Yes i agree, the gameplay atm is focused on spamming the most broken skills, every survival and tactical element is gone at “endgame”
The post is named “Qol design tips” there is qol and design tips, and for me some of them overlaps because the implication they have on the player items management and mental stress… Do i need to put a “,” or “and” or change the title in a way you can suggest me ? So you dont feel scammed reading someone opinion just because you expect just QOL ? There u go i changed Titol To QOL, combat design, and general feedback.
One thing with basing runes or the game in general off MOBAs & MMO adjacent systems is they all follow a power fantasy perspective and the skills work in place of needing to dodge or shield with consequence. If I dodge here it’s because we deemed it necessary to avoid damage & I lose stamina. If you get a rune that just freezes the enemy… I mean how’s that not exploitative, who wouldn’t use that cooldowns be damned?
There’s a lot of MMO bosses too which are just cycling skills offensive skills 1-5, then using defensive skill 6 every 30 seconds, and you just follow this pattern until the boss dies. I don’t think cooldowns inherently fix this. I did make a post in the past(or maybe just a reply IDR) about how we need to make rune inputs more dynamic: let them charge, make it timed attacks, input-dependent, let you lob say 3 bombs in areas you choose, etc. The Radahn spell in ER summons 3 giant space balls above you, if you could do that and choose when to shoot out each for example it would add tons of Rune variety.
I don’t think overhauling the rune input system though directly correlates to taking skills from MMO-adjacent combat. Being able to shutdown a bosses’s moveset for example shouldn’t be a thing(I’m actually against staggers for this very reason in all soulslikes)
I think you only see that in the currently niche EA sphere. I honestly think if you did a poll or the developers had some internal tool, most people aren’t doing focus spams yet of the extremely broken runes like lightning flurry. Most people just use whatever they’ve got on hand because you gotta remember, all these broken builds are mostly from people who farmed EK for 50+ hours which gets them the Crucible-exclusive runes.
The main focal points for me from MOBA’s and MMORPG’s are the mechanical distinctions between abilities and synergies to create combo’s. Which I think Wicked lacks currently.
Think of any melee character in any Moba, they have various sequences to their abilities. Maybe they always start with Q, E, W or they weave auto attacks in between them. In Wicked we mostly go AA, AA, AA, Rune and repeat. I don’t think we have enough incentive to weave runes together. I would love it if we had a big leap ability that stuns/slow enemies on impact so I can then whirlwind on top of them without having to run to the enemy only for them to dash away. Just a simple 1 → 2 is enough for me. I just want more mechanical distinctions between runes and not just raw damage.
I agree but I just think pedantic as it is grabbing straight from MMOs/MOBA-adjacents you gotta be careful because those games create situations with clear counters in terms of mechanics. Like there are attacks or moves that are unevadable and the way you’re supposed to beat the enemy is use something that can break you out of it, it is basically not optional. Which works for something like VRising, if you get caught in a net THAT is something which would guarantee a death in any soulslike, but in MMOs/VRising you just activate a spell that lets you phase through stuff.
We can’t have that in this game is what I mean. You can have a gimmick boss maybe who sets the arena on fire and you’re expected to outheal it or up your fire resistance, but you can’t make the moment-to-moment gameplay consist of mechanics that can’t be beaten by skill in these types of games. You can’t make a boss that can only be countered by blitzing it or having this singular class of runes. But at the same time regardless of if you have a boss which requires the rune, the rune is now severely overpowered for the average enemy. AOE silences for example if you’re crowded by mages, it doesn’t matter if the cooldown is 30 seconds(absurdly long btw) and the effect only lasts 5 seconds, that’s 5 seconds for you to just annihilate them, then back off for 30 seconds if there’s any survivors
I just know that since i found the ice throw the game went from hard and challanging to easy mode, then i found the focus ring, the health and focus on hit and it became omega easy mode. All the tactical and survival aspect of the game went out of the window and so my desire to play. I now have 99h on the game but half of that time was just exploring, doing useless daily missions , learning the map, trying stuff on multiple world instances that gave me zero progress. I think that the focus should be on the endgame not reaching it. For runes, i just saw a archer build of a average player spamming 1 ranged rune and some basic attacks 20m away from the crucible boss, dude was randomly clicking 4-5 dodges one after the other every time he could get hit and was still able to kill the boss abusing range and infinite heals (this is why we need limited flasks enanced by foods). I dont think this should be endgame. I would prefear people to use actual tactical runes even if broken but that add to strategy and gameplay depth. If you have a rune that makes u water form and intangible for 3 sec on 60 sec cooldown that would make you use that skill defensively to avoid some lethal damage or to reposition ,or offensively to combo into lighting to stun the enemy. You could have a rune that doubles the parry time window of the next 1-3 parry attempts (goes on cd after the last attempt) and on each parry summons a zombie that explodes charging the enemy or gives you a aura effect of whatever, or transforms your weapon in a divine artifact for x seconds and soo on… if they want to make broken stuff to make you op in endgame it has to feel tactical or have a mechanic… not just spam shoot 8 arrowns from 20 m or throw a 2h weapon and kill everythink while its stunned and gives you back all the focus if not more. Even the silence you talked about, yes, for example would be better to have a skill that lets you manually aim and pull enemies on you one by one, then silence them with another skill and then f them up while they are unable to use spells for 5 secs, but you set the whole think up and earned the right to destroy them.
the ranged thing is present in literally any game is the problem. It’s not the build that’s the issue, it’s that since gaming has existed devs never program AI to deal with ranged-only players. Cheese archer/mage/necro builds that stay far away and don’t do anything have always existed & will continue to exist until bosses have a programmed function to close the gap & pressure the player. The other option though to prevent cheese builds is to make them so unequivocally boring that anyone who does it is essentially punishing themselves. This is a valid game design strategy.
Your water form thing is just too strong & too weak at the same time and contextually not too dissimilar from our blink rune thing. You stick a long cooldown on it, no one’s gonna use it, don’t have a cooldown, spam. You’re not gonna end up with this balanced offense/defense strategic thing in the game you hope for, players will just naturally gravitate to damage dealing runes that’s how gamer brains just work. Focus in a hard battle is a valuable resource and people won’t want to waste it on a simple one-off evasion when they could die any moment. And consider if you could just be intangible through the waterfowl dance … yeah no. Unless you’re telling me with that ratio you want to give damage runes a 120 second cooldown to balance it which GL with that.
Runes are broken but for a multitude of reasons, even if you stick a cooldown consider the fact we have three mainhand weapons which gives us at minimum 6 runes to rotate through & at max 12 runes. Include offhand like bows and suddenly you have 24 runes to balance. Cooldown doesn’t fix this. Unironically the biggest problem right now is that runes give back focus, could you imagine if weapon arts in souls gave back FP jajajajaja.
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