Can we please stop self promoting how great of a player each of us are and how others must be horrible? It adds nothing to the conversation and these aren’t supposed to be confrontational and combative.
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Played pretty extensively this weekend and can say I loathe the combat changes. I can get (kind of) used to the input from player but the NPC changes are horrible.
Do you know how many times I was chased around by someone running backwards? What about enemies sliding along the floor sideways? How about the number of times I got hit, even with a dodge roll because the enemy changed direction mid-lunge? Or, enemy targets and lunges one direction at an ally (friend or thrall) but I ended up hit because it, again, changed targets mid-attack? And my favorite: enemies disappear and seem to reset and then suddenly appear on top of me and half my health is gone because it desyncs?
Combat is becoming less and less fun with every update. This is NOT a souls game and doesn’t have the fine-tuning to AI and hit boxes to BE a souls game. The devs need to recognize their limitations and work with them, instead of trying to make this game something it’s not and cannot be.
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This is the most idiotic farking thing that has ever happened to this game. Funcom must be looking for an excuse to kill it so they just ruin it worse with each release. I’m done with CE until they revert this atrocity.
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If you have control over the server settings… I found these options return “playability” to something that more closely resembles combat and targeting prior to AOW ch3:
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I need a PC player who is actually interested in testing to try something.
I play on console, always have. Combat on PS has not changed. I have to use the left stick to turn towards whatever I am attacking. My view can be straight ahead, yet I am attacking to the left or behind.
That said, I do not use target lock. I’ve never liked it. Because of that, I used to have an issue where I want to attack an enemy straight ahead, and my character would invariably turn to the closest enemy no matter the direction. In the purges at another clan’s base, I would turn on their thralls during attack sometimes.
I found a method to continue to hit the enemy I want in a crowd, and I want to know if this will work on PC.
It’s pretty simple. I push the left stick forward as I attack. That way, I continue to attack the forward enemy, leaving the side enemies or friendlies alone. I tested this weekend, and I do turn on attack if I look another direction as I am moving forward.
Does this mechanic work the same on PC? Can you attack, look, turn, and attack in a new direction continuously on PC while still moving forward?
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“Yup… what @heaven13 said…”
Hence my remark “more closely resembles” combat prior to AOW 3.0 update for adjusting settings as:
There is a noticeable difference in that the aim assistant doesn’t work unless you move the left stick and you couldn’t just use the attack movement and auto-aim to propel to to complete the combo but after a weekend of playing, I only have some mistakes but overall I am back on playing no worries.
I haven’t went through all of the weapons but there are some I am no longer proficient with in this new world now that I used to love (short sword being one of them) . No worries, I just switch to a strength build and started playing and actually having some fun with that. I will go back to agility when I get a stable supply of good quantity of end game katanas (which I am expecting to be easier since the black blade as a 100% spawn chance in the stronghold but that thing is too popular now so I will let everyone else have their fun and go back when they move on to the next shiny)
However I think there should be consistency in that the NPCs and thralls should have the same limitation in movement during attacking.
We don’t need a rework, we need a rollback. PvP is presently a boring joust where skill expression has been hampered by q-lock, burst damage, and changes to hyper armor. The first hit to land always wins a trade and weapons lack identity when they can always be pulled out of a moveset by a simple dagger poke. We no longer need to manage stamina, or think about recovery, or consider weapon choice beyond a pair of daggers and a bow.
A rework wouldn’t address any of these issues. You can’t create weapon dynamics without hyper armor. You can’t encourage fun trading or recovery with burst damage. You can’t make players mindful of infinite stamina. You can’t reward weapon accuracy with q-lock.
The Age of War changes aren’t a rework of PvP, they’re a series of decisions made to strip elements of skill expression from combat. Age of Sorcery introduced more tools for players to use and changed attribute dynamics to allow for greater build diversity than ever before. That was a rework. Age of War is just the devs slowly converting the game to tab combat.
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Momentum was disparaged because Funcom’s first application of it as a mechanic was terrible. It took about 2 seconds to fully arrive at max speed, and reset every time you pivoted. For anyone that needs to escape and recover, that’s a death sentence.
Funcom fixed it by increasing starting speed, lowering the turning speed penalty to basically nothing, and lowering the time it took to arrive at max speed to under a second. These fixes finally had the intended effects. Combo attacks became more viable as opponents could no longer evade them by simply turning heel and running, and spear users faced more risk from trade weapons like the 1h sword and 1h axe for the same reason.
Given how easy recovery was, it was a solid change to PvP. With AoS adding running attacks and animated potions, momentum became less necessary for catching people without a spear. That said, it’s removal still hurt gameplay by skewing the balance back in favor of spear-use and mitigating the consequence of constantly disengaging to joust with a running attack.
Forgive me but this pretty much sums up PVP on officials since I have been playing and the reason I left it behind. The point I’m making is that no matter what is done in combat, a new method of locking, burst damage, and hyper armor abuse will take over and you are back to square 1 again. The issue you have will never be fixed because there is always going to be something in the gameplay that can be exploited. When you realize this, then you understand that PVP isn’t about fighting each other as that becomes boring and it’s not about raiding because that is boring. PVP is about finding the latest exploits and lording it over others. That is what is triggering the dopamine. The rest is mild adrenaline that gets old quickly.
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I think this is a pretty cynical view of PvP as a concept. Yes, a meta will always exist, but distilling combat to that ignores the fact that skill and combat mechanics can be used to create a gradient of viability.
Prior to this current game state, spear was always the most versatile weapon in Conan. It could deal meaningful damage, allowed players to avoid team hits in a group fight, and had the reach to take advantage of gaps in hyper armor.
That said, it wasn’t the be-all end-all until Age of War removed every single factor that mitigated its strength as a weapon. The skilled use of a 1h sword or 1h axe could easily bypass a poke with starting hyper armor and deal significant damage to a spear user. The spear could only evade trading weapons by rolling, which allowed 1h sword users to simply press them until they ran out of stamina or roll-catch them with a chaser like the daggers or another spear.
Conan’s meta was about recognizing what weapons and tactics someone was using and countering. Trade weapons beat chasers, chasers beat heavies, and heavies beat trade weapons. Skillful use of weapons could break up that dynamic a bit, but the advantage never fell into the hands of someone who only ever used one weapon.
That said Conan’s vanilla PvP servers have always had a terrible, grindy gameplay loop and I don’t engage with it either. I can’t fathom what sort of person genuinely enjoys farming materials all day only to get offline raided by players who built in the keyhole.
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Too true. Officials did make me very cynical. Thank you for pointing out that bias.
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I don’t blame you to be honest. Conan’s vanilla PvP gameplay loop isn’t really even PvP. Like you said, encountering enemy players while online is extremely rare. There’s not really much fun to be had in that kind of environment, especially given how many players blatantly cheat.
I use an agility build with katana, short sword, chakrams, and daggers. I will switch between weapons based on the enemy.
Never used aim assist. I like to stay fairly flexible in movement. I am enjoying the better attacks from enemies. Fights were rather boring when they would go into their attacks and you could just move to the side and let them pass. Now, you have to actually use decent tactics to not get caught in bad spot. The boss croc fight is especially fun now.
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uninstalling the game is now the best solution, the pvp system is so damaged that there is no way to fix it, the only solution would be to go back to the initial combat system which was the best, they turned the pvp/pve game into just pve ■■■■■■■■
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To which I tried to warn players earlier on this. When the PVP community, collectively, makes the ultimate goal of PVP is to get other players off the server, the play style inhibits the business. I begged FC for an official stance of what they wanted PVP to be, their expectation, and I got silence from them and a bunch of players chiming in that it’s about freedom to play how you want to and blah blah blah. Well the lowest common denominator wins for unregulated play and you get the ‘wins at all cost’ toxicity. The playstyle had so much potential but ruined with a lack of direction or planned vision and the influx of players that treated the public servers like a litter box that actively treated new players horribly.
Like @Glatix pointed out, I’m jaded on it because I truly tried to make it work but without positive energy from both devs and playerbase, it was doomed to die.
But I know…I’m not dead yet.
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The combat is awful for everyone!
Why do you behave like only PvP was affected?
The think the IDEA behind the PvE-C servers was meant to address the offline raiding problem by windowing when people can actually fight. That said, the result was just people constantly trolling outside of that window and then doing a pyramid war within it. There isn’t really an incentive to play the game in a fun or communal way on official servers.
That’s why I’ve always favored empowering unofficial servers with as many in-game options as possible. Arena servers can be really fun because you jump right into the PvP without having to engage with the grind loop. The Conan gameplay loop just doesn’t appeal to that many people, and on PC a vast majority of the top servers are roleplay servers that use Conan as a platform rather than as a game.
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There is dedinately some, what we Aussies call FIGJAM, going on with some members here. 
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Oh btw, in case any of you are able to use mods… I made one that patches things up a bit.
Just thought people here might wanna know
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