Request for Feedback: Combat (Patreon)

Greetings! Trying to make the combat system more interesting has been on my to-do list for a while. As covered in the last post, the game will be moving to incremental releases, and the first one will introduce the arena and probably involve tweaking combat. Letting you fight in the arena seemed a good opportunity to make any combat changes, since it gives you the means to test 'em out.

Before going too far down this path, though, I wanted to get your input on what you think about combat in the game right now. Do you generally like it? Dislike it? Mostly indifferent? What would you change? What would you keep the same?

I have a few ideas for how to improve combat - for instance, making Emily's rotation more like a WoW rogue's - but I'm not sure this is a good idea. Making the game's combat depart more from standard RPGM mechanics could make it more interesting, but these changes would also make it more complex, and could be confusing to some players. In addition, since combat is a relatively small part of this game, I'm not sure how much effort should be devoted to improving it.

I had the idea of introducing the "threat" mechanic, but eventually concluded threat isn't very interesting in a single-player game. I wanted to make Ana's combat more "tanky," but I think it already kind of is. And the only important fights in this game are boss fights, but they usually revolve around figuring something out (i.e., they're a puzzle of sorts) or in doing some minigame. The actual combat is kind of secondary.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out is this: do you think combat is in a good place right now, or does it need to be improved? If the latter, how would you improve it? What are your thoughts? Please let me know, and thank you for your support!