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I've just given a melee class a try, and unfortunately they are even worse than casters. 
One thing they added to the basic movement was that you could "dodge" attacks by doubletapping either left, back or the right button. This would cause your character to jump to the respective direction, and to get a buff increasing his/hers chance to dodge. If you do this with the forward button, you get it as a chance to stun with your melee attacks for the next X seconds instead. What REALLY bugs be about this is that the animation to do these takes time, and you're unable to do anything at all! First your character crouches a little, then he jumps, and then he stands up. For everything but the stun attack, this is utterly useless. While you watch your character jump sideways/backways, your enemy will get off some free attacks. Rendering the entire concept of dodging useless. It's even faster to just plain run the same instance you dodge jump, so if anyone does that you just run up to them and hit.
The melee system is decent by it self, but as soon as you factor in other factors that you can't leave out, it sucks. The 1 button is mapped to left swing, 2 button is overhead swing, 3 button is right swing by default. There is no auto attack, so you have to keep choosing where to attack. Every class has three "shields", that you can place on your left, right side and above you. These reduces the damage you take from these directions. When fighting mobs you can see where they have their shields, and attack on the weakest side if they haven't it evened out. Your melee attacks hits a cone in front of you, meaning that you hit everything within a certain angle in front of you. The melee skills is called combos, and is activated by pushing the icon for it in the UI, or by pushing the mapped button. When you do this you'll see the combo near the middle of the screen, along with a left, up or right arrow. You then have to swing from the direction of the arrow to perform the combo, there can also be more than one direction to a combo. The huge problem here is that it's very slow. You can press the combo button, and then wait 1-2 seconds for the combo to appear, and then you have to wait around 1-2 seconds again to complete your swings to get the combo done. This makes the melee combat feel very unresponsive.
Edit: Also it isn't the revolutionary combat system that is fail, it's the simple fact that this game is by far not done yet. Now the developers are so desperate adding vital stuff that simply had no function before, so they are just throwing out patches without even testing it themselves! If that combat system had been implemented the way it should have been, it would be a nice feature to the game.
Age of Conan could have been an awesome game if it only was made right, and I have friends uninstalling the game already. They've fucking spent millions of $ and time motioncapturing even the horses movement! How the fuck can you justify that when that money and time should be spent on making the basic gameplay playable over time! It's making me angry just thinking of the sheer stupidity of Funcom.
One thing they added to the basic movement was that you could "dodge" attacks by doubletapping either left, back or the right button. This would cause your character to jump to the respective direction, and to get a buff increasing his/hers chance to dodge. If you do this with the forward button, you get it as a chance to stun with your melee attacks for the next X seconds instead. What REALLY bugs be about this is that the animation to do these takes time, and you're unable to do anything at all! First your character crouches a little, then he jumps, and then he stands up. For everything but the stun attack, this is utterly useless. While you watch your character jump sideways/backways, your enemy will get off some free attacks. Rendering the entire concept of dodging useless. It's even faster to just plain run the same instance you dodge jump, so if anyone does that you just run up to them and hit.
The melee system is decent by it self, but as soon as you factor in other factors that you can't leave out, it sucks. The 1 button is mapped to left swing, 2 button is overhead swing, 3 button is right swing by default. There is no auto attack, so you have to keep choosing where to attack. Every class has three "shields", that you can place on your left, right side and above you. These reduces the damage you take from these directions. When fighting mobs you can see where they have their shields, and attack on the weakest side if they haven't it evened out. Your melee attacks hits a cone in front of you, meaning that you hit everything within a certain angle in front of you. The melee skills is called combos, and is activated by pushing the icon for it in the UI, or by pushing the mapped button. When you do this you'll see the combo near the middle of the screen, along with a left, up or right arrow. You then have to swing from the direction of the arrow to perform the combo, there can also be more than one direction to a combo. The huge problem here is that it's very slow. You can press the combo button, and then wait 1-2 seconds for the combo to appear, and then you have to wait around 1-2 seconds again to complete your swings to get the combo done. This makes the melee combat feel very unresponsive.
Edit: Also it isn't the revolutionary combat system that is fail, it's the simple fact that this game is by far not done yet. Now the developers are so desperate adding vital stuff that simply had no function before, so they are just throwing out patches without even testing it themselves! If that combat system had been implemented the way it should have been, it would be a nice feature to the game.
Age of Conan could have been an awesome game if it only was made right, and I have friends uninstalling the game already. They've fucking spent millions of $ and time motioncapturing even the horses movement! How the fuck can you justify that when that money and time should be spent on making the basic gameplay playable over time! It's making me angry just thinking of the sheer stupidity of Funcom.
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