As always, buff marksmanship. (and fix animal AI)

[Amberlight99]

I dont know shit about coding so take this with a grain of salt. But how hard can it be to make sure that when an animal feels threatened (aggressive, cause thats why animals attack. they dont walk around angry.) and it realises that its in real danger and cant defend itself (like with a guy safely attacking it from a boat) it will just turn around, flee and not slow down until its time to lick wounds? I think animals should be more aggressive if they know they can defend themselves. But if they cant do that they should just bolt like a normal animal would. Just remove the re-aggro shit. Cant be that hard right? Right?

This way (hopefully) there would be a reason to have a hunter that can damage and bloody the animal (if it did any damage) without getting to close, peace with it, and start tracking again. Or if you wanna be more effective, you have one hunter with a spear or sword and shield ready to tank for the archer who is doing most of the damage while the guy in melee is focusing on defense.

so based on the wiki it does do that. if you deal enough damage to an animal that would normally fight back, it will begin to run away as a simple "I'm losing time to go" the issue is the boat hunting cheese seems to be about blocking their movement abilities entirely.

I think the only real solution to this would be to have an animal begin 'attacking' whatever items are near it if it discovers that movement is not working but that is a difficult thing in my imagination to try and code properly without having issues like animals just randomly turning to attack trees instead of you when they bump into them.

Edit: I read more, they already do this too.

It looks like according to the wiki if you just sit in a boat, the animal will attack the boat and eventually destroy it if you are exchanging melee blows.

I think this solution takes away from the variety and strategy involved in choosing between melee weapons and no weapons when deciding what you will invest your build into without fixing the issue with MM

Your damage with cleave, etc. on a high opening won't change regardless of what your Melee Combat is anyways. You could have 1 MC and 5000 Unarmed to get the openings and you'll still want to have a weapon for the kills. You're not going to kill much with punches alone. The best use you get out of raising melee combat right now would be to use Parry as your maneuver, and that's really the only reason I personally have that would make me want to raise it at all. I guess Quick Barrage spam isn't too bad either in some cases.

The point being there already is no reason to raise melee combat except for very niche cases.

I think then that still the solution would not be to merge melee and Unarmed but if that genuinely is the case, address the specific issue of melee combat attacks dealing strong damage no matter the melee skill so long as the opening is down, as well as addressing MM. By the way you make the dynamic sound, Unarmed and Melee might as well be the same single skill already seeing as you just need to pump Unarmed and get only one point in Melee, and if that is the case (sorry if I misunderstood) then the lack of MM in people's builds shows that at least merging the two would not help MM, even if it might help the combat meta generally.

[shubla]

One should not try the same mechanic for pvp and pve, they are 2 completely different things as in one you are against dumb animal AI and its mostly for some larping but in pvp its the opposite.

Bows are ridiculously overpowered in RL, many people use still them successfully in places like papua new guinea, I strongly believe that they should be very strong in this game too at least against animals. 1 Shot to kill or seriously wound the animal, then finish with spear or another shot at close range. Should work for most larger animals as well.

Would like to know what devs want hunting to be like, difficult/challenging game mechanic wise? Realistic? Fun? Just larpy?

[Archiplex]

on the cheese:

programming mobs in such a way that they satisfy both the difficulty requirement but also foolproof them against cheesing is a war harder to fight than the entire botting stuff.
sure, you want a game that's punishing (permadeath, hardcore wound system, etc) but the more punishing you make things, the most people will be incentivized to cheese the hell out of it- and we've seen this happen over and over across many different changes. Not including w7 where cheesing was basically accepted, w8 had the entire beginning with cliff cheesing (you could get mobs stuck on cliffs and use attacks until they died, they would never reposition) followed by op archery (you could 2shot bears with a 10q bow) and stockpile/fence-trapping mobs using alts, blah blah. every attempt was met with a solution, up until now where we still have boat cheesing and spears which make everything extremely easy.

I think the best solution is to just find a way that allows the game to be fun while tolerating some of the cheesing anyways- without some of the cheese, hunting would honestly be one of the worst experiences in the game. it's bad enough that animals don't have stamina at all, and always run away at max sprint- if you weren't able to reaggro mobs onto you or kill them relatively easily, the pace of early game would be absolutely horrifying- imagine having to beat every single monster in a straight 1v1 from bottom up; how hard it would be to kill your first bear, how long it would take to grind up a character just to be able to mine with (and now remember that because you have little to no armor, you're racking up wounds each fight because without cheese the only animal you can fight while avoiding ever taking wounds is a boar or ants)

so, i'd much rather the design doesn't focus on how to remove cheese and more focuses on expanding on ways to tackle things without needing to cheese mobs (i.e archery) and then, later, actually doing something about dumb cheese mechanics- the game expects you to kill so many mobs flawlessly currently that the only way to achieve that is by exploiting other mechanics- or being in a very large group of players since horde strategies>>>>>cheesing always

[fuffens1]

if you weren't able to reaggro mobs onto you or kill them relatively easily, the pace of early game would be absolutely horrifying- imagine having to beat every single monster in a straight 1v1 from bottom up; how hard it would be to kill your first bear, how long it would take to grind up a character just to be able to mine with (and now remember that because you have little to no armor, you're racking up wounds each fight because without cheese the only animal you can fight while avoiding ever taking wounds is a boar or ants)

Dude what? Whats wrong with having bears, moose, whales etc be a late-game animal that you probably wont wanna take on alone? Why should this game try to balance things around being able to 1v1? Who tf would be strong alone in a world like hearthlands? I disagree completely. There will always be a cheese way so it dont matter? Bro, you are for sure overcomplicating this. Sure there are layers upon layers of issues and resolving one will make another pop up but dont make it seem like the fact that you can sit in a boat outranging the animal and make it never flee is not easy to fix. Sheesh...

[Archiplex]

if you weren't able to reaggro mobs onto you or kill them relatively easily, the pace of early game would be absolutely horrifying- imagine having to beat every single monster in a straight 1v1 from bottom up; how hard it would be to kill your first bear, how long it would take to grind up a character just to be able to mine with (and now remember that because you have little to no armor, you're racking up wounds each fight because without cheese the only animal you can fight while avoiding ever taking wounds is a boar or ants)

Dude what? Whats wrong with having bears, moose, whales etc be a late-game animal that you probably wont wanna take on alone? Why should this game try to balance things around being able to 1v1? Who tf would be strong alone in a world like hearthlands? I disagree completely. There will always be a cheese way so it dont matter? Bro, you are for sure overcomplicating this. Sure there are layers upon layers of issues and resolving one will make another pop up but dont make it seem like the fact that you can sit in a boat outranging the animal and make it never flee is not easy to fix. Sheesh...

What i'm more saying is that even if it does get fixed, some other method of cheesing is sure to pop up in some other way- it's been that way for years- and that rather than trying to fight a war against just cheesing, that the design focus should be FIRST on providing a more interesting/fun dynamic for fighting mobs before eliminating cheese.

While I do think whales (and mammoths, etc) should definitely be lategame mobs that should require either a really tough dude or a horde of less-tough-but-still-tough dudes to tackle, most of what i was referring to was early/mid game mobs like bears, mooses, lynxes, and hell even badgers and wolverines- boars being the (sort of) exception just because you can very easily outrun them. without proper cheese or a horde of friends, most of these creatures would be far too difficult to tackle without seriously crippling yourself for days at a time- not to mention actually be able to finish off because of how quickly they dart into forests never to be seen again. There's a lot of consequences to this game if we eliminate cheese entirely and without rebalancing other things, and the game would not be in a healthy state at all.

[fuffens1]

But is really the moose, bear and lynx early game prey or have all these years with cheesing made you think that you are supposed to be able to kill them within days or weeks? Think about it.

I've said it before, boat cheesing is such a long-standing abuse that its become a game feature, not a cheese.

[Kaios]

In the last few worlds, moose have typically had the highest quality of any animal though I think that is also due to the realm buffs that increase their quality. Don't think even mammoths have been as high in quality as some moose. The change to make them murderous might have been Jorb and Loftar taking this in to account but they certainly have ended up being one of the most valuable animals to hunt all the way to the end of the world in previous iterations.

[Archiplex]

In the last few worlds, moose have typically had the highest quality of any animal though I think that is also due to the realm buffs that increase their quality. Don't think even mammoths have been as high in quality as some moose. The change to make them murderous might have been Jorb and Loftar taking this in to account but they certainly have ended up being one of the most valuable animals to hunt all the way to the end of the world in previous iterations.

I didn't play much during the era of realms (w10/11/12)- at least not any more than a handful of months each time, but pre-realms bears and mooses were normally around the same quality ranges, with mammoths always having been the 'best' to hunt.

But is really the moose, bear and lynx early game prey or have all these years with cheesing made you think that you are supposed to be able to kill them within days or weeks? Think about it.

I've said it before, boat cheesing is such a long-standing abuse that its become a game feature, not a cheese.[/quote

Bears are pretty vital to kickstarting decent mining in the early game, without that foothold there'd need to be something else.

Lynxes have never actually been tough to fight. The cheese is about getting them to not run halfway across the map the moment they enter fleeing health (usually making sure that the attack that kills them deals well more than enough damage to never trigger the flee). Moose. I'd consider mooses/bears midgame at best- and again, my biggest note here is about earlygame, not midgame+.

[ghandhikus]

There were a lot of good points in this thread so here is my go at it.

I really like the idea of animals having stamina and getting exhausted. Marksmanship shouldn't be able to cheese any kind of animal, maybe some animals should have combat moves for people who try to cheese. But then people would cheese even that. There is no point to trying to find a way to stop players from cheesing, because they will. This is why game developers do create game mechanics to let only specific builds excel at what they are supposed to do but not as fast and well as others. For example EVE Echoes, the mobile off-spin of EVE Online. It gives players special editions of sniper ships just to shoot at stuff from further away, to the point where some "instances" are easier, they are even more afkable. But they do take more time than to fight one on one. In haven it's still possible, but marksmanship suffers from chasing animals and not giving better rewards to the user in any way. It is not faster than UA, and it's not giving higher animal quality, and it's not safer! Where as in other games it's usually one of the many differences that make it viable. I think devs could focus on trying to give user a reward for doing something a specific way rather than limiting the number of ways or making some ways easier.

I think the main point should stand out, marksmanship should be better in PvE, MC should be better in defence, and UA should be best in PvP. We should have 3 different types of combat rather than having 3 systems of combat combing into one. It's the same as the old school raid roles, a dps, tank, and a healer. Except we have PvE, Tank, PvP instead. Maybe we could have a full revamp on the system and have MC have moves both for tanking and supporting other characters in party defences. That way we have the role of tank and "healer" fulfilled, at least in a side note. And there could be marksmanship which excels at hunting higher quality animals to provide himself and the village with stuff. The more passive role that isn't active for actual combat either in PvP or PvE. MC could be good at fighting bigger animals like trolls or mamooths, but a character with it shouldnt' be able to tank and kill it himself. He should be taunting and letting others damage the animal. Marksmanship would be like equivalent of "slayer" from runescape or any other gathering "job" that isn't actively using anything meaningful in combat but is still killing.

Also a lot of games have a clear division between gathering ingredients and using them, some skills or classes excel at gathering ingredients, while others are good at using them. Where as marksmanship could be treated as one of the gathering roles, and could implement more hardcore killing mechanics that don't work in PvP but they do in PvE, like poison or any other DoT(damage over time) that's easily countered. Maybe people can carry simple antidotes just to counter it. We already need to spend quivers of arrows, and attributes don't give any damage increase, so why not give us more resources to spend like adder fangs just to make damage over time arrows.

There is a lot of solutions that can be done. One of the simplest being damage increase for PvE like making perception increase damage like strength does to close combat moves. But I think the best middle ground would be to just focus on fixing anything in q30-50 for normal bows to be able to kill mooses and bears, and q75-100 ranger bows to be able to kill mammoths and L1-L2 trolls, and Q200-300 to be able to kill L3-L5 trolls. I'd like to believe L6+ trolls should be a group battle.

On a personal note maybe giving some actual reward for killing animals with hunter credo through projectiles could give better quality, so that people actually prefer that over UA. Because let's get real, the main point all along is that marksmanship is supposed to be for hunting, but it isn't working right now. So bandaid could just simply be to let people kill bears on q40 bows with quality increase, over just letting UA people kill it and losing the quality perk.
Edit: The quality perk should be either independent of survival or at least increase the quality of animal beyond what survival the killing character has right now.
// On a side note, maybe some bandaid could be applied to group fighting not decreasing animal quality but maybe more in the future, because I don't see a way where it won't be cheesed with alts.

[Reiber]

[quote="Amberlight99"]it seems to me like the system is currently trying to stave off the (unfortunately uninteresting and frustrating) reality that ranged combat without extremely complex and active combat systems will always be better, or, be completely useless.

The difficulty of balancing in a (mostly) nomagical setting to allow for both meaningful and useful ranged attacks and meaningful and useful melee combat, is that if you are being realistic, ranged is always better.

A spear will always be better than a sword (on average) a javelin will always be better than a spear, a bow will always be better than a javelin, a gun will always be better than a bow ect.

The nature of ranged combat excludes melee combat. in a realistic setting, ranged isn't just a combat style or a preference in weapon choice. Ranged combat in reality is a decision made to directly counter melee combat. To begin the arms race of "I will win if you can never hit me" via the everlasting chase for better armor and better reach. To use a bow or a sling or even if there were a such thing as thrown weapons, is a decision to try and engage in a one sided fight, where only you can make attacks on your enemy, and they cannot attack you.

yea. that is unless you factor in that armour is an thing,
especially steel plate armour, plate was an incredible gamechanger in warfare, too expensive too mass produce at first, but an plated soldier was laughably save from everything an peasant with an bow or an spear could do.

things get so far, that even with crossbows,2handed swords or staffweapons like helbards or pikes, you can only hope too annoy or overwhelm an full plated knight with numbers,
hell, even swords at some point where turnd into blunt metal bats, since blunt trauma was an more likely way of incompassitating an opposing knight than trying too wiggle and pry your blade through some weakpoints if they are ever accessible.

in general, you are right, ranged combat will always shoot down any clothed person charging you with an stick,
but slings and bows could historically only penetrate so much armour, and at somepoint , your foes discovered shields and full plate, and you where better off shoting at peasants and horses,

and the discovery of gunpowder didn´t even emmidiately change that dinamic, sure, cannons are a blast(pun intended) but before guns where cheap enough too equip your peasanty frontline with them, you where still pretty "save" on an battlefield in plate,

you want an nongunpower powered rangedweapon that can reliably penetrate steelplate? try ballistas, or catapults, plated infantry at some point was nier untouchable by anything less