I mean all MMOs suffer from awful combat. WoW has decent combat for an MMO, but that still doesn’t mean it should be the main focus of the time – especially not for wqs. I’d say reducing the GCD to 0.75 s would be a start. Maybe let us cast more abilities while moving. Maybe add some dynamic defensive buttons you smash on a short CD. Maybe give characters the ability to dodge around or something. If the combat were more engaging and dynamic and you didn’t spend forever mindlessly standing there and mashing, waiting for the GCD to come up, it would be more fun.
Sadly, lag constraints prevent the combat from ever really being good. It is what it is. I never felt as dragged down by it in the past. Like BC has the same slow (or arguably slower) combat, but the difference is that you again spent more time traveling from A to B than you did killing the mobs. Legion felt pretty good towards the end. MoP actually had a really smooth feeling to me. It really has a lot to do with haste scaling and reducing the time between keypresses. SL feels miserable to play. I hate the combat, and it just feels like something I do to get through. Honestly, the entirety of SL just feels like something I’m painfully trying to get through until the next expansion.
Exactly. Isn’t it absurd? Literally every RPG in history has done this and it was fine. Why are they fixing an imaginary problem?
Ion: We heard you like fighting mobs so we put mobs on the way to the mobs you’re gonna fight so you can fight more mobs before you fight mobs. FIGHT MORE MOBS. DON’T YOU LIKE FIGHTING MOBS? ISN’T THIS FUN!?! WHY AREN’T YOU HAVING FUN!!! WHY? WHYYYYYYYYYY!!!
I feel like your proposed changes risks alienating people who specifically avoid action-heavy combat games. I rarely play casters, so the gcd to me is often quite fast, and haste makes my key presses even faster on WW monk, enhance shaman and rogue. Seems to me like this game just isn’t your style anymore, because personally, if I had to spend a bunch of time just running from one place to another, I would feel like my time is being wasted on looking at the same scenery over and over, which it’s close to this expansion. I’d spend that time watching videos and reading instead. At that point, why bother playing the game?
There are a fair amount of action-combat MMOs, like BDO, Tera, Blade and Soul, and a few others. But Western-made MMOs stick to the tried and true, I suspect, because many find constant action in this genre to be extremely exhausting after a while. I know it’s why I can’t play BDO for longer than an hour at a time, at most.
You don’t really play the game do you? Again, play melee. You’ll come to find out there’s a lot of abilities to be dodging around. PBAoE, frontal cones, charges, 180 arc swipes.
I think this pretty much sums up my opinion on the thing. It’s not that WoW’s combat is awful, per se - in fact, I enjoy it enough to dip my toes into PvP every now and then - it’s that a lot of PvE content, currently, suffers from some major pacing issues.
Most games, including MMOs, keep things exciting by having uptime and downtime - but when mob density is this high, you risk a situation where the player has nothing but uptime. Always on their toes, lest they get ambushed by some (usually trivial) mob.
Heart of Thorns for Guild Wars 2 suffered this problem as well - to a much, much greater degree than Shadowlands. That game did have the advantage of letting you ‘waypoint’ out at any time, if you wanted to take a moment, but the zones themselves could be absolutely relentless. Staying still for more than a minute would more than likely have you swamped with respawns, and given many of the mobs in that expansion had some form of CC or disable? Yeah, didn’t end well.
There’s something to be said about always having to be on the move sometimes. It can be really fun and exciting when it’s part of a setpiece, or a big boss battle; but for open world PvE content, it quickly becomes exhausting.
Well melee is a lot more engaging than ranged tbh. It’s one of the discrepancies they need to address.
Also, like I said, the raiding is good because of the varied and interesting boss abilities and the coordination aspect. When you couple that with the combat, it now becomes a bit more interesting. However, for stuff like WQ, it simply isn’t engaging enough to be the focus of the time.
I do play melee. I also play a warlock. Why is the melee experience so much better than the warlock experience? Why can’t we have fun as casters? Also, melee deals with its own misery. They add obnoxious things like tornadoes, cleave, and stuff just to penalize melee.
No they don’t. If I wanted to play like a melee class I would… pick a melee class. There are plenty of ARPGs out there if that is what you want, but WoW isn’t, and hopefully will never be, one of them.
Spoiler: Some people like casters more than melee so maybe we should make all melee function like casters.
I completely agree WoW is not an ARPG. Again, I don’t expect them to change the combat. I’d like them to revert to the previous design of WQ. I’m saying the combat should not be the focus for the time spent on WQ. WoW lacks engaging enough combat to justify it.
They just asked me what would make combat more appealing to me, and I answered.
Switching back to the old type of WQ is fine. It’s just that has nothing do with combat regardless how many times you try to link them. I mean maybe that is why you don’t like them, but you are seriously the first person that I have seen attempt to link that dislike to combat. Combat isn’t the issue. If the WQ was to pick 10 flowers (with a castbar), and then once you did that you got ok pick this other flower, and then when you did that you got ok now pick this other other flower… people would still not like it because killing things isn’t the issue.
This is all personal feelings. People find ranged to be more engaging. Why? I dunno. I don’t care for ranged play. Never have really.
But that’s the trade off I guess. Melee vs ranged. Higher risk, higher reward? If forms of fun (for me). I don’t know.
My first MMO was EQ. And every now and then I go back and dink around for a few months. Level up and hit max level and play end content for awhile. And I’ve always enjoyed their open world concept.
Mobs have a looooot more health. Groups are damn near required, and for anything meaningful they are required. Mobs drop gear. Multiple elites throughout a single zone to form “camps” fighting mobs and trying for these elites that drop usable end game gear.
All the while still having instances dungeons with their own scenarios and rewards
I don’t give a pig’s fart about the interview. It is completely irrelevant. It does not matter what Ion thinks. It matters what the players think and the players do not like the structure of the current WQ. It is completely separate from travel time OR combat.
As someone already said in this thread: Ion was wrong, but you are as well.
A lot of that was addressed in MoP, by giving many casters the ability to cast while moving, but it absolutely tanked the flow of the game so much that it essentially created a runaway arms race. Every class needed low-cooldown defensives, crowd control, and uptime abilities because casters essentially had free-reign in nearly every area of the game. It practically upended pvp from what I heard.
I don’t think it’s an easy fix, and Blizzard backpedaled on it HARD. Idk if you played then, but Warlock in MoP was an absolute BEAST with Kil’Jaeden’s Cunning.
It’s not completely irrelevant because in it, he explicitly says they made wq 2.0 to solve the alleged problem of players spending more time traveling to the quest than doing the quest (doing the quest being fighting mobs 90% of the time). And my post was to address that and state that it actually wasn’t a problem at all and that many successful RPGs have this as a property. Of the time you’d spend on a quest, in most RPGs, almost all of it is spent on travel and not actual fighting. This is because for most RPGs, fighting isn’t particularly exciting except in short bursts as a way to resolve a quest.
But that someone was wrong. Ion was wrong, and you are wrong. Most of you are wrong about many things.
Yeah. I did play, and as I said, MoP felt great for warlocks. IDK about other classes. I can’t really comment on MoP’s PVP, but if your argument holds, this is yet another example where the game is gimped for PVP. Wonderful.
I don’t see anything wrong with every class having low cd defensives, cc, etc. It sounds like engaging class design. It’s a lot better than my current 10 button rotation where it takes forever to do anything, and I feel like I am constantly waiting on my gcd to setup my dots.
But this one is structured around fighting. And people enjoy that. This same argument had been brought up in the past too about Flight Paths.
They wanted to play the game, not afk in flight for what seemed like forever. And that’s the main gripe still is having to run through Orion’s. The downtime of the travel is a killer.
The current structure of WQs with their do these tasks, followed by those tasks, and then this, and nooow you can kill the baddie is due to people complaining that WQs in BfA weren’t engaging. So they added multiple steps to the process, and now it’s too much for people. One extreme to the other.
It’s not about being in combat. If that were the case, (and although you mentioned the “differences”) you wouldn’t haven’t combat bases systems being the highest amounts of time spent in the game (dungeons/raids/PvP).
Given the choice, people would rather AFK for 30 seconds and be in combat for 5 minutes than afk for 5 minutes and be in combat for 30 seconds
The problem wasn’t just pvp however. It also created homogenous classes. Since every class needed what others had, very few felt unique anymore. Every class needed an interrupt, or a silence, several heals and defensives (Where their class was previously thematically balanced not to require them). Blizzard’s spent the past several expansions removing and/or re-integrating what was lost as a result of the “arms race” that MoP accelerated.
I will concede that Warlocks played best in MoP, but for me that was because each spec felt wholly distinct from each other. Not a single spec had the same resource, to start.
Hunters too. All 3 were distinct, with a few crossover abilities. And i think a lot helped with classes having the most abilities they’ve ever had at that point too.
But like you mentioned, it also homogenized classes by giving everyone everything.
You: No one likes combat. They like travel.
The thread: No, combat is actually good and travel times suck.
You: Nah, I think everyone hates combat. They like travel.
When people tell you that you are wrong about what they like… you should probably listen to them rather than continue to insist that they don’t like what they like.