Fellowship - MODA (Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure)

Palum said:

If its a dungeon crawler its about moving through hallways, doors, caves etc. which means that action combat may not be the best fit. Take the example of generic dungeon and a dwarf warrior tanking for his party against orcs. In a traditional RPG like DnD, I'm thinking about blocking a hallways and not letting mobs get to squishy party members. So I don't think it'd be very gratifying to have an action combat system focused on movement (dodge/roll/etc.) but have no way to leverage that in what is a typical encounter.

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On this bit specifically, action mmos just often solve that by making the blocks what you have to time. In this case, you're just reactively blocking instead of passively getting block rolls, so you still have action combat, without needing to spaz out and souls roll all over the place. Vermintide also does that well enough, although in that if the "DPS" are good enough using a shield is pretty redundant but you get active blocking(with shields consuming less stamina to block), and pushing enemies with a shield has a lot more power so you can crowd control that way, playing Dwarf tank in Vermintide 2 was pretty satisfying imo.

So you can definitely make it work, but it'll just depend on what your goals are. Vermintide 2 just plays very different than most mmos cause it's entire focus is on the combat and the netcode can be worked on from the 4 player limit perspective and less server checks for cheating that are necessary for a mmo but it's an example. In TERA the shield lancer tank thing didn't have very good mobility but you could just block stuff too, in Blade and Soul "tank" classes had a mix of passive damage mitigation, longer blocks and short timed counters(which would entirely mitigate hits without consuming ressources). In Black Desert, classes have front guard on some skills and you can use them to facetank some stuff if timed properly and every class with a shield+a few others can block on demand too(although a lot of these classes just do as well/better by dodging instead).

Even thinking in terms of tanking, dodges are fine if they're like short hops with iframes kind of things for tank classes. Doesn't have to be the whole roll and as long as the iframes are conveyed with a visual effect it won't look too out of place. In a realistic setting even if you have a shield it doesn't mean you need to block every attack, side/backstepping are perfectly valid ways to do combat and this can be reflected in giving the tank classes dodges, just less extravagant looking ones instead of blackflips and short teleports and what not.

Yeah XIV plays well enough with a controller, you just need to build the system properly but unless you get to crazy EQ2 level of skill bloat it's not a big deal. Shit XIV even has quite a lot of skill bloat itself with most classes having 26-28 abilities and that still works fine with a pad, it's basically a matter of using the trigger/shoulder buttons to swap the face button AND the D Pad stuff, and that gives you 8 button per "plate", and then you can use either double tap to get 2 more(double tap right shoulder gives you different stuff than single tap right shoulder), or use cross combination(pressing right then left shoulder gives you plate 3, left then right gives you plate 4). You could also add a more robust macro system than XIV has similar to wow where you can make conditionals and shit and you likely don't even need as many.

The main issues are usually targetting related, especially for healing. Stuff like large raids become a bit shit, but for FFXIV 8man raids it's pretty much fine.

Even WoW has somewhat gamepad support from what I understand, it's official but not fully encouraged kind of thing? Like you have to enable it in the console instead of it being directly integrated in the settings.