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

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But this isn't really a question of who will play what on that level.

We're talking about Raiders. 95% of players are not raiders.

As an example, I 'know' (not like, super friendly personally or anything) about 50% of the upper echelon of players of Street Fighter V. I could give you their opinions on many many things in that game, what they would like fixed, what they would enjoy, what the majority wanted and liked (and got).

95% of 'people who have ever tried to play SFV for more than a week' not only 'don't want the same things as those people', they don't even know what they are .

At some point you have to give some credit to someone's experience, don't you? If the discussion right now is about 'what will Raids look like in Ashes', then you need to care about two types of people:

1. People who raid all the time because it's fun for them
2. People who would raid all the time if it was more fun for them

Noaani is almost certainly in group 1. I am sometimes 1 sometimes 2.

The 'consistent few' who argue are the ones who have reason to care.

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Well, I don't want that. I want my Action Abilities to be important in more encounters. I don't want to have to respec to Tab abilities to be effective on hard encounters and I don't want to just be standing there using none of the strengths of my Action Abilities because they're borderline useless in easier Tab encounters.

If your response is 'well don't do that' then I as the "Action Combat Raider" now don't have a raiding scene. I would very much like one.

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How did we even get here...?

I'm not talking about it being hard or easy. I'm talking about 'suboptimal' or 'unengaging'.

I don't even know where to start with this one.

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But the main raider and the sometimes raider are in this thread saying "No they don't take a backseat for us".

One of whom claims to be in connection with a massive amount of other top-end raiders, and the other claims to represent 10 (up from 8) people.

It ain't backseat to me, this is the second most important aspect of the game, from my end. Everything else Ashes offers I can get better somewhere else.

EDIT: Realized it wasn't clear, because I didn't address your point. I obviously 'only' speak for 10 people right now.

"It must be built to reward Action style play or I won't play."

Should I call them all?

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I am an Action Cleric.

I want to play Action Cleric. I find Action to be more engaging for Support Role.

My Summoner and Bard are probably able to give their opinion. Feel free to 'claim we are the minority' but understand that there's no reason we assume that.

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And that is absolutely fine for you to dislike it, and I hope Intrepid makes it so that you don't have to do that. I also hope Intrepid does not make it significantly suboptimal for ME to do some equivalent of that. And if it is optimal for me to do it, it almost always has to be 'more rewarding' for the additional effort and risk I am taking, which in turn often makes NOT doing it suboptimal.

I don't want to take anything away from you playing careful Tab-Target backline when you feel like supporting.

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Surely you have played ONE of the more recent difficult group Action games enough to understand why one would claim that, though? I'm not even saying you have to agree, just give some example other than 'this can just be made easier' or something. Doesn't even have to be an MMO, since, after all, they usually aren't.

If we are talking 'mechanical variance that can't just be cheesed by a monolith of a single class avoiding a main mechanic', you absolutely will lose variance in terms of a raiding scene because raids are tuned to be hard and doing a raid suboptimally (more than 10% below tuning) is increasing your failure chance by a LOT.

"Can I hit the Dragon in the head with my Magic Hammer when the Dragon also requires me to dodge to reduce damage?" is the 'challenge' when using an Action Skill (let's assume the last stream showed an Action skill).

There are two ways in general to design this, either you NEED to hit the dragon in the head as part of the encounter or risk wiping, or if the skill was Tab, hitting the dragon in the head is either not possible, or not a thing that involves physically orienting your character correctly in the case where the dragon spins, moves, turns, for any reason.

If the Tank is keeping the dragon completely still, Action and Tab are almost the same now, right? Which means either Action gets a bonus to SOMETHING (Accuracy, effect, damage, whatever) becoming optimal, or it gets little or no bonus (Tab is now better for those few moments where the thing does spin).

Yes, you CAN make a bunch of varied encounters in Hybrid, but 'well in this one you need to hit the Dragon in the head and in this other one you don't NEED to hit it' does not cover 'variety' to me.

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Yeah.... 'Tab target' on a summoner with two-three summons.... Nah. I'm sure it'll be better for some people, but the way I currently can perceive summoner working with the current combat direction, I'll definitely have more fun and just be over all more able to actively move and command my summons with action combat. Especially in situations where positioning matters a lot .

Then again I'm also the sort of person to never player with lock on in souls-like games. But I definitely wouldn't tell FromSoft to take away tab targeting from those games any more than I would from AoC.

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Let me ask the obvious question then.

If I have a healing skill that requires me to dash perfectly up to the Tank and be literally right next to them, like 'I am practically using melee to heal my own tank', and be facing forward to do so, is it cool if it heals twice as much health as a backliner?

I'm doing something physically harder to TIME and SPACE correctly if the encounter is serious, and I must coordinate more effectively with not only the Tank but anyone else who might be about to throw off the spacing.

Bigger risk, bigger reward, right?

At this point I feel like it's coming down to the level of raiding standards for different people. Noaani and Azherae are trying to say that not utilizing literally all of the combat's mechanics during the top lvl content is asinine and that, in order to have a raiding scene, you need to have several top level raids with enough variety for all of them to be interesting to said scene.

And all the others seems to just be saying "well, you can just forget about some mechanics during the raid and it'll be just fine" or "you could have some raids w/o said mechanics". Yes, you can do those things, but at that point it would stop being a top lvl encounter (from the raiders' pov) and w/o that you're not having a proper raiding scene.

And as Noaani pointed out, there haven't been proper action raids that would be as highly valued as some tab raids have been. And, imo, the two videos that were posted (wildstar and Tera) did not show me top lvl content, as I imagine it to be. Now, I don't know whether those videos showed best raids from those games or whether devs even tried making harder action encounters, but just looking at them - they didn't look any different from smth like a FF14 ultimate fight. Except the pace of everything going on felt even slower, while FF14 has the longest gcd in mmos (to my knowledge).

This fight, just by the looks of it, looks way more involved than either of the other two. It's quite possible that this is the case because it's just 8 people instead of 30-40, but if I wanted a proper top lvl raid - I'd want this kind of involvement at whatever the raid's size is (and afaik not even FF14 has that, but allegedly EQ2 does for 24 people)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGReBbXnynQ

edit: that ending should indicate how difficult the fight is for the players. They're almost crying because they managed to finish it. That's the kind of reaction I wanna have when I raid in Ashes