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Yessss! An Old Timer Rejoices!
MightyUnclean
Member EpicPosts: 3,531
Slowing things down
Combat in Pantheon will be built around a desire to change things up in the MMO space. Contemporary MMOs have become very fast paced and, for lack of a better term, spammy. While the combat is still reactionary in nature it tends to break down to focusing on your rotation while moving left or right. With Pantheon the desire is to shift things back to a slower paced combat where the frequency of ability execution is slower and your rotation is dictated more by your response to the encounter than just a sequence of abilities.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1588672538/pantheon-rise-of-the-fallen/posts/728944
This sounds great for a slow old timer like me! Not kidding! 
Comments
I didn't say anything about depth of combat. I didn't take any shots at other combat styles, either. That text up top was a quote from the game's Kickstarter info, which I provided a link to.
I like the idea of slower combat speed because I have slow reaction time.
To the OP, Amen, me and you both!!
I am really hoping they pull this off. Pantheon seems to have a lot of lofty goals and I for one would like to see them succeed.
Del Cabon
A US Army ('Just Cause') Vet and MMORPG Native formerly of Trinsic, Norath and Dereth. Currently playing LOTRO.
This is good mechanic for bringing back that old school combat feel without taking anything away. It is working well for us and although we are still in early stages combat is looking much better, with a few more tweaks and some testing, I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised.
Glad to see you following our progress mate!
Even Vanguard felt spammy to me. They need to slow combat somewhere between EQ Classic and Vanguard imo. Slow combat is boring only if there's a lack of options and/or decisions made. The reason FFXI combat felt too slow is because each class only had a couple abilities on long cooldowns and so you were stuck watching nothing but autoattack for multiple battles at times.
Pantheon needs to have alot of options with linked cooldowns to show players their decisions matter. For example: lets say a warrior uses an offensive ability called powerful swing, which has a 20 second cooldown. That ability would put a number of defensive abilities on cooldown for 20 seconds as well, so you have to anticipate what you'll need for those 20 seconds or else possibly get killed. Maybe rogue's backstab will put their snare, bleed and stun on cooldown, etc. For casters the decision is in loading spellgems and they shouldn't be switchable in combat, in order to punish bad decisions.
As a magician and shaman in EQ, combat was more than just spam spells as fast as possible. You would go OoM if you did that.
Combat was about knowing what to cast and when to cast it. Resource management was a real skill, especially in a fast moving group.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Exactly right, and a shammie or mag were damn important in a group too.
Ya, when I think of spammy I think of infinite resources, going through a rotation of abilities to make ++damage or ++ healing. I used such a wide variety of abilities in Vanguard that I seldom spammed any particular sequence other than to get the hidden combo buffs, but I also don't really recall worrying about my mana. Rest periods between fights also seemed very fast compared to EQ.
To me if you arent having to consider every ability you use carefully, the result is spammy combat. That means mana conservation and downtime where you have to rest longer than the 20 seconds it takes to consume a piece of food/water. Without those things you will just spam abilities.