Game Development: Approaches to Combat

[Hasta]

Ended up doing some spars today and its pretty much the same as last time, damn near impossible to lose a fight. Even with neither of us using steal thunder, and having ip stacked in quantity. It was damn near impossible to down someone even if you focused soley on offense. Not to mention the build up time to even get to that point is pretty dull, the whole combat process atm is just unexciting.

Did you max your stats prior to sparring or did you try it at 100s?

[dzielny_wojownik]

we need more moves like "all or nothing" like we had in legacy to win stale fights ( combat meditation, no pain no gain(this was one of the best moves ever in old combat), sting like a bee, the teeth move(forgot the name) etc.. etc..)
we also had opportunity knocks that helped in long fights where both had loads of coins if the fight became stale it would quickly come to a finish
bring in some offensive moves that would be risky or would cost a lot to use them, but would be highly effective at the same time, then i dont think there will be ever the "impossible to win fight" scenario

the longer the fight lasted - the bigger probability it was that it will finish sooner

[Astarisk]

Ended up doing some spars today and its pretty much the same as last time, damn near impossible to lose a fight. Even with neither of us using steal thunder, and having ip stacked in quantity. It was damn near impossible to down someone even if you focused solely on offense. Not to mention the build up time to even get to that point is pretty dull, the whole combat process atm is just unexciting.

Did you max your stats prior to sparring or did you try it at 100s?

We sat at default stats, didn't want the weapons to cap MC too badly, arguably we should have raised our stre so we could get beyond pinging armor, but we figured that on live our AC would also be a lot higher than it is on the test server.

Overall I didn't come away from today's spars with a good feeling. The only two reasonable moves to try to down someone's defense with is punch and left hook, the cool downs on mc moves are far too long for that, and can all be easily blocked. So something like parry / shield up spamming makes you pretty invincible, as parry blocks all moves but cleave, and has the added benefit of attacking back against a UA move (which is pretty move the only moves people will use to try to down someone's defense). My opponent pretty much gave up trying against me if I had either of the moves in my deck, wasting an offense bar just to down a defense move doesn't feel right.

[Hasta]

We sat at default stats, didn't want the weapons to cap MC too badly

I'd settle for a few days with realistic stat values and item qualities.

Well, scratch that =( Seems that the system needs some tweaking regardless of stats and qualities.

* * *
Would be nice to hear some "dev's summary", seeing as the weekend is coming to an end. Like, "test server was a huge success, we've determined this and that and now we're going to try something like this". I'm very sure that those players who participated in test are more than willing to be your guinea pigs for the changes to come, myself included. Keep on keeping on! =)

[Granger]

Test server was a huge success, if only because of no shitstorm on the forum

Combat still is completely unintuitive for beginners and I think the version on the test server is even more convoluted than the life one.

[Jacobian123]

Test server was a huge success, if only because of no shitstorm on the forum

Combat still is completely unintuitive for beginners and I think the version on the test server is even more convoluted than the life one.

Yeah, that real life combat system is pretty confusing, takes a while for people to learn it. Pls fix, jorbtar.

In all seriousness though, it seems to take forever to resolve anything, but maybe that's because of the wonky stats/stuff on valhalla. If that's the case, maybe tweak that valhalla to have realistic item qualities/stats (capped to 360,) then it could be realistically tested.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, I think that reimplementing the defence bar is the wrong way to go about addressing one hit kills because it convolutes things. IMO the right way to solve this is by adjusting the damage/armor model, which has to be done anyway because of archers.

As for the infinite ties in 1v1, I think they can be resolved within the card system with addition of new cards and tweaking of the current ones. Specifically I'd like to see a new category of status effect cards which would roughly correspond to stances of the legacy system. Stuff like a card that while active doubles your attacks weight but halves your defence weight, or a card that doubles the next attack's damage but also doubles it's cooldown. The more powerful stance cards should require quite a bit of IP or a specific set of cards out on the table, so they're really used for breaking ties in longer fights rather than coming up with quick gank builds.

The removal of deck cycling is spot on, though, the 10 slots system is much better and putting points into specific slots seems fairly interesting.

[Amanda44]

Test server was a huge success, if only because of no shitstorm on the forum

Combat still is completely unintuitive for beginners and I think the version on the test server is even more convoluted than the life one.

So, it looks like, from all I've read, I'm going to be back to square one again then ... ... do you think it will be complicated for the wildlife too? Only I understand the system in place atm and can kill everything now with melee ... though I haven't attempted a mammoth yet.

[dzielny_wojownik]

what is there so hard to understand though? i don't get it, you can learn the combat system easy if you actually try to learn it, i'm talking about all combat systems, the old one, current one and the new one it was just a matter of minutes, atleast for me. just spend a minute learning how the defence and attack bar works and read about what the combat moves do and train it a bit for example slide will convert your offence into defence and jump will gain you offence its pretty much explained.

[Amanda44]

The only combat system in any game I have ever had a problem with was in legacy and I'm certainly not alone in that ... I daresay with enough practise I may have understood it at some point but it was just too complicated to even bother with when a good q sling did the job fine ...

You also have to remember that I'm not a pvp player (in Haven) so I guess not engaging in that much fighting didn't help matters.