Tab vs Action Combat Philosphy

Precise Spacing: Needed, doesn't matter a lot, but people will absolutely complain, and the game has to build it in anyway.

Attack Cones: Already part of Ashes' main design, no loss in keeping it, impossible to do their intended 'weapon cleaving' without it. Debatable whether we need narrow ones, but here's even more data you might not have .

Hitstop: People seem generally opposed, I don't think I've yet 'explained to someone what the problem with it would be' and they still wanted it, outside of 'big moves occasionally stagger me a little'. I have been treating it as 'around the same amount of time as the recovery animation for the move that does it'. So that it only becomes an offensive mechanic in a coordinated group, and even then is rare. If you mean just the '3-5 seconds animation freeze on the attacker's side on impact', ignore this.

Dodging: Already in, at least a bit. I thought that without it, most people would be upset, and that's where we hit the most confusing part. Lots of people dislike being rooted. I thought this was because they wanted to dodge more attacks. Indication is 'no', that's not the core reason. Many don't care. Those that do care, explicitly care about not only dodging, but attack cones AND the idea that enemies don't target like Tab Target.

I generally feel like dynamism within Ashes' current combat system is lost without dodging, and found no calculable flaws to point out in the 'we should be able to dodge twice but less far' suggestion that was integrated into the Compilation'. Ashes needs 1x 'unlimited no iFrame dodge with a longish recovery' (current ground movement speed makes simply strafing insufficient against 80% of current attacks and abilities, which fluctuates upward with the size of the attack cones) and at least 1 more limited dodge. 2x works on the current Dodge timer without breaking things, and prevents '2v2 staggered burstdown'.

Generally, from all our ingame tests, Ashes' design has these as requirements or they need to overhaul the ability sets of all current classes and meaningfully rethink a considerable number of systems and intentions. Their intent is to have hotbar ability lists be 'manageable' (probably 20 abilities total, also presuming some of those slots will have items in them) and don't intend for every class to be able to learn every ability without a downside (or possibly at all).

Unless these change, most of the requirements you listed have the prerequisites. With the current game flow and speed, even if they rip out Action Combat as a whole, they will still have these problems.

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

Unfortunately what you would need is a video on 'how netcode works in games'.

Games use different netcode models, and have different ones based on the types of games they are. Some aim for fairness between people of differing ping, some aim for server consistency, some aim for satisfying interactions that work to ensure the client isn't confusing for the player.

These three implementations don't overlap much in the US/EU. In Korea or some parts of Japan, the ping is by nature smaller. Geography matters. Let's assume Ashes 'plans' to try to give us more geographically consistent servers than most games, and since it is already a Western game, we don't have to worry about the usual issues that old MMOs faced on that front.

This implies their optimal model is the last one. Loss of fairness is unfortunate, but surmountable in different ways and the game offers many activities. PvP or not, you can avoid this or just accept it, like... literally anyone who tries to play competitive games on a laggy connection/far from their server, already does.

Server consistency would be a good aim for Ashes if it was going for Action Combat entirely, but Tab or Hybrid with telegraphs doesn't benefit much from this. You already have lots of leniency in terms of what people expect. 'Spend it'.

So that implies the third model is optimal.

This one is done by making it so that the 'startup frames' can be clipped out of certain attacks, but a visual indicator unrelated to the actual animation is required from frame 1. Players who have really good ping have a higher chance of dodging correctly, but you just put the mindgames behind that.

"Make the first move always reactable on 50-80ms ping, but never devastating."
"Make the second move much harder to deal with if you dodged the first."
"Make the player not need to focus as much on the mechanical difficulty of the dodge so that they can focus on the opponent to watch for the second move."
"Give the attacking player options after their first move that put the defender at positional disadvantage if they are watching too hard."

Example:
Mage lines up and throws a Fireball. Their hands flicker an obvious flaming orange from frame 1. You could dodge this fireball. It starts in 5 frames. They got leniency from their soft lock, so if you were in the wrong position on their screen, you're still in danger. Ashes' movement speed already supports this.
If your ping is 80ms, the fireball is 'already moving toward you' by the time you see the flames. So what? Still do something. If your ping is 400ms, call your ISP, but you can just 'not dodge the fireball'. Because you know that the mage is now in a Fireball Recovery animation. And you know where they are. You can attack instead. Suboptimal, maybe, but you still get to play.
Your client can skip some number of frames in the Fireball animation based on the timestamp data it gets from the server. As long as those hands keep flaming for a while, you're still in control.
A player with 50ms ping could easily dodge this Fireball. The key is to make a game where that isn't always the correct thing to do. The Mage needs to be able to 'know that your dodge will probably take you to a certain location', 'watch for the startup of the movement in the direction and know that if they see the startup it won't be rolled back', and 'target their own next ability or movement toward their desired location'.
This is the reason for the Root Motion conclusion in the Compilation. The Mage sees you moving, they can't see exactly where you are facing or where you will dodge to because of latency. They prime to be ready when you lunge or strafe dodge and set their AoE to approximately that location.
Then they see you move. Human reaction time of 240ms means that the dodge itself must have 15 frames of animation recovery. Ping values above 240ms mean the player has to guess a bit since they only see your movement's start 15f late.
So 15f +15f on their side, if the dodge is 34+, they can hit you.
On your end, you could have 240ms ping. That means that you see this as 'I hit dodge', and 15f later the server recognizes that you did that. But the server can 'catch up to you'. It now has 'a clear direction', it can just skip 15f on its side due to timestamps. The server 'puts you where you should be' and then sends the data to your opponent. The server doesn't have to care as much 'what you do when the animation is over' because your animation is going to be another 19f.
So you, after your dodge, decide to strafe back in the direction you came.
If both players have 240ms ping, your opponent 'saw you blip forward' (the netcode difficulty here is determining how much of an animation to skip since which frames are important, must be built into the animation model, which is a processing thing).
On their side, by the time the server info reaches them, it basically looks like:
"Dodge Start Position: Coords, Dodge Start Timestamp: X, Animation Frame Reached: Y, Vector: V3D"
You don't strictly need the animation frame reached, that's the server working to help the client, that load can go wherever.
The Mage's client shows maybe 5 frames of 'player at the Dodge start Position', skips some number of frames, and then we get really close, but it still works. The thing is, the Mage doesn't care. They saw a startup, and if they could interpret it (or not, and guessed well), they targeted the spot where the player will be. They send back 'target location', their own start timestamp, and off we go back to the server, another 15f journey.
But the defending player didn't get out of that AoE in 4 frames by walking. They didn't get out of it by just 'strafing back the other way'.
On their side, they tried. The server cuts 15f off the Mage's AoE animation. The defender's client another 15f. But the key thing that makes this work is that the Mage got to react early enough so that when this all plays out, since that player was 'waiting 19f after the first dodge to be able to strafe', in a specific spot, they know that when they see 'the mage AoE descending on that spot', it's less strange when they get hit despite being a few frames out of the AoE visibility point.
If this isn't acceptable enough even with 15f ping to server on both players, almost nothing will be, short of 'Ashes of Creation releases in Korea'.

A final note for the unfamiliar. Your Ping is based moreso on your ISP and network infrastructure than your distance, in a game with regional servers. Dallas to Boston is 40-50ms (3 frames) along fiber optics. Generally you double that for your expectations (lots of other stuff beyond just the fiber) and 2.5x if rurality starts to factor in (depends on ISP).

@beaushinkle has various links suggesting (and I'll quote from it):

Build the game around tab targetting concepts - short damage reduction windows on cooldowns, short burst damage windows on cooldowns, baiting enemies into poorly trading offensive for defensives. Add tab-targetting skill-based mechanics, like skill sequences that force players to have a high APM while moving. Add the ability to create/remove line of sight and create/close range gaps. Tax player's tab-targetting abilities with buttons that drop targeting, or create dummy targets (like illusions or totems). Add layers of bluffing/counter bluffing with reflection type abilities. Add reaction-based abilities like interrupts, and reward players for faking and landing those interrupts.

Unfortunately from my perspective, these things are slightly too vague, go against what we've played so far, and multiple parts of the game's Action Combat model, just don't work.

"They give up too much of what an Action Combat game would feel like, for no reason."

It's frustrating to have a skillshot miss some percentage of the time. But 'not having them because of this' is only 'succeeding at not frustrating people' because those people just don't play.

So I've finally had enough time to write this up as a full 'disagreement' with the quoted concept. Tab Targeting has too many limits for a PvP system using the base Ashes has. I finally believe that if Ashes does not implement Hybrid Combat, given their current ideas , they might as well not implement PvP at all with any expectation of competition or skill mattering.

I don't mind PvP that is just the 'is my gear better than yours, am I capable of reading my ability cooldowns and active status effect icons?' in a game where Gearing up is the primary treadmill (i.e. a Themepark) but a soft-power game like Ashes probably needs more agency than that. For the first time, I'm going to say this.

I think Ashes of Creation actually has to have Hybrid Combat, given what we've seen so far.

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

The short answer is 'I played it', but obviously that's not good enough, and I know that.

I'm completely in sync with you about the idea that 'extremely precise targeting of any kind' is not a good plan. The thing I perceive as 'agency' is the precise result of two interactions.

The first is 'that movement is necessary to either fake out an opponent or dodge meaningful attacks'. Not perfectly, not precisely. Just that you generally should have a good reason to consider it. The reason for this is that Ashes intends to have Summoners and those Summoners will have pets that act like Mobs. I'll elaborate on this more if you wish it (even more than I do later in this response), but for now...

The second is that making any movement contains a disadvantage relative to your own ability to launch a counterattack, which you must overcome with your own skill, or in some cases, cannot overcome because it is too large.

So in the example of Marth's sword, we come back to a point where Naraka and Vindictus show us how this works. You move into a position, your opponent makes a melee attack that should hit this position and fails.

In a fighting game, there is hitstop, so a whiff punish happens and you lose control of the situation. In Ashes, there is no hitstop or stagger. So your opponent doesn't care if their first attack whiffs, they only care that their flow into their second attack is correctly targeted. You, in turn, don't actually care if their first attack hit you or not other than 'well it reduced damage'. A Summoner doesn't even get this much. They had to 'position their summons correctly' and hope, because the Summon will generally 'keep attacking'.

For Summoners to be effective, a player's choice has to be 'I can dodge, or I can attack, but usually not both'. If they dodge forever, fine, it distracts the summon, but just drags things out. If they attack, they get hit some amount of the time, and the summon's power gets to work. A Summon generally can't 'decide if to dodge AoE or not', and if they were given this ability, even as a stance, then the speed at which this happens means that now you have just one Archetype with latency issues (technically two because the same thing will happen to Bards).

The problem with any Tab like combat is the stuff we have now.

The Tank ability Javelin, does a pull-in effect on hit. Even if it doesn't have its short CC, this is a big deal. In Tab Target mode, the effectiveness of this move is based on 'can I get line of sight to the target' and 'Will my Acc beat their Evasion'?

Javelin isn't about baiting. Neither is Cleric's Judgement at high level (a relatively strong Movement Speed Down). These abilities need to be Action or Action-lite with a soft lock, or what happens is not 'agency', it is 'My opponent pressed a button to change my agency and I watched to see if it happened'.

If one argues that 'the opponent can react', then you're back to a level of 'netcode' where you might as well have gone all in. I can't use an ability or block in time against Javelin if I couldn't dodge it. Fireball is the example I used because Mages have an obvious "AoE that matters" for the rest of the consideration.

The style of effects, the movement speed, the concept of how melee and procs will work, all of these things would need to be rethought if Hybrid Combat were removed or stripped down to 'ground AoE markers'. And even those fall into the same problem the smaller they get. If melee matters but there is no stagger, then in a fantasy game, magic and similar abilities will have strong effects or the game's (arguably) 4 ability/non-melee based classes are going to be in a bad place. Nothing worse than 'my strong moves are dodgeable AoE but my opponent just melees me down'.

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

If you would like to engage in the debate on either 'stat based miss chances on abilities' or 'Javelin shouldn't be tab target at all', I can point you at the threads, but note that the opponents of both these concepts have directly quoted the Creative Director's strong implications that these are the intention, specifically as support of their own wish for it to be so .

I have made only overarching/compromise based arguments 'against' those positions. If your stance is stronger, I'm sure they can hear you out.

As for the aspect of making people care about being hit, I don't personally see how this helps if you're not going to be dodging particularly well in the first place, nor was I even trying to imply that there should be a change. My suggestion is based on Vindictus and on combos.

You don't want to get hit by the telegraphed final hit of your opponent's combo because it debuffs you or benefits them in ways I mentioned here , which are based on the concept of weapon procs, as mentioned in that comment.

My overall stance is that Ashes' design already supports everything they intend, and only iterative design and tuning is required now. Any points I make come from 'where they are already', since that's my 'chosen role'. You'll need to talk to some other people to get the more specific 'Acc vs Eva' debates, since 'removing RNG from interactions' is not currently confirmed to be on the table for this game's combat design.

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

I was trying to figure out a way to summon you without literally giving in to my urge to go 'Dygz, I choose you!' and quoting one of those lines you always react to.

Success!

I have no opinion on your post one way or the other, but I bet @beaushinkle does. I hope it's 'agreement'.

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

This is @Dygz consistent stance across multiple discussions , whether it be 'should Evasion and Acc decide hit chance in Action based attacks' to the linked thread.

It may be best to not discuss that topic in this thread, presuming you prefer to keep this one on a particular track for any post-Livestream feedback.

There'll be a multitude of reasonings in the link provided.