Tree of Savior Forum

Skills vs auto attack

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#36

The big difference is that AA is a part of battle system and IMO a minor part of it.

A skill type battle system is more or less a complete part of it.

What you would call dance dance revolution mmo. Non stop button press in a precise rotation to generate DPS is so yr2000.

A balancing of AA maybe old school but it isn’t as stale as training your muscle memory to do a series of button presses under stress. bad bad bad. We’ve had enough of those wow clones.

Right now i think the balance is decent. Some builds are very spammy some are burst and some are low. That’s fine because it makes it a lot MRE flexible then an entire game of DDR online

#37

uh, again, what is an auto attack but another button in the line of buttons to press? In world of warcraft you could easily claim that is it different, as your character would autoattack automatically.

But in ToS ‘auto’ attacks are triggered the exact same way skills are.

#38

Preface: I don’t want to come off as sarcastic so, if I do at any point, don’t think anything of it mate. I feel very strongly about specific classes (not just Thaum) who lack the option of damage delivery skills. Again, I hope this remedies itself by having more skill choices added later on to C2 and C3 of every class.

Believe me, I know and understand the implications of choosing my classes the way I did. I pointed this out in my post describing my feedback on my progressions and the Necromancer etc, in the full context of the actual quote that was made in this thread (not just the snippet), and even in this thread as well; in all these ways I’ve accepted that, yes, I did limit my offensive capabilities early on. That doesn’t mean that I agree that the reliance on AA is justified.

The snippet revisited:[quote=“Shadeborn, post:7, topic:124708, full:true”]
This beta I went C3 Wiz-> C2 Thaum -> C1 Necro. But I only chose Necro because of the limited selection I gave myself in terms of damage delivery… sure, I could buff up, but I didn’t have any skills to deliver that buffed damage when soloing lol And… oddly, there was a lot more soloing than I’d have expected lol So…yeah, Necro.

The next time I play I will be going C3 Wiz-> C3 Thaum-> ???-> PROFIT

I am still keeping my eyes peeled for something that really speaks to me and, the moment people whispered about Mimic months and months ago, it has had my interest. I have some ideas of what they could do, but no idea what they will actually do, and there are plenty of speculations. I will likely take a slow leveling approach though and make an alt if needed once I hit my R7 election. And even then I’ll need to be 100% sure on the exact number of ranks available and how the hidden class ranks will be counted lol (i.e. do you have 3 hidden classes available at R9 and can pick one for each C1 of R9, R10, and R11? Or perhaps you can pick only one hidden class quest and it takes you from R9 through R11? Or are you able to skip these hidden ranks and just pick additional classes from lower ranks? etc etc etc). Until more concrete evidence is out I likely won’t know my exact path =) But I know the first 200-240ish levels worth and that should give me plenty of time between the wait for another beta and the grind to R7 =P
[/quote]

The point that I’m attempting to make in this thread though is that no class should be forced to rely on AA, not even supports. Essentially what is being stated is that “you went support, so get used to auto attacking” lol See what I mean? There are only X buffs to cast and X debuffs, and X situational skills. We’re left with AA. Isn’t that a little silly? I can’t think of any other game where the support is just expected to stand there until the party’s buffs expire. Supports aren’t buff vendors that should be forced to stand there or hop around like lunatics in attempts to not passively wait. Archers and Swordies obviously don’t have to worry about a lack of delivery skills. Every possible combination of classes in their trees will result in greater than 3 attack skills, even if they are looking to fulfill the role of tank or just service vendor. Cleric has a few “gimped routes” aka support routes, so it isn’t just my class choice. C3 Cleric -> C3 Priest for instance. So after they have cast their buffs, or I have cast mine, and we’ve exhausted our situational support skills and debuffs, we… we… lol we’re expected to hop around auto attacking? (But that almosssssst doesn’t even count because there is no comparison between the effectiveness of a lv15 Heal/Cure vs a lv15… energy bolt and earthquake? lel because those skills for Wiz scale so utterly terribly they are almost a waste of points unless you’re desperate unlike the Heal/Cure counter-argument).

It is not so much the idea that it is broken, that in every other games even supports have damage skills, but it’s the fact that rather than just agreeing that a few offense skills would help these builds you’re just saying “yeah that’s how it’s supposed to be.” lol I mean… okay. Hear me out. Let’s say they really flesh out all C2 and C3 class skills and add 1-2 more skills in each. It doesn’t mean that I magically get OP and cackle on a mountain with lightning raining down around me. It means that my points are suddenly more important- I have the option to go full support or pick up a damage skill or two and sacrifice those points. My someday C3 Thaum is stretched thin as it is and I had to make cuts where I didn’t always want to. Imagine the difficulty of having to choose between a couple more viable skills?

In the end though my wishes for more skill selections may not mean a lot. I admit that. I mean, we have 400 more levels of content, X amount of end-game class elections that may get expounded upon later months after release etc. Maybe even just by 600 a full-time support will have enough skills to cycle through that they won’t have time to squeeze in even an auto attack. Meh. I guess we’ll see. But for now I still find it silly that any class choices, even up to 240ish at R7 pick, should be expected to hop around to fill their free time.

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#39

Fair enough, but I don’t totally see how Wiz C3 is a support. To me, that’s a setup for a later DPS class for yourself, no benefit to others via supporting ( except reflect shield, but c’mon ). If you had gone, say, pyro c1 linker c1 thauma c3 that would seem more like a support build, and with pyro c1 you wouldn’t have any problems in the DPS department.

I also don’t see anything wrong with auto attacking on a wizard. It’s really pretty strong. Stronger than an archer’s auto, for sure. If you’re going wiz3 to prepare for some amazing r7/r8 class, then that’s kind of the price you’re paying. You’re still offering a party full thaum c3 buffs, so it’s not all horrible.

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#40

Eh, true, I only said support though because it was the first thing I could relate to in word-choice that described an election whose class skills resulted in buffs. C3 Wiz definitely is a setup kind of class for late game, for sure, and lv15 Sleep alone isn’t enough to fit it into support lol But it’s more a support than a dps class because it lacks delivery choices (Earthquake, Energy Bolt… at least Magic Missle isn’t terrible and supposedly now it fires off without the required sleep synergy). Everything else it does is buff/debuff.

After all of this… maybe my gripe is just C3 Wizard. I mean, sure, I still feel all the classes could use a few more skills. Something to give more choice in build, not just by the freedom of class. But C3 Wizard… now that I’m thinking about it… that’s why I had to hop around the whole game. Energy bolt sucks so badly. Earthquake helps save you once in a while by the CC it offers but it disrupts party play and the damage isn’t great even at lv18 with the +3 weapon (which I used way past the time I should have lol). I didn’t realize it until I mentioned the C3 Cleric route that their cleric skills offered serious damage, even more so now that Heal is 15 tiles at lv15 in kcbt. Thaum is listed as a support, so attack skills should be limited (but still an option in there imo)… but Wizard’s energy bolt and eq aren’t really even viable at any stage of the game lol They really don’t compare at all… o.o

I’ll leave the thread for now, I think I need to think on the reasoning to really make a solid point in respects to the C3 Wiz route now. My agitations for AA and the route I chose aren’t necessarily because of the class route itself but because the base delivery skills for Wizard are just that bad. I mean… of the three attack skills, only one is truly viable, which resulted in buffing/debuffing and only having one attack skill to use. If energy bolt/earthquake either didn’t exist and were replaced with viable skills, or they were scaled appropriately to become viable at higher levels than just Red Kepa, then I would have 3 actual attacks and not just a lot of hopping, even maybe taking me through my Thaum phase lol

#41

Cure + Zaibas + Heal + Autoattack
Just remember to upgrade your weapons.

#42

I don’t really agree with this, unless you were in one of three scenarios:

  1. You were a mage. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with spamming skills if you spec into a non-nuking mage.
  2. You were in PvP. TTK is what it comes down to.
  3. You were on a mid/high rate server or had things like healers and what not available to you.

Instead of thinking of your most recent end game fights, think more about your time spent as an archer or swordsman. You had maybe one or two kills worth of SP if you used your skills. More if you pushed up your INT, as it should be.

Your assessment is based on extreme scenarios, and doesn’t hold any water.

#43

Actually…many many games make a point to never give up AA. Especially in Eastern games.

You are probably a bit too glass tinted on western game(of the WoW nature) where again, DDR-button spam became a “thing”

Asians theories have asian implementations as they say. Unlike WoW-clones which generally cookie cutters jobs and characters for the sake of balance and “skill-based play”

Asian games tend to say screw with balance, and opens up massive amounts of stat and class changing options.

Basically Western theory since WoW was such that, you can never stab yourself in the foot. Playing a preset character with a preset balance, and a preset skill set design. Eastern theory states, everything is the player’s doing, go reset/remake your character.

Eastern ideals, you did exactly that: You went off the deep end, and regret it, and now whine because you’re unhappy vision did not equal result (wasn’t it obvious?)

It’s like running into a game with 1/1/1/1/9999 stats, and then not being able to beat a story boss, complaining “no game should make an unbeatable quest boss!”.

No developer would balance around a 1/1/1/1/9999 battle scenario, they just don’t care. Same with AA. Developer don’t care if you choose a bunch of passive skills, and then complain about it.

#44

Granado Espada Korean Alpha because that’s what it feels like to me.

The reason it worked so well then was because of the MCC. If you’ve played GE from Korean Alpha to today you’d see where ToS is coming from and hopefully where it won’t go and stay. Make a new family in GE now and try to level 1 character alone from the beginning it’ll feel very similar to what ToS does in OBT.

For me ToS combat feels like Alpha GE the big difference is ToS doesn’t have MCC and a autoattack key if it had autoattack maybe it won’t feel so harsh to some people.

I for one encourage anything that makes a game unbearably difficult all the way through sadly those days of difficult games are long gone but,** for the sake of this game I say they test an autoattack semi afk key for all base classes. Give mouse mode the assault on move+hold and give keyboard; gamespads and mouse mode the semi afk key**

#45

I believe it’s more of the ARPG lineage which is very popular combat type in KrMMOs.

AA serves a large purpose in those games, and thus a manual attack button.

It has not yet been that significant in ToS, but remember animation lock is still part of AutoAttack, such instead of calling it auto-attack it should be better call basic-attack or Main hand basic attack.

Putting it on an WoW-like AA proc would change the game and the balance significantly.

Again the East-west divide is perhaps a too big theory divide hat would make a game worse then better, if slapped on.

Making the basic attack more flexible would be tons better then making it proc on combat. Now that’s an AA that really serves no purpose.

If they went generic, then basic attack might have some kind of SP leech effect that many ARPGs like to do, but I hope they make it more creative then that.

A developer can do anything to enhance the basic attack, such as making it a multiplier, aka combo system ( 1st AA does base, 2nd AA does +1.1x 2nd does 1.1crit+10%, 3rd does 1.2x etc )

Too many people are too quick to immediately go “Well WoW did it this way!” when in fact WoW is one of the most boring combat systems that came out of last gen.

#46

Err…RO?
Except for Heal bombing undead, Acolyte are basically walking herbs. If you wanna be a monk, click on passive skills and AA.
Thief class rely solely on AA for leveling even with a lot of skills available until they introduce SinX.
Archers AA Greatest General to Hunter then AA Geographers to rebirth.

Let’s get to the fact here. Most…or almost ALL Agi/Critical characters rely heavily on Auto-Attack. Even with skills available. And support ARE buff & heal vendor. If you don’t wanna be a buff vendor, go DPS or Hybrid.

There is a reason why it was initially known as a JOB level.
You don’t expect Hulk Hogan to heal a patient and you don’t expect a dentist to take down a bull.
The balance we are talking about is not the balance to kill a boss monster is 5 sec but the balance in usage/usability.

When i’m playing a Monk but expect to support, don’t expect me to kill except:

  1. Aggro on me
  2. Heal on CD. Boss low HP. DPS running…kamehameha time!!! :grin:
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#47

lol good call xD I haven’t played RO but was more drawn to ToS because of the FFT style graphics and 2.5d feels from games of the past. Sounds like RO would have been up my alley back in the day had I not been busy elsewhere lol

I’ve determined though that there are very, very few routes that only offer 1 single viable attack skill, and it so happens that C3 Wiz is the start of each of those paths, as even C3 Cleric gives you some actual bread-and-butter style skills to work with. C3 Wiz, offensively, gives you QC attribute but only has MM to really help deliver, Earthquake and Energy Bolt seem to me to be the culprits. In theory you have 3 attack skills to help take you through your R4-R6 picks but in practice you really only have AA and MM. I’ll likely inquire in a thread if anyone feels the same (i.e. who ignores EB and EQ because they are trash vs. who justifies more than a few points into them etc) to see if there is an issue in viability/scaling that we could bring back up. If I had 3 actual attacks I wouldn’t likely have been as reliant on AA as I’d actually have something else to use lol

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#48

and many of those “eastern” games have auto-leveling macros built into the game because no one can force themselves to play them for long. Most “eastern” games as you put it are sub-par and can’t really hold a candle to mainstream mmorpgs. You get at best 3 months of game play before it is utterly boring in its redundancy. I’ve played damn near every mmorpg that is out there. Don’t get me wrong AA builds can be fun and i’m not condemning AA. Before this game i mainly played AA builds but when your skills feel utterly useless when compared to AA then there is definitely some tweaking that needs to be done. It got to the point where i just didn’t use skills at all because they felt like a resource dump. Really i think the cooldowns need to be tweaked down by 20% or so. That would give skills more viability. Honestly i much rather have a skill rotation than be jumping around and AA all the time. Especially if i built the class with str and spr to maximize skill usage and damage. I felt that i wasted a lot of time in the beta trying to get something that didn’t exist. Now i know to just AA and save money rather than leveling skills.

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#49

As a mage/archer, we need bread and butter skill for AA, like Diablo 3 there are primary skill to replace your AA.
However, there are no AA modifier, then AA gets really boring, and a lot of down time where you need run around.

#50

Archer already has oblique shot. Mage has … energy bolt?

#51

Auto Attack in this game is definitely a key feature, and it was emphasized (main attack in previous Beta). But people don’t like it because it is too weak.

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#52

Continuing the discussion from Skills vs auto attack:

Off-topic-irrelevant-WoW-free-boost-to-90-character-cough
Off-topic-irrelevant-WesternMMO-since-WoW-flop-is stupidly-high cough
Off-topic-irrelevant-Revenue-from- mostoftheMMO-for-the past decade where eastern cough

Wizards jobs only do a lot of AA on bosses really and only if the bosses don’t die. Their damage is second to none in terms of finishing a fight fast, when they just spam all their skills in a single burst.

And gasp, realizing the character you tried to twink, turned out to not be what you wanted to play is new?

I don’t see it much of a problem in wizard jobs, as that’s what traditional mage jobs do. But some would rather it be more like pew pew…eh…I don’t know.

#53

Yes, I played on a mid-rate for 5-6 months.

But a key point was that HP and SP pots are spammable and have almost no cooldown in RO. In contrast, the cheapest HP/SP pots in ToS has 30 seconds cooldown, and the higher level ones have more.

Think about it for a moment. If you have the money, resources and weight capacity, even a level 66 Archer/Hunter (1/3 of the way to max level, so kind of equivalent to level 200 here? Assuming 600 is the real cap) can spam Double Strafing over and over. Run out of SP? Spam Grape Juices/Blue Pots/Slim Blue Pots. Low SP Pool? Get equips/items/cards to boost your max SP. (I admit that the Hunter/Sniper path tends to be low on SP, but that’s not an issue as long as you have pots.)

On the other hand, you -cannot- spam skills in ToS, with the exception of Overheat skills, and even those skills go into cooldown after a max of 3 instances. If you run out of SP, you cannot spam your SP pots to heal your SP to 100%, because of the huge cooldown. Instead, in ToS we have skill rotation, and we have to manage our SP by drinking them in intervals. As a result, even if a newbie farms like 300k silver in Kepa Slaughterhouse, he cannot spam skills by buying 1000+ SP pots with the silver gained. The same cannot be said about RO.

The other significant point that allows the Archer to be able to spam Double Strafing is due to the differences in the mechanics of cooldown, cast time and attack speed between the two games. Not going to elaborate on this but, in the case of spamming DS, think about cards like Doppelganger and Cecil Damon, as well as things like the Archer card set. (The drop rate is not the main issue. The issue is that we don’t even have rare items that could reduce cooldown times of skills and/or pots.)

#54

I’ll start by saying I exclusively play private RO servers for the custom convenience that it offers.

When playing them (especially mid rates, where convenient leveling is part of the main attraction) you forget exactly how difficult these three things are to manage in good alignment: money, resources, and weight.

In ToS we don’t have @storage or @go. There’s no NPC in every town selling discounted quivers. There was no tool dealer selling white and juices at every save point. No, we had to rely on merchants to actually sell those 37z red potions outside of payon caves. Remember that? Oh, and archers with weight to spare? Please. Archers had all kinds of weight problems.

The point is, if you got yourself (or are being supported) well enough to get money, weight, and potions in abundance, you deserve to be able to spam. It wasn’t easy.

As RO got older, we got things like juice makers and more kafras. This changed things to make it less of an issue.

#55

An SP pot from fedimian ( or alche SP pot ) will fill your SP bar to full, and continue to fill it to full for the duration of the pot buff. If you can’t manage your SP to not use it all before the next cooldown, then I don’t know what you could be doing wrong. It’s not hard to use the SP pots effectively in this game, even with building 0 SPR.