daedalusAI wrote: »

LennoxPoodle wrote: »

@daedalusAI (OP) I feel your criticism, but don't agree on all points. The relevant use of light attacks in this game is great IMHO, since I really resent neglectable auto attacks in other game. Also it makes no difference compared to sustainable direct DMG abilities. It even offers everyone a baseline DPS tool, which is great, alongside the other general abilities (HA, bash l, block and dodge). And after all, were is the difference between lobbing fireballs via ability or LA/HA for your mage?
I'm still firmly against weaving, although I have adapted to use it. It is just counterintuitive and bad communication, leading the game away from the "easy to pick up, hard to master" sweat spot, mentioned so often. I'd still like LAs to stay relevant in some way, but either trigger global cooldown or get a new animation-dmg timing (same for all other abilities in that case) as @Darkstorne explained it.

Why does a mage have to autoattack with his staff in the first place: do you miss your mage not autoattacking in WoW or FF14?

Lobbing fireballs implies an actual cast and a choice: do I want to cast a fireball or another spell.
Lightattacks are autoattacks which you haveto do in order to reach good damage as they:

• Contribute a large amount of overall damage
• Enables you to cast spells/skills in quick succession due to partially cancelling their animation

Not much choice to not do them.
Sure, you can refuse to weave and get through the game just fine, but once you know about weaving you'd cripple yourself willingly by not using it.

The question is what you want here. Throwing spells at enemies or doing light attacks is both lobbing magical projectiles at the enemy. Not much of a difference here aesthetically. Gameplay wise, there also is no real difference between sustainable spells and light attacks, it's periodically pressing a button. Insta cast DMG abilities with irrelevant cost add nothing to the gameplay (channeling is different though).
I can agree on weaving being not a great thing however, at least the animation canceling part.

daedalusAI wrote: »

LennoxPoodle wrote: »

One other part is your comment on sustain. I wish it was more like you describe your experience. IMHO there should be an underlying attrition during combat, realized through overall resource loss always outweighing gain for group size appropriate combat. Efficient and short combat should of course mitigate it, but never step or invert the trend (obviously with short term exception, but never mid to long, I.e. it will always oscillate but around a declining curve). Sometimes that's already the case but not always.

My point is this: the combat is designed around limited resources due to pricey spells/skills which prevent you from just spamming them over and over.
There are heavy attacks to regen a portion of your resources, but in reality everything is done to circumvent that limitation:

• Gear with recovery or resource leech
• Pots
• CP passives
• Undaunted Energy Orb

It's like the game pushes you abuse every item/mechanic possible just so you can get the normal "I can cast really long until I'm out of juice".

The interesting thing about resource management is, that it adds an additional dimension to combat, making everything a bit deeper and interesting. Thus you have to consider more than just pressing the same sequence of buttons again and again. Also a heavy resource drain does bring boring stalemates to a quicker end.

daedalusAI wrote: »

LennoxPoodle wrote: »

On the problem of less viable hybrid builds we can agree I guess. Making all distributions of attributes work, provided you build everything else properly around it, would be really dope and open up the playing field. The issue I see here, is that by improving ability effect, focused builds are not only more effective but also more efficient. The advantage of having multiple "proper" resource pools (and thus sets of regen) is just not as strong. I think that could be addressed somehow. One of the coolest things about ESO is its system of multiple compatible skill sources, making your character more about combination than being defined by its class.

I wish there even was some kind of class identity/flavor: it's not "My bars are mainly filled with class skills and a weapon/world/guild skill here and there" but "I need to use those stamina/magicka weapon/world/guild skills, how much space do I even have left for class skills?"

My dual pet sorc is the only build so far which actually uses mostly class skills.

But why do you want to limit your characters to be mainly defined by one thing? One appeal of TES so far is it offering so many combinations of of different stuff. Should you be able to build a viable char around your class, using mainly its skills? Definetly. But that doesn't mean that it should play such a big role in everyone's build. In an (or rather my) ideal world you should be capable of constructing a build defined by any other building block, be it NPC guilds (hey, guild mage build!) or weapon-armor combinations, heck even race. Meaning every player should be capable of choosing what is important and what supplementantary.

daedalusAI wrote: »

LennoxPoodle wrote: »

What I don't want this game to become, is one were you have your set focused rotation and just hit play on your muscle memory. The requirement for flexibility and adaptability to a sometimes unexpected flow of combat in both built and play style keeps your head invested. I want to make active decisions and judgements and not run a algorithm (that includes clear do if situations). Let me figure stuff out while I do it.

But it already is quite set in terms of which skills and sets to use and how to combat properly:

• Wall of Elements, Rain of Arrows, Destro Staff Ultimate, War Horn, Caltrops etc. are almost always used by stamina/magicka/support builds and you just can't not use them
• There's only a handful of sets you're using for trials, as the sole focus of itemization is to buff your group while debuffing the enemy
• I'm not too familiar with every set, but just by browsing them the majority seem like garbage and filler, even further limiting what you can wear, and you have to wear a set, as certain set bonuses are mandatory/too good to pass up

And let's be honest: with limited skill + equipment build variety, being limited to only 12 skills across 2 bars without being able to swap skills out in the heat of the moment, active decisions/judgements sounds more impressive than it actually is ingame.

No doubt it can and will be vastly different in PvP, but even then you're still limited by game mechanics.

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Yep, PvP is already a bit to "learnable" (or rather predictable). It revolves more around knowledge and not skill. But that is the nature of PvE.
All those BiS things are obviously bad and need to be balanced down. The very concept of BiS is a diversity killer, no objection here. But that can be fixed through balance and offering vertically equal, horizontally different alternatives.
Again I think it depends on the view of what a character is defined by. If you mainly see classes, stam versions seem to be to samey across the board. If you see them as n-tupels, (like {attribute, class, weapon, weapon, armor, guilds}) it seems only appropriate that there are similarities if there are any values being the same between characters.
Still diversity could be enhanced.