Some combat fairness (about UA and MC)

[Zepar72]

As far as i understand, the most common strategy of combat is using high UA combined with a meele weapon, without having any points into MC, as the "finisher blow" damage is taken purely from weapon. This leads to MC being fairly inferior to UA. Not only MC is slower to make openings, it also requires you to have your hands occupied (or at least one hand) with weapons.
My solution, which will probably be hated by 90% of the current meta community, would be to make UA more similar to MC. If you wanted to use a UA attack (e.g. Punch) you would have to have at least one hand free (i mean, you can't punch someone with a sword). It wouldn't completely remove UA+Weapon combat, but at least it would prevent people from punching openings with a two-handed axe equipped.

[Kaios]

It’s not a suggestion I have seen given before. Switching weapons in combat gives the player a cooldown anyways so I don’t feel this would be taken advantage of by scripts for instant switching and it sounds fair to me that a player holding a B12 or sword and shield wouldn’t actually be able to punch you effectively. Perhaps that leaves room to add shield attacks as well.

Such a change might make shields a little less viable though, you may end up with most players still only building unarmed and using UA based maneuvers with a sword with second hand empty for punching. It might also be a nerf to boar spear, a weapon that is also two handed but does significantly less damage in melee than that of a B12.

Interesting suggestion.

[Hrenli]

If applied directly it would kill B12 and boar spear (the two-handed sword less so as it still can benefit from parry, but will nerf it too and I am not sure if it is considered to be any good atm already). There will be just not enough opening moves and both MC-based stances aren't properly working with B12. Would need something special based on MC. Or at least some of the UA moves still working (you still should be able to knock opponent's teeth out with the axe's handle for example).

But yeah, interesting proposal...

[Zepar72]

If applied directly it would kill B12 and boar spear (the two-handed sword less so as it still can benefit from parry, but will nerf it too and I am not sure if it is considered to be any good atm already). There will be just not enough opening moves and both MC-based stances aren't properly working with B12. Would need something special based on MC. Or at least some of the UA moves still working (you still should be able to knock opponent's teeth out with the axe's handle for example).

But yeah, interesting proposal...

Just as with weapons, where you need to have both hands occupied to do most dmg, maybe with UA you would need both hands free to use most powerful attacks. And yea, some attacks like knocking teeth or kick shouldn't really take equipment into consideration.
Maybe there could be a new pose added, made specially for axes.

[Sevenless]

Didn't you used to need 2 hands free to strangle in legacy? At the time it just made strangle useless.

i mean, you can't punch someone with a sword

But tbh fuck realism anyway if it's believable enough.

[Zepar72]

Didn't you used to need 2 hands free to strangle in legacy? At the time it just made strangle useless.

i mean, you can't punch someone with a sword

But tbh fuck realism anyway if it's believable enough.

You call that a punch? Imo that's regular "knock it teeth out"

[Sevenless]

Technically a pommel strike but eh. The problem is that without a melee weapon finisher, UA is pretty useless. That's why no UA ability is used for damage, they just don't scale with the world effectively enough. If you weakened UA enough that using it with a weapon becomes obsolete, UA itself would just become obsolete wouldn't it? I'm not sure flopping the PvP meta straight into MC is really helping solve the system. If by "solve" we mean multiple viable combat options fitting into the meta. If we aren't moving towards that, there's no particular reason to upset the meta because it wouldn't be actually helping.

That said I'm an armchair combat player relaying what the PvPers I know tell me. So take that with a grain of salt. People who actually know what they're doing should tell me why I'm wrong here.

[Kaios]

The main problem with combat that I see is that there is very little opportunity to defeat a player in a 1v1 fight that outstats you by a significant margin. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be that large of a difference.

You can run around a bit which sometimes helps to mitigate the overall damage you take and decreases the difficulty in maintaining lower openings but if you are the lower stat fighter you are immediately and constantly playing defense and any moment you take to make an offensive move is negligible in effect on your opponent since you are effectively trading out time to lower your openings with an attack that chances are barely has any impact on your opponent in the first place. So you’ve got a guy that outstats you using quick barrage and kito to build ip and deal damage and build up your red opening and you essentially have two choices, keep defending and die slowly from numerous lower damage hits or attempt to fight back and deal damage in return but significantly increasing the risk you’re going to get slammed by a larger hit and lose while you only deal about half the damage back.

Add to this that there is only one reliable method of reducing your red opening (dash is not reliable, the cd makes it useless and you’re still giving ip with it) and so you are consistently feeding your opponent ip to keep fucking you up when you try and stop them from fucking you up.

There are not nearly enough variations of attacks, effects, opening reductions, etc. to have any semblance of a balanced form of combat.

[Zepar72]

Technically a pommel strike but eh. The problem is that without a melee weapon finisher, UA is pretty useless. That's why no UA ability is used for damage, they just don't scale with the world effectively enough. If you weakened UA enough that using it with a weapon becomes obsolete, UA itself would just become obsolete wouldn't it? I'm not sure flopping the PvP meta straight into MC is really helping solve the system. If by "solve" we mean multiple viable combat options fitting into the meta. If we aren't moving towards that, there's no particular reason to upset the meta because it wouldn't be actually helping.

That said I'm an armchair combat player relaying what the PvPers I know tell me. So take that with a grain of salt. People who actually know what they're doing should tell me why I'm wrong here.

But at the same time, as it is now, pure MC is totally useless, as it just doesn't build any openings reliably. With my solution there still would be a mixed style, but it wouldn't be using both strongest traits of MC (damage finishers) and UA (openings). Solo players could balance those stats, and if the battle was between more people, there could be specialization between players. Both UA and MC would be flawed, but they could complement eachother.

[Zyean]

I think there needs to be new moves, and useless moves reworked or buffed, as well as maybe moves that use both UA and MC