I think I just feel really disappointed in the direction of the combat beta from reading what the proposed changes are (I am aware that we haven't tried it to see things addressed.) It kind of just feels like the beta proposes more damage. I'm not sure damage is the solution as to why combat feels unsatisfying.
It feels extremely clunky. Just to touch on a few of the difficulties within combat:
- I have to cancel channeled abilities because it's higher damage.
- Animations often don't match the damage hits, so I have to animation cancel as well.
- Magic has like 5 different basics to use - none of them are interesting beyond damage scalings.
- Why dodefensive autos exist? (same issue as 4taa?)
- Why do auto attacks exist? Why am I doing them at all when I have powerful abilities to use. I think necro really got the simplification of this correct.
- HItboxes don't match tiles (sunshine/death swiftness).
- The tick system has led to mehaving to abuse unintended combat mechanics to sneak in more damage. It leads to higher APM gameplay and is just really unsatisfying to use.
A lot of the time it feels like the response to these gripes is "git gud", and like, I can't be the only one that feels like this. The vast majority of the playerbase hasn't killed zero enrage zammy - and part of that is on them for not being willing to try and fail; the other part is a combat system (excluding necro) that feels completely unintuitive and difficult to learn to the extent that they can't overcome how convoluted it is. If RS3 combat were a card game it would be YU-GI-OH.
I haven't even touched on Meele and it has a whole other series of problems in it self. Other MMOs do not have the same problem of combat being completely inaccessible to the vast majority of the player base - combat is a lot more intuitive and not riddled with the above challenges.