How to balance tab vs action abilities

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I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic but if it will help you make your point or start a discussion that helps Intrepid in any way I can give a detailed status of my GearScore and how I got to it in BDO.

If you only need the short version it is generally about 525 (Full TET + Catchup Mechanic Gifts), on Console (Kuno, Shai, Dark Knight), No P2W player, I consider myself a casual since I play BDO to study moreso than for fun. My PvP performance is, I believe 'ass', but I really have no way to say for sure. I definitely don't seem to contribute meaningfully in RBF though.

lmk if that 'helps' or if you need more data for whatever point you are making.

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Oh ok, you were predicting me, then? Or calling me to help make the point?

In the former case 'yes I agree'.

If the latter, lmk if you need me to detail how my 'gear chase' went and how it affected my experience, in brief.

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Oh, yeah, for sure, it's either easy because you're lucky/rich or discouragingly stupid if you care about actually being very competitive with players who are lucky/rich.

And ofc since it is BDO when I say rich I mean 'can spend $2000 a day on BDO'.

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I agree, the only valid point in my opinion that has been made is Noaani's point, and Noaani's point is about 'amount of variety potentially present across all endgame encounters'.

I think you and I still disagree on that point because I agree with Noaani on it, but all the other points that seem to be arguing about the prerequisites to Noaani's position do seem to just be misinformed.

@ OP note that I have not done analysis on your main post, I am 'responding to being summoned'.

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Right, this is the part I disagree with entirely and am completely aligned with Noaani's perspective on.

Except for one aspect which kinda flips the whole thing, and I end up wondering if you're in the same situation without necessarily noticing it.

As an Action-heavy/capable player, I don't care about the 'mechanical variety' as MUCH. The Action part is engaging, which I believe is the basis of the point. I don't care as much if it is that 60% of the strain is the encounter and 40% is the physical execution. I don't consider Action games to have 'simplistic' Physical execution variety even at raid levels of play, but maybe I've just been lucky to play some that don't, or maybe I've 'never raided' by the standards being used.

My point is... 'who cares?' It would mean that the raiding scene looked different, made up of people like me instead of people like Noaani, and if that's what Intrepid is ok with, then certainly I can't be out here complaining.

tl;dr if the 'part of the encounter that involves me aiming, dodging, and thinking about my position relative to Action Abilities' is also interesting and variable, I don't care that other complex mechanics have to be cut so that I get the encounter. I'll consider it 'variety' either way. The only way I would not, is if 'all the Action Combat parts were similar'. Which would just be Intrepid failing to meet a design bar just as it would be in a heavy Tab Target case.

Tab-Target-only players are not expected to exist, so they would just have different roles in such combat.

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I feel like your perspective/interpretation might be a little binary here.

It's not like it is '90% action 10% mechanics', and idk who claimed that (if you're arguing because of a person).

I personally feel like the 'debate' is closer to '70-30' or '30-70'.

And I don't care because 100% occurs in all cases.

But at 70-30 in favor of Action, variety in the non-action parts does suffer, I think.

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Well, you're obviously free to believe that. As a designer, I can't afford to. I'd prefer to discuss how to solve the thing that I have experienced to be a challenge or problem, than to just go 'yeah I'm sure they'll fix it'.

We've played enough average/below average MMOs lately to know that 'I'm sure they'll fix it' is worth nothing.

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Ah, sorry, I think I misunderstood you. The 70-30 thing wasn't about players or 'support'. It was about the complex point Noaani has made in some thread recently.

"If you are spending time on the dodging and repositioning, and you make the encounter the same difficulty as a Tab Target one mechanically, it is now impossible."

So you always have to choose 'what percentage of the design of this encounter is Tab-optimal and what percentage is Action-optimal', that's all.

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I would find that system to be weak. I prefer games with higher skill floors where you must deal with the mechanic, the action, and the coordination all at the same time.

Now, I believe your answer indicates that your perspective is (please correct me):

"Because mechanics are usually sequential and not parallel, Action is easily equal to Tab in most situations."

I agree that with the assumption of only sequential mechanics, you are correct. If Ashes only has sequential mechanics for its encounters, I'll be disappointed, but if that's what it takes to make hybrid work, then I'll accept it.

I could try to give mechanics, have you played Monster Hunter World, if so, up to what monster? If you consider Monster Hunter games to be irrelevant to the discussion, let me know, and I can try to look for something else, but we can also just disengage here, now that we've cemented where our point of disagreement is.

Yes, it sounds like we have different perspectives on what "Action Heavy Combat" means, and if you haven't played Monster Hunter I feel like I won't be able to relate properly and will just waste your time.

Sorry about that, for now, let's just agree to disagree, the related priors are not available, and I'm not about to ask you to go play Monster Hunter: World for a potentially irrelevant forum discussion.

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This part, but as I said it is really hard to explain without the priors.

Think of it this way. In MMOs, particularly Tab MMOs, the positions and roles and requirements of each player are fairly set at most times in a battle. You have said, multiple times, that Tab suffers because 'you just know the mechanics and dodge them', right?

I don't play games like this for very long. I play games where things 'stack', combine randomly, require rapid adaptation and shifting between roles to cover for someone else who has become unavailable in the moment due to mechanics.

"Alright the Boss is doing his AoE pull, Healers prepare to use AoE Heals."

vs.

"Ok who's silenced from that? All Healers? Ok Rogues get behind and prep for the AoE pull, don't stun the pull, we're gonna rely on the Summoner to cleanse the Healers if the pull happens, Tank prep to CC the move after the pull, if you're Stunned at that time due to the Stun from the adds yell and we'll flip the strat to have the Mage take hate with a big attack so that the boss won't use AoE on next ability. Rogues, if Tank is stunned obv you can move, get on its tail and pull hate off the Mage so we don't lose them while the Summoner Cleanses the Healers. Healers, you know what to do, top the Tank back up so they can pull off the Rogue, and ffs people remember that if we all dodge the same direction on the magma blade attack if it goes for that we'll just end up back where we started."

So in that example... The Summoner has become Cleanse, the Mage has become 'Tank', the Rogues have become 'offtank', the Healers now have to have a whole concept of how they're going to heal everybody in the correct order without wasting mana, and the boss is STILL about to randomly do maybe 6 different things which we might have to respond to before the current situation is even resolved. If the Rangers were standing near the Mage now they have to scatter, but only if the Tank is stunned, and only if the Summoner DOESN'T get stunned.

Now add to all that 'you must do all this perfectly mechanically dodging the adds so that you don't get stunned on the way to the position you're supposed to be in after the AoE pull, and you have something I consider 'an average encounter'.

Roles change fast. Roles change based on spacing. Someone else 'running up to try to land a big attack' now means every player has to load an entirely different set of responses mentally to all 8 of the random potential mechanics the boss can use next, and then in Action Combat you have to be aware of the spacing of every other player.

This is about the point where I start to have fun. Maybe I'm not much of an RPG fan.

I haven't played top lvl pve, but what I'm imagining when trying to roughly design some complex encounter is smth like "you gotta track ground hazards, several party memebers' positions and your relations to them, particular buffs on yourself and the boss - all while doing peak dps (or your own class' role), and all those mechanics being randomized instead of in the same order every try" for tab; and smth like "you need to aim at particular points on the boss, while dodging horizontal/diagonal/vertical attacks from mobs/hazards - ideally when the boss is not a hugeass stationary pillar and, instead, a fast-moving mid-to-tall humanoid creature" in action.

You literally can't do the tab mechanics in action because you will not have enough surroundings awareness to execute all of that perfectly. And if you just have some basic movement to avoid hazards and simple button presses to attack/defend against attacks - that's super dull in tab.

As for hybrid, I'd probably try to push players to their utter limits with a combination of the things I listed. With the randomized boss actions influencing what players need to concentrate in that exact moment, switching from one camera to the other and doing the actiony or taby things depending on the current mechanics.

NiKr wrote: »

I haven't played top lvl pve, but what I'm imagining when trying to roughly design some complex encounter is smth like "you gotta track ground hazards, several party memebers' positions and your relations to them, particular buffs on yourself and the boss - all while doing peak dps (or your own class' role), and all those mechanics being randomized instead of in the same order every try" for tab; and smth like "you need to aim at particular points on the boss, while dodging horizontal/diagonal/vertical attacks from mobs/hazards - ideally when the boss is not a hugeass stationary pillar and, instead, a fast-moving mid-to-tall humanoid creature" in action.

You literally can't do the tab mechanics in action because you will not have enough surroundings awareness to execute all of that perfectly. And if you just have some basic movement to avoid hazards and simple button presses to attack/defend against attacks - that's super dull in tab.

As for hybrid, I'd probably try to push players to their utter limits with a combination of the things I listed. With the randomized boss actions influencing what players need to concentrate in that exact moment, switching from one camera to the other and doing the actiony or taby things depending on the current mechanics.

Right, and this is my general experience. This is my general experience in 'Tab Target' because apparently I play one of the many more hybridized Tab Target games with a fairly strict range limit for abilities. I have also occasionally experienced it in Action.

I'll boil it down to one thing.

"If your healer cannot heal you because they are busy dodging a slow moving triple fireball from a three headed dragon, but you are facing that dragon and can't see the healer is dodging and not ready to heal, then you don't know if to pop your mitigation ability early or if you can save it."