I played TERA briefly and did recall aiming a bit although it has been a long time.. How do you think this combat system works for magic ? Aiming spells or ? In all the action games I have seen Magic has suffered imo and I wonder if there is a way to make it work. ( even if they left magic alone and used action for melee/ranged non magic it may work ).
This is a derail, so I won't go too far into it, but in TERA, the combat, for magic, ranged and melee, works as follows:
1. Melee is nothing new, it is basically an untargeted, directional PB AoE.
2. Archery is also Easy, its standard FPS stuff with a slightly delayed travel time.
3. Magic is the hardest, but works in one of three ways: (1) lock on (you click a button while hovered over the person to "lock" that target, then click again to execute the ability for what is, in effect, a temporary, one spell target...this works best for beneficial spells and certain damage spells like DoTs, (2) like the wow mage Blizzard effect and league of legends effects, but while you are casting the spell (and standing still) an AoE template comes up that you place on the map. When the casting time is finished, the effect goes off at the targeted location, or (3) the same way as melee (for spells like cone of cold) and archery (for spells like magic missile).
All of the above is pretty common for the action RPGs out there, but the thing that TERA did differently, which is 100% the right way to go (although it needs cleaned up through massive Blizzard style iteration) is to tie strategic movement into ability usage. Generally speaking, you slow the game's default movement down a little relative to like WoW, then add strategic things like animation lock (ie, you cant move for 1 second while your fireball animation is going on), automatic movement (a warrior's spammable cleave ability lunges him a little bit forward) and real time collisions (so a paladin can use his shield to block an arrow for a priest that is standing behind him) to add depth to the base system. This latter part is where most Action RPGs fall short, because there are a ton of subtleties there that really impact the full picture and it takes a lot of work to get it to feel really good. TERA did the best of any game so far at working through all of it, but it still needs a lot of work to make it so the action combat is also very strategic, but not clunky. In all games right now, its like (1) Active, (2) Strategic, (3) Smooth...pick two. Wow is strategic and smooth, but not active. Guild wars 2 (along with almost all action RPGs) is active and smooth but not very strategic. TERA is Active and Strategic, but not very smooth, etc.
Just my two cents. Sorry for the derail.
