What Are Some Easy Wins for Improving Combat Content?

[Shurrikhan]

...

Questions and Critiques:

[More reactive and responsive gameplay]

1) Improvent visual clues and less bright light/distractions that serve no purpose...

2) Remove scripted fights.. it should be RNG based, only few abilties, stages should be based on hp %.

3) Rework the whole infrastructure of the game engine, so we no longer have clipping issues.

4) Seperated global-cds ; None-dps (buffs,heals,defensives..ect) abilties shouldnt share globalcd with DPS abilites!

5) More defined roles ( role responsibilities); not every role ingame should be a DPS with a tank/heal skin ..
Every role should be dependent on one another to succeed!!!!

1.
Could you elaborate?

Alternatively, here are some potential interpretations: (A) rather than only being able to choose which particle effects are drawn in at all, allow players to determine the opacity of those layers of VFX; (B) much like ally outlines being visible through walls in a team-based shooter, attach superseding opacity masks (of conditional strength) to enemies and perhaps allies, allowing their positions and their own visual tells to be visible even when prominent VFX are going off between them and the camera. Would any of those interpretations suffice?

2.
Wholly removing scriptedness from fights would largely mean removing most contribution to the rhyme, rhythm, or reason across fights and would likely result in a net decrease in apparent skill ceiling for most players. There is also the whole spectrum between 0% scriptedness and 100% scriptedness.

It's also worth considering what a mechanic even is as players perceive it. If a boss performs a "mechanic" that gives players no directed action or means of optimization to deal with it, players are not going to feel it, but by and large what players feel comes from interacting/synergetic sets of mechanics, or the transitions between them, where "Be at A" flowing to "Be at B" creates a limited window for player movement that may require CDs or banked procs to maintain uptime.

And that's all without accounting for your reducing every boss fight to "only few abilities"... I do not understand the motive for this request. Why so simplify fights in this way, regardless of whether it allows for randomization to that "Simon Says" among mechanics A, B, or C?

Finally, stages based solely on %HP tend to be unintuitive bottlenecked nightmares, as seen in almost any challenging fight that had such %HP phase shifts. You can do something similar, but it absolutely needs restriction.

3.
This likely would not require any change to the game engine. The effect can already be had via plugins already. The base game simply includes an extra command to reset one's animation lock timers (and without a reduced remaining value based on time spent in that animation lock thus far or based upon roundtrip ping) upon receiving a confirmation message from the server, causing one's animation locks to be extended by their roundtrip ping. Simply removing command (which does not appear to need to exist) fixes the issue entirely, as would a reduced duration on the refreshed animation lock based on the time between query sent and confirmation received.

4.
I do not understand the motive behind this. This seems like it would further cripple healer decision-making.

5.
You may need to give examples of your intended result, but this likewise does not seem like it'd be a "quick fix" even if the intended policy were more concretely clear.

Overall:
I suspect the game could manage certain cheaply/easily applicable policies that could make the game feel at least slightly more responsive or reactive, but I do not suspect that these are great ways to go about getting there.

Randomization of some aspects of fight design, for instance, tends to require relatively rigid contexts in surrounding actions (be those through bundled sets of actions, or certain actions being disallowed during or within X seconds of the one randomly selected, or total damage output being decreasingly restricted over time since a given damage peak based on that peak's height, etc.). That does not mean that you can't have randomization nor that it cannot be helpful; we've already seen a degree of that in a particularly iconic Shadowbringers Extreme Trial, for instance. But it does need to have its permitted contexts as rigidly mapped out as a script would, else you cannot finely tune the fight's difficulty, which will in turn likely lead to a far clunkier and less engaging fight than even a wholly scripted one.

For a quickly-applicable policy to be made, we'd need to know which mechanics ought to be varied, to what threshold of bundling, and within what parameters. Precision there will be essential if you want tight tuning, which, so long as there are quick follow-up requirements (of healing, movement, etc.) added after the landmark mechanics, will probably the more noticeable contributor to fights needing more "responsiveness".