I do have to say that I also think Mortal's combat is total ass. I never enjoyed it from minute one, thus I didn't have any interest in getting better and just became a mage tamer. But pet combat is also pretty ass, talk about magic pre-necromancy. Oh yeah, I don't wanna grind just to find out I don't actually enjoy spiritism either.
I like abilities based combat, played LoL for like 7 years back in the day, many other MOBAs etc. and all the MMOs I have tried for a bit longer than few minutes have abilities-based combat. Auto-attacking can exist, but it is almost never the fun part. And it sure isn't fun dragging mouse awkwardly around which moves your camera when you try to block, also trying to quick-read attack animations is not something I enjoy either in this game.
Auto attacks are so simple: more attack damage/str ---> more auto attack damage, or more atk speed/dex --> more attacks. Sure, there is some whole parry nonsense in this game which I never bothered to learn apart from the basic "time your attack with quick block" (which is btw rather similar to Witcher 3 (and 1 and 2) basic combat, which I also think is the literal worst part of the otherwise awesome game).
Auto-attack based combat is difficult to design well, I mean solely auto-attack based. It works really well in Dark Souls, but From Software is a team of Japanese experts, SV will never be anything near them designwise. And still, in DS weapons DO have abilities, there are more than one type of main attack, you got spin and jumping attacks, lot of control over where your attack will land, camera lock/unlock controlling, actually interesting parry system (very difficult though I'm not expert), poise system balancing lighter and heavier weapons, tons of variations in weapon types and styles. The only reason the PvP has issues is really the latency in their servers (or p2p), otherwise it is the most interesting and skill-based combat there is, without parry-spamming back and forth. They do the one thing that farbox talks though, you die quickly, you kill quickly. Thus, even in a potential 1v3 scenario, the invader could easily snatch all three of them. Sure, the combat doesn't explore zergs, but the magic in those games definitely could deal with that.
So yeah, I also think the combat should be completely redesigned from the ground up, but at the same time I see that it is some sort of unique non-selling point (and a selling point for some sweaty vets) of this game, that just changing it to abilities from Albion etc. would make it less unique, although not saying that is a bad thing.
The game should really focus on its strength in my opinion, the list being very short:
1. The only game with no instanced content: it is a crazy design choice for an MMO, but you wanted to make it, so actually try to even design the game around that instead of just building it like any other MMO which is instanced designwise. THINK about how the single instance affects things and design DIFFERENTLY. Don't just make dungeons like you would make instanced ones, when there are no instances. Literally have some creativity so that there is a single world, that is still accessible to everyone, similar to how an instance would be, but with the upside that there are no loading screens or individual timers for stuff.
2. There are no microtransactions in the game, no in-game cash shop. This is the biggest differentiating factor after 1, they really need to make this count, by letting players create cool stuff in the game, like the professions many ppl want. Selling art, or whatever, stuff which is usually monetized needs to accessible to the community. Right now the game is dull af, and I don't see a change.
3. I couldn't come up with any more strengths, only weaknesses rly. I guess the free roaming projectiles from ele are somewhat interesting, could really expand on that by having more moving stuff in the world that would impact everyone. Stuff that doesn't need to be instanced, like not enemies, but more like events, trees falling and killing ppl, walls crumbling and able to be rebuilt by players. A constantly changing world, instead of this static shit which makes you stuck. Let ppl climb, build paths on mountains which can break, simulate weight of things on stuff. Things that really don't exist in other games like this.
Also, full-loot is not a strength of this game, it is just a feature which other games have too, and here it is implemented rather poorly. Weird timers for loot despawning when you die, the system only incentivizes to use the cheapest gear always. I think the main issue is gear really and the way defense works in all cases:
MAIN ISSUE:
Defense values scale pretty badly in comparison to effort required for acquiring armors, and all armor is just flat values. They really should change the system to be %-based instead like most games already do. Right now they can't make armor that is super strong and affordable, as then some weaker weapons would just deal 0 damage, making them useless. Many weapons are already now quite useless against strong armor, but the time spent to get super strong armor just isn't worth it if you are not constantly in a group that protects you, and if you are, then you don't need that armor anyways. Additionally, the damage types are too few, and there is no magic resistance in armor, which both makes building against magic builds impossible, but also limits magic's damage abilities design, as they can't do more than X damage as there is no way for players to resist it. It is a lose-lose.
The main solution
is to make strong armor more accessible, like 10-30x lesser the grind for crafting them, and give them %-reductions, best armors could have like 90% blunt reduction for example, could be weaker to some other damage type, or just super heavy, or give a movement debuff if not those, anything really is possible. And add magical resistances to gear, ideally each school could have their own resistance, so gear and many of the mostly useless crafting materials in the world could become useful and we would have more gear variablity. Also lighter armor types could have strong defenses in cases, but could have debuffs, like magic damage decreased etc. THE GEAR NEEDS SOME DAMN VARIETY IN THIS GAME.
With these kind of solutions, which of course, people have talked about here for 2 years+ with no changes in the horizon (one new armor set yey), there would be ppl full looting something else than just the basic cheapest shit every time. If Oghmium armor cost 100 gold instead of like 10k or whatever it is, it would be healthier for the game. No one gives a shit about items in a game that are never used. NO ONE will use items that take months or years of farming if they can lose them permanently. But, FULL LOOT IS GOOD, so the only solution is to REDUCE THE GRIND. There are no other alternatives.
Also imho crafting etc. info shouldn't be hidden in shady Discord chats, every other game has a wiki for almost everything, it just happens, and if this game will every be popular, it will happen nevertheless, so get used to it and rather change it now. The secrets that almost no one bothers finding and in many cases are not even worth it won't make the game any more enjoyable or bring any new players. There can be secret areas etc. but for the love of games do not just make players RANDOMLY MIX AND MATCH everything for years until they stumbly upon the secret "receipe" that you could have just told was there in the first place. The ppl who enjoy that are like 0.000001% of players who want to play this game otherwise, which is already a low number.
