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[StephenAnthony]

Some of you may have read and responded to my previous battle system topic, which discussed different aspects of an ATB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Time_Battle#Active_Time_Battle which was the original design for Ara Fell's battle system.

You can check out the original topic here, where I go over the details a little deeper than I will be now. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=996.0

We hadn't done much work on the actual battles lately, and with recent work in other areas, Ara Fell was beginning to feel more and more like Secret of Mana... So we thought we'd try making a Secret of Mana style of battle system. This would be an RTB, or action battle system. For those unfamiliar with Secret of Mana, it's similar to Zelda, only faster paced and with 2 other allies with you.

So, having said that, what I'd like to do is keep the original idea from Ara Fell's first battle system... Every character gets a multitude of skills, but can only bring 6 with them. Your energy cap is low and recharges quickly during battle.

You can change the skill layout of any character you bring with you, and there are many situational skills, and different tactics you can use.

For the sake of this discussion, let's assume I can put all of what I said together to form something fun and exciting. Assume it's all balanced properly and AI was done right.

I said all that to say this;

The way we want to give you access to these 6 skills is with the keys QWE and ASD.

You'd move with the arrow keys, attack with space bar or enter (or any key you want) and use skills with QWE, ASD.

What are your thoughts on that? Does that seem like a comfortable way to access skills? I'm aware using WASD for skills instead of movement could possibly be a little jarring, but as it's a 2D game, I think it'd be a lot easier to tolerate.

Anyway, I'd like to get some opinions on how this sounds before we start putting the concept together. Thanks, guys.

[1337-n00b]

For what it's worth I use 1-5 and QERT to bind spells in World of Warcraft.  Yours doesn't sound any more complicated.  My only suggestion is to include keymapping, so we can tweak things to our liking.

As an aside - and I apologize, I haven't read the original thread - six abilities might be a bit much for a game like Secret of Mana.  Could you maybe have two or three "active" abilities and make the rest "passive" abilities that occur under certain conditions?  An example would be "parry" and "block" abilities that have a chance to occur on contact with an enemy.

At any rate, QWE / ASD for skills sounds perfectly fine to me.

[StephenAnthony]

Well, we're going to have cast time and recharge time on skills, so hopefully it'll work out that having 6 skills at once will be useful. In Secret of Mana, you had a ton of skills to choose from, but really, you only needed something to do damage and something to heal and you were set. We'd like to make our skills have a variety of different functions and ramp up the difficulty of enemies a bit. The idea behind this will be creating and using different skill combinations to get the job done.

For example, an enemy may have a shield spell that you first should break before you continue attacking, or perhaps an enemy can dish out heavy damage that you need to dampen or protect yourself against. Maybe one skill weakens an enemy versus fire, and  one of your allies casts fire spells... that kind of thing.

(I don't know if I said this before, but energy is constantly recharging, and health recharges fairly quickly outside of battle, making the use of skills or taking heavy damage less annoying than in typical console style RPGs.)

[LThenton]

I think you'd be better off using the number keys rather than letters--it'd ease the learning curve considerably, especially if you give the player a hotbar listing the number for each skill (they could toggle off the hotbar when familiar with the controls).  This is already a familiar control scheme for many PC RPG players, so they'd fall in with it instantly.

[skaldicpoet9]

I agree.

The num keys are your best bet for hotkeying spells.

Most CRPG players are pretty familiar with that setup already.

[StephenAnthony]

I thought about that (and there will be an option to set it that way if you prefer), but the thing with this battle system versus, say, WoW, is that it'll be much faster paced. You won't target an enemy and just stand there and fight it, you'll constantly need to move around.

Reaching for 6 is a little more difficult to reach for than, say, D.

That's the ONLY reason that I'm considering doing it this way.