Weapons/combat

[stickman]

I was thinking of a few changes that could be made to the weapon system.

Firstly, I think unarmed is way to good. and dodge is absolutley rediculous.

IMO armed combat should be far superior to unarmed combat. People told me when I started playing that unarmed gets better then armed combat only at high levels.. but i have only been playing a little over a month and i already notice that my brother (who chose unarmed) does far more damage with his hands then i do with my bronze sword over the same period of time. getting over 100 unarmed and 100 str takes very little time even for someone who has never played before.


Anyway my suggestions:

1. Rework HHP damage: Punching/strangling etc unarmed in general should deal very little or no HHP damage. Damage should very wildly and it should be hard to hit. It should also be reduced heavily by armour... honestly puching someone who is wearing a metal helmet would do more damage to the puncher.

3. Dodge: I think this should be made into kinda like the diablo 2 amazon skills.. where you have Dodge(standing still), Avoid (ranged), evade(moving). Obviously it would have to be changed but the important thing was that this value was capped. There should be no 99% dodging attacks especially if you are standing still and fighting. You should also be able to parry an attack with a sword.

4. Sling: made from a peice of leather (maybe just string). you use stones as ammo. you should have to kill rabits with this or a bow... not catching them with your hands.

5. Bolas: 3 stones and 5 string, you throw it at a moving target and it has a chance at making the target move at a crawling speed for 3-10(random) seconds. Used for chasing things down that are getting away.

6. more weapons: daggers, short sword, longsword, maces, different styles of bows (long, short, reflex etc). The wood type should also be a factor in a bow, it should not be made out of branches either.

7. Wearing heavy armour disables your ability to sprint at top speed and gives negative bonus to ranged.

8. blow gun - poison darts - thorn from needly plant...+ reed type plant that grows in shallow water + poisonous frog. deals damage over time.

9. poison tips for arrows. and arrows should require feathers.

10. different type of shields, a shield bash attack that removes initiative points or combat advantage of your opponent.

11. Weapons should de-crease in quality as you use them. eg. bronze sword Q 90 (71Q). this would be a bronze sword of 90 quality that has an effective quality of 71 because its dull. Each time you repair/sharpen a weapon its base quality is reduced. Eg goes from 90q to 89q but its now bronze sword 89q (89q).

[burgingham]

I want fireballs, thunderstorms and demons I can summon....

Other than that the devs are working on the combat system right now, so just wait what they come up with. When you go ahead and implement different types of weapons there is no sense in just making them better or worse, give them different effects (which you did for some, but not all). Same thing goes for ua vs melee. If you just make ua worse than melee you can as well take this skill out of the game.

[stickman]

Well i was thinking that the dodging type skills would be dependent on unarmed and your agility. Also when someone enters into melee combat range with someone who is using a ranged it should default to unarmed. People do not walk around with a weapon in their hand all the time either.

EDIT: i guess what im saying is you should be able to block with a shield and dodge without having to alter your combat maneuver. Having high unarmed should give you passive bonuses while fighting with melee.

[Jackard]

The current combat system is probably going to undergo some major changes, so people should stop making suggestions based on it and wait to see what the new one is about. Offer feedback on that instead.

[loftar]

I guess I might take this opportunity to write a little bit on our current rework of the combat system. Mind you, we still haven't gotten to the point of testing it, and there are quite a few things that I'm unsure about, so don't take it to be the final version in all the details. It may serve as a bit of food for thought.

First of all, the initiative points will be moved so that they are per fighting relation, so as to fix the problem of charging up against bunny rabbits. Second, a character will have offense and defense values, ranging from 0% to 100% and being independent, in themselves, of any character stats. When an actual attack (as opposed to a combat move like Sidestep, that is) is carried out, the following happens:

1. The attacker's offense value is reduced to 0%. Let the value it had before be O.
2. A conversion factor F is calculated based on the ratio between the attack value of the attack (usually taken from a related combat stat, e.g. UACMB for Punch or MCMB for Chop) and the defense value of the blocker's current maneuver (currently, the defense value of Dodge is the blocker's UACMB, and the defense value for Shield is 150% of the blocker's MCMB; I don't know yet whether that should be changed), divided by two. For instance, if Ace punches Bison, Ace has a UACMB of 100, Bison uses the Shield maneuver and has a MCMB of 50, then F = (100 / (50 * 1.5)) / 2 = 2/3.
2b. F is modified by the balance of the combat relation in the same way as it currently is -- that is, the attacker's attack value is multiplied by a factor of 0.5--2 depending on his advantage in the relation (if the advantage A is considered as ranging from -5 to 5, the factor is 2^{A / 5}), and the block value is unaffected.
3. Let the defense reduction value, Dr, be O * F. The blocker's defense value is reduced with Dr (but not below 0%). Let the blocker's defense value before the attack is carried out be D. In the same example as above, if both Ace and Bison started out with 100% in both offense and defense, Ace will, after the attack has been carried out, end up with 0% offense and 100% defense, and Bison will have 100% offense and 33% defense left.
4. If, and only if, the blocker's defense value is reduced to 0% will the attack have any chance of succeeding. The chance of the block succeeding (that is, of the attack failing), then, is D / Dr. In other words, the attack is only sure to succeed if the blocker has 0% defense left when the attack is carried out. If Bison, in the example above, would have had 50% defense left when Ace attacked, he would end up with 0% defense left, and Ace's attack would have had a 1/4 chance of succeeding.

IP won't be coming automatically and by chance, but by explicit action with some or another combat move.

It will be possible to see the offense and defense values of your opponents.

The offense and defense values will recharge over time, but slowly; slowly enough that it probably won't matter a whole lot within a fight (but so that one can expect to be fully recharged if one hasn't fought for a couple of minutes). More combat moves will be introduced to manipulate them (and to manipulate the other fighting variables, like balance, intensity and IP).

There probably won't be any autorepeating attacks anymore (there wouldn't be much use for that since the offense value is reduced to 0% after each attack). Many combat moves will probably be autorepeating instead, however.

The scheme as outlined above has the following desirable properties:

• The gap between fighters with differing character stats is reduced. It probably won't make a world of difference if one has 100 UACMB and the other has 120. It will make a difference, of course, but that is to be expected. The gap should be small enough that a player with a superior strategy has a large chance of winning anyway.
• Most of the elements of pure chance are eliminated.
• In fights between players who are roughly equal, attacks will succeed comparatively seldomly, seeing how the defense value decreases much more slowly than the offense value. Hopefully, fights between equal players will, therefore, be more focused on maneuvering and outwitting the other rather than just waiting for the punches to succeed. In return, the attacks themselves will probably be rebalanced to deal a lot more damage than they do now. Unless you have quite a lot more than twice your opponent's combat stat, an attack at the start of the fight will autofail (but reduce his defense value, of course, so it may still be useful).
• Numbers will matter a very great deal. One will be very disadvantaged by being ganged up upon.

[loftar]

Here's an outline for the future of archery, as well.

Archery will be mostly removed from the combat system proper. My current model is that of a two-step process:

First, a bow shot is initiated by taking aim at a target. An indicator will display on the screen, which displays the chance of hitting. The chance of hitting begins at 0%, and grows upwards towards a maximum. The speed of growth and the maximum value depends on a couple of factors, like the shooter's Perception and Marksmanship stats, and the distance from the target. If the targets starts moving, its movement speed will counteract the hit-chance growth by a certain speed back towards 0%. If the target changes direction, the hit-chance will decrease further by some yet to be determined factor. The maximum range in itself will be unlimited, but novice players won't get very good hit chances if the range is large enough, of course.

While aiming, if the target is a player, there should be some mechanism by which the target can be alerted of the shooter's malevolent intentions, probably based on the usual perception/stealth stuff. If the shooter is hit while aiming, the shot is cancelled.

When the shooter has determined that the hit-chance is high enough for him, he can fire the shot (or cancel it, of course). Obviously, the chance of hitting is determined by the hit-chance, but I'm thinking that the hit-chance might also determine the actual range of damage the shot will do. One shot will deal quite a great lot of damage, mind you. A good shot will be able to kill. Either way, regardlessly of whether the shot hits or misses, a fighting relation is initiated between the shooter and his target, but that, and shot cancellation on being hit, are the only interactions with the fighting system.

It could probably be fun to add an extra skill that allows the shooter to move while aiming.

[Caradon]

This still weakens defending towns, In raids, townspeople are generally unaware. A raiding party already knows their target and has numbers on their side. Without a townwide alert to all players currently logged in that a structure is being damaged this will only empower criminals.

We don't want to make criminal behavior impossible, It's incredibly rewarding but the ease through which it is done now is too high, and yes even after this kind of fix is initiated it will become that much easier.

I propose A town function that alerts players online to the location of the criminal acts occuring, as well as the need for seige weapons to destroy brick walls. Pallisades can be torched but it should take time, and players can then defend against raids by buckets of water and archery. Why dont you ask a martial artist to break one down with a punch. No human, and regardless of strength, hearthling, should ever be able to destroy walls or non liftable constructs by hand. Ever.

So please, if you are going to add this combat fix, fix the walls and town alerts first.

[Divagador]

First, a bow shot is initiated by taking aim at a target. An indicator will display on the screen, which displays the chance of hitting. The chance of hitting begins at 0%, and grows upwards towards a maximum. The speed of growth and the maximum value depends on a couple of factors, like the shooter's Perception and Marksmanship stats, and the distance from the target. If the targets starts moving, its movement speed will counteract the hit-chance growth by a certain speed back towards 0%. If the target changes direction, the hit-chance will decrease further by some yet to be determined factor. The maximum range in itself will be unlimited, but novice players won't get very good hit chances if the range is large enough, of course.

Wow, you really like Mabinogi

[Chakravanti]

[*]The gap between fighters with differing character stats is reduced. It probably won't make a world of difference if one has 100 UACMB and the other has 120. It will make a difference, of course, but that is to be expected. The gap should be small enough that a player with a superior strategy has a large chance of winning anyway.

100-120 is nothing. The real question here is how effective the margin between those with 300 and those with 500 is.

[jorb]

[*]The gap between fighters with differing character stats is reduced. It probably won't make a world of difference if one has 100 UACMB and the other has 120. It will make a difference, of course, but that is to be expected. The gap should be small enough that a player with a superior strategy has a large chance of winning anyway.

100-120 is nothing. The real question here is how stupid is the margin between those with 300 and those with 500.

What would be reasonable?