What Should The Benefit to Action Combat Be?

How is Selo even remotely incorrect. They didn't say anything about mashing mindlessly.

If you can react faster, and press your buttons faster, in that style of play, you win.

If you don't, you shouldn't really be calling it Action Combat, it's just standard combat with extra steps to make you feel like you're better at it.

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Well, I agree completely, even as someone who plays very 'hardcore' otherwise. I'd have 'given up' trying to bridge the 'divide' by now, but I've had multiple productive conversations with at least some of the Action Combat supporters and we might have a less 'hardcore' compromise for now.

So I'll keep talking. Hopefully every person who has anything to add 'nearer to the middle ground' will say something, but so far, this thread hasn't taught me much other than the fact that people are still argumentative. Oh well.

I let myself fall into the style of communication I shouldn't use, and so I clarify.

In Elite Dangerous, my ship has one laser that has 'gimballed' system, I can fire it by holding down a button and if my opponent is anywhere in a cone in front of it, they are hit. It also has a Plasma Accelerator where I must not only take the shot at a specific moment, I must read their movement, and lead this shot, and calculate the velocities of both ships in space.

In a small ship dogfight, I spend a large amount of time making rapid, possibly large adjustments to vector, and lining up a reticle, managing energy in the ship by pressing other buttons to make sure that the Plasma Accelerator even has enough energy to fire, etc.

I press more buttons in 30 seconds than I do in some fighting game matches, but I only fire the actual Plasma Accelerator once or twice every 10 seconds in a dogfight with another small ship. The rest is 'aiming, dodging, and holding down the button for the laser'. (I could fire it more but it has a 2s cooldown and ships can maneuver out of position or do a lot of damage in 4 seconds so you don't want to miss)

Manual aiming and dodging is the thing Selo is talking about. You barely even need to aim half the abilities in BDO in terms of reticle perfection, and at higher levels you land one CC, mash a combo, and it's over.

You know what has high energy PvP Action Combat? Minecraft. Can we all agree on that at least?

Can we also agree that the 30 seconds of this starting from where the link opens is not necessarily what we're talking about? Should I have clarified in the OP that this is not what I'm talking about when I say 'Action Combat'?

If people are really going to be okay with 'Action Combat' meaning 'moving at the rate that Ashes moves now', swinging your weapon while slightly moving from side to side and lining up a reticle shot on someone wandering away from you at 3 steps per second then it is genuinely my bad for wasting time with this thread, because Tab Target will be so incredibly superior even if the skill shots are more powerful, that it will just be Action Combat players preferring the control scheme, which is what we already have and Intrepid is already doing great. Love the feel of it personally.

But they've said there will be bonuses to these skillshots, so here we are.

Using Javelin as the example, right now, if you use tab to target your opponent, they only need to be 'somewhere in a 90 degree cone in front of your character' and the ability works, and any accuracy for it is based on stats.

If you were in Action Mode, you have to line up the reticle to hit the target with the Javelin. If you miss, it's presumably just wasted entirely. The devs have therefore already implied that there may be either bonuses to skills when they are tuned to be used in ACM, or certain skills are ACM only.

The point of this particular discussion is spawned from something very specific.

If the Javelin user points their reticle at a Rogue, what is the thing that represents the Rogue's high evasion ability in this situation? Do Rogues move faster making it harder for people to line up the reticle?

Is the Reticle more likely to 'stick to' a player like in Neverwinter and give you some leniency? Is that lessened when the target has high Evasion statistically, making you need to be more perfect with your reticle?

Things like that.

Overall we're looking for 'the reward that a player gets for a skill shot' vs 'the reward that a player gets for their Evasion stat'.

Edit: I said presumably because I don't play Tank, and my group's tanks don't currently use Action Mode for Javelin because... it's pointless to do so.

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Yeah I'm realizing from reading the posters that this thread probably wasn't necessary. I was basically concerned because I imagined that more people had supported the game based on a specific list of promised features. So if Intrepid told you 'we've decided not to include Summoner any more based on feedback' you might feel 'hey you can't do that at this stage'.

That's why I consider the wiki's content important. People who are backing the project are making that decision based on what they've been told, and those who backed early I figure would, by the nature of doing so, have more feedback on anything ambiguous.

I'm moreso 'surprised' that people aren't bothered by these things, or are just 'willing to let it go'. I have a lot of faith in Intrepid, but Combat is the one part where they have basically gone 'we'll cross that bridge when we come to it', with some rough guidelines.

I don't personally care what the system is, within a certain range. But other stuff that has been said, ties directly into how the game FLOW is. If you told me 'we're discarding some of the basic stats an RPG uses' then what happens is that the gear progression feeling of the game changes. If you tell me 'we're making the combat a low mobility stat contest' then as a Hybrid Combat supporter I'd feel 'betrayed' because of how it would change PvP and Sieges, Node or otherwise. Similarly if you told me 'we're making it a flashy high mobility action game that only depends on your attack and defense and everything else is your execution skill' then I'd worry that PvE was going to be terrible in the long term.

I can't figure out if that's what people are feeling, or if they really just don't care. I care a little, in that I don't want a specific type of combat interaction, but I couldn't imagine them making the thing I'm worried about, when I first heard all their plans.

That's the problem here. If you tell me 'well we'll just make it based on feedback', and a bunch of people give feedback that changes the whole thing... what happens to the 'minority' that supported something else they thought it would be?

Similarly, what happens to people who can't afford to back things at this stage but in the other scenario, 'get ignored' because the backers are the ones whose feedback 'should matter'?

I guess 'caveat emptor', but I feel like that doesn't apply here.

While I understand that approach too, one thing stood out to me, and maybe I misunderstood it.

Things were usually phrased in a way that made me think not 'We know what we are aiming for, so we're going to iterate'.

Moreso 'we don't quite know, we'll just try lots of different things and see what people think is fun'.

What people think is fun for combat tends to ripple through other systems.

Either way, same outcome. Those who don't think there's any reason to say anything until there's more to see, won't, and since I am just theorycrafting and don't care that much, all these threads are just 'gathering people's pre-emptive feedback', so if there isn't much of that, these threads should be ignored.

I just hate being right about these things going wrong... and unfortunately... I'm very often right...