Originally posted by FredomSekerZ

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UZYyImnESY 6:00 minutes

You can't switch in combat, you're right about that.

However, build swaping is probably going to be a must in later areas of a game, and obviously pvp.

He swapped in combat... at 6:10

Again, more misinformation.

SWToR: 9.0/10

There goes all of your credibility.

I actually think that you can invert the revew scores to find their true values.

Originally posted by Gwahlur

Horror fanatic

Minor point-and-click elements

Questionable voice-acting

 

Subtle 

Well some parts of it are goofy. The voice-acting and story at times, particularly the dialogue, like in SWToR, is simply goofy. It might be something out of a B movie, but it's still entertaining to watch.

If you love horror movies and the old 80's B movies, then you'll get a kick out of it in any case.

This isn't the kind of game you play to challenge yourself, but to be entertained. Isn't that what all games used to be about? Enjoyment?

Originally posted by Chopsticks

that and so much more.  Did you know you don't have to do the story at all? 

  If you don't do the story, you miss out on the experience. The story quests are of generally better quality than the generic (blue/blood red) ones anyway.

In that sense it's a bit like SWToR, but with a better world design and much more detail.

Seriously, grow a sense of humor. I was one of the guys in OB who made fun of the Elin and the people who played them; people were putting me on ignore left and right, but I kept the chat mostly entertained and it entertained me. 

Why interact with people through an online client if you can't joke with them about the things you'd never joke with them about in real life?

Originally posted by cutthecrap

 

Meh. Swapping between builds takes place before combat, not during, although within a mission. People might scorn upon it, but it can add a tactical element to it, especially if tactics and skillsets have to be changed on the fly - outside combat but within the same mission - to better deal with a situation.

 

As for the information in the OP, sorry, you might feel 'insulted' by the provided information (kinda odd but whatever), but I bet that a whole lot of people had no overview of the mechanics nor the detailed workings and found it helpful

You actually can swap in combat as demonstrated in a developer video. Troll harder.

This MMO was made for HORROR FANS

The setting and details are mostly references to 80's horror flicks, Lovecrafts works and other horror/fantasy literature.

There are literally references everywhere. You can't escape them and they will draw you into the game like nothing else.

To further draw in the player, there are some minor point-and-click elements that require you to read the quest text, find clues and follow symbols.

The character customization is also unique in the sense you can gain all skills in the game and readily swap between skill sets.

Everybody will be able to tank, heal, DPS etc. and will readily be able to swap between the roles at a whim, sort of like in GW2 with respect to its weapon-swapping mechanics.

Often it feels like you are in a horror movie yourself, with the gory monsters, gratuitous topless nudity and questionable plot/voice acting.

[mod edit]

That's not the combat mechanics, but the skillset mechanics.

You might have to plan your builds, but once you have found all of the appropriate builds for every situation you're basically set.

Reading tables is not hard. It's not intimidating. Everybody nowadays can work with excel, hell high school students are now experts in it.

Condescending to future players for no good reason at all isn't helping the game. Maybe if you had compared it with GW2s weapon swapping mechanics you would have had more people interested instead of just trying to insult their intelligence. 

Maybe GW2s base combat per weapon set is just as bland, but I haven't played it yet, so I'll reserve my judgement. The whole complexity of the actual combat per se is NOT figuring out the builds, but figuring out when to swap between them. Combat implies real-time decision making, not planning.

Originally posted by jdnyc

Originally posted by JeroKane

It is a free skill system.

The reason they do it like this, is to create progression... the further you move into the skill tree, the better (more advanced) skills you unlock.

What you unlock stays unlocked. So once you unlock one full tree, you can start unlocking the next, and the next, and the next, etc... potentially unlocking everything.

Then you can pretty much mix/match any skill you want, with the only limitation of picking 7 active and 7 passive skills at once.

That and the actives you use must have the corresponding weapon attached.  Passives have no such restriction.

Some of them do implicitly, as they correspond to some active skill.

Originally posted by Nitth

---

 

There is a "dodge" skill that serves the same function as gw2's. Can switch builds in combat.

How the hell did I miss that in OB? Well thanks a lot for pointing that out. That definitely spices things up a bit. You've changed my opinion on combat with one post.. although the arthritic builder spamming I could still honestly do without, but that's my personal problem, so..

c'est la vie

Originally posted by stromp45

Im looking for a good combo .During beta i was useing fist -blood combo worked ok just wondering if theres a better combo out there.

Fist/blood is awesome. I did the same. It is the most survivable thing out there with fair damage.

You could do the same with anything/blood really.

Sword/blood worked for me as well and the last combo I tried, which was more damage oriented, but not very survivable was hammer/shotgun (but very fun!).

[mod edit]

Originally posted by AdamTM

I tend to see them as story bits and pices:

The cowboy tells you that the 2nd issue he has is keeping them (the zombies) down".

This is a little "bite" that adds more inmersion to the game, it gives explaination on the respon of zombies from a world view.

Most MMOs just go with "there is always more", wich is never true, in a world like ours.

I've been trying to make this point but nobody believes me...

To be fair, quite a few of the quests were very standard, especially the one you get at the church that requires you in the first 4-5 tiers to go from massgrave to massgrave to kill 5 of some type of mob. It offers very little story past the first tier and forces you to do mindnumbing grinding ... well not much, but still a good 25 mobs worth of boredom before it gets slightly more interesting.

That wasn't the only quest of that nature either. The quest that has very little story and asks you to kill the zombie veterans wasn't too much better.. and the list goes on.

Contrary to that, there's the quest that makes you look for the pages, the symbols on the church, or the main story quest that forces you to either know of the famous song that nearly every person on the planet has listened to at one time, or another, the four seasons. It was easy, but still refreshing.

Still, the fact remains that a lot of the content is very standard, although there are a few gems in the rough witih point-and-click elements in them.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Actually I don't think that's correct.

Now keep in mind I'm a huge fan of Tera and I'm planning to be in the game for some time. A good part fo this is the combat.

But Tera has about 700k subs and who knows where that will go down to as we haven't fnished the first month. And you know what I"ve been hearing in the noob area? People saying they are having a tough time getting used to the combat. Soem people having a tough time with not "clicking" the skills. Now this isn't a huge amount of people but it is telling that there is a disconnect for some.

Raiderz is not released and I wonder what the numbers would be.

I played GW2 exactly like the current mmo's with decent results. I wonder how many will try to do the same.

This isn't a huge paradigm shift in combat thinking. You have one game that's a year old in Korea and only 700k subs (good to be sure but not groundbreaking) a game that is not out yet and another that is not out yet.

If every game that was in development was "action combat" I would agree but the only other game that I can recall is planetside 2 and that is just following in the footsteps of it's forerunner.

 

 

The problem is that the few who haven't coped yet with hotkey combat are very, very few, because of WoWs immense popularity.

Hell, Teras catchphrase is even "True action combat", partially because that's all it really offers, but still, it's becoming a trend in upcoming titles for good reason.

If GW2 didn't have weapon switching and "dodging" its combat would be conisdered prosaic. GW1s combat is nowadays considered bad for a new game.

The newer titles are catching the trends, or at least trying to. Even the Elder Scrolls MMO that sounds horrific is using GW2s/AoCs system to an extent.

Most people have played WoW, so most people are facing diminishing returns when it comes to the same style of combat, or combat that offers less complexity than WoWs.

Originally posted by ShakyMo

 

but you didn't, you used fury stance and fury tree for grinding and raid dps.  you used arms stance and arms build for pvp (ok with stance dance for some cc, but then back to arms), you used tank stance and tank build for tanking. 

most of them wow abilities were just the same ability but more damage and longer cooldown.

OK for tanking you had to actually watch the fight, even though it was pretty much a standard rotation you spammed.

but for dps in wow  - macro your keyboard up and spam that 1 button till your finger bleeds while you watch tv.

Also your talking like in TSW you have ONE build.  I already had 5 viable builds by the end of 2nd beta.

For PvP in WoW you had to use all stances in the good old days. There are definitely a lot of viable builds in TSW, but all builds are situational at best and that's apparently what they were aiming for, which is good.... but..

The problem is that you can't change builds during combat. You are relegated to a certain way of playing once you're in combat and it's kind of boring, because it can't accomodate strategic play due to constraints.

You're right: You didn't have to use all of those buttons in certain aspects of the game, but there were situtations that required all of them, especially when tanking/pvping etc.

TSW will never have that kind of complexity the way it is now, unless they let you change builds on the fly in future content.

In fact, if they let you did that it would solve a lot of complaints I think and make it more interesting to play.

Originally posted by ShakyMo

 

but its not WOW combat, it really really isn't, if you play it like wow you will be disapointed. 

the 2 games it has most in common with combat wise are COH and................................... GW2!

Its ALL about states, combos and movement.

Tera yeah thats more action combat, raiderz I don't know about, it combines my two least favourite things in its very title - raiding and chav spelling.

I went the fight club with my friend, we kept messing with our builds seeing what would beat each other (he had 4 weapeons maxed, i had 3, 2 halfs and a few bits elsewhere), we both commented that the build messing about stuff was just like when we used to do arena back in GW1

Yeah, it's not.. it's sadly worse than WoWs combat, because the rotations are more trivial. There are less situational abilities, because there are only 7 active abilities period.

GW2 forces you to swap between different weapon sets, in this game you predetermine your set of skills before combat, not during, so regardless of what you pick it's the same old 7.

You're definitely spot on with the GW combat too; GW combat is just as shallow. The whole complexity, just like TSW, is with determining your skills beforehand. The problem is that in GW there wasn't really a lot of grinding and a lot of the PvE stuff was forced grouping, which was great for that particular game.

So far in TSW it feels a lot like CoH where you can progress mindnumbingly easy through the content single player, since the base mechanics are so trivial and finding that optimal heal/sustain build is easy with claws, or sword/blood etc.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Someone above said build, build, build, build, build, spend, spend.

Well done for spotting double finishers, but your still doing it wrong.

Some spends do same damage regardless of how much you built, but they do bonus based on state or mob health.
Some spends, get rid of 1, 2 or 3 resources, not the whole pool.
Some passives have you build automatically on triggers
Some attacks are neither spenders or builders, but do more damage when you have full resources
some builders do bonus damage when you have no other resources
then you have the movement thing, using los to telegraph mob attacks and timing your own hard hitters so they don't get interupted.

this is just with the inner wheel in the open beta. it IS better combat than your typical mmo combat, you can't just stand their and spam a rotation if you want to do well.

now that's the mechanics, some animations need work though to make it knit better.

I generally agree gw2 has better combat.

BUT
I take tsw combat over wow/swtor/rift style combat anyway, I actually have to think about what I'm doing, I can't set the thing to a keyboard macro and just stand there, doing entire combat off 1 key press.

The problem is that there are only 7 abilities. You can only skin a cat so many ways. Most builders you alternate usage with, like with claw healing/damage; there's little variation to your base rotation once you have it figured out.

The elite active skills generally have cooldowns, so once again the base rotation is trivialized through the button constraint and builder/finisher design.

Take the WoW warrior: You had stance dancing => 3 buttons

Initimidating shout/Stun => 1 button (situationally used)

Base damage abilities => >= 3 with 1 situational (execute) => >= 4 buttons

Situtational defensive abilities => shield wall/spell reflect/healing/fear immunity/damage etc.  => >= 3 buttons

Mobility abilities => >= 2 buttons

Snare abilities => 1 button

etc.

Obviously I omitted some, but that's intentional, the point is that for only so many different effects you need a certain number of buttons.  7 buttons is a serious constraint by itself.

Originally posted by Sovrath

 

I think this boils down to semantics.

Most mmo's are focused around combat. So does that mean that every mmo had lousy combat? Well, if you ask combat game afficianados they might say "yes". However I don't think, as much as "some" players might want to believe, that developers are dense.

They know what fast paced combat games offer. and as I said part of this might be technology but i think mose of this is to include players who don't have the capacity for fast paced, visceral combat.

 

   GW2, Tera, Raiderz etc. are all showing that that simply isn't the case. This isn't 2004, where WoWs combat will fly, this is 2012, where we have seen and done everything EQ-like.

  It's not a question of being "bad" in the absolute sense, but "bad" compared to what else exists and what our expectations are. Diminishing utility is the operative word and some of us, nay, most of us have played the hell out of WoW/EQ/CoH etc. and NEED something new.

Back in 200X, X <= 4, we didn't have those expectations, because we were all relatively new. AO had absolutely atrocious combat, but a lot of us didn't mind, because it was still relatively new.

It's like releasing  a platformer like super mario bros. for the NES AGAIN during the 64-bit era; it would have not have flown then and it still wouldn't fly today as a superior good.

Originally posted by Arkain

 

LOL, I'm with you, but some players are strange and want to be pacifistic in MMO's about wars and death (the player in WoW that leveled their toon to max without killing anything comes to mind). I was just saying it should be posible, thats all.

You sure dug yourself into a hole with that one, but you did the smart thing and lay down it.

Originally posted by Sovrath

 

And what did I do in City of Heroes or Lord of the Rings or Vanguard?

Are you saying there is no combat in a Super Hero game? Or the conflict in the Lord of the Rings is about diplomacy?

The game has combat but it's not "about" combat.

Those games were all about combat, just like this one is for the most part.

You complete quests, or kill enemies to advance.

The latter is enitrely combat, the former is MOSTLY combat, so it is, by definition, a combat-focused game.