Weapon & Combat Rework

[Siege]

Disclaimer
I do realize AMAGI already made a topic about weapon weight. I’m only including my own so the other ideas I’m posting make sense. Also, some of these other ideas are based on ideas from other players.

Mechanics

1. Weapon weight: Swing speed is affected by weapon weight. The number of ingots in construction could set the base weight. This would make players think more carefully before adding a dozen blades to their weapons. Weight could affect shields based on their size.

2. Material weights: Different metals/alloys could have different weights. This would mean players can balance raw damage with swing speed when constructing weapons instead of just making everything from valyan or occasionally palladium.
   Having a “best” metal takes away from the variety of items.

3. Recovery speed: Have a recovery buffer from attacks, so heavy weapons can’t be reused too quickly, but things like daggers, katars and katanas can.

4. Shield parry: Players can do a wide swing with their shields. If it hits a weapon that is being swung at the shield user, it can knock the weapon back, adding a delay before the attacker can swing again.
   Heavier weapons, especially hammers, require a larger shield swing arc to parry.
   Large shields would offer more protection, but shields would offer a higher parry chance due to the weight, if the shield user is skilled enough.

5. Teleportation limit: If a player has dealt damage to or received damage from another player, teleportation distance should be halved for 20 seconds. Forces players to stand their ground, somewhat.

6. Selective injuries: Hitting a player with enough damage in a limited period could slow that area briefly. This means a few stabs with a dagger in the arm or a strong hammer hit could make it harder for that player to swing quickly, a hit to the body could affect movement speed, or a head hit could affect vision. These effects would be short.
   The idea is that it allows highly skilled players a way to really perfect their fighting skills.
   Armour could offer protection from these effects, depending on both armour and weapon type.

7. Blocking: when a weapon hits another, the swing speed is reduced for both, effectively lowering the damage received. Weapon weight plays a big part in how much the speed is reduced as well. No stopping a warhammer with a dagger. This would open up some interesting combat techniques for skilled players.

Weapon specific:
Decided by the damaging weapon part that costs the most ore. If all parts have the same ore cost, the first blade added sets the base weapon type.

• Hammers: Slower swing speed. Longer attack recovery. Higher crippling effect, especially to head. Stronger Divine Slam. Can affect durability of shields.

• Sickles/scythes: Highest cripple direction to body and limbs.

• Rapiers/Spears: More damage on stabs/lunges.

• Halberds/tridents: Slightly more damage on stabs/lunges. More cripple effect than spears.

• Large axes: Slow speed. Very high durability damage on wooden shields.

• Small axes (tomahawks): Can be thrown for bonus damage.

• Curved swords: More damage on swings, less damage on stabs when compared to swords with straight blades. Decent speed.

• Great swords: Very slow swing, high damage. Resistant to parties. Damage buff if 2 handed. Best at blocking other weapons.

• Daggers/tonfa/katars: Highest attack speed. Shortest attack recovery time. Can only cripple if multiple attacks hit the same area in a short time.
  Parries have a bigger effect on these weapons.

[Eturian]

Interesting ideas for the most part, but strikes me as a system that would suit pve far better than pvp (I’m guessing this is meant for pvp?) due to aspects like crippling, and parries knocking weapons back. You’d have to over-ride peoples’ tracking for a moment to knock their weapon arm away, surely?
Shield parry is an unusual idea to me … More common to have the standard block, and then a shield “bash” to stun or knock back, but you’ve reserved “Blocking” for weapon against weapon, which is more commonly seen in games as a parry. Still a good read though, some nice ideas with weapon weight and nuanced weapon attributes.
Also, good disclaimer, but I hope you’re still braced for someone to quote and deconstruct every individual thing piece by piece

[Siege]

I hope it gets deconstructed completely. My main goal is to kickstart a discussion that hopefully generates some useful ideas. The weapon specific ideas in particular were just throwaway ideas and not something I felt strongly about.

A lot of ideas are put forward on Discord, but without being written down they get lost to the ether.

I’m certainly down with the idea of a shield bash skill for the warrior tree. It could open open a lot of possibilities, but I would like to balance it a little. That’s why I suggested axes being able to inflict high durability damage, to stop players turtling up with a shield.

For things like parries I had games like Dark Souls and Infinity Blade in mind. High skill offers increased rewards, but at a risk. This would need some problem solving to get around latency issues though.

To be honest I’m hoping for more ideas for more skilled players. That way making a powerful weapon is still important, but matching the weapon to the player’s fight style, the enemies fight style & gear, and general player skill become just as important.
In the current state high level PvP is often a Divine Slam for the cripple or holding the movement stick forward to charge with the same short valyan trident. Skill should be more of a factor.

[Eturian]

Fair enough. I misinterpreted your disclaimer perhaps then
I can’t agree more that it’s not good when there’s only one viable way to win a fight. No single weapon should be so OP, or the latency so crippling, that personal choice is no longer an option.

[Edit]

Weapon weight: Swing speed is affected by weapon weight. The number of ingots in construction could set the base weight. This would make players think more carefully before adding a dozen blades to their weapons. Weight could affect shields based on their size.

I’m really for this, it does have the problem of desyncing where your arms are in game from your RL ones, but I think stuff like Boneworks is showing that it’s not the worst thing to do as we thought.

There is also the possibility that a weapon too heavy would just not swing right (bit of wobble) and would do a lot less damage than it normal should.

Material weights: Different metals/alloys could have different weights. This would mean players can balance raw damage with swing speed when constructing weapons instead of just making everything from valyan or occasionally palladium.
Having a “best” metal takes away from the variety of items.

Makes sense and I can’t agree more with the last part.

Recovery speed: Have a recovery buffer from attacks, so heavy weapons can’t be reused too quickly, but things like daggers, katars and katanas can.

This would make sense to tie into weight and having the weapons need to gather momentum to get good damage up, kind of like how minecraft’s newer combat system lowers the damage of attack spams, but actually having some feedback and technique to it.

Shield parry: Players can do a wide swing with their shields. If it hits a weapon that is being swung at the shield user, it can knock the weapon back, adding a delay before the attacker can swing again.
Heavier weapons, especially hammers, require a larger shield swing arc to parry.
Large shields would offer more protection, but shields would offer a higher parry chance due to the weight, if the shield user is skilled enough.

Makes sense, it would be really cool to see daggers being a great counter to a shield with how fast they would recover.

Teleportation limit: If a player has dealt damage to or received damage from another player, teleportation distance should be halved for 20 seconds. Forces players to stand their ground, somewhat.

No, we already have some threads talking about nerfing teleportation in combat (and in general), but it should not effect teleportation and smooth locomotion in different ways, since it would put people that use, and some people that need to use, teleportation locomotion at an unfair disadvantage.

It’s true teleportation locomotion has an unfair advantage now, but that needs to be dealt with as a whole.

Selective injuries: Hitting a player with enough damage in a limited period could slow that area briefly. This means a few stabs with a dagger in the arm or a strong hammer hit could make it harder for that player to swing quickly, a hit to the body could affect movement speed, or a head hit could affect vision. These effects would be short.
The idea is that it allows highly skilled players a way to really perfect their fighting skills.
Armour could offer protection from these effects, depending on both armour and weapon type.

This would be cool, so much more skill application.

The problem, besides arm desync, would be that the player being “crippled” would need some feedback to know when it starts effect starts.

Blocking: when a weapon hits another, the swing speed is reduced for both, effectively lowering the damage received. Weapon weight plays a big part in how much the speed is reduced as well. No stopping a warhammer with a dagger. This would open up some interesting combat techniques for skilled players.

Makes sense, I could see it causing more durability damage for blades.

Weapon specific :
Decided by the damaging weapon part that costs the most ore. If all parts have the same ore cost, the first blade added sets the base weapon type.

All of this makes sense.

Small axes (tomahawks): Can be thrown for bonus damage.

Would add that the would fly better through the air too, much like the kunai.

for someone to quote and deconstruct every individual thing piece by piece

Who would do that?

On a more serious note, I couldn’t really deconstruct it as well since I agreed with it more than other stuff and most of the problem was just repeating “arm desync”

I hope it gets deconstructed completely. My main goal is to kickstart a discussion that hopefully generates some useful ideas.

I really respect that.
Also

My main goal is to

I can’t be the only one that heard “blow up and then act like I don’t know no body.”

I’m certainly down with the idea of a shield bash skill for the warrior tree. It could open open a lot of possibilities

I think Larry’s suggestion of having shields be in it’s own skill tree would be better, it gives more flexibility for archers and such to also dabble into shields.

Shield skills

Summary Shield skills Core concept Any of these skills are activated by blocking an attack, or bashing the shield yourself. The effect remains till 3 seconds of inactivity, or if the shield is dropped. Each learned skill increases charge time by 2 seconds XP would be earned for each NPC attack blocked magnetism 1 - enemy’s weapons are drawn to the shield, making a block more likely magnetism 2 - enemy’s weapons stick to the shield on contact till pulled back magnetism 3 - if an attack is …

Rest of the reply is a bunch about making skill more important which I think would be really good, it’s always great in games when skill gives a huge advantage in combat and not just solely on how good weapons are.

[AMAGI]

Thank you for mentioning my thread first, much appreciated.
And yours does covered much more other factors and elements than mine.
Which regardlessly, our goal is the same, there no certain form of weapon supposed to be so OP and everyone just start to craft and use it, and there no certain combat style supposed to be so OP, and everyone just start to use the same weapon structure and the same combat technique and have a “let’s see who die first simulator” and just spam poke each others or ground smash until one is down.
We all want to see some more skillful, dinamic and more “detailed” combat techniques and play styles, we all want to see different people hold variety of different weapon types those suit them the best.
You have a vote from me.

[Eturian]

Who would do that?

…no names coming to mind ^_-

[Willyjum]

To add onto this, weapons should have motion values, where a longer swing will do more damage. This means someone lugging around a giant greatsword will have to do a wider swing for more damage. It can be balanced with the weight slowing down the speed.

Smaller weapons like daggers should have a fixed amount of damage if they aren’t limited by speed.

[Edit]

I don’t think they’d even need to code that in, right now the faster something goes, the more damage it deals (mostly) and if a giant sword has weight to it, there really isn’t any way to get it to a high speed without using the momentum of a large swing, light daggers on the other hand could get to a maximum speed (devs have said after a certain speed you don’t do more damage) in a short distance, but should still do damage based on that speed.

Now I’m thinking of how someone (in the far future) could apply explosives to the back of the blade to speed it up for a really fast attack.

Actually warriors could have two new skills, one that lets them manipulate heavy items as if the player was a lot stronger, and a skill that adds momentum to his/her weapon so you could get a fast strike.