jorb wrote:
This is the new combatometer (actually it's a mock-up, but it looks like this). You will notice the blue and red bars. Offense, and defense. Offense is used for attacks, and consumes the defense of the opposing player. These refill on their own, but that takes time. What's more important are combat moves.
Each attack empties your offense meter completely, reload it by using moves.
All maneuvers have new static effects that trigger on an opponent's move -- except shield and dodge.
Some moves can only be used under certain circumstances, such as having enough IP, certain advantage, intensity and so on and so forth.
You cannot miss with moves. They always take effect.
What I wrote about the new combat system in the old testing thread still holds true. It's worth nothing that we've -- since we were on the test server -- shuffled lots of stuff around. All attacks do however have tooltips now, which should make the system somewhat easier to penetrate. Also, all attacks, weapons, armors and whatnots should be fixed. We've also added in new lores for the attacks, please tell us if character progression is completely foobar. Calculations of HP, attack damage and armor values have been modified. HP and attack damage scale with the square root of the relevant stat, which, for HP, is now constitution, and constitution only. Newbs start with 100 HP.
One major change that has been made to damage is that all attacks now have a penetration value. Penetrating damage is actually somewhat of a misnomer, as it mostly applies to unarmed combat attacks. The point is that some attacks deal damage that isn't blocked by armor. In the future, we have plans to replace that with actual damage types, but for now consider this an approximation.
The test server was, by and large, not very useful. Very few people logged in on it, the kids from Wayneville mostly used it to dick around, and very few relevant comments on the system were made. Thus, our conclusion has been that, for all intents and purposes, the main server is the only real, meaningful test server we can have, because that's the only place where this stuff actually matters to you.
Our own testing has by necessity been cursory. The amount of tests that need to be run on this system is too big a number for us to even be able to scratch the surface, which is why we need you guys to do it. The system interacts with such a staggering amount of variables that only a real, live test would actually be meaningful in any sense what so ever. Sure, I can mod my stats back and forth to test some general scenarios, but the basic fact is that I don't know what the reasonable scenarios are.
This fighting system might very well not be to your tastes, broken or, quite simply, not fun, but, of course, we hope it's rather the opposite.
All in all, the new combat system goes live now.
By the way: You have two weeks to play with this system until complete character and map reset. The reset will bring whatever changes we can introduce in two weeks, but don't expect Haven 2.0. The more broken shit you find before the reset, the less we have to deal with in the new world. Report anything odd, but please remember to BE CLEAR and to post all factors relevant to the situation. Level of the enemy, stats on the enemy, your stats, exactly what happened, etc., etc., etc. "Lolwut itzbrokAn" will not help us make this better.
Please also note that you can spar with your friends now. Right-click on a character, and pick spar.
Enjoy.
EDIT by Loftar: You will notice that the melee weapons deal a lot more damage than previously, but also that armor soaks a lot more damage than previously. The intention is that weapons ought to be pretty much deadly when used on people without armor, and that the purpose of armor is primarily, indeed, to protect against those weapons. That's why the penetration value of unarmed attacks is higher than those of the weapons. We hope this will entail some interesting effects; in particular, that the arms-race with weapon and armor quality will actually matter, unlike previously. There is quite a deal of difference between low-level and high-level stuff.
