Removal of hyper armor is the worst change in the history of the entire game

[Dzonatas]

@Barnes

I rather like the leap with the axe, and the whirling combat with axe and shield.

Better than knock back. The rocknoses are constantly stacking knockback and it only needs 2 to cancel the move altogether.

[RagnarRandom]

i like this ‘hyper armor’ change. it makes it feel more difficult. i already played with an agility build and rolled alot in combat, so i didnt even notice the change in play with that, and i adapted to stamina pretty easy. last chapter the adjustments to enemy stats made the game too easy, now couple with this hyper armor ‘behavior’ change, it balanced out.
i restarted my character at the beginning of chapter 1 of age of war, and the restarted her again at the beginning of chapter 2. i found i enjoyed the combat loop more this time.
but then, who the hell am i?

[Einarr]

i know that NPC’s were supposed to lose their hyperarmor, but i can tell you from experience that they havent. once in a blue moon ill hit an enemy thats in the middle of his attack and interrupt him. it rarely happens. 99.9% of the time, if any enemy is attacking and they keep taking a hit, they will tank the hit and keep on swinging

[stelagel]

I remember going for Berserkers low lvls and my only concern was not to do the hyper armor hit. Every one of them had a 6 hit window and then you had to go back because they were starting anyway. The only (for the npc) way to break the 6 hit window was the hyper armor hit. In low lvls, this hit was enough to one shot you.

[demonado]

New Chapter changes:

1. higher damage
2. auto facing

What it means:

1. enemy attacks are more deadly (so is yours)
2. enemy can’t miss an attack within his attack radius

What you gonna do?

1. jump in the enemy horde and do 4x heavy slash combo with hyper armor and die within 2 sec
2. punish attack your enemy when he whiffs, dealing damage safe but cautious

You choose.

[Glatix]

@demonado

What you gonna do?

1. jump in the enemy horde and do 4x heavy slash combo with hyper armor and die within 2 sec
2. punish attack your enemy when he whiffs, dealing damage safe but cautious

You choose.

There’s no longer a x4 heavy slash combo with hyper armor. The game’s been dumbed down to the point where taking that risk isn’t an option.

As for punishing NPC “whiffs”, that’s giving too much credit to the NPCs. The reality is that singular enemies are too dumb and too lacking in weapon starting hyper to counter you if you choose to spam the axe. Groups, meanwhile, stun-lock you and force you to either disengage constantly or climb a roof to use a bow.

This isn’t an issue of people playing the game wrong. PvE and PvP are just less engaging now than they were.

[arktara]

The hyper-armor changes are so bad that they roused Glatix from a 3-year slumber to pen this well-reasoned screed:

Thoughts on the Age of War 2.0 Hyper Armor Changes

TL;DR: The Hyper Armor changes hurt the state of PvP and PvE experience by limiting the options of players. The Change: At present, most vanilla weapons have lost most of their Hyper Armor frames. Per the Developer Letter, the purpose of the Hyper Armor changes was to “increase the consistency of play further”. In order to achieve this, a rule was set that “Hyper Armor is reserved for moments during an attack where extreme momentum is present”. The General Issue Hyper Armor is a valuable too…

More discussion here:

Hyper armor changes: please revert

As I think about it I think what they could add is basically… re-add hyper-armor. Add a defense check to stagger - if a crappy low-level pissant attacks a high-level opponent with high defense (armor factor, armor quality, agility) then the stagger should not happen. The simple thing to do is admit they were wrong and revert Ch2’s reduction of hyper-armor. But in the best of circumstances it takes them about 2 years to admit they were wrong, so why not keep on pretending they have any hi…

I’m glad to see another thread. I hope the community never drops this topic until Funcom admits they were terribly wrong and undoes this senseless mistake.

It has been discussed that the hyper-armor changes apply to NPCs as well as players, as if there is some balancing aspect to that fact. There is not. NPCs do not have brains or emotions, NPCs derive no joy or pain from the game being played. Also the most common combat situation is one player versus multiple NPCs. As a result the hyper-armor reduction has a negligible effect to the NPC experience of combat and a tremendously negative effect to the player experience of combat.

To make the whole situation worse, since Funcom is incapable of making combat challenging in interesting ways they designed a new purge whose primary tactic is simply overwhelm. Overwhelm defenses with way too many attackers. It doesn’t matter that the attackers are weak because they are so ridiculously numerous and hyper-armor is such trash that they can lock up defenders and poke them to death. As if that wasn’t enough the game engine is not even capable of handling so much action at once and the sheer quantity of attackers will sometimes cause defender AI to simply shut down. They don’t even need to get staggered, they’ll just stop fighting because the game engine prioritizes NPC AI over follower AI.

Funcom needs to understand the limitations of its own game and stop making decisions that might be interesting in a game that didn’t have such limitations… because this is not that game. This game is full of years of poor decisions and buggy code that place severe limitations on what new changes can be introduced without having adverse effects.

[Dzonatas]

@arktara

This game is full of years of poor decisions and buggy code…

I think we could pour weight onto this, but ready-set-aim types are out there.

@arktara

…that the hyper-armor changes apply to NPCs as well as players, as if there is some balancing aspect to that fact.

Cool beans! I think, and I’m solo, this is something good. At least trying to sound good. Take a snapshot your database, especially where you made such changes.