I agree, most of us want the old stagger system back as a starting point, not the ending point.
The old system wasn’t perfect, although a lot of the issues were more related to weapon balance than the system itself. For example, the hatchet was so powerful because, if I remember correctly, it didn’t have the combo system for its light attacks and so could just constantly swing. Sure a knowledgeable player could break out, but a new player was in trouble.
But there are plenty of changes that could be made to the system to make it better, but we need that system (or something similar) back first.
pvp in wow is an incomprehensible mess where you are reacting to things that you basically cant see
look at the UI of real wow PVPers they need all sorts of special menus to monitor the enemy’s abilities
combat with stagger has a high amount of visual clarity, vs the current system where two players mash against each other and you attempt to react to any cooldowns that get used
Enemies stagger you. You take inevitable damage in this game that you can and should avoid and that’s also a problem in pve. You should not go out venturing and know that one way or another you will take damage. Aren’t we pushing for no “damage” type of model? Stagger helps in many many Pve situations also.
Combat feels light and floaty now. People can literally run from you FOREVER with no ability to catch up or slow them down significantly. And the second they get away theyre back to full health.
Well, I play Wow Mainly for the PvP open world, and BG. Made Rank 14 in vanilla under the original Honor system too. They reintroduced it in Classic, but Classic was not true Vanilla either.
In any case, I never needed addons, over time you got to know intuitively the timing of other classes, recognized the animations knew what they were preparing and knew how to interrupt them and deal with each class. I played Survival hunter.
It is all about Spacial awareness when solo and knowledge of one’s class abilities strengths and weaknesses versus the other classes. It is about teamwork synergy and planning when in group.
So basically I disagree with your statement here because my experience was different.
WoW became a CC spam Fest combined with Focus. Plus well, WoW is a PVE game with PvP, its focus and main attraction is Content Consumption and Perpetual Progression from levels with questing and then from Gear with Raiding, rinse repeat expansion after expansion.
After a while it became really old for me as it is so shallow in terms of gameplay. It works for kids I reckon. WoW unfortunately also brought out negative aspect in people. Guilds denigrated one another, players were very toxic too, clearing content became like a Prestige thing… I came back to Wow with Classic after 8 years of absence, and quit it in disgust…GDKP was the epitome of that negative way of playing in Classic, but I digress (different topic)
Suffice it to say that New World is like a breath of fresh air for me.
Combat just became a spam fest. No more timing, no more positionning, it’s a slap battle with some dodging. With the scaling being very weak, you just got stomp by levels.
I miss the timing, positionning, and actual mind game.
Bring stagger back AGS ! It was far better than what we have now. Just fix the hatchet problem and we are good to go
They fixed the hatchet problem before they even removed stagger.
You could always just dodge or block, people just weren’t aware and were spamming LMB.
Then in the SAME PATCH they removed stagger they introduced combos, which would have made the stagger-combat even BETTER, and then they TURNED OFF STAGGER FOR PLAYERS. What an absolute mistake.
They implemented combos because when internally testing the build they realized that the lack of stagger ruined the flow of combat along with a slew of other things like lunge and tracking which ruins the spear and autorun which ruins anything that doesn’t have a long lunge.
I personally think combos would have actually made stagger worse if it was on every hit since the attack speed of weapons had a general increase. The delay between one combo and the next would have had a chance to turn things around but you would just use a skill to keep the attack chain up.
there is quite literally zero skill or tactics involved in the game as is currently. heavy armor, use big weapon, spam lmb, basically nothing you can do to stop them.
the entire meta of this game right now is every wears heavy armor and zergs, thats optimal strategy, and it works, you cant stop it.
the combat has been reduced to trading hits and just dps racing, if you try to use lighter armor and play more tactically with dodges and what not, you will just lose because you ultimately lose the dps race.
It’s not an all or nothing situation. Stagger does not have to be as was in Alpha. Even just adding elements of it can make a huge difference.
Heavy atks - stagger
Some skills - stagger
Successful Block of Stagger attacks causes counter-stagger (or perhaps this would be a passive in SnS or inherent on Shield but a passive with certain weapons?)
This provides a new element to combat while also avoids the stun-lock phobia from spam stagger. All the above need to be timed well to accomplish rather than spam left click, which also means all the above can be successfully avoided quite reasonably.
This should also apply to mobs who seem to still use the old stagger mechanic.
Stagger has to be on light attacks or it defeats the purpose of stagger. The primary purposes of stagger are to reward proper timing and punish reckless attacks. You can’t do either with heavy attacks. Likewise with skills.
The stagger system worked because you primarily attacked with light and heavy attacks. Skill cooldowns were higher and you couldn’t just swap weapons to get a new set of abilities to use.
Yes there are tweaks to the system that could/should be made, but taking stagger off light attacks is the same as we have now: a system where timing is much less important and attacks feel weightless.
An adjusted stagger does this - if successful blocks of stagger attacks causes the attacker to be staggered (and they should, else blocking continues to lack impact), then timing is everything because recklessly throwing out stagger attacks will see you vulnerable and punished, similarly, failure to react to said attacks will leave you vulnerable and punished.
Original stagger is not returning, it was decided that it wasn’t good for the majority, whether one agrees with that or not is somewhat irrelevant because light attack staggering will not be returning. The closest we may ever see is a hybrid between old stagger and what we have now and even that is unlikely, I’d rather have a compromise than what we have now.
Spam clicking left click in PvP is a awful mechanic. I miss the alpha 2 build where every fight was like dark souls. Also stamina should drain from light swings. The only time stamina gets used is to avoid damage but never deal which just makes it a face tank dps race in melee combat. These mechanics don’t offer any skill based combat. There needs to be consequences for mistakes.
Fortunately this is not EVE online.