Some reservations about the combat

General
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Hi, I haven’t played much of this game, love what I have played and was thinking with how deep the skill system is, this could be everything I ever wanted and missed since Marvel Heroes Died.

But, after watching some end game videos I have some reservations, the same ones that stopped me from trying to get into Path of Exile.

And that’s running around in circles.
Let me explain. Part of why I loved Marvel Heroes style of action combat was, you had a few more skills, but importantly, you had rotations that needed to be maintained, buffs, debuffs to manage, procs and combos with your own abilities along with ability to use movement to traverse or dodge etc - The skill and build system as nowhere near as deep, but it was interesting and had a cool speed running community, dps metrics etc that was all made possible by how you abilities worked with one another.

The videos I’ve watched seem to be a lesson in running around in circles while you press a button to aoe clear everything while sometimes using a barrier or movement to allow you to keep running in circles and surviving. This couldn’t be less engaging to me. Fair enough, the furthest I’ve personally gone is with a mage, but Ive watched arena videos of all classes and well, the pattern is kind of the same.

If anyone can tell me otherwise, great, please do, I’ve missed playing a game like this and it seems with it’s class system it has everything going for it I would enjoy. Other than the running in circles, only one skill needed to kill everything, minimal actual interaction combat

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Being a fan of Marvel Heroes (RIP), I understand what you’re talking about in terms of how it plays so I feel comfortable addressing this.

MH was kind of an unusual beast when it comes to ARPGs. Many ARPGs (Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Grim Dawn, Diablo 2, etc.) heavily favor an endgame playstyle where you hyperfocus on 1-2 attack skills with some passive skills and utility skills to support them. Additionally, they hyperfocus on clear speed to the point that other than some Elite+ enemies and bosses, most things are meant to be immediately destroyed by an appropriately built character.

Marvel Heroes was different, and part of that has to do with the larger MMO aspect to the game. 95% of the characters end up having to utilize their whole bar. You have the one “basic” attack and then a series of abilities that you basically use “off cooldown”. This style is very reminiscent of MMORPGs like WoW. The reason for is that boss-style enemies in MH have a HUGE amount of health and have will often have 5+ players attacking them at once. So the game has to be designed with a skill-rotational dps in mind to make the game more interactive than just smashing one attack against a health sponge.

Marvel Heroes is also, on the whole, a less punishing game in terms of the need for building defense. With with the various “dash” abilities and some solid attack area indicators for actual deadly attacks, the game’s focus is to dodge the big hits rather than to tank them. Other damage is dealt with by a combination of life sustain from heal, life steal, and MedKits + invulnerability proc. Since you’re only concerned about the big, telegraphed attacks, the rest of the time you’re standing in place wailing on the big health pool of the enemy (some exceptions like Nightcrawler’s teleporting aside). This is what you’re remembering from the attack rotations.

In ARPGs like LE, this isn’t what you do. While there are some particularly dangerous telegraphed attacks that you should avoid, damage in general is just much higher. Unless you have the defenses and sustain for it you’re going to want to shoot and scoot. Furthermore, the one “main” skill you build towards often has little to no cooldown, so it’s available for wiping out anything you come across–no rotation required. Furthermore skill bar space is pretty limited (for a lot of balance reasons) so there’s not a lot of skills to even rotate through.

Bosses are often down in 30seconds or less so even if you had several skills with cooldowns you’d rotate through, cooldowns are long enough that you wouldn’t even “rotate” though more than maybe twice.

That all said, you can certainly try a build that utilizes more offensive skills that you’d like to combo off of (and that’d be a nice thing to see in theory), but I feel like a lot of times they are just going to trade off doing so for efficiency.

I wrote the above mess in like one rambly sitting so apologies if I’m unclear anywhere.

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You were perfectly clear mate. I’m most certainly going to keep playing and I’ll likely get a similar sense of satisfaction for building the type of builds you need Last Epoch as Marvel Heroes combat gave me. We’ll see, I’m just concerned with what seems like a ton of depth for everything to boil down to cosmetic changes to the same aoe running in circles strat, so actually, the depth is simply something to waste your time in.

Anyway, I am enjoying the game, still deciding what class I like and what abilities I want to focus on. Thanks for the response

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Totally agreed with everything said here. Especially nice to see some other Marvel Heroes Lovers :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
Really missing the Danger Room events =C (i was multiple times place 1 :smiling_imp:)
Juggernaut 4 Life!

On OP, i think the problem here is that (most) builds that are REALLY pushing heavily into endgame(we are talking hundreds of waves of arena and like 80+ MoF) use just 1 or 2 skills to do damage and the rest is mostly utility and movement.

Since in LE and many other aRPG, MOVING is a mechanical defensive mechanic, since there are alot of hits that will damage you when you dont keep moving.

I 100% understand what you don’t like about that. I also like to have builds that use alot of skills that i permanently have to use situationally. Like 1 Single Target, 1 AoE Skill, 1 Movement skills and 1 or 2 buff/utility skills.

Most of those builds are really fun, even in LE current state. But i never be able to reach those ridiculous high areana waves or MoF with that approach.

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I can understand that reservation, and to be fair where the game is right this moment in Early Access, end game is kind of that level of interaction.

That being said: the satisfaction that’s found in many of these style ARPGs (at least for me) is had in trying to figure out new build that work. You have so much freedom of choice, that there’s no one “right” build that’s the best. For many people, fun is found in creation and experiementation rather than pushing for uber-late game dives.

This is pretty distinct from Marvel Heroes where you have specific characters that often have 1 real build that has the “best ttk”. BUE helped with that a bit, but even then there wasn’t much build variety for each character. Maybe 1-2 valid styles of play. The skills were designed with combo-potential in mind so it wasn’t very open-ended in that regards.

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While i agree that LE has a much more “open” skill system than MH had. And i know that (most) characters in MH had 1 “best” build.
I have to say that one of the, if not THE reason for me spending a ridiculous amount of game time in this game(we are talking literally thousands of hours >.<) was that each character had at least 3 very distinct playstyle, which some even having 4 or 5(basically every of the 3 skill trees of EACH character had one major theme/build and there were multipel comibnations possible).

I spend so much time prestiging character and playing them totally different.
And towards the end MH had like 60 different heroes, which IMO can be all seen as an
individually “Class”, which on top of that huge amount of different chars also had different playstyles.

And Gazillion really made EVERY Character in this game unique, litterally. I mean there was not even one single character that was even similar. (Even Hulk vs. The Thing, Wolverine vs. X-23 kinda “mirrors” were TOTALLY different)

Well, sorry for the huge MH ramble, but i had no real outlet for talking so extensivly about marvel heroes for a long time.

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Oh, I feel that. I sunk a LOT of time into MH, and still think about it sometimes.

LE (and other ARPGs) scratches a different itch though.

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I haven’t played Marvel Heroes so i can’t really make a comparison. But from what i know by playing ARPGs like Grim Dawn and Path of Exile is that it is just more efficient to focus your efforts to scaling 1 or 2 skills instead of spreading thin into many different skills. There’s less focus about debuffs or crowd control and more of killing as many mobs as quickly as and efficiently as possible.

I have only played primalist so far, because i like summons. But playing melee build and having a way to sustain your hp by life leech or regeneration, you can just stand there and kill without needing to dodge. Melee skills also don’t have cooldown so you don’t really need to kite to wait for skills to refresh.

What i also like about this game is that other than your mastery class, you can respec your passive and active skills easily so you can always experiment and try different ways of building your character without having to remake the character. Theory crafting build is part of the fun of ARPGs for me personally, so that was what got me to try Last Epoch.

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I don’t know about PoE (never bothered) but in Grim Dawn you are certainly trying to gain as much resist reduction (debuffs) as possible via the three RR types, -x% / x% reduced / x flat reduction. The other points are debatable as well, but yes, you generally want to focus on a few skills to max out. Crowd control is more a build dependent thing (such as gun builds vs say a retaliation build…you’re definitely more attentive when playing that gun build).

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I also loved “early” marvel heroes it was an amazing arpg ( i had nearly 2000 hours in it) the characters were all unique and the difficulty was up to the player not the game… On the flip side i hated Grim Dawn and PoE as the games were just punishing for no real reason and i agree with you this game does not feel like marvel heroes sadly… The combat feels very limited and a over abundance of useless stats (to me) and those skill resets make character building more of a chore than a enjoying experience…

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Which stats do you feel are useless?

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Throwing stats are imo…
So many leech could be added to one type, dodge has multiple types, so many minion stats but also Attunement stats

Many stats are useful but so many are convoluted and hard to understand, vit doesn’t affect health, why?
Four tabs of stats seems information overload to me.

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I agree on the throwing stats, but the others are mostly conditional affixes for stats (eg, spell leech as compared to global leech, increased dodge for 4 seconds after using a potion). Perhaps better tooltips (of the Alt variety) & translation into other languages. Though I agree that vitality isn’t used in it’s normal meaning.

IMO, we need more information, not less, there’s a lot happening in the game that I’d like to understand (skill damage). Also I think that we should have an additional affix that gives +poison/necrotic/void protections just like the +elemental protection affix gives +fire/lightning/cold.

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Agreed completely LLama8

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Yes i recently made a post about combat interaction, but what i left out of mine and i will add to yours is this example:

When your in the arena (Most major end game system atm) there are 3 stages.

Stage 1: Everything is to easy and this is really boring but i have to get it done to get further along and its unskippable.

Stage 2: This is where things start getting hard, This is a different area for every build since builds are not completely balanced, but you will know when you hit this stage because the arena is no longer boring, you actually have to “try” No longer can stand in the 1 shots, trash mobs are actually reducing your health and you have to kite and dodge, use potions more, this is “interactive combat” it doesnt get any better than this, but it doesnt last, this is usually only about a 40 wave span before you hit…

Stage 3: Anything can now kill you. Skill isnt as important as RNG at this point, it all comes down to the game not giving you the wrong combination of mobs. While this stage can still be considered “interactive combat” stage its lost a lot of its fun appeal. Mobs now take Wayy to long to kill and any mistake or bad RNG is certain death. The only “Fun” appeal left to have is to try and break your previous record, but most people at this point have lost interest and just leave.

Now what we need is alot more of that 2nd stage feel. WHile in the arena this might be harder to implement as its purpose is to scale the way it does, This stage 2 feel is how the campaign feels. We need more combat like this in the game. Not to turn it into an MMORPG but i do feel the following points would help:

-Longer buff duration’s
-Higher health pools
-Smaller amounts of damage taken
-Reduce the amount potions/leech/heals can give you

It feels bad when the game comes down to you have to try and hit mobs before they hit you so they are either dead or if they do hit you you can leech enough life to stay alive. Feels like PoE and the games direction will head into a kill before be killed playstyle. Make it slower!

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IMO if combat is going to be more responsive/interactive, we also need a complete buff bar showing all of the buffs you have affecting you at the time along with their remaining duration. Otherwise you’ll be going through it with one hand tied behind your back.

Mind you, if you have an infinitely scaling arena, you will always get to a point where anything will one-shot you.

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Yes I mentioned that.

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