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Comments
So, with apply health to limbs being able to restore two fractures every apply, Arador and I did some testing. We had him parry head and put up rebounding and just stand there.
I used Precision whenever the balance was up... 3 minutes later, he hasn't moved, touched tree or restored. He has 3 chest and 2 leg fractures and by the time I regain balance he's down to three fractures. I stacked on torso first to build sensitivity so that he'd take more damage and have to sip some. I envenomed curare so that hopefully (not likely but hopefully) if he was trying to hinder me it would slow him down since the balance in carve/shatter is nice and since almost everyone prioritizes paraylsis over sensitivity it would be an extra hit with sensitivity.
This doesn't even take into account things like Demon Syphon, and other passive curings... or the fact that 50% of achaean classes use paralysis spam as part of their general offense. And honestly, if he parried head, prioritized leg fractures over torso fractures, set his fracture curing to 50% health he could basically just ignore me and go get some coffee.
So, what I'd like to know is if we're doing something totally wrong or if you guys could test the same thing and see if you get similar results.
Thanks for your time.
Edit: And Arador pointed out that once curing catches up and people start NOT applying to limbs that have only one fracture and save apply for when you have two fractures or more it will be even worse.
https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/ce6a37c4
Start time of the log is 22:39:38
End time is 22:41:10
SVO touch tree there right at the end for some reason, but should still give a decent indication.
Only sipping, applying health and rebounding for the rest of it.
No passive cures or healing and just one stupid tree touch at the end when I was about to die anyway from the damage.
My initial inclinations are:
(1): the specs are balanced around using all of the skills. Deathaura for more health pressure should be pretty much a staple for infernals going this mode. Infestation less so, but still relevant. If you can't force them to sip health, you'll have issues.
(2): If you're not going to envenom, you should be using a warhammer, otherwise you're getting all the negatives and none of the positives.
(3): precision isn't always best. Focusing speed is probably more benefitial in this situation, particularly when using a bastard sword and being restricted to slower balance times.
(4): He did this a little, but prepping different debuffs at once is far more optimal. Weighting your attacks on one kind makes it far more trivial to heal.
(5): Due to your slower balance, people are often going to drop their own rebounding in active combat. This will likely change things fairly considerably.
2) He envenomed in the later ones but I was so damn laggy I could not get consistent diagnoses. It helps, yes but considering how slow he hits, I think he managed 2-3 hits on me with sensitivity during it all.
3) One stack on that though so I am not sure the one extra hit per rebounding is going to make much of a difference apart from some extra damage pressure.
4) His only other option was arms which would increase the affliction tick and maybe get a few more sensitive hits in. As for healing, I could heal much much smarter just with health. Prio tendons above all else so he can only stick arms and torso, only apply when there are 2 or more fractures on my legs so I do not waste the application to cure only one fracture, rather sipping in those cases. Then I still have not used a single other thing at my disposal. I could use tree, restore, other could use passive healing, I could use vigour to boost health and let my sip go to curing. Even just a few of these here and there will lock him out completely.
5) Indeed they will. They will also hinder the hell out of you with clumsiness, paralysis, breaks, the odd moving of parry for one hit before returning to head.
Curing will only get smarter and smarter against this spec and of course people will realise they can just fly, run like hell and you will lose a lot more than they will when that happens. This was almost two minutes of just standing there, curing stupidly and doing nothing to hinder him apart from rebound.
I've bugged it in game, but it's not currently possible to use the CLASS balance queue for use with Battlefury balance as two handed spec. Hopefully that will get fixed and allow more fluid usage.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Slaughter balance wasn't decreased. We've adjusted the damage against mobs though.
It'll also be affected by battlerage focus speed now, that was an oversight.
Between aura, shield and smart use of parry and 2h gets shut down. That's without any sort of hinder from your target. Oh and restore.
Continuation isn't an option. Against someone with basic server side curing you have to focus precision. Focusing speed doesn't help with your momentum when dealing with aura/shield. I can't really see any situation in which speed would be better than precision.
Then you've got dodgy classes. The to-hit on basic bastards and hammers is just stupid low. even Arty hammers have a disgustingly low to-hit. And of course anyone with evade.
Warhammers are down right useless. The extra speed at the cost of to-hit, damage and no venoms isn't worth it, at all. The Lagua/l/z additions don't help much. The bleeding from Lagul may as well not be there since moss alone takes care of it. The extra limb damage from Laguz doesn't mean anything if you can't build the frac/tendons you need to put someone down long enough. As for the rebounding bypass chance from Lagua. That's just insulting. No sane person is ever going to count on that. It's what 10-20% chance? Sure if it progs when you lag and don't catch aura going up in time or whatever that's nice but beyond that it's not really worth the ink cost. Maybe these things apply better to bual blunt but they don't help 2h.
I like the concept of health pressure beyond raw damage. I like the idea of swinging around a giant hammer/sword. I really really wanted to like this spec and I know a lot of work went into all the new knight toys but 2h really needs an evaluation of it's fracture/tendon/general affliction speed compared to one's ability to cure those fractures/tendons/general afflictions.
Or we can all roll SaB. I'll console myself with being able to use an SoA I guess?
Also forgot to mention that there is no room for thurisaz/hugalaz ground runes outside of an opener when they will be least effective. You try to use them after you've started to try and build momentum and you're just slowing yourself down.
Hugalaz runeblade is pretty monster though. That's like the only nice thing about 2h runie
If you absolutely want to fuck over somebody playing Two Hander, all you need to do is switch parry to the first leg they break. Their prep will continually reset.
Obviously if you just sit there they can eventually kill you with damage pressure, but it's not particularly hard to get away (it's not like you're being actively hindered).
E: Their hunting damage is dabes, though.
Basically fighting Two Handed is like an R.L. Stine choose-your-own-adventure where somebody has already gone through and highlighted the choices that will get you killed. And you get to spend like an hour deciding whether or not you want to die.
There are ways to "maximise" how quickly you can stack but in all honesty, I do not see them fixing the problems with this spec. I wish we could toy around with some other ideas on making it better. So far, I can think of a few but I can not say if they will help, do nothing or make it completely insane, I will admit that.
Also, Battlefury being an "Independent Balance" sounds like a nice idea except when you take into account how long all the abilities take that balance for and how horribly it meshes up with your hits. If you get to the point where you have enough fractures, you do not want to hang around for an extra slash or two so you can get battlefury balance for the Upset. And if you are not using your battlefury every time to focus precision or speed, you are essentially being wasteful and not getting the most out of your offense. You are also much less likely to stack.
So, ideas:
1. Shorten the balances and reduce the damage per hit by the same percentage to keep it reasonable.
Forged Bastard Sword - 3.3 secs up to Lvl 3 Bastard Sword - 3 secs
Forged Hammer - 3.1 secs up to Lvl 3 Hammer - 2.8 secs
2. Tie in Battlefury with hit balance, the same way it is with Voice Balance for Bards. So with every hit you have a choice between Precision, Speed, Upset, Perceive and Continuation right before every hit you dish out. (That would make Continuation useful for a class that can be so easily screwed by hindering and if you use continuation, you still lose a bit of momentum since you did not focus speed or precision.)
3. Let Speed drop the balance time by 0.3 seconds.
4. Now if looping one of these options is too strong, maybe put in a limit on the same Battlefury ability being used twice in a row. Continuation is probably OP against locks like this so maybe put it on a slower rate at which it can be used, like once every 4 balance cycles.
5. From there we can tweak the amount of fracs that the different methods cure to help balance, but at least the class is now more playable and not so damn slow and clumsy.
6. Recover footing can stay as is.
7. Devastating a broken limb should increase the limb damage level if you devastate before the Restoration salve has taken effect. Currently if you break a limb with your hit right before you were planning to devastate legs with 4 fractures and you do the devastate before the restoration salve has taken effect (but after applied), then when the salve takes effect they are left with one broken leg and one shriveled leg. So breaks can actually ruin your offence. To counter this you would have to keep hitting, wait for the limb to be healed and only then continue your offense.
These are just some ideas and theorycrafting. I know it is early, but even now with people not really curing and defending properly against this spec, the shortcomings are already becoming very very clear.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Of course for the fractures themselves, it helps a lot to get those two working together. Each one on its own does not make that much of a difference. Head fracs are bit more helpful for stacking than torso fracs, from what I have found but having both together makes it almost viable (minus all the other shortcomings)
What would we think of not allowing salve+elixer to happen? This would give a bit more reason to speed up the prepping with a warhammer.
Since realistically, a single limb is only going to take up five seconds of salve time, you're only going to be getting a max of 3 fractures in at any given location, or a 1/2 split if you break one leg.
breaking two arms is pretty unrealistic, you'll still be hitting shield. or having the player run, but you will still have a bit of time to recover your lost balance before they start curing all your fractures, even if they shield/flee.
Where it might be a bit stronger would be a leg/arm/arm kind of prep that with venoms, could keep them applying other salves for a bit while you continue to hack at them since you have not expended your actual fractures on anything, you could only be adding fractures and only possibly losing them from tree or passive.
That would add a bit of worth into trying to quick prep some limbs with a warhammer and actually getting the full use out of the skillset. Besides prepping limbs faster like this, I actually don't see a reason in using a hammer really.
What I was talking about is using more normal limb breaks to offset the speed of curing fractures. Prepping and breaking a single leg/epteth/upset would essentially give you an extra fracture that won't be cured right away. Then if you hit an arm with epteth again, there is another fractured added to a new spot. Then you could focus on the other arm.
While you did say 18 seconds salve balance seems like a lot, I really don't see it as too much since your devastate uses up those limb fractures. If you just spent 30+ seconds stacking arm fractures so you could use that 18 second salve balance to then try and get legs, when they can still fly/tumble/etc, are you really going to bother with that?
Which is the issue
2H still definitely outclassed by very basic curing and so you can't really -get- going
Also really disappointed at how much the warhammer (at least base) kind of completely outclasses the sword.
Unless they have very low health or have not intelligently set HEALTHAFFSABOVE and are needing to sip after every hit or two, there is simply no point in using the bastard sword. Even with the venoms and the added bleed. It feels like the sword should be the faster weapon and the hammer should be the slower, more powerful one.
(not sure how a weapon "similar to a longsword in shape and size, but has a longer hilt, and perhaps a slightly heavier blade." is -that- slow)
The quick breaks from the hammer would still make swapping weapons a beneficial and viable tactic specifically for parry mitigation as stated above.
You gave Runies Isaz+engage, presumably at least in part to help with momentum building. But you can't engage with the hammer which you essentially -need- to use in the early stages of a fight and the early stages are when you -need- the room hindrance to keep the target locked down.
Issue isn't late-game. Issue is early-game. Sword should be faster/less damage, hammer should be slower/more damage. Quick limb breaks with hammer + upset would necessitate it's use for quick and easy parry mitigation while faster speed on sword would give some semblance of hindrance early game as well as allow for Isaz+engage to be used when it's needed rather than after you've already gained the assistance of tendons to keep your target within a room or two.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
- 2015/01/05 15:17:34 - Makarios says, "Perceive won't take battlefury balance (but requires it), and parry is shown on perceive. Focus precision/speed are sped up to be useable closer to once per attack, and carve/splinter will knock off bal when stripping shield."
Relatively recent update from Mak. When I was testing 2h with L3 weapons, focus speed was getting some really weird results (Dreadblade was swinging faster than Warhammer), so I don't know what's up with that.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
This helps a shitton
The battlefury balance specifically makes this feel actually usable.
@Makarios you're the best.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten
Once they start sipping health rather than applying, it's probably better than precision honestly.
- Limb Counter - Fracture Relapsing -
"Honestly, I just love that it counts limbs." - Mizik Corten