Auto-attack Outdated?

[Thage]

Playing every single class constantly GCD locked, without even a solid two seconds of breathing room, sounds pretty hellish for a tab-target game. Sure, you've got games that go full-ARPG with their combat like TERA, Neverwinter, SWTOR, and WildStar, but how many players do those games have, again? I think people grossly overestimate how well full-action gameplay works with MMORPGs, especially when you concentrate a shitload of players in a small area, and I certainly don't trust the current crop of devs to pull it off with the necessary skill to turn it into anything less than a total shitstorm--they can hardly manage the gameplay they've got now.

[Onikaroshi]

And the combat in SWTOR feels really really shit compared to WoW.


The perfection of the tab/autoattack combat system is one of WoWs greatest strengths. No other MMO feels as good to play as WoW. Even with BFA dumbing down most specs and making everything slower, it's still miles ahead of all the competition.

Do you want to redeisgn/remove one of the things that WoW are the very best at in the entire genre?

Combat feels really shit in swtor because the animations are stiff, it functionally plays similar to wow.

[Kalisandra]

Most can agree that tab targeting / GCD based combat feels slow and is outdated in comparison to action combat.
Instead of the auto-attack we currently have, what if WoW had an active weapon attack ability that is not affected by the game's GCD that can act as a filler in between other abilities? Would that create the illusion of a faster paced / more fun gameplay?

WoW can easily be made to feel like an action combat game by changing all single target attacks into frontal AoE attacks not requiring a target. I think the game needs more of these, especially for melee classes.

Dear gods, no! WoW's facing system isn't really set up for this, and it severely punishes players on high latency connections, and there are still some of those. It would also either be like Heroic Blow was for fighters and macrod into everything, or it'll just be another low-damage filler move, and many specs have one of those already.

Oh, and I don't agree that the current model feels particularly slow, aside from Haste levels being lower than usual for this point in an expansion. WoW, for all its flaws, has one of the smoothest combat systems in MMOs. Play other MMORPGs for a while and WoW classes tend to feel very fluid and quick in comparison.

[TheVaryag]

Most can agree that tab targeting / GCD based combat feels slow and is outdated in comparison to action combat.
Instead of the auto-attack we currently have, what if WoW had an active weapon attack ability that is not affected by the game's GCD that can act as a filler in between other abilities? Would that create the illusion of a faster paced / more fun gameplay?

WoW can easily be made to feel like an action combat game by changing all single target attacks into frontal AoE attacks not requiring a target. I think the game needs more of these, especially for melee classes.

Imean I liked the way SWTOR does It, despite It being a shite game, with shite story, shite endgame, "okay" enough classes but even they get changed and streamlined for no reason like WoW ones did. Despite that, SWTOR has no auto attack, you just weave In your replacement, your basic slash/shoot attack Into your rotation cause you can't just spam, you have various resources to consider, heat, energy, clips, force etc. so If you spammed you'd regenerate your energy very slowly and you have to weave your basic attack Into your rotation sometimes.

Which became less prevelent as the years gone by, but that's only to SWTOR's shame but the Idea still persists In my head that It wouldn't hurt to replace auto attack with that. Or, keep auto attack but make attacks abit slower like FF14 does, giant two handed weps swing for up to 5 seconds and with you using your abilities every, that said I'm only a Warrior and Rogue on there so far but It looks and feels great even at level 10/70.

[Schattenlied]

I think most classes already have a filler, so no need for it really in terms of a filler in the current system. Mind Flay for shadow priests. Crusader strike for paladins, ext.

If Crusader Strike didn't have a cooldown I might agree with you, however, it's cooldown is actually six fucking seconds... That's not "filler"...

It could really do with having it's CD removed, it hits for less damage than auto attack and Ret's downtime is atrocious without absurd amounts of haste.

[arkanon]

As opposed to what? pre cata times where white hits were upwards of 50% OR MORE of your damage? Game was like that for a long time.

You know 75 is bigger than 50 right?

[Zka]

Action combat would make me 100% quit forever. WoW has already gone towards reaction/dexterity elements way too far but action combat would be the icing on the cake.

[Onikaroshi]

You know 75 is bigger than 50 right?

75 what? No one mentioned 75 anything

[arkanon]

75 what? No one mentioned 75 anything

The person you replied to and quoted did.

[Onikaroshi]

The person you replied to and quoted did.

In a hyperbolic way, we're not even close to 75%, the 50+% is actually real from back in the day

[Craaazyyy]

i much prefer target based combat system in an mmo.. and i feel like autoattack should matter.. like if your rotation is complex enough and feels smooth why does it matter if auto attack does decent damage?

[Aeula]

Dear god no, I don’t want RSI spamming that shit in a Mythic+.

[LuminaL]

I don't feel like autoattack matters at all. I'm not sure what the point of it is, don't get why removing it would even change anything.

people have some weird fetish of removing everything from this game and then complaining about how bland and boring the game is, dont take these threads too seriously.

not sure about it? just take a look at this forum in about 1 year when they start to complaint how removing Titan forge killed this game and blame it on blizzards bad choices.

[RemasteredClassic]

Dear god no, I don’t want RSI spamming that shit in a Mythic+.

But that's what casters have to do...spam or else nothing happens, unlike melee.

[Nevcairiel]

I like to give Star Wars: The Old Republic is an example - no auto attack for any spec. I find the combat far more dynamic and enjoyable there compared to WoW.

I always thought the combat in SWTOR feels slow and clunky, to be honest. Classes have way too many abilities that you want to keep track of, but somehow you still manage to need fillers.

WoW Melee combat always felt much faster and better to me.

[Daffan]

I don't feel like autoattack matters at all. I'm not sure what the point of it is, don't get why removing it would even change anything.

So the game doesn't look like a pause simulator aka SWTOR

[Aeula]

But that's what casters have to do...spam or else nothing happens, unlike melee.

And that’s why I don’t play a caster. No need to homogenise the rhythm of gameplay.

And besides, casters have castbars.

[Tradu]

But that's what casters have to do...spam or else nothing happens, unlike melee.

Except casters don't do that at all. They press a button every GCD, which is the same as most melee(and more than a couple of melee). Casters aren't spamming some off-GCD "auto attack" filler.

[Orby]

I see Blizzard have far removed themselves already from the slower based game-play vanilla WoW had. I wouldn't mind a faster paced action style but personally I kind of wish it would go back to the more slower style, but unfortunately people don't have the patience for that way of playing these days

Despite still loving the Dragon Age franchise I still think Dragon Age Origins has the best combat due to the stop and pause and combat checks. Not that I want Blizzard to go that slow with their combat but I kind of miss when getting in combat was a preparation very much like the old D&D days. Now its just go in and hack away, its all fast and carefree, little thinking and more doing, its brain dead action rather than thoughtful strategy.

[Cosmic Janitor]

A neutral weapon based attack is an interesting concept, but only really works if there is something in that attack that either integrates well into the class design itself (think of the short CD melee abilities which you essentially spam on CD), can be boosted by things in the class design (giving the attack more weight by empowering it with class abilities) or is itself part of a system that makes it interesting (different weapon types come with different abilities and masteries etc.). Unless you do one or more of these, it would just turn boring yet unintrusive autodamage into a chore to increase the carpal tunnel syndrome related cases in the WoW playerbase.

So I don't think you could just implement it without any problems, by just doing away with auto attacks and requiring another button to be pressed. Another issue is that WoW's combat is extremly spammy in the first place. Abilities lack impact in comparison to proper action combat games because everything is build around spamming little abilites to whittle down enemies over a couple of seconds, even if we unleash world ending attacks that should all rights obliterate them in fractions of a second. To make combat more action oriented and properly utlize such a proposed switch away from autoattack, you'd need to rebalance everything in game.

Edit: Not to mention it will never happen anyway. The current WoW devs are scared shitless of giving us active abilities we can use that translate to large chunks of our DPS. This is why we are constantly showered in passives and proccs that make up between 30-50% of our dps now.