Rinsui wrote:
So, Wint, tell us about your honest impression of the new combat system.
If 1 is "just like in 1.0" and 10 is "a combat system reborn", where are we standing, and why?
It's an 11.
Honestly I was a little nervous about just hammering abilities but there are a few things that calmed my fears:
1) You can perform extra powerful chains. Say you open with one skill, then the icon for another 2 in your hotbar light up, depending on which you choose one of two others light up for the finishing blow so to speak. Not only are there combos, but combo paths you can take with different effects from the skills you use on the monster you're fighting.
2) You still need to watch hate. When we lost to the boss mob of that dungeon, one thing I did was steal hate from the tank accidentally on Archer. Our second time through I used some abilities you can trigger that do things like reduce your hate to allow me to spam for a bit before the effect wore. It feels a little more challenging to manage than say, FFXI, but once you get the hang of it it is a lot of fun.
3) We haven't seen all the abilities yet. My character was only level 35, and they're capping at 50 at launch so there are another 15 levels to see what is coming. Add to that the ability to use some of the skills from other jobs and we have a lot of choices and combinations to choose from, hopefully they will make the "sub job skills" useful in multiple situations so there isn't that perfect build out there that everyone will demand (que Kachi to come rant about this
Another thing I was responsible for (other than popping the pods I talked about earlier) was keeping up enfeebs like blind and poison. Between keeping those applied and running through my combos, and watching the environment and the monster behavior, there is enough there to keep a skilled player hopping.