 fucking years, yet nothing has changed. Big sad.

Not exactly...

Remember that New World had to take out the no-flag PvP because of seal-clubbers.

Azherae wrote: »

Not exactly...

Remember that New World had to take out the no-flag PvP because of seal-clubbers.

Yeah, I know it's not as pvp as Ashes or older mmos, but it was still advertised as "mmo with pvp" iirc. And even with a $40 price it got 1 mil on release. And I'm sure if Amazon had not fucked up pretty much every single fucking thing they could've possibly fucked up - the game would've lasted way longer and would've had at least a few hundred thousand active players. Which is why Intrepid gotta iron out as many kinks as they can before release, considering that their pvp is harsher so it's gonna be a tougher sell.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Not exactly...

Remember that New World had to take out the no-flag PvP because of seal-clubbers.

Yeah, I know it's not as pvp as Ashes or older mmos, but it was still advertised as "mmo with pvp" iirc. And even with a $40 price it got 1 mil on release. And I'm sure if Amazon had not fucked up pretty much every single fucking thing they could've possibly fucked up - the game would've lasted way longer and would've had at least a few hundred thousand active players. Which is why Intrepid gotta iron out as many kinks as they can before release, considering that their pvp is harsher so it's gonna be a tougher sell.

But this would generally not change the way it flows, because the core flaw of how PvP MMOs are designed is to create antagonism with minimal benefit to all but the toughest of psyches.

New World, in particular, even with good design otherwise, simply shifted who was on the receiving end of that 'pain' by adding scaling so that lower level players could win fights. This resulted in a different set of people being salty and 'damaged'.

I'm not saying MMOs shouldn't have PvP, I'm saying that if that PvP happens outside of arenas or has real consequences, in the game paradigms we have available NOW, they suffer the same problem every time.

Azherae wrote: »

I'm not saying MMOs shouldn't have PvP, I'm saying that if that PvP happens outside of arenas or has real consequences, in the game paradigms we have available NOW, they suffer the same problem every time.

Which is why we're long overdue a paradigm shift. But it's so risky to do, moneywise, that no one even attempts it. And the ones who even try going for smth pvp-centric, usually go for nostalgia-inspired games, instead of trying to come up with a new system where owpvp might work in everyone's favor (if that is even possible obviously).