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Slowing down combat
Now I'm not sure what many of you would think of this, but in the past recent years I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the speed of combat. I guess this could be do to a few factors:
-I'm getting old
-Bahrain has too much lag
-Nostalgia
But I think just as well it could be a few of these things:
-The rise in artifact availability to players, making the speed threshold generally lower, and more tactics being developed and widely spread as the only way to fight at a certain speed
-More classes have various ways to cause more afflictions, sylvan/occie can be more precise and generally quick in dishing out multiple things at once. Serpents speed increased, changes to hypochondria
-classleads. Skills just seem to be naturally faster these days, and I think that comes from years of classleads saying "X is too slow" so something might get sped up a tiny bit, but it ends up making another skill less effective, and kind of goes in a circle.
Like I said, this is pretty subjective, but as I got around to trying to mess around with shaman and sometimes toying with some other classes, I feel like there is a lot more affliction tracking that is needed and a good algorithm for figuring out what attack or affliction to use next.
I've seen 2h counters that will instantly bypass parry (check their parry, if you go for a leg it switches to the other), triggered tumbles to an appropriate room if your legs are broken and prone, things such as that. Now I recognize that a lot of these things are a kind of ease of access thing and I am sure plenty of it would still be done. But many times in combat I see that the winner can often be done because of a fluke of a system, or an input sent in at a certain point that ends up firing instead of the desired input (lag between applying to head, then getting your leg broken but not having it switch to legs in time)
But, even as I go through doing a slew of alias' to make my offense somewhat reliable, there are still things that I don't seem to have the reflexes to do that get handled by a system. Touching tree if I'm inches from a lock sometimes, or automatically fitnessing, when I had instead hit the attack button. Sure those have saved my life before but in that moment it was a computer that took over for me and fixed my mistake before I could go through with it.
So I know restructuring how balance works would take a ton of work and completely re-evaluating every kind of curative, balance, and defense, so I won't even go into how that would work.
I'm mostly interested in if anyone else happens to feel that combat in itself is a bit of a blur, and if it could be slowed down a bit. I think combat could be decently slowed down, and while automation wouldn't really stop I think it would be easier to ponder your next attack or defensive posture before you regained balance, and before you were pummled again. If instead tactics that relied on a .1-.2 second window relied on a half second window. I think it would make things slightly easier to understand and allow you to make some better judgment calls rather than having a system interject at the right moment when you're not quite expecting it.
TL:DR I'm not really a combatant and I probably don't know what I'm talking about. It would just be a personal preference
-I'm getting old
-Bahrain has too much lag
-Nostalgia
But I think just as well it could be a few of these things:
-The rise in artifact availability to players, making the speed threshold generally lower, and more tactics being developed and widely spread as the only way to fight at a certain speed
-More classes have various ways to cause more afflictions, sylvan/occie can be more precise and generally quick in dishing out multiple things at once. Serpents speed increased, changes to hypochondria
-classleads. Skills just seem to be naturally faster these days, and I think that comes from years of classleads saying "X is too slow" so something might get sped up a tiny bit, but it ends up making another skill less effective, and kind of goes in a circle.
Like I said, this is pretty subjective, but as I got around to trying to mess around with shaman and sometimes toying with some other classes, I feel like there is a lot more affliction tracking that is needed and a good algorithm for figuring out what attack or affliction to use next.
I've seen 2h counters that will instantly bypass parry (check their parry, if you go for a leg it switches to the other), triggered tumbles to an appropriate room if your legs are broken and prone, things such as that. Now I recognize that a lot of these things are a kind of ease of access thing and I am sure plenty of it would still be done. But many times in combat I see that the winner can often be done because of a fluke of a system, or an input sent in at a certain point that ends up firing instead of the desired input (lag between applying to head, then getting your leg broken but not having it switch to legs in time)
But, even as I go through doing a slew of alias' to make my offense somewhat reliable, there are still things that I don't seem to have the reflexes to do that get handled by a system. Touching tree if I'm inches from a lock sometimes, or automatically fitnessing, when I had instead hit the attack button. Sure those have saved my life before but in that moment it was a computer that took over for me and fixed my mistake before I could go through with it.
So I know restructuring how balance works would take a ton of work and completely re-evaluating every kind of curative, balance, and defense, so I won't even go into how that would work.
I'm mostly interested in if anyone else happens to feel that combat in itself is a bit of a blur, and if it could be slowed down a bit. I think combat could be decently slowed down, and while automation wouldn't really stop I think it would be easier to ponder your next attack or defensive posture before you regained balance, and before you were pummled again. If instead tactics that relied on a .1-.2 second window relied on a half second window. I think it would make things slightly easier to understand and allow you to make some better judgment calls rather than having a system interject at the right moment when you're not quite expecting it.
TL:DR I'm not really a combatant and I probably don't know what I'm talking about. It would just be a personal preference
Replies the scorpion: "It's my nature..."
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Comments
[ SnB PvP Guide | Link ]
Could it be? Yes. Should it be? Probably not. It would absolutely kill the game for me, I imagine. Long balances are incredibly painful for me, personally, so it's simply not a game I'd enjoy playing.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Also, I think part of the rush of combat is that it all happens so quickly, you either win or die, but whichever it is, it happens fast. Prolonged combat and spars never quite have this feeling, so I am not sure it'd be for the best if PVP as a whole was made to feel like this.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
That said, I enjoyed fighting in retardation. Get a mage, drop ret and have fun. It is another world altogether.
I'm caught on slowing it down in general - as a non-com the speed and complexity is part of what scares me about combat (also personality-wise it's just not my cup of tea, which isn't Achaea's fault by any means, I dislike combat for the same reason I dislike chess and Risk). But also the speed and complexity is obviously something the combatants who pour their time, energy, and money into it seem to love.
So I'm not sure if it's fair to want the game to adjust to people like me who are not hardcore into combat. The lure of multiclass seems to be primarily around combat strategy, and that makes more money for Achaea, which is a wonderful thing.
There is also the factor, though, that speed can completely shut out folks who have a lot of lag who might otherwise really want to get into combat. Server-side curing definitely mitigates this to a point.
It's complicated.
I don't think a slowdown would really change the pace of combat at all to be honest. I think a lot of combat ends up going longer than intended because of someone screwing something up. Most of the time a good fighter will be finishing things up on the first proper execution.
I guess a lot of it is just looking at the people who have affliction trackers/ venom selectors as part of their main offence. The game is fast enough that people are more reliant on specific codes of affliction settings than being able to properly decide what they want on the fly.
Right now a lot of the afflictions seem to be: I'll press F1 if I want to stack kelp afflictions with a bloodroot spam or I'll press F2 if I want to stack ginseng afflictions with a bloodroot spam. Now I know not everyone is guilty of that but I think the speed is what makes people somewhat unable to do that on their own two feet.
I remember back before speed knights were the only way to play knights and when serpents had 2.8 second dstabs. Sure the furious speed of combat might be the draw, but if you look at it over the course of the years it really seems like has done nothing else BUT speed up. But maybe again I might be wrong. It seems like since the whole meta of achaea is to go as fast as possible, always, why couldn't it be slowed down to compensate for actual human inputs rather than pitching triggers against triggers?
I think whether it's too fast can hugely depend on what class you play, really. I've toyed around with bm/monk/watched a lot of dual-blunt knight, and those have been pretty great because if I have to focus on my afflictions and forget to attack for a second or need to run out of the room for a breather because I don't know what's going on, I can do that and it only slows me down instead of messing me up. And I could play a propagation-focused sylvan and not worry much about afflictions, if I wanted to. So I think that "slower" options do exist right now, to some extent, but I also think that slowing things down/providing a practice mode that's slower could really help ease entry into a lot of popular, but affliction-centric classes.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
However I think as curing advanced and coders began to find the most optimal way to survive, that 1.5 timer on herbs specifically was not quite enough. So offence got sped up or given new ways with how they interact with someone.
This also applies, but less so to salve curing. some on the use of tree or mixing in restoration. The perfect curing set could never be vivisected, so the solution to that was frenzy, a way to speed up your attacks.
Since systems have become more complex, the game has been designed to make things faster and faster to fit in the constraints of the nearly static herb/health/salve balances, rather than doing a full out re balancing of speeds that can still be fast and furious to play, but slow enough for a persons natural reflexes to take part in.
That said, I don't believe people would actually feel slower balance times all that much if everything was uniformly slowed. I hate playing slow balance classes now, yes, but if proportionally I stayed fast, I would definitely not mind. It'd be pretty great for helping people get into combat, and it's obvious that speeding up combat hasn't really fought automation as much as helped it in the end.
I really cannot respond and type fast enough to do serpent combat without some sort of offensive script. That's a bit sad.
A lot of people turned off from combat are convinced they 'can't' do things, but you really, really can if you stick to it and believe in yourself.
That doesn't mean combat should remain as is, though. It would be way better for a lot of people if it was uniformly slowed across the board, imo. But until then we have to deal with what we have.
I have a friend who is very very good with reacting to stuff quickly, some people are just naturally good, some people are naturally bad. I remember someone tipped over a drink when we were at burger king once as teenagers and he got himself and his bag out of the way before the drink spilled. He'd moved before I'd even processed what had happened. If I was in that seat, I would have been drenched.
My skills lie in other areas, but it's a bit frustrating when the only option to some classes seems to be to script the hell out of them offensively as well as defensively. I accept this is how things are, but if given the option to vote for slowing it down a bit, hell yes I would!
I don't really understand complaints about "long balances" being boring - are you really going to get bored if there's a four second interval instead of a two-second interval?
Pretty much everyone in combat uses scripts, if not to automate aspects of fighting, then to automate something akin to record-keeping. And gagging and highlighting are huge. It's damn near impossible to fight without significant investment into customizing the way the game presents the information.
The big problem would probably be how to scale it. If you just doubled every balance, I don't think that would work - there are almost certainly things that have pretty careful timings that don't work proportionally. It would be a really big undertaking.
I think it would be a worthwhile undertaking - people have always talked about how the combat system in Achaea is so engrossing and complex and it's always been kind of a shame that there's a big OOC component to becoming competitive, above and beyond actual knowledge and strategising. But it would still be a really big undertaking.
That being said, every time I've tried to learn combat, it has been too fast for me. I as a human being can't read what is happening, process it, and then react to it while also keeping track of afflictions, zillions of cures and combos, and curing systems that react almost instantaneously. That is before you factor in artefacts designed to make it even faster...
Ship combat presents no issue for me, so I feel like my problem with pvp is the speed and the over complexity. It also seems like most people have some kind of artificial-intelligence-super-script that does a lot of this stuff for them, and despite claims that these things are "easy", a high degree of coding skill is needed to really make them work. And nothing turns me off a game that is supposed to be an immersive experience more than boring meta requirements that have nothing to do with the game itself - in this case, learning to code, figuring out SVO/Wundersys, installing complicated client packages to change mudlet into an X-wing cockpit, or what have you.
I'm omni-trans and I don't even feel like I'm entry level.
And if coding were less necessary, you would probably see at least a little bit less coding - it'd change the cost-benefit balance of coding things and there are certainly people who wouldn't put in the time to code things if they could get away with a similar level of performance without them.
But mostly it would open combat up to people who aren't interested in learning to code or in putting in the hours to actually write all the things.