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Hey, I am a huge fan of the tabletop version of Pathfinder, and it was quite to my delight to discover that an online version would be produced. I really love all the work that's being put into making this a living breathing world. It's really spectacular, however every time I read another clever way to imbue life into the game, I just keep thinking, what about the combat?
Quite frankly, most MMOs out right now have pretty lame combat. It's systemically lame. Every MMO isn't about fighting so much as repeating your job for maximum efficiency. You're the tank? Keep focus on you and make sure you don't die. You're the healer? Make sure everyone isn't dead! You're the DPS? You'll never guess what your job is!
It's entirely an "efficiency race". Who can out-efficiency the enemy? buffs and debuffs just mean you're recalculating the most efficient pattern all the time. The combat isn't really based on outwitting the opponent, it's based on who can crunch numbers fastest.
In comparison, I think that the genre that got it right is fighting games and their progeny. A great fantasy example would be Dark Souls, which despite balance and netcode issues, has a really great PvP system worked out.
Have a look at the combat in skyrim, it doesn't feel like people swordfighting so much as people standing in place hacking at each other.
The thing that fighting games got right include counters to other moves, and hitstun. When you hit someone in the middle of an attack, they don't just keep going, you interrupt them, this is pretty much critical to preventing combat from becoming stale, because by attacking you must make yourself vulnerable. That and there are natural counters to different strategies, blocks beat attacks, throws beat blocks, attacks beat throws, and so on. Not to mention chip damage, which can hurt the enemy slightly even if they're blocking, which is generally how people in Dark Souls beat out turtles (Usually using bleed weapons which cause the opponent to bleed out if they block too many hits of a bleed weapon or pyromancy, which shields don't always have the best defense against).
It's counter based systems like this that enable games to have depth even long into their lifetimes. A common trouble with WoW and other MMOs is that everyone just uses the most efficient build instead of theme builds, because there's no reason, no benefit to. Either you build to max your output, or you're useless. However having natural counterbalances not only in character builds (so some builds counter others) but in the attacks themselves, is what creates true depth and enables competitive play to flourish.
I don't think anyone can really describe this better than David Sirlin, one of the most intelligent Street Fighter players around.
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/yomi-layer-3-knowing-the-mind-of-the-opponen t.html
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/rock-paper-scissors-in-strategy-games.html
On the whole though I really love what's being done with the project and I'm sorry if I come off as a bit demanding, but personally, a great combat system is what will make or break this MMO for me and a lot of other players, because it is a huge part of basically any gaming experience. To have great combat, we need movement, we need hitstun, we need mixups (different ways to attack that need to be countered differently), we need accurate hitboxes (instead of most MMO's thing where you lock on, perform an attack animation, and whether the enemy walked away or not, they get hit), we need a varied array of normal attacks, we need advanced tactics, we need a significant departure from the traditional ideas of how MMOs should handle combat, or I think we're doomed to bite the dust.
Thanks for listening, and if you can, could you please share what ideas you have for the combat system? I really want this to succeed, and I know you know how to do everything else.
P.S. I'd also like to know what sort of stealth gameplay will go into the making of the rogue and other stealth based classes, if any. Thanks again!