Make it so first-shot never does more than 50% health

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Arkah EMPstrike, May 18, 2018.

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  1. Bambino

    Bambino Avatar

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    @Hornpipe: You're going to have to rephrase. I do not understand what you are trying to say.
     
  2. Hornpipe

    Hornpipe Avatar

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    Absolutely. And if you are going alone in a PvP zone, you should have to know what you are doing.

    Actually, there should be this "predator" effect. And I agree that silent movement or the corresponding moon spell shouldn't grant total invisibility. But that's another topic.

    I can confirm that it works. And it would work if you charge a melee attack too, if the offender is at range.

    It depends on the conditions. If the target is just standing in the middle of everybody's sight in a pvp zone or while tagged, just roaming, it would deserve to be killed this way even if, most of the time, it is just not possible to do a one-shot, contrary to all that thread suggests.

    No, it's not easily done : Look at that thread. People post their high damage. Not that I enjoy that type of thing, but it is informative. On your last screenshot, I saw that you have approximatively 790 health points. On the leaderboard, only two persons had their maximum above that point (we still have to compare the resistances, but it's a good start for a comparison). And the maximum is not the standard. And you are absolutely not assured to get a critical hit at first when you engage in a combat. Most of the times, I can say that your critical hit will be around half your maximum. Then, dealing 800 or more damages on one attack is pretty rare. That also means that, when you got one-shoted, either your enemy was lucky either you were already wounded/in a fight.
    Secondly, what you say invalidate totaly @Spungwa 's arguments. Because, basically, you are talking about critical hits. It means that the second attack would be as easy to do as the first. It also means that the big critical hit can come with the second attack, few seconds after the first.
    Now, I already said many times that one of the hardest thing to balance would be to allow the same effect of two skills to accumulate. Here the problem is with the critical damage bonus. Tomorrow, it will be with something else. But still, you make a lot of noise for a case that happens once in 100. Sorry, but to me, all of those complains are not based on rational analysis. Not to mention that very few players who are posting here are flagged most of the time. So, it's funny, because it's just like when people, who don't get into the swimming pool, are trying to teach the ones who are within, how to swim.

    Personaly, if someone succeeded in killing me with one blow, I would respect that and try to figure what my mistake was, and I would post here only if I'm absolutely sure that there is a real issue (after being one shoted many times by the same person, actually).
     
    Last edited: May 22, 2018
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  3. Hornpipe

    Hornpipe Avatar

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    You surely say that because you think that, in the present case, the skills should do less damage in PvP. Actually, I heard long time ago that there was already a difference. It could be useful to ask @Chris about that. And personaly, I'm absolutely not sure that it makes any difference. I think it just makes balance harder to reach and the gameplay would be unpleasant this way, separating people when we already struggle to regroup everyone. The problem here is in the perception people have of the skills, not the skills themselves.
     
    Last edited: May 22, 2018
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  4. Trihugger

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    @Hornpipe - I think you misunderstand what exactly I'm getting at here. The gameplay is basically seamless. A skill simply has a different calculation depending on if the target is NPC or player. It doesn't change based on PvP flag vs not; that'd be a horrific monstrosity to deal with. None of that prevents any regrouping you're mentioning, it just adds a different set of rules to the game based on if the target is NPC or Player.

    In effect it is actually MUCH easier to balance. You now have two systems in place that have very minimal cross over between them. AKA less variables to consider. Some cross over is inevitable in the form of stances/buffs/etc. that you always have to deal with. You can tweak each one, for the most part, separately from the other. For example, let's say rend's healing debuff is OP in PvP but fine in PvE. The Dev's have the option to tweak the healing debuff as it applies ONLY to PvP. My point is that every ability needs this sort of "pass" made before any intelligent PvP discussion is to be had.

    This is what I mean by having two "systems" in place: One for PvE to balance it and one for PvP with a different balance goal in mind. I can't say for sure for others, but I do know ESO, FF14, and WoW all were forced to implement a two system setup because it was impossible to balance otherwise.

    And... it was transparent in the skills' descriptions how they worked against mobs and players... w/o needing to page the Dev. as to how the hell things work because he's basically the only one that knows lol...
     
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  5. Boris Mondragon

    Boris Mondragon Avatar

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    Sooooo, after much deliberation this is what it adds up *grins* You check you gear, your deck, your underpants *smirks*. You get all bold and walk up to the Oracle. Personallly last time I saw her and said something in her ear she blushed and keeps blushing furiously every time she sees me. You are a machine that cannot be stopped and step into the instance to wreak havoc upon all that are dumb enough to face you then it hits you. The noise and this music starts to play in your head. From somewhere in here a phantom pirate whispers in your ear *Welcome to The Panic rooooooooom* *winks at all who reads this* R/Boris/El Pirata. P.S. I had to throw some levity into the thread and could not help myself .

     
  6. Hornpipe

    Hornpipe Avatar

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    I will only speak about two games I know :

    TESO don't seem to have such a thing. Skills have always been universal. There are, of course, choices which are more competitive in PvP, but the associated skills seem to work the same way with PvP and PvE. For PvP, skills simply use a system named Synergy, which favors team play, grants bonus to your friends, but it doesn't change the skill effect according to its target. So no, TESO did not seem forced to do anything.

    SWTOR had a specific PvP stat named "Expertise" (in french). The reason of this was not to balance PvP with PvE, but to force player to grind two times more in order to give the illusion of content. It has been removed years ago, while players were constantly complaining about it.

    I think that damages are already mitigated differently with SotA.
    Actually it DOES prevent any regrouping as long as PvE doesn't work the same way as PvP. When PvP and PvE share the same rules, the quests can be used to learn how to use the skills and figure how effective those can be in different situations. If the rules are not consistant with the two types of fight, it requires everyone twice as much involvement as if there was no difference. In fine, casual players will never PvP if they need to learn how to play the game again just to enjoy PvP.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2018
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  7. Brass Knuckles

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    Make it so air shield doesnt block the first hit then.

    Actually ive no problem with sneak attack, if you see ? In the zone you can shield up or use ur defensive skills as well as stealth.

    Lots of counters to sneak.
     
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  8. Arkah EMPstrike

    Arkah EMPstrike Avatar

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    You will not see a ? in pvp zones, to clarify for those that dont know. Nothing but you and your party member's names show in nearby until you actually encoutner someone.
     
  9. Hornpipe

    Hornpipe Avatar

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    In PvP zones, you have to consider that you are not alone, simply.

    Actually, the problem here is much more related to how stealth skills works than to anything else. And I must say that many of us don't understand why silent movement, cocoon of night, shadow form, vanish and camouflage make the user totally invisible in PvP (even with the level 1, even during a bright sun day), and are only partially effective (for NPCs) in PvE.

    That is an exemple of skills which are breaking the game with different effects for PvP and PvE. And that's not to mention the fact that it's easy to be stealthy again when discovered by other outlanders while it is a pain when NPCs spotted you.

    To me, those skills should only be totally effective at night. There is no way someone would be able to hide totally in the middle of nowhere with a bright sun upon, especially not with lunar spells. The tranparency effect should be toned down or up according to the skill level and the weather conditions.

    This way, people could more easily avoid a sneak attack, while having to stay cautious at night.

    Now about every form of attacks, people can already use many effective defenses, one of which has just been mentioned by @Brass Knuckles. And again, it is sad to see that the best defenses are magic, here.
     
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  10. Ancev

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    I wish the hit point and focus pools were a bit larger. In Shadowbane it was pretty normal for players to have 2500+ hp and it's definitely something that helps in group vs group (GvG) PvP. Some classes had 8k hp and were HP regen builds, but there were countermeasures to everything. There were poison attacks that did a % of someone's health, regardless of what their HP pool was. There were also other attacks that debuffed HP regen entirely.

    For the most part I don't agree that there needs to be more ways to reveal stealthers, unless there are countermeasures. It's insane as is. Fire a spell in a stealthers direction and the spell auto seeks the stealther and they're revealed, immolation (especially avatars with fast movement and immolation), AOE attacks, detect hidden, body slam lights up when stealthers are near, falling from a great distance, etc.

    Maybe there could be npc guilds, factions or professions that grants access to exclusive skills. Join the bounty hunter npc guild and you gain access to the Tracking skill. Maybe a ranged bleed attack for bows. Join the Red Sash Bandits or some other rogue affiliation and you get anti-track. Can't be part of a rogue faction and bounty hunter faction or whatever.

    Tracking would let you locate "?" entries in the /who list in normal scenes, and in pvp scenes it would bring up a menu of trackable targets based on your tracking skill's range. Some of the most powerful players in the game can also cover huge distances with blink so I'm not sure if it could be implemented in a way that doesn't give them a huge advantage.. also the zones are fairly small in sota so the range for this skill would need to be relative.

    Anti-track type skills.. perhaps one of these skills reverts your revealed name on the /who and track list back to a "?" and another skill could remove your avatar's name from the /who and track list entirely for a period of time.

    Detect Hidden (personal version) perhaps the bounty hunter faction also grants a version of detect hidden that allows you to detect players, but not reveal them for everyone to see. You would still need to successfully attack them before their stealth breaks.

    I agree it's not fun being 1-hit that's for sure but at least if you had some way to track players around you you'd have an idea that an enemy might be close. (closer than 'in the scene') However, being able to simply fire an attack in a player's direction to reveal them needs to change in my opinion. Otherwise if you have a guaranteed way of popping stealthers then tracking wont work. You'll be able to track right to someone and hit any attack button. It would also make Detect Hidden a more viable skill if it was required to reveal people before attacking them in most situations. The difference between SOTA and Shadowbane in this regard is that in SB, all attacks were based on a simple Attack and Defense calculation. If a players defense stat was higher than another player's 'fireball' attack rating then most of the time it would miss even if you were right on top of the player. This allowed stealthers to move through AoE's and other random attacks coming their way because of their high defense. Some attacks were auto-hit and didn't require a to-hit roll.. crucial for revealing stealthers with high defense.

    Also if you have a hp pool of 2500 you can tolerate a backstab for 1500 without it being as big of a deal. Someone could always sap you after the backstab then stealth up and do it again. But it's better than being 1 shot. The way SB got around this was having some skills (Backstab) with 30 sec cooldown to prevent them from being used over and over. So they were indeed powerful skills, but couldn't be spammed.

    Being able to do large amounts of damage up front is important in group vs group situations - for example if 3 or 4 players of an 8 player party were pure healers and the other 4 were dps. It would be tough to take down the group because the healers would focus target whoever is taking the most dps. The player being targeted could drink cure poison potions while being healed, etc. In order to get around this you 'sync dump' on one target (timing based attack), and hope that you can dps burst that target before the healers can react.
     
  11. Brass Knuckles

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    You dont actually get total invisibility with super high stealth (118) and a very slow and long 6 stack you can get to about 95.? Stealth its lower on the moon tree one. Mabey it should scale better where 50% skill is more visible or something.

    @EMPstrike in addition to going into a pvp zone knowing your there you should assume people are sneaking up on you and the skill sneak attack is harder to pull off on a moving/paranoid target.

    Stealth with stone arrow and body slam is very devistating as well.

    I used sneak attack on erdness hit her for 650 all absorbed by her air shield then I hit her with body slam and 2 punctures she was able to pop a focus potion and eventually collected a body part from me.

    Airshield the eliet defence vrs sneak attack.
     
    Last edited: May 23, 2018
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  12. Trihugger

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    @Hornpipe - Skills function differently in Cyrodiil and the arena in ESO. Hell almost everything functions differently in actual PvP areas in ESO, you even have higher HP. For example, healing is halved, shield effects are lowered (can't remember the exact #), stun effects are tweaked, etc etc. I'm not counting duels as PvP as they are just a "for funnies" aspect. Dunno about you, but that's a pretty "system wide" level change.

    Synergy also doesn't function anywhere near what you described. Synergy is an event that triggers when one player uses a base skill and another player triggers a synergy off that base skill. For example, there's a skill in the undaunted tree that flings a magic web at the enemy as the base skill that also allows other players to trigger a synergy in the form of summoning some little spiders for a period of time. It's a group based concept, not a PvP based concept.

    By definition, PvP doesn't work the same way as PvE. You cannot use the same strategies against players as you do mobs. Case/point.
    Also not true. PvE vs PvP are apples to oranges. Telling someone to learn PvP by playing PvE is telling someone to ride a motorcycle, but learn only to drive a car. They have similar concepts but ultimately there's a HUGE difference. I'm not saying thrust, for example, should turn into a healing ability when used in PvP. I'm saying there needs to be a clear balance pass done across all the abilities so that, while they mostly maintain their same function, they've been tweaked and balanced with PvP and ONLY PvP in mind.
     
  13. Hornpipe

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    Oh, that's true, I forgot about that, but if my memory serves me well, your informations are not exact. The buff effect is called stats scaling (or something spirit). I also think I remember that healing debuff but I'm not sure. Anyway, it was absolutely not about PvE/PvP scaling : it was primilary intended to boost V14 and lower, in order to get everyone to a minimal equity against other players. You also had the Emperor bonus which substantialy improves your stats. For this one too, it was not about PvP/PvE scaling. But most of all, Cyrodiil had PvE content as well, despite those buffs/debuffs. Then, its PvE content was scaled accordingly and THEN, PvE and PvP shared the same rules at last, in the PvP zones. But I must admit that I haven't played that game for a very long time (more than two years now), so maybe my informations can be wrong as well (or things have changed since) despite the fact I checked those with links.

    That's true, it's not labeled as a PvP concept. But if you have ever played TESO, you know that it was mainly used in PvP. Synergy was a Group content (that's what I described, by the way). TESO has faction pvp (and a good one). Except for closing Oblivion gates and go for some rare raids on some dungeons, when you level in PvE, you are generally alone. Leveling is about questing alone in instances where your PvP foes can't go at all. And PvP in TESO has always been about to build a correct group to walk in PvP zones. Synergy is mandatory in PvP, because it grants huge bonus to your party friends, while it's useless in PvE because, except for some episodic or high end content, you are alone. Maybe you didn't understand my quote because you did not make this link but it means that you didn't play TESO so much (or at least you didn't pvp so much in TESO).

    This is a very peremptory statement. And nothing is more wrong. For exemple, when you backstab a "mob", you get more damages. And when you backstab a "player", you get more damages as well. Will the player be more difficult to backstab ? Maybe, maybe not, but it will be easy in both case as long as your presence is unnoticed. Not every player is a pvp competitor checking is back every now and then. So yes, at least some strategies can be used both with one and the other. The fundamental thought behind your reasoning is that "mobs" are objects you pick up to get experience. But that's the main problem behind the grind feeling. In SotA and many games, currently, the AI won't react smartly and "mobs" have different stats, but PvE and PvP have already more in common than what you claim. And the more the AI will be effective, the smaller the difference will be between those two situations. To the point that some AI is able to win against the best human chess player.

    And still, PvE content is very often built to be some sort of tutorial. As for TESO, everything has been made for players to go with the PvE content before even visiting a PvP zone.

    That said, we are digressing. You are entitled with your opinion and that's fine. But obviously, a good game is not a game where you have two different coexisting systems. It's a game the AIs has an effective behaviour which prevent the need for anything else. Because of immersion, because less "grind" and also because it's easier to balance one unified system than two interacting ones, contrary to what you repeat. Your solution multiplies the variables to take into account. It's as simple as that. You want regression with another MMO theme park dealing with the same basic solutions. I want progression with a game where there is innovation.

    Anyway, this discussion is fruitless because I heard once that SotA has already two different systems, actually (and sadly). It's just that if people could try to not get this worse with such ideas, it would be great.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2018
  14. Hornpipe

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    You ARE totally invisible for players even with the level 1. The effectiveness is for PvE content, I think. As soon as you get the glyph and use it, the transparency effect on screen is at 100%.
     
  15. Alley Oop

    Alley Oop Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    no, sometimes it shows others the same flat grey it shows you. known bug.
     
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  16. Hornpipe

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    I didn't had this one, but as long as it is a bug, we can't really talk about this as a feature.
     
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  17. Brass Knuckles

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    Hrmm mabey ur right, i swear ive seen people walk near me stealthed.

    Low skill should reflect being seen easily as the skill scales it should become harder to see.
     
    Last edited: May 24, 2018
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  18. Lars vonDrachental

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    Reading your post I instantly had to think at Sword Art Online. I think there it was:

    you killed and harmed no other avatar = you are green for other avatars
    you harmed another avatars = you are yellow for other avatars for some time
    you killed another avatar = you are red for other avatars for some time

    I don’t know if we should use that system but I think some visible indicators could be a good idea for SotA.

    @topic
    I’m not convinced that there should be a general maximum for a first hit. If someone is doing everything “right” and has the perfect possibility to launch an attack he shouldn’t be punished but if there is a easy possibility to hide you there should be a similar easy possibility to counter this. E.g. additional to the night vision we get a thermal vision skill that is showing living beings (hidden or not) with a heat sign while skeletons or the surrounding itself stays gray/black.
    Or if you are killing avatars without being killed yourself you get some kind of “blood rage”-buff that is making it more and more difficult to kill another avatar.
    You killed 0-1 avatars = no effect
    You killed 1-2 avatars = there are continuously falling bloody drips from your weapons to the ground that are visible even if you are invisible
    You killed 3-5 avatars = blood splatter cover your lower clothes and stay visible even if you are invisible, additionally you are in rage and that way 10% lesser defenses
    You killed 6-10 avatars = you have blood splatter from head to toe that stay visible even if you are invisible and even have slight red glow effect, additionally you are in rage and that way 20% lesser defenses
     
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