[EQ2] Combat system discussion

[Miele]

This post is meant to be a quick analysis of EQ2 combat, to discuss it with those interested in a more organized manner. I love the game, but see clearly its flaws, here I'll try to picture a few of them.
I don't think there is a better place to discuss it than here, as the official boards are not exactly a good territory to criticize some of the game's aspects, although there are quite valid inputs from some of their members.

Based on the recent topics about EQ2, I couldn't help but notice that many players who are or were judging the combat part of the game, had to criticize the amount of hotkeys pressed and the need for consolidation of the abilities already present. This is especially true for scouts and to a lesser extent for other classes as well.

Seeing that EQ2 went already through 2 combat revamps (with the latter being more a fix for stat caps) and that what didn't change is the practice referred as "mindless button spamming", I honestly don't think it's feasible to change everything again, potentially pissing off a moltitude of players and made the forum crowd scream "NGE is back again, waaargh!", but you may never know.
Nonetheless, I found some minutes here and there over the last 2 weeks to consolidate a few thoughts I have on its combat system. This is not an attempt at armchair designing, just a discussion for those who may be interested.

The goal of this post is... well, just mindless text trown on the internet, I guess I just want to pose a question to nobody in particular: what could be done to EQ2 combat sytem to improve it? even if only from a theorethycal point of view, tho I'd like to see some good ideas implemented of course.

If I do grammar mistakes, forgive me, English is not my motherlanguage, but it's not even my 6th language
In case, point them out so I can edit them and learn something new, thanks.

The "perceived flaws" (combat only), based on my personal experience and feedback gathered around are:

• Too many buffs, unreadable buff/debuff bar, buff management in general.
• Button spamming, too many abilities, too many hotkeys to manage, no class "core skills" to rely on.
• Action/reaction skills flaws (or lack of in some cases).
• Some spells/arts are actually worthless and a waste of a hotkey space (if someone can point them out, I'd be grateful, so far I couldn't pin down any in particular).

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Buffs
Many classes, including some melees have at least 1 group buffs, often up to 3+, with the addition of single target buffs that either take a concentration slot or can be cast on a single character only.
Due to the concentration slot issues the player is required to make choices "sometimes" on which buffs to pick and this in itself doesn't seem a very bad thing, but can cripple pet users for example, especially coercers/illusionists.

It's not unusual for a full group of mixed composition to go in battle with up to 20+ different buffs thanks to the fact that imbued gear, food and drink and specific items such as Jboots show an icon in the buff bar as well.
Add the fact that the UI isn't exactly helping in recognizing buffs as many share an icon or a similar to others from different classes.

With debuffs it gets even worse: first they'll show up on the effects bar, one icon for each of them and they'll show "around the top of it", pushing down other effects, but sometimes they won't show exactly at the top (and I wonder why) but one to three slots below. Food and drink buffs also show up in a random slot.

As a tank it happens quite often on big pulls to have 6-10 debuffs on, which at this point are just some colored icons to ignore, because by the time I can figure out exactly what they do, they are expired or have been cured.

Curing debuffs is another HUGE issue: if it wouldn't be for those "click to cure" UI mods, a lot of people would have issues in figuring out what's going on. They just cure everything not caring of what they are curing aside from it being trauma, arcane, etc. and this isn't exactly amusing. Sometimes there are visual effects too (mostly for stuns) which is a good thing.

There is a separate window that shows the "mantained spells", aka buffs, debuffs and dots casted by you.

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Button spamming
EQ2 doesn't have a class defining set of skills or class mechanics that makes the bread and butter of the class or if it's there it's not so obvious and lost in the overwhelming amount of skills available. Every class has a "theme" and it sticks to it, but there are not "core skills" ala WoW (think Sinister strike for a WoW rogue or Sunder Armor for a warrior). While it's true that a Berserker does more AE damage and a guardian is slightly better at raid tanking, the 2 classes often play the same way, have similar combat arts and generally speaking play the same way. I could find few spells/skills that could be labeled class defining, such as the Shadowknight "symbol line".

The skills an EQ2 character has are really redundant, in some cases even annoying to have, because if you don't use them all, you'll end up having to wait the cooldown on others and this hurts the dps (or agro generation) output too much to be an option (true also for casters). A quick example is for the shadowknight class: a lifetap nuke, a disease nuke and a bigger disease nuke with a snare component. Making one skill out of three wouldn't be a bad idea here, at least at a first glance. More details on this below:

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Power
Another flaw in EQ2 combat is power management: in combat power gains are ridicolously low, with the exception maybe for those who can wear a ton of flowing thought gear, power gains proc gear, are buffed by enchanters/bards and use all consumables/clickies when available (basically high end characters only).
In shorts, there is no benefit at all in saving power, because the faster you kill, the faster you get out of combat and start regenerating at increased rate. Basically there is no reason to NOT press each hotkey when it's up as long as you pick the correct order. This is and remains true in general when talking about damaging abilities.

On the other hand every heroic mob has a huge power pool, epic mobs have an insanely huge one, for both these types, power draining spells are a waste of a hotkey (unless they give some power back to the caster).
At launch raid strategies consisted in sucking raid mobs dry, so that they had to do autoattack only and couldn't cast specials, hence the change in their power pool. Talk about putting a patch on a hole and forgetting the hole exists in the first place.

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I could do numerous examples, but I'll pick one class (a quite popular one):

Swashbuckler

Excluding the so called "fun spells" (which are just fluff), the swashy has 42 distinct abilities to be hotkeyed from level 1 to level 70, this including self buffs, tracking and pathfinding,. Some are obtained at higher levels only and some have no (yet) upgrade, the others get an upgrade generally every 14 levels (why 14 it escapes me, it's really conflicting with the tiered game system).

Let's go in detail, check this list here:
EverQuest II Ability Progression List - Swashbuckler

And confront it with this that has the descriptions for each skill: Allakhazam's Magical Realm: Everquest II
(I prefer to use allakhazam list because it shows the icons for each ability).

For who played this class, even to mid levels, it's perfectly clear that there are redundant skills, see it from 26 to 44:

• Lvl 26: Snap of the Wrist: Two precise quick attacks. If one of these attacks misses, the successive ones will miss automatically. Line starts at level 12.
• Lvl 28: Flurry of Arms: Three quick attacks. If one of these attacks misses, the successive ones will miss automatically. If all attacks hit, target's physical damage resistance is decreased. Line starts at level 28.
• Lvl 29: Playful swipe: A quick attack that lowers the target's combat attack damage. Line starts at level 1 and upgrades at 8 and 15 too.
• Lvl 29: Nimble Cut: An attack from the side or front that deals medium damage. If it hits, it cripples target's ability to parry. Line starts at 15, can't be used from behind.
• Lvl 44: Flamboyant Strike: An offensive attack that cripples the target's intelligence. Line starts at 44.

So at level 44 there are five frontal attacks with different side effects, plus there is another that does low damage and snares the mob, plus another that gives extra hate to whom will land the next melee attack (it has a purpose at least). One of these cannot be used from behind.
To these you have to add the positional ones and the various other skills, such as short duration buffs, etc.

The snaring attack would deserve a chapter on his own, as the swashbuckler gets 1 more snare with a debuff attached and one more from the Splitpaw adventure pack. Considering that snare serves no purpose whatsoever in PvE (mobs do not flee and kiting is basically undoable due to nerfs over nerfs), the comical value this skill provides reaches the highest levels. Still, if you count it as damaging attack, one of the snares would be the 6th attack.

It's even worse, don't forget the 3 different backstabs, the 2 AE attacks, the god-knows-how-many short duration buffs, and the occasionally used skills like mez and taunt.

The idea I got from the EQ2 combat system is: "this is a cool skill, let's put it on a 30 seconds cooldown" then "ok, now let's give players another skill to use meanwhile they wait the cooldown" then again " the 2 skills do not fill the 30 seconds gap yet, let's fill it with more skills".
It just doesn't make sense, doesn't matter from which angle I stare at it.
Five skills with semi-insignificant debuffs attached, where for example WoW used one, called it Sinister Strike, gave it only a global cooldown of 1.5 seconds and players have to pace themselves due to the energy mechanic and make choices on what to use after each SS, whereas an EQ2 player has no choices but using ALL these skills to achieve maximum result in terms of DPS.

Consolidating these five skills into a single one with a short cooldown (very short) and some debuffs attached to it would be a step in the right direction. Keep the "agro increasing on next attack" skill separated and the snare separated as well (and make it one snare, not three).

Let's face it, in wow you spam your hotkeys as well, in a more paced way, it's just that you don't have to do 1,2,3,4,5,Alt+1,Alt+2,Alt+3,Alt+4,Alt+5,Ctrl+1,Ctr l+2,Ctrl+3,Ctrl+4,Ctrl+5 and so on.
I know they are different games and all that jazz, but playing piano and playing EQ2 should't have all these things in common.

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Action and reaction
One thing I loved about WoW was the need to be ready and react to the mobs' actions, with stuns, interrupts, counterspells, etc.
While this is possible in EQ2, it's extremely hard to do for 2 big reasons: you don't know what exactly the mob is casting although you can figure out if it's a heal or a nuke (which is a semi-good thing) and you can recognize some spells from their sound effects or particle effects (like those Ice comets for example) and you have to use 0.5 seconds casting time abilities to counter 1.5 seconds spells: talk about some reflexes.
In some cases it's doable due to the mobs poor AI (e.g.: they try to heal once every 10 seconds only), in other cases it's impossible or close to impossible. This aspect of the game is fine in my opinion, but it could use some tweaking. I reported it because I read several times in various places that it could use a more intuitive system.

[Kodylan]

I can't really say I enjoyed pressing 3 over and over and over for an entire year as a rogue either, so there has to be a middle ground.

[Abalieno]

I only have a VERY limited experience on a Defiler but I second what is being said.

In general what I didn't like is that the spells I used weren't straightforward. Each one had mixed effects and not one clear purpose. Kind of odd to "parse" combat and figure out strategies. I often tried to change the order of spells I used with no relevant differences and it felt a lot as if my input wasn't all that important.

[rangoth]

I got the impression from my brief playtime of EQ2 that they wanted people to have options.

It felt like they thought people would choose between which of the attacks and debuffs was best for a given situation and use that. Solo, help tank, caster mob etc etc. I think the problem came in when in reality and practicle(sp?) application of the game was applied, there was no need to choose. Just slam all abilities.

Now as has been stated before, you can tell the difference between someone mashing buttons and someone doing it with intelligence/style/coordination or whatever term you want to use.

The question still remains however, "Are all of the skills really needed?" It's always hard to cut back on skills and spells as opposed to adding new ones, but perhaps it is time? If I have learned anything from playing all the various MMO's I have it's that they are all button spamming in one form or another.

I only made it to about 40 in EQ2 so maybe I am off base, but at that time with a Coercer I had 4 hotkey bars filled with spells that I did actually use. Now if I'm honest that had nothing to do with why I stopped playing, but it was excessive, yet I did see the point. To give me choices in combat that would affect how well I played.

Perhaps the some simple changes like making certain abilities function on the same cooldown, removing an ability here and there, and changing power cost/timers on them can bring a balance back to the situation?

[Digits]

I am very hesitant about making any suggestions for a game I never played past level 30 not because I cannot recognize the problem, but rather that I do not believe that I can at all speak for the people who matter: the subscribers. As such, I will try to avoid any over arcing statements and stick to a more general prognosis of the combat problem.

As has been said a hundred, if not more, times on this board the problem lies with redundant skills. Everything about the combat system is very repetitive, from the chain of abilities you hit to the Heroic Opportunities that present themselves ---every ten seconds---

EQ2 developers failed to realize that a player has to have options and skills that are reactionary so as to promote observance of the battle and strategic decisions over hitting buttons in a specific order. My Shaman in WoW would only press 3-4 keys in a given fight, but I also had upwards of two dozen abilities I could use at any moment. What totems do I use? What spell should be instant cast? How should I juggle damage versus healing? It was not challenging, but it was a constant set of questions in my mind that entertained and occupied me. EQ2, however, can be summed up as 'And One and Two and Three and Four and One and Two and Three and Four' The job of most (all?) classes cannot be done with a handful of keys, but rather multiple rows of hot keys. If all my time is spent smashing buttons in an optimal order that someone already parsed out for me, where then is my mind in combat? If I am not in the game, why bother playing?

If I had a suggestion beyond merging skills it would be to make items such as short term buffs and debuffs, as well as combat utility spells (such as Poison/Disease Cleansing Totem), impossible or retarded to use every fight. Don't just give them a long cool down, or make them just suck, but figure out a way to force players to think on whether or not using an ability is worth while.

[Qhue]

This really is the crux of the remaining fundamental failure of EQ2. While EQ had specialized skills for each class EQ2 has pretty much every ability imaginable available to most anyone (except healing!) in some varying degree.

Its never worthwhile to enter combat strategically at lower levels. Its always best to throw every single ability you have at the monster NOW for the regen reasons mentioned above.

Its very much like City of Heroes in this aspect.. a successful group is made up of lots of people running in and just mashing all of their buttons at once confident that they'll win no matter what. Either its a guaranteed win no matter what they do or its a guaranteed loss no matter what they do and there's really very little middle ground.

Sadly all of this is too far ingrained in EQ2 to be undone at this point...but for the eventual EQ3 I'd like to see a return to strategic roles and less massive piles of buffs debuffs and button mashing.

[Miele]

Originally Posted by Qhue

Either its a guaranteed win no matter what they do or its a guaranteed loss no matter what they do and there's really very little middle ground.

Aside from the reasons listed above, this is very true. There is no middle ground and almost no way to pull out "creative" wins with unconventional groups.

[MrGraham]

as a Guardian, I always had the same 3 group buffs and 2 self buffs up, combining those into 1 self and 1 group buff would be awesome.

i had one dot that did dmg and reduced the mobs dps. i had a 2nd dot that did dmg and reduced the mobs melee skills. i had a 3rd attack that wasnt a dot but reduced the mob's casting skills.

i had an efficient direct dmg. i had a big direct dmg. i had another big direct dmg from aa's. i had an accurate direct damage. i had a direct damage that sucked but stunned non epics. i had a big direct dmg that dazed.

i had a taunt. i had a taunt that did dmg. i had an encounter taunt. i had an encounter taunt that did dmg.

button mashing, button mashing.

although i liked the game and would keep playing it over wow if i had more of a friend base playing it instead of wow, the combat and the encounters were definitely the weakest features, with class roles and variety of things to do being the strongest.

[Penalty]

Its already been discussed to death, whether they decide to change it or not is what its going to take.

[Zuuljin]

Its the same for solo, at least for some classes. As a Shadow Knight, theres mobs I can solo, and there are mobs I cannot solo. There is barely any middle ground unless I happen to AFK in the middle of a battle.

I agree with pretty much everything that was said, and wont really touch on those, but I would like to add something that sort of ties into it all.

Confusion.

IMO there are too many abilities, too many buffs on your screen, attacks happen way to fast to follow in the combat text, skill damage is random, and monster health is random based on its con.

To start off, abilities. As was said its a spam fest, but more so than that, its just confusing having SO many abilities, and having half of them with near identical stats. In EQ1, I could list every spell I was using at a level, exactly what it did, and exactly how much damage it did. The spell lines were blatantly laid out and easy to follow. In EQ2, I really cant tell you what half my spells do, without having to reference them. I know some heal, some are DD, and some are dots, but for how long, how much heal and how much damage do the spells do? I don't know. Add into the fact that there are different tiers of the same spell, and its even more confusing. Not that I think the tier idea is a bad one, but the spells need to be more static and condensed, so I can know them all.

Buffs: Again, just too many to follow. When I have 30 icons on my screen, 15 of them blinking and which disappear before I can inspect them, it makes me not even bother to know whats going on. Another problem that could actually easily be fixed, is have the buffs/debuffs stack on the screen in the order the happen. I don't know why buffs jump in front of other buffs in the window, but it makes it really hard to follow. Also, the buff location should be static until the buff fades, with no condensing. That way I might actually be able to have time to inspect a buff/debuff before its sent down the line because something under it faded. I don't remember off the top of my head, but didn't EQ1 have this? Where if you had a buff that was in your 15th slot, even if everything under it faded, it would still be in the same 15th slot?

Speed of combat text: Along with so many abilities, attack speed, various dots and status spells, watching the combat window is impossible. I remember in EQ1 I was able to have my combat text and chat text in the same window! Holy crap! Now in a fight, its just a blur of text, impossible to follow. Having a ton of abilities, followed immediately by auto-attack, followed by your 3-4 random dot spells + enemy damage, sometimes with 5-6 enemies on you at once thanks to the arrow system, and combat description text (You begin to cast... etc) and its just too much and is too confusing. Again, I don't even bother watching

Random skill damage: Not really sure about the idea behind this one, but its another area of confusion. Why not have an ability do X amount of damage, and each tier of the spell does X amount more? As it is now, its just confusing having a spell do a range of values, on top of random resists, which leads to confusing attacks, since your never really sure what the damage is going to be with any consistency. I like crunching numbers, being able to break down spells by their dmg/mana ratio, without having to work probability into the equation.

Lastly, monster hit points: Not nearly a big a deal as the others, but its still something. I like the idea behind the arrow system, but it again leads to a bit of confusion. A lvl 15 wolf should have the HP and stats of a level 15 wolf, no matter how you want to shake it. Having group wolves, single wolves, super powerful wolves, but all being the same mob is again confusing and hard to follow. As was in EQ1, you knew what to expect going into a fight with a monster. I could also nail down its approximate hp just by watching the combat text. But now, when you have the same mob in 7 different flavors, with a 3-4 level range, its just way too much gong on.

Put all of this together, and you have one confusing, hard to follow battle system. People love to crunch numbers and stats. They don't like the random floundering feeling you get when theres just too much randomness going on in a fight. Things just need to become more static across the board, so people can follow the fight so they don't need a parser program or a degree in probability to guess the outcome of a fight.

Now, I don't really think it is possible to fix all of that without a NGE revamp, which is not going to happen. But little things like making static buff locations would be a start, or making spell damage a single value, rather than a range. The main thing I think that needs to be done is get some good UI tools to sort the mess out. Allow very detailed chat filtering, so I can put buffs in a window, dots in a window, dd's in a window, or at least filter by specific type, so I can perhaps get rid of status text, or not worry about dot text. Just some way to let me follow it all. Same with buffs. Have different windows for dots, short term buffs/debuffs, long term buffs, long term debuffs etc. Or let me just create multiple buff windows, with a filter of what buffs I want there and which I don't.

As for the arrow system, maybe add in an auto prefix naming convention for the arrow system? Such as you have "A Wolf", and lower arrows make it "A Weak Wolf", to "A Fragile Wolf", and in the other direction as well with "A Strong Wolf" to "A Uber Wolf". You get the idea. =P While this seems sort of superficial, it adds a sense of static mob type to the world, if that makes sense.

Thats all for now. =)

[Wodin]

Originally Posted by Kodylan

I can't really say I enjoyed pressing 3 over and over and over for an entire year as a rogue either, so there has to be a middle ground.

3 is for nubs, 2 is where it's at.

Seriously, though, the non-positional/awareness aspects of a raiding rogue in TBC can be encapsulated completely by a keyboard macro pressing the following keys: "2 E 2 2 2 2 (2?) R ... " Literally everything else is awareness, using stuns/spell interrupts, and making sure your positioning is good. The difference between a good rogue and a great rogue is 1-2% time on target and the timing of Blade Flurry/Adrenaline Rush/on-use trinkets.

Does the "enjoyed" there mean you quit your rogue?

[WillzZz]

I love my skills on my 70 Assassin =( Think I'm part of the minority, but I love EQ2 combat way more, since a little bit of player skill is involved in managing your DPS. It's not much, but atleast it's more than WoW, where most blind retarded monkeys can do the same DPS as anyone else.

I'd certainly be less likely to go back to kunark if they changed the system =/ Guess I like button mashing, or something..

[Arrr]

I play a swash, and this is spot on. I might as well be playing the piano for how many hotkey combinations I'm hitting.

that said, non-caster classes in EQ2 are most comparable to the current implementation of the TBC-era hunter in wow. You have an auto attack and you need to thread your specials in between. This does a bit to differentiate good from bad, but not very much. For swash in particular, it's still a silly amount of button mashing.

an example of combat: Starting stealthed, which I almost always am, It goes: stealth attack, avoidance debuffs (3), then mit debuffs (3), then attack skill debuffs (2), and then if I'm feeling spunky, I'll debuff caster stats (1), snare it (1), hit my AEs (2), use my stun, use my aggro shift attack, and then I can pop my short-term self-only dps buffs. and taunt a little, you know, just because I can. and if I'm lucky, I'll get in a master strike.

I'd be absolutely thrilled if they consolidated some of my skills. Just one avoidance debuff, one mit, one attack skill, even one AE.

[Spyryt]

Originally Posted by Zuuljin

As for the arrow system, maybe add in an auto prefix naming convention for the arrow system? Such as you have "A Wolf", and lower arrows make it "A Weak Wolf", to "A Fragile Wolf", and in the other direction as well with "A Strong Wolf" to "A Uber Wolf". You get the idea. =P While this seems sort of superficial, it adds a sense of static mob type to the world, if that makes sense.

This is an awesome idea. The "arrows", and the other graphical option which I can't recall a one-word name for and Im not even sure most people know about it but I will just call it the "fancy bracket" option, are, for lack of a better word, not immersive. Your thought is a great way to fix 95% of the mobs. Something slightly different would need to be done for named mobs but that is so easy for all generic stuff which is most mobs in any game. Let's see how long it takes Scott to implement. They obviously thought this was a weak spot as they tried to fix it before (which is why we have two options).

On the button-mashing topic of the thread, I have no such issues as a bruiser. I only have two skills I would call "repetitive" (low dmg punch, low dmg kick). Combine those two with faster re-cast, just remove one, whatever...no biggie to me.

[Leadsalad]

Originally Posted by WillTR

It's not much, but atleast it's more than WoW, where most blind retarded monkeys can do the same DPS as anyone else.

Sorry, no.