TL;DR: Rant about all the ways in which the combat in AO isn’t great. Points in need of improvement.
A significant reason why this game’s PVP and really all combat in general isn’t great is also because of a lack of any kind of hit stun or effective parry. Parrying exists but it’s very inconsistent in both timing and when you’re allowed to block at all, doesn’t have enough visual feedback, and isn’t quick and responsive enough to the player. An example of a good parrying system on Roblox would be Deepwoken. Say what you will about parry trading but that game pulls it off nicely. In Arcane Odyssey you’re basically wasting time choosing to parry anything but attacks you’d otherwise be completely incapable of avoiding when you could be dealing more damage with brain dead gigantic attacks with tons of damage. Y’know your 1000+ defense, 180+ power meta builds with stupidly high size scaling infused weapons or high damage status effect synergies with magics. That brings up the other point that the game hardly factors in skill to PVP at all and skill in PVE is often null and void, especially against bosses like Jarl Ivar who you just have to block against the whole fight to not get blitzed, Allanon who requires ranged attacks and running away from half the fight, and King Octavious who has pretty much the same issues as Allanon but minus the flying and plus WAY more attack spam. You can’t realistically guard break any of these as that system is practically non-existent with how weak and buggy it is, and you can’t just learn to parry god them as so many attacks come at the player too fast and parrying is once again bad in the game for a variety of reasons, and animations can often break or have inconsistent speeds. As a result of this, most fights in both PVP and PVE in the game result in pure stat checks with the only skill being aiming vaguely in the direction of your target and learning to dodge away from where you think your opponent will be hitting. Also baseline startup for most attacks in the game feel a little too fast and result in a lot of spamming despite people running 0 dexterity, with this being especially true of bosses and minibosses as well not just players.
Damn this rant turned into a behemoth of a paragraph lol. Regardless my only point in posting that is pointing out all the weak points of AO’s combat that the devs could put work into reworking and improving based on my lifetime of gaming experience and little personal delves into game design in my free time. Don’t have any specific solutions myself at this time as at that point I might as well make a whole suggestion post and spend like half a week writing it.
PvP in my opinion feels too much like PvE in a sense, there’s no skill, you just have to have high power and defense to win with the right build.
Parrying feels awful because as you said there’s no feedback, but also because of the HORRIBLE latency and performance.
PvE skill doesn’t exist, because no one cares to actually balance PvE enough to make it feel interesting, PvE gets balancing but only as a side-effect from PvP changes because someone lost in Elysium, e.g. savantlord getting a heavy nerf at first likely because someone got especially pissy.
It also affects Spirit Hybrids as well, though to a largely lessor degree since we’re not overly reliant on Rites.
But yeah, Oracles have it rough.
Which isn’t even getting into the fact that the God Imbue interaction doesn’t even do anything outside of Patrimony and Tidestone band. Leaning more on a it being a bug but who knows really.
Which is a shame since SoN has the steam thingy going on when using Poseidon imbue. Giving away/indicating that Nyx and Poseidon have a largely clashing history it seems.
it’s not a case anymore of whether all builds are equal but magics. Mage is just always going to be the best build no matter what, in terms of speed, versatility, variety, damage and literally everything else. Mage has the good things about all builds and none of the downsides.
I am quite interested in seeing atleast one proper way to nerf mages. That wouldn’t result in them actually skinning the Dev team alive and having them tortured on stake. You’ve seen what happened with warlords.
Aren’t like all classes in terraria good. With all of them having niches. Like Ranger being typically the safest option, melee the most dangerous but tanky, etc etc
No, summoner is the most dangerous after hardmode— Most Melee weapons in Terraria post Mech start to have projectiles by that point. Every single whip has a locked range, and no projectiles.
Ranger has the longest range, but objectively speaking: Ranger needs ammo for all its tools, it has less defense than melee and mage, and its got the lowest damage in the game I think; Mage has the 2nd lowest defense, needs mana for its maximum damage output; and summoner has the lowest defense in game despite needing to be the closest for its maximum damage output, too be fair, summoner does like, the most damage in contest with melee; Melee just has the highest defense, and a really good damage output despite not using any resources or having any risks.
Although for Terraria’s sake, the difference usually doesn’t matter that much, they’re usually pretty close to eachothers strengths; but still. These comments from 9676 till now are so being DIvanoichi’d to their own post lmao.
Terraria gets away with this to a degree because it’s PvE and not PvP. People really just go with what they like rather than what’s the most powerful, if anything when doing friendgroup playthroughs melee is the last class to be chosen
