Game Development: Fighting Quail

[MagicManICT]

So a question especially to you PvP'ers:

If this running around strategy was not a consequence of the combat system, would you still want it or would you prefer a stationary system? OR, I guess, does it not actually even matter as long as the combat system is fair, balanced and interesting?

I'm probably wrong person to be answering this, but...

Most of the PvP I see in combat videos is people... running around, either chasing or being chased. Even the more fixed battles, such as the recent siege at Aurora, are people moving around, not just standing still.

[T0ne]

Old combat system (or slightly tweaked) + new armor decay rate + armor repair + shift overall "combat power" from stats/abilities into armor/weapons.

Just a thought.

[DDDsDD999]

You just can't come up with a sophisticated combat system based on such a boring premise.

Feel free to present better premises.

tl;dr at bottom

The problem with just 1 opening is that it's hard to be dynamic with it, allowing a variety of moves, while at the same time being straight forward: For most of the previous combat systems there was just two ways to fight: Raise green/yellow so you can spam uppercut/side-swipes on animals. Fast moves that deal low damage, but that doesn't matter since animals don't have armor. And the other way, raise blue/red so you can try to land a critical opportunity knocks on a target to widen their blue opening massively, lining up a high damage cleave.

I like the simplification to one opening type, it removes the problem of half the colors being useless at each time. But it doesn't allow for a complex strategy. It's just punch to raise Guard Down, and try to use a weapon move to deal damage if it gets too high. This is where I see the purpose of the two openings: Guard Down, and Opportunity Knocks. Guard down is where you try to whittle your opponent's defense down with small attacks, and Opportunity Knocks is where you go for a strategic or opportune hit. But it doesn't work that way. imo, make opportunity knocks interact with how wide the opponent's guard is down. Here's how I would do it:

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Opportunity Knocks
IP cost: 4
Openings: 100% of the opponents Guard Down is added to their Opportunity Knocks opening

This makes it basically a "taking advantage of an opening". Opportunity Knocks opening should slowly decay if it's recently been raised, gradually increasing the decay rate over time. Next there needs to be some moves to use it:

Let's make a big damaging attack, Valorous Strike, to use this. It relies more heavily on a wide Opportunity than a fair fight. Characters that may be out-statted may use this as an attack for its unreliable, yet situational use:

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Valorous Strike
Weapon: Any melee weapon
IP cost: 6
Damage: 90% (Opportunity Knocks opening is effectively tripled for the purpose of damage)
Cooldown: High

Next a big damaging attack that doesn't RELY on opportunity knocks, but can still take advantage of its ability to make really wide openings really fast. A strong candidate for the fighters with decent stats that want a reliable big hit, and don't want to take too big of a risk:

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Raven's Bite
Weapon: Any axe
Damage: 110% (Opportunity Knocks opening is effectively 150% for the purpose of damage)
Cooldown: Medium

And finally something for high statted fighters that aren't trying to "take advantage" of the opponent, instead just trying to over-power through sheer strength:

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Cleave
Weapon: Any heavy, edged weapon
Damage: 150% (Opportunity Knocks openings is effectively 75% for the purpose of damage
Cooldown: High

But there's only one way to raise the Opportunity Knocks opening. We need some supporting moves. Let's do one that tries to widen an opponent's Opportunity even further, without relying on their Guard being down. This comes at the cost of IP:

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Low Blow
Damage: Low, 10% extra effectiveness from Opportunity Knocks
Openings: 7.5% Guard Down, 10% Opportunity Knocks
IP Cost: 2
Cooldown: Medium
(maybe) Local Cooldown: Medium, about double the global cooldown

Let's do something for the "supporting characters" that want to stick on their opponent. This move lets the weaker characters try to pressure the opponent's Opportunity consistently, more than just pressing Opportunity Knocks and walking off. Note this refreshes the Opportunity decay, which means that the opponent is pressured into using a defensive move for their Opportunity (more on this below):

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Low Blow
Damage: Low, 25% extra effectiveness from Opportunity Knocks
Openings: 5% Guard Down, 5% Opportunity Knocks
IP cost: 1
Opponent's IP: +1
Cooldown: Low-Medium
Local Cooldown:

Now some defenses so someone doesn't just get their Opportunity to 100 and is unable to do ANYTHING. These should come at a high global and local cooldown, give the opponent IP so they can continue their assault if the user is vulnerable, and mostly just be used to dodge a predictable incoming attack:

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Yield Ground
Reduces: 50% * μ Opportunity Knocks
Cooldown: Medium
Local Cooldown: High
Opponent's IP: +4

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Momentous Dodge
Reduces: 80% * μ Opportunity Knocks
Cooldown: High
Local Cooldown: Very High
IP cost: 2

This is the foundation I'd start with. The numbers and stuff are very rough, but mostly just to give an idea of how I would see this working.

Also remove local cooldowns on nearly every move except ones that shouldn't be spammed like: Artful evasion, Regain Composure, Opportunity Knocks (?), and the Opportunity Defenses I made up. Local cooldowns are just way too plentiful: they are really difficult to manage (most MOBA's have 4 cooldowns TOTAL) and make moves useless since your bar can only hold so many.

tl;dr: Guard Down is the "reliable" opening, useful if you outstat your opponent, or are fearful of risky moves. Opportunity is the "risky", "going for a kill" opening, that also acts as an equalizer for stats. If an opponents Guard is wide from a strong ally, the weaker characters can Op-Knock the enemy, to make a big bonus opening. A weaker character might also try to extend the opponent's Opportunity by spamming Low-blow, which refreshes their Opportunity Opening, but costs IP, and granting their enemy IP for a possible turn-around. A weaker character can also try to damage a strong enemy by landing a high-risk, high reward attack like Valorous Strike: its damage is multiplied by the Opportunity opening, more than the Guard Down opening, with a high cost and cooldown if the enemy lands a last-second defense against Opportunity.

[fenrirfenix]

I'm not much of a fighter, because permadeath was too terrifying to fuck with. I've played since back when foxes were the most dangerous things and you had to ask jorb or loftar personally to spawn you a mine in game and I've only just recently figured out how fighting works well enough to not get murdered by animals. My only participation in PvP was getting ganked by a pair of people that knocked me out faster than I could tell what was going on.

This seems like a pretty gross over-simplification of combat. Either there aren't enough new functions to properly carry whatever vision the devs had or trying to cobble it together out of the pieces of the old system isn't working. The four color system seemed to have the possibility of being a little more sophisticated (I don't think it ever got there, to my understanding) with using your 10 given abilities to specialize in attacking red/green openings or green/yellow openings, with different focuses being more effective on different animals based on what their defenses are. Trying to cover all four colors in defense would take up a considerable amount of the move slots and limit what attacks you could bring. Granted, it seems like you really only needed a couple to get the job done.

Local cooldowns seem good in premise, because using the same attack over and over again is hardly realistic. Trying to kick a dude in the head several times in a row is obviously going to stop working after a certain point. Maybe animals aren't as smart. Not being able to spam the same move over and over does force you to choose a wider variety of attacks, and thus have potentially fewer slots for restorations. But now, there is only one opening and all restorations affect it.

Again, I barely know how to fight, but it seems like the best fighting style is doing the math of opening% / speed to see what the fastest path to getting their defense down, and then damage / speed to do the most damage per move. IP always seemed a little silly, because you either get none or quick barrage your way to 20 or however much you need. There seems to be a more limited strategy because, again you're thinking only on one defense/attack style against the possibility of the four or combinations of them. Even still it became a pretty simplified system of qb + cleave, with the occasional restoration to kill any animal I came across. Some tweaks to mismatch the openings on cleave and qb would be a good way to stop this if they thought this type of combat was overly cheesed.

Armor deterioration - thumbs up. It'll take some tweaking so hopefully one beating won't ruin all your good stuff. The obvious issue is right now everybody has their favorite set and is worried about losing it but I think that's the name of the game. How long ago was everybody losing their whole character and several months of progress? I would say the best balance here is a more variety of armor from different sources, but then I would guess more content is always a goal.

Animals are now way more powerful. I can still kill boars without trouble, in exchange for some damage to my armor. A bear unhorsed me and almost ate my face, and did 30-40% damage to all of my armor. Before I could kill single walruses with a few scratches, again, using two combat moves repeatedly. I think this is because the old moves don't translate well. If before I have four separate restorations that recover 30% to one of the four colors, now I have four restorations that each restore 30% and my single defense is way more secure. This goes for attacks too. I'm sure some effort was put into keeping this from happening, but something is off on animals.

I liked the old system better. Probably because I was good at it.

EDIT:

The problem with just 1 opening is that it's hard to be dynamic with it

Well, my post is redundant now.

[Sarge]

That is an awesome post DDD's.

In my little bit of testing in PvE vs the little bit of PvE I did the last 2 weeks on the previous system I agree that a single opening type feels dull now.

I just also want to comment from a noob perspective that the term Guard Down is confusing. Getting Guard Down up, your Guard Down down, the opponent's Guard Down down or up? And then some, or one? attack has a "Your own Guard Down" something, which I have no idea if it's a buff or a nerf for using that attack.

[Schattengaenger]

So to make it clear almost all community is against or don't like new changes.

I guess I count to the few who like it then. Even though I am not much of a fighter (since any meaningful PvP is to some extend just won by having disgusting high stats) I will learn it soon and I know that they put a lot of effort into the new system.
Certainly it is not fair to (mostly ... I have seen well mannered, constructive critique) just yell at them because something is diffrent and you just don't like it because it is not what you are used to. the only constant in the universe is change. Everything will change eventually.
Not for a secound have I regretted to buy myself a year worth of gold-subscription.

But since this is the "eternal alpha", there are some ideas I would love to see implemented.
In this context I can only secound jtpitner. It would be nice to have something (maybe traps or something else) that is only really effective against the uncautios and animals.

To come to the point:
Thank you Jorb and Loftar for you continued efforts in improving the game and playing-expirence for us.

Kind regards,
Manny

[Schattengaenger]

Attack has a "Your own Guard Down" something, which I have no idea if it's a buff or a nerf for using that attack.

From the double negative, I'd say that it reduces the amount that you have you guard down, thus "increasing" you guard/attention or in other words makes your opening smaller.

[Sarge]

It turns out the new armour wear is kinda kinky. Half a day's worth of PvE testing and I'm basically naked.

With noob stats, here's what's working best for me so far for PvE:

- Quick Barrage - spam to 7 IP
- Knock It's Teeth Out - to get mob dizzy (it seems to just always work never mind what the tool tip says?)
- Raven's Bite
- I also have Cleave in my deck for stronger mobs and use that next if it's still alive

If there was another attack that made sense after this I would add that as the fifth card in my deck and have zero restorations. Restorations seem just too weak and in all the testing I took the least damage by just going for it. The quicker I could kill it the less damage I took. Restorations just dragged it out and gave the mob more opportunities to wreck my gear.

My fifth card at the moment is Regain Composure though, but I'm still looking for a better 5th. I don't know if there are more options if you're wielding a sword. I'm wielding a Woodman's axe.

I'm also carrying a shield now and have Shield up in the F1 slot which seems to be always active? I dunno can someone confirm if you just permanently have buffed defences with shield up in your deck?

If this helps any other noobs then great.

[Chebermech]

Another variable worth taking into consideration is weapon damage / effect. Right now every weapon is useless compared to b12, yes you can arguably have a hirdsman sword for sword only attacks / parry and use shield which isn't really that good either, but can be easily tweaked to make it more useful. Though once 2h sword comes out i feel like 2h will be the only meta judging by the past. I've tested all the weapons in the game at approximately same quality, where of course nothing comes close to b12, but just comparing all 1h weapons, nothing beats hirdsman sword either. The armor penetration is so insignificant that you hardly see any difference, same goes for attack speed, if you are fighting someone of your skills/stats level, it makes no difference apart from damage being worse than on hirdsman. In my opinion damage of 1h weapons should be recalculated, taking into consideration the difficulty of getting the quality up, as well as changing/adding or tweaking the numbers of the effects on them. Maybe even nerf the damage of b12 by reasonable amount, if killing people too fast is a problem, or make the effects of wielding two weapons stack (for faster attacks or bigger armor penetration bonus), and making it viable to use both sword and axe attacks if both are equipped.

[jordancoles]

Time to quit haven until combat works, because now it's unplayable, as most of people said u should first let us test it in valhalla instead of breaking our 5v5 fight.. If I were you I would bring back previous combat for time that u are trying to fix current one.
I was going to buy a gold-sub for a year but now im really dissapointed with ur work.. Shame on u Jorbtard.

Thank you for the consideration, but I would caution you that there will almost inevitably be setbacks over the course of a year's development, so disappointment may be baked in the cake. I would think three times before supporting us, I'm glad that you do, and certainly there are AAA productions out there more worthy and deserving of your hard earned shekels. I'm afraid that our experience with testing in Valhalla has been that it is lacklustre and uninteresting. No one bothers to really test it, because it doesn't really matter in Valhalla, and those who do, labor under arbitrary and obscure circumstances. Perhaps it can be improved upon, but I am somewhat skeptical.

Valhalla would need to be improved in a few ways before it could be used for proper testing and tbh I'd be willing to pledge a sub and a month of time to see it given some attention because there is potential there

1) logging in to valhalla should automatically set your stats at the cap (if you log out or die outside currently you need to spend time resetting stats again)

2) all skills and abilities should be unlocked upon logging in. (Currently we lack most maneuvers because its not possible to buy all of the required skills for them)

3) allow for us to set gear qualities. Maybe right click the equipped item to set its quality could work. Currently the gear q is way too varried. You either get a q13 b12 or a q200 with nothing really in between

Do those things and valhalla will get some use