[AC] PvP Feedback

[Ziv]

[turbine]

From Crowley:

Hey all,

You've given us a lot of really good feedback over the past couple of weeks -- and before that too, of course, but the targeted feedback of the past few weeks has been incredibly helpful to us. Now we want to turn around and ask all of you some pointed questions to make sure we understand, and also to see how you might feel about some solutions.

I know we've talked about some of these things before in other threads. But we want to make sure we get this right. Anyway, sometimes asking about the same things in different ways helps open up new ideas for solutions.

We can break up most of the feedback about PK in general into two categories:

* PvP combat is too tedious and slow, and

* PvP players need better reasons to fight and something to fight over.

This thread is going to concentrate on the first point. The second point is also important, and we'll be asking for directed feedback on that a bit later. But this thread is all about improving the feel of PvP combat.

In order to help organize things, I'm going to number the statements or questions we're seeking feedback on with the label {FP#} (for Feedback Point). That way you can refer to specific points better. Of course, any and all feedback you give us is really helpful, so feel free to talk about more than just things mentioned here. Please do keep this thread to combat feedback, though.

The underlying problem that we're looking at in this thread is: PvP fights take too long. There are many reasons for this.

{FP#1} Did we miss anything major in the following list?


YOU CAN'T LAND ENOUGH HITS ON YOUR OPPONENT

* Non-melee hits can be physically dodged.

---- {FP#2} Because of various animation issues with spell-casting, this seems to be mostly a problem for missile combat. Is magic combat okay in this area until and unless the animation issues are fixed?

* Once you physically connect, the combat system tests attack skill vs. defense skill. It's too easy for your opponent to have a very high defense skill and thus avoid getting hit. This is especially an issue when attacking a mage with a meleeD tinkered wand.

---- {FP#3} Is it a more general problem when attacking melee and missile opponents?

---- {FP#4} Do skill buffs, imbued armor, or rare gems make this problem much worse, or would those things be okay if we solved the meleeD wand issue?

---- {FP#5} Is there also a problem with missile defense?


WHEN YOU LAND HITS, YOU DON'T DO ENOUGH DAMAGE TO MAKE AN IMPACT

* Players have an awful lot of health these days, so normal damage often doesn't make much of an impact.

* Players are usually protected by a high level of armor, which reduces non-magic damage considerably.

* Players are often protected by a high level of protection spells and wards, which reduces all damage considerably.

* Melee and missile weapons do relatively small amounts of damage per hit compared to magic. In order to make a real impact on your opponent with melee or missile weapons, you have to rely on critical hits.

---- {FP#6} Do mages also need to rely on crits?


WHEN YOU DO DAMAGE, IT'S TOO EASY FOR YOUR OPPONENT TO HEAL THAT DAMAGE

* Players can heal much of their damage very quickly with spells, potions, or kits.

Now, assuming that we haven't missed anything too major, let's look at some potential solutions. Keep in mind that nothing here constitutes a promise or plan of action yet. And while we'll only mention things that we think we can do, there may be unforeseen problems that end up ruling out some of these ideas. Finally, if one of these ideas looks like a winner, we may still need to work out a lot of details: How does it affect PKL and/or NPK? How do you get the effect – is it global or do you do a quest or get an imbue or what?

Also note that many of these ideas came directly from your previous feedback, so a lot of this should look familiar. :>



YOU CAN'T LAND ENOUGH HITS ON YOUR OPPONENT

* For missile weapons in particular: The PvP-oriented missile weapons had their maximum missile velocity increased up some time ago. In other words, they fire faster arrows. We can speed up other missile weapons – namely loot weapons – by the same amount. Unfortunately, because of the physics of the AC1 world it's going to be very difficult to speed up missile velocity any more than this. We've been playing with it internally: when you speed up the launchers more, you suddenly can't hit anything at all.

---- {FP#7} Did this help? Did it help enough? Is it worthwhile adding a way to speed up missiles fired from loot bows?

* Also for missile weapons: {FP#8} We may be able to play around with the radius of the hit area. In other words, instead of the attack hitting if the arrow hits your target directly, the attack would hit if the arrow came within 3 feet of your target.

* And finally for missile weapons: {FP#9} We may be able to let you turn on and off the behavior that causes missile weapons to try to 'lead' their target during combat.

* We could add ways to increase attack skill without increasing defense skill. The attack mod spell we've been talking about in February is an example of this. Other examples:

---- {FP#10} We could add Level 8 Heartseeker but not Level 8 Defender.

---- {FP#11} We could cause attack mods to be twice as effective when used against another player.

---- {FP#12} We could add an effect – like an imbue or the Aegis effect – that increases the attack mod of a weapon vs. other players by a large amount. This amount could be fixed or could vary based on a skill.

* Alternatively, we could reduce defense mods:

---- {FP#13} We could just say that all defense mods on weapons are only 1/4 as effective when used against another player.

---- {FP#14} We could add an effect – like an imbue or the Aegis effect – that decreases the defense mod of your opponent's weapon by a large amount. This amount could be fixed or could vary based on a skill.

---- {FP#15} Our general feeling is that increasing attack powers is better than nerfing defense. But what do you think?


WHEN YOU LAND HITS, YOU DON'T DO ENOUGH DAMAGE TO MAKE AN IMPACT

* {FP#16} We'd really rather not directly decrease the health of players. We think that increasing damage is probably better than a direct nerf to health. What do you think?

* {FP#17} We could decrease the effectiveness of armor and/or protections (life spells and wards) across the board in PvP combat. For instance, we could say that in PvP combat, all armor is automatically reduced by 1/2. This could affect real armor, or only AL-raising spells, or both. (It could not affect just tinkers, though. We don't track what AL comes from tinkers and what was there to begin with.) Similarly with protections and wards.

* {FP#18} Alternatively, we could cap the effect of armor and/or protections. For instance, we could say that in PvP combat, armor will only ever reduce damage by 90%, no matter how much armor you have. Similarly, we could cap protections at a 90% reduction. Other numbers might be more appropriate here, of course – I pulled those out of thin air.

* {FP#19} Or we could improve armor rending and resistance rending effects for PvP combat only in order to better cut through armor and protections. For instance, AR currently maxes out ignoring 60% of armor. Perhaps for PvP combat that could become 90% of armor.

* {FP#20} Because PvP combat often relies on critical hits, we could increase the base crit rate for all weapons when used against another player. Or we could increase the effectiveness of Critical Strike and/or Crippling Blow in PvP combat only.

* {FP#21} We could simply raise the damage on weapons in PvP combat. We could do this through a human slayer effect or other special PK-only damage bonuses for loot weapons, or by raising the damage on PvP-oriented weapons.

* {FP#22} We could add new "PvP cocktail" effects that give loot weapons a mix of useful PK qualities. For instance, imagine an effect that makes a loot weapon: shield hollow, ignore 25% of other amor, critical 25% of the time, and do an extra 50% damage against other players.


WHEN YOU DO DAMAGE, IT’S TOO EASY FOR YOUR OPPONENT TO HEAL THAT DAMAGE

* {FP#23} We could cause all healing methods to be less effective when involved in PvP combat. Or we could put PK timers on all healing methods. My feeling, however, is that increasing damage is better than nerfing all healing methods. What do you think?


Okay... that should be enough feedback to keep us busy for a few days. :> Let's get to it!

[Ziv]

So before I solicit more feedback, I'd just like to tell everyone that, while I am the one posting these solicitations for feedback, the PvP research and work that we're doing is a whole team effort. I am not single-handedly steering this effort. I have taken the role of the board poster guy because we've found that a single poster helps to organize our efforts on this very large and complex task. Just look at me as the Voice of Sauron (for those of you who've seen the Extended Edition of RotK) .

So with that said, let's talk about loot weapons!

Our goal with this is to open up new choices for PvP combat by making loot weapons as attractive as PvP-oriented quest weapons against other players.

{FP#24} In general, we'd like to meet this goal without adding too many new imbues that use the "gather lots of salvage and then take your (at best) 1 in 3 chances" mechanic. Instead, we'd rather use less tedious mechanics like quests and simple interactions. The feeling we get is that you guys would rather be out fighting than gathering salvage. Is that a good assumption?

I should also mention this: the numbers in this post I am not pulling out of thin air. These numbers are based on comparing weapons -- especially in terms of critical hits -- on our internal charts. Now, charts will get us in the ballpark, but charts are never as good as seeing these changes in play. If we go with any of the changes mentioned here We'll probably end up tweaking these values after you guys have had a chance to play with them and give feedback. We're also probably going to give the quest weapons themselves a small damage boost -- say, 10% -- so keep that in mind as well.

Okay! Let's start off by taking a look at some of the special qualities that make quest weapons effective in PvP, qualities that can't be found on loot weapons right now.

Weeping Weapons:

- Unenchantable
- Shield Hollow
- Human Slayer


Phantom Weapons:

- Unenchantable
- Ignores armor


Hollow Weapons:

- Unenchantable
- Life Hollow
- Item Hollow


In addition, there are some qualities that can already be put on loot weapons that aren't really useful right now, but might be if they were stronger:

- Armor Rending
- Resistance Rending
- Critical Strike/Crippling Blow


So what can we pull out of this?


{FP#25} The quest weapons are all unenchantable. Would it be useful to add a way to make a loot weapons unenchantable? This has come up in this thread already. Think of this as a repeatable quest you can do to make a weapon unenchantable -- like the Dark Idol quest for bows, not like an imbue or a tinker. The weapon would still get the benefit of any spells that were put on it by the treasure generator, but it couldn't be buffed or debuffed by any player, gems, etc. Would there need to be a drawback, like a penalty to the defense modifier or some other stat, or would being unbuffable be drawback enough?


{FP#26} Weeping and Phantom weapons both ignore shields. This is convenient from a balancing viewpoint because it's otherwise pretty difficult to balance a weapon for use against both melees and archers/mages. So perhaps adding a way to make a loot weapon shield hollow when used in PvP combat might also be very useful. What do you think? Maybe a repeatable quest that renders a weapon shield hollow but also reduces all of it's defense modifiers by some amount. Would that be a useful tradeoff, or would that be too much?


{FP#27} Phantom weapons, AR weapons, and to some extent Hollow weapons ignore some or all of the target's armor. This is useful since player armor is pretty high these days. Loot weapons already have an option to ignore some armor through the AR imbue, but it just isn't good enough for PvP. How about if we boost the maximum effect of AR for PvP combat only, so that when you attack another player, your AR effect can ignore up to 70-75% of your target's armor (instead of 60% as it is now)? An extra 10-15% AR doesn't look like much, but it would raise the crit damage of an imbued AR weapon about 10-20% above current Weeping weapon damage.


{FP#28} Alternatively, we could add a new effect that did the same thing, but didn't require the salvaging and imbuing process. Consider a repeatable quest that let you make a weapon "PK AR". This would count as an imbue (so you can't have a CS/PKAR weapon) but wouldn't use salvage and wouldn't have any chance of failure.


You might ask, why not just give all existing loot weapons a small human slayer mod, or add a small AR effect when used in PvP combat? (In fact, I think ChildoftheKoRn asked about the AR in this very thread.) The problem is strictly one of balancing: we need to be able to control exactly how much slayer mode or AR each kind of weapon got, or some would end up way, way better than others. That means figuring out how much AR a CS sword gets vs. a CS dagger vs. an RR bow vs. a ... It's much easier to balance these things if we are only dealing with one variable -- that is, just AR weapons or just PKAR weapons -- and not throwing the other imbues into the mix.


{FP#29} Here's a general question for you: Is improving existing imbues so that they are useful in PvP a good route to take? Or would it be better to add a new effect that did the same thing for PvP only, but could be gotten through a quest instead of through the process of salvaging and imbuing?


We could go into details about ways to make RR and CS strong enough to be useful as well, but for now let's just sum up the basic ideas. Our thoughts right now for loot involve the following:


{FP#30} Adding a couple of effects that can be applied to any loot weapon, like the ones we mention above:

- making the weapon unenchantable
- making the weapon shield hollow


Are there any other cool effects that would fit well in this category?


{FP#31} Plus intensifying some imbue-like effects -- either making the existing imbues better for PvP, or providing effects that take the place of an imbue but don't require the whole salvage and imbue thing. Effects like:

- ignore a lot of armor (like 75% AR)
- cut through a lot of resistances (like level 8 or 9 RR)
- crit way more often or for more (like 75% CS)


{FP#32} Plus, maybe one new imbue-like effect -- again probably done through a quest, but which didn't allow further imbues on top of it:

- add a human slayer property


{FP#33} If we did all of these things, do you think it would improve PvP combat? Or are we trying to do too much too fast? Or are we just way off base?

...


{FP#34} Incidentally, does anyone use CB weapons in PvP right now? They don't critical any less frequently than a Weeping weapon, and with the big critical damage I'd think they'd be pretty good. But you, the players, are the experts -- you tell us!