Action combat or tab-target: what the Holinka hire tells us

For about five years, Brian Holinka was the lead PvP designer on World of Warcraft. For more than four after that, he was its lead combat designer. World of Warcraft is the tab-target MMO: you select an enemy, you press abilities, the abilities resolve against the selection. Before its 2024 reset, Riot said its own MMO would do the opposite, with action combat and no tab-targeting.

On 1 June 2026, Riot hired Holinka as Principal Game Designer on the Riot MMO. Either the combat model changed with the reset, or Riot wants a decade of tab-target discipline applied to something that is not tab-target. This article sets out both readings, what each would mean for the game, and the one conclusion that does not depend on which is right.

What was promised, and when

Greg Street, who announced the MMO in December 2020 and led it until March 2023, described its combat in 2021 and 2022 as action-based. The phrase used across coverage of the time is that the game would not use tab-targeting: you aim, you dodge, you land things by positioning rather than by selection. That fitted Riot's house style. League of Legends is a game of skillshots, and Valorant is a game of aim.

All of that predates the reset. In March 2024, Marc Merrill wrote that the first vision "wasn't different enough from what you can play today" and restarted the direction. He did not say which parts were kept, and Riot has not described the combat since. Action combat is therefore in the same category as every other pre-reset specification: stated once, never repeated, and possibly among the things that were reset. The full list of those is in the 2024 reset, explained.

What Holinka did at Blizzard

Holinka joined Blizzard in 2012 and left in 2023. Wowpedia's account of his tenure lines up with the reporting from Inven Global and Wowhead when he moved to Riot: around five years leading World of Warcraft's PvP design, then more than four leading combat design across the whole game.

The two jobs are different. PvP design is about the frame around a fight: how matches are made, what modes exist, how rewards and ratings work, how a system stays fair when the players are the content. Combat design is the fight itself: how abilities interact, how damage and control are budgeted, how a class feels at the moment of pressing a button. Holinka has run both for the biggest MMO in the West, which is why the hire was read the same way by every outlet that covered it: Riot is building combat now.

After Blizzard, Holinka worked at Fantastic Pixel Castle, the studio Street founded to make an MMO called Ghost. That studio closed in November 2025 when NetEase pulled its funding. Riot hired him six months later.

Reading one: the combat model changed

The straightforward reading is that Riot reset the combat along with everything else, and that what it is building now is closer to what Holinka knows.

There is a case for that beyond the hire. Tab-target combat is what makes large-group content in an MMO legible: forty people can fight one boss because the system, not the player's aim, decides who hit what. Action combat scales badly past a handful of players and is one reason so many action MMOs cap their group content small. If Riot wants raids, and Street said it did, the combat model has to support them, and the model that demonstrably does is the one Holinka spent a decade on.

Against this reading: it would be a strange thing to reset toward. Merrill's complaint was that the first vision was not different enough from existing MMOs. Moving from action combat to the combat of the most-played existing MMO is a step toward sameness, not away from it. And Riot would be giving up the one design instinct that is its own.

Reading two: the discipline, not the model

The second reading is that Riot kept action combat and hired Holinka for what World of Warcraft does better than any action MMO has managed: the balance, the tuning cadence, the class identity, and the PvP infrastructure.

This fits Riot's own strengths. The company has spent fifteen years balancing 170 characters in a skillshot game, with a patch cycle the rest of the industry copies. What it has never done is balance those characters across a persistent world with levels, gear and a ratings ladder that has to stay fair for years. That is precisely the problem Holinka's two jobs were about. On this reading, he is not there to decide whether you aim; he is there to make sure that whatever you aim with stays fair in month thirty.

Against this reading: principal game designers shape the thing, not just its schedule. If Riot wanted only tuning expertise, it could hire a lead systems designer. "Principal" is a title you give someone whose judgement will set the model.

Which we think is more likely

The second, narrowly, and mostly for the reason given above: a reset justified by "not different enough" is unlikely to have moved toward the genre's default. Our expectation is a hybrid, aimed abilities and free movement on top of a targeting layer that keeps group content readable, which is what several MMOs since 2012 have tried and what a designer with Holinka's background is unusually well placed to get right. That is an inference, and we label it as one.

There is also a third possibility that both readings underrate: that the combat model is what makes the game "different enough", and that nobody outside Riot has seen it. Merrill's silence was requested precisely so the team could work on the "incredible amount of work ahead of them". Combat would be near the top of that list.

The conclusion that does not depend on the model

Whichever reading is right, the hire places the project in time. Studios do not bring in a principal combat designer to a project that is still deciding what it is. They bring one in when the design is settled enough that someone can start building the systems players will touch, and combat is the first of those. That is why June 2026 is a fixed point in our reading of the release date, worked through in why "before 2030", and not sooner, and why Holinka's arrival, rather than any statement from Riot, is the most informative event of the year.

For the rest of the team he joined, and what each of them implies, see the WoW all-star team.

What we do not know

Whether action combat survived the reset. This is the whole question, and Riot has not said.

Whether Holinka's brief is PvP, PvE, or both. His two Blizzard roles cover both, and the title does not narrow it.

Whether he reports to a game director, and who that is. No design lead above him has been named since the reset.

Whether Riot intends the MMO to have a competitive scene at all. The company's identity is competition, and Holinka is the person you would hire to build a ladder. That is a signal, and only a signal.