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Affliction Combat - a potential change
Garryn
Member, Administrator Posts: 527 admin
Okay, so I'm reasonably sure that I will regret starting this thread, but this is something that needs to be sorted out, one way or the other.
So. Let's imagine for a moment that we were to add some means of better tracking of target afflictions - probably by adding room messages to all cure methods, although the exact method is not important right now. Obviously the increased precision potential would require some affliction delivery changes, but that aside - should we do this? Is this the kind of change that you would be interested in, and/or feel that would benefit the game?
Accessibility is the main motivation behind this - the concept of afflictions and affliction dealing/curing is one of the features that makes our combat system interesting and complex, but it is also one that tends to increase the barrier of entry quite significantly, which is something that I think should be addressed.
This is not a new issue, of course, it gets raised whenever we make any significant changes to how afflictions work, or release any profession that uses afflictions to any non-trivial degree. I've been receiving very mixed opinions on this over the years, so I'm quite curious how this thread will turn out.
Thoughts?
So. Let's imagine for a moment that we were to add some means of better tracking of target afflictions - probably by adding room messages to all cure methods, although the exact method is not important right now. Obviously the increased precision potential would require some affliction delivery changes, but that aside - should we do this? Is this the kind of change that you would be interested in, and/or feel that would benefit the game?
Accessibility is the main motivation behind this - the concept of afflictions and affliction dealing/curing is one of the features that makes our combat system interesting and complex, but it is also one that tends to increase the barrier of entry quite significantly, which is something that I think should be addressed.
This is not a new issue, of course, it gets raised whenever we make any significant changes to how afflictions work, or release any profession that uses afflictions to any non-trivial degree. I've been receiving very mixed opinions on this over the years, so I'm quite curious how this thread will turn out.
Thoughts?
1
Comments
A lot of the newer skillsets, like Outrider, Mage, and Summoner have specific messages for specific afflictions, which really makes developing a system easier.
dsl ahkan
-30 mana (start 10s cooldown)
Ahkan is stupid and impatient (<-- see what I did there?)
afflict check ahkan
-45 mana (Ohshi, cooldown)
Though really, I still don't like this, but it's approaching something a little more manageable with a drawback.
Edit: Someone is probably going to cry about low mana at mana kills. The argument could be "make it cost health." There should be some sort of cost that cripples you over time, because this is a HUGE boon.
I believe that coding an offense is the compromise you handed to people upon providing them a powerful, customizable healing system server-side.
This is totally a legitimate statement.
Classes that need accurate toxin tracking to succeed in all builds:
Classes that have modes where you need aff tracking:
Classes you can show up and mash attack and do well: (in teams) (1v1 isn't even that hard either)
Classes that are just dumb
Druid, Bard
Now look at the color code.
I'm pretty against this for a few reasons.
If you're making perfect tracking you may as well make herbs always cure in a certain order, since it boils down to the same thing. I think this is a bad idea because it ensures 100% optimal offense. A lot of the affliction classes even in the hands of good players don't fight at optimal efficiency (because of the random factor, eventually you're going to double up some things) and still put out some of the best offensive power in the game. That moves me onto my second problem with this.
If you make all affs cured in exactly the same order or give everyone perfect tracking, everyone is eventually going to fight exactly the same. There's a fair component of this already, but if you can 100% guarantee affs you're going to stick reliably there's far less need for tweaking your offense. This might just be a personal thing, but I think that's bad and would boil down to who can finish their kill chain fastest.
That said, I do think certain things would help. I'd not quite go as far as Ahkan's aff-trueassess, but making certain affs easier to track is probably a good idea. Primarily mental ones, since they really get the short end of the stick compared to toxin classes (this hits demonic the hardest, particularly post summoner change). It might also be worth making it easier to track tree/purge, but I'm not sure about that even.
Edit: Also, all passive curing methods need to show WHEN they cure something. Example, 'Your(Auvryist's) ouroboros has syphoned an affliction.'
I don't even know why Azefel let me use it. The guy hates me because I break it in ways he couldn't imagine and ways I shouldn't. The best thing that his system did for me is he has a function that uses one database for afflictions and toxins since demonic is a clustercrap off names=other names =third names and I can use that function to call affs for my own offense. Most of the people that are beebopping around the game with Azefel's system don't even pk. The best parts of his system don't even involve pk. If some of you weren't such a bag of dongs you may not have gotten blacklisted from using it. The best part about the system? I can take someone who doesn't know anything about pking (Katalina, Aleutia,) (Azefel can toss them his system and teach them how to use it. No joke, I've learned a stupid amount of Cmud coding just by looking at his system, let alone him explaining it. Not only do they get spoon fed a "this is how you pk" but that actually get taught the reasoning behind it and the motivations behind the tactics. Some of them even code parts of the system that are so badass, they get included in the system itself. That's where it's awesome. That's where Imperian (and the cry babies) should focus the effort.
Bads <<< Afflictions <<< DPS <<< good afflictions <<<artifact dps
These are all 'skillfull' plays that you can't pick up with 100% tracking. Sadly, the only way you learn this is hanging around people who do it or dying to it repeatedly.
IMO, the reason that affliction combat and tracking has become problematic of late is because you've basically turned every class you've revamped, aside from Druids and Clerics, into a class that relies on affliction tracking for kills, or which at least benefits greatly from it.
More and more, the classes are leaning to afflictions to kill people because that's the kind of kill method that's easy for people to implement via classleads, and it's the kind of thing that's favored by players like Azefel, and the game supports it easily.
Once, we had damageknights that were 1v1 viable with broadswords. We had Hunters and Druids and Summoners and we had Wardancers who mained a sword-and-board combo. As people got tankier and more capable, you phased out everything that's not limb damage or affliction kills. Druids and Clerics are really the only two outliers to that I can think of.
Now, as more and more classes are forced into affliction play and the higher coding demands it brings, the accessibility becomes more problematic. People used to avoid Renegade and Assassin, except for the Fazlees and Septuses, but now it's awfully hard to avoid afflictions and so, while we have more people fighting than ever before, most of those people don't actually know anything about how to really play their class, because the affliction mechanics are beyond either their ability or their care line.
A better change would be stopping this "skillful" thing where you make every class an affliction class and coming up with new kill methods.
"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."
A second post for actual comments about current affliction combat:
Every skill I have that delivers an affliction should either straight up tell me what affliction it gave, or have a unique recognizable message.
Right now, stabbing looks like this
It should look something like "You stab Kryss viciously with a mercurial quarterstaff covered with aconite."
And rebounding looks like this:
When it should look more like:
"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."
Here are four options that I think would be enough(individually, not together) to pull several classes into the general players range. These don't make high-end aff tracking 100%, don't make high-end aff tracking less complicated, and give newer players to aff classes an easier time building a foundation(making affliction classes less of an OP for high-end, useless for low-end kind of class).
Disclaimer: I don't claim that any of these ideas are perfect, or that they'd be balanced well, or that they could be balanced well, they're just meant as ideas so we stop just arguing about 100% tracking(don't think Garryn is even actually considering this). There are all kinds of shades of grade between our current tracking and potential tracking, and from the tone of his post, I'm guessing he's willing to put serious work into rebalancing with changes, rather than just tacking on something cheesy like 10% Discernment from Supremacy or 100% Discernment from other IRE.
- Mental 3P affs. 3P affs are where you start building your first aff class. Tracking Hemotoxin and Butisol and a 3P-less kelp is simple enough. Adding ciguatoxin in, then adding useful toxins from other plants(and eventually second cures on the same herbs) is a great way to build your system piece by piece. It gives you an obvious start to your system, immediate benefits to your combat, and a certain feeling of stability that you mostly know what's going on. Giving mental classes a few 3P places to start(on mostly innocuous afflictions) would give them a decent way for new aff class users to learn the ropes of afflicting without needing to buy someone's system or spend a million hours with no intermediate benefits.
- Make Tree, Focus, and Purge not as noob-system ruining. Fully 3P "Ahkan touches a tree and his impatience fades away." (probably OP without some major aff-class rebalancing) or just giving some information(but not too much) with 3P messages like "Sarrius focuses his mind, ridding himself of a mandrake affliction."
- Only partially prioritize herb curing. Not having a completely standard order of herb curing, but maybe making Recklessness always cure before Impatience on Mandrake curing. Just small examples of priority, without having a set order for every single cure like other IRE games.
- Give aff-heavy classes some mode that gives them 100% tracking at a major cost. Not mana, mana is a bad thing to tax heavily on lowbies, because mana kills are dumb, and the mana cost of some aff classes is already too high for any long combat without sip rings. Maybe like an alternative to Wight form, you get Newb form that gives you reliable aff tracking, but slows your afflicting speed or reduces int or something. Hunters could get an aura(meaning they can't use NatureAura, slowing their afflicting by at least like, 0.3 seconds per combo). Wytch could use a rune on themself that lowers int or limits bone dusting speed(or whatever it is that Wytches do) for reliable aff tracking. Summoner could trade 2 or 3 leashed demons in exchange for reliable aff tracking. Mages could focus their crystal(and prevent it from being used for anything else) in exchange for 3P messages. This option doesn't effect high-end aff combat, but makes lowbie aff-class players not useless. Also, one of the easier options to balance and control.
Edit: Also, not saying that they have sensitivity in MKO like that, but I'm using it as an example of how not boolean work.
The certain affs cured before others is still pretty excessive, IMO. For instance if there is one maidenhair aff cured before the others that instantly gives a huge bonus to tracking what is arguably one of the hardest herbs to 100% predict. This is bad because every single maidenhair aff is amazing and part of the payoff to rolling all four into your offense is that you're going to have to accept some inaccuracy.
Another example of this would be asthma/clumsy. Process of elimination would pretty much enable perfect tracking on the important herbs if certain ones were always cured first, and if you didn't do it for important herbs it'd not help overall.
How about Bard and Diabolist?
Edit: ideally I'd like to bring MOST classes in the middle of the list by Ahkan, and reduce the amount in the top section. This would mean moving some classes in to a more simple line of play.
The idea that 100% aff tracking might aid new people with their offense is pretty much body-slammed by the much more accurate assumption of 100% aff tracking leading to new people getting face-smashed by every combatant in the game having optimal set-ups that are almost impossible to screw up.
Really, my biggest problem with affliction combat is probably the afflictions we use in it. So many of them are completely and utterly debilitating in combat that the affliction class offense is a control offense.
Paralysis, Metrazol, Confusion, Lethargy, Slow Bal, Slow Eq, Stupidity, Clumsiness, Weariness, Peace. All the afflictions that prevent you from healing them. A million and one writhes on top of it all. The affliction classes bury you underneath a pile of crap and you suffocate in it because you can't swim out of it long enough to hit them back. Even if it doesn't kill you, it's impossible to push an offense through it, which is why the only other effective combat strategies are limb damage setups that are okay with hitting them once every 10 seconds and insane burst that can put the boot in before they get rolling.
That's generally awful, and I don't think it's really needed anymore. If you removed all the hindering effects from those afflictions, I'd still have to heal them to avoid brainmelts. I'd still have to heal them to avoid annihilates, to avoid infirmities, to avoid cirisosis and enlightens and 100% disembowels. It's not like reducing and removing those effects would mean that I suddenly got to stop curing.
It would just mean that I'd get to hit an affliction class back reliably. It'd mean that they could be a bit tankier to compensate for the fact that getting hit is no longer optional for them. And it would mean that classes like Druid could slow their damage truck down to a reasonable speed limit, since they wouldn't be so dependent on smashing the enemy to death in the handful of balances they get before they're in disable hell. Those are all good things.
"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."
This is a bit of a tangent, but I keep hearing about these 'new combat/kill methods', yet remain unsure what they should actually be. To date, we have:
- raw damage (druid, defiler, ranger, claymore knights, etc)
- timebombs (limb damage - most of AM classes, bard resonance (wasn't intended that way, but it effectively is one))
- afflictions into instakills (assassin, hunter, wytch, diabolist, to a lesser extent predator and outrider)
- afflictions into damage overload (knights, summoner, wardancer, mage)
- power meters (monk, priest, summoner, to a lesser extent mage, defiler and druid)
- damage over time effects (mage, summoner, outrider, defiler)
- bleeding (outrider)
- incurable temporary effects (priest, runeguard, wytch, defiler)
Positional effects are out, the game doesn't work like that. What else is there to add?