Combat Spam and Skillsets

Ambrose

I saw some mention of this over on the Experience Loss thread and didn't want to derail it further, but as far as reducing combat spam, it strikes me that a lot of that is tied to certain passive skills. The ones that come to mind in a big way immediately are Hunting (as an Outrider, I'm biased here) and devotion rites. And probably a few others that don't come to mind right now. As a lot of these skills are holdovers from other IRE games and Imperian seems to be trying to separate itself as a bit more unique in regards to a lot of that, and was wondering if the idea was on the table to overhaul some of these skills? 

I haven't been back long enough to see how the balance out or anything like that so I am not going to put anything solid on the table, but I do enjoy the ideas behind a lot of what is happening to edit current secondary skills with making them more active (Hunter's basilisk... Mage's secondary skills... etc). I like the added control of these instead of 'summon posse' 'order posse smash the heathen' and then poke with a sharp, pointy stick as necessary and really just bide my time to let the bleed pet do his work or shoot for hypothermia stacks to let loose death on someone. 

I know these aren't simple overhauls, and Priests and Outriders both seem to have had (fairly?) recent overhauls with other skill sets already, but was just curious about thoughts on that or other ways to reduce combat spam that you guys have.

Jeremy Saunders

I was actually going to start a thread on this. Please post anything that you find really spammy in combat that can be reduced, combined, etc.

Selthis

Honestly, I know it would probably be a lot  of work, but would  it be possible to set up a config option for simple combat?

It would basically remove all the flavourtext from abilities and would just be simple statements like 

You were hit with with Spiritbomb..

You are afflicted with: You're pretty much boned.

Damage dealt: 10000000000 blunt (raw damage: 10000000001)

This would make it a lot easier to set  up color triggers the like and would cut down on some of the  text blocks you see thrown around on the screen.

Edit: The reason I say config is that way if someone doesn't want to use it, they don't have to.  Plus some of those messages are  awesome and I would hate to see them forgone totally because  mechanics.

Khizan

I'd rather not see a solution like that, because I'd rather not see the 'optimal' suggested solution for combat spam become "remove all flavor text from the game and replace it with the WoW combat log."

Ahkan

Remove stuff like

Ahkan orders a small wildebeast to attack you.

Ahkan orders a rabid duck to attack you.

Ahkan orders an asian intern to kill you.
Ahkan orders a fat woodling to attack you.
Ahkan orders Olanre to eye laser you.


Devotion isn't that spammy. I'm not sure what the issue is there. As a victim of it, most messages are on line that I'd like to keep. For the devotion user, they're all pretty small...I guess you could thin them down to +20, revitlization. Affliction healed (healing).

Also, if you want to thin down on combat spam we need to direct more people to use separators, because it makes you look pro. I'm not sure how to look at newbies and say, "SEPARATORS ARE YOUR FRIEND. SEPARATORS ARE FRIENDS OF YOUR FRIENDS"

order hound kill bathan;raze bathan;engage bathan

That's not here.

<752/731h 324/324m 0B> 51.01E <eb b> 

You raze Bathan's aura of rebounding with a Souledge Sabre.

bal:2.20

<752/731h 324/324m 0B> 51.01E <e- b> 

You move in to engage Bathan.

eq:2.07

<752/731h 319/324m 0B> 51.01E <-- b> 

becomes this

order hound kill bathan||raze bathan||engage bathan

You order undead remains of a ravenous hound to attack Bathan.

Undead remains of a ravenous hound obeys your command.

You raze Bathan's aura of rebounding with a Souledge Sabre.

bal:2.20

You are already engaging Bathan.

Aleutia

Even as someone that doesn't especially fight, I don't want to see combat boiled down to one liners of "Khizan hits you with a nuke from orbit. You have been slain."
We already lost learning messages (which I liked the flavor of), lets not trim any more than the somewhat excessive "X orders y to pulverize you," please

Khizan

A lot of the problem stems from the added complexity of the new Imperian classes being combo attacks. My average Druid combo is TWELVE lines of text on my side, with a 120 wrapwidth.

You quickly summon a poisonous wisp and with a commanding gesture, send it flying towards Ziat.
A poisonous wisp flies at Ziat and stings him painfully.
The strength of the Air energy in a mercurial quarterstaff has increased to 10%.
You focus on empowering a mercurial quarterstaff and it turns momentarily grey as the power of Earth infuses it.
You rub some strychnine on a mercurial quarterstaff.
You stab Ziat viciously with a mercurial quarterstaff.
Several tiny rocks materialise above Ziat and fall down, battering his body.
The strength of the Earth imbuement in a mercurial quarterstaff has increased to 10%.
All empowerments have faded from a mercurial quarterstaff.
Balance Taken: 3.29s
You swing your quarterstaff and an animated ash root spins around and batters Ziat, shredding his skin mercilessly.

Equilibrium Taken: 2.75s

Condense the wisp summon and wisp attack into one line. Condense the envenom, stab, and empower messages into one line. Drop the empowerments message, which nobody tracks like that. Let me track elemental powers from the prompt.

You quickly summon a poisonous wisp,, which flies at Ziat and stings him painfully..
You focus on empowering a mercurial quarterstaff and it turns momentarily grey as the power of Earth infuses it.
You rub some strychnine on a mercurial quarterstaff and then stab Ziat viciously. Also, rocks fall.
Balance Taken: 3.29s
You swing your quarterstaff and an animated ash root spins around and batters Ziat, shredding his skin mercilessly.

Equilibrium Taken: 2.75s

We've just cut my combo's lines in half without any real loss. Well. My messages suck, but if you made good ones, there wouldn't be any real loss. 

Ambrose

@Ahkan I suppose I was just trying to address two thoughts in one go - I'm not a huge fan of a fair portion of combat being extremely passive (at least in regards to more than one pet or something like that). But anyways...

Also to be one of the newbies for a moment and ask: how do separators work cause uhm.... we haven't built a friendship yet.

Iniar

config separator <choose symbol>

eg. config separator |

say What's up | kick Iniar | tongue Iniar

PROMPT

You say, "What's up."

You lift your leg, thrusting it at yourself.

You stick your tongue out at yourself.

PROMPT

Selthis

That's actually a fair point.  Is there any way for commands within a certain amount of time (say within 1 to 2 seconds) to automatically act like it was done using the separator? So if I do order hound kill person;raze person;engage person would be the same as order hound kill person|raze person|engage person?

Edit: In that it would generate only 1 prompt rather than 3.

Labil

Even when I agree with Khizan, what makes easily 50% of the spam in battle is all the afflicting and curing messages. And that can't be really helped.

On the topic of separators, and while I haven't done yet the new tutorial, wouldn't be there space to show newbies how to set and use a simple one? Like a task where something drops when you do an action, but resets when you send an individual command to pick it up. Then a lil fairy would appear and go like 'Hey, listen! Looks like you can use separators here.'

I also admit that I'm guilty of not using separators yet for all my attacks. Going slowly there.

Jeremy Saunders

Typically separators are parsed by the client. 

There is no way for us to really wait to see if another command comes in before we send the prompt in the case of several commands coming in quickly. That would introduce lag for your character, which I assume you would not want, no matter how small.

We could put in a separator for players, but that really seems like a pain to teach newbies on top of the 50 thousand other things.

For now I would rather look skills and commands that are used often and are spammy. One thing that has bothered me forever because of spam is combo attacks, and that is on my list to make cleaner.

Labil

Septus balls up one fist and hammerfists Lionas.
He connects to the right leg!
Septus balls up one fist and hammerfists Lionas.
He connects to the right leg!

This has always bothered me. It is just plain annoying.
DSL and weapon attacks rebounding been a different message.
Anyone with knowledge about a #gag command will forever ignore Predator stance changes. I don't know WHY I should see their stance dance.

Khizan

As far as separators go, I think it would be worthwhile to introduce a default separator like "\\" and work it into the intro, especially for classes that have combo attacks.

The separator is an awesome thing that is full of awesomeness. It's also combat mandatory in many aspects, as it completely removes the ability for the opponent to slide a parry inside your feint/punch/punch combo, or a juniper in after your DSL but before your bcry. It also massively reduces your spam and may possibly cure cancer.

But by the time people are informed about the separator, they've quite likely got a system full of freaking semicolons, and they can't be bothered to change it, because they either don't care about the performance increase or don't realize it exists. Making it clear that the separator exists from the start would let them start building it into their aliases and such right away.

It would also be pretty awesome if the in-game alias system could be modified to allow for the use of separators and multi-command internal aliases. Something like "setalias dslcry ((dsl &target oxalis strychnine\\battlecry target))", using the parenthesis to indicate the the separator is part of the alias, and not meant to be immediately parsed. 

If you teach them things like this early on, they won't have to go unlearn all their bad habits and change all their existing code when they later realize that they did it completely wrong because you failed to tell them about such an important feature.

Dyrren

Selthis said:

Honestly, I know it would probably be a lot  of work, but would  it be possible to set up a config option for simple combat?

It would basically remove all the flavourtext from abilities and would just be simple statements like 

You were hit with with Spiritbomb..

You are afflicted with: You're pretty much boned.

Damage dealt: 10000000000 blunt (raw damage: 10000000001)

This would make it a lot easier to set  up color triggers the like and would cut down on some of the  text blocks you see thrown around on the screen.

Edit: The reason I say config is that way if someone doesn't want to use it, they don't have to.  Plus some of those messages are  awesome and I would hate to see them forgone totally because  mechanics.

You could probably hack this in by adding the damage source to CONFIG HEALTHINFO.

So it would look like :

Orc100456 : 45 cutting (90 raw)

And the affliction message would come afterward.  You might not be able to identify the attack with that alone, but you'll know what's happening to you.

There are three ways to reduce the effect of combat spam :

1. Slow things down, which gives player time to read.

2. Have less messages, which gives the player less to read, and thus more time.

3. Give the players skills that work reliably over time, which allows players to ignore most messages.

I tend to prefer the third option, and many of the current ents are a good example.  You simple sic them on your target, and they do their thing until it either falls dead or the ent is killed.  That counts as a constant affliction on the target which you don't have to keep track of.  We should all be so lucky.

Conversely, it's a pain in the **** for the person on the receiving end, who doesn't know what's going on.

I tend to see the trend toward damage dealing abilities as a good sign.  Then all the player has to do is heal or prevent damage.

Menoch

1. How do you propose slowing combat spam down without slowing combat down?

2. How do you propose less messages and still having any ability to be situationally aware?

3. What ent counts as a constant affliction again? I was under the impression due to you know, actually timing almost all of them, that they were either actively ordered to do something different in the case of the hormone surge thing, or that they operated on a tick.

I think that from the partially coherent part of what I read that you want really slow relapsing incurable DoT affs that give you no idea who or how or what is hitting you, just a simple damage readout. Please tell me the fact that I've been working in the rain without food or sleep for three hours has more to do with this than what can only otherwise be an utter lack of interest in combat being anything but "You took damage. You are dead."

Mathiaus

I thought combat focus already resolved these issues?

Azefel

combat focus is good if you want to be useless to the rest of your team

Khizan

Combat focus is an excellent way to ensure that you have no situational awareness or ability to react to changing conditions in the fight.

Ahkan

1. Slow things down, which gives player time to read.
Not gonna lie, this isn't the responsibility of the game. Reading speeds vary. Comprehension may vary.You log fights. You can enjoy all the subtle nuances of your health bar plummeting against a druid while you do everything in the world to avoid it. As for combat. Highlights. Subs. They're my friends. They should be yours too.

2. Have less messages, which gives the player less to read, and thus more time.
Less messages really means less information. I want to know that Tiala is spamming judge. I want to know that Sarrius is at 49% mana, it lets me know that the malignist we have isn't going to catharsis. I want to see the blinking lights that say "Your teammate left to the west" and "Your teammate is dead." That's when I need to switch my playlist to something heroic so I can die awesomely. Good combatants need this information. How about, less information in these messages. I don't need to know that Bathan's sword is inky and black when it's hitting me. It's a damned sword.

3. Give the players skills that work reliably over time, which allows players to ignore most messages.
My skills work all the time. All day, erryday. Not sure what class you're playing.  Maybe you mean DoT battles? Snoozer.

Combat needs to be stream lined. It doesn't need to be made to be like pk karaoke. God, can you imagine that bouncing ball and scrolling text.

DSL AULANI *bounce bounce* DRINK HEALTH *bounce* EAT TOADSTOOL *BOUNCE* WRITHE *bounce* DRINK HEALTH *bounce bounce* 

Dicene

tl;dr - If you can't keep up, you're not gagging/highlighting/replacing enough, or you don't just haven't been attending shardfalls for long enough. With the right triggers and a few months of experience, 6+ vs 6+ shardfalls are usually very manageable.

Edit: Not to say that there aren't improvements that could be made, but it's not all that terrible currently.

Azefel

I stopped actually reading the text several years ago, as I'm sure many others did.

Just go off colours, symbols and the prompt.

Juran

Reading battles is for after fights.

Bathan

This is so totally true. I used to run MB and when I switched to autocuring, I still had the gags and color setup that let me know what was going on. I don't run MB anymore, and I have few gags up and I have like basically no idea what's going on anymore, haha.

EDIT: I'd also like to see DSL slashes have one, uniform message, just for gagging purposes.

 Just, Bathan slashes into NAME!

Kryss

Sub it yourself. For justice of course.

Dyrren

Menoch said:

I think that from the partially coherent part of what I read that you want really slow relapsing incurable DoT affs that give you no idea who or how or what is hitting you, just a simple damage readout. Please tell me the fact that I've been working in the rain without food or sleep for three hours has more to do with this than what can only otherwise be an utter lack of interest in combat being anything but "You took damage. You are dead."

Can't say I really like uncurables unless it's elevated to something more or less equal to a kill.  It's outside the current orthodoxy of the game.

Toxin stacks are a good example of the third option, and the sort of thing that I tend to like.  You merely iterate on what's already present.  (By the way, that's the only part I really argued for.  I don't like the other 2, but they are consistently used.  Thanks for wasting whitespace, though.)

However, toxin stacks are an offensive mechanic, and what we do with triggers, subs, and highlights is largely defensive.  That's the part I'd like to whittle down with game mechanics, as curing is currently a very linear process.





Moving on to things we can change right now, one tweek that I would positively love to have is the option to highlight our own actions in-game.  In the middle of a fight, it can be hard to distinguish your actions from your enemy's, especially if they fight similarly.  In the middle of a team fight, it can be hard to distinguish your attack from three or four of your allies' attacks.  That combined with the variable length of many attack messages can make it hard to highlight in a manner that doesn't make you want to cut out your eyes.

Labil

While NOT totally related, can we finally get an config option to not see titles? I would settle for them not showing in LOOK, says are fine.

Ziat

Finding a cylindrical sinn vial empty of a salve of mass, you quickly roll the mouth of the vial across one of the many spouts on a black leather 

vialbelt. In only an instant, the pressurized liquid sprays into the vial and it is once again full.

This could go or get reduced, because it is currently a three liner on a wrapwidth of 120 

Ahkan

Ziat said:

Finding a cylindrical sinn vial empty of a salve of mass, you quickly roll the mouth of the vial across one of the many spouts on a black leather 

vialbelt. In only an instant, the pressurized liquid sprays into the vial and it is once again full.

This could go or get reduced, because it is currently a three liner on a wrapwidth of 120 

I thought that message was cool. That's such a minor and not often occurring problem.  If that's really putting a crimp in your style, you've got issues. If it really bothers you, learn to #gag.

It the combat spam, I don't even see that because it's white on black. Thus, it is not important to my winning/surviving. Honestly, I don't even see that message that often. I see it afking and bashing. S'bout it.

Edit:
Honestly, it's stuff like this that I'm worried about losing. This is nice flavor. The arghpee nerds would call this immersion. We're talking about combat spam here, kids.

Ahkan hits you for four lines of blahblahblah.

You flail like a wounded fish for five lines.
Lionas hits you with four lines of impeccable grammar.

You can't do anything but your prompt zooms by at light speed.

Some moron on your team spams your ring 18 times with the wrong target.

Ahkan hits you four more lines of blahblah.

Commence the flailing.

We're not talking about rare messages.

-Unique deaths

-Ambiance messages

-Flavor

Most of my combat spam is my own doing. There's no avoiding it. I'm going to assume most your combat spam is your own. My screen has 34 lines of text available.

-Every dsl is 4.

-Every druid combo is like 4-6

You do the math here. There are at least 4-12 people in the room all doing this. You're not going to trim this down to be anything tolerable/reasonable/readable. It's not going to happen.

Things I think we can do to make this less stupid.
-For the love of all the is holy, remove the absolute spam wagon derp fest that is aconite, replace it with like 1-48 unique messages telling me how dumb I am, that only I see. Also remove taking off pants and armor. Uncool.
Dsl ziat
You ponder the mysteries of the word "doughnut."

-Razing: I don't give a crap what Khizan razed my shield with, all I need to do is see the raze message.

Ziat

Ahkan said:

I thought that message was cool. That's such a minor and not often occurring problem.  If that's really putting a crimp in your style, you've got issues. If it really bothers you, learn to #gag.

It the combat spam, I don't even see that because it's white on black. Thus, it is not important to my winning/surviving. Honestly, I don't even see that message that often. I see it afking and bashing. S'bout it.

----

Its not about me, or you or #gag. It was a line that I didn't find necessary so I posted it. When I first started seeing it in spammy combat, I panicked and started arc'ing ciguatoxin because I thought it was some instant kill I didn't have lines for

It might reduce the spam that is being pointed out, but if people like it, I'm happy to keep it. Just pointing things I find spammy