Does combat need to be slowed down?

[Tartantyco]

A little early, of course, but from the few hours I've played so far it seems like combat is way to fast. First off, some of these enemies are rocket powered. Just now, I tried to lure some wolves towards my party by firing off some magic missiles with my wizard. He was standing in the middle of the party and fired the missiles at max range. I pulled him back to the rear and moved up my fighters to engage. Within 2 seconds of the magic missiles hitting the wolves had ran from their original location, past my fighter barrier, past my priest and rogue, and slammed into the wizard, knocking him down and taking a big chunk of his stamina and health away. Similar scenarios played out against beetles and the small spiders, who are extremely quick. This speed negates a lot of spells and abilities that are area of effect, as well as making it hard to keep enemies at a distance.

 

When it comes to the combat itself, I feel like things are just happening too often. This might just be the fact that I've been facing mobs of 5-7 enemies at once, but hits are just very frequent, and I quickly lose track of what is happening. The lack of feedback in combat also makes it hard to determine if my current actions are successful, and the difficulty in separating one model from another in the combat moshpit that inevitably occurs means I often can't see or target specific enemies, and any numbers that pop up just disappear into the chaos.

 

Right now I feel like movement speed should be reduced across the board. At current speeds, the enemy can close the distance too fast, making making the variety of viable tactics quite limited.

 

In combat, I feel like accuracy should be decreased across the board. The less frequent hits are, the less quickly combat becomes too noisy. Maybe attack speed should be reduced, as well.

 

What do you guys think? Does combat and enemies feel too fast for you? Can you keep a good overview of combat events?

[notenome]

I tend to agree, combat seems to go way to fast, to the point where I think the game may require toggling the autopause options in order to keep things minimally sane.

[BrokenMask]

Yeah, even when not in combat, everyone moves really fast. It feels bit unnatural

[Hormalakh]

there is a slow mode.

[sp3cw4r]

there is a slow mode.

 

Even if there is, default should feel normal not overly fast.

[Hormalakh]

It might need a little adjusting. I bleiev Josh already slowed it down once. I think if it becomes too slow then the issue becomes that as players become more comfortable with the game, the game will be too slow. I bet if you played with slow mode for a few days, then you'd want to speed it up.

[BrokenMask]

there is a slow mode.

I think the problem might be that first button I pressed in whole game was D <_< Since my muscle memory says WASD moves camera. I didn't know its double speed button

 

I have to test this later after going back to sleep whether that was cause of problem or whether normal speed is still unnaturally fast

[sp3cw4r]

I'm still downloading the beta so can't speak from experience, but I've already been thinking exactly this just from watching the game play streams. Everything just seemed a little too fast.

[_DrMario_]

Whether there's a slow mode or not does nothing to address the fact that monsters move to fast and cover to much ground quickly in this game.

 

Lack of feedback is also a problem. Honestly i'm playing on normal and I've only got one dungeon left and so far I'm just facerolling most encounters and I don't even know why. 

[GilliusThunderhead]

the game is promising but combat needs work

even discounting speed there is so many special effects and crowding it is sometimes hard to tell what is going on and differentiating between characters

[Freshock]

I think I triggered a fast mode in combat, probably using WASD-buttons? It still didn't feel slow to me both in "normal" and "fast" mode. 

[mrmonocle]

it's not about fast or slow, it's about responsive, the damage should occur when you visually deliver the blow and the enemy reacts to it, not somewhere in between as it's now. when i fight i don't see how the animations effect health bars, the actual damage is not conveyed visually at all. This async between what you see and what is happening mathwise is a nwn disease that evidently followed here.

Edited August 19, 2014 by mrmonocle

[Billy O]

It feels very fast to me as well. Perfect out of combat but too fast in it. As I have said some of this feeling may be due to the craziness of trying to learn 6 classes in an hour with 40+ new abilities while dealing with 5-7 mob groups. I'm going to give it a few days to see if combat seems to slow down. I imagine a combat speed slider is the appropriate solution eventually. That way everyone can set it as fast or slow as they prefer.

[Eddain]

Yeah combat happens a bit too fast for me.  The Rogue is all about setting up debuffs to take advantage of Sneak Attacks, but the problem is I can't really tell if my debuffs are sticking or not.  And if I do manage to see it, the enemy dies before my Rogue even does anything.

 

The other problem is enemy movement.  I accidentally moved my Cleric a bit ahead of the party and she aggroed 3 lions.  They instantly pounced on her before I could really react to seeing them and she was practically dead from that moment.  Attempting to move her out of the way just meant taking all those hits of disengagement and she went down the moment she took one step.

 

Then there was the time I moved my party into sight of three Feral Druids and half my party went down before I could even set up some commands.  They cast all this AoE that I couldn't react to fast enough.  Cast times in general don't really give you enough visual acknowledgement or time to react to them.

[bob54386]

I agree that combat felt a little too fast to know what's going on.  I think part of the problem is that it's dropping us in with a 5 man party and everything is moderately well powered.  I wouldn't write off this pace in the full game -- ultimately I was able to clear encounters rather quickly-- but there's too much going on to really learn and evaluate mechanics.

[Forkedman]

Have to agree with most of the above. Combat needs to slow down and probably more importantly combat needs more feedback and more responsiveness. There is a real lag between the action shown and the impact of the action. This makes it harder to judge what's happening results in combat feeling so 'behind the scenes' that it's hard to feel like you've had much impact.

 

The other thing that I think would greatly help is a better sense of spacing and area. At the moment everyone just sort of crowds in on each other into a big jumble of characters that is frankly rather confusing. With one or two characters it doesn't matter so much if there is some clumping. With 6... matters a whole lot more. It doesn't feel tactical at the moment. It just feels messy.

[Arouet]

Agreed. Combat is waaaaay too fast.

[MrPopoGod]

Are you guys setting up pauses?  I agree that things seem to move faster than on the IE games but setting up the pauses can really help.  Right now I'm using spell cast, encounter start, enemy death, and low stamina.

[nikolokolus]

Assuming they put in enough granularity in the step up/down to the combat speed controls, then this really shouldn't be too much of an issue. That said, I agree the default speed seems a bit frenetic, but I suspect a lot of that feeling is a lack of familiarity with the systems and being thrown in at a higher level.

[Arouet]

Assuming they put in enough granularity in the step up/down to the combat speed controls, then this really shouldn't be too much of an issue. That said, I agree the default speed seems a bit frenetic, but I suspect a lot of that feeling is a lack of familiarity with the systems and being thrown in at a higher level.

It plays a part but I still think it's too fast even ignoring that. You shouldn't have to constantly pause after every one or two attacks.

[Sensuki]

Posted my response in a different thread: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/66950-combat-feels-activeness-speed-and-pace/

[kozzy]

I kind of like the speed, if they do slow it down, maybe about 5% would be good.

[Valorian]

Perhaps, but I definitely agree that reducing recovery time (i.e. accelerating combat) isn't needed at all.

[Wolf_Amarth]

I said the same on another thread, I agree and should be something they should consider allowing players to manipulate the speed somehow in the options? At least this way everyone will be happy to an extent.

 

Hell, throw in a turn based mode,

[Tartantyco]

Are you guys setting up pauses?  I agree that things seem to move faster than on the IE games but setting up the pauses can really help.  Right now I'm using spell cast, encounter start, enemy death, and low stamina.

 

Pausing doesn't do anything. It's about relative speed, not absolute speed. If enemies are moving too fast relative to your ability to use area of effect spells like Web on them, then the utility of Web is extremely limited. Right now, the example I used in my original post means that I cannot use any other character to lure in enemies but my front line fighters. It means I can barely use any of the abilities used to slow down an enemy approach, or the abilities of the fighters themselves to soak up damage, because the speed at which the enemy moves relative to the speed of my characters, abilities, and spells just completely overrides their utility.