SOTA needs active damage mitigation to make this game excel

I refer to SOTA as an example in this video.




- Block, Parry, Reposte, Counter, Counter of a Counter
- Active blocking system creates skilled gamers
- Most of the time a player tabs to a character, hits a button, and there is dittly squat the other player can do to prevent this damage.
- This is scrub friendly, and allows for more players to play into the system, but ultimely dimisishes the overall skill required to play the games that have these systems
- I consider myself an aggressive player, that could rush players down


Game examples (with no damage mitigation per se) (low skil level)

- Smite and MOBAs
-- More advanaced gameplay, Heavy Turtling in smite near towers
-- Cooldowns mitigation damage output because there is no damage mitigation
-- The cooldown is a form a damage mitigation
-- Creates a lot of turtling, because heals are generally weak, and no way to block


- DayZ
-- Again, you can only wear armor to block bullets
-- Most players, can just camp out in a bush, and just shoot oncoming players.
-- Cover is king, and a player that gets the jump on another player is going to crush them with gun types a high percentage of the time
-- Even popular YouTuber FrankieOnPCin1080p agrees that getting the jump, due to lag mostly, is the main reason on how to win in this game
-- Not really the main focus of this video, since this is the style of gameplay that players want and prefer to play in


- World of Warcraft
-- This game didn't have any real damage mitigation for a long time
-- Then after vanialla WoW, when arena's came out, pretty much all character classes gained some ability to negate damage
-- Pallies always had bubble, preists had a shield, rogues got a big buff with cloak of shadows (and vanish), warriors cooldown on shield wall got reduced, hunters had beast mastery, and so forth.
-- In some cases, the negation was 100% ability, player presses a button, and well, 100% of the time it negates damage
-- This is still quite scrubby b/c it allows for a PASSIVE form of damage mitigation, usually on a heavy cooldown timer
-- In pugs I would shed much orc blood, until I got friends that could heal me, then most people got rolled, the healing was damage mitigation, and the main form for a long time.

- SOTA (Shroud of the Avatar)
- Currently Shroud of the Avatar, a game that could have a lot of potential if it impliments ACTIVE damage mitigation falls into this scrubby mode.
- An example is a fire mage casts a spell, puts a dot on the player, the player has to hit a button to stop drop and roll, or put out the fire if he wants.
- The player could run out of line of site, hit a button, and negate some, all, or most of the damage.
- Or the player could cast a spell/ability, or just block, all, some, or most of the incoming damage.




Higher level of games with damage mitigation:

- ESO
-- ESO Had a lot of potential as an MMO.
-- It had great story for PvEers, crafting, and combat.
-- It also had a active blocking system that allowed for counters
-- ESO though didn't really focus on the PvP elements, released in a semi beta state, didn't patch major bugs, and is also a subscription based game, raised level caps way too soon (weeks after the game's release)
-- If ESO went free to play, like most other MMO models have gone recently, they would have a MASSIVE following, perhaps (you lose momentum after release)



_ Chivarly
- Blocking, countering, dodge
- Limited by stamina

- Tekken
- Active blocking, countering, counter of counters
- Plus and minus frames based on the blocked abilites
- No cooldowns

 

Games like Tekken and WoW are very different games. Tekken only needs to maintain a connection between two players for an online match for latency. Games like WoW need to maintain connections for tons of players at once. Latency kills real time blocking and such.

WoW has defensive cooldown abilities, like most MMOs these days. SotA has some of these currently like Riposte, Parry, Ice Shield, etc. They may get more defensive maneuvers when the skill trees are filled out and finished. SotA will likely never have Tekken like blocks.

 

I agree that if done well having an active defense option in a game can add a lot of depth to combat, but pretty much any system that's heavily based on reaction and timing is out for MMOs simply because the system needs to allow for some lag, and because it gets extremely one sided if nobody who has other strengths than just fast reaction time gets to be good at the game.

I do like active blocking as a mechanic in games because it acts as a counterbalance to focus fire, which IMO really ruins the PvP in most MMOs for me. In way too many MMOs the basis of all successful PvP strategy is to focus down targets with an assist train, which tends to lead those games down a path where their combat doesn't scale well at all because through focus fire damage scales up infinitely, while a characters defenses are always finite, no matter how many buffs and heals you stack on a guy. That simply ends up meaning that maybe you can keep a fight going back and forth with healers in a 5v5 scenario, but the second you start going any bigger people just get melted and healers just end up being there to shut down any attempts the opposition makes to do anything other than focus firing. So I really dig it in games if someone can just put their shield up and become super hard to kill, as long as they can't reset the fight by blocking.

One of the most important differences between MMOs and fighting games is also that in fighting games you usually don't have any way of getting health back during a fight, which significantly changes the value of blocking and avoiding getting hit. In MMOs there is usually a lot of ways of getting health back, particularly if there is ever a break in the fighting, and that tends to mean that taking damage only matters if you are taking more damage than you can get rid of again. That's fundamentally different from fighting games, where any amount of damage you take is permanent, so even if you partially deflect an attack it never becomes completely ineffective.

 

Sounds like you want to play Mortal Online, i did it a few and its definately not fun to be online with ~50 people and because of politics you arent allowed to fight half those anyway.
In Fact this is almost impossible with Lag issues,
in Mortal Online Swedens pwn, why? because the Server is in Sweden.
So in Sota Americans would pwn? i dont think the distance to the server should define whether you win or lose.
wasnt you the guy that said locked bars are way better than decks? i guess you kinda dont understand Sota Mechanics ...

btw: taking Tekken and Chivalry as examples... really ? a beat em up and a team deathmatch game compared to Sota

regarding from your post you should really try http://www.mortalonline.com/ it sounds like it suits your ideas, but please dont try to get Sota like this, it would fail like all others game did before...

yeah see Swedens at Mortal Online, Lowest Possible Ping, just parrying the **** out of everyone

 

I couldn't agree more.

Blocking, Countering and Countering Counters.

I've been saying it since before Pre-Alpha started. I'm glad to see someone else joining this cause.

 

Blocking and countering are really unlikely in a game where latency and lag have to be accounted for.

 

I'm aware of that. That's why I'm an advocate of turn based elements to help counter the lag.

Speaking of lag, we have a ton of it now. If you watch another one of Azbolg's videos, you'll eventually see that his connection is horrible causing him to lag. But what this does to the other players is comical (from his end of things) as they appear to stand in place just waiting for him to tear them up.

SOTA has two major problems right now with PVP....



1. Latency. If you make the game kick people that have tons of lost packets and bad ping (probably because they're trying to play Pre-Alpha from the other side of the world) then you lose potential testers. So this means people with bad ping and lost packets have a major advantage, as seen in the video above.

But if you start requiring good ping and low lost packets, you will begin to favor people with great connections, as the gap between connections becomes smaller (the game can now keep up with the frame rates) and players that are close to the servers and have the best PC's and Connection speeds will dominate.

That's why I suggest turn based elements that even the playing field. NOT turn based. Turn-based elements...there's a difference.

2. There's no blocking, countering or counters of counters. So there's no skill. PVP is just a DPS War.

 

This won't become turn based, but we have stuff like that now.

We have defensive stances to increase blocking chance. We have parry, riposte, ice shield, etc.

 

You are not following the logic. That's all just DPS by another name.

You're just dialing the DPS up and down. If you can't block then you can't counter. If you can't counter, then you're just trading DPS....the person that does the most wins. That's a stupid combat system.

Seriously, if combat is like this at launch, I won't be playing. I'll be a merchant or something and hire stupid people to go out and fight for me. But I won't be one of the people going out into that lag infested DPS randomized world of stupidness.

And I love pvp.

 

I don't understand your logic.

You've said that a stun is still DPS, because it just slows DPS. You've said a root is just DPS even though it has nothing to do with DPS. You've said a heal is still DPS. You've said aggro abilities are still DPS. But a block is completely different and has nothing to do with DPS.

How is a block different from a stun in slowing down DPS?

Your logic seems rather flawed and inconsistent to me. It seems to me that you really want active blocking and you're trying to justify it with faulty logic and it doesn't matter either way. This game is unlikely to get active blocking due to technical limitations. And they won't turn this into a turn-based game just to give you active blocking.

 

1. I'm not saying "make this a turn based game". I'm saying add turn-based elements to the game to make it more competitive and free from lag being the deciding factor in pvp.
2. A stun requires you to stop doing damage in the hopes that you might stop someone else from doing damage. So at best, you're both not doing damage, giving you BOTH a DPS of zero for a small amount of time. In the case of ROOT you're still able to fire weapons so it really just stops YOU from doing DPS while the other guy can shoot you at range. In the case of heal, you're adding hit points back. So your Damage output is Zero but you're damage intake is whatever your opponent is attacking you with minus whatever you healed yourself for.

Whereas if you're able to block something COMPLETELY, then and only then does the cycle of DPS stop. So your opponent can't spam you with damage attacks and OUT DPS you when you can BLOCK the attack. That's the difference. It's really not complicated, but you're not the only one that appears to be confused by it.

 

Stun - stops DPS
Block - stops DPS
Root - stops DPS

Two of these you say are still completely part of the DPS system and one you say has nothing to do with DPS. Nope, that logic just doesn't hold.

 

Mortal tends to destroy any good ideas it may have with ridiculous systems like having it be possible for a character to end up gimped because you didn't pick his grandparents correctly, or having to force feed a character until he gets massively fat or starve him until he gets extremely skinny to minmax their stats.

 

Ok, well I'm sorry you don't understand. I will stop trying to explain it to you. I'm sure other people will not have the same problem.

 

No I understand it fully and plenty of people have repeatedly disagreed with you on your definition of what is and isn't DPS.

You said a stun means neither party does DPS for the duration of the stun. That isn't how a stun works. You don't seem to understand how it works. For one global cool-down, I activate a stun ability. You are then stunned for a longer period of time. For the remainder of the duration I do DPS to you, you are unable to DPS back or use any abilities. And maybe I don't even directly DPS you during the duration of a stun. Maybe I'm just eliminating one player from combat so we can focus fire on another target. You keep insisting there is zero strategy or complexity in DPS systems and that they're all alike. Stuns create strategic opportunities.

A root is different in that it just stops movement, and again this lasts longer than the global cool-down.

You describe a block as COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than a stun, because the problem with a stun is that I can't damage you in the same action I'm activating my stun. Do you presume that a block wouldn't consume a global cool-down? Can you attack and block in the same action? How would that work when you're talking about making these delayed and somewhat turn-based to allow people adequate time to respond?

The net effect of a block is to reduce damage coming in, which you say is nothing like any other ability to reduce damage coming in. And a block is far more related to a DPS race than other abilities such as aggro abilities that you've said that are nothing more than pure DPS abilities.

 

i would like to this added to the game and likely totally change the existing abilities that are intended to play a counter role . ie cc abilities.

kind of shocked that they havent added them considering the amount of combat discussions that have taken place here in the forums.

i agree with the notion that a roadbump is not a counter. yes a kd will upset a players rotation but i would consider a actual counter a opportunity to have a extra attack - not at the expense of a gcd, either.

more depth is needed and abilities should have more weaknesses or potential to err or to capitalize upon.
Sent from my GT-S5690M using Tapatalk 2

 

I've been reading your DPS comments for months and I still don't understand what you are talking about. DPS is a statistic. As long as the game has damage and as long as we live in a universe with time you will be able to calculate DPS. I don't understand what your definition of DPS is.

MMORPGs offer various abilities. Abilities that generate damage will increase your DPS and abilities that reduce incoming damage will decrease your opponents DPS. It doesn't matter if it reduces some damage or completely blocks all damage it impacts the DPS statistic.

I agree there should be several damage mitigation abilities and I am intrigued about these turn based elements you mentioned and would love to hear what these elements would be.

 

Regarding DPS (Damage Per Second).

Currently the game works like this...

Round 1: I hit you for 40 damage that you can't stop. You hit me for 50 damage that I can't stop. End result, you do 10 more DPS than I do.
Round 2: I hit you for 30 damage that you can't stop. You hit me for 25 damage that I can't stop. End result, I do 5 more DPS than you do.
Round 3: I hit you for 15 damage and 5 Dots per 2 seconds or whatever. You cast a heal spell on yourself for 30 hit points. End result, it's probably a wash.
This goes on for approximately 30 seconds until someone is dead.

What I'm proposing is a battle that looks more like this.

Round 1: I cast a spell that absorbs 100% fire damage. You attack me with a fire arrow that would've done 30 points of damage, but so sorry that's not going to work today.
Round 2: I hit you for 40 points of damage that you DIDN'T STOP. You continue to throw fire arrows at me because you're stupid. End result, you take damage and I don't.
Round 3: I hit you for 50 points of damage and you're almost dead. You finally think "gee, fire doesn't work against this guy" and switch to water magic doing 40 points of damage to me.
Round 4: I cast a spell that blocks water magic. You don't really have anything else in your bag of tricks and try to run.
Round 5: I laugh at you as you take Fire damage into your back and die.

Or, if you like...

Round 1: I cast a spell that absorbs 100% fire damage. You were not born yesterday, and you immediately cast Frost Arrow at me doing 40 points of damage.
Round 2: I cast a spell that blocks water magic. You cast another Frost Arrow but it does no damage to me.
Round 3: I move closer for melee combat, pulling out two blades. You take out a longsword and shield.
Round 4: I attack you, but you are actively blocking with both your sword and shield and I do ZERO damage to you.
Round 5: But now I know you're blocking and attempt a COUNTER move. In this case, I have the ability to TRIP anyone that is actively blocking. You go down hard and are now open to attacks from me.
Round 6: Ah, but you are ready for this and use a COUNTER move to my TRIP attack, and roll out of the way. My attacks smash harmlessly on the ground.
Round 7: Trying to recover, I block with both my blades. But you parry my blades and set yourself up for a counter attack that I will be unable to block.

Which version of combat do you like better?

Here's the CONCEPT of what I'm talking about, just for Sword and Shield, but it should be applicable to magic and archery too. The key is to have Blocking, Countering, and Counters to Countering.



Regarding "turn-based" elements. MUD's have been doing this for years and it's worked VERY WELL. What Text Based Mud's do is give players 3 to 5 seconds to attack and defend themselves. That means you can't twitch or spam attacks like you normally would. The reason that this was designed this way was because the internet is imperfect and favors people with good (or even sometimes bad) internet connections. So the designers of MUD's wanted to make games fair for someone using a 14.4 baud modem playing against someone on a T1 line. The end result? Everyone gets 5 seconds (usually, but sometimes 3 if you have a fast weapon) to attack the other player. during this time, you can hit ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK but the server isn't going to do anything. You can't move during this time though, because you're in the act of fighting.

And there's the problem that people get all huffy about. They want to move around like a crazy person because it makes them feel like they're in control of what's going on. People equate this with "fun" even though what's actually happening is that one person is probably getting 3 hits in for every 1 that another person is because of lag. If you look at most logs, that's what it looks like, even when someone is just rapidly spamming attacks (in the current combat system). So while I agree that it's not IDEAL, in my opinion, it's the best compromise if you are really honest about wanting a fair playing field.

You attack me, and you have to wait 3-5 seconds for me to respond. There would be all kinds of skills to make this a very active process. But it wouldn't be run, jump, attack attack, run jump, attack attack. It wouldn't be turn based either, because turn based implies that I always get my turn, which wouldn't be the case. I'd just have 3-5 seconds to complete my turn in an effort to keep lag from deciding who wins and who loses.

 

Drocis I believe this is anouther night to mark on the calendar, not only do i think i folowed what you were saying and agreed with it, your commentary actuly made me laugh in a good way.

 

Thanks for the explaination and examples Drocis, it makes it much clearer to get the point you are trying to make here. I think it is an important point that you are making for example casting a fire shield protects against fire but would not protect you against perhaps a water dmg spell. I am replaying might and magic 6 a bit and see the counters very present in this very old game. Combat will be much more interesting in Shrouds with what you are mentioning, it should not be left out, and don't think I was quite getting this point that you were making maybe I was being duh, who knows. I'm still mulling over the turn based aspect you are mentioning, so maybe more thoughts later. Thanks again.