I’m curious what the actual vision is for Wicked’s combat. As I’m sure you’ve seen, people have made impressive builds where they quickly clear enemies as a mage or endlessly spam rune attacks and easily take down Echo Knight.
By contrast, Souls combat is a refocusing on combat fundamentals such as timing, weight, precision, opportunity cost, and other. This is exactly the kind of thing Moon is referencing when they talk about “animation based combat”. This is very different from Diablo style combat.
Here lies the problem. I’m not against gear having an impact on my character. In fact, this is an area Souls games lack in. But, I am against it if it totally overlaps the combat fundamentals in the game.
i think they should limit the usage of spamming weapon runes, the runes should be strong and impactful but deleting everything in the visinity is just superpower and needs balancing
i think they should remove the chance to get hp when damaged from gear affixes, its just too strong of a stat and very hard to balance in a game with constant changes
It’s, for the most part, a balance issue. They’ll most likely tune setups down more when most of their focus is not on QoL and performance improvements. I don’t think the story should be balanced around high-end gear but any endgame activities certainly can and I believe they will be.
Ultimately Moon Studios has a vision for an ARPG with weighty, methodical combat and they’ve been doing well so far to stay true to that vision. If it gets to the point that they’ve lost this combat they had in mind, I believe it’s reasonable to assume they’ll dial back what’s necessary.
I think people just want to know clearly what the intended combat is supposed to be. It’s very confusing. On one side the devs have said methodical combat. They have also said you should be OP and obliterate things. So which is it? I’m fine either way…but if it’s one way I probably wont invest any more time. I don’t need another Diablo/POE clone where it’s single button screen clearing and I’m not telling the devs which way they should go with their game. I would however, like to know. The game as it currently stands felt great through most of it until you find all of the broken aspects of the focus/rune system. If that was not intended no worries (I get the content difficulty stops at level 20). If that is intended, well I’ve lost interest and I’ll just move on to another game.
Razor, feel free to share an alternative to Souls/Diablo for combat. Give details, please.
The game as it currently stands felt great through most of it until you find all of the broken aspects of the focus/rune system.
This is the main point. You learn the fundamentals of combat and get skillful, then the gear rolls blasts all of that out of the window and turns it into shallow ARPG combat. People are confusing the relief of the game becoming easier at that point with good combat.
Yeah I did a detailed post of my 140+ hours with this game and for me the Diablo version of combat should be avoided.
Finding gear is fine. Gear creating new builds is fine.
It just needs to be balanced so that the core mechanics of the game are not avoided-timing attacks, dodging, rolling, parrying, backstabbing, blocking. If those 6+ aspects of the game are no longer used because you can just spam ice throw or lightning flurry then you have broken your own game!
I’m suggesting it can be its own thing, not a copy of something else.
The fact you’ve wanted me to list further combat examples from other games proves the point I was making exactly.
People can’t just learn a new concept or combat style these days, can they? They always have to compare it to something else. “Is it Diablo? Is it Dark Souls? Is it God Of War?”. No. It’s No Rest For The Wicked. Treat it as its own thing and stop expecting it to be something else.
i dont think it should be classified as either. sure, it is inspired from both in some aspects, but it doesnt want to take the identity of either. at least not in my view.
i think that if we look at it as a completely different thing on its own the issue becomes more of a balance problem than a “so is this souls or diablo” problem.
inarguably though, i do not see a way to make tight, spacing centered, and tense combat work together with “bomba mage power no cooldowns you explode teehee”.
not at the same time anyways. and i dont see an environment in which i would choose to fight the first way rather than the latter, mostly because the second way (assuming both are balanced in this hypothetical) gets you where you to (killing the enemy) just as well but with less, effectively speaking, “manual” effort.
soooo where does this game go? personally i would prefer if it took a more “soulsy” direction and it, while preserving build variety, made everything more considerate and less spammy, but this is purely personal and subjective and i can absolutely understand the delight in creating strong builds that destroy everything.
then again, i initally argued this game shouldnt be categorized in either; maybe theres a middle ground that im not seeing and it is possible to have strong expansive and “dibalo-esque” characters while keeping the fighting considerate and strategic and yadda yadda.
a lot of people say stuff like this. i dont get it, respectfully. yes i love it too, but this is the baseline. in my humble opinion, we’re not here to say “its okay” and move on, what we’re here to do is help the devs improve this game as much as possible. you can’t tell me with a straight face “yeah no its perfect and i dont see a way to improve it”, i wouldn’t even believe you. imagine if it wasn’t just “fine as it is”, if it was better than it is right now!
for me the combat in wicked is great.
I didnt played Patch 1, the only thing i didnt liked was the jumps in difficulty (balancing) but this is hopefully an issue ot the ealry acces.
But even in the harder parts of the game i liked it.
Dodging/Rolling feels fair, parry system is hard but rewarding (high risk high reward) Weapons feel good (and if not, the game offers a lot of weapons with different movesets to play around).
Enemies are sometimes hard but i didnt had anytime the feeling the game is unfair - just me to bad
I agree that I think there is not a true balance, and this game is mostly an inspiration child from both. With that said, I think there are some balancing that can be made to reach a better combination.
Rune rebalancing:
– There should be standard, more basic ones that can be spammed. Think of a mage’s auto attack of sorts.
– Then there should be more “ultimate” moves. High-hitting, potentially more flashy moves, that come with some form of cooldown.
– Make it so rune attacks can’t replenish focus
Not perfect, but I think this would allow for a natural flow of combat with occasional “explosions” of more flashy skills. Weave in your ultimate runes between a dance of melee or smaller rune attacks.
hi JP! you’re good at this lol.
increasing the “required focus amount” between basic runes, and strong runes sounds great. love that.
if this game wants to be its own thing, that being the next evolution of ARPGs, i’d definitely say that is a step in the right direction.
here are some proposals from me:
at the moment, the game shifts from slow and considerate in the early game to spammy and build-synergy centered later down the line.
to me, this is the main reason that this “divide” is so palpable. because you feel it happen while playing the game. theres a breaking point in which you stop worrying about what the enemy is doing and you start tearing shit down, and thats when it clicks: “oh, it’s an arpg, right”. y’know what im sayin’?
this isnt inherently a negative, (it can be leveraged to create a sense of "oh man my build is getting GOOD) but it does in great part come down to balance, and to how “exponentially explosive” builds become; i’d argue that the major culprits in this are, as listed below:
-specific runes
-gem stacking and farming
-the current stat sheet and scalings
-rare and unique effects that make the build rotate around themselves (like heal on hit)
so, outside of balancing stuff, i’d argue that the core of the issue is:
player perception+the way the game addresses power fantasy and scaling.
one of the two could be addressed by:
•reducing exponential synergies between different parameters (like stacking gems with focus gain with armor with focus gain with weapons and rings with focus gain etc.)
•making negative effects in purple weapons always tackle build typologies that the positive effect enhances, and “break” a balance in between the strategic swordplay combat and the classic arpg combat (this one kind of a stinky idea tho because then it makes everything annoying)
•making basic attacks more useful, by either increasing base damage or making effects that reward simpler combat.
can’t think of anything else but i hope you find this input valuable.
So you can be a reference to help me get hired by Moon right?
Jokes aside, I do really like your thoughts on this as well. I know we talked about it in other threads, but I think some of this is really hard for us to picture in the grand scheme of the game. Watch us make a call for a bunch of nerfs/balancing on broken builds, then act 2 comes out and obliterates us
I do think runes and focus need the most adjustments to even out the game, but I think I’d take baby steps toward that until we at least see the next area!
