New Combat System

Artifact has just announced that their long awaited new combat system has entered public testing. This new combat system is coming closer to what they originally promised. These changes include many features that should make combat more responsive, read on for detailed information.

Just entering public testing is an entirely new combat implementation. It was redesigned from scratch with an emphasis on smooth, responsive game play. We've also made some combat-related game play changes. The primary goal of this re-design was to create a very responsive and robust system that also provides better feedback to the player about what exactly is going on during combat.The most noticeable change that this affects is that character animation and actions will be better synchronized and occur as they happen. These animations will also no longer "fall behind" as the previous system did and could sometimes lead to what was commonly referred to as "combat lag". In addition, server side response time has been drastically reduced so that animations for all characters will occur as real-time as possible with the only limiting factor being Internet latency.

Combat abilities and spells have also been slightly altered. These actions will now trigger instantly when you call upon them, interrupting any repeatable action, such as regular combat attacks. Previously, the delay on any ability would happen prior to the ability being triggered. This has now been changed to after the ability has been triggered, which causes the ability to fire as soon as you tell it to but also has the effect that you will need a slight amount of time to recover before restarting your regular attacks. In an effort to give better feedback during combat, many interface changes have been made around this new system.

Spells and abilities will now continue to retry until a target is in range. Previously, when these failed due to the target not being in range, combat would then switch to your standard repeatable attack. By continually retrying, this will allow you to initiate combat with the action that is queued as soon as the target enters the range of your action. You can still cancel this action before it is successful if you wish to perform a new one.

In the Status window, along side your health and experience bars, you will find two new boxes which are your combat queue. This will tell you what action is currently being performed and what action is next to occur in the queue. This will allow you to more accurately set up attacks in the order you want them performed and have greater control over your combatant.

In addition to the damage numbers that float over both a target and your character, names of actions will now be displayed. This will allow a player to concentrate on the action and not on the chat window and should help provide for a more immersive combat experience. In addition, these floating displays will now drift towards the source to help distinguish who the actions belong to, allowing an easier time to determine the best course of action in a heavy battle.

These floating items will also correspond in color to the now fifteen combat channels. These will allow a greater amount of customization of the color of both the message displayed in the chat window and in the floating displays and allow for more concise reporting for what is happening during combat.

Another new feature aimed at helping provide combat feedback is the spell-casting bar. When casting a spell, a new progress bar will appear to clearly show the time remaining until the spell is ready to fire.

Combat damage is also now further randomized using a Gaussian system. What this means is that average damage will be more likely, but there will still be the possibility for extremes both on the high and low end of your attacks.

With this new robust manager and responsiveness large scale combat involving both many players and creatures will be possible. Now, there is some debate on whether this is a good thing, but those in the Undead camps are very much looking forward to it... Thankfully, for players, there will be a new experience bonus for fighting multiple enemies at the same time, scaling based on the number and rating of foes. This is applied in addition to the standard group bonus, so a group of players fighting multiple enemies has the potential to be very rewarding...or very painful, depending on the outcome of the battle!