I don't like action combat, and it could very potentially stop me from playing

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Some people have innate timesense. Perhaps others don't. You know where this will go if you try to do a bunch of arguments based on that.

Your point is that you don't need to do anything else, right? But in a game where you did need to do something else, then your point wouldn't stand up to it, and there are plenty of Tab Target games where there is a lot to do, you just happen to not have played any.

You really wanna get into another long banter with people based on the fact that you haven't played certain games, by all means continue, but I'll join the chorus of saying that you seem moreso concerned about something you might not have an ability to do, or you're not addressing your own point.

Now the question of 'whether or not Intrepid should do something for players without innate timesense' is different, but it doesn't need to be answered because we know the ability bar does show cooldowns.

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And with body collision you'd only be able to attack people at the front, which will be purely tanks (cause that would be the immediate meta). And unless literally all abilities can be lobbed over the targets' heads, ya ain't hitting anyone behind those tanks. There's a reason why action combat games are usually purely open world and wide open spaces, because you're limited by environment design by combat design.

While back in L2 we had narrow chokepoints in castle sieges and dungeons. And you had to pick and choose your targets appropriately out of 50-100++ people on your screen.

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One of the worst things you can do to yourself in a competitive game is to conclude that because you can't/don't do something, other people can't/don't either. It leads to all sorts of negative reactions without purpose, and you never end up trying to address it with devs if they are taking feedback on the matter.

Making noise about it in that way just makes you seem incompetent or, at least for some others, misinformed, about the intentions, designs, and capabilities of others. I'm just telling you not to make yourself look 'bad' in another long argument that's going to just end up with 'people realizing that you can't do something they can do'.

And so, for your education, whether you choose to believe it or not, I can sometimes get that 'timer' in my head so calibrated that I 'start casting Haste', which is a buff with a 3 minute duration in the game I'm talking about, and then start recasting it before it's actually worn off the target (it has 3 seconds casting time) and have it wear off the target while I am casting.

I have done this automatically while doing everything else. No timers, no UI. I would never suggest a game be designed so that a person HAD to do this, but crowing about impossibilty will just make you seem silly to everyone else who has either done this or seen someone else do it.

All you've implied to someone like me is that you're bad at Tab Target games if you play any classes that require you to do any analysis or adaptation.

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And it's kinda the same way when it comes to huge pvp battles. The variety of counter play is much bigger and the ability to single out targets in a huge crowd is super important to setup that variety. You could throw some powerful debuffs on enemy healers or cancel some of their buffs in order to help your dps dudes to kill them faster and now you have an upperhand not only in hp, but in mana too, because even if their healer gets revived, they'll have to be rebuffed, which decreases their buffer's combat ability in the long run.

And that kind of interaction works at scale, from just a few parties fighting each other to ~150vs150 as shown in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhGWqzzdfdQ

Btw, the video also shows high lvl pvp in low lvl gear. I hope AoC's gear progression is similar to this, where pvp can be super fun at any lvl exactly because even the low lvl gear is at least viable at higher lvls.

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Alrighty then, please proceed.

I should however also tell you that the game I'm referring to does not have an indicator for what buffs are on what players other than yourself at all, and my class in that game has 20+ buff spells.

Maybe I indeed have not played enough Tab Target games.

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I've played with quite a few people who replaced literally all their skills on the bar with macros (cause on some versions of L2 that sped up the cast delay by fraction of a second). And those macros didn't show cds, so those dudes just had to remember which skill was which macro and play purely by feel of cds.

And in L2 pvp you didn't stand in one place all the time. You'd be moving, flowing, changing targets while also clicking the ground to move, picking debuff targets from a crowd and so on and so on. And healers would have to do all of that at even higher pace, because they had to heal and constantly be aware of their positioning too. Yet people managed all of that just fine w/o seeing their skill cds.

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And for me there was no reason to look at my skills cause I knew where they were under my hands and I, at least roughly, knew their cds. While looking at everything else on the screen meant the difference between my survival and death, and optimal farm too. I'd be constantly spinning the camera to check the entrances to my farming room and to check if some mobs have respawned, because they'd have staggered timers due to difference in ttk.

And when I was in a party I'd be checking what others are doing just to be in rhythm with them, on top of the things I did alone, so it'd be even more stuff to check. And during high value high intensity farming, I'd be spinning my camera even more, because mobs respawned even quicker and the chance of someone coming to such a lucrative place were even higher.

And in all that time, no matter what class I played, I had no reason to look at my ability bar.

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L2's tab targetting didn't work as "just tab between enemies". You'd have to click on them, because the "tab" switching (called Next Target and was a general active ability and not an innate feature) would have a very short range. And unless you were a melee class (though even those not always), you wouldn't really have any uses for that feature.

And the macros didn't add anything to make things easier. It was just a macro that said "/Delay /use skill ___". It was just a replacement of the skill icon with a macro icon that didn't show the skill's cd, so in this case it literally made things more difficult for the player.

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And I literally don't see how moving your camera a bit to the side requires more brain juice in action mmos. L2 didn't have gcd so its combat was super fast and you had to react to what your opponent was doing asap, sometimes even canceling your cast in order to do a counter move to your enemy's last ability. So it's not like I was just sitting on my ass for 2 secs while I waited for shit to happen, while in an action mmo I'd be constantly watching the enemy to time my dodge. And with most L2 pvp being at least multiple people on multiple people, you'd have to react and track several people at once. Yet when I watched a mass pvp BDO video, it seemed like it was just a ton of 1v1 (maaybe 2-3v1) fights in one location, instead of a truly huge swarm vs swarm.

Now I could be wrong in my observation of that BDO video, but BDO itself isn't really the best example of pvp party play, so I'd rather look at some other mass pvp action combat mmo, but I don't really know any. Would gladly be proven wrong on this topic if anyone has a good example.