Odovir's "Much Letters", part 3. Still no potatoes.

[WolfPosts: 22]

Hello there again. To begin with, I feel sorry to tell you, but there will be no images in this post, because I was too lazy. As an excuse, let these beautiful carrots warm your broken heart.

Combat Mechanics

Yes, this thing is still bothers me. I don’t know, why other players didn’t show any complaints about it. Or is it just me, who didn’t see anything? Anyway, we will focus exactly on combat, but after one information note:

The current skills for hunting, assassination and weapon are probably gives us +0.5 damage per skill level (if I didn’t miss anything). Damage increasing formula works on all weapons the same way, even for hammers and daggers. The only difference in damage we have is in the basic amount of it on each weapon. For example: on the same skill level, hammer and dagger will have 18+35 and 12+35 damage, what means their final damage will be 53 and 47 accordingly.

Well, I can’t say that their combat capability has big imbalance. Hammer can strike 4 cells at once, when dagger has faster attack speed. The sword is sharp, the spear is long. Thinking logically, the current weapons are balanced well enough… but only in spherical vacuum. Why? All because of positioning. Sword is very useful against crowds, because mobs always surround you. Dagger is usefull in corridors and 1vs1 fights, when spear can pierce fast for 2 cells long and even through walls. And bow is just a bow. As you can see, every weapon is situative. But not is all good, as it might seem.

Hammers

Yes, HAMMERS. What is wrong with hammers? The answer is here: Who is gonna dare to use hammer in dungeons? Sephi the Destroyer? Who knows… But it seems like only her is using it for combat. Well, hammer is pretty strong weapon, because it can strike in diagonal, 2 tiles long and 4 tiles in general. With this, you can circling around mobs or players without giving them a single chance to strike you. Like a carousel! Hammer is the most strongest and most intresting weapon in the game, but why nobody wants to use it? I’ll tell you why.

Because in reality the best result you will gain with it is hitting two mobs at once. The current geometrics are too bad for hammer to hit more targets, and I don’t want explain you why, you can think of it by yourself. Next goes the PVP, where in duels because of lags and high ping hammer is no better than a spear. With it’s low attack speed, in front of a spear, hammer is useless in outdoor PVP. You can’t even properly fight back with hammer if you are blocked. As you can see, hammer is neither fish, flesh nor fowl. And I’m talking only about solo playing. Have you ever seen a guy with hammer in dungeon raid? All I can say is that to see a dude who swings his f***ing hammer near to your party is much more scary than to see a three green dragons in one room. Seriously, with these hammer hitting geometrics its more easier to kill your teammate than a single mob. I don’t even know why hammer can hit targets as far as spear can. Have you ever seen a hammer long as a spear? What a scary hammer should it be then… Because of this attack range, double wall protection is not as effective as it should be. And why the heck hammers can attack one wall through another?! This is a truly mysterious weapon. It can do stuff that it shouldn’t and can’t do stuff that it should. It is imba and it is useless sh*t. It is a weapon, but everyone uses it as an instrument. This is madness! Madness? … This. Is. HAMMER!!! (*sound of breaking wall*)

Suggestion: remove double cell atack range, add 2 cells around player, like those what sword has. With this change hammer still will be a scary weapon for playing with it in party, but now atleast with optimal balance between atack speed and atack diapason. I think it is more than fair.

Shield

My lovely shield. After getting more than 70 level of it’s skill, I’ve started to hear in my dreams those non stopping shield blocking sounds, after what a huge amount of pus and blood leaked out from my ears and I started to play without sound. Those TUK-TUK-TUK sounds are still chasing me in nights… But thats not what I wanted to say. As a top shield weilder, who played with shield all 104 levels, I’ve become to understand, that shield is kinda ruins the fun. Besides providing you a high chance to completely block an attack, it also adds huge amount of defence. As the result you can see invincible tanks not only in PVE, but also in PVP too. They can get 1 damage from every attack and even block most of them. On the other hand, without shield I get optimal damage, what makes a challenge for me in fighting against mobs and players. But without shield I lose the block chance, and my shield skill becomes useless. In the end, shield is even slowing down atack speed. Ridiculous. I love blocking, I don’t like high defence bonus and I hate attack speed reduction.

Suggestion: Remove defence bonus and attack speed penalty. Yes, I know that this will make the shield another imba, but don’t be rush to throwing stones at me. Because I have an Idea how to balance all this.

Dual Wielding

Be still, my heart!(c) I know, that this is what we all want. Even when I just started to play, I was surprised that I can’t equip two daggers at the same time. Just imagine: two swords, two daggers. More weapons, more attack speed, more blood. Cool, isn’t it? Then even with bonus defence shield will seem balanced. But only if the current damage formulas will be reworked. If swords and daggers will get buffed, then and other weapons too should be buffed. The spear then could have double damage bonus for two-handed style, and standard damage for using it with shield. No more stupid attack speed penalties, no more imba shield defence, no more weak attack for two-handed weapons. Simple, cool, solving a lot of balance and logical problems. What else need this suggestion?

Axe

With the current damage formulas, axe is super-puper-ultimate useless. End of the message.

Suggestion: rework it or delete it. Lets stop this farce.

Bridges

Just to mention, I started the new big project called “The River”. The River supposed to be… erm, supposed to be the river. The river that stretches through the whole map from north to south, east and west. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some romantic trip on rafts across the Mystera continent, to see a beautiful landscapes and enjoy wonders of nature? But the problem is that those stupid roads are blocking rafts! This is really annoying, and also kills all future sailings mechanics. I feel pity for Captain either. Before fishing update he couldn’t fish, and before rafting update he couldn’t float. Now he has fish and rafts, but no bridges. Please, JVH, more bridges for Saptain. And us.

Anyway, thank you Cap for helping me with the project.

Dyes for hair

Yep, that’s all what needs to be said. I want my beautiful long hairs look green, so I need some dyes. Adding new colors to the textures surely will take a lot of time, but as a feature for donators dyes are pretty suitable.

Ending

Thanks for reading me, comrades. Hope that these suggestions will help JVH to see some problems from player’s sight of view, if he didn’t it already by himself. Still, I don’t want make him rush something or listening players mindlessly. He is developer, he see the game as it should be. We are players, we see the game as it might be. Only the balance between these two issues can make the game great.

I wrote a lot of suggestions because it IS time to do so. Low online and lack of feedback can kill the game before it’s “release”, so I just decided to take initiative. Our heroic role is to test, find bugs and make suggestions. But someone thinks of me as a crazy man. Still, I really want to see that JVH’s ToDoom list, but for now, let us just discuss some of this stuff and wait for the upcoming updates.

Carrot.

[Polar BearPosts: 38]

I am Sephi the Destroyer and I approve of this message. I would also like to say that having your blue hairstyle available to me in Pink would be pure heaven!

[GoblinPosts: 94]

Quick response.

Agree:
Dual-wielding (more options! it would balance the shield, but weaken the hammer and bow)
Bridges

Meh:
Dyes for hair (There’s already alot of options. Not a priority for me.)
Combat (No change was suggested)

Disagree:
Hammer (Hitting diagonally gives it it’s own edge and is great)
Axe (Like Pickaxe, doesn’t seem to have been intended to be compared to the other weapons anyway)
Shield (To be balanced with dual-wielding as an option, no need to change any of it’s current stats)

[RobinHood Lvl 95 USEastPolar BearPosts: 40]

Your formulas are definitely off, not that it really matters but I’ll tell you anyway just so we all know. 4 levels of a weapon skill is 1 damage, 5 levels of hunting or assassination is 1 damage. I’m 75% sure they don’t work as decimals, so you can’t get 1 damage by combining 3 hunting and 2 weapon skill.

That aside, I think some combat changes are definitely required. As it stands attack speed is the king by such a large margin, there needs to be a way to balance that a bit. My idea was to give dagger a critical strike chance, give sword a bleed effect, give hammer a stun, give axe armor piercing, and give club the non-lethal blow mechanic that has been talked about.

As for shield, yeah, this is the current meta game, 100% shield block rate. Being completely indestructible trivializes the entire game, pvp and pve. Sure you can break shields in 800 hits for a +0, but you can also just carry extra shields and repair kits. Now that it’s apparent how game breaking it is, I would definitely expect a nerf. Maybe instead of increasing attack speed cooldown, give shield block a cooldown that can be lowered with levels, say 20ms per level.

Dual wielding? Could be a good idea, it would be a big change for dagger if that was made an offhand only weapon. Then we can consider extra attacks, parrying or maybe disarming.

Bridges, sounds cool. Don’t know how it would work. Maybe if we could get another layer above ground zero or something.

[GoblinPosts: 73]

Maybe if we could get another layer above ground zero or something.

Could you explain this more?

[Pino Lvl 9 USWestWolfPosts: 13]

It feels bridges would be easier than that Robin. They can function just like roads, only with different texture of course, then the rafting script can just be set to behave the same as water to move ‘under’ them. Maybe do a bit of work for gfx to show them over the player/raft also, but again, doesn’t feel like any layer rework stuff needs to be done. Just a little raft scripting.

+1 on most of the combat oriented ideas. I think hammer having a wide swing and having the potential to hit up to 5 targets in a perfect situation would be really cool. If 2 handed weapons received a nice damage boost like they should, then it could definitely be a viable weapon. It would still be unwieldy and dangerous in groups, but that feels like a realistic and important thing for such a powerful weapon to need to consider. I know I love my sword, but when I’m down with a group, I often feel I am doing more damage to party than the mobs are half the time due to the wonderful mix of lag and bad positioning. I still love my sword however, and just make more of an effort to be careful. It adds another aspect to the game that people don’t even realize is there usually, especially solo players.

On dyes… definitely would be a cool addition, although I probably wouldn’t use it personally, however I’d love to be able to dye my robe. It would be a bit of a project, either would need multiple sprites for every hairstyle/clothing style, which is quite time consuming to prepare, and doesn’t allow much for expansion, but still would be really cool. I’m not nearly as up on my programming skills as I should be, so don’t even know if it’s possible, but IF you could have neutral colored sprites for everything that only emphasizes the shades involved and not set colors, and then scriptually tint/shade them when drawing, and just have each one have a ‘default’ tint to start with, it feels like dyes would be a nice addition that allows for quick and easy updating/expansion to the sprite sets, and allow for some really unique looks.

anyway, there is probably things I wanted to touch on that I’m missing, but oh well, no more time for now. Good post with lots of ideas to get the juices flowing. Thx Odovir

Edit: thought just occurred to me. We already have color tinted particle effects, so unless they are drawn manually, and not from an image that is just tinted, then there is a chance the tinting idea might be possible(don’t know if it would be worth the time/work required from them to make it with everything else that needs work, I’m just talking from a technical standpoint, it might be possible)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by  Pino.

[PenguinPosts: 3]

If equipment/items/hair have greyscale or primary color renders, that could make coloring them easier

I mean Death to Legion!

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