I for one don't find the round robin system as obnoxious as many players do. The way I see it, if we change it the alternative - purely in order of Initiative for all combatants - it means we'd just stack Initiative on *everyone* instead, which easily leads to no one on the enemy team ever getting to do anything. I honestly can't see how this is better than the way it is right now. The fact is that a cc-oriented caster alone can easily incapacitate half or more of the enemy team within his turn. If our entire party get to go before any enemy, there's not much else to say about this. The first two members Teleport and Nether Swap enemies to pull them into a bunch -> the other two mass cc the whole lot of them -> end of story.
At least there's still something delicate about Initiative in the round robin system. Within the party, it decides who goes before who, which, in turn, given a specific encounter, means which party member will go before which enemy. This has a big impact on the ability to, as you pointed out, deny enemy turn by cc'ing/killing them in turn order. If you get the chance to examine enemies' Initiative before combat, you can actually use this element to your advantage. At least there's still some sense of "strategy" here. The ultimate goal is still "none of you will get to do anything!", but at least the round robin system makes it harder to pull that off.
This is why I get the impression that the reason we hate this system is not so much because "Initiative is useless" as it is because "it makes the game harder".
I'm not opposed to a change that does improve the experience. It's just that given the way things work, simply reverting combat turn order to the old system will completely trivialize combat. I imagine a lot of other changes will have to accompany that change to ensure everything works properly.
Last edited by Try2Handing; 07/07/18 02:22 PM.
