I really like AO’s vertical and large-scale combat when it comes to PvE, I think the issues only start to arise when you get stuff like tiny areas to fight in (cough. cough. Ivar.), in big open spaces I always find it really fun.
The “variety” is a huge issue. Not because variety itself is bad, but because Arcane Odyssey’s is, in the words of a frienemy of mine: “wide as a kiddie pool and deep as the dew that forms on grass in early Spring.”
We get a decent amount of options, but most of them can be functionally described as “Blast, Explosion, Beam, or Leap with a gimmick.”
Increase Blast cooldown, remove placed explosion/change it a lot and buff damage of most close quarters moves and make terrain destruction less inconsistent (relatively flat ground and then suddenly a chasm that goes to Australia), remove hunger.
I have an idea that you’d be able to charge your dashes up to drastically increase the range they cover by holding shift, the longer you charge the more ground you cover, this would allow Vetex to have his giant AoE’s of doom while keeping them dodgable, make it so size of projectiles/AoE’s scales with charge time and drastically reduce the baseline for people with a lot of size.
The biggest issue i have is just how the bosses are designed, a lot of them have little downtime and deal absurd amounts of damage with large AoE’s, most of their attacks aren’t scary and then there is that move that some bosses have, a lot of gimmicks are also poorly explained, such as Calvus charging up.
I’m just going to throw in my own thoughts here and say that with the way that the combat system is currently, it doesn’t really make attacks stand out too much, an example would be crash, and crushing judgement, to me, those attacks are too similar.
Another problem to me is that attacks don’t seem to really have natural armour/block piercing, which I feel like would make certain grab moves stand out, for example, if you had a higher damaging grab that is rendered useless by blocking, and then you have a different grab that bypasses blocks (or breaks them) that deals less damage, that’d make those two grab moves pop out more to me.
I think the lack of defensive and supportive options also makes combat a little lacklustre, especially in team focused situations, now if holding the charge button regenerated energy, stamina, and/or even health, I feel like that’d help make combat a bit more interesting. (Please note that I’m not suggesting that we go back to when we had to manually recharge our energy in combat, as I found that to be quite jarring when you go from fast paced combat, to standing still)
The last thing I wanted to mention is the fact that cannons don’t really do much currently against non boat entities, which is odd to me with grapeshot being in the game, now if cannonballs were balanced a bit to be good enough to hurt (and potentially even kill) players and other NPCs, that’d make boat combat a bit more interesting imo, especially if we got siege weapons such as ballistas, which could then open up the opportunity to have weapons in the cannon slot, and siege weapon slot to be focused more so on slaying beasts such as krakens and white eyes.
Yeah and it helps my dog shit aim. I barely play dbz games but I remember how they were the only games where I could actually hit things 
Now that I think about it, its probably part of the reason why fights aren’t that fluid
Personally; the restrained velocity when casting/firing an ability, I see Arcane Odyssey as an action game with emphasis on movement, halting the players’ movement for the primary way of attacking feels counterintuitive.
This too is one of my grievances.
that variety is weakened even more when we consider how for the most part people will only use the magics that do the most damage with specific status effects. Probably why 90% of conjurers are lightning or ice from what I’ve heard.
(goodbye double tap dash nobody will miss you)
I’ll also add that I feel like there should be attacks that aren’t grabs that can cancel attacks, or at least ones that build up some sort of meter that upon fully filling up cancels whatever that player was currently doing, since then we could potentially see the resistance stat being a bit more useful, and it’d make choosing when to use an ultimate attack a bit more interesting, since using it after getting hit by an attack may lead to your attack being cancelled if your opponent lands one or two more hits on you.
I wonder how many people here even play fighting games to know how the mechanics would work? I’d say it should be a mix of action and fighting games.
If you made a combat system that resembles Itagaki’s Ninja Gaiden series (PvE) and DoA or Virtua Fighter (PvP) then found a way to make a hybrid system then that’d make for an excellent combat system. Because then both PvE and PvP would be technical enough for people to like one aspect and want to dip their hands into the other. It’d probably have stun as is the nature of a fighting game but the DoA part has that covered (That game has counters in a triangle system) and I just think people here hate on stun based stuff too much.
Also there would be less balance issues, it’d take more skill, and it wouldn’t hurt my eyes as much. At the same time keeping it’s mobility based gameplay and having even cooler move techs.
Only problem is whether or not Roblox players are smart enough to learn about basic fighting game stuff (Frame data, plus and negative on hit, recovery, stun, crumpling, actual risks for being in the air, etc).
I forgot that I sometimes tend to overestimate the familiarity some have with what I’m talking about so I decided to drop these videos below so you can have a base idea as to what I’m thinking about.
Ninja Gaiden
Dead or Alive
Virtua Fighter
If you watch all 3 of these videos and actually paid attention to them you will notice a very common theme.
anything but parryslop #999, there’s enough of those on the platform
AO combat is good the way it is the only issue I particularly see is how spam dashing is litterly the only viable movement method
Thingy I said earlier
Removing t-jumps in exchange for double jumps would be nice, its basically a extra move slot for half of the builds which would allow more build variety, its pretty much just qol since you dont have to swap FS/magic for basic movement if you want to use more moves
What the hell does “make it more like a fighting game” even mean? Do you think the only fighting games that exist are like SF, KOF, Tekken, and maybe SSBU? Fighting games are very diverse and many of them function very differently. “Make it more like a fighting game” hardly narrows it down to anything and most people just think of like five popular franchises at best which is the only reason why it isn’t winning the poll by a landslide
For me personally, the primary issue I have with AO combat is that pressure hardly exists, and no matter how good your neutral is designed, it collapsed as soon as it leads to nothing.
The lack of a hitstun based system is one of AO’s biggest strengths, setting it apart from most Roblox MMORPGs and making teaming less miserable whereas in games like VV, battlegrounds, and YBA, getting teamed on is an outright death sentence. However, it also allows for all close range interactions to mostly boil down to how much numbers you can vomit out. Even after a grab, the situation is a mixup at best, and the grabber can end up underhanded because they have no real way of winning a grab exchange reliably. Whoever can’t puke numbers as effectively will always be underhanded since they lose any mash exchange, leaving most games stuck on endless neutral (mid to long range attacks, aiming, and quick punishes if you get the opportunity) that doesn’t go anywhere until one side gets chipped to death. Compare this to a traditional fighting game like SF, they have rewards beyond damage for winning neutral that typically leads to the person who won neutral getting pressure (hitstun, knockdown → frame advantage → facilitates setups that makes the person who got knocked down either have to hold the setup or make a call out through reversals that are usually VERY risky and kills the user if the call-out fails). AO lacks a rigid system to reward winning neutral interactions with pressure beyond HP advantage.
It’s not that spamming from afar is too effective, it’s that there is one person who NEVER wants to have a close ranged interaction forcing them to play passive or die trying anything else. Only if they repeatedly chip away at the other person so much that the HP gap outweighs the DPS gap would the person with lower DPS attempt to press momentum, but all that does is reverse the situation and there is STILL one person who wants to play super passive and chip from afar.
Basically:
- Exciting combat systems make you think: “Okay, I’m at a disadvantage here. However, I will play carefully, find an opening, and once I do I’ll be given advantage state to swing my momentum forward to equalize/flip the overall momentum of the match.” This is what makes games like SF33S considered classics.
- AO combat makes you think, “Okay, I’m at a disadvantage. No matter what I do, I cannot push a pressure state to cause huge momentum swings. I’ll just play like a zoner, and slowly chip my opponent and pray that the HP gap will eventually swing in my favor.” A lot of zoner characters in traditional fighting games also sorta play like this, but that’s also why people hate them and why zoners in modern FGC are intentionally lower tier.
Also most of this applies in ely/1v1 context
3d hack’n slash if ao were a singleplayer game
might elaborate more later on what kind of ideas fit if i feel like it
honestly would just want m1s to be more important, rn it just feels like skill spam. m1s giving me time to actually prepare combos or something would be nice. it doesnt need to be like parry slop games but i want to atleast be able to combo skills with m1s.