zebratul's Fighting/Taming Guide for new players (18.02.19)

Ask, answer and discuss any and all topics about the hows, whys, wheres and whens of playing Haven & Hearth.

zebratul's Fighting/Taming Guide for new players (18.02.19)

Postby zebratul » Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:09 pm

Hello and welcome again to my guide.
This detailed guide will help you tackle the confusing and deadly skill of fighting in the Hearthlands.

What i’m going to cover:
1. General introduction.
2. Attacks, Openings, Damage, Restorations and IP explained
3. Fighting process write-up
4. How to hunt
5. Taming tutorial
6. Armour, Hit Points and Death
7. Terms used and credits


1. General Intro.

The combat in current iteration is based on deck-building. You use moves drafted into your deck to create «Openings» on the opponent in order to damage them, and reduce your own «Openings».
In order to fight, you’ll need to have 3 things: «The Will to Power» skill in order to get the ability to aggro, «Hunting» skill to be able target animals, and a decent enough Combat Deck, consisting of up to 30 cards (moves). First two are easy to acquire, however the Deck is more of a hassle – you’ll have to either grind ants and other small animals like foxes and bats for moves, or ask a good friend to describe you some of his own moves via parchment.
To win a fight, you’ll have to create openings on your target and push damage through faster then they do. The easiest way to do that is to have superior stats and gear, have more and better moves or just being more combat-experienced and know the combat system better.
Here’s the combat UI explained (it’s a mess)
Image



2. Openings and damage correlation.

So, you made your deck, aggroed an ant and punched it for the very first time… but nothing happened! Only a tiny Green bar appeared in the top-right corner of fighting UI. Do not worry, that’s the Openings system at work.
Basically, a character starts the fight in a state of maximum protection, having 100% (virtual and invisible) defence of 4 colours.
Each attack (and some other moves) has a specific stat which says what colour type and by how much it increases Openings every time you use it. Once it lands, it lowers one’s defence of appropriate colour, by creating Openings. After that, the attack applies some % of it’s listed damage, based on the Attack type of the move and how much Openings your target have.
Openings = how much defence you are missing.
Suffering a 100% Opening means that you have no defence of that type and will take 100% damage from an attack with corresponding colour type, and 0% Openings means you take no damage. The amount of Openings you get from each hit depends on difference between your and attacker’s Combat Skills, type of an attack, and the Stance you're using for blocking.
They also ramp up exponentially: the difference in damage between 10-20% Opening and 70-80% is massive when you’re getting hit for 600 damage per sting.

Let's have a look at an example of a basic Combat Move, Punch:
Image
Offensive combat moves have following stats:
Combat Weight. This line tells you what Combat Skills is used in the calculations (Unarmed, in this case, as opposed to Melee Combat), and also how much of a weight modifier this attack has. Punch only has 80% modifier, which means it's a little bit harder to get through enemies' block with it. It also has a Mu «μ» symbol, more on that later.
Attack type. Attack type indicates, from what colour of the Opening this attack gets it's damage. So, a target with 100% Green Opening will take 100% damage from this move. Note: Attack type and Openings created don't always match!
Openings. This shows how much and what colour of an Openings this attack creates with every hit. Keep in mind that the value shown here will get modified with the delta of your Skill and your target Skill when you punch him.
Damage. This, simply, is the base damage this attack deals with 100% openings without taking in account your strenght.
Grievous Damage. How much damage you dealt to enemy's Soft Hitpoints will transfer into Hard Hitpoints wounds.
Cooldown. Not shown, but it affects how long the cooldown will be, if you use this move. It's affected by the delta of your and your target's agility, and sometimes by amount of copies of the move cards you have in your deck (μ).

However, not all moves are as straight-forward as the Punch, which creates the same Opening as it's Attack Type. For example, Uppercut.
Image
As you can see, Uppercut has three times the damage of a Punch. However, using it creates Yellow Opening, but the Attack type is Green and Blue.
Which means you need another move to combo with the Uppercut, either to create Green or Blue Openings for it (with Punch of Flex), or take advantage of the Yellow Opening it creates (Raven's Bite or Sideswipe, for example).

Restorations are easy to explain.
There are 10 different restoration moves in total. Your character starts with 3 basic ones: Quick Dodge, Jump and Sidestep.
These help you remove 20% of your current Green, Yellow and Blue Openings, correspondingly. Since the reducing is calculated in percentages, it’s easier to remove higher Openings (20% of 70 is 14, while 20% of 5 is 1). Your Opening also naturally go down over time, helping your lower your small openings on their own. Keep in mind that your starting deck does NOT include a way to reduce Red Opening, which means you will get gored by pretty much any animal, once they get their IP up.
To get a Red Restoration and other, better moves, you will have to grind different animals. Some of these better Restorations include Zig-Zag Ruse (-50% Yellow and Red Openings), Artful Evasion (-20% every Opening), Flex (-10% Red and Blue, your opponent receives +15% Blue). To balance moves like Zig-Zag and Artful Evasion, your opponent receives free Initiate Points, when you use them.
Like almost every other move, Restorations are affected by the number of copies you have in your deck, and reduce more based on μ.

On Initiative.
Initiative Points (IP for short) are a resource that is spent on more advanced moves. You generally need to find a way to generate them, first, as your deck starts without any way to do it. This can be very annoying, since it based heavily on random. Study the Combat Moves page on wiki to learn who to farm for IP generating moves.
The most common and sought out IP generator is Take Aim. It allows you to gather Points relatively quickly and from a distance. Take note that the more IPs you have, the slower the cooldown will be on Take Aim and Think. If you have 7-8+ in the bank, it might be more effective to use Death or Glory stance for IP, or even other options like Watch its moves.
IP requirement is stated in a move’s description. A single digit means the amount of IP the move will consume, when used (for example, Chop costs 1 IP, and Sting costs 2).
There are also moves like Cleave, that cost 4+2 IP. That means that you have to have at least 4 IP collected before you can use it. Using it will cost 2 IPs.
Moves like Chop and Cleave are a great way of getting your stone axe or bronze sword damage in, but using them costs


Here’s a small calculator i’ve put together to understand openings and damage correlation better: https://goo.gl/MBW8Rt
Don’t forget, the attack cooldown scales the difference between your and your targets agility, so having more Agi is always good.
Bullet points:
᛫ Use attacks to create Openings.
᛫ Match the Attack Type of your moves with the Openings you create. Try out some combos.
᛫ When the Openings get high, your target will start taking damage.
᛫ The amount of Openings you create depends on your Combat Skill (Unarmed or Melee), type of attack you use, and your target's Stance and Combat Skill.
᛫ In order not to die, use Restorations to reduce your own Openings.


3. Fighting process and combat moves/deck.

Here’s how the PvP and PvE works currently: you can level up either Melee Combat or Unarmed combat, and use dedicated or mixed decks. From the calculations point of view, it's more efficient to level up only a single type of combat skill to get more Openings. In this guide, i recommend leveling up Unarmed Combat, and use Melee moves like Chop to actually deal damage in fights.
Here are all combat stances in the game, as you can see, Unarmed has more interesting ones, which is why i recommend leveling them up.
Combat Stances

Here's an example: you have a character with 100 UA and 15 MC.
You use Unarmed Combat stance like Combat Meditation (100% of defence, less attack weight, but you attack faster when you get hit) or Oak stance (150% of your UA counts as defence, you reduce 5% of your highest opening every time you get hit.);
Use Unarmed moves like Punch or Flex to gain Openings, then use Utility moves like Opportunity Knocks to drive your target Openings into 70-100%. Once your enemy is ready to receive a death blow, you use Chop or Sting or Cleave to actually deal damage with your sword. Your Melee skill doesn’t affect the damage per se – having more skill only increases openings more, and damage is calculated separately. But you don’t need to increase it further when your target is already low on defence, so everybody levels up Unarmed combat since it has much more interesting effects than Shield Up.
All of those move names sound really fancy, right? Have a look at the Combat Moves list on Wiki.
When you kill a creature, you have a chance to unlock additional move or a copy of that move (or you can ask a friend to teach you). Having more copies is good because the more of the same move you put into your deck, the better it becomes (basic moves have coefficient of 1, each copy add an additional +0.1 to the formula, up to 1.4).
You can see what exactly becomes better by looking for Mu symbol in description of the move (μ). For example, «cooldown: 70/μ » means that stacking more moves reduces the cooldown of that move (from 70 at 1 copy, down to 46 with 5 copies).
Stacking means simply having more cards of that move in your deck. There are 30 deck-card-slots in your combat deck, and 10 active combat slots in your fighting GUI. You can have up to 5 copies of every card (except block stances), which increases their effectiveness. Always max out your main Openings creators and Restoration moves.
Bullet points:
᛫ Level up Unarmed and Punch/Uppercut/Flex at people to create high Opening. Use OpKnock if you have it.
᛫ Chop/Sting/Cleave/Sideswipe once Openings are high enough. Your Melee skill is not part of the damage formula.
᛫ Use Restorations to lower your own Openings.
᛫ Always load the maximum copies of the same moves into your deck. They get better.



4. How to hunt effectively. Even you can do it!

This guide is good an all, but you still will have a bad time trying to punch a hydralisk-ant with 10 agility and 5 UA.
Hunting on feet is very dangerous, because you can not outrun most of the animals when your own Openings get high and you start taking damage. To hunt more effectively, i suggest using the Boat-hunting or hiring a wild horse by feeding it a clover (tip: to pacify a wild animal (horse, hog, goat, ram, auroch) run up directly to it and click it with a clover. This way it won't do the stupid shy dance around you).
Horse hunting is easy — you just outrun your prey if things go sour, restore openings to 5-10%, then attack again. Animals don't use restorations while chasing, which gives you an edge.
Boat hunting is a bit more complicated, but more reliable, as you don't run out of boatpower (:
Here's how it works:
Build a boat and find a long penis-like protrusion of shallow water. Due to the jorb’s phallic obsession, you can find quite a few around.

Image

Aggro and lure an animal as far away from land as possible, onto the tip.
Then, position yourselves in the deep water between the animal and the landmass, and start punching the poor beast. As soon as your openings go up and you start taking damage (usually at 20-30%), swim back into safety of deep water and use Restorations to lower the Openings. The animal will courtly wait for you to come back.
After a couple of rounds, the animal will start fleeing away from you, bouncing around the deep water boundaries. Don’t let it escape!
In general, animals will start fleeing, if they are taking damage and can’t path to you. You can work around this by quickly ending the fight and re-aggroing your prey when they flee. It will promptly run back into the trap. This method won’t work when It’s fleeing because of low HP, tho. Blocking animals in is always recommended.
Some animals love to bounce at 90 degree angle and head straight back to the land, try to bodyblock them in that case. And be careful, it can turn back on you, just repeat the process if it does. This is the most effective hunting strat for newbies atm. You can kill many dangerous animals using it, expect for swimming creatures. Hunt them on the horseback, as they are slower on land, or trap them using other methods, as described below.

• You can also make a palisade box for your prey, lure them there, and attack safely from outside the walls, as the melee range is longer then the palisade hitbox (or you can aggro the beast and hide inside yourself, then barricade the animal outside with an alt with stuff so it wont flee).
• Or, alternatively, you can surround yourselves with bushes and rocks, and then attack the target from the safety of your fortress (very useful for taming).
• Another useful method is luring you prey to a very long cliff ridge, and then jumping over it. Your opponent will be left stuck behind the cliff, unable to path around to you. Use this to reduce openings, but keep in mind, that you still have to chase it, when it gets low. Ideally, ask your friend to box the animal in with unbreakable things like bushes, rocks or alts. You can use logs or boats, but fleeing animals tend to bash stuff.
• Alternatively, you can use a cave entrance, or a house door (disclaimer: some animals can bash your house). Jump out, punch a few times, then hide to reduce openings.

Here's a table that roughly allows you to understand how much stats and skills do you need to slay the beasts:
Image
The stats given for the «fair fight» assume that you know what you're doing, but are on foot. Use different cheesing tactics otherwise. Lynxes are not included because they are ashamed of the model Jorb gave them and will probably run away at the light-speed if you try to punch them.
Bullet points:
᛫ Abuse the boat hunting/palisade hunting. Most animals can't get you while you're in the deep water.
᛫ Positioning while boathunting is important. Dont let the beast run away.




5. Taming tutorial


Now that we've figured out how to fight, here's a way for you to simplify taming.
Step 1: Prepare a taming pen as shown. It's a location surrounded either with impassable terrain or non-bashable items. Best things you could use are cliffs, boulders and bushes. This way, when aggroed, the animal cannot physically leave the pen by breaking things.
Image
Step 2: Find a clover and a tamable creature. Sprint right up to it and click it with a clover (don't tame it from range), then rope it and hearth back to your base. You can move around with clover on your mouse cursor, if you hold the alt button.
Step 3: Leash the beast to a tree, column or a hitching post inside the pen. This completes first 15% of the taming process. Wait 12-24 hours.
Step 4: When the animal is ready to fight (it will take a seductive stance, spreading its hips and rocking back and forth), aggro it from outside the pen and press the «Peace» button in the upper-right corner. This way you can safely attack it for ~150 damage from outside the barricade. Feel free to chop, cleave and sting it, just don't deal too much damage.
After that, lift one of the boulders, run in and Punch it until it yields. Punching deals less damage per attack, so it's a safer way.
Sheeps require less damage, while boars and cows are tougher. You can check the wiki, animals yield to you when their HP is somewhere between fleeing and death. If you deal too much damage or the animal can't path to you directly when it yields, it will die instead. Free meat, tho.
You can, alternatevily, tame beasts by shooting them with arrows instead of punching, following the same logic.
Image
Step 5: Once you've done a spar, you'll receive more % of taming. Re-leash the animal and wait. Repeat until tamed.



6. Armour, Hit Points and Death


᛫ How armour and HP works:
Your HP bar actually has 3 different numbers if you mouse over it:
Image
№1: SHP — Soft Hit Points. They represent your current state and your will to continue fighting. This is the main stat that damage is measured in. They regenerate quickly while you have green energy (above 8000), and you will get knocked out if they reach zero.
№2: HHP — Hard Hit Points. They represent your overall health. Every time you take SHP damage, around 10% of it will be dealt to HHP as wounds. Your SHP is capped by your current HHP. When it reaches zero, you die forever.
№3: Total HP — max HP you can currently get.

Each piece of armour has 3 important stats: it's Wear, Hard Soak and Soft Soak.
Image
Both hard and soft armor soak eat damage at a cost of damage to the armor, but the soft soak is only gradually applied to incoming damage, with the full soft soak value of damage only being deducted from the damage if the damage exceeds 2x the soft soak value.
An exact formula for calculating soft soak would be. If X is ((Total damage - Hard soak) / Soft Soak) then the proportion of soft soak actually used to soak damage is 1 - (1 - X)2.
Disclaimer: i have no idea what any of this means. More armour = more good.

Death.
If you get knocked out in the fight, you fall on the floor hard, receiving a concussion HHP damage as a bonus to all wounds you got from the battle.
You then spend around 30 second lying on the floor. During this time your opponent in PVP can loot you. You then get a 15 second window to either log-out, or hearth home. You cannot be re-aggroed during this period. You still can get HHP damage from, say, leaches.
If you choose not to do this, you stand back up with 1 SHP, and might be knocked out again.
If during fighting, or otherwise (wax harvesting, midge bites, nettles harvesting, coal mining and many other activities, for example) your HHP reaches 0, you die forever.
If you have picked up the «Rage» skill, your knocked out body will still be targetable by animals and evil-doers after knockdown. You can and will be re-aggroed. This is a quick way to die, don’t learn Rage if you’re not into bullying people.

Moderator edit: Please see this post for updates to rage and murder mechanics since this post was originally submitted. -- 3 March 2021


7. Glossary and FAQ


Finally, here’s a small glossary for this guide.
Combat School: your deck. You can have up to 10 different Combat Effects in there, up to 5 copies of each, up to 30 in total.
Combat effect: any combat move that takes up 1 of 10 slots in your combat UI
Attack: an Offensive move, that 1. increases Openings on your target, 2. deals damage
Restorations: Defensive moves, used to reduce Openings and incoming damage
Openings: a colour-coded stat, representing a loss of defence. More openings = more damage.
Maneuver: a combat Stance that determines the weight of your passive block, and sometimes grants additional benefits when you’re attacked.
Jorb's original post on the new combat: http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... 39&t=50921
Combat Skill: either MC — Melee Combat, or UA — UnArmed Combat. You generally only want to level up one of them.
Cheesing: Abusing game mechanics in a way to gain an advantage. In fighting case, it's generally trapping creatures by boulders, using a palisade to fight from or trap animals in, or boat-hunting.


If you still have any questions about combat, feel free to ask them - i'll answer and add them to the guide.
Last edited by MagicManICT on Thu Mar 04, 2021 7:16 pm, edited 92 times in total.
Reason: inserted link to updated information on rage and murder
User avatar
zebratul
 
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:15 am
Location: Moscow

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby Necroliter » Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:35 pm

Opportunity Knocks (which scale with Unarmed too)

Please test, from my tests it does not. There is flat (opening*0.4*u) increase. The weight in description is for unknown purpose.

(basic moves have coefficient of 1, each copy add an additional +0.1 to the formula, up to 1.5).

If you start at 1.0 at 1 card, then you end with 1.4 on 5 cards. Or not? :)

You can have up to 5 copies of every card (except block stances)

For consistency sake i`d call it maneuvers.


One of the best and easiest ways of hunting without problems is in duo (or more). Pull animal to the small corner of shallow water (there is plenty of these) and let your friend place boat or two behind the animal. It will not break boats if it tries to flee. It should'n`t be your friend IRL, for those lonely geeks out there, I hunted bear this way with fellow hermit-neighbor of mine.

P.S. You can use body of your friend as block too, if you don`t have too many boats nearby. If animal is not aggressive - he can sit there and block it with his body and boat. Moose is nice example.

Question of mine - how is determined minimal threshold on which you take damage? And how does modified by maneuver defense corresponds with opening attack SHOULD do?

Possible improvement - adding armor description to guide would be nice. What is absorption, why there are two numbers, what is armor HP, how damage is spread among armor and why you still take SHP/HHP damage in armor.
Necroliter
 
Posts: 206
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:29 pm

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby beardhat » Thu Feb 09, 2017 9:22 pm

You should point out that no matter what you will take some damage in PVE fights as some animals cause autowounds.
beardhat
 
Posts: 163
Joined: Sat Jan 24, 2015 9:50 pm

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby TurtleHermit » Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:30 am

Could You explain how moves like "Uppercut" works?

It's kind of confusing as it is green+blue type but actually opens yellow as effect?
User avatar
TurtleHermit
 
Posts: 88
Joined: Mon Sep 16, 2013 1:37 am

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby JackMehoff » Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:06 am

On a question of "While Oak Stance is active, all your attacks will have 50% of their normal attack weight.", does that mean all of your ua attacks do half % in openings and damage?
JackMehoff
 
Posts: 76
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2016 12:14 am

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby MagicManICT » Fri Feb 10, 2017 4:05 am

Necroliter wrote:how is determined minimal threshold on which you take damage? And how does modified by maneuver defense corresponds with opening attack SHOULD do?


If you have 0 openings, you take 0 damage. Beyond that, it's damage taken = damage dealt * size of opening, so doing 5 damage with an opneing of 7 results in .35 damage. Don't quote me, but I think it's rounded down to 0.

Not sure what you mean by the second question. Let me try to answer based on what I think you're asking. Example: shield up--weight of 250% MC. If you have MC of 10, then you block with an effective MC of 25. You opponent has an UA of 50 and is using Oak Stance, which gives 50% attack weight. You opponent punches you with 1 punch card in his deck. His effective attack is 27.5, so it's 27.5 vs 25. (Assuming I'm doing the math right.) I think this answers the later question about Oak Stance and other maneuvers, too.

beardhat wrote:You should point out that no matter what you will take some damage in PVE fights as some animals cause autowounds.


Good point. Ants are the worst at this as they always get 1 point penetrating. Good thing Antacid is easy to heal with Yarrow. Other animals penetrate based on the attack used. Not all of the attacks will penetrate good armor.

TurtleHermit wrote:Could You explain how moves like "Uppercut" works?

The colors on the attack are the colors it hits, but doesn't necessarily create openings there. See the card to see what color opening it creates. In the case of two color attacks see jorb's post about how damage is calculated. Some attack do create openings in defenses completely different than the ones attacked. There are at least a few.

@zebratul: had a very rough draft together I was working on, but as you have this... good. I hate writing, but hated not seeing something like this more. (Linking this in the "How To Guides.")
Opinions expressed in this statement are the authors alone and in no way reflect on the game development values of the actual developers.
User avatar
MagicManICT
 
Posts: 18437
Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2010 1:47 am

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby Glorthan » Fri Feb 10, 2017 5:13 am

JackMehoff wrote:On a question of "While Oak Stance is active, all your attacks will have 50% of their normal attack weight.", does that mean all of your ua attacks do half % in openings and damage?

Weight is related to openings not damage. Which is why you can do a pure ua build and still use weapon moves effectively.
Glorthan
 
Posts: 1099
Joined: Tue Jun 11, 2013 4:33 pm

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby zebratul » Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:42 am

Necroliter wrote:If you start at 1.0 at 1 card, then you end with 1.4 on 5 cards. Or not? :)


I can see your point, and i can only quote jorb on this one:
jorb wrote:[*] Spending more points on a combat effect increases the efficiency of said combat effect in that school. The meaning of increasing the weight of some particular combat effect is indicated in the descriptive text for that combat effect by a μ-symbol (Mu). The actual value of μ ranges from 1 to 1.5, depending on your weighting. Usually, a higher weight for some particular combat effect will serve to reduce its cooldown, increase its damage, or the like.


I'll add armour to the guide, good suggestion, ty.
As for determining damage treshholds - i think you can use my openings/damage calculator to get the rought idea.
User avatar
zebratul
 
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:15 am
Location: Moscow

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby zebratul » Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:44 am

TurtleHermit wrote:Could You explain how moves like "Uppercut" works?

It's kind of confusing as it is green+blue type but actually opens yellow as effect?


Yes! Will add a small section to the guide.
Basically, some attacks scale in damage from one colour of opening, but they create other type of opening on their own.
Which means you have to combo them with other moves to actually deal damage.
User avatar
zebratul
 
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 08, 2016 9:15 am
Location: Moscow

Re: zebratul's Fighting Guide for new players (WiP)

Postby Necroliter » Fri Feb 10, 2017 1:01 pm

Not sure what you mean by the second question. Let me try to answer based on what I think you're asking. Example: shield up--weight of 250% MC. If you have MC of 10, then you block with an effective MC of 25. You opponent has an UA of 50 and is using Oak Stance, which gives 50% attack weight. You opponent punches you with 1 punch card in his deck. His effective attack is 27.5, so it's 27.5 vs 25. (Assuming I'm doing the math right.) I think this answers the later question about Oak Stance and other maneuvers, too.


Following your example - if it`s 27.5 vs 25 - then how much opening should it create? I don`t remember punch opening value (let`s say it`s 10%), so will it create 10*(27.5/25) = 11% opening? Is it linear indeed or is it the way Jorbtar (one of them) said - something about third root?


As for determining damage treshholds - i think you can use my openings/damage calculator to get the rought idea.

My question about threshold is caused by next observation. If i hit animal with 10% opening and my damage at 100% opening is 150 - i deal 1 damage. In theory i should have done 15. Same goes the other way around. I can safely take no damage at 20-25% opening but take 30 damage at 50% opening. For example bear (or any other strong animal) should deal AT LEAST 1 damage when your opening is non-zero. Let`s sat 5% opening and bear deal 100 damage - i SHOULD take 5 damage yet it is not the case, i can tank to some value even without wearing armor. It doesn`t seems to be that simple and linear to me, maybe i need to explicitly test it.
Necroliter
 
Posts: 206
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:29 pm

Next

Return to How do I?

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 6 guests