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Limb Damage
Ahkan
Member Posts: 2,375 ✭✭✭✭✭
Limb damage is popping up in a lot of threads and it's actually gotten 'better' as of late for a few reasons. I figured we can bicker about it here.
Limb damage has always been awesome. Limb damage is a time bomb affliction that has a payout of at least 6s of salve balance that can stop standing, attacking and parrying. With the way the game has developed, you can't stop the limb damage train. I'm going to break an arm, a leg, or an arm and a leg at will and there is little to nothing that you can do to stop it. The only sure fire way is to keep me from hitting one limb for 60 seconds. That's not going to work because there's another arm or a leg I can run the same game on and you can't block both. This gets more complicated when capable people can track 2,3,4 limbs at a time and set up double (12s), triple (18s), and quad-breaks (24s) set ups. The reason this is is because the affliction doesn't manifest itself until the limb damage threshold, which is predetermined. The offense has 100% control of when and under what circumstances that happens.
Limb damage has always been awesome. Limb damage is a time bomb affliction that has a payout of at least 6s of salve balance that can stop standing, attacking and parrying. With the way the game has developed, you can't stop the limb damage train. I'm going to break an arm, a leg, or an arm and a leg at will and there is little to nothing that you can do to stop it. The only sure fire way is to keep me from hitting one limb for 60 seconds. That's not going to work because there's another arm or a leg I can run the same game on and you can't block both. This gets more complicated when capable people can track 2,3,4 limbs at a time and set up double (12s), triple (18s), and quad-breaks (24s) set ups. The reason this is is because the affliction doesn't manifest itself until the limb damage threshold, which is predetermined. The offense has 100% control of when and under what circumstances that happens.
Another problem you run into with limb damage is that limb armor is pretty useless now. Back in the day, when people could hinder and push an offense the 5-6s limb armor bought you could be put to use keeping the attacker from attacking. Since we've nerfed all manners of this approach, limb armor really only buys you seconds before you're screwed anyways. Leather limb armor may as well not be a thing. Chain limb armor is kind of ho-hum and plate armor makes an already annoying, tanky class more annoying and more tanky.
You can capitalize on limb damage as almost every class and 'good' fighters have always been able to work it into their repertoire. The bar for this has recently been lowered with 1/3 and 2/3 damage messages. It's so much easier to track now and this is a good thing. Limb damage just gets crazy in teams. There's just not enough salve balance to handle 2-3 people breaking a limb each.
Building classes around this mechanic is, in my opinion, a pretty bad idea. For two reasons. One: The defender can't stop it. The way the mechanism is designed, I can't cure it until it's too late. If the setup is right, I'm dead and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. This is a bad mechanic in my eyes for the same reason bards are dumb. The fight was really pre-determined and all my opponent had to do was cookie cutter me into a setup I really couldn't stop. Second, if we make the limb damage set up to exorbitant, you never see the kill mechanic used. Triple bbt much?
First, I think we need to step back and look at the way weapons deal limb damage.
First, I think we need to step back and look at the way weapons deal limb damage.
1) Sabres doing an appreciable amount of limb damage is just silly.
2) Limb damage needs to be scaled BACK on slashing weapons. All of them. No exceptions.
3) The x2 blunt damage buff probably needs to go away and exist on the high end of the damage spectrum.
4) Some skills just don't need to do limb damage at all.
5) I'm sort of loathe to say this, but I think we need to port pre-restoration into Imperian in some incarnation.
Basically, the BASIC mechanic behind pre-restoration is that you can apply restoration to a limb before it's actually 'broken' and it will cure some, or all of the limb damage up to that point. I'm not sure how we'd implement it, but I think you could the case that for 6s, you can cure 2/3 and reset it to 0. Before you start crying, this forces people to use toxins better and penalize people for pre-restoring (6s of salves is 2-3 attacks). This mechanic gives the defender some way to INTELLIGENTLY cure something they know is coming. If Bad-Warden is only hitting my right leg...I can pre-restore and avoid the break/sleep combo and switch my parry. This forces him to realize I have 3 other limb targets, or keep hitting into my limb which he'll never break because he's bad.
Basically, the BASIC mechanic behind pre-restoration is that you can apply restoration to a limb before it's actually 'broken' and it will cure some, or all of the limb damage up to that point. I'm not sure how we'd implement it, but I think you could the case that for 6s, you can cure 2/3 and reset it to 0. Before you start crying, this forces people to use toxins better and penalize people for pre-restoring (6s of salves is 2-3 attacks). This mechanic gives the defender some way to INTELLIGENTLY cure something they know is coming. If Bad-Warden is only hitting my right leg...I can pre-restore and avoid the break/sleep combo and switch my parry. This forces him to realize I have 3 other limb targets, or keep hitting into my limb which he'll never break because he's bad.
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Right now, against a smart person the only cure is running and not getting hit for 60s.
Monk in Aetolia is way stupider than our monk, to be fair. For some reason they thought back damage should be cured by time not restoration (so some trollbot monk bbting you off guarding is actually potentially going to kill you, god forbid they actually break a leg), and their damage is ridiculously excessive for unprepped bbt/etc.
Also kai strike stores limb damage like numbness, then the limb takes it all at the end. (To me this always looked like a "ok pre restore, let's pretend that didn't happen for this class", but I'm a cynic.)
I.E. their monk is what our monk would look like if classleads never got rejected.
I was always mad you couldn't be a werebear in Skyrim
@Iluv I'm hoping so too.
That's pretty much how most of the classes work, if you just simplify it down into one-sentence statements. They either have something that allows them to ignore the fact that pre-resto exists, or they do such absurd limb damage that pre-resto barely matters in the first place, or pre-resto has made them entirely irrelevant and unable to kill anything with how they were originally designed, so the playerbase/coders are trying to redesign the class because of it.
Second thing is perhaps to apply longer balances on repeated shielding within a certain time frame. A person who shields multiple times within x seconds has an increased EQ cost of .x seconds for each subsequent shield. This change addresses more than just limb professions, but all. It would promote smarter use of turtling and allow the offensive party some momentum. Not I'm fully behind this idea yet, but I wanted to put it out here to hear some ideas.
Who wrote the limb damage classlead?
I imagine we need to keep our changes and testing constrained to the areas changed.
For those unaware, limb damage as we know it does not exist there..Instead, you damage a part of their body and depending on the sustained damage post hit, it applies some afflictions. The afflictions are limited to what you have in your skillset. Knights have multiple options of primary specializations, and each spec has a theme for its affs (Blademaster is heavy bleeding, hinders, and tendons or artery damage, Bonecrusher is a mace spec that does a lot of salve affs and light herb pressure that eventually spirals in to bashing your brains out, etc).. as you learn your skill, you gain access to these afflictions. You can tell the game not to apply certain ones on a strike, theoretically allowing for clever play and tracking to optimize which you apply.
The way you cure your limbs away from these aff thresholds is by applying health elixir to your limbs. AM's classes are far too damaging for that solution, so I'd ideally just say restoration cures some damage if no affs are present for it to cure.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Pre restore would actually be a pretty huge buff for aff knights that afflict intelligently. A lot of the time I break one or two limbs in knight specifically for that restoration balance rather than going for the dsb (since you can stack calo into a ton on top of that or whatever). It'd screw with monk/pred (because no secondary threat for pre restoring early outside of perhaps cirisosis, although not really since no sure fire way to stick the butisol and 4 s shouldn't really be enough to build the necessary affs assuming you're also stacking limb damage which is a given for the cenario). Rangers would require you to use toxins unlike now, but they'd potentially gain the same benefits as knights (if not more so, because they hit harder and faster).
Limb armour should definitely happen. I'm pretty anti pre restore (mostly because I think its a mess in the games I've seen it implemented in), but I don't think it'd be a monumental rebalancing project if it did go in. Preds, monks, everyone else toxins or some other form of salve aff (outrider/priest) for duel pressure.