After giving myself almost a solid week to cool off, I decided to try the combat changes with a fresh eye. I'm not sure if swing speeds have been adjusted a bit from the last time I tried them (this is what I suspect), or if taking a break from the game and playing much slower paced MMOs like WoW and LoTRO for a week gave me a different perspective. In any case they don't seem so bad to me now.
After spending an entire evening with the system, I can describe it more thoroughly. The current attack pattern is that your guy does a three hit combo, with a slight (maybe one to two seconds) pause where he leans forward holding his sword out in between combos. I have read that you gain more attacks in your combo chain as your base attack bonus increases but I can't confirm it (mine is at +1 on a level two wizard). I also haven't rolled up a new wizard just to see if his attack combo is fewer hits.
Overall attack speed is slower than it was before (at least at the low levels that matter to new players like me). The transition from the old system to this new one was absolutely jarring, and I'm still not convinced that it was warranted. Assuming for the sake of argument that the change was warranted, the way that Turbine handled the transition was horrible. We all wake up one morning and find that the combat has been greatly altered, without any real warning from Turbine that it was coming.
That said, I think the combat system in DDO is still overall quite good. Once I gave myself enough distance to see it with fresh eyes, I find that I am still having a lot of fun in DDO. Spells and special abilities are still as responsive as they have ever been. After adjusting to the pauses in between swing combos, the combat even begins to feel a little more rhythmic and strategic than it did before.
Edit: After more testing, the difference between what I remembered from last week and the way the game is playing now is actually lag. The patch originally added lag for me in places I wasn't getting any before. The crazy thing is that the lag affected mainly my swing animations, not walking around or other animations. In the last week lag has apparently been improved immensely. Tonight, it took me a while to stumble on a spot that was still laggy enough for the bugged animation to show up again. In those spots my dude now appears to swing exactly as I remember, holding the sword for a good long while behind his head before he decides to swing. Now that I am seeing the real swing speed nerf, I can see that I overreacted. If you give it a chance it's not that bad.
That is a strange form of lag. Have you looked at the lag thread on the forums? I'm not sure that your particular case would be fixed by it, but it is worth a shot.
ReplyDeleteActually, whatever caused my mystery lag has improved so much that it doesn't matter at all any more. The only place I get it now is in city locations crowded with PCs, never in instances where it really matters. I suspect that's it's video lag that will disappear entirely once I get my main PC up and running again (any day now I hope).
ReplyDeleteMinor changes that they make to the GFX client would affect me in ways that they wouldn't most users because I'm currently using a back up PC from the stone age made out of rocks and sticks.
Thanks for the suggestion in any case!
Yeebo, that lag bit is all kinds of strange. Glad to hear it's cleared up, though. All is right with the world!
ReplyDeleteI'm back on my main PC (finally), as of tonight. Indeed, it was video lag.
ReplyDeleteMy theory is that the reason my swing animations bugged out on the old PC was that it's a very fast chain of animations. My video card was having an aneurysm trying to render them at the same time as everything else in certain areas, and so what I was seeing on screen was a subset of what it was trying to render.
How you get your dude holding the sword behind his head and then taking one swing (out of the three I should have been seeing) out of that I'm not sure. But I think it's basically on the right track.