The Case Against One-Handed Weapons

I think you are falling into a communication fallacy here. Support increases the visibility of your ideas, potentially rephrases aspects of them in replies (different people understand different phrasings better), adds credibility to your statement that something is wrong and ultimately could fulfill your purpose (if the person in charge of the system supports what you said, things are more likely to be done about it).

 

With my charged attacks, I rarely stack. When I do it is usually a very quick thumb mouse click, 1, 2.

Holding down the mouse button while running and thumb clicking to stack and pressing # keys and WASD and knowing when exactly you want to be back at the mob to unleash the attack would be amazing if anyone could get good at it but I find it insane and probably ends up costing me DPS.

 

That is exactly what i found. However, I decided that for me personally the advantages of using stacked buffs and using stacking to keep glyphs from decaying to be more import than using charged attacks.

I may retry when i have time, but I haven't yet.

I'm assuming you bound the combining key to thumb - do you know what it is labeled as in the key bindings?

 

Searched to no avail. Can someone expound on "shield mage"? Is that a mage build using the shield tree, or something else using magic shield spells? Or something even different? Thank you in advance.

 

This.

 

Hey just because i don't look it doesn't mean it wouldn't be welcomed. It was just a poor way of justifying the broad purpose of such a post, sorry if it seemed other thing.

Start Glyph Combo, almost at the end.

 

Thank you. May play around with binding that to mouse when I next have time to play.

 

You know, this could be remedied by letting attacks charge in free mode passively, and then requiring a click to attack (instead of click-hold-release). Assuming, of course, they make sure that clicking on a glyph doesn't trigger the attack.

 

Exactly!

The alternate keybinding is called "Attack". I used to bind it to some less used key, and bind that in turn to a mouse side button. Then just, well, keep that side button down when in attack mode. Easy.
This makes it possible to use charged attack while stacking glyphs with a mouse.

I don't use it any more because I have tried to learn combining & activating glyphs using the keyboard (which, after one gets used to it, consumes less "real-life focus" than weaving with the mouse).

However, while using that mapping, it became quite clear to me that, just like @DaemienX observed, chronic pressing of some key or button to "charge" an attack is, completely, totally unnecessary. It could just as well be charged totally passively. All this constant button pressing does is strain injuries to some people.

Actually, to delay my SotA-caused RSI a bit, I developed an evil macro that works exactly like DaemienX described above: passive charging, and then requiring click to attack.

Spoiler: My evil macro

Basically, my evil "macro" just toggles the following on and off: ' while true ; do xdotool keydown 6 ; sleep 1 ; done ' where '6' is my keybinding for 'Attack'.

Spoiler: Another evil idea

The idea of passive charging would, of course, make the entire concept of "autoattack" even more questionable than it is now

 

I'd be okay with this idea. As before I suggest making a thread specifically on the subject.

 

#killautoattack #teampassivechargeattack

 

Talk to Kendric Darrow he is a shield mage.
The jist of it is a pure mage and also pick up the shield line.

 

I would like to take the opportunity to point out that, even though Noric has done significant research into this subject to devise his DPS formula, it is still not 100% known. He makes a lot of educated guesses, but reading through the description there are many things he remains unsure of. This is probably as good an example as any for why we, as both players and testers, need complete mechanical transparency. I've said it before and I'll say it again: only giving us tidbits raises more questions than answers. The addition of the tooltips for the 3 main stats, for example, was very nice, but we need to see how these stats affect everything. Instead of telling me that dex increases my chance to hit, the tooltip should tell me how much my current dex increases my hit chance.

I know that many people are in favor of obscurity in SotA, but I say leave that to the story and the world, but not to the exposed mechanics that we deal with constantly. It's not fun and it doesn't add to the mystery, it's just frustrating and makes me not want to bother playing. I want to leverage the mechanics to enjoy the world, not spend hours trying to figure out how the mechanics work.

/rant over

 

I agree with you that obscurity is an issue, but i do think you are underestimating the tools we have. A lot of the things that are not properly defined by me are things that could be expanded through the analysis of chat logs.

The crit chance or hit chance provided by dex can be analyzed through generating a decent sample size of attacks upon a target with and without a notable dex buff applied. Using that sample data, one could also average the damage of crits versus noncrits to get a closer approximation of the size of the bonus of damage from crit. By adding in a bronze weapon's data set you could calculate how the critical damage boost stat actually modifies things.

Similarly, looking at changes in damage with or without a strength buff can be used to figure out the specifics for the way different weapons gain damage from strength. That can then be used to test the way bonus strength damage works.

I am not saying that any of this is trivial to do, but we as a community only need to figure out each thing once and provide a resource for the information.

As a whole, I don't mind the frustration of lack of information when there actually is something i can do about it. When it comes to more abstract things (xp decay, 4x bonus and similar) I feel a lot more powerless about actually discovering what we don't currently know.

 

You have more patience and dedication than I, good sir! I agree, we can totally deduce this information with proper methods and time invested, but I just think that it should be universally available to all players. However, I have seen that, in this matter, my opinion might be the less popular of the two.

 

Honestly, i think your opinion is the more common one. However, any time spent laying out systems by devs is time lost developing a game. My volunteered time does not eat into the development budget at all, nor does it slow development.

 

Yeah, since the moment in time where chat/combat logs have existed in these games, log parsing and analysis is pretty much the only thing that drives change, after persistence/post launch.
In my experience, developers -always- believe they are right, until dozens or hundreds of parsed logs finally prove them wrong. And that's fine, because hubris is part of a combat designers personality profile.
But we need the log to build tools around as a community, to verify the game is working as intended.

IMO, we need some serious changes to the combat log. Chris acknowledged this in the R25/R26 feedback forums, so hopefully at some point in the indefinite future, we'll at least be able to parse accuracy for glyphs and not just auto attack, when the log finally shows misses for glyphs.

 

Totally get it. In this case, I personally think it would be a sound time investment, since it would allow for more frequent, more consistent feedback from the playerbase.

However, it looks like they are already stretched thin so in the interest of having the game finished this decade I can understand if they pass on it.

 

I just wanted to say thanks to @Noric and others who are testing these mechanics and posting their results. I know it takes time to not only train up the skills in question but to also do sample tests, then parse the logs, and then take those results and figure out what is working, what isn't, etc.

Your time invested is greatly appreciated because I know it will either give the public a better understanding of how things are actually working or enlighten the Devs as to what might need changes or fixes.

Keep up the good work everyone!