http://www.rerolled.org/showthread.p...5645#post45645
Game Design: Combat Mechanics
MMORPGs have traditionally been developed around global cooldown, skill cooldown and other hotbar mechanics and less about movement, timing and positioning. Combat mechanics in DraeganMMO will most likely be a hybird. Players will be able to select a certain combination of skills to bring to a battle like a deck. Instead of having the full array of 5 hotbars full of 30 different abilities, a player will have a much smaller selection of active abilities to choose from. Players will be able to switch this in and out at any time while out of combat.
Combat will have "pulses" inside these pulses players will have a chance to dodge, parry or evade attacks as well as execute autoattacks. Active abilities can be used at any time and aren't restrained to pulses. They work like any other combat system.
Inside these pulses, players stats will take over as well as some of the passive skills. In many autoattack based games, players will attack with their weapon every X amount of seconds whether that's weapon dependent (one sword is faster than the other), weapon-type dependent (all daggers are faster than all swords) or a combination of the above. Instead, combat will have pulses where a limited amount of things can happen at any given time.
Each pulse will be two seconds (this time will be heavily tested and tweaked) where players will autoattack. There will be passive skills/buffs/debuffs/attacks that can increase or decrease pulse timing of yourself and opponents. The basis of this is that there will be passive skills that increase the amount of attacks per pulse. So for example a newbie character will attack once with their weapon inside a pulse. A higher level character with Double Attack trained will attack twice during a pulse. An expert character might attack three or four times.
This also works with defensive passives like dodge, parry and block. A new character can only dodge once. Higher proficient characters might be able to dodge 2 or 3 times inside a pulse for attacks that are available to dodge or parry.
In addition to hitpoints and mana, players will also have stamina. Stamina is a resource system for all active skills. Stamina also effects your movement as well. While in combat if your stamina reaches a certain threshold, your movement speed is decreased. Running and walking in combat also consumes stamina. If you are in combat, wounded and attempting to flee, sprinting away will consume stamina forcing players to slow down at times.
Stamina can be augmented to regenerate incredibly fast and is not meant to be a hard limit on simple movement. Low tier spells and skills can be used to regenerate stamina like healing spells. Any movement form outside of combat does not consume stamina. Stamina is there to limit the amount of active skills you have to fire off in combat, allowing you to pay attention more and make skill usage more tactical. Spells cast be cast from Stamina when Mana reaches zero, but depletes it incredibly fast and does not regenerate as fast if used in that fashion.
Passive attack skills aren't just augments like Double and Triple Attack. You can include movements and special effects as well (think Bard songs in Vanguard). These attacks consume zero Stamina and happen during pulses. Certain abilities sync pulses with other character to perform special attacks.
