Impactful Attacks

[Dzian]

Can you name any skills in particular? I don't recall any of the elemental spells having that much wait, and iirc the PLD skills are the exact same ones we have now just slowed down. I do miss that fire blade attack though.

I'm gonna say everything basically. the battle system as a whole had more weight to it. some skills just emphasised it more.

the problem here is that you're pressing so many buttons and they all have such similar effects that combat feels nothing more than a glorifed auto attack.

it's almost like a fight between arnie and mr burns from the simpsons. arnie is the warrior of light mr burns is almost any enemy within the game. mr burns could be standing there for ages trying to hurt arnie and arnie wouldn't feel a thing. but at the same time it would still take arnie a dozen of his "powerfull skills" to knock mr burns down... 12 of your best hits or "skills" to defeat a frail old man that hardly has the strength to even raise his hand let alone hit you with it..... doesn't sound very powerfull does it... if anyone saw arnie smacking an old man 12 times and the old man just stands there and takes it they would laugh so hard "look at arnie couldn't even fight his way out of a wet paper bag with hits like that"

in 1.23 I would quite often run around natalan at 50 soloing mobs at 52 or so for the chest keys (sentinals gear was the great back then) run up to a mob stun it get behind it and smash out a combo and bam that thing was dead on to the next.... you felt powerful because you're skills felt like they actually hit hard.

I think maybe the pace and auto attacks helped here. because you actually saw them in 1.23 so when you repeatedly saw auto attacks hitting for a couple of hundred damage and the skill you pressed hit for a couple of thousand there was a huge feeling of power to it...

currently though people hit skills so fast and so often you never see the auto attacks all you see is a bunch of attacks that all do largely the same amount of damage there no real distinction between one and the next and thus it feels like nothing more than a glorified autoattack.. there's never any real oomph to it.

it's not a sound thing either. with the pace of combat in this game and the number of players using skills at any given time the last thing you need is more bass and oomph in the sound effects. but that would also detract because if you added the oomph to the sound effects skills would then sound more powerfull than they really are. you'd end up with massive booms that sound epic, but hardly touch a monsters hp and so many of those epic booms that they'd just drown each other out entirely. combat would sound like an epic warzone but look like a pre school play ground scrap.

[Zojha]

the problem here is that you're pressing so many buttons and they all have such similar effects that combat feels nothing more than a glorifed auto attack.

I don't feel that's an issue, honestly.

Having played an Assassin in Dragon's Dogma not long ago (dual dagger class), even those attacks seemed pretty impactful and as an action game, I was pretty much mashing buttons like crazy. Snake/Spiderbite and Masterful Kill were probably my favourite, but even rapid attacks like Scarlet Kisses felt very satisfying. That's not even mentioning the glory of heavy 2-handed weapons that just felt immensely powerful, whether you ploughed through bandit/goblin packs or staggered creatures 3-4 times your size with it.

It's very hard to nail on one thing in particular. The fact that people never really stagger, pause or show any signs of being wailed on is probably one of the reasons why attacks feel less impactful. Sound effects "do" matter, but I will agree however that it can seem odd to hear a heavy impact and see no actual dent in the HP. What irks me more is that hit sounds are identical, whether they hit metal, wood or flesh. I think one of the biggest reasons however is that attacks simply don't do a lot of damage relative to the HP - In 24 man raids, even a LB3 can feel rather "meh", because it's still only like 3-4% of the mobs HP. Huge buildup, big animation, big oomph...and you go:"That was it? ._.' "

[ReplicaX]

I'm gonna say everything basically.

I understand where you are coming from on look and feel, but playability was sacrificed heavily. 1.xx had very little tactical purpose for its pace. So many changes were made to combat in 1.2x+ and the direction they were going with the content additions to the point where the dev team hit a brick wall with Crystal Tools (CT).

My original hopes were a happy medium on combat pace and its look and feel with ARR. However, with the mechanics they were moving towards, this seemed extremely hard to implement. Especially with a console limited to 256GB of RAM and 256GB of VRAM (PS3).

Sadly, there are some that want the GCD even faster than it is currently.