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

To add to this, when they add combos, maybe some people might not need to rely on root so much. What if a guy gets the sprint skill instead of root, and say death magic has some killer combos. We might see some totally different combinations of play style.

root just keeps people off of you, but so can sprinting. Death magic is cool because the death ray interupts longer casting spells, and it's cast speed is instantaneous. Death magic doesn't do much damage yet, but if the combos are good (and maybe have damage over time DoTs), that might be a new kind of danger. Death and fire combination. Air, lunar, and chaos... who knows.

Truth is we really don't know what is going to happen.

 

I disagree if you were playing fire magic you should have an inherent disadvantage versus a mage that does water magic. Or how a Warrior would suffer versus a mage given a decent amount of range is between them. If nothing had advantages or disadvantages everything would be bland and boring you wouldn't have to approach problems different ways you would just run in and do the same thing over and over again.

 

I agree, everything should have its balance. If you go for all power in one tree, you should sacrifice in another, there should not be a way to be all powerful in fire, and resistant to water, electricity, or melee. If you want some defense, you need to put skill into it in those trees IMHO.

 

*Edit how could I forget...

• Death Magic\Root\Bowman this was another highly effective build that was GREAT at shutting down mages. (looks at Pumkin Escobar and shakes fist), this build didn't even need armor, these guys were always butt nekid for some reason yet kicking butt!

We have a long way to go and lots of testing, combo's, duel wielding, new skills, counter skills...but it's a solid start.

 

Water magic seems to nullify most of the effects of fire magic like you're saying.

The thing about the Water magic is there's two paths if you look at it. You could just pick up the Douse, Soothing Rain (heal over time), and Summon Water Elemental that has buffs and heals. If you take this route then Water magic just adds buffs and heals. Heal over time is kind of the opposite of Fire DoTs too which did most of the killing. So it's a great fire defense skill set. IN fact it is just a good defens magic skill set anyway.

However if you go full on water magic the cold spells will SLOW down the opponent. That would be serious problems for a guy trying to get away. So learning fire magic and Water magic might be a synergistic combination.

Once we get enough skill points to reasonably have multiple decks, a mage might have a deck full of Fire and water magic for some poeple. and Fire and Lighting for another... and so on.

Active:

• Ice Fist: Touch ice attack
• Ice Arrow: Ranged ice attack
• Shield of Ice: Damage absorption + fire resistance
• Ice field: AoE move speed debuff
• Summon Ice elemental: Summons an ice elemental (does ice attacks)
• Douse: Removes fire dots
• Soothing rain: AoE Heal over time
• Summon Water Elemental: summon Water Elemental (support pet with heals & buffs)

Innate:

• Icy Breath: Increases slowing effects of ice attacks
• Blue Blooded: Increases Cold Resistance

 

Armor was nerfed this release.

I want to wear plate armor. Please don't make me be in underwear or wear stupid leather just so I can avoid slugs.

 

i think a stun is fine as long worriors have battle crys making them for a short time unstunnable
+ a charge spell and a combo which use at least 2-3 buttoms but when u hit all it will knockback the enemys infront of you

so you could charge in 2-3 enemys and knock them down

 

That's a good idea. That kind of reminds me of knights grace though. Why make a second skill to do the same thing. There's no point in making the root totally useless. Just time your jumps and you can get out of them too. So there is already a way for all players to get out of it without a skill. Jumping. Then we add knight's grace, and heavy armor and shields make people more resistant to stuns and knockdowns. Keep in mind if you use a shield you can bump up the innate skill to reduce stun chance.

 

I didn't think knights grace was either effective nor worth the cost in R8

 

Couple that skill along with the innate skills of being less likely to be stunned or knocked off of your feet, and heavy armor on a whole should be very effective against stuns and knockdowns.

 

I hope they design it so that:

Heavier armor: least chance to get stunned, highest chance to get knocked down.
Medium armor: increased chance over heavy armor to get stunned, less chance than heavy to get knocked down
Light armor: increased chance over medium to get stunned, less chance that medium armor to get knocked down
Cloth armor: highest chance to get stunned, lowest chance to get knocked down.

This seems more logical to me...

 

Why would heavy armor be easier to get knocked down?

Seems to me that a person who is trained to use heavy armor should be less likely to be unbalanced in it, and the increased mass should require more force to cause it to move.

 

I did, but I was still stunned. Knights Grace maybe wouldn't come up enough (it was very expensive to have multiples of them)

And I felt the points were better spent in fire resistance and focus.

I'll try again next time when the new skills come on line.

I think heavy armor was penalized too much - it created lots of slugs but also took more damaged from fire and elec ? There were many attacks that also *ignored* armor... so that also didn't help plate out... Too many penalties for knights who didn't want to have ranged spells (already an innate disadvantage for this 'type' of player)

I mean come on... do we *want* everyone to be naked ? I hope not.

 

Heavy armor restricts your movement (as opposed to wearing no armor), higher chance to get caught flat footed but allows you to take harder shots due to the protection hence lowest chance to get stunned , of course there should be skills to mitigate this... "a person who is trained"

and the other way around...

If I'm wearing a plate helm, and I take a shot to the head from a baseball bat vs. a cloth "hoodie" I think my chances of getting stunned are going to be way less for the plate helm...no?

 

here another vid about melee combat

first i thought combo skipping wtf it was a bug in this game caused several chars to do way to much dmg in short time , but if it would a planned feature i like it , the feature to combine small melee combos 2-3 buttom ones

during the last hit of a combo the characters mostly do a last animation turn arround or putting a sword back or whatever and have a small cd on next melee combo , but when you hitting the next combo while the last swing connecting you skip the last animation (turn arround or putting a sword back or whatever) and immediatly start the next combo, so timing could be also a feature to make melee combos attractive and skillfull. without having an aiming baised system ala chivalery which would lag with housing everywhere and 1 megaserver

 

If they build it, we can break it.

Build 8 wasn't even half of the foundation from which to begin your survey for square and level. I don't disagree with the OP's sentiment on how import balance is in a skill system based PvP. In my experience though it's a journey not a destination when it comes to balancing. There will almost always be flavors of the build that have a broken or exploitable mechanic that allows them to have advantage. The question then really becomes; How quickly can the development team recognize balancing issues, brainstorm fixes, code and test the fixes and implement them into the persistent shard? Most of us know the golden rule. Fix one thing, break two others...

 

I think they should move to armor reduction rather than armor bypass. So some spells would ignore 50% of armor or even 75% of armor, but never completely bypass it. This way it's still a good "anti-armor" attack, but it doesn't make armor completely useless in those situations.

 

I don't know. I like the way they have the damage set up. One thing I really would like to avoid copletely is the elemental based armor that UO now uses. I cannot stand that system. Clothing that has fire resistance, electrical resistance, etc etc.

I would rather just keep it simple, and let armor not block magic. There is a good case for keeping it the way it is. Mages get creamed by warriors weapons since mages wear light armor or just clothes.

Even realism seems to corroborate the notion that armor shouldn't resist magic. How can metalic armor protect a person from electrical attacks? Wouldn't it make the electrical attack worse? Also keep in mind metalic armor could get heated by a magical flame and actually increase the damage over time from the fire spells. Then I don't have any clue how armor would protect from death magic since death magic seems to attack the soul of the person rather than the physical body, and if it does effect the physical body it would be some kind of necrotic damage by a negative force that I don't see why armor would protect against that. Cold just saps the heat out of an object, which like lightining might make damage worse for soembody with freezing metal next to their skin. Also if armor protects against fire because most of the explosion is shielded, then fire magic is now a lot weaker than electrical, death, and cold. Those things said, I think it is better to just keep the damage as it is.

 

I'm not making a "realism" argument. It's changes depending on point of view, primary concerns, and level of detail. I just think that from a balance perspective, armor having "some" effect, even a fairly negligible one will keep people wanting to use it. Too many ways to bypass it and everyone will use those attacks, leading to less armor usage. At least that seems likely to me.

It's just my take.

 

Weapons will do a lot of damage against mages. So the trade off is the same. People wearing armor won't be as good at casting, but they will be great at using weapons.

What would say about a mage running around with clothing that has special resistance to Physical damage from weapons? That's what UO currently does. In fact nobody should wear heavy armor in UO when clothes protect you just as good, but without all the negatives to dex.