Ship of Heroes

Here's a chance to weigh in on something important. How fast should melee combat be?

We're discussing this issue within the development team. And we'd like to post a few links and let you guys weigh in on what you want. Note, you don't generally need to watch each of these videos completely. You can kind of see what's going on. Also, it looks to me at least, like faster melee seems to be teamed with a lot of knockback.

You can see for yourself, and then let us know what you think.

1. COH is a bit slower than what we have now in SoH.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJDTIlxi6KA

2. SWTOR may be a bit faster, until you're knocked back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VjLi35yVvE&t=26s

3. WOW looks slower than SoH to me, but our devs think they are about the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkyUIIDdjPE

4. BDO is definitely faster than SoH right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPgrdpu93hg

5. Our devs think FFXIV is faster than we are right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tphsDbakEDs



If you are looking for the SoH melee combat video, we have not really posted one recently. But we are using these clips as references. Share your thoughts.

I think the faster combat is, the more room for CC and telegraphed (get out of the fire!) Enemy and boss mechanics there is.

Faster melee means controllers can have more impact but melee will need gap closers. It's delicate

Black desert is the gold standard for mmo action combat. Not only should you be trying to get that level of speed and response, you should be going for that level of complexity with combos and flair.

The combat should allow you to easily incorporate your movement ability to allow you to expand your move set offensively and defensively in a way that makes sense. Bring a super hero game, there should be slightly less emphasis on gating travel abilities in combat. Spiderman webslings when he fights, iron man uses his flight to keep him distanced when he fights while superman uses his flight too add power to his punches, the flash uses his super speed to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, get what I mean?

I know you guys are just talking about speed buy please consider a combo system too, where skills interact with each other and party. See final fantasy 11 and thier renkai /skill chain system, or EverQuest 2 and their heroic opportunities.

As a future melee player I always hate when melee doesn't keep up with ranged combat.

Ps.. For the animation, lean towards fun and exciting over real and boring, anime vs us cartoon. Black desert flash, not swtor. Melee combat should be fun to look at.

Pps... Allow us to dual weild, allow us to use giant 2 hand swords, allow us to use spears and polearms. Remember stances and that a katana and a sword aren't held or swung the same.

Pps include single player games in your search for great melee combat, sekiro, darksiders 3, devil may cry, all good.

IMO if combat is faster than CoH, that's good enough. CoH had its share of annoyingly long activation powers. But they were like that to balance the power without raising the endurance cost.

I've fought in combat in SoH, and find it is very good. I loves the responsiveness of the melee set I tried, and I like the balance in the ranged set I tried. Lower damage, lower end costs, fast activation and recycle, vs the higher end powers with high damage, high endurance cost, slow activation and long recycle.

I can only imagine that the combat is better now, about a year and a half later!

I'll be basing my feedback on my experience in COH since I have not gotten to actually play this game yet... I think that while fast attacks are, generally speaking, a QoL improvement, you don't need *every* set to feel like Fire Blast (or TW with momentum.) A little variety from set to set is nice. I'm not at all opposed to slower animating powers, but the expectation should be that the animation times have a payoff.

The issue with COH is that a lot of slower animating powers have lower DPA than lower tier powers in the same set. While I think it's important to have variety both from set to set and power to power, it needs to be rewarded from a DPS perspective as well. If I have a fast recharging attack that animates twice as fast and does 75% of the damage as a slower attack, I'll use that twice and it'll be a DPS improvement over the higher tier power. This is a problem, and it happens all the time in COH.

Another thing I would point out is that while longer animations are typically annoying, what's *teally* annoying is long animations with rooting effects. If I could move around while casting Thunderstrike for example, I wouldn't mind it as much. Rooting just makes games feel clunky and unresponsive, and that is never fun.

While I don't mind combat being a bit faster than COH, I really don't want anything at all like an action game. I'm getting a bit old for twitch reflex stuff (and never really like it much when younger). I also think that if you include sets which have combo mechanics, you should also have ones which lack such. Personally I avoid the combo mechanics sets in COH like the plague.

Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I'd just like a game to take it easy and not have to work too hard. I don't mean I need everything to be easy, and don't want everything to be a handout, but if I have to concentrate on lining up perfect sequences of powers to keep up, I'll lose interest in fairly short order. I suppose that means I'm not compatible with what some other people want from this. I can live with some grind, but I'll get mighty tired if I'm way behind in playing if I can't get the APM up to competition levels. If I wanted to worry about APM I'd go back to playing Starcraft 2.

I tried the combos in CoH and did not care for them at all. The main reason? They weren't very worthwhile. You got a tiny boost in damage/ recycle/ whatever, but you often had to wait for a power to finish recycling before you could finish the combo. Knowing Doc's propensity for working out precise attack chains to maximize DPS, particularly for ATs that are not noted for their DPS, combos would be a nightmare to him.

Here is the word on combat; it is very similar to City of Heroes, but it is a little faster, mostly in activation times. If you enjoyed the speed of combat in CoH, you will very, very, very likely like the speed of combat in SoH. Consultant is trying to see if there is a benefit to be seen to speed up combat a little more.

Considering the type of combat used in SoH, combos won't be very well liked, just like in CoH - notice how many dual blades scrappers are in the game. If you make the combo bonuses powerful, you need to nerf overall damage for the powerset to balance it, or even worse, lengthen recycle times.

A little bit faster than CoH is perfect. Like drbuzzard, the last thing I want is action combat. That would be an instant turn off.

Here's a chance to weigh in on something important. How fast should melee combat be?

Speed of what?

Speed of movement, speed of power animations, speed of power recharge, speed of kill time?

Now often those all go together, but they don't have to, necessarily, and they all affect slightly different aspects of the fight.

They give different levers to tune the combat.

As Consultant well knows, my view is that the last quantity, the kill time, is the first quantity to determine, since it affects the whole feel of the the game, and feeds into the others.

If you want a short kill time, then you likely want fast power recharge but slower movement (easier to avoid being hit), and vice versa.
Power animation speed makes it easier to do damage, but not being locked in an animation also makes it easier to hit-and-run, which can lengthen fights. Again, that depends on the feel you want - and of course, should vary between powersets. Some powersets should be "flighty", being able to dart in, burst, and step back, others should be sluggers who get up in your face and stay there. The former would want shorter animation times, the latter can have longer.

This then feeds into control powers - fast movement to dodge and disengage is obviously countered by CC, whereas if people have no choice but to slug it out toe-to-toe, movement affecting CC is largely ignorable.

I'm not going to address combo powers here - I'll actually make a new topic for that, because it is an important discussion.


My personal view is that I'd like fights to be short, at least against below "boss" level enemies.

I would like to have bursts of movement speed, but moving constantly at the speed of SWTOR video makes things feel too "floaty" and disconnected for me. My mental image of "superhero" has a solidity to it, a feeling of being grounded. The quintessential superhero landing pose sums it up for me.

The WoW animations felt the closest to right for me - the CoH now look overly slow, SWTOR particularly felt way too fast. But, as above, there should be some variation between powersets - tank powersets should be slower, brawlers slightly faster, etc.

I have no problems with fast recharges on powers, especially in something like SoH where there is no base "auto-attack" - if you have no powers up, you can do literally nothing, so I'd rather err on the side of shorter cooldowns balanced by energy costs < obvious hint >I will have a rather concrete example of this soon... < / obvious hint >