Best examples of Action Combat? Starting to Feel Like Tab > Action

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If you played a 'Tab Target' game where range matters that much, then calling it 'Tab Target' might miss some people's perspectives. This is why I don't like the terms (though I don't fault Intrepid for using them).

True, pretty much any/every ability in L2 had its range stat and the better players would know those by feel and move on the battlefield accordingly.

Azherae wrote: »

There are Tab Target games that involve 'autofacing', 'abilities that hit even if your opponent moves perfectly as if to avoid it', 'interactions that mostly involve no repositioning or commitment so you can stand pretty simply around relative to the enemy'.

And L2 had those too If you were out of range of the ability you wanted to use, and had a target selected, your character would auto-move towards the target to get in range. All weapon in the game were melee if you wanted to auto-attack with them, so mages that had action-based cone abilities with short range would usually select a target, press auto-attack so that their character turns and runs towards their target, and then use the action ability as soon as they thought they were in range.

And most tab ranged abilities would allow you to just stand in one place and spam them, because your character would turn/move with your target.

Azherae wrote: »

At that point, Tab vs Ground Target is decided by 'will my ability strike my opponent even if I don't anticipate their movement'. A game where you 'select' a target but your abilities don't auto-target your selection and don't auto-track their movement, I would question what the Tab Targeting is for (beyond changing priority of a target within a group that would all be hit, or Tab-Targeting allies for heals and buffs).

Tab is there for other abilities. The more updates L2 got, the more variety in abilities it had. With my favorite class of Soul Hound having mage and phys abilities, with several of those being purely action-based or purely tab, so you had to know ranges of your abilities and move across the field appropriately so that you could use your whole skillset.

Right, and you enjoy that. Others don't necessarily, but balance wise, it still matters for a lot of things, and that's why this comes up. There's a weak correlation thus far between players that want Action Skills/specific playstyles and players that plan to play certain Archetypes in Ashes (I'll provide my datasets if you want, but they're small and not statistically significant, they're moreso confirmatory).

So if you have a player who comes into Ashes and says "I want to play a Wind ArchMage. I want my Tornado spell to do lots of damage. I also want my Tornado spell to manifest around whoever I have Tab-targeted, regardless of how they move, and do full damage."

That person is not going to be satisfied by 'well you can select that person as the Tab Target and it will make your character face them correctly so that when you set down your Tornado spell at the 6m distance you can safely cast it from, you are more likely to hit if they don't use one of their movement skills to get out of the way."

Tornado spells are usually pretty expensive, y'know?

You could disregard that person and say 'well, for Balance, Tornado can't be a Tab Targeted ability'. Maybe that's what they'll do. I have no opinions on just that level of decision, as its too low-level compared to most of the things I prefer to think about.

Here's some data on stuff people said. Relevant outputs are in the Spoiler tags.

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

Agreed but the problem that Intrepid needs to solve if staying Hybrid is pretty simple.

"If playing Tab is competitively viable, AND using Tab allows you to bypass the skills of Action style players (let's assume I mean spacing and prediction, not twitch reactions), what will be the point of Action?"

Any 'Mixed' system in a competitive game will devolve to one side, quite possibly even in PvE.

You can say that many players don't 'hate' Tab Target combat, but you'd have to answer the question of if they consider it an actual 'game'. Most people don't 'hate' afk games or low-skill cookie-clickers either.

Note that I have zero actual concerns here, I recently read an interview from the Throne and Liberty devs and they mentioned a 'design conclusion' that is the obvious one, as their main implementation method. I would fully expect the Ashes devs to have similar conclusions, so only the nuance matters to me.

EDIT: Realized I might as well add the design conclusion itself, since it IS in fact capable of furthering the conversation.

"The larger your adventuring party, the less any given player will need to move."

Pretty elegant IMO. When you are solo or duo, you use all your mobility and counters and cool tricks, and you can choose to mostly play in that situation. When you get into a full group, now you use timing and preventative methods to control mobs so that you don't need to move. I perceive that this would allow a 'full Action' game to function (not saying that it's the best option) while still both providing good PvE and 'a meaningful challenge increase aspect for PvPvE (now you have to move because PvP is happening but the boss is not the reason for this requirement).

Azherae wrote: »

"The larger your adventuring party, the less any given player will need to move."

Yep, that was very true in L2. Obviously its pve was super basic already, but if you're in a full party of 9 people(and you usually were), then only 1-2 people would be really active. Bards would be on a timer of their buffs, dps were burst-bois who only attacked at the perfect time, healers barely even healed if the kiters were good and the kiters themselves ran around like crazy and did their best to survive w/o burning healer mana.

If you were in smaller groups, everyone would have to work more to optimize farming and mana usage and hp and everything else.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

"The larger your adventuring party, the less any given player will need to move."

Yep, that was very true in L2. Obviously its pve was super basic already, but if you're in a full party of 9 people(and you usually were), then only 1-2 people would be really active. Bards would be on a timer of their buffs, dps were burst-bois who only attacked at the perfect time, healers barely even healed if the kiters were good and the kiters themselves ran around like crazy and did their best to survive w/o burning healer mana.

If you were in smaller groups, everyone would have to work more to optimize farming and mana usage and hp and everything else.

Noted.

Also for clarity I noted this primarily because it's one of the places where BDO fails (as if BDO even had group PvE content lol) because BDO doesn't have the OTHER side of it for a lot of classes.

But I could complain about BDO for weeks in depth, just adding it because that's one of the games that OP was considering trying.

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

Wow I think you misread my input entirely...

Noaani explained why some player types leave games, and my contribution was to remind/point out to NiKr why people might do that.

I have no opinions on whether or not PvP should be in MMOs. I have many opinions on HOW PvP should be applied in MMOs. I am unsure why 'stubborn' and 'selfish' come in, on my part, so I'll leave that there.

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

You have just described L2 pvp. L2 didn't have a gcd. Skill cast times were atk/cast-speed-based so at higher lvls you'd be shooting off dozens of high impact skills a minute. 90% of your gameplay would be in a constant party of the same people that you spent weeks/months/years with. Any and all pve would usually lead to a pvp fight with another constant party that's been together for a while and know how to play with each other best. You could stop your cast at any time, exactly because your skills were animation/cast-based. Time to kill was also really short at top lvls, because you'd have a ton of buffs on you (because of your party)which would give you really high dps. And this led to a constant pressure of "be ready to fight back at any time, because if you don't - you're dead".

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

This is a bit confusing to me because how exactly could you not target someone deep within a group of people in a tab system? If anything, I'd imagine that it's the action bois who'd have to attack frontline because they literally cannot hit anyone behind those lines.

In L2 we'd use rangers/mages to snipe healers at the back, while melee classes would clash in the middle. Or if you were in a dagger party, you'd have support classes agro/attack the frontline of the enemy, while daggers ran through/around to pick off people at the back. And once a "Shadow Step" ability was added (it blinked daggers behind their target's back), you'd have daggers attack those back lines directly exactly because it was a tab target game. We also had blinks for mages that allowed them to move around the battlefield, which made melees' life harder.

But from all the action games I've seen, you just pile on in the middle, while ranged classes just shoot whoever's closest to them in that pile, because they can't hit over the pile (unless there's some height difference in the terrain). I've played a bit of B&S, but never got to arena fights so don't really know how difficult its pvp was, but I definitely liked its combo system. Dunno if that would work in Ashes though. But I do think that L2's overall gameplay situation would probably be close to what we'll see in Ashes, which is exactly why I'm interested in the game in the first place.

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

It's probably moreso that Lineage is among the best PvP MMOs, and the implementation style suits it. Most of the reason I'm counting on Throne and Liberty to be good if Ashes isn't, is that it'll have the same 'base',

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

I mean, yeah, I agree, I just found it weird that you pointed out "only attacking frontlines and running around" as a downside of the tab system, when it's one of the main downsides in an action one.

Also, I forget, did B&S have massive pvp? I usually saw 1v1 arena or maaaybe small group vs small group during faction quests. I totally support B&S' combat system, but I'm not sure if it would work well in the context of hundreds vs hundreds, where you can't really do your full cool combos when there's like 10 other people trying to kill you.

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

Are there any videos of the bigger pvps that you know? I tried googling "B&S mass pvp", but the top results just gave me arena stuff and a few videos of "guides to pvp" w/o any real big fights. I'm just curious to see how the combat worked in a proper big fight and not in a 1v5 or 1v1 situation.

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Well, that certainly brings us closer to an understanding of what your preference would be relative to what you don't find important/interesting.

I haven't played Fighter in NWO, I play Rogue mostly, so I can't speak to it one way or another. How much does 'the range' of abilities or 'needing to interact with spacing consistently' factor into your enjoyment or lack thereof?

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

Man, I am reminded how much I hate 5-digit damage in games.

BNS might as well stand for Big Number Syndrome.

(Ashes starts low and might stay lowish, but I'm not counting on it).

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

If those are all players, then this reminds me a lot of the times when one OP party on russian official servers would toy with a whole guild just for fun. Not as much of an utter destruction, but considering that it's 9 dudes going against (alleged) ~170 - they definitely killed more than they should've
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYNbR-mvfU

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

Well then either literally all other devs are so damn lazy that they can't just keep pumping out expansions on the same scale as EQ or EQ by its nature is easier to make those kinds of expansions for. Cause if the game was so successful, obviously other companies would look at it and try to copy its success, but, as the history has shown, it's probably impossible to pump out that much content for a game that requires more developmental time. Though I'm not a dev so I wouldn't really know.

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

You do realize that you've described predominant majority of mmos, right? And I somehow doubt that even EQ made brand new AI for each new monster across their huge 29 expansions. So me battling against a person that's using new abilities would be the same as you fighting against a new mob that might have some new abilities (though even that doesn't always happen). Except you know what the difference is? I got new abilities too, which makes my opponent react to them in some new way, while the mob AI won't change.

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

Except those rebalances work in pvp games. With mobas being the perfect example of that. Mobas keep being relevant exactly because they have changes to their "classes" and items. That is what keeps the game fun and the experience "new". If classes never changed across decades of playing - the game would be utterly solved, pvp would be utterly boring and pve would get solved within days just because players would know the upper limit of their class and would use it to figure out how to beat the mobs. Afaik that's exactly what happens in WoW prepatch tests (or however they're called). Which is why Bliz have been resetting their dps boosting systems each patch, because that would change how classes play and would make players spend a bit more time figuring shit out (though it usually gets leaked/datamined either way).

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

How exactly does EQ(2) manage to have enough content for a year off of one expansion? Is it long grind? Is it difficulty? Is it "clear what's there and wait for more" approach? Are there hardcore players that clear all the new content within weeks/month and then do whatever they want? What does the daily gameplay of a normal EQ(2) player consist of?

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

BDO is also ridden with p2w, bad gaming practices, RNG OE fest, huge siege lag (afaik) and a slew of other problems on top of it having a pvp system - and even with all of those it's still a relatively big mmo. Yes, obviously not wow/ff14 size, but also not the same as countless 100-500 player ones either. So if Ashes comes into the genre and manages to deliver on their promises w/o most of the issues listed above - I'd assume it'll be successful enough.

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

I mean, tbh, what I see is just hardcore players being hardcore, while the more casual crowd doesn't even try to clear that top lvl content because they realize they can't. And from what I've seen of not even top difficulty boss clears in WoW - that is exactly the case.

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

From my understanding, caravans will most likely be used by guilds or at least big groups of people, because they're meant to transfer huge volumes of goods and I'd assume a random casual player wouldn't just have x100 their inventory of resources on him out of nowhere. They might have x10, but that's why there's mules which will be way safer than caravans (assuming the corruption system works as intended obviously).

And those who join guilds and/or big groups of people would probably be more hardcore than your everyday casual player. And just as the hardcore pve players, they should be ready to lose more than those casual players. And if the gear tier system is properly balanced, they should have better chances in a fight than 100:1. But even if it is 100:1, the diminishing returns should play enough of a role so that that 1 win is way bigger for the weaker side than that 100 is for the winners.

Let's take a party of super hardcore top lvl players that could win those 100 times vs a party of 2 gear tiers lower dudes that miiight win once if they play their hearts out while the top bois are slacking.

As you've said, the weak party was probably out gathering shit and not really progressing too far, because they'd hoped to sell their gatherables for some good cash and progress that way. Their gear would be in good shape and, even if it decays a bit, it's fairly cheap to repair cause the gear itself is cheap.

The super top tier strong party has been bashing their heads against uber mobs and bosses and dying in constant pvp for those mobs and bosses. They've spent a shitton of money on gear repairs and have restocked their uber costly gear several times due to its decay. They make way more money doing all that stuff rather than attacking some weak caravans. But on the off chance of them getting super bored (though I doubt that's possible), they decide to attack such a caravan.

They go to a lower leveled node to catch some weak caravan and they come across that weak party of people. They attack the caravan, fight it out with the weak bois, might not get decay on their gear cause they probably didn't really die in that fight (if the system works only on death), but they did spend a fair bit of time doing that. And all that they got from it was 50% of some mid tier resource that barely covers their wasted time.

Now there's 2 possibilities. The strong bois could say "what the fuck are we doing wasting time on this shit?" or "let's repeat this 99 more times just for the hell of it".

The weak party is a bit sad because they lost half their shit (if we assume you're right on how caravans work), but they were prepared for the loss, because if they weren't - they coulda just ran mules 1.2 times and been completely fine. They could now also choose, risk it again or go run the mules.

If strong bois decide to leave, weak bois are fine either way. If strong bois stay, weak bois will lose once more and then definitely run mules to cut their losses as short as possible in their situation. So in the end strong bois lose out in any of those setups, mainly because their level of progress requires them to do way more important stuff than attacking some random casual caravans.

And if instead of the top lvl super strong bois it was just a party of dudes whose gear is only a tier higher than the weak bois' gear - the ratio wouldn't be anywhere close to 100:1 (again, assuming that gear tier balance is good) and the stronger bois would lose out more because of gear decay, which is now way more probable, considering that the power lvls are similar. And even if the strong bois still win way more times, the weak bois can always just run mules which would mean that strongs have wasted their time not farming better places.

If Intrepid manages to have this kind of diminishing returns for the stronger players, I think pvp losses won't be as prevalent. Obviously a few casual players might try running their caravans completely solo, get ambushed and die, and then leave the game because of it, but that's just the nature of the game. And I hope Intrepid has a good tutorial that suggests running a mule before trying out a caravan.

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

Relatively speaking, the same applies to the difficulty scaling of pve. A hardcore player has more time to spend on the game. Which leads to him being better geared, which allows him to bash his head against top lvl content for a long period of time. And he spends a ton of time doing so, meaning that the reward-to-time spent ration is most likely way smaller than what it was for all the previous gear tiers. One might call it diminishing.

The casualer player has less time so even getting the pre-top tier of gear is already a hassle. And each failed attempt, trying to get that gear, impacts the casual player more than hardcore player's attempt at top lvl content does to him. And usually, as I said before, this leads to the casual player stopping their attempts and either leaving the game or just being content with whatever they have.

If they leave, it's the same as if they left due to pvp, if they stay to enjoy other sides of the game - the corruption system should prevent anyone else from interrupting their enjoyment.

Now we obviously have the bigger pvp picture of node sieges that lead to freeholds getting raided and all that, but I think that's a discussion for another time.

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

I think you misunderstood what I said there. I meant that Ashes should try to be the game that has years-long strong communities that stay in the game not only for the game, but for the company of themselves. I hope Ashes doesn't take several huge shitty turns that lead to people wanting classic versions of the game and/or make their own servers. I want this game to succeed because it's the only mmo I see myself playing, considering the absolute state of the genre currently.

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

In my "definition" of it, as long as the ability doesn't require a target - it's an action ability, cause you just do the action. If you had to target something and then move around to use it in the best way - that's still tab.