Poll => Combat Changes

When you do it 20 times you’ll take the crazy in love badge :rofl:, join the club brother :metal:.

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Crocodiles turning like a steering wheel will never grow on me.

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Use a shield meanwhile. Strike, block their next “heat seaking guided attack”, strike again.
For the giant croc, roll at the last possible moment. Take extra potions because it won’t always work.
On both cases, avoid target lock.
As soon as you level and gear up, both die too fast for it to be a concern.
It’s not a change I particularly liked, but it made combat a little more challenging.

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Yes, but it made it challenging in the way that driving a poorly maintained car is challenging.
In the way that marksmanship with a filthy rifle is challenging.
Not entirely unlike the challenge of training a dog with rabies.

It’s just janky, and when we add that to the shield’s known habit of just lowering the guard for no discernable reason… it’s worse.
Also, shields only block (some) front attacks.
Enemies with lunging type attacks can course correct to come up behind you if you manage to evade them. Which evade you must as some attacks are just entirely unblockable by design.

This one would love more challenging bosses that actually have more developed combat choices. But fighting with training weights and the handling of a tugboat while the enemy teleports about and corrects like a guided missile isn’t fun.

Games should be fun.

There is a difference between a challenge and fake difficulty. If we embrace fake difficulty as tolerable, then we should be as eager to support the use of undermesh and sky bases. It’s the same idea that the game doesn’t have to play well and success is determined by mastering the jank of the system.

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Yes. The wrong kind of difficulty. I mentioned that already a few times. :blush:
Bugs also make the game harder… in the wrongest way possible. :smile:
But this change was deliberate… which makes it worse.

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Yah. Or like the screen periodically turning black for several seconds, or the controller switching itself off. This post would receive the entirety of my daily like allocation if I were able. It strongly underpins my own discontent.

Challenge can still be achieved without burdening players with inexplicable handicaps unique to them which do not seem affect any other man nor beast in the game. Using absolutely horrid controls to generate manufactured/fake difficulty is just terrible design compensating for a lack of actual gameplay challenge. Thus making the “control” the challenge instead of the game itself. And your analogy is spot on. It It’s just … not good.

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Thanks for bringing this up, it’s a good thing to discuss or at least to point. I believe that crocodiles should be like arena champion, slow as they were but extremely powerful on hit. The way they react now is goofy and they became the worst enemies to battle. Not because they are difficult, but because this choice is poor and immersion breaking.
You are absolutely right fellow exile.

This includes lizard fighting as well. I am already sick to battle with them and be up on their head on insta rotation. Ugly!!!

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They should chase you in the water! This is something that seriously annoys me since the moment I found out the cozy & safe water embrace during my FIRST playthrough. It’s been a few years. What is it that makes water so impossible to navigate for npcs? Sometimes thralls swim. Sometimes they don’t and just teleport. Crocs should definitely swim, catch you and kill you. No more noob river. Noob river BANKS. The river should strike fear into our hearts. :smile:
And since I’m asking for new stuff, give us a raft so we can sail, made out of flotsam, sinkable by crocs after a few hits. :grin:
And bull sharks on Buccaneer’s bay and the entire eastern shore. Let’s make those sunken chests risky to get.

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The Age of Calamitous mod has sharks in the water that will attack you. If a modder can make swimming npcs, there really shouldn’t be any reason the devs can’t do it :man_shrugging:

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That’s for another topic, but years i live with this dream too. Years!!!
One day brother, one day!

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Welp, unless they neglected to mention it in the Testlive notes, it appears Funcom has decided to ignore the feedback we the players have all come out of the woodwork to provide both here, and in their now seemingly inane survey. Tell me, what on earth is the point of even having the survey if you are just going to stubbornly double down, and act against overwhelming majority of your player base!? How exactly is that supposed to sure up support and incentivise your playerbase, to stay engaged and safeguard their ongoing dedication? Of course it is not, but if this issue were an election we would have won by one of the most decisive and historical margins ever seen. If you cannot make a change that 87% support among the customer base, then when the dickens do you. I am really dreading fighting JhebbelSag followers, champions and the Werebear boss, with them being able to rotate on the spot like a spinning top. Unblieveable.

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If this one recalls, and this one’s memory is far from perfect, it had been noted that any action on adjusting according to the survey/feedback on the new combat would be not this update but the one after it.

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Oooooh boy. You mean too tell me I am only half-way through a 6 months stint with this combat? Ancestors give me strength.

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This one speculates that the combat update was rolled out in haste.
That, rather than sneaking it in because they knew it would be unpopular, they shoved it in at the last minute because that is when it was done.

So, untested, in to the field.

They likely expected some small bugs (but pushing out the patch right before the Christmas - New Year break was foolish) but not the lead balloon that it has proven to be.

Thus, the survey goes out and when they see the results are not just forum hyperbole, then is when they start talking about putting a course correction into the works. This one does not think correcting this mess has been given the priority it should have, but there may be more factors at work than this one knows.

While there is this claim that the version of the game that the devs are looking at is several patches ahead of the one in the wild… This one severely doubts that claim, especially with the unfinished nature of updates as well as the flat admission that they run out of time.
But if they are already ahead, that would make back tracking to fix a huge undertaking.

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My own recall is also far from perfect - but I thought I remembered it as ‘would not be ready for the January hotfix’, but with at least an implication of prepping for the March update. I could be misremembering, or might have misinterpreted at the time… I do recall there was talk of Dennis going back and personally testing the combat changes - I think it was in one of @Eradicati0n’s videos - perhaps he may remember more clearly?

(But I’m not sure it would matter - even if Dennis swore blind that it specifically would be fixed for a particular update, I’m not convinced I would believe him. “We don’t want to put out any more broken updates” - promptly puts out broken update and goes on holiday. “We’re adding ch4 to our ‘3-chapter system’ to enable us to fix and finish features that weren’t ready for the earlier chapters” - puts out update that doesn’t fix or finish anything, just adds new ideas and systems (and, inevitably, bugs)…)

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To be entirely fair, there are quite a few bug fixes in the upcoming Chapter 4.
Perhaps not the ones that this one would prioritize, but they do exist.

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True - it is a long list (and not what I would prioritise either). I should clarify and make that ‘doesn’t fix any of the new (big) broken things introduced in the previous update’ - there are bug fixes (and, at least on testlive, new bugs added for extra value). But no fixes to combat or the seige (either in terms of respawn nonsense or the lag it causes even on high-spec machines). I would also say there are no fixes for broken thralls either (at least none specified in the patch notes - but then they also fail to mention the introduction of a new ‘locked camera’ mode, or the removal of the ability to split stacks into desired quantities, so merely not being mentioned does not mean not existing). It is possible that the new ‘flee’ command may incorporate some sort of fix for the thrall brain damage issues - or at least serve as a band-aid.

Seeing these patch notes - the things that have and haven’t been included - has me somewhat riled, but I’d prefer not to go off half-cocked - I should wait until the live version actually releases before passing judgement. I appreciate the ‘hand on the collar’ to slow me down :slight_smile:

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This one does not mean to restrain anyone.
On a personal level, tilting at windmills is sometimes the only entertainment to be had, and this one seeks not to interrupt any expression of enthusiasm, or vitriol.

This one’s posts are often meant to be half a joke and either give a laugh while spewing vitriol, or give a laugh to lighten vitriol.

However, this one always thinks righteous rage is a dish best served at the precise moment. It’s very fiddly, undercooked and it loses weight and is easy to dismiss, overcooked and it doesn’t land with any relevance or it is otherwise unsatisfying.
And really, righteous rage should never be squandered, too precious a resource.

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:laughing:

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Having snuck onto a PC to experiment, and this is possibly most pertinent to @Croms_Faithful , there is a setting that toggles auto facing with attack.
This one only had a few minutes on it, but it seems that we have made 5-7 steps forward as compared to the 10 back that Chapter 3 was.
This is just Prima Facie tho, deeper play will be required.
Also, this one is not enjoying the execution mechanic, it interrupts the flow of battle, especially multi enemy fights, But that’s a different issue.

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