Action Combat for meele classes, tab targeting for ranged classes

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I dunno how it worked in AA, but in L2 I had to click on people instead of just hitting tab, because L2's tab had a limited range and, due to the speed of combat, tabbing through random close people was a waste of time when you could just click on a person directly.

L2 had detargeting abilities so you did in fact have to track your targets. And if you had those detargeting skills yourself, you'd try and use them to prevent enemy casts, so you would not only track movement, but ability usage too. And with some abilities being preventive (dodge/def buffs), you'd want to use them right before a big (or usually time-limited super buffed one) attack, so you had to predict your enemy's actions too.

And imo, clicking on 10 pixels on my screen during a hectic fight, so that I can single out the healer in a crowd, takes more skill than just moving my mouse a bit and using an aoe in a general direction.

And if AA was anywhere near that kind of combat, it would've required even more skill, considering that it had faster movement than L2.

So overall, tab games can still require the same skill sets from people. The only difference is that instead of just moving your mouse to aim, you need to move the whole camera with your mouse and then move on top of that, so it's a double move instead of a singular one.

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True, but how many of those does any given class have? Cause any class in L2 required this. You could've been aggroed by a tank and had to reclick your main target, you could've been clipped by a mage's aoe detargeting skill or by a dagger's targeted detargeting, or you could be hitting a light armor wearing class and it had an augment that made you lose their target at some % chance.

All of those things usually meant that you gotta track your opponent constantly and you gotta be precise in your clicking, because if you spread out your dmg to much, it'll just get outhealed.

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Obviously, to you it isn't a positive. But in L2, good targeters were highly valued and considered to be great pvpers. Just as a good twitch aimer in action mmos would be praised for great aiming and precision.

And as for "weaved through and killed their healer", L2 had this too. Daggers had a full stealth buff for 30 secs, which would be dispelled if they were hit, so they had to run through a ton of aoes around the enemy healer in order to not be noticed. This required knowledge of cast timings and enemy classes. My main class required me to properly use directional blinks in order to get behind enemy lines quickly. This required precise character movements, while being very fast so that your enemy can't react fast enough to counter your actions.

Again though. All I'm saying is "not all games are the same". Some tab games can require you to have good twitch skills. Some action games just require you to aim in a general direction and cast some aoes w/o thinking too much. And other games on either side can push their own mechanics to the limit w/o being similar to the other side at all.

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I haven't played too much BDO, but "pixel hunting" in smth like shooters (which would be close to pixel hunting in L2) was way harder than just moving my camera around in BDO. You're not hunting pixels in BDO, you're hunting a huge target and then use aoe most of the time on top of that, exactly because having action mmos be as hard as playing a sniper in CS would probably push way too many people away.

If there are action mmos where most of your skills are just precise headshot-like abilities - I'd definitely like to at least check it out, cause I haven't heard of such an mmo.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

Guess you either didn't read my answer to Stackerson or decided to dismiss it completely, but as I said there, in L2 you had to track your target because your targeting would be removed quite often. You also had to constantly move away from other people and any potential aoes (be they on the ground or around your allies or around enemies) and you did that with the same mouse that you used for targeting. So your eyes had to track your surroundings, your target's movement, your allies' movement and other enemies' movements - all while clicking on the ground to avoid dangers, glancing at your targeting window to be sure that you're still targeted and retargeting every time you lose it.

And I hope Ashes has this exact mechanic for tab part of the combat exactly so that it's as difficult as the action part. But you either refuse to read and comprehend my argument or just decide to completely dismiss anything that's not literally 1-to-1 copy of action combat mechanics, even when the basic concept and player actions are very similar.

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Darkfall definitely seems close to what I imagine when I think about difficult action combat. Though it looked fairly slow in the video, so I guess you could still get more hardcore. ESO didn't feel as precise though. Maybe it was just the class in the video or it just doesn't translate through video as well.

Have you played all 3 (BDO being the 3rd)? Which one would you consider the most difficult one mechanically/aiming-wise?

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I wish I recorded my pvp from back in the day, but sadly I didn't. And most videos I've seen on yt don't match the gameplay I, or my friends, had back then. Though I'm sure that even if I did have those videos, you'd just say that it's not the same because it doesn't look the same (which it wouldn't, because the video doesn't explain/show player action, only character action).

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Yep, which is why I'm gonna be pushing for "target play" in the tab side. It would not only raise the skill ceiling, but would also help with the hybridness of the combat, cause it would either push people towards trying out action abilities or just get used to being more aware of their targeting than just clicking once and unloading everything w/o worry.

I really don't feel like getting into yet another one of these, but just in case my understanding or opinion matters.

BDO is actually still the hardest, Mag is right.

BDO just has a gentle 'learning curve' for more casual players, for the exact reason that we are discussing in general. Most players actually cannot do this at the level required and so the game simply makes it so that you don't have to for about 90% of its PvE.

Know that I say this not as a fan of the game, nor even of its specific form of Combat, I definitely expect to prefer what Ashes does, but bearing in mind that in almost all these cases, PvP is the main thing being referred to (the number of people who could code a scaling PvE encounter in proper Action Combat in this industry can't be that high, but I hear some are at Intrepid so yay!).

I assure those of you who have not played 'full' BDO that the mechanical depth and requirements of the game increase very fast in the PvE encounters that actually get close to PvP.

Are they good/fun/fair encounters? Not claiming that (except Katzvariak). But they are definitely 'similar or higher in difficulty relative to the vast majority of FPS and similar games'.

But don't take my word for it, you can level to 60 in BDO in 3 hours if you use their giant piles of catchup mechanics, autorun options, EXP boosts, and so on. At which point you can go check literally all of it yourself if you actually care.