Hi all,
Several times in the most recent Twitch Stream, COH referred the combat pace of Pantheon as "slow", and while he loved it, others may not. I think it might be worth some clarification regarding what he meant by slow, and it's implications to player actions while in combat. I categorize slow combat as being rather boring and un-engaging. For instance, at low levels (and arguably higher levels), melee classes in EQ 1 were "slow" in that you turned on auto-attack and kicked once every 30 seconds. This to me is "slow" combat, and is not a good thing. It was completely unbalanced when comparerd to casting classes. While I don't care for many aspects of the current successful MMOs, what they did right was give melee classes something to do in combat other than stand there and use a special ability once in a while. I'm hoping Pantheon will offer melee classes a more engaging and enjoyable experience than EQ.
I would have to agree over all. I am glad to get "Auto Attack" again, but I would prefer it to be more of the background noise that happens while I'm doing whatever else. I really have no desire to play a button masher again, but there has to be a happy medium between "Auto Attack, make a sandwich" mode and "Button mash, instant carpel tunnel"
kelenin said:Since a number of them were on the Vanguard team, and Vanguard is definitely an influence, I have a little faith that they'll do ok at not letting melee classes be too boring.
On an aside, is your avatar Frick from the NBC Merlin TV special?
Frick is how I always imagined my EQ1 gnome as looking!
I agree. The slowness of combat should mean that your average battle takes longer, therefore mobs die more slowly. It should not necessarily mean there are less decisions to be made or actions to be taken.
Really though, combat in early levels is generally a little slower even in the sense of how busy combat is. That's by design. At level 13 (the lvl of the chars in the stream), you should pretty much only have some of your core abilities, and likewise the mobs you are fighting should be using the same. The advanced abilities and harder mob mechanics should come gradually which will also increase the amount of decisions and actions that need be taken.
As you get higher level and gain a bigger arsenal of abilities, the mobs should also have more options and that means more attacks to utilize and more variability. You really can't just throw all that in at the start. It has to be introduced over time.
I have to say, one of the things I was most thrilled to see from the stream was the slowed pace of combat (intrinsically tied to difficulty). While I knew full well that the difficulty/pace was very much a work in progress during the first two streams, I was secretly praying for longer/more difficult fights. This time around, it felt to me like we were finally catching a glimpse at what we can expect regarding combat difficulty.
I have wondered this about mele class too, i thought it seemed that Cohh (as an example) was being EXTREMELY stamina efficient with his dps output and hardly using his skills to any great degree, (and we couldnt see anyone other mele stamina bars from his perspective to see if other people were using a lot of skills or not many), but it seemed like if he wanted to (and at times did) he could open up and spam some special moves but it seemed he would also draw agro quickly doing this and use his stamina up relatively quickly. They were talking about backstab being OP still so maybe he was being cautious with his agro. I think it is still hard to see the each class performing at their optimum with all their skills at hand and until we see a stream that is focused on tactics and less about feautres Q&A and an update on graphics.
As D said above they are only lvl 13 so fewer skills at that stage but even with this in ming they may not even have all the skill concepts finished and able to be used yet for that level, who knows.
One other thing i think that might be important to consider (less relevant to skills but more relevant to the feeling of a faster pace through encounters) and hopefully no offence is taken here, but with the absense of tactics the overall gameplay speed tends to diminish with this kind of game and of course people die as we saw quite a bit. I would really like to see someone step into a tactical leadership position during a stream, call some shots on who to mez, who to pull, who to assist etc, without this it is slow going and that is also true of EQ. Its almost like trying to play EQ like a modern mmo at the moment, minimal assisting and minimal respect for the job of the CC and i understand this is mainly b ecause they are focused on chatting and Q&A during the stream, but allocating one person to call the shots before pulls might show some "faster" gameplay in action.
I think part of the "slow" feel of the combat comes from the fact that the stream was meant to showcase the game progression and reply to as much questions as they could, so going to a zone or level with more engaging combat mechanics requiring more concentration and focus would have been to the detriment of the quality of the stream and the amount of questions answered.
Yes the combat felt slow and very much EQesque but I honestly think it will be far from boring come launch or even beta.
Think some of the "slowness" mentioned stems from a lot of standing around as the mob is being killed. It takes awhile to kill them so there is more time to observe actionless killing. Now when I say actionless, I am only referring to motion you see around the mob. There were not a lot of twitch reflexes involved on trash fights. You can't see each individuals skills they were using to kill off each mob.
Therefore, my conclusion is, people viewed a lot of motionless killing as if players had no skills or were not using many skills to kill the mobs faster. Most probably never played EQ1 maybe? Not sure if this will pick up during Alpha or not, but I think this played a big role on the observation and usage of the word "slow"
Hokanu said:One other thing i think that might be important to consider (less relevant to skills but more relevant to the feeling of a faster pace through encounters) and hopefully no offence is taken here, but with the absense of tactics the overall gameplay speed tends to diminish with this kind of game and of course people die as we saw quite a bit. I would really like to see someone step into a tactical leadership position during a stream, call some shots on who to mez, who to pull, who to assist etc, without this it is slow going and that is also true of EQ. Its almost like trying to play EQ like a modern mmo at the moment, minimal assisting and minimal respect for the job of the CC and i understand this is mainly b ecause they are focused on chatting and Q&A during the stream, but allocating one person to call the shots before pulls might show some "faster" gameplay in action.
Just having an assist key would probably make that a lot easier. Watching Cohh, he was constantly standing back (when he wasn't distracted) and struggling to figure out which mob to attack. Being able to assist would have probably prevented at least half of their wipes.
Dullahan said:Hokanu said:One other thing i think that might be important to consider (less relevant to skills but more relevant to the feeling of a faster pace through encounters) and hopefully no offence is taken here, but with the absense of tactics the overall gameplay speed tends to diminish with this kind of game and of course people die as we saw quite a bit. I would really like to see someone step into a tactical leadership position during a stream, call some shots on who to mez, who to pull, who to assist etc, without this it is slow going and that is also true of EQ. Its almost like trying to play EQ like a modern mmo at the moment, minimal assisting and minimal respect for the job of the CC and i understand this is mainly b ecause they are focused on chatting and Q&A during the stream, but allocating one person to call the shots before pulls might show some "faster" gameplay in action.
Just having an assist key would probably make that a lot easier. Watching Cohh, he was constantly standing back (when he wasn't distracted) and struggling to figure out which mob to attack. Being able to assist would have probably prevented at least half of their wipes.
That would be helpful, I liked the /assist command in VG but to get around that now, on my Rogue I target the person I want to assist and have them as my defensive target so I know where they are and just watch what they attack, if I am too far away using TAB to cycle targets is an easy and quick mechanic to get right into the action but Cohh was just having the time of his life, I don;t think he cared about DPSing properly lol
Kilsin said:That would be helpful, I liked the /assist command in VG but to get around that now, on my Rogue I target the person I want to assist and have them as my defensive target so I know where they are and just watch what they attack, if I am too far away using TAB to cycle targets is an easy and quick mechanic to get right into the action but Cohh was just having the time of his life, I don;t think he cared about DPSing properly lol
Yeah, I'd say that the assist command is basically a requirement. Even better would be the ability to (like modern EQ) set a specific player as group/raid main assist, so instead of having to change your assist hotkey every 5 minutes, you can just use the command /assist and it will automatically take advantage of the included system.
I really need to watch this stream I guess. It's comforting to know that Pantheon has the defensive targeting system as was included in Vanguard. Despite the bugs with the UI that Vanguard often had, defensive target was a great inclusion. Such an improvement over EQ.
I am not sure of this assist comman people are speaking about.
But the way WoW(I know, blasphemy to name) did it with having Target of Target and a way to set Focus on a specific target, friendly or hostile was pretty good. I really like the idea of having a Offensive and Defensive target seperately (Though I wonder how spells that have defensive and offensive components depending on target would work, if they are a thing) and together with Target of Target and Focus I think it would be a very good and flexible system.
//Voices of Terminus' Youmu Svartie
Youmu said:I am not sure of this assist comman people are speaking about.
But the way WoW(I know, blasphemy to name) did it with having Target of Target and a way to set Focus on a specific target, friendly or hostile was pretty good. I really like the idea of having a Offensive and Defensive target seperately (Though I wonder how spells that have defensive and offensive components depending on target would work, if they are a thing) and together with Target of Target and Focus I think it would be a very good and flexible system.
Assist is simple. In the earliest stages of EQ, you would target a player and type /assist, and you would then target whatever they were targeting.
However, that is a very primitive, outdated system. Modern iterations of EQ (Phinigel, Live) have Target of Target which simplifies that a lot. However, the /assist command is still used. You simply designate a player as Group Main Assist or Raid Main Assist and the commands "/assist group" and "/assist raid" will take care of it for you.
World of Warcraft has an amazing targeting system, and Vanguard's targeting system was largely derivative of that. Pantheon's seems to be as well, which is great.
Here's how Vanguard's system worked:
You can target both an enemy (Offensive Target) or friendly (Defensive Target) at the same time. Beneficial effects will automatically default to the Defensive Target. Hostile effects will automatically default to the Offensive Target.
The Offensive Target window also was the default window for targeting things like merchants and non-hostile NPCs just for convenience's sake, but it was obvious and intuitive in practice.
In other words, a Cleric can simultaneously nuke and heal without having to micromanage targeting through the use of cumbersome macros or anything else.
I understood the basics of how the system worked, what I am more curious about is about spells having both at the same time, let me take an example, in this case from WoW.
Holy Shock
Deals 100 damage to an enemy OR heals for 50 on a friendly.
WoW which did not use a double targeting system had not problem with such spells, I'm just curious how Pantheon would handle those, how where these sort of spells handled in Vanguard? Did they exist at all within the game?
The assist commad sounds like the proto Target of Target system that WoW and many other MMO's utilize now, and instead of a command I think I would prefer just having a Target of Target portrait.
//Voices of Terminus' Youmu Svartie