Interesting suggestion. I like it on the surface, I love the idea of giving players (PvP or PvE!) more options in combat. You can plan out your combo attacks differently, shake things up, etc. Cool idea.
Though I have a few of thoughts/concerns on where I feel it gets a bit difficult to implement (for a little background, Iām framing my thoughts from both a players perspective and a developers perspective, as I know at least a little bit about this subject matter. )
- Balance
This undoubtedly will be very difficult to maintain any semblance of balance (something Funcom is slowly trying to adjust and look into). Would you make what normally would be a 3rd attack very strong, less strong with less stamina? Or do the same but with increased stamina costs? Overall, itās doable, but will be difficult for sure.
- How would chains work from that point on?
Maybe let the player decide what the first attack will be, but follow in sequence from that point on? If I was going to mod this in myself (which wouldnāt be possibly to do), thatās how I would approach it.
- You couldnāt use the 4th attack
Most 4th attacks in the chains are all these heavy wind up style attacks. Even if I wanted to as a modder, I couldnāt create a new animation chain with starting these types of attacks because they arenāt designed to be used with follow up animations. Like literally, I tried lol. You put the 4th chain into say, step 2, and your character just stops on that attack and doesnāt carry out 3 and 4.
Now Iām definitely not an animation artist what so ever, so a lack of experience in the field could most certainly be making me not see something. But from what I can tell, either these 4th attacks would have to be adjusted to accommodate the new system, or not used at all (which is the more efficient development route in terms of cost and time. Having animators redesign an animation is definitely less then ideal).
- Itās not currently possible to implement
I donāt really want to get into a long winded back end information on the subject, but the way combos are currently designed, it simply wouldnāt be possible. A coder would have to do some bloody heavy lifting to implement this because the system would have to be redesigned on how combos are fed into the game (then again, Iām not a professional coder, maybe its easier then I can envision). Which anytime a system has to be heavily modified, it gets a lot more complicated from a development standpoint in terms of cost, time, and amount of work involved.