Mob/Boss Combat Interaction (plus a compromise for hybrid combat)

Starting from the absolute most basic, to see if anyone disagrees with it.

Regardless of even the outcome of any disagreements on Split Body and Root Motion as combat for players, I feel Mobs need the three.

Lunge, Strafe, Standing.

For big enemies, Strafe should probably just be 'a big side swiping attack they do when they turn', instead of actually needing to move their bodies much. With the important part being the damage, damage type, and recovery time from this attack.

Dragons and similar could Lunge with 'long neck extended bites', again without moving their bodies much, but still long recovery. Griffons dive, most other things do leaping bites or whatnot. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't (to close distance).

Standing attacks could have slightly less angle on their hitboxes so that players could sidestep these at least some of the time. A good timing for this would be 'enemy lunged, player moved to the side and kept moving'. If the enemy does the Standing attack at this point, they probably miss unless the player was also swinging their weapon immediately.

I'm sure we could come up with any number of other really cool things, but basic barebones system, is this a problem for anyone?

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Even with one, and the passion shown by people who want it, they're limited by the community's strong opinions in specific ways.

A single cohesive Hybrid Combat system variant would fill a whiteboard, but 'one that players won't constantly ask you to erase things off that whiteboard' followed by 'other players asking you to put those things back' is probably impossible.

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NWO has unfortunately been reworked recently so it'd be more difficult to discuss it. Every single part of a combat system matters. Every incredibly tiny intricate thing, and it's worse in MMOs than it is in fighting games. To put in perspective how precise it is in fighting games:

One character in Street Fighter a while back had a low attack that was slightly advantaged when blocked. This made them almost universally accepted as one of the best, if not the best character in the game. This was changed along with some other things about this character, to make it very slightly disadvantaged. This was accepted as a balanced change that affected the whole meta.

Neverwinter's Combat is good because of many very tiny things like this interwoven. That's why I'm still just following my 'instincts' with the way I interact while here, poking for every little bit of data. The designer has to know every little bit of what the player wants, to fill up that whiteboard.

Neverwinter is Root Motion, Medium Ground Mobility. The player hits the enemy, sees an attack telegraph coming, stops attacking and moves out of the way. The enemy's animation is long enough for the player to feel rewarded by getting a combo by being unafraid of being damaged until the animation ends.

The player's movement speed is tuned exactly right for these interactions. The animations are tuned almost exactly right in most encounters (they were when I played a while back, for 90% of enemies). I'll give the video for one I know is tuned right because I used to fight it on Rogue for fun. Imagine that. Fun! In this day and age!



New World is this, but not tuned right. It's not trying to be this either because it wants to give a 'less clunky' feeling. And it could, but it still needs the tuning. It does a lot of other things right, though. The hitboxes are better than a lot of actual Action focused games, but off relative to the move speed. New World is also Root Motion, and it is the correct amount of Root Motion for New World.

It's problem is that the movespeed and the transition-to-move tech space is wrong. They can fix this easily. I haven't played New World but I know it is wrong because you're supposed to base it on the one handed sword and the one handed sword transition-to-move is wrong.



New World will continue to work for most people because the TTK masks the transition-to-move problem well. New World is wrong via tuning specs, or berated by people who don't like the style of Combat it offers, but they're doing good for now.

I can, as always, go on and on, because this is what I do.

Ashes is tuned wrong for what it is. It's a bunch of dials you have to turn to get to somewhere, and you have to know the output you want before you start turning the dials. That's why some form of consensus is so important. If we can't agree on one whiteboard, we still need to 'fill up three separate ones'.

There's a build where Ashes would do best with Ground Telegraphs, a build where it would do best with 'the enemy glowing in a specific animation to tell you that it's charging up', and a build where enemies have combos and every enemy has a defined Archetype and some weapon-restricted abilities so you know what to expect without any telegraphs at all by just looking at what they are carrying and the first ability or two that they do.

I think the last 'consensus' was that only the first two were preferred, and we only went with the second because the 'no Ground Telegraphs' was a thing Steven said, but we didn't discuss it for long due to that. (I believe you, @Dygz , were the main person who wanted that, my group prefers the glowing form or the Defined Archetype-Weapon form).

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Well, that's another 'derail', but it can be worked in here.

Let's assume that everything has a heavy attack or a combo that leads into one (depending on whether you want a glow system or a Defined-Archetype system). Now the player can sidestep or move out of the way of this attack because they can see it coming. The player can 'punish' harder in PvP, increasing the skill ceiling.

This isn't really the thread for this specific debate type, so I'll pull it back. Would you mind if they gave nearly every Mob a heavy attack that you could see coming, but that the AI would prioritize whenever it noticed you trying to use one of your own abilities while in range of that attack?

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The problem with this concept is that you have 'basic spammable spell' as an idea. Ashes already is 'telling us' that what you are thinking of is not how it will work. Cooldowns for some abilities are between 10 and 20 seconds, because the abilities are allowed to be quite powerful. So your preference leans away from what it is now, and from 'Hybrid Combat' in general.

Therefore one would have to assume, 'on the whiteboard', that this should be 'ignored'. Similarly, Clerics are OP right now partially because the thing you mentioned doesn't work on them, and can't work on them without making the group gameplay terrible.

"This request does not fit within the ranges of the dials we are working with right now." would be my answer to this if it were up to me.