[Suggestion] PvP changes, Stealth and Assassination

[JerrylThesekar]

I've seen a lot of talk about PvP on here....and then I see that there hasn't been too much talk about stuff as everyone awaits the new "Hafen". I want to make a few suggestions; This thread being about PvP and 'Subterfuge' skills. It also suggests a new "Signing" system for rune stones and parchment notes, as well as poison and disease.

First thing to note, this suggests a new layer added to the murder system, and makes work more dangerous. With enough grind, you can make a strong poison that can indirectly kill someone if ingested and this would be harder to avoid than combat. If you don't like the idea, you should stop reading.


A new "Signing" system should be in place that places a character's name on a runestone or parchment they write on. This will let people know who wrote the message. The reason for this being is simple enough; You find a runestone outside your house telling you to move. If it was blank, you might think its a joke, or a threat from bandits. However, you'd be far more inclined to move if a famous member of a large village nearby happened to leave that on your doorstep, and you'd totally consider relocating for whatever reason to prevent anyone from killing you. These signatures would help verify messages from person to person, make mailpeople to deliver said messages between villages (As well as trade goods) more important, and simply lets you know who's been putting offensive literature in your library. It would be more interesting with this mechanic if you could make books, using parchment and leather, to store multiple messages in (Or just write a book/journal, duh).

Subterfuge Skills
[CHANGES] Theft
You should no longer be able to make a Bandit's Mask, as it will be moved to another skill.

[New Skill] Trickery
Cost: 15,000 LP
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.”

Effect: Allows you to use the name of a person you memorized in place of your's when signing a document or runestone, effectively forging a signature and fooling the person reading into thinking it came from someone else. A person without ranging can tell the signature is forged with a high enough Perc to beat the Dex*Stealth of the forger. With the ranging skill, a person will find "A faint hint of forgery" when they examine the runestone/paper that will be put in their inventory (If the message is new enough to produce a scent). This scent can only track a perpetrator, not find their hearthfire. When you own this skill in conjunction with Militia Training, you unlock a maneuver called Feint.

Feint
Weight: Unarmed combat
Effect: Cooldown reduction, reduced attack

[New Skill] Concealment
Cost: 75,000 LP - Requires Trickery
“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”

Effect: You can get closer to people before rendering on their screen, based on your Stealth(Up to a limit..can't be invisible, eh?). This may sound odd, in the context of default launcher, but with the amount of people using Ender's client and such, you can zoom out to see farther, and have minimaps to tell them where you are, also good for running away from bears and trolls, as you will lose aggro sooner. This skill will also provide a bonus to stealth when a ranger tries to find you. This also allows you to see your own stenches for crimes even if your perception isn't high enough to match your stealth, or if you don't have Ranging. You cannot do much to them, but this will give you an idea of what they can use to track you.

[New items] Poison
Poison is crafted from a variety of sources, but requires the Murder Skill and the Alchemist Skill suggested on:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=38556
There are many different levels of poison, some draining stamina and SHP at a rate that gives a slight advantage in melee combat or helps with hunting animals, poisons that effectively cancel out ranged combat if a hit gets in, ones that can kill quickly, or knock you out. Most of these take a lot of time or rare materials to make, but once made are tools for a perfect assassin. These are more often found by foraging, but can be obtained from other sources, like Snakes. There can be many effects but the most prominent of which would be the ones that can kill people.

Example Poisons:
Mandragora (Medium HP Damage)
Snake Venom (Medium HP Damage and Stamina Drain)
Black Widow Venom (High HP Damage and Stamina Drain) (Crafted from Itsy Bitsy Spider)
Nightshade (High HP Damage)
Tranquilizer (Instant Knockout on effect) (Crafted from Poppy Bulbs [Dried Poppy Seeds] and Mandragora)

[New items] Blowdart Gun
A neat little idea, this is made with Marksman in mind. It does very little damage on its own, and with this comes the idea of a belt pouch, for storing sling rocks and blow darts in, however that's besides the point. The blowdart gun does very little damage (At a maximum, probably about 10 damage, pitiful compared to others), but it charges faster than the sling in comparison to marksman speed, and allows you to apply poison with its darts, which can be strong if done right. I originally thought it would be a stealth ranged weapon, but there isn't much stealth to be had standing in the middle of nowhere or in a boat on the river shooting at some animal or person who will know where you are after hitting them, so this is what I've got.
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Secondly, let's talk about PvP. I completely agree with the statement made in the sticky; There is no 'Black and White' solution to PvP, as every action can be considered in more ways than one, aggressive. As such, I would never recommend a total change or removal of PvP in this game. I do suggest, however, Softcaps whilst fighting another. For example, it can go one of two ways; You can softcap fighting skills based on gear, making players reliant on fighting equipment as much as Marksman are on the quality of their weapons and ammo. Have certain clothes or armor/weapons increase the softcap of your skill by an amount, so you can only fight as good as your armor/skill value let you.
Or, on the other hand, have a softcap limit to how much skill you can have over another person, so it isn't one sided. You have two players fighting, one with 100 UA, and one with 900 UA. Right now, the 100 UA would not stand a chance, but if we implemented a cap, the 900 UA person could only fight that 100 UA person as effectly as a 200 UA person.
These two styles can go hand-in-hand, Your max skill (From gear/skill softcap) can only go above a certain amount than the cap of the other person (Their UA as determined by their skill and gear).

Also, it sounds dumb of me to say this, but Melee Combat is massively flawed. I see the merit of fighting either Unarmed or with Melee weapons, but either way, Unarmed usually wins unless there's a huge boost in the Melee's favor. What I suggest is making a Trifecta of melee weapons, a Rock-Paper-Scissors, if you will, of melee weapons that have clear advantages and disadvantages over each other, and unarmed combat. Daggers will be the new addition. Daggers beat Axes, by shear speed and maneuverability, as well as other factors. Axes beat Swords, with brute, unstoppable strength that cannot be blocked and swords aren't fast enough like daggers to stay a step ahead of axes. Swords beat Daggers, matching them in maneuverability, finesse, and boasting an increased reach and flexibility in fighting style. Unarmed is faster than all of them, unburdened by unnecessary equipment, but (should be) lacking in damage. What they lose in power, though, they gain in the ultimate flexibility of stances, maneuvers and fighting styles. Of course, this means nothing if all of them get shot down at a range by a Marksman, but we are going to ignore that.

I will probably expand more on this later, but for now, I feel like I've made a point.

Flaws:
With Poison, it will be hard to avoid getting destroyed by someone who has done the infinite grind more than you have (Which is hard to avoid, as it is), but with care, you may have Antidote on hand to counter it, or a high enough perception to stop yourself from eating tainted food. Darts, at the same time being faster than slings but weaker, can be annoying. If done right, they don't need to do much damage, as a person with decent supply of good quality darts (Not even poisoned) can shoot it off like a carbine. I can also see the signing system (And subsequently, Trickery) being used to troll people by making alts named in ways just to make weird, funny, or fake messages that are "Real".

Other suggestion threads:
Medical Skills [Medicine, Alchemy, and Disease]
http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=38556

General Additions [More Animals, Foragables, Crops, etc.]
Not yet set up

More soon to come....

[shubla]

Instant knockout?

[JerrylThesekar]

Instant knockout?

I'm not sure how else to word it. I don't mean taking out all SHP and literally knocking them out, maybe simulating the effect of losing all your SHP without losing all of them though, for like 10-20 seconds or however long depending on the quality.

[Ninijutsu]

Your suggestions would be horribly unbalanced if implemented in any way. For instance, a blowdart gun that can instantly knock people out?? Maybe you haven't tried the PvP in this game, but that would be disgustingly overpowered and nobody would use anything else unless they were decapitating their grounded victims.

Also, if you put in this "concealment" skill, remember that every single character will be able to trivially purchase this skill, and that perception can easily be raised to the thousands off of carrot-eating bots alone whereas 1000 intelligence would be horribly difficult to acquire as the only food that can get you there is Jorbonzola (meaning that this mechanic would not affect pvpers at all).

Your ideas are great at heart, but your examples of implementation are far from a good idea, and I don't think there IS a way to properly implement such mechanics.

[Kaios]

Your ideas are great at heart, but your examples of implementation are far from a good idea, and I don't think there IS a way to properly implement such mechanics.

I'm in partial agreement, I think the ideas are great as well. I really like the idea about forgery, I personally haven't seen a suggestion like that made by anyone from what I can recall.

I don't think it's fair to immediately dismiss the bulk of his ideas or the method of implementation based on current mechanics however, we need more information on how the new mechanics are going to work or if a specific mechanic is completely the same, slightly adjusted, totally different, etc.

I see what he means about the blow gun, it would be an immobilizer rather than a damage dealer but either way I will concede that any stun/immobilization implementations certainly require more thought.

[JerrylThesekar]

Thank you guys for the feedback.

@Ninjutsu
I understand your concern about the Blowdart gun; If you had read it, you would see it requires a poison to do that, and whatever poison required to do that would likely be difficult to make, or take a lot of time. I suggested poison in general, and if anyone was interested, a followup depicting a process similar to distilling where you make the poison. For poisons (Like that from plants and herbs), it can take weeks to make an antidote through distillation, so it's easy to infer that making the poison is equally as long a task. This would encourage botters, again, however. I like some of the ideas found here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=38278

As for the Concealment stat, I see the flaw in that. What I probably forgot to mention was the counters for that and why it could be useful in the sense where you know people with a gigantic circular carrot farm producing over 150 q50 carrots a day and tons of wax. Again, you post that as an issue against botters. Let's ignore that part and go straight to the issue of perception. You seem to think that the context of having a high perception will negate the stealthiness of another using Concealment, which is the idea that makes the most sense, but why not have some fraction of a person's perception vs the hidden ones perception and stealth? Half of the art of stealth is noticing where you have misstepped and hiding any traces of your existence.

And yes, I tried combat in this game, it's appalling. Most of my friends have lost a ton of alts to some guy who could punch down a Palisade barehanded and nuke 7 of their characters. I suggested the knockout poison as the alternative for a peaceful (As close as you can get to that position without the black and white views) of getting rid of someone. I'd also like a way to remove unconscious people from villages by sending them to their hearthfire as well.

@Kaios
Thanks for defending me without giving up any spine. I do believe I was probably wrong in posting this when I did (At 11 AM as I was passing out from nearly two days without sleep, lol), though now I am much healthier of mind having had rest, I can say that if something doesn't make sense or is generally regarded poorly, then it can be changed or removed. I am more concerned about PvP balance in this thread, but I had the idea of Forgery some time back and is much better thought out.

[Kaios]

@Kaios
Thanks for defending me without giving up any spine. I do believe I was probably wrong in posting this when I did (At 11 AM as I was passing out from nearly two days without sleep, lol), though now I am much healthier of mind having had rest, I can say that if something doesn't make sense or is generally regarded poorly, then it can be changed or removed. I am more concerned about PvP balance in this thread, but I had the idea of Forgery some time back and is much better thought out.

None of your ideas are by any means terrible and I include your other thread in that statement as well. A couple have been suggested in the past, or at least certain aspects of them but otherwise they are quite good. The only reason I didn't post in the other thread too is because I'd have essentially said the same thing. We need more information, don't know how mechanics will work and so on.

Some of your suggestions might spark a discussion but I wouldn't expect much in the way of a conversation regarding them. Generally on this forum suggestions are either received rather well and most tend to agree that something may be a welcome implementation in the future, or, it isn't. There is not really much discussion involved once people have made up their mind or have gotten too comfortable with the way certain mechanics work.

In any case, I like the way you present your ideas and in my opinion they will be appreciated most by the developers themselves and that is really all that matters in the end.

[LadyV]

I have many reservations about the implementation of your suggestions. They open up large areas for abuse. Im not opposed to some of them just the way you have worded them.