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

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Your first line here is incredibly hyperbole to me at this moment (mood). I do not wish to engage here, but I absolutely am not against trying to have a productive discussion on it. I posted a different thread, in which I hope I can come to a greater understanding of exactly what you are saying/believe and why, if you're willing to engage there.

I feel like our perspectives are currently too far apart for this to be a productive use of time. I'll gladly come back to this later.

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/52939/lets-theoryraid-1-jormungand-vs-xenojiiva#latest

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Any random environment hazards that come from your perspective's back, while you're attacking a specific part of the boss. In tab your camera is usually waay further away from your character, so you see more of the environment, so if there's a horizontal attack coming towards you from behind - you'll probably see it. In action your camera would be way closer because you need to properly target different parts on the boss (proepr utilization of action combat features), and if something comes from behind your back w/o your knowledge and, potentially, oneshots you - I'd assume most players would consider that unfair, while for tab players that's just a mechanic that makes the encounter more fun.

The flipside would be, a small fast mob jumping around you making you target it properly and dodge its attack actively. In tab that shit would be the dullest thing ever because you just target it, press "def/evasion buff" and unload, while in action (I would assume) this is a fun active gameplay.

At least that's how I see it as mainly an outsider of hardcore pve. Also, the first example works in the context of dps maximization, where you have to look at the target to constantly do top lvl dmg so you can't just be looking around with your camera.

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But that's the point though. In a tab mmo, the random attack from somewhere makes you react to it, and that attack can come from pretty much 360 degrees around your character. If you wanted to warn action players, that attack would only come from their cone of vision, or the ground indicator would be ginormous so that they can't miss it.

At 5:30 in this video the dragons make a dash. There's no indicator where the hit will happen and by the looks of it the aoe is pretty big. I dunno if their order is randomized and obviously this is a non-combat mechanic of the fight, but there's a few such dashes earlier in the video where they dash during the fight. As you can see from the camera pov, the visibility is huge so you can see where the dragons stand and can figure out where you gotta stand. In action, I'd assume you'll have a much narrower fov so it'd be more difficult.

https://youtu.be/kGReBbXnynQ?t=330

And if I was trying to do a difficult encounter, I'd randomize position and order of these dragons, so player have to react on the spot. Yes, you can have this kind of stuff just in the player's vision, but then it limits the design possibilities a lot. It also brings down the difficulty of the encounter because you're still just staring in one point, while 360 dangers would require you to pay attention to the entire screen.

You could also say "just let shotcallers call those dangers out", but I'd imagine a 40-man raid will have a tooon of things to call out, so a randomized mechanic on top of all the other difficult mechanics would make it really difficult to call everything out correctly w/o making VC a mess. Ideally you'd have personal responsibilities on top of raid-wide ones, and I'd say that being completely aware of your surroundings should definitely be one of those responsibilities.

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Mm, I'm not sure if I understand what exactly you're saying here.

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Well, to figure out if chaos is not the way to go we'd have to get Noaani to tell us about some super hard raids from EQ2 and whether those had chaos or just rng that players played against. But we know that Noaani won't tell us shit

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How far though? Especially in the context of "you need to target particular parts of the boss in front of you by aiming at them exactly.

Btw, @Noaani I was thinking about this and got curious. Back in L2 no one cared about raid videos because the fight was super easy and you just needed people and gear to win. In FF14, from what I've heard, no one cares about showing their clears because the game is so difficult mechanically that it doesn't matter if you know the mechanics, cause you still need to execute perfectly in order to beat the encounter (I believe WoW's raiding races are similar). So I got curious where EQ2 was on that spectrum, considering that you've said multiple times that people didn't release videos to prevent others from clearing some raids.

Was the reason for that some super secret mechanic during the raid that you had to figure out? Was it a particular party setup? Was it particular actions that players had to make? All or none of the above?

NiKr wrote: »

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Well, to figure out if chaos is not the way to go we'd have to get Noaani to tell us about some super hard raids from EQ2 and whether those had chaos or just rng that players played against. But we know that Noaani won't tell us shit

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How far though? Especially in the context of "you need to target particular parts of the boss in front of you by aiming at them exactly.

Btw, @Noaani I was thinking about this and got curious. Back in L2 no one cared about raid videos because the fight was super easy and you just needed people and gear to win. In FF14, from what I've heard, no one cares about showing their clears because the game is so difficult mechanically that it doesn't matter if you know the mechanics, cause you still need to execute perfectly in order to beat the encounter (I believe WoW's raiding races are similar). So I got curious where EQ2 was on that spectrum, considering that you've said multiple times that people didn't release videos to prevent others from clearing some raids.

Was the reason for that some super secret mechanic during the raid that you had to figure out? Was it a particular party setup? Was it particular actions that players had to make? All or none of the above?

This happens partially because in older games, 'special' or 'secret' team/group compositions can be a thing, moreso than FFXIV which is intended to be much easier.

Note, I am unsure whether or not it is easier, only that it was explicitly intended to be easier than FFXI. It's probably harder by now... or the two are even.

When mechanics are random, your group may be able to find a way to mitigate something an entirely different way than another, so it's multiple groups trying out things and not sharing 'the optimal group with which to mitigate X problem'.

The Meta-shakeups you often talked about for L2, within Raiding, can happen in that way specifically.

E.g. since I've provided the point now... One might expect that the sensible way to defeat Jormungand was to get a lot of Ice defense to reduce damage, but while the fight is POSSIBLE that way, it is definitely not the easier way to do it, and the easier way to do it is not particularly intuitive.

So you might want to keep your group's 'special technique' secret.

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Yeah, but you'd need awareness to do that dodge. And fov gives you that awareness. As I said before, imo having a huge mob that you don't have to aim at properly is not my definition of hardcore action combat content. Both of the videos you showed were closer to smth like LA in their design: you have ground hazards to dodge and you have aoeish and cone-based attacks that you use against a huge mob that moves slowly.

If I was trying to design a "true action top lvl boss" I'd be using all of the action features to their max. You gotta aim properly, even as a melee character. The bosses would be way smaller and way more agile. You have more verticality gameplay than any given tab game (or even wildstar/tera). You gotta almost constantly be aware of things to dodge, those things being horizontal dangers and ground hazards (with some of the hazards accounting for verticality, so you might need to duck under or jump over them). You'll have to actively parry/block some attacks too.

That is what I think of when I hear "top lvl action combat pve content". All of the prominent features used in one encounter. And then you'd have to somehow design dozens of such encounters over the years, with tangible variability between all of them.

And in the case of all those mechanics, you'd need camera to be way closer, so that you can properly dps the boss. And when the camera is closer, your fov is narrower and anything that comes from behind you will feel unfair to the battle (at least I'd assume people would call that unfair).

Now again, I'm not saying that you have to have 360 view in order to have an engaging fight. I'm saying that a 360 view brings quite a few benefits to the design variety of encounters. And due to properly difficult action combat (again, as I see it) limiting your fov, you won't have that variety. I might be wrong in that assumption and I'd love to be proven wrong by some game devs, but, until that happens, I think this is the thing that action can't do (that being the utilization of all 360 degrees of space when designing an encounter w/o it being unfair to the players).

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But that goes against the whole point of the encounter being top lvl. The context of the discussion is the attempt to prove that either sides have features that the other side can't do. The ones I could come up with is the 360 design in tab and the verticality precision gameplay in action.

Azherae wrote: »

This happens partially because in older games, 'special' or 'secret' team/group compositions can be a thing, moreso than FFXIV which is intended to be much easier.

Yeah, I guess secrecy was a much bigger thing back in the day, just due to the overall amount of information that you could get back then.

Azherae wrote: »

The Meta-shakeups you often talked about for L2, within Raiding, can happen in that way specifically.

If only NCsoft cared about pve back then the pvp matchups would definitely get shaken up with a new update, but pve rarely changed all that much. You still had the usual suspects when you needed top dps for a raid. And I don't think that ever really changed. At most, you might've added a new class to the roster because they got a new cool debuff in the skillset, but that kind of action was beyond obvious to anyone who played the game, so it wasn't like your new raid setup suddenly became such a huge and valuable secret that you'd tell no one about it.

Azherae wrote: »

E.g. since I've provided the point now... One might expect that the sensible way to defeat Jormungand was to get a lot of Ice defense to reduce damage, but while the fight is POSSIBLE that way, it is definitely not the easier way to do it, and the easier way to do it is not particularly intuitive.

So you might want to keep your group's 'special technique' secret.

On the topic of icey strong bastards. Here's a vid of the first attempt at a new epic boss in L2 by the strongest clan at the time. They got completely obliterated even though they had the best gear at the time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqWKEoZGg0Q

Ice protection wasn't the answer there either

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It's not assumptions though. We literally have Noaani, Azherae and me who want top lvl raiding content in Ashes. And in order for that content to be top lvl, it'll need to utilize literally all the mechanics and combat features in the game to their limit. Otherwise it's not top lvl.

And obviously it doesn't have to be the only content that's in the game. Afaik that was one of the reasons why Wildstar died. But it should be present if Steven really wants to appeal to high lvl raiders, and in the past he has alleged to want that (mainly with his mention of encounters only beatable by <10% of players).

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I addressed it with this.

NiKr wrote: »

Both of the videos you showed were closer to smth like LA in their design: you have ground hazards to dodge and you have aoeish and cone-based attacks that you use against a huge mob that moves slowly.

And continued to explain why I don't see that as difficult and not really a justification for having that kind of zoom in an action game.

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Always has been.

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Yeah, you can ignore most posts on the forum at least until Alpha2. All we do is just argue pointless things in circles over and over and over and over again. And until we have the game in our hands to properly test and give real feedback on, there's not much we will achieve by discussing the same things with the same people. There might be a good point here and there and I do hope that Intrepid's mods/admins/managers read this stuff to see those good points, but even if they don't, we'll just have to remember those good points when we give feedback for alpha2.