Request: Zero Sum Damage and Focus

I think there's a better way to balance combat damage than we're currently doing in R19.

I believe that regardless of behind the scenes math, 1 point of damage should require 1 point of focus. Here's another way of looking at it. If I do 30 points of damage to your character, that act should require 30 points of focus by my character to perform.

There are number of reasons I think this would be "better".

1. Death and Healing magic are currently unbalanced. Using the above methodology would bring these more in line. For example, currently death magic does X damage and uses up a smaller portion of focus. Healing does the same.

And this is where it would get really interesting. Because currently healing pulls health out of no where in exchange for a small portion of focus. So most players strategically use as much healing as possible because it doesn't really have a cost to it. It's "free health".

But if you tie the amount of healing you're doing to the same amount of focus, now you could quickly run out of focus during combat.

Death magic works in reverse of that. Currently the use of Death Touch (for example) takes health away from another player and gives you a portion of that health in exchange for a small portion of focus. But imagine if each time you took health from another player an equal amount of focus was drained from your character? Now it's not such a good idea to spam everything in your inventory, is it?

2. This would naturally slow down combat by making players more considerate about their focus use in comparison to their damage. Large hits that didn't drain all focus would be more appealing, and spells and skills that preserved focus would also be more important.

3. The result of this would be MUCH LESS of a focus on DPS. Because now DPS (aka spamming damage) can't really help you unless you're killing people in 3 hits or less. So assuming the game doesn't allow for that, combat has to become more of a "dance" and less of a "who has the best build".

4. The use of potions and scrolls would be more important. The way they're currently designed would need to change so that people didn't have to have these to compete in pvp. But I think that's doable if we think on it.

 

This is a follow up post to the OP. I think all the crazy math involved with the combat system is unnecessary and needlessly creates a complex environment that's hard, if not impossible to balance.

Combat should LITERALLY be this simple. (and yes this is consistent with the above OP)

Hit anything 4 times and it's dead. That's it, this goes for PVE and PVP. The rest of the combat system is just blocks and counters that prevent hits or give you extra hits.

It's soooooooo much that simple. I'm dead serious, if we were to fundamentally change combat to be more like this it would be more intuitive, more fun, and have more people enjoying it overnight.

Notice that this doesn't in any way require complicated math or formulas. It doesn't require DPS. Every spell and skill now would have a rank of Damage = 1. Every armor would have a rank of protection = 1.

Shields would block, counter and attack.
Weapons would block, counter and attack.
Spells and skills would block, counter, and attack.

And now those combinations vs. other combinations would result in one player or mob having a score of 1 (hit) or a score of 0 (miss).

For example: You vs. Me.

You are wearing full leather armor. This protects you from light slashing attacks (and by protect I mean it blocks them). But nothing else.

I am wearing full plate armor. This protects me from light and medium slashing attacks as well as several other attacks of light and medium variety.

You are using a short sword that allows you to strike me with light and medium thrusting attacks. That is, if you can hit me!

I'm also holding a shield that I can use to block your thrusting attack. So I'm a tank and I will be very hard for you to hit.

Unless of course you use a counter to weaken my defenses! Which you do by tripping me. Now I'm susceptible to your thrusting attacks, and you hit me!

I have not been able to hit you yet because you are faster than me due to your light armor! If I do hit you though, you have no answer (way to block) my war hammer and will be damaged and dead quickly.

So we dance! You attempt to use your counters to make my tank vulnerable to your attacks. While I attempt to swat you like a fly.

Whoever hits 4 times first, wins! It's simple, it's fair, it's fun, and it doesn't require half the non-sense we have in the current combat system.

Why in the world are we not doing this already?

 

Drocis, really, your crusade against DPS is getting so old I can scrape it out of walls in caverns.

If anything like that (1 dam = 1 focus) would ever appear, it would mean:

1) You don't know what you can and cannot cast. What if your spell has a theoretical critical ceiling value of 100 dam and you have only 80 focus? Can you cast it or not? What if you have 100 focus but, for stillness and increase in crit chance, now it CAN do 120 dam? You lose the chance to cast it unless you regen focus, or move again?

2) Difference in spells becomes irrelevant. Stone Fist can ignore armor, Ice Fist can slow down, Flame Fist can apply a dot. Only the last one is actual bonus damage. How you calculate that, with regard to focus necessary to cast them?

3) Intelligence, the already overpowered stat, will become even more critical, since it gives extra focus, and thus extra guaranteed damage. And not just for mages, but for everyone.

4) As long as you have more focus than the enemy has health, it's an auto win. So much for the dance.

5) How can you balance this silly idea with PVE? Where mobs have in excess of 1-2000 hit points? You ought to engage them with 1000 focus? Good luck with that.

6) Melee skills will be tied to focus too in the same way? If yes, the game will become a race to find the crowd control and free-focus skills. If not, mages will simply disappear.

7) Death WAS overpowered, but it's not anymore, stop complaining about something that fell out of the FOTM a couple of releases ago. And especially, stop suggesting radical changes on the wrong assumptions on a single magic tree.
As not said. It's a lost battle.

 

I would literally throw out the current system of unbalanced and NEVER TO BE BALANCED hit points, and use a scale of 1 to 4 on everything. Why? Because 1 to 4 is so much easier to balance than anything else we've done to date.

How many hit points does a Lich have? 4
How many hit points does a Kobold have? 4
How many hit points does a Dragon have? 4
How many hit points do all players have? 4

Armor, weapons, skills and spells all work the same, one hit equals one point of damage and requires one focus.

So where's the skill and the fun? Simple. Players use combinations of weapons, armor, skills and spells to "break through" defenses and "protect" themselves so that they don't get hit and they hit other people or monsters. Used in combination with free attack and free aim, "fairnesss" is baked into the cake.

This is SO MUCH EASIER to balance it's not even funny. Plus it's easier to understand and play (have fun) in a system like this. I guarantee this would be better than what we have right now.

 

Basically, what I'm proposing is something as simple as Street Fighter mechanics on a much slower and deliberate pace. But instead of attack high medium and low, we'd have a more sophisticated system with many more combinations of attacks, blocks and counters based on weapons, armor, skills and spells.

Melee Examples: (don't get caught up on the details)

Slashing Attack (blocked by leather and plate armor)
Thrusting Attack (blocked by chain armor)
Piercing Attack (blocked by chain armor)
Bludgeoning Attack

Leather Armor = no counters
Chain Armor = 2 counters
Plate Armor = 3 counters

So the more protection you have, the more counters someone can use to set you up.
The more attack range you have the more counters someone can use to set you up.

Ideally you'd make a huge matrix of all the weapons, skills, spells and armor and just adjust them based on strengths and weaknesses. The deciding factor would be player skill in timing of attacks vs. what the other player was doing.

 

I don't like it but i like the thought behind it.

 

Four hits and dead? Can you identify an existing game that uses this now where it is fun?

A few challenge I see: 1) You might as well do away with all skills too while you are at it. No time to use them. 2) Ranged skills would have an utter advantage over melee.

Given those two things alone, the proposed approach just does not seem fun on the surface of it. At the end of the day, it has to be fun. Else it fails.

 

If 5 or 15 hits is better, fine. It's not really important what number we settle on. It's more about the idea that we don't use "hit points" and DPS to determine success.

All of the complex math we're currently using is a huge distraction to the goal of combat balance. It should be really simple...I stab you with a sword a few times and you're dead simple.

No, we just modify what skills would mean. No longer would we say "increases damage" and instead we'd say "allows you to hit against plate armor". Of course, every skill and spell would need to have advantages and disadvantages. So if something allows you to do X, it would make you vulnerable against Y.

Sure, and they should have advantages against melee. But in my system (unlike current combat) they would have disadvantages too.

For example, if you are shooting a bow maybe you are stuck in place long enough for someone with a sword to run up on you. Or maybe you can't change weapons quickly and bows don't work at a minimum range at all. So ranged weapons become more tactical - like you're standing in a guard tower where no one can get to you easily. The moment someone steps up next to you, that tactical advantage is lost and you're at a serious disadvantage.

There are a ton of "what ifs" to consider. But I honestly think I have all this covered. I think we as MMO gamers have gotten used to a combat delivery method that is inherently broken. I don't think we can tweak our way into combat balance so long as we have a system built on DPS.

 

Here are some examples of common skill (thrust) and how they might change in a system without DPS....

Thrust can now hit against certain armor types. But when you use it, this opens you up to counter attacks and blocks. Someone may use a shield to block your thrust or a blade to parry your thrust. This means you don't hit them (if they use a shield) and you are counter attacked by them if they use parry.

However, if someone uses parry or shield there are counters to that. You might use double slash and hit them twice. This is of course if they are wearing cloth armor that would have no protection against slashing weapons.

To me this is a much more interesting and fun way to think about combat. This logic can also be applied to all skills and spells in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way. Ranged Archery beats Magic, Magic beats Melee, and Melee beats Ranged Archery. Of course, as I mentioned above there are tactical situations where one attack type might be "trump". Archery on high ground or cover, Melee in confined spaces, and Magic in open areas.

 

I've always liked your combat ideas. I think this system is different, in a way that it brings combat around to feeling intuitive again. The simplicity of the damage system is tempered by your stress on the importance of blocks and counters from all the skills. This helps to keep skills the defining factor in combat, which supports a leveling up system that focuses on increasing skill options.

Keeping this form of simplicity on the damage side means that a lvl 5 could kill a lvl 80, if a lvl 80 didn't use their skills. But if a lvl 80 uses all the skills at their disposal, they should easily be able to win the fight, through the smart execution of those skills (and not because they have higher hit points / damage output). Which is what SotA was promising to be. That's why I like it.

As long as the skills are being learned gradually as we play, and their use is evident visually as to what they are doing, while they are being used, this should be extremely fun!

I hope this approach is seriously considered. I really feel that it may be so different, most would have to try it out to really understand it.

 

I mean no offense but this idea is just awful in so many ways. It would utterly kill player and monster diversity. We'd be right back in 1999 UO where "the build" required everyone to run around pre-casting and smacking people with halberds while wearing cloth armor. With your proposed paper/rock/scissors system it wouldn't take long for people to figure out that wearing armor type "x" and using weapon type "y" gives me the most benefit for most of my encounters. We all then use X and Y instead of any alternatives.

Also, removing damage intensity altogether also removes the possibility of having fun and intricate mechanics such as burning, poisoning, bleeding, or any other type of damage-over-time effect. Removing types of damage intensity also further encourages people to just use the same abilities over and over. Whichever abilities are the most cost effective and ignore the most types of armor will be all a player needs.

Plus on an immersion level it makes no sense to me whatsoever that just because someone is wearing plate armor they are completely immune to slashing damage for example. Or as you said they would be immune to my sword until I trip them. NOW that I've tripped them my sword can penetrate their plate armor whereas even while landing hits before my sword would not. ...What?! That makes no sense at all. Enough hacks and that armor should peel right open! More so, I want to run around swinging a sword, but oh no can't do that because 95% of players are wearing plate armor so I have to use spells or piercing weapon like a spear. Your suggestion forces me to play in a restrictive fashion in order to be successful which would be against my desired way to play.

Plus if Plate Armor blocks the most attack types, why wouldn't we all wear plate? What incentive would there be to wear lighter types of armor?

Next if all monster die in four (or whatever number) hits how is that any fun? How is one monster different from the next? Offensive abilities notwithstanding, how are monster encounters to be diversified? All players need to do is figure out which ability(s) will bypass that specific monster's defenses and simply spam those abilities in a very boring and non-challenging way.

Plus as someone already mentioned, if it only takes a certain number of hits why would anyone use melee over ranged? Why would anyone use an ability with a cast time over an insta cast? Why would anyone use an ability that uses more resources as opposed to one that uses less?

The primary goal of any game is to be fun and entertaining. While your proposed system is certainly simple, it sounds extremely boring. Putting boring systems into a product that's primary goal is fun and entertainment is 100% counterproductive.

 

Well, I would say it should not be zero sum, there should be efficiency involved.

100 focus points will do 80 damage (could be up to 100), but sacrificing 80 health will regenerate only 64 focus (again could be up to 80 after randomization)...

I think that players should have way more focus than health though. The main issue in the game I can see is that focus is regenerating too quickly and during combat! and that Tap Soul + Healing Touch generate both focus and health, which should not be case, anyone chaining those spells should bleed out to death and lose focus as well. Overall I would like spells to do less damage, healing to heal way less and focus and health bar to matter. Currently players with 400 health often lose 1000+ hp in a fight before they die, which is really insane. The focus of the combat should imho shift to counters and shields from healing, which has its place in the game, but it should nto be the main thing to counter everything.

 

I think in the same way as Themo. I really like the concept behind it, but i'm not comfortable with some elements used to achieve it. I'd prefer focus to be managed faster in a sense that it depletes in a couple of moves, but it also gets filled in a couple of seconds (in the same way energy work for rogues in WoW). That kind of limitation may generate a "dynamic turn" element that could work towards the implementation of the rest of good ideas here. In the end i share Drocis' vision of this kind of combat being better current trends in MMO's, and personally think that is more suitable for the random deck system to develop its full potential.

Crusade or not... excellent suggestions indeed.

 

I fully support the idea of strong counters and blocks and far less regeneration of health in combat (i.e., avoid damage to survive, rather than "heal it up"). I would like to see faster, more lethal combat such that a fight can be ended in a few successful blows (but perhaps many attempted but blocked/countered blows), rather than extended vastly by heals into a less thrilling war of attrition. I like the ideas of more differentiation in types of armours as well. I'm not a great fan of hit points (and huge hitpoint pools) making greatswords seem more like butter knives either, so agree with the sentiment on hit points, the dragon in the example should be very difficult to slay but hitpoints is a dull mechanism to represent such I agree.

 

Im picturing this making things more gear than skill based. While simplicity can be a good thing, it would also narrow options. It would create playstyles that are compeltely invulnerable to other playstyles, forcing some people to have to change their playstyle to "counter" another. By playstyle i mean, someone who likes to use daggers would be forced to use soemthing else if thier target's armor is invulnerable to daggers.

Groups of 4 people woudl roam around "1 shotting" other folks.
People would feel the need to cary multiple sets of different kidns of weapons and armor in their invetory at all times no matter who they are.
And while strategizing to defeat your opponent is a good thing, it will be reduced to looking at what they are wearing, and using things in direct contrast to that. THis would ALWAYS give the person initiating the fight the advantage because they will have seen their target, changed their equipment accordingly to assure hits are scored and/or blocked, and then engaged thier taarget.

Stealth wins.

But the idea of making blockign and countering more effective than heal-tanking i am fully in support of

 

In a game which I hope to play for years, a "simpler" system of combat is not necessarily what I am looking for. I want a complicated system, which I can learn, and grow into over time. If the game is set up well the skill advancement matches the areas and opponents that I will face going through the game.

Arranging a "simple" method that adds up in a way to balance physical vs. magical attacks and defenses for PvP does not interest me much.

My name is Celowynn, and I approve of this message. (my opinion guys and gals. I like complicated and difficult, so there.)