Honest Review of Combos and a Suggestion

[Bahn]

Removing the TP Waiving is significant, as it then forces choice. With the current combo system, the choice is simple; 3 weapon skills for the price of 1. By removing the TP Waiving, you must choose to either to deal damage now or save your TP for a more devastating combo. As a result, you cannot keep the new TP costs. 6,000 TP for a combo would be hard to accquire, given the max TP is 3,000 and the difficulty in accquiring 3,000 more TP through the duration of your combo sequence. My suggestion would be something around 500 > 1000 > 2000, and the finishing move could allow any extra TP to increase damage or the combo's effect.

I think TP waiving shouldn't be removed, but TP costs should be reducedfor the "correct" combos. I do agree that I dislike the way the current combo system is set up. In order to be effective in your class you're not allowed to deviate from these combos, or else you'll be wasting time. Those elitist players with parsers will be looking at you and thinking you're just being a stubborn mule for refusing to spam combos, and much of the other skills that we have really kind of lose their utility if the "best" combo to use is just this one, practical, easy to use combo with little or no positioning requirements. I also agree that any leftover TP accrued from the combo should be used as a Doomspike-style "TP dump" for the last hit to increase the power of the combo.

The new positioning is a positive improvement, but I would like it decoupled from the combo system entirely. Placing enhanced damage, for example, on certain weaponskills (Brutal Swing for example) would accomplish this alone. By decoupling the positioning requirements from the combo system, combos can be made freely regardless of role albeit at the cost of some effectiveness.

I agree, but I also understand it is a balancing issue. The reason why DDs like Lancer do not have position requirements for their combo is because - well - they're DDs. Having position requirements would nerf their effectiveness. However, based on my experience as Gladiator, I already know why they put in a position requirement for the Riot Blade --> Rage of Halone combo, because if we were allowed to use that combo at any given time, we'd be doing some serious damage for a tank class. I do think the position bonus should be decoupled from the combo system, but there needs to be a compensation for that to make combos that do have position requirements and then become decoupled not to become too powerful.

Finally, combos should be made freely and the skills used should be at our discretion. For example, if I have 3000 TP, the combo should be something I form. Whether it is Heavy Swing > Skull Sunder (For extra enmity) > Whirlwind (For extra Enmity and AOE as an example). Every skill should be chainable, so long as we can get the TP to do it. Because a limitation is made by TP and not arbitrary action, we will only be able to chain a few skills still, yet the variance in effects and skills used are greatly increased.

Yes, I agree with this completely. In fact, this is what I INITIALLY thought when Yoshida said we could do combos. Of course there are balance issues to think about with these new combos, and to be honest I think, as you pointed out, the issue is that this system is its infancy and maybe, down the line, they'll have plans to add new combos, so this part will probably (I'm being optimistic here) addressed in the future.

As I've said before, the combo system currently restricts what we can do, as the optimal thing to do right now ARE combos. Deviation from that system hurts your party in terms of raw damage output, so I do think the combo system needs a bit more refining. Allow us to do (Street Fighter Alpha 2 term here) Custom Combos and require us to use TP to do them. If you want to make things more challenging - keep the current 10-15 second timer on the combo requirement - that way we'll have to skillfully find a way to time our combos and even the hits we take so we get enough TP to make our Custom Combos. If we find players are unable to pull off good combos with the 10-15 second timer, increase the timer to 15-20 seconds to compensate for the fact that the TP cost isn't waived.

Great discussion post Rohan. Keep it up.