LogFAQs > #893468495

FellWolf posted...

What didn't you like about GW2 combat. I'm a fan.

It's been some time since I've played it so hopefully I'm not off but its one of those hybrid psuedo action combat systems where you still have disconnected attacks with lack of hitstun, unavoidable damage, and an aggro system.

For an action combat system to be good there really cannot be an aggro system or tanks, and there cannot be any unavoidable damage or stat checks. A good action combat system is one where given an infinite amount of time a naked level 1 character could theoretically solo the entire game. Of course, the game should generally be hard enough that that would take an inhuman level of skill and patience but it should still be possible.

The only MMO I've played that understood this was Raiderz where I could go in naked and underleveled and beat something solo that a fully geared party of max level players were failing at over and over just because of the difference in player skill. That kind of skill depth is what makes a system fun for 1000s of hours. Granted, raiderz broke my earlier rules in a few places (like with maneloth and viva) but for vast majority of the time worked how I described.

You can look at non MMOs for good examples like dark souls or monster hunter where in souls you can go through the games naked at SL 1 and still win and people have done as much or MH where you can at least beat everything solo naked, sometimes the clock stat checks you but its pretty minor. What a surprise that both series regularly have players invest 100s to 1000s of hours into them. It's almost as if a deep and well designed action combat system with rpg elements is something that entertain people for a very very long time.

To put it another way, if its an action game, and I master the combat system, then I'm done with game, so if you are an MMO you need an action combat system I cannot master without putting in 1000s of hours. I've still yet to master MH combat and while I'm close on souls I'm still not there yet either.

MMOs are for some reason afraid to cash in on this and feel anchored to the tab targetted WoW stereotype. They think players will get bored without long skill rotations and its fine to anchor players and enemies in place when they attack instead of having dynamic fluid motions. They think its fine for enemies to not have gap close attacks and instead to always manually walk up to a player before initiating an attack (this is sickening when I see it, happens even in tera all the time), that its fine to have static worlds with hordes of gormless enemies standing around to die only to respawn in view of players. It's all so incredibly lazy and frustrating.

I know I really veered off from talking about GW2 specifically but I'm pretty sure I covered enough things about it. Raiderz and PSO2 prove that the "we can't have good combat cause latency" is 100% BS and hasn't actually been an issue for nearly a decade so it would be really nice for one to just ditch hotbars, make a good combat system (of which many outside of MMOs already exist to copy), and make an immersive world.

At this point though I'll really settle for "has actual action combat, and is open world". Even that does not exist. BDO and Tera are closest but BDO has its own host of problems and tera isn't really action combat and if it is then the hitboxes should be complained about endlessly cause they are awful because avoiding attacks is not how you mitigate damage in that game.
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