Game Development: Dust & Mud

[dafels]

Here's again an older suggestion of mine:

Give us the option to flee, de-equiping and dropping gear should result a speed boost to running away. Attackers would have something to laugh about and stuff to pickup, cowards could escape and could be hunted again another day instead of dying, quitting and afterwards being unavailable as a MOB.

So, what would it fix? Attackers would just drop their gear too and it will be way more easier to kill the fleeing person since he doesnt have armour and later come back for the dropped gear? You want people to fight naked, are you a prankster granger?

[Pan_w_okularach]

yeah we can make people drop armor OR we can just put everyone on equal footing in terms of movement speed so whoever is better at the game would win.

[Granger]

Here's again an older suggestion of mine:

Give us the option to flee, de-equiping and dropping gear should result a speed boost to running away. Attackers would have something to laugh about and stuff to pickup, cowards could escape and could be hunted again another day instead of dying, quitting and afterwards being unavailable as a MOB.

So, what would it fix? Attackers would just drop their gear too and it will be way more easier to kill the fleeing person since he doesnt have armour and later come back for the dropped gear? You want people to fight naked, are you a prankster granger?

You should be faster when you run, compared to when you fight. And you should be faster with lighter (or no) gear compared to being equipped with heavy armor and wielding a battle axe.

[jorb]

We've been sparring a lot testing this update and we all came to conclusion that even 2v1 is a death sentence now. Even if you do everything right,(keeping openings at 30% or lower, avoid combat with multiple opponents at the same time) you're still going to end up KOed just because of the armor bypassing damage, which you have no effective way of blocking. It probably wouldn't be so inevitable if not for the 5% speed boost introduced in this patch, but because of it and penetrating damage you now have a 5 to 10 minute life expectancy if you run into a couple of players.
Armor penetration is cancer, how about you don't recieve any damage if the opening is less than 50%? 5% speed bonus is excessive, there was no problem staying in melee range with a fleeing opponent as it used to be in legacy, so why exactly was it implemented?

It was implemented because there seemed to us to be a consensus that it was too hard to kill one-another under the last patch, quite simply. Was this not so?

Do the maneuvers help at all in a 1vMany scenario?
Do you like the change to the relative importance of stats?

Would you like to see a change to the speed, the armor penetration or both, and won't either or a combination of the two make it too hard to kill another player?

I love how I am constantly taking small amounts of damage when fighting animals, so I'm in no rush to change that aspect of it.

[azrid]

Would you like to see a change to the speed, the armor penetration or both

Both
Armor set effects:
Full steel set should give you armor that cant be penetrated but slows you down.
Having leather gear should keep your original speed but can be penetrated.

This would balance steel armors being pointless late game and would give use to the less used steel helmet.

[Jesus_Smith_Nandez]

^^ nothing should change the speed of your character

[MagicManICT]

Wearing heavy armor, if anything, should slow you down. Then again, we don't have full plate armor in this game. It's closer to classic Greek or Roman style armor given the approximate time period this is supposed to be set (plus we're missing legs and arm armor). If you look at the story of the victory at Marathon, a runner was dispatched, and he made the run in full gear* immediately after the battle in about three hours according to historians, which really isn't all that slow. Only in the last 20-30 years has marathon times dropped below the 2:30:00 mark, and these are people in almost no clothes.

*Well, according to actual historic theory, he was likely dispatched to warn Athens of the approaching Persian army who were routed at Marathon and retreated to make an attack elsewhere. He probably carried full gear to be prepared to fight at the gates or fields surrounding the city.

So, what would it fix? Attackers would just drop their gear too and it will be way more easier to kill the fleeing person since he doesnt have armour and later come back for the dropped gear? You want people to fight naked, are you a prankster granger?

It's a viable option. Lightweight gear like cloths don't slow you, leather has minimal impact, metal armors slow a good bit. Raiders have to choose how to gear up. Dressing light brings more risk to raiding. Maybe the target takes a person or two out along the way because of it. The obvious issue being "macros to remove gear with a hotkey" in custom clients.

We've been sparring a lot testing this update and we all came to conclusion that even 2v1 is a death sentence now.

This concerns me. It's always been hard enough to escape, but was at least possible.

It was implemented because there seemed to us to be a consensus that it was too hard to kill one-another under the last patch, quite simply. Was this not so?

I don't think a small increase in movement speed is the answer unless there's a penalty to using it. I've not tested the pvp aspects of combat at all with this, so couldn't say if there was one, but I'd probably have noticed someone mentioning it if there was at this point. I've mostly stayed out of this balance discussion because I don't PvP, but this just looks broken in the long run.

As for the comment you made about damage, yeah, I can learn to deal with the small hits, but I'd like to be able to get my character up and running relatively quickly if I'm going to be taking that kind of damage all the time. Localized resources are still too uncommon to be relied upon for regular healing. The natural healing plants (yarrow et al) are nice as they provide a wider access, but feel slow, even for the pace of HnH. (That's another topic of discussion... there's two paces to game mechanics. Might write something up later.)

[tyrtix]

one thing i've found: if the animal speed won't drop a bit while fleeing, the game starts to become "go around and find animal felled by others".
Yesterday i came home with 4 boars, 1 fox and 1 badger, only the latter killed by me.

[DeadlyPencil]

Regarding 2 vs 1 senario, is the "1" using combat mediation? that needs to be tested as it might be possible for the 1 to absolutly destroy 1 of the guys so quickly he cant respond. leaving it a 1v1.

Suggested Balance changes

Low Blow is one of the worst skills, damage is the lowest at 10 and has a 50 second cooldown, and only does a 10% green opening. Buff either damage or the opening % or reduce cooldown. my suggestion is make damage 15 and cooldown 45.
Rip Apart needs a large buff. the skill either needs its cooldown reduced or its IP reduced. The skill is to expensive in both categories. i suggest lowering to 4 IP and 70 cooldown.
Go for the jugular needs its IP reduced, maybe to 2+3 instead for now and see if more people use it.
haymaker should have its damage buffed, the skill is almost the same as kick but it takes longer to do and doesn't give as high an opening %. if you want it to be different, i would increase its damage. maybe start being increasing to 25 damage and see if its used more.

Currently combat meditation seems to be the way to go. i dont necessarily want it nerfed though as i think combat is slow vs a real person. Here are some buffs to think about:

Parry: 1 weapon- 5% red opening when attacked. 2 weapons - 6.5% red openings when attacked
shield: 7.5% damage reduction
chin up: unarmed attacks have 2.5% more armour penetration
to arms: 5% increased damage if axe equiped, 5% increase weight if sword equiped. both if dual weilding sword and axe

[stickman]

when you guys are doing your 2v1s are you in an enclosed area running in circles or flat our running through the forest? if your running in a straight line I would think it would be very hard for the 2nd person to hit u at all really due to getting blocked by his buddy

I am not so sure the speed boost needs to be removed because you can still get people caught on corners and things, you can still swim across rivers. since you cannot be 1 hit anymore you can also cliff jump away now. if you have more CON then your opponents u can attempt a longer swim then they are comfortable with... and the speed bonus doesn't help on horses and everyone fights on horses.

it also doesn't help that the multi attacks don't seem to work. Full circle is a great skill but it doesn't seem to work on people running away. it queues up and never triggers even if your right beside the opponent and they are moving slower then you.

the 2nd issue with multi attacks is that most of the time you wont have any openings on your 2nd and 3rd opponents, the multi attacks right now are designed for like a 3 vs 3 not a 1 vs 3.

if you concentrate on one opponent and get their yellow up and then do a full circle you will hurt 1 person but the second person will get a little bit of green and red opening and no damage...

I think there just needs to be more synergy... like maybe full circle should give less openings but give yellow instead of green? maybe add a few more multi attacks that are yellow/blue to make stuff like storm of swords and full circle usable.