i remember shortly after CoH was launched , before they had capes and nerfed the CoT demon farms.
i was a noob and was out in atlas park basic attacking the a thug . and i found that by timing my punch it would interrupt the incoming attack of the bad guy. and obvious bug but it got me to thinking the other day about a fun combat idea.
picking a couple of melee attacks. left right high and low. and the like. letting you pick where you hit a mob. and get
"lite" crits on your Foes.. where it will give a half moment. before they can queue.an attack back up. nothing really big but a fun way to put some action into basic attacks.
maybe later it can be fleshed out styles. like boxing or martial arts of some sort
what do you think? it could be a nice way to add some action AND something you dont see in other MMOs. this could be " just that little bit of time i needed" thing you can do while a power you need comes off cool down.
Would players consider that 'twitch combat'? And if you could do that to enemies, surely they should be able to do the same to you, yes?
Frankly, I wouldn't mind it or anything that breaks the norm for combat in an MMO and think it would nifty if timing allowed you to solo tougher content (there's really a lot of different ways one could do it too, in such a fashion that you could forge lots of variety within the game).
...but now then, who would disapprove and to what degree?
For me, I'd like movement attacks, kind of like Shield Charge and Lightning Rod, but less clunky (i.e. just point my character in a direction and *ZING*) and have some of that work as a dodge or absorb during to mitigate certain attacks/alpha strikes while also giving melee-types the means of closing a short distance or giving themselves space.
that type of 'Interrupting' combat style I would classify as Twitch-based combat.
Anyone with a poor lag/ping and they have no chance of using said feature as by the time their client see's the opportunity, they click the power and it gets back to the Server its already passed and wasted.
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
Considering that City of Heroes in certain circumstances used to show your abilities as usable when they actually weren't, not even the CoX method was "perfect"....
Exactly. No system is ever "perfect" to everyone but it has to be useable to as many people as possible and poor Internet connection/speeds or ping/lag due to distance will be a problem for a lot of people. No matter how fast my Internet is here in Australia, my lag/ping will be worse than those in America as the servers will be US based.
And as the plan is to only have one server there is no option for regional servers.
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
This sort of 'directional' combat is a feature of Age of Conan. A problem occurs (for me) when this system grows beyond 3-4 buttons. Even with Prompts, I start having difficulties remembering which button I'm supposed to press next. When I played EverQuest I had no trouble 'weaving' Bard-song, but that was a matter of pressing the same 3-4 keys in timed sequence. I was still greatly gratified by the (relative) simplicity of CoH attack-chains.
I prefer an attack-chain supported by situational additions, to a system that requires me to Specific key, in order to be effective. That's more 'twitch' in my mind.
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Fireheart
i should add this would be very low level combat. and useless really after level 5? and optional. if we used the same combat as CoH it would have a click to open extra bar that connects to the basic attack. you can then hard lock the 1-6 keys to the basic combat. or just use your mouse on them. and basic attacks would auto cycle through the left and right punches. now for the people saying its too twitchy? i should point out that it only works to lightly interrupt basic attacks. or as an alt idea make it do a soft crit of +1 or 2 extra damage. look at it as being able to control a left and right boxing combo and stuff like that. more flavor than substance
This sort of animation interrupt of opponent is effectively "blocking" by an alternative means/mechanic. It very definitely falls into Quick Reaction Twitch gameplay due to its timing reactive nature. Best not to go there.
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i think you are missing the point. it is such a small bonus to your basic lowest attack that it would take more time to "twitch" someone down then it would to just trigger a real power and do 10-100 times more damage to the mob
how many times past level 5 did anyone even need to use the brawl punch attack in CoH?
All the time.
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This would definitely fall into the "twitch" category, and if we had a multi-million dollar development budget to implement a lot of odd-ball ideas, I wouldn't be opposed to this as an [i]option[/i] that is an exception from the rules of how most power-sets operate. However, considering the very limited budget our wonderful developers are operating with, I'd say that this is not a desirable use of resources.
Twitch gameplay isn't inherently bad, but an important part of the design of CoX was the lack of twitch gameplay that allowed you to focus your attention on things other than direct control of your character.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Which is ironic really, because CoX started off as a *fast* (in comparison) combat game compared to other MMO's and whilst WoW's combat speed has not really changed over the years, towards the end of CoX's life, it felt that CoX's combat was far slower than WoW.
It is in interesting POV though.. where two systems don't really change over the years and yet you get different feeling as the years progress.
I wonder to what extent that has to do with animations, effects, and expectations.
Take an attack that has a character leap up into the air and come down with a 'boom'. Many, perhaps even most, WoW players would likely be aghast at such a long animation / slow attack. The consensus among those who played CoH appears to mostly be, "Bad. Ass."
In a game like WoW, especially in the end game, it becomes increasingly important to maximize performance. Animations and effects take second place. Heck, there is often so much going on in a raid that most people probably don't see their character 90% of the time.[color=red]*[/color] (And 90% of the time you look exactly like every other character of the same class, anyway.) In CoH, I dare say even for many min-maxers it was still important to look good while doing what they did and you could afford to take a few extra seconds to enjoy the sight of everything slowly falling down / being on fire / stumbling around in confusion / etc.
[br]
[color=red]*[/color] In CoH, odds were good that you [i]couldn't[/i] see your character.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
To be fair, ED did result in a functional nerf to PCs by reducing the effectiveness of 1xAcc/5xDam and other similar slotting, which necessarily slows down combat by reducing damage output.
However, the speed of combat isn't necessarily what I was thinking about. More along the lines that you weren't sitting on a hot-key waiting to react to something the opponent did. You lined up what you were going to do, and you tweaked that lineup based on the flow of the overall battle, rather than a specific action by a mob or teammate. You still were doing a lot of stuff, but it was mostly proactive, rather than reactive. Most animation delays really prevented the possibility of twitch play that was limited by the player's reaction time, so we had to understand what was happening overall and adjust tactics.
Your team is taking a lot of damage? I need to cycle to my heal more often. AV finally showed up? Time to switch on that debuff toggle, even if in means I don't have the endurance to spam my DPS chain. Healer dropped? Now's a good time to burn that Nova.
None of these are typically going to be limited by reaction time, but rather, are limited situational awareness.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Dang, you made it sound like it was a Turn Based MMO. :(
Ironically, the only part that I was affected with by ED was the changing of Fire Imps from a 2-5 spawn to a fixed 3 number spawn. I didn't even have perma hasten.
Reading all of that, brings up something else that I read... apparently some people were able to get around the "rooting problem" in CoX and were able to cast on the fly... Sure, quite possibly not with *every* ability, but it was enough for them to break the balance points in the game.
An example of "breaking the balance points" of a game ... The Elder Scrolls Online has a really good one. It's called Animation Canceling or sometimes Animation Clipping.
The way it works is that you have basic attacks you do with mouse clicks (Light and Heavy) and then you also have Skill abilities on your hotbar that you click using 1 through 5. Because ESO has Blocking, and because Blocking is something that you need to Quick React (in Twitch Time!) in order to do successfully, you can "override" certain animations with other animations. The net effect is that you get a Light Attack + Skill Attack sumultaneously, effectively raising the DPS your character can output. It requires player discipline to be able to "weave" attacks together like this, but the practical upshot is a sort of "2-for-1" kind of deal when it comes to animating attacks made by players.
But wait, it gets worse ...
This sort of Animation Canceling, and how it gets used, means that powers that require Channeling (ie. can't be Animation Canceled) immediately lose a lot of their value [i]by comparison to[/i] other abilities that can be overridden by Animation Canceling. Why attack with only 1 thing if in the same (or less!) amount of time you can attack with 2 things instead?
Then you get into the fact that Blocking is a Click And Hold sort of operation, but there are spells that are Instant Cast ... meaning that you can use offensive attacks while actively blocking! This means that being able to Block AND Attack has much greater value than being able to Channel and NOT Block at the same time.
Needless to say, it didn't take the PvP crowd in ESO all that long to figure out those advantages. And it came as no surprise to anyone that because these things are "features" rather than "bugs" there's no reason not to exploit them as hard and as effectively as possible, simply because these things depend upon how the entire combat system "works" rather than being an edge case exploit. Of course, it then didn't take long for the same thinking and mentality to migrate into the PvE community, simply because the advantages were too great (think +40% DPS for starters) and you've basically got a situation where if you AREN'T exploiting these "features" then you're "doing it wrong" when it comes to playing and defeating the game's content ... whether that be players or mobs.
Incidentally, the above has one tearfully hilarious side effect. ESO has effects that are called "Hasten" and don't do what you'd expect them to. In a game with no cooldowns (or at least, no obvious cooldowns aside from potion usage), there is an internal timer that runs cooldowns for how long you have to wait between Light Attacks before the next Light Attack can be launched. It's usually like 1 second or so.
Most people assumed that Hasten would speed up animation times. Nope. Instead, Hasten merely reduces the *delay* between Light Attacks, and maybe (maybe?) reduces the amount of time needed to charge up a Heavy Attack (click and hold). But when you're doing Animation Canceling, that entire delay time between Light Attacks simply becomes completely irrelevant and moot. That's because Animation Canceling in effect "bypasses" the entire cooldown delay between basic attacks that Hasten was supposed to be speeding up.
Oops.
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I think it's been established the devs and some players want a simple combat system. Target an enemy and hit a button (Tab Target). What you suggest would add a complication.