Wildstar combat was identical to wow. Then they added a handful of pbaoe abilities with red shit on the ground. Then they added more. Then they made npcs have them. It slowly turned into what is there now. It's wow combat but every ability in the game is cone of cold.
It was never designed from the ground up to be what it is. It's a mishmash of shit design layered on top of shit design.
precisely. and if you ever played the game outside of 80ms latency (the game also had some of the most shit netcode imaginable, i've played indie games on shoestring budgets with better server connections), ie if you were more than a few states away from the server, or heaven forbid an ocean or more away, you would see this.
It was a generic hotbar combat MMO. at some point in the development they realized it wasn't very fun, but they didn't have enough money to scrap it and restart. They saw all these games coming out that featured action combat and decided to piggyback those ideas and incorporate them into their game, but either didn't have a clue how to do that or didn't have the money to redesign their netcode or their basic combat fundamentals to support real action combat.
Here's a barney style breakdown of the differences between an actual action combat MMO and hotbar combat MMOs:
Hotbar combat:
Server tells client you are in range (this is built in to the hotbar typically, either button is greyed out or when you try to activate you get an error telling you not in range).
player activates ability, client tells server to perform action.
server resolves action including another check if you are in range
server tells client to draw animation, new health totals, etc. ***this is when wildstar draws telegraphs. but it's entirely client side so it only appears where the client thinks it should, not where the server does***
client draws animation including telegraphs, shows dmg, hp bar reduced, etc.
this whole process takes fractions of a second, maybe 100-200ms + whatever animation time on the client, which is simply animations after the fact and are irrelevant.
For wildstar the dodge ability's only function is to move the player out of range between "isinrange" initial check and the "isinrange" server resolution check, immediately prior to damage/effect being dealt. It gives a very narrow window for a real dodge action to occur, and in regards to PVE in almost all cases unless you have ungodly low latency, it is why the initial ticks of dmg are very low and you are actually dodging the follow up damage from moving out of the rain of arrows or waves of fire or mortar blasts whatever the ability used was.
Action Combat:
Server tells client you are in range (this is built in to the hotbar typically, either button is greyed out or when you try to activate you get an error telling you not in range).
player activates ability, client tells server to perform action.
server tells client to draw animation, which is almost exclusively an animation lock, which allows telegraph to depict precise location effect will be delivered.
client draws animation and telegraph
server resolves action including followup "isinrange" check and then applies damage/effects, tells client to draw resolution ie new health bar totals, dmg, etc.
this transaction takes slightly longer, because it includes the entire animation lock time.
Dodging or other active defenses ie certain abilities are not just nullifying "isinrange" check, they are (again almost exclusively) utilizing iframes which greatly cutdown on any issues caused by latency.
Because Action games utilize animation lock and because your latency will be different depending on how far you are from the server and other factors, you know when you should dodge based on where you are playing. Telegraphs are used sparingly and you rely more so on knowing animations (player classes or bosses, ie for pvp or pve). If the animation is 1.5s long and it is the character raising a 2h sword over his head and then bringing it down dealing massive aoe dmg+knockdown, If you have low latency you learn to dodge right before the sword comes down, while if you have higher latency you dodge half a second earlier, as the character is bringing the sword over his head. both players dodge action gets to the server at the same time and they both dodge, and the iframe covers minimal latency during the resolution.
tldr: among a host of other things, Action combat does the resolution checks at the end of the animation instead of at the beginning. Wildstar is a hotbar game that added laser light shows on top of it, and it shows.
in japan connecting to US MMO servers I typically run anywhere from 200-250ms which is slightly noticable but playable in most every game, action or otherwise. extremely competitive FPS probably not so much but just dicking around on a battlefield server with my buddies i'm ok. Wildstar though runs 300-500ms which is basically half a second behind. and with this high of latency you get to see where all the cracks are in their combat and netcode. like status effects like knockdowns etc apply in the initial tick which means by the time the game tells me to draw the telegraph to avoid something it is also drawing at the same time my character on the ground and unable to dodge anything. Also that their telegraphs are entirely client side and do not represent where you are actually located on the server, ie i'm well outside of a telegraph drawn for me but still taking the damage/effect etc because the aoes are just doing a simple "isinrange" check just like any other hotbar game. dodging is in practice identical to just running out of any DoT AOE in any other hotbar game like wow or SWTOR or whatever, it's just slightly faster than running so you take less damage . you take a tick or two of dmg and then you stop taking it when you are no longer "isinrange".
