WoW Question re: Speed of Combat

[Cyrene]

If I'm not hallucinating, some of RBD has been in various phases of the Beta.

I've been messing around in the open beta (just a *very* little bit so far), and have played around with a Pally (human), Hunter (Night Elf), and Shaman (cow). They are all still babies (lvls 5-11), but I am already concerned about something.

The combat seems, well, glacial. This drove me nuts in NWN. It's like some little gnome behind the monitor is rolling dice between every swing. And the mobs (so far) politely wait for you to finish your swing, then take their best shot while you politely stand still for them to do so. I'm sitting there, leaned back in my computer chair with my arms crossed watching this little slow-motion minuet, thinking "Get ON WITH IT!!!" If this was Civ3, I would have pulled up the "Options" menu and turned off combat animation by now .

So, once you get out of newbie-land and get some skills, does the combat pace pick up?

For some reason I'm just not having "fun" so far. Hmmm, maybe I'll go start a nuker.

--Cy

[Sirian]

I have no direct knowledge of or comment about WoW.

However, just tonight I finished playing Gothic II. It was BY FAR the biggest blast I've had with an FPS since Half Life. The graphics would probably seem dated to you, Cy, but the game was put out by a small German developer, and truly, it was a diamond in the rough. Good AI, good quests, good story, good characters, and interesting STUFF to do.

The combat system almost turned me off before I started. It's TOUGH. You have about four moves, plus the possibility of combo moves. Each move requires a mouse press and two keypresses. Combo moves require mouse click and three keypresses. The action is FAST. Swing-swing-swing and a fight can be over. It's almost too hard. However, once I got used to it and got better at it, and my char got beefed up on levels and equipment to where he wouldn't get felled in two or three hits, it was quite a run.

Not sure if it would be good for you or not, but I guarantee you that you would not have that slow kind of feel I hear you talking about.

I'm about to restart. Played the pure fighter the first time, going for the mage next. Won't be as fun the second time, I think, knowing all the spoiler info, but the mage gameplay is supposed to be quite different, so I'll be starting all over again in terms of figuring out how to fight and survive.


How can you make combat "hard" and not turn off the dexterity-challenged? Not sure if that's possible. Playing Descent was not for the timid or the slow witted. What I don't like in an RTS (clickfest) is actually what makes for the best FPS. I enjoy it when I can BECOME the character and train the interface to react similarly to how my own muscles respond to trained commands. Then I want it to come at me quickly. It is just not the same thing clicking dozens of units simultaneously from third person perspective.

Anyway... Half Life 2 has gone gold. I'm afraid you couldn't PAY ME to play World of Warcraft any time soon. Best of luck with it.


- Sirian

[Pete]

Hi,

That's the way combat is in WoW. Each weapon, spell, etc. has a 'speed' and attacks with that speed. It is more like BG than it is like D 1 or 2. Takes a while to get used to, but overall is an improvement in that you need to both plan your attacks and develop a 'pace'. More grey matter and less CTS. And, no, it does not 'get better' as you level.

--Pete

[Nystul]

It is always pretty slow, although combat gets a bit more complex as you develop your full arsenal of skills. Complex as in, you get to do the exact same sequence of skills every battle instead of just swinging away. I don't think pacing is a problem, but it is much more along the lines of NWN than Diablo.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the WoW beta for a few months of very heavy playing, then burnt out, and confirmed my fear that an MMOG is just a decent CRPG/dungeon hack, ruined by an attempt to accomodate lots of players. I totally don't "get it", but for those of you who like MMOGs this is probably as good as any of the others.

[Cyrene]

It is always pretty slow, although combat gets a bit more complex as you develop your full arsenal of skills. Complex as in, you get to do the exact same sequence of skills every battle instead of just swinging away. I don't think pacing is a problem, but it is much more along the lines of NWN than Diablo.

LOL on the “exact sequence”. When soloing, my L2 Shaman only used 3 spells… (party play was an entirely different animal—there I was group buffer, group healer, mob puller, aggro manager, traffic cop, healer bodyguard, and secondary tank—busy busy).



The combat pacing is driving me nuts. I don’t mind discreet battles with lots of feedback, different swing speeds, attack times, etc.—I mind turn-based combat. We could do that with dice before PC’s were invented, for Og’s sake. L2 used an Unreal engine—the Mobs were attacking you WHILE you were attacking them, not standing around waiting for their “turn.” You had to be *Really* careful vs quick-attack mobs, even if you were theoretically much more powerful. Conversely, you could stick-and-move vs slow attack ones, even if they showed red against you. I can't get stick-and-move to work in this game so far.



And what is up with run speed in this game? It doesn’t seem to be consistent. I was playing around with some mobs trying to figure out why it was so hard to kite, and got some odd results. Whack on MobA with Cow until MobA runs. Easily chase it down. That means Cow is faster than MobA, right? Whack on MobA a bit with Cow. Run away with Cow. MobA easily chases down Cow. WTF?

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the WoW beta for a few months of very heavy playing, then burnt out, and confirmed my fear that an MMOG is just a decent CRPG/dungeon hack, ruined by an attempt to accomodate lots of players. I totally don't "get it", but for those of you who like MMOGs this is probably as good as any of the others.

Well, that IS a reasonable definition.


The communication and opportunities to quickly find some fun play in one is awesome, though. Guild and Alliance chat channels are great. You might be soloing at the moment, but you’re always chatting with your friends, and can always get/give game advice, plan for a group, ask for help, offer up new items you found, borrow money, get a translation from or to a foreign language (pin yin is your friend), etc. For those who haven’t played a MMORG, imagine (back in D2’s heyday) if, in addition to your game/party chat, there was another channel where you could talk to every RBD’r online, and another where you could talk to every, say, LL, Amazon Basin, and RBD’r online, and you could all meet/trade/party up/help each other/swap characters without changing games 8-).

Also, some of us (though not many here) have a rather high tolerance for asshats, and find playing around them amusing, in a train-wreck-reality-tv-show sort of way. As long as the world is big enough to get away from them when you want to, and as long as quests are done so that idiots cannot block your game progress, they add some flavor to the game.

--Cy

(not always a GOOD flavor, mind you, but flavor all the same)

[Occhidiangela]

Also, some of us (though not many here) have a rather high tolerance for asshats, and find playing around them amusing, in a train-wreck-reality-tv-show sort of way. As long as the world is big enough to get away from them when you want to, and as long as quests are done so that idiots cannot block your game progress, they add some flavor to the game.
--Cy
(not always a GOOD flavor, mind you, but flavor all the same)

I have to agree that the occasional teasing of the animals is good fun. When WoW comes out, I have a feeling that my Son will be playing.

Occhi

[Skandranon]

It is always pretty slow, although combat gets a bit more complex as you develop your full arsenal of skills. Complex as in, you get to do the exact same sequence of skills every battle instead of just swinging away. I don't think pacing is a problem, but it is much more along the lines of NWN than Diablo.

I agree. It reminded me of KotOR, which I liked. Count me among the dexterity-challenged - hitting the 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 keys to use my special abilities is already hard enough :P

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the WoW beta for a few months of very heavy playing, then burnt out, and confirmed my fear that an MMOG is just a decent CRPG/dungeon hack, ruined by an attempt to accomodate lots of players. I totally don't "get it", but for those of you who like MMOGs this is probably as good as any of the others.

This is the first time I've ever played a MMORPG, and never have I had such a strong sense of exactly how I'd get tired of a game. Right now, it's a timesink like Diablo and Civ II and Alpha Centauri - one more turn, one more level, one more quest. But unlike those other games, I can envision all the thoughts and processes that will lead me to get tired of it. I actually could see it within the first hour of playing. That isn't to say that I couldn't see how I'd get tired of the other games, only that this time it came to me without a conscious effort to find it.

[Lissa]

Combat speed in WoW is dependant on a number of things. It's more like Lineage 2 that you might realize. You attack as many times as your speed of attack allows while mobs follow the same rule.

For someone using a weapon, the heavier the weapon, the slower you attack, but you also hit harder to make up for that (except for staff, it's slow, but doesn't hit as hard as other two handed weapons). If you want to attack fast, you go with daggers. If you have dual weapon capability, each weapon attacks on the its attack speed (so if you have a 1.5 s dagger and a 2.2 s sword, you will see the dagger hit more often than the sword, this is also helpful when dealing with casters as each hit you make against a caster makes them loose time in their casting, 1 second for the first hit, then .8 second for the next, down by steps of .2s to a minimum decrease of .2 second per hit so you can't keep a caster from casting completely while using dual daggers).

The main difference between WoW and Lineage 2 combat is that WoW tends to take a more realistic attitude toward the attack sequence where heavier weapons swing more slowly than light weapons which was different in Lineage 2 as weapons all seemed to hit at around the same speed no matter what was being used. So, like Pete noted above and Nystul as well, you kind of have to have a little more planning in your attack plan, you need to look at how fast you will deal damage and how fast your opponent deals damage and make your attacks based on this so that you come out the winner in the fight.

[Nystul]

The communication and opportunities to quickly find some fun play in one is awesome, though. Guild and Alliance chat channels are great. You might be soloing at the moment, but you’re always chatting with your friends, and can always get/give game advice, plan for a group, ask for help, offer up new items you found, borrow money, get a translation from or to a foreign language (pin yin is your friend), etc. For those who haven’t played a MMORG, imagine (back in D2’s heyday) if, in addition to your game/party chat, there was another channel where you could talk to every RBD’r online, and another where you could talk to every, say, LL, Amazon Basin, and RBD’r online, and you could all meet/trade/party up/help each other/swap characters without changing games 8-).

This is a nice aspect, for sure. I think one of the main reasons RBNWN flopped was that we couldn't keep tabs on each other while playing separately. On the other hand, for Blizzard this is a pretty small step from b.net. B.net had the ability to communicate between players in different games and channels and see who was in various channels. The infrastructure for these features was in place well before D2. They just never expanded the feature set to what they have in WoW.

The game I want is something of a pipe dream. I want to eat my cake and have it, too. I want the finished product, the customizable content, the pseudo-random dungeon levels, good single player experience, balanced multiplayer, roleplaying with real in-game consequences, AND the built-in IRC network. But one thing I don't want is a ton of players in the game just for the heck of it. And another thing I don't want is a bunch of static mobs that respawn on top of me every couple minutes to accomodate the ton of players who may or may not wander along to kill them! Or dumbed down tracking AI (not to mention social AI), or constant lag spikes, or grinding/macroing, or monthly fees, or mid-game nerfs, or the other baggage that accomodates these bohemoths.

But hey, for all that griping, the game kept me entertained (no... more like obsessed) for months. And that was when it was no where near being a finished product. If not for the subscription fees, I'd be the first in line to buy it. However, that would certainly be in spite of the MMO thing rather than because of it.