Combat is a Slog

[Father Spookus]

I really enjoy the game for the most part but I have to say - the combat is an absolute slog. It doesn't feel like I'm making that many tactical decisions. I mean sure, I make a few minor decisions like where I place my party in regards to the spawn points and which enemies I use abilities on, but for the most part the battles are poorly balanced to the point that decision making doesn't feel impactful.

Most of the battles are simply a DPS check. Crowd control used by players is so short-lived that it only really influences a fight if things are REALLY tight - and even then it's value is sometimes questionable because the animation/mana costs you valuable damage. Crowd control used by enemies is so uniquitous in many of the fights that it's not even worth actively trying to counter. Some of the fights feel okay, you kill a few priority targets and everything else gets cleaned up if you do it right, and the other fights have so many priority targets that none of them are even priority anymore and no special tactics feel worthwhile.

Enemy ability cooldowns are quite a bit shorter than those of player interrupts (or rather, there are a lot more enemies with obnoxious abilities spawning into fights than you have characters that even CAN interrupt), but on the flipside the player-character on-hit effects can be ramped up to high enough chances that the interrupt abilties become obsolete and you just interrupt every non-boss enemy with dazing wands or whatever if you even bother at all.

You can make minor battlefield adjustments using the walls or the stun/immobile traps but they're short duration / long cooldown relative to player/enemy DPS balance means that unless you can burn enemies fast the momentary reprieve is worth nothing, and if you CAN burn enemies fast you don't really need the tactical approach in the first place. Random spawns from random battlefields and random portal locations mean that your battlefield planning has little value. You can set up a defensive perimter in one direction and only spawn 1 enemy over there. Half the time it feels like the best possible choice is to just sit on top of a spawn point with a tank and just spank everything as it approaches. That doesn't feel tactical. The way that enemies wander at you 1-2 at a time over the course of a few minutes also makes the taunt ability useless except as a weaken effect, and threat in general is pretty weird.

The biggest offender here though is the enemy CC as mentioned before. Some battles spawn WAY too MANY enemies that have CC Abilities. It's no longer about choosing targets or anything when you have 15 daze wasps surrounding you, it's just a question of whether your AOE dps can kill them off in the brief reprieves or if you happened to have itemized for immunities. Having 15 enemies casting drain simultaneously doesn't make my use of interrupts feel impactful: The counter is just having enough DPS to kill them fast enough and maybe some line of sight shenanigans.

Portal fights are really, really weirdly balanced as well. Once again, the tactics are questionable. It's basically a DPS race to kill the first two portals fast enough that the third doesn't have a giant swarm around it by the time you get there. The portal timers don't even seem to matter much, you can just attack them in any order. If you're not burning the place fast enough to beat the first portal the third will have 700 enemies around it by the time you arrive and your party will melt.

Add in the fact that battle rewards don't feel impactful and some battles are way too long / slow / enemy counts too high to be fun and you've got something similar to the old final fantasy random encounter game where you get so frustrated with having yet another battle interrupt what you were enjoying about the game - aka the rest of it.

Additionally, bosses are a joke. If you have enough DPS to outpace the shenanigans of the other battles you can largely ignore the boss mechanics and kill them before any of the adds reach you. Boss battles are probably the easiest fights in the game.

My suggestions: Rethink your enemy tables. Spawning 500 dudes that drain in a single fight is bad design and is more easily countered by "nanigans" than good gameplay patterns. Having 10 orcs that do the drag'n'stun ability on the battlefield at one time is just obnoxious, not compelling. Rebalance enemies with abilities to spawn more rarely but feel more threatening. E.G. make drain heal the enemy a lot more so that it requires an interrupt, but don't spawn so many of them at a time that you can't possibly interrupt them. Force players to interact with these enemies.

Make the pull'n'stun enemies more frightening, but don't take me to the "bounce house" of having my range DPS pulled 10 times in a fight. That's just dumb. Pull me and put me in serious threat, and make me respond with something on a reasonable time scale e.g. teleport / smoke bomb / charge'n'taunt, defensive walls, etc. Don't pull me 50 times and caress me lovingly at the end so I can just walk away. Spawn like 1-2 of these guys and make them feel like they need to be countered.

Enemies that CC for arbitrary reasons need to go. Especially ones that spawn a lot at once. The chance on hit daze that enemies have or whatever that is is just unfun. The freeze on the same duration as the cooldown is just obnoxious too. Give me enemies that CC me in ways that I need to interact with, not just randomly to be irritating.

Also, rebalance the player abilities in regards to this. Make it so that I don't feel like I can only interrupt 2 abilities per fight but throw 50 abilities at me. At such low odds there's no point in bringing such unreliable interrupts.

Boss mechanics need changed somehow. Make them do interesting stuff. Make them spawn less adds but more that actually require a target swap. Make them cast more ground effect abilities. Something to that effect. They just need more.

Add crowd control diminishing returns. For players and enemies. Right now you can easily get perma'ed by enemies, and things like daze wands make perma'ing non-boss enemies back just too easy. Sure, you make a sacrifice for running a daze wand, but it not a tactical choice it's just a build choice.

Add items in the game that have impactful effects on your gameplan in battles. Unique items (or whatever the yellow items are called) are generally hella boring and hella bad. Quite a few have stats that are easily worse than blues and purples, and the ones with more interesting design choices tend to have such big downsides it's not worth it (e.g. massive move speed debuffs in a "tactical" game so you can't respond to threats is just whatever).

Make items that actually change the way I play the game. Give me items that reduce the cooldown of a specific ability only, E.G. a wall CDR item for Kane would be a lot of fun and would even justify downsides. Make an item for Aeric that makes his buff single target instead of party wide, but stronger, or changes the element of Earth Curse, or makes Bear Trap drop a single trap only but that disables an enemy until they're targetted again or any of a million other things to keep the game fresh as you progress forward with only 4 abilities per char.

This game is really quite fun and has a ton of potential, but the combat system just feels really unpolished. Some fights are way longer than they should, some fights are just weird, some fights are clearly trying to make you make tactical decisions but you don't have the tools available to make them, etc. So much could be done so easily to really make it feel a lot better.

That's just my $0.02. Anyone have interesting thoughts, counters, differing opinions?

[Super Captain America]

What I have experienced is that toward the end of the game the fights are very tactical. I find myself pausing and adjusting things every few seconds, and that death is only a couple mistakes away.

Early on, yeah it was no big deal, but that changes about the time the story gets more exciting.