PVP

I spent the last two days playing A LOT of pvp. It was a lot of fun. More fun than I've had in any other release to date.

But there's a still a long way to go before combat and pvp becomes balanced. There's still a long way to go before combat and pvp becomes something I can play for more than a few days of "testing".

First off, I want to mention a few good things about combat and pvp:

1. I really liked some of the new skills and spells. Confusion was amazing in pvp. This is such a simple spell, but it really had a positive impact on pvp for spell casters. It worked great when you wanted to get away. It was helpful during ranged combat. It was funny seeing your opponent stumble around lost and "confused". Love it!

2. The combat stances were interesting too. As a pure mage, I don't use weapons, so having a defensive stance that gave me more durability was a welcome relief. I didn't see a lot of people actually using these stances though, as I believe the give and take from DPS was just too much for the hardcore pvpers. There's just not a very compelling reason for someone to reduce protection for more damage.

3. The last patch before the devs went on break for the holidays seemed to change most spells so that you could no longer cast them while moving or they would be "interrupted". While this took an hour or two before I was used to it, I eventually loved this as a perfectly good form of balance. Don't cast and move! Love it.

Now for the things I don't like:

1. I don't understand why we have reagents at all if no one is going to have to use them. I'd love to know the percentage of spells that are being cast in the game with all required reagents. I'm guessing it's less than 2%.

For testing, this is understandable. But I'd really like to see more from reagents in future releases. I could really go on and on here, but I'm not going to. I think I've made just about every point I can think of regarding reagents. All spells should require them. Honestly, this is about casual play trumping GOOD play. I hope we choose GOOD over casual.

2. No spells should work on the move. None of them. This is extremely unbalanced because of latency and the fact that there's no player collision. By allows spells like Death Tough and Flame Fist to work on the move, you're giving players a "free hit" as they move through their opponent. Some of the higher level players can time this correctly so they get a hit in their opponents back that crits for well over 60 points of damage. While I appreciate the "skill" involved with timing combos and gauging frame rates, I'd prefer a more balanced system that doesn't reward the top .01% of players that min/max everything to the lowest common denominator.

Player collision during combat should be added, and no spells should be cast while on the move.

3. The range of spells is comically poor. While spells like Fire Arrow can be extended to a moderate range, most spells don't have this same depth. Death Decay is a perfect example. Not only does Death Decay typically not do as much damage as fire arrow, it often can't be cast because it's being interrupted by range or melee attacks.

What I'd like to see is the range of ALL (ranged) spells increased to whatever the extended range for fire arrow is currently. Then I'd like to see options for extended range beyond that.

4. I still can't block anything. Listen, I know that because of latency we're never going to have active blocking, it just doesn't work in an online game. But what we COULD do, is make skills and spells like the stances that last for a certain amount of time and they BLOCK particular attacks. For example, I could have a spell shield that blocks elemental attacks like Fire Arrow, Frost Arrow, and Obsidian Arrow. The shield wouldn't give me invulnerability, it would just make the other players COUNTER it with something else that would shoot through the shield. It's very easy, BLOCK and COUNTER...everything has a block and every block has a counter. I'd love to know why we're not doing this.

5. There's too much movement still in PVP. Part of this is because of the previously mentioned lack of player collision. But another reason is that the stillness buff isn't a big enough incentive. As a spell caster, I can cast my best spell (or combo) at max stillness and I won't even put a dent in my opponent before they are within range and hacking me to shreds. Now that they're right next to me, most of my spells will be interrupted, if I turn to run I'll get hit in the back. The pure mage is still being set up for failure.

I would recommend a penalty for movement...less chance to CRIT. Start with -25% and work your way up to -45% the more people move.

6. No one uses all these melee defensive skills in pvp. Again, it's a DPS War so using these takes away from your ability to win. If you want people to use these defense skills Riposte and Blocking etc....then you either need to GREATLY increase their value, or you need to goto the BLOCKING AND COUNTERING method I keep railing about.

7. I love the spell Blink. But it's not very useful in combat. It's too difficult to point and click, the range isn't far enough, and often the best spots to blink to (up on a roof, for example) don't work. Here's my suggestions for improvement. OPTION 1: Make blink RANDOMLY teleport the player around a small area. The player has no control over where they're blinking to. BUT the player will always be facing whichever opponent they're locked on it. Blinking will occur every 3 seconds for 30 seconds. OPTION 2: Give the player the ability to map their right mouse button to the blink spell. As long as the blink spell is available to cast on their combat bar, the player can click the right mouse button AT WILL anywhere in their field of view! Honestly I like giving the player both these options for this spell.

8. In Open PVP I need to be able to see other OPEN PVP people much sooner than I currently can. The way it works now, I can't really tell if someone is open pvp until they're about 15 feet away from me (by hovering my mouse over them - and seeing it turn red and not blue). I can't tell what the name of the person is until they're about 5 feet away from me. My suggestion for improvement is to make all players that are open pvp highlight as red from as far of a distance as possible.

9. Not only can I not block anything, I really can't counter anything either. I kept getting hit with a disabling shot, and my movement was reduced to a crippling speed. This is great and working as intended from the attackers side. But what's my counter move? Why do I have to just take it? Do you see how frustrating this is? With Root you can jump out of it. With stuns you now have smelling salts. What's the counter to disabling shot? Every attack should have a viable counter move.

10. I don't understand what Dexterity is doing. It's hard for me to determine what I should put skill points into when it's not obvious what DEX, STR, and INT do. I feel like the people that use weapons where strength is important have learned to min/max the heck out of it. Where as DEX might be behind the curve because archery hasn't been viable until now.

11. Speaking of archery, there needs to be a minimum range. Seriously, if you're not 30 feet away from me, you should not be shooting a long bow at me. That's where a crossbow would be more advantageous. Range should also play a part in how effective a player is at hitting a target.

12. Which brings up another point about archery. No one ever misses. I'm not a fan of auto hits for melee ranged weapons.

13. Why are we allowing people to swap decks? The more I see this, the more I hate it. I don't mind people using multiple kinds of weapons...or even swapping decks. FINE. But please STOP the quick change of clothing, that drives me out of my mind. It kills immerssion and the only people doing it are people that switch from completely different sets of gear (like underwear to full plate). Not good.

14. The off-hand weapon attack is still stupid. Please understand that if using an off-hand weapon skill, you're not using a primary weapon skill. The off-hand weapon skill should be completely removed and instead, people using two weapons should get two attacks and less defense. The off-hand weapon should also open up combo moves like disarm and trap weapon.

15. Auto-Attack is pointless, bad, needs to be completely removed. Please remove it. I don't understand the point of it. But where auto-attack really irks me is with Staves and Wands. Staves and wands (like ALL weapons) should not have auto-attacks. It's unbalanced and it means that all players should carry them around or else not be competitive.

Staves and wands should work just like potions and be considered an item that opens up glyphs in your deck. That's a perfectly balanced way to use those. But they shouldn't have an auto attack. I'm going to give you one example of how stupid this is. So I'm fighting a guy using Fire Arrow, Fire Ball, and a Fire Staff. I'm losing to him because for every cast I attempt, he's interrupting me with this fire staff. In addition, he's shooting me with double hits of fire (and DOTs) and there's just no way for me to match that firepower without getting my own staff.

If there was no auto-attack, his staff would've just expanded his tool box of skills and spells, but instead it gives him a free ranged attack no matter what he's doing. COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. Please remove auto-attack.

16. Almost all of the cloth armor has slugs. The choices for cloth armor are horrible. They look horrible, they are horrible. Horrible. Please put cloth armor at the top of the list of clothing to create, and when unity 5 comes out, please for the love of god make flowing robes.

17. Summoned Monsters have horrible AI and horrible options. Yes, they last a little while longer now and that helps greatly in PVE. But in PVP they're virtually useless. Here's a long list of requests for improvement:

A. Don't stand so close to me Summoned NPC. I can't skin things, I can't see myself, I'm getting claustrophobic.
B. Just set yourself to SUPER AGGRESSIVE KILL EVERYTHING by default. I don't want you to ask my permission to kill stuff...just kill stuff, whatever is close by, rabbits, a priest, children, the last good person on Novia...kill them all please! You're hurting my soul with your passiveness.
C. When I tell you to defend, that means defend ME. Don't putz around and attack something and then run back to your safe zone.
D. If I tell you to "stand here" don't teleport to me the moment you get lonely. Just "Stand there" where I told you to stand. Got it?
E. If I "Command you to kill Player X" then go do that. Forever. Spawn camp his corpse. Kill his family. Burn his house down. Don't randomly stop and think about what you should be doing.

18. Hybrid Mages and "Best Builds", that's what the current system is rewarding. This shouldn't be the goal of the combat design. We should work to allow pure mages and pure fighters to be as viable as any combination in-between.

Ok, I think that's it for R13 combat and pvp. Overall it was a lot of fun. A big thanks to the devs for continuing to listen to feedback and make big improvements. Let's keep moving this ball forward and maybe someday we'll get over the goal line.

 

Thanks, Chris! Happy Holidays!

Good luck nerfing sleep for a few days.

 

Wife and I are expecting our first (baby girl) in just a few days! I guess that means she was conceived about the time your family brought Maxine into the world. Enjoy the down time! I hear I won't be getting much sleep for awhile.

 

@Drocis Fondorlatos,

I like pretty much most of your comments. The one I am not to thrilled about is casting on the move. This is something I actually like a lot. For the brief time I played WoW I played as a warlock, and had a lot of fun running around casting instant DoT spells. Thankfully SotA won't be a WoW clone, but I'd actually like to see more instant spells.

You mentioned that Blink is "too difficult to point and click, the range isn't far enough, and often the best spots to blink to (up on a roof, for example) don't work." I noticed this same kind of difficult behavior for some of the fire spells (Fireball, and Ring of Fire) as well. The ability to successfully aim sometimes seemed sensitive to me. Not sure if it's a terrain thing or what, but even on near-flat land occasionally I'd fail to successfully target a spot and the spell would fail.

 

Yeah, I noticed the same thing with fireball, I'm glad you brought that up.

I'd be all for moving around if the internet allowed for a fair playing field. But because I have a good machine and a good connection, I feel like I'm actually lacking behind. Whenever I look back at my logs it's always full of "Drocis Fondorlatos attempted to use XXX spell but failed: Out of Range". I feel like I'm in a dance with my opponent but I'm always following their lead, which is not a very good way to win.

Plus, when you look at the design of this combat system, it's not designed for all this movement. I think we can say that with full confidence. Just look at that all the weapon, armor and shield defensive skills. If you're moving around like that, are you ever going to be in a position where Riposte is going to come in handy? It's barely useful in PVE, and the NPC's don't move through you to get a hit on your back.

 

Mind if I get that setup and scheduled like a month early so we can get a schedule to cycle people in and out? Keeping it as a community hangout event would let you get a lot more raw feedback from community members at a faster pace The Dev hangouts with you, Richard, Starr, and Gina are nice too but it'd be great to have you as a target in a firing range and let everyone try to shoot your hopes and dreams to smithereens!

 

As a dual wield blades. I find the offhand attack very worthwhile. It allows a second instantaneous attack to follow. With my build I can consistently use offhand - choose 2nd attack. Over and over. If anything it might be a bit overpowered.

The combo Quadruple slash is a total waste. I do more by doing each piece of the attack separately. Stacking them does very little additional damage for a single card to validate the time spent stacking them.

Dual Wield build 5 offhand attacks, 5 thrust, 5 dbl slash, 5 riposte and 5 heals. Slugs bought off to 10. Full augmented iron. I can fire off the offhand with a dbl slash or riposte pretty consistently. Causing most fights to be very quick indeed. For defense . I loaded heavy armor, earth, and offhand defense. This makes for a fast and high DPS combats. If I close the distance to a mage they toast pretty quickly.

Mages need cheaper reagents used in all spells with higher damage output. Additionally more defense, more defense, and even more defense. They are still way underpowered.

Stacks in general are a waste beyond the reduced focus cost. I would like to see all combos do more damage than their components total with a slow down equal to 2 cards instead of one. This would make combos more inviting and challenging as the trade off between consistent attacks and high DPS becomes a choice.

 

That's interesting. Can you explain what you're talking about in a little more detail. It's been my experience (very limited) that the off hand attack was only activated at the bottom of the combat tool bar. Are you locking the off hand attack? Is it an instant and that's how you're able to get off multiple attacks? Are you talking about PVP or just PVE?

The case I'm making is that if you have to move your mouse to click on multiple attacks, it's not really a multiple attack, it's different single attacks. Does it not work like this? Maybe I didn't give this enough time.

Also, regarding defense. I totally agree with you. I can't last very long in cloth armor casting spells. Playing this way should be called "a million ways to die in Novia". I want to play a mage, and I don't want to have to run for my life. I should be able to just stand there and control the battlefield....if they get to me, it should be because they countered what I was doing...not because I can't stop them from running up to me and cutting me down.

 

Is there a way to stop auto attacks for PVP only? I can see why they would be unfair in PVP but I don't want to see it go away for PVE.

 

No I do not lock any cards at all. The off hand attack card when used allows you to select any other card as an instant attack. There is no cool down activated after using the off hand attack thus allowing a quick one two attack. Movement between cards is as fast as you can make it. Normally after any attack there is a standard cool down of 1-2 seconds before the next card can be fired.

Example if I have 3 off hand attacks showing. I can rapid fire all three in sequence with no cooldowns at all. Then fire any other card I wish to. Then a standard cool down runs. If I draw another off hand card I could get another 1-2 attack in. I have slaughtered elfs with 4 separate off hand cards showing by clicking them 1-2-3-4 as fast as I could. Generally in less than 1.5 seconds.

Mages I would like to really see the spells become high powered DPS but hard to get off. Trade off is tactics for damage. But right now I find them so tedious that it becomes hard to have any desire to even try it. My hope is that as the trees fill in it will become more tempting.

 

I tried more off hand weapon use and it just wasn't working for me. In part, it's because of the weapons I was using (Short Sword and Dagger). These weapons should be viable, but they're not. But even if I were getting 30+ points of damage with each swing there's still a huge problem with off handed weapons (for PVP).

Yes, you can swing your off-hand and your primary hand essentially at the same time. But because of the cool down factor involved, you really need a skill like furry to make it dangerous. Meanwhile your counter parts are hitting you for 70+ points of damage and swinging their weapon roughly the same amount of times that you are. The only way to avoid this is to "get lucky" with card draws, be amazingly quick with your hands, or lock all your glyphs in place and take the enormous hit on focus cost. Another issue is that your off hand attacks can only have 5 glyphs total in your deck, making it too rare to count on.

Beyond just adding more attack options or increasing damage, I'd like to see two-handed weapon uses have the ability to increase their attack speed so that if maxed out they can basically swing both blades without a cool down at all. (I know this would be very powerful, but I'm assuming that we're also adding player collision and a more robust way to defend ourselves).

 

I need to level up and PvP...

 

Auto attacks have always been essential for both PvE AND PvP...otherwise the hard hitting BURST DMG caster would have the advantage and Archers and Melee would be useless...

 

Don't lock yourself in the box of bad PVP created by games that weren't designed for PVP.

Movement and Auto Attack cater to one style of play, which in my opinion is one of the reasons the average person doesn't like PVP.

 

I like the idea of flurry to make it dangerous to opponents in PvE. As for quick that I can do. I do not use any points to slow down the discard. So my hand is constantly shuffling, which is where it works fine for me. I would like to know where the 70+ in same amount of time comes from? Please expound on this or direct me to a thread?

 

It's been my experience in pvp that someone with a polearm or greatsword will do 70+ points of damage to me in one hit (I'm wearing leather or cloth armor) and I'm just not able to keep up with the damage output using duel blades. Of course, I could use larger blades, but then the weapon speed is reduced.

I've seen a few players use duel blades in pvp effectively, so I know it can be done. But whatever they're doing seems like a combination of tactics that is more about twitchy run through your opponent "skillz" in spite of the game's design.

 

Now I understand, but usually I only see less than half that amount. With the occasional crit getting above 50 on a single hit. I guess that is due to the amount of points I invested in heavy armor, offhand damage resistance, and earth attunement. I would never try to build light infantry in this game until they seriously address the burst damage output for mages and archers. 2H weapons damage can be mitigated as I have but that would be useless for a mage or archer.
The main problem as I see it is they need to create high burst damage output for light armor types to balance their being shredded alive by heavy melee types. Or, with encumbrance rules slow down the movement and swing rates of heavy types so foot slogging infantry has to face the artillery before it can engage. Do that with no movement allowed while casting/firing (or at least spell failure/higher miss rates for movement). The game becomes more tactical in nature. Can heavies close whiles lights try to stay nimble and fleet of foot while doing damage.

 

Yes, I think all of that is true and your suggestions will contribute to balancing important parts of combat and pvp. But as I've said in MANY threads over the last year...the real problem is that it's a DPS war. If you make mages do more damage, you're really just making some other play style weaker. If all we're doing is changing the rules of what works best for DPS, then we're playing a shell game. That's why I'm so adamant about creating BLOCKing and COUNTERing so DPS doesn't matter (as much).

If a fighter has the ability to shield himself from ranged melee attacks, that really changes the game around and creates a scenario where the Archer has to either COUNTER that move, or change their own tactics. Currently (especially in PVP), the best players like to use a bow at range (there's no way to block it and it hits every time) and a large weapon in melee. They switch interchangeably between the two whenever it suits them best. This reduces the game to a twitchy DPS war and there people that are really good at this style of play because they've been practicing it for years and years in other games.

I'm horrible at it and find it very boring and stupid. It's unimmerssive and really it makes me feel like I'm playing a first person shooter where strategy is unimportant.

 

The defensive stance makes sense for defending against ranged attacks, if you have no ranged attack yourself.

The reckless stance is harder to think of uses for. I'm supposing if you're fighting multiple enemies at once, and your defense is pretty good, it might be easier to pare your enemies down through knocking them out one by one with strong attacks. And then enhance that with flurry and other speed skills, and dodges and active deflections. I'll continue to play around with these in the game. Still it would be more interesting I think if you had to choose one stance versus another, rather than being able to have no stance at all.

I tried the berserker stance, I waited a long time for another card to stance card to come up, and it didn't, so I died. :<