Conan PvP is arcadey by design, as it’s a trading game akin to something like Dark Souls. Movesets define weapons and hyper armor frames are a big part of weapon utility.
The reason weapons like the 1h axe and 1h sword need starting hyper is because they’re otherwise rendered useless in the face of weapons like the spear. Differences in hyper coverage also create differences in weapon identity. The 1h sword had less hyper armor and damage than the 1h axe, but the trade-off was a lunging moveset to allow for better positioning.
To use the 1h mace as an example, it’s always been a joke in PvP. It does great damage but only if someone is inexperienced enough to walk into the moveset. Otherwise, it doesn’t have anywhere near enough speed or movement to out class other trading weapons like a 1h sword or 1h axe. Even total hyper armor coverage won’t stop someone from just disengaging from a trade and waiting until you’re done with the moveset.
This doesn’t work in a trading environment. Combos are fixed. Weapons don’t collide. You can’t parry or chamber or block directionally. What happens instead is that the meta weapon is whatever reaches the hitbox the fastest and everything else becomes secondary in terms of utility.
Hyper armor meaningfully breaks up that dynamic by introducing trading weapons (1h sword, 1h axe) that counter fast-attacking chasers (spear, daggers). In turn, those trading weapons can be beaten by slow but heavy weapons (2h sword, 2h axe, 2h mace) that have great hyper armor and better damage. Finally those low-movement heavy weapons are vulnerable to high-movement chasers that can take advantage of holes in hyper armor later in a moveset, or simply out-space them entirely.
Each weapon had a specific niche (except javelins they’ve never been good for some reason).
It will definitely end the dominance of the spear, but that dominance is going to be supplanted by daggers, until those are nerfed as well. Without hyper armor to define the purpose of a given weapon there’s always going to be a singular dominant melee weapon.
The spear is only this ridiculously strong because everything that mitigated that strength (stam management, starting hyper for trade weapons, attribute requirements, health recovery, momentum, damage) has been altered in a way that hurts the viability of every other weapon.
Not particularly, I might look at the actual animation differences when we have the devkit update, which we don’t yet.
Anyway, I remembered them saying 7 frames on the stream, but maybe it was 9 indeed…
Basically if it’s 7 then it’s 230 ms… if it’s 9 then it’s 300 ms longer… and only for the heavy attacks (possibly not even all of them)
Doesn’t seem like a particularly strong nerf, especially if what they said was true and the heavy attack actually was faster than the light… in which case it’s more of a bugfix.
Personally I don’t think this is going to affect the usage of the weapon even the slightest way… it’s going to be enough for people to make complaint threads like this one and that’s about it… If anything it’s more of a “fake nerf” to shut people up who complained about the spear. As long as it has the range it has… nothing else will really matter. But I guess we’ll see.
It does not seem like it, but you needed 6 attacks with a spear to kill an opponent if it went “flawlessly” (which means no potting and no full glutton perk regeneration).
1.8 seconds extra is huge already.
Also the timings will be different. It will be impossible to hit someone doing a double roll to escape after you hit him and put him into stagger.
Bows will have an even easier time to hit people using spears (300ms extra).
Trading great axes will be harder as well. But this is more of a timing adjustment (start 300ms earlier).
So daggers might take the spot of the spear, as other people have already mentioned.
But be warned, this will not be the last thread about spears. There are more changes than just the spear heavy attack speed that players will complain about.
No, what I meant is that the Funcom nerfing / buffing trend has always been to do it in much more significant steps… so I think this is a good sign that they’re starting small… adding a few frames to an animation that they identified as being out of line with the rest.
Basically what I mean is that it could have been way way worse…
As for the constant rolling, they did mention on the stream that they heard the feedback and they intend to do something about that too. So maybe once that enters the picture, then it won’t be as noticeable as you describe above.
I still don’t think that avid spear users will suddenly put the weapon down because of it, in fact I think most wouldn’t even if it got a much more significant nerf… most of those who use it would use it if the thing didn’t have a heavy attack at all, just for the range and maybe combine it with some other weapons.
Absolutely this . The problem from this “whining for absolutely everything” is that the essence of the problems is getting lost and completely disoriented.
Patch notes say on the opener. So first heavy attack.
So yeah its not a strong nerf. Most players won’t even notice it. In fact this thread never would have existed if someone wasn’t paying attention to the devstream.
Though I’m almost tempted to change my tune and call it a catastrophe just to get the duelers riled up enough to change their weapons to daggers and greataxes just to throw them off lol. Though they’ll go back to the spears once one of their buddies keep using one and start getting kills on them.
Except there is nothing “drastic” about the situation. Encounters with spear players are not unwinnable, and the game is not ‘totally broken’. There are already 4 weapons which are viable and competitive; spears, bows, greataxes, and daggers.
Balance will never exist in PvP, because it is a system built upon imbalance. This outstanding essay by @Kapoteeni sums it up well.
There will always be a meta weapon, attribute loadouts, building locations, and no amount of nerfs or reworks will ever change this. It is no different than in CoD, Ark, Fallout76, or any other PvP game. One will always rise above and dominate the others. At some point people need to accept this and adapt.
That’s exactly the reason friendly fire must go . Congrats @SirDaveWolf, you are by far one of the most skilled fighters i ever seen in this game. Sometimes you remind me of Riddick!
The most recent changes on testlive towards the turning make PvP (and probably fighting in PvE) even worse. All this because of this stupid target lock feature that Funcom is too stubborn about to remove.
Although i am not supporting removals from the game, to this i will make an exeption. Target lock is one feature i never use, i only use it on role play sessions when it’s pitch black and i need to locate enemies, but after i locate them i remove it to battle. I hate loosing freedom of movement in my battle.
Off-topic i was watching some recent videos of yours and i couldn’t help it from comparing them with older videos.
Do you use something to speed up your videos, or the battle speed has been changed so much?
You don’t have to do the Funcom move and remove it. Just disable it for all PvP servers. (Make it opt-in)
Or change it so it only works on NPCs.
Yes, it’s just a bad feature that gets abused with poke’n roll and daggers.
No, I have 1 clip in my first event server video where I have sped a short part up in the beginning, because it was too long but I wanted to show the full scene.
They need to nerf momentum , so thralls uses other weapons more. As it is , there is a momentum Fest for thralls. no one wants to use other weapons … well most dont, since tmomentun is so powerful, (same goes for the hanuman gada, who will use any other 2h hammer?
. The problem from this “whining for absolutely everything” is that the essence of the problems is getting lost and completely disoriented.
. Congrats