The 4 Principles of Balanced Combat: And my thoughts on PVP R8

You're "right" if you're looking at the problem using typical MMO glasses. Combat design becomes damage increase here, cool down there.

What I'm saying is that designing combat like that is foolish, it's not fun, and it can never truly be balanced. All those min/max naunced adjustments are built on top of an extremely unbalanced foundation. The internet doesn't lend itself well to "timing". There's lag, there's network interruption, but there's also processing speed and player reflexes to consider. That's not something that can be balanced across different systems, players, and internet connectivity.

While I appreciate your attention to detail, I believe you suffer from the same thing that many of the devs suffer from...trying to fix the wrong thing. Who cares what the cool down is set to? It's always going to be out of balance depending on your point of view (meaning your individual connection, your PC, your reflexes, your deck build, etc...) The problem they need to address is balancing the way combat works fundamentally, and that has much more to do with having a defense for every offense and much less to do with Damage Output and Cool Downs.

When you start talking about Roots and Stuns, this is an even better example of core elements of combat being unbalanced. Why on the gods green earth would anyone think that letting one player completely immobilize another player would ever be balanced? That's inherently NOT BALANCED. So now the solution is to min/max cool downs on something that's never going to be balanced INHERENTLY? Please tell me you understand what I'm saying? Please.

 

I think a stun here and a root there is good for PvP. You have to have some semblance of control when movement is a factor, as it is in this pvp so far. Diminishing returns would make it so after a few stuns, the target is immune. It's worked in every pvp mmo ever made. My biggest gripe with the system is that blades is the only fleshed out melee tree and fire the only magic tree. The rest of the skills aren't really being tested in this release as there's not much to test. I would have rather had one or two skills in every tree available.. test that balance.. add another tier.. test that balance.. see if there's any regressing impacts to previous skills from the new tier etc. I do agree with your build on foundation point. Even in games that have been out for years are imbalanced. It's a moving target and with a classless game... there are thousands of possible builds to consider. We should not expect any balance at all until at least beta if not post release.

 

I agree with you, roots and stuns are "cool". But they aren't cool when they're inherently unbalanced - which they always will be unless you change what the definition is of what a root and stun are. In D&D roots and stuns are equally if not more OP. They're deadly. You fail one saving throw and you're caught helpless in the spiders web! I used to game with some people that would cast hold person on players like it was candy. People would routinely find their characters tied up and naked, while some idiots asked them stupid questions like "do you do magic?" for hours until they were finished showing the new people who was boss.

But that doesn't mean we have to allow that to happen in SOTA. It doesn't mean we can't reinvent what a root or a stun IS. Why does a root or a stun always have to work the first time? Why can't I block it? Why can't a player take preemptive steps to just completely avoid the whole thing?

It worked for you and you're style of play maybe. Maybe.

But it doesn't work for the vast majority of players because it's one of the top reasons people hate PVP. It's probably just below "I don't want to be ganked" on the I hate PVP list.

If they don't add more skills and spells for R9, I think we could achieve a very balanced game by R10. If they add more, it's hopeless. We'll never be able to keep up with the ever changing landscape. I know they have a development schedule to meet, but there's no way around this. You add more you at another layer of unbalance.

 

I think I see what you're saying. That this game has an opportunity to reinvent the way we see PvP. Or, maybe you're saying that you'd be happy if root fizzled, because currently it's fizzle proof. Is that it? We're pre alpha man, we can't even comment on balance. We're just trying to find skills that are bugged and report them.

 

Yes.

I'd be happy if root (for example) had a proactive counter. Meaning that you couldn't just cast root on someone and expect it to work. NOT because of some random chance of failure like fizzle (although sure that's fine too). But instead because the other player said, hey everyone roots me all the time, why don't I do something about that?

They have to put something in the game that just freakin blocks certain attacks from being effective. Just like plate armor should be great against bladed weapons. People should be able to perform some kind of proactive and or action in the moment that protects them against "whatever".

Yeah I know that, which is why I really appreciate your feedback in the thread you made about 500 kills. That's probably exactly what the devs want to hear. What I'm saying is that at the end of the day if you're going to bake a layer cake and the first layer is filled with unbalanced crap there's no reason to assume that when you put on more layers of that cake you're going to improve it. You're just going to have more layers of unbalanced cake. We're still really making the batter for that cake right now...I'd like it to make a great first layer. If we bake what's in R8 right now into the cake...we'll regret it.

 

I'm sure all of that will happen in time. Those discussions are less valuable to me right now because I feel the core balance is typically skewed. I totally realize that it's not supposed to be perfect right now. It's also good to hear that part of the reason for this was to make it "fun". That's a good excuse for the rollout, and you certainly accomplished that goal.

Chris, thank you.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like a stupid fan boy. But I really do think extremely highly of the entire team. The deck system was brilliant and it's working very much like I believed it would after you described it to the community last year. But I wouldn't have come up with that on my own, I would've gone a different direction. So I hope you guys are really patting yourselves on the back for the deck system and R8 - both are a huge success in my eyes.

As far as the future, it's good to hear that you guys want to make "active defenses and counter elements". That's music to my ears. Going forward, I only ask that you take the time to read through this thread thoroughly because I think it speaks for everything I'll be saying in R9 and R10 and beyond.

I'm really looking forward to your post on balance. Again, not because I expected R8 to BE balanced, but because I expected the language from your team and the direction to be more fundamentally clear as to how balance would be achieved, as well as what balance means to your team (how it will be measured). I'm really hoping that we can get away from all of the damage modifiers and cool downs and become more conscious of how players defend against attacks in a meaningful way.

 

@Baron Drocis Fondorlatos I think I understand now what you mean with the balancing the core of the system, with it meaning, among other things, "making it independent of external factors like connection speed or player reflexes while mantaining the desired dynamism". If that's what you really meant, then I must completely agree with that. I still think, though, that once "core balance" is achieved "deck balance" requires all skillsets to be present to be efective.

I will wait, however, on Chris full balance report and ideas before futher commening on this, as now we now we've not even seen a draft of the real balance blueprint, but a distorted version designed to make an incomplete and flawed system fun.

@Chris, I must also thank you and the team for taking the time to read all these posts and for your hard work. Expect a torrent of comments on your post, because that'll be interesting but I'm sure between all of us we'll be able to make a perfect and innovative game.

P.S.: Perhaps a little off-topic now but about wat was said earlier about "mass root" that fits in my personal thoughts on how "deck balance" shouldn't be "anything is the same agains everything" but more of a "rps type, specialized decks better against something but worse against something else". With those kinds of skills in play, for example, we could have a "crowd-control 1 vs many" specialized mage which would be very good agains multiple foes but suck against one single enemy (think area vs homing, distributed damge vs directed one, etc...) whereas one specialized in 1 vs 1 combat could utterly destroy a single enemy but suck against more than one. Then again we could have a warrior specialized on spellcaster slaying which would have an advantage over that 1vs1 mage but then be weak against other kind of warriors, and that goes on and on. That's the game I'd like to see, one in which your skill choices determine against what you're strong, against what you're weak and against what you're on equal grounds, but never having a build (again, excluding nonsense ones, but even some of them could be surprising) that is "good against everything", "bad against everything" or even "equal against everything".

 

That's an important part of what I was saying, yes. But it's not more important than all the other stuff I said. I'm glad you agree with that part. I hope we don't lose focus on the other equally important parts though.

"Deck Balance" is really a byproduct of "core" balance. I'm surprised that people seem to have a hard time understanding this, but I guess I shouldn't be.

When "you people" ....what I mean is "when everyone but me" seems to read this post they immediately start talking about cool downs and damage counts" and that's "fine". But it's not what I'm talking about. Here's a bunch of other words I'm not talking about: Kiting, Nukes, crowd control, tanking, damage reduction, buffs, DPS, etc.. This is not how people talk about real balance. That's all window dressing for a broken system that frankly every game uses to hide from the inherently poor design that was created around the time of EQ and continued for the last 15 years.

That's all MMO broken combat mechanics talk as far as I'm concerned. Here's what I want to know as a player. If someone throws a fireball at me, how to I stop that from hurting me? What do I DO? Don't tell me that I get a 25% fire immunity and a spell (douse) that allows me to stop the DOT's that are doing 14 DPS. That's not what this is about.

If someone casts a fireball at me, I want to hear the devs say something like the following:

Well you could dodge it! Or if you're really smart you could cast a preemptive spell on yourself that makes you immune to fireballs. Or if you're really quick on the draw you might be able to COUNTER the spell by using a special focus ability that literally allows you to dispell incoming magical attacks! There are drawbacks to all of these moves that are balanced against the likelihood of an offensive spell like fireball hitting you, but you'll have many ways to block it.

Notice how we're not talking about DAMAGE and we're not talking about COOL DOWNS and we're not talking about any of those other things MMO players like to blather on about? That's what I want, real solutions that are BALANCED against the offensive attacks they're designed to mitigate, avoid, and prevent.

And what I'm suggesting is that it doesn't make ANY sense to add MORE spells and skills to an already unbalanced system. That's absolutely NOT how we're going to make this work. I guarantee that's a failed plan, and I'm going to attempt to show (the devs because that's what all these posts are about) just what I mean.

Say you have a base that looks like this...

BASE = Fireballs are too powerful. Lich Axe is too powerful. Archery is underpowered. Fire Elementals don't take commands correctly. Roots and Stuns have no counters. This is just an example dataset, the point is not to say "well they can fix all that quick!" Imagine this times about 500 and you probably have the real R8 environment.

As a developer, you may not have the resources or the time to fix all of that in a month. So you have to make choices. You might take some of the things that are considered low hanging fruit and knock those out quick for easy wins. Or you might take one of the hardest things and put your best people on it. Who knows...it's a challenge. But what you're not going to do is get it all balanced well. Why? Because you're limited on time and resources and this stuff is HARD.

Plus don't forget, we're adding more skills and spells next month! So let's say you take that base and you fix a few of the things that were listed. Now the BASE looks more like this:

BASE = Fire Elementals don't take commands correctly. Roots and Stuns have no counters.

That's much better than before. But oh yeah, now you have more skills and spells and at the end of R9 your new base looks like this:

NEW BASE = Fire Elementals don't take commands correctly. Roots and Stuns have no counters. New Flaming sword does double intending damage. New Shield can be used to create unstoppable combo move. New blade skill is underpowered. Archery is still underpowered.

If we look at all of the games out there, this is not just a real scenario it's REALITY. The system of damage and cool downs that relies heavily on "timing" and "new skills and spells" to "fix" everything - it doesn't work. We need something better. We need a system based on defense and not offense. We need a system based on BALANCE and not constant change so that people have short term "fun" and forget about all the things that don't work right.

BALANCE is HARD. Making new crap to go into the game with complete disregard for balance is infinitely easier.

 

Its definitely different now than it was earlier in the week, or maybe I've adapted. Either way it's a lot of fun.

Root doesn't always root you. Sometimes you can jump out of it right away.

As for the stuns, don't like them, but do like giving them to folks

 

Ok, I noticed another cause of our misunderstanding (and noticing them are good because we can better communicate with the devs!). When you say "skill" you seem to mean (roughly) "offensive skill". But that active defense, that counter spell or than focus abilities you're "requesting" are skills too! So you're requesting skills to fix balance issues while requesting no new skills at all When I was speaking of "skill" I was meaning everything, from attack to defense to counters to innates. That's why I said we needed more skills, because we need the defense skills needed to balance out the existing offensive skills. I completely agree that numbers are the least important thing, only needed for fine-tuning, and should go last.

So, the way I see it, we have two kinds of basic balance, numbers aside:
-Core balance: How you do things, basic system design. Should all kind of skills be mixed on the same deck/hand or we need parallel independent ones (one for defense, one for attack, for example)? Should the deck be completely randomized or add some kind of situational awareness? Should movement be an important aspect or an ancilliary one? etc... Most of this aspects are being discussed, in fact, in other posts and might still need a couple of revisions.
-Deck balance: What things are you able to do. What attacks we have? What counters do we have for those attacks? What kind of preemptive actions can we take?

For the first one, I agree that only a couple of skills just for testing should be needed. After reading Chris post, now it seems we're not even at this point (as the system we have is not the actual one but a modified one). but this indeed should be the first thing to be clear and complete.
For the second one, you could argue that the better way to do it is gradually. First put the fireball and its counters, see if it works or if needs conceptual (not numbers) adjustments, then add lightning and defenses agains stun, see if it works... And that is a good way to balance, but in my opinion has a flaw: it makes it difficult to test more original, complex or unconventional combinations of attack-defense that could also work, be balanced and be fun, even if not originally thought of. So yes, it's true that putting everything at once might create an unmanageable list of issues, but adding too few things at a time could end with a too rigid combat system. Here is where the devs need to come with the adecuate balance of balancing things

This game, however, has another problem related to balance: Whatever the good way is to balance things, it usually isn't very fun. This game releases, however, need to be fun to play to continue enticing the playerbase and attracting new players while still being a good source of data for development. That, in itself, is surely a challenge of its own.

 

@Kether...

You're right, in one breath I'm saying no more skills and spells and in the other I'm saying where's the defense? However, "in my defense" I believe the lack of defense is what should've been avoided to begin with. I would rather they removed offensive skills and added defensive skills in their place rather than "make the game fun" for a few months of time during pre-alpha. But I understand the move from a business standpoint!

Still, it's important to not lose sight of the fact that all design documents and developer discussions have lack specifics about defense. So I'm not entirely certain (in fact I lean heavily towards the opposite) that the devs have really baked defense into the cake. I'm very excited to read what Chris has to say on the subject.

 

Great thread!

I too have a confession... I was fully expecting not to like, and was internally very vocal about my concerns for this approach to combat. I worried that a mechanic traditionally found in turn based games, would not carry through to real time application. even through our internal debates, I expressed more concern than expectations of success. I regularly kept the fallback plan for a traditional MMO shortcut bar, on standby.

However, I despite my concerns, we all knew we hoped for something better than the status quo, and Chris and others on the tech team, felt passionately, that they had an approach that could give SotA a clearly new and better playing combat system, that has never before existed in games.

My concerns have been proven completely wrong! Internally, we have been playing this combat approach, and refining it for just the last few weeks. However, even in its earliest form, well before you saw it, it was obvious that this was going to be great fun, and offer a fresh and compelling new form of game combat. Wow, was I wrong! Wow, am I happy I was.

Now, the system is still VERY rough. It is very much unbalanced. It needs substantial UI streamlining and overhaul. But, I am a strong believer, that the foundation is VERY strong!

From this foundation we will now be able to address many of the concerns you all address above. Bear with us. I suspect it will remain unbalanced and awkward for another release or two. But, it should steadily get better and better. And your analysis and commentary can be pivotal in making it great! Please help us do so.

I look forward to seeing you all on the battle fields! I look forward to you all testing my immortality, which fortunately seems to be working. So far, in none of my previous visits to Britannia, has immortality been reliable. Through bugs or intentional back doors left by staff, there has always been a way to kill me. We will see. Perhaps I deserve it for my lingering doubt in my amazing team.

Huzzah to the combat team!!!

- Lord British

 

I already said that I like the new combat, as it is a fresh take on combat with some unpredictable elements to it. Also it is more tactical as you have to adapt to situations during combat.
I really, really hope that you do not fall back to the traditional MMO shortut bar combat system, this would be horrible.

Yet as fun and unique the combat is, there is one problem. A problem others already pointed out and to which I agree.

Normally you learn how to use a sword, you train, you acquire some types of attacks and defensive skills and you learn when to use those skills.
With the card deck combat we have now you know what skills to use but you do never know when to use them, as the skills show up at a random pattern.

I already stated this in another thread but I would like to say it again: A better and more realistic approach would be to have skill that are locked and effects for those skills that are drawn randomly by the card system.

So you would learn the fireball spell and lock it into your hotbar. And you can cast this fireball whenevery you want. But you will not be able to control the effect, the fireball has 100%. So when you learn fireball you also have to learn different effects for this spell, like a double fireball or a broader explosion, maybe a fireball that can follow your enemies etc.
Those effects would essentially be the cards and you can stack those effects into your deck just like we do it now with the skills. This way you could put one effect more often into a deck to raise the chance of this effect appearing. But you will never be 100% sure that this effect will show up. Magic is unpredictable and you can never control it 100%.
The same for weapon skills. You may use a thrust attack that is locked in your skill bar and thus you can thrust whenever you want. But there is always a chance that the effect of the thrust may not be what you hope it will be. That is just the unpredictability that can happen to everything you do.

With this change you would be able to use the skills you learnt whenever you want to but you would still have the card deck determine the effect this skill has.

 

Thank you Lord British for stopping in! Its always great to see you! I hope you didn't mind me with my tape measure, measuring your skin size for the "Lord British Skin Armor" that I will be making in the future muhahahah,,,,, Ahhh muhahahahahahh!

 

Thank you Brother Baron Drocis Fondorlatos for preaching from the alter of reason and conjecture, consider the ~Time Lord~ as a member of your choir,


I cannot add or subtract any of the given arguments and reasoning of any of the players posting here with specificness, yet I know that any balancing needs to be thought of as each spell or attack having a corresponding countermeasure.
I find myself between balance and difference. Difference encourages teams and Balance more encourages the single player.

I do see, that even in this primitive build that we have some preferring more of a Knight and others preferring the Mage and as Lord Trady pointed out I saw few archers among us. I point to these because with our game we see that differences are by preference of play style of the player. Yes there are hybrids and many here because of the way the current world is.

I see the discussions of our individual preferred play "style" slipping into some debate of it's PvP engage ability in hopes of balance, which I find at odds with the development of preferred flavor of style which is of the role playing non-PvP community.
This I find disturbing ... But not totally unreasonable as PvM is not so very different than PvP, yet PvM is more "a fashion of play style" and PvP is more of a need to balance a battle environment. This may seem to the PvP minded community as babbling nonsense, yet when a spell is suggested for development that is just fun to the PvM community, the PvP community will always say it will unbalance their warfare in some way. Thus the thought of balance becomes an even greater difficulty to achieve if the majority or large enough minority is effected by the others desires or restrictions.

*and very bloody note*
Let us not forget our 3 PvP power's rise which is that of our Cannibal's plight within this mix of PvP where, "Dose a Knight provide more of a melee boost in nutritional value or a Mage provide more of an enhanced Magical flavor to them?"
"Oh yes, there are many much larger lightning bolts from our PvP skies yet to be seen!" ... Fore already do we see them smell the taste of sacred blood drooling by their lips... "Indeed!"

It is for all of this and these that I say I see many such separations of powers that will all needing their balances considered somewhere within our mix.
But as all rain comes to all of us, we thus have always invented the umbrella as our Aron Swordmaster does represent in his statements as well...

A Choir member of balance, as ever one such as I, yet there are more things in creations yet untold for our full table of any contents to be seen and thus considered...
Balance, indeed well put and in it's place Baron Drocis Fondorlatos, your thoughts on such are of great context and much appreciated because they are well needed !
~Time Lord~

 

Love how the pvp is going so far I just wish for more control of the character besides just lock-on and shoot, hopefully in future versions we will see more dodge mechanics like dodge rolls, parry and blocking. Ya I know, I just finished the Dark Souls 2 DLC and maybe this is wishful thinking for SOTA but never hurts to ask

 

I'm horrible at Dark Souls 2, but I really liked the combat system there. I'm looking for even more defense out of SOTA though.

I think there's a whole untapped subset of players out there that just think differently...when most PK's are attacking they're trying to defend. If we could give those people a way to compete, we'd really have something special here.

 

my 2 cents what could be improved in the latest combat release and how the system could be easy changed to smth better more tacticly with a taget baised system

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...tom-click-system-ala-age-of-conan-idea.13127/



agree with dark souls combat system but only for mobs that they are challanging have slow animations but are dangerous as hell and you can block them or make the right movement to prevent to get hitted by them

 

One of the oddest things I encountered was that I was trying to sneak up on an enemy and wanted to attack him but suddenly there were only defensive skills in my hot bar, so my sneak attack became a desaster...
I mean, when I try to attack someone from behind I fully know that I want to attack him and not suddenly roll to the side...