I know you guys are going to respond badly to this but hear me out first.
The game was much more fun when weapons did about twice the damage they are doing now - sure fighting a single NPC was easier, but if you managed to pull 3 or 4 and made a mistake, you could be caught staggered and easily lose 3/4 to 100% of your life. As a result, I felt much more powerful as a player but, at the same time, much more vulnerable than I do now. Things were both harder and easier at the same time and if you were good, the game was pretty easy (in a dark souls way). Now with the nerfed weapon damages, I feel like my testlive fights are wet noodle fights.
And this goes double for PvP. I had a lot of fun before the balance patch. PvP felt much more deadly in that the first person to make a mistake was usually the one to bite the dust. It got my blood pumping, it felt more fast-paced and skill based than it does now. I canât be the only one. Daggers feel absolutely useless now - I think I am a pretty skillful player and the only way I can seem to get kills is if I poison the dagger beforehand. Forget about heavy attacks to apply the bleed, you donât get hyper armor and the animations are slower than alot of the weapons that do get hyper armor⊠which makes the daggers useless - were we not supposed to trade the speed for the hyper armor. Donât just take my word for it, try landing dagger attacks against greatsword users⊠or even spear users that know how to use their hyper armor. The armor pen nerf on them (and pretty much everything else) has made fighting people in black legion gear a nightmare (not to mention that there is a bug that causes that gear to weigh nothing - which makes those fights almost impossible to win).
And donât even get me started on archery. Before the patch, if I put 50 points into accuracy I felt that I was dangerous and that this was a viable weapon - of course, if people were able to reach me they could kill me in one or two hits, but I had tools to prevent that from happening and if I was skillful, I could win a fight. Now, I feel like Iâm shooting feathers at people when Iâm dueling them. Iâve tried out multiple builds and have dueled for hours with friends and I gotta say, I preferred testlive before the patch.
There is some trouble trying to figure out the balance on a TestLive server â TestLive has 10x the rates as the regular servers will at launch, so things will be a lot more âintenseâ when youâre playing with weapons and armor you really donât want to lose. Your heart probably isnât pounding in TestLive simply because itâs TestLive â there are no real consequences on the test servers.
When the fights last longer, then they become less about who gets the first hit (usually the person with the lowest ping / best hardware, rather than the most skill) and more about who has mastered the mechanics best. When the fight takes multiple stamina bars to finish, then stamina management comes into play, as well as positioning, blocking, dodging, etc. Itâs less about getting lucky, and more about having a prolonged skill or gear advantage. (IMO, Gear = Skill, because a majority of the game is about crafting and successfully running the industries required to make gear.)
PvP in Conan is very different from fighting in something like For Honor or Dark Souls. For one, in Conan, you might fight just a handful of times during the course of one raid. Dying in a raid might mean the whole raid is forfeit. Therefore, Iâd say that if thereâs just going to be one fight, then that fight should last. In For Honor / Dark Souls, you can die dozens of times, often with little consequence. When I fight in Conan, Iâm usually getting an adrenaline rush the whole time through. Sometimes that rush can last for an hour, from gearing up for the raid, to hauling all the loot home afterwards.
I prefer the fights taking longer, but I donât like how easy it is to run away in melee fights as result of it. If you realize youâre going to die, then of course you wonât want to lose your armor. Players are going to run, and theyâll have an easier time of it when damage is less of a âburstâ. Especially now that archery has been nerfed. (Iâm alright with archery being nerfed â It was primarily being used by players to exploit AI. But now we have an issue with players easily dodging away from them in melee instead.)
Regressing to the old ways is not the direction I would prefer to go.
The key now, to me, in these final weeks is to make sure that going forward the new combat system as a whole allows for fun and competitive play styles, whether it be archery, sword/board, zweihander, etc. Different weapons and combos should be poor to use in some situations, mandatory in others, but good overall.
To me, the bones of a good system are in place, and the meat just needs to be put on them.
I think the Bow should be reworked in a way that aiming should be hard, for exemple, removing the dot, (and lock on, for God sake, Lock on in a survival game seems a Kidâs Feature, and Conan for sure its not a kids game) its a survival game, there shouldnât be a dot showing where the arrow will land, you should know (aim) by skill. I know it got better with inaccuracy, but Bows should be hard to use, and rewarding when skilled, the same with all ranged weapons.
Removing the dot was a tactic that some FPSâs have tried in the past make âhip-shootingâ harder, but players usually just end up drawing a dot on their monitor using a sticker. It was certainly that way back in the days of Halo 2!
Iâd really like to see server-side inaccuracy introduced to the archery standing-shots as well. Itâs an RPG - if my player is inaccurate, I donât expect my arrows to land perfectly, no matter if my eye is looking in the right spot.
IMO, archery damage also needs to be buffed back up by about 25%. It was eviscerated over the last couple patches. Buff archery across the board, but also make it more reliant on the Accuracy attribute. That way, devoted archers can enjoy archery.
Iâm not talking about regressing to hack and slash skyrim combat on testlive Iâm talking about the most recent balancing patch they implemented that made certain weapons ridiculously OP while making others useless; i.e. the bow and the daggers being the most egregious examples of gutted weapons and play-styles.
Post-combat testlive update before last weekâs patch was the sweet spot for me. Combat was fast-paced and lethal. And now itâs slow and boring. Especially when using a bow. Daggers are a lesson in frustration because their animations are almost slower than heavier weapons (definitely slower than the spear), but things like the spear get hyper armor heavies. Itâs weird balancing. Bows and daggers need a significant boost in order to be competitive and viable in pvp, or youâll have nobody investing in accuracy again and it will be a dump stat just like itâs always been.
How that goal is achieved? I leave that to the developers; we shall see if they utilize the communityâs constructive feedback and criticisms in implementing a refined and polished combat system in the future.
Heâs not disagreeing with you, heâs stating that itâs up to the devs to balance it, and âflesh it outâ more. All the structure is there â the weapons behave relatively correctly, have animations, weapons trails, etc. and itâs just some numbers tweaking that needs to happen between now and release. Thatâs a great position to be in, for a game developer.
IMO itâs ludicrous to ask the devs to ârevertâ a patch. Better to offer suggestions going forward, than to say âyou did it exactly wrongâ.
Archery was gutted for a reason: Players were using it to glitch the AI, and it was too powerful of an âalternate routeâ to playing the game as it was intended. Youâre supposed to get up there in the enemiesâ face, and trade blows. This is a melee game. They spent months enhancing the melee combat, and itâs likely the best feature in the game. The ranged weapons are secondary, and situational.
Daggers were previously seen as perhaps the most OP weapons. I havenât been playing the game lately, but from the streams Iâve been seeing, the daggers are still useful â especially for world bosses. Their power is in the bleed effect â stack enough of those in PvP, and you can just walk away from your enemy as they bleed to death.
To me, itâs a good sign when the devs can change just a few balance mechanics and shift the whole weapon spectrum. That means weâre getting closer. Much closer than the days when it was all Stygian Kopeshes, or Black Ice 'Glacier Crackâs and weapon macros.
Accuracy / Archery should be a âviableâ way to play (if you canât handle melee combat), but by no means should it be better than the players who choose to stat into Strength, Vitality, Grit, etc⊠Thatâs what I think.
âIf you canât handle melee combatâŠâ lmao f*ck off bud.
I can âhandleâ melee combat just fine. Archery is borked beyond belief right now and you can hardly say âwell the game is meant to be played in meleeâ when FC added in ranged combos and ranged combat has itâs own stat that you can pour 50 points into. Basically at this point you choose to go either melee or ranged. If âaccuracyâ was meant to be a tertiary stat it wouldnât have a stat sink of 50 points and 5 feats. They literally would not have added a stat that only buffs ranged damage. You can tell other people how to play the game or you can realize that itâs a viable playstyle and should be balanced, I shouldnât feel like Iâm shooting feathers at something when using the bow.
Some people play on RP PVP servers as well and like to have viable character concepts. âDaggers are great for world bosses.â I was strictly talking about PvP. âStack enough bleeds and someone will die.â Well no fcking sht sherlock lmao thanks didnât know bleed was a mechanic. Come at me with daggers while I have a greatsword and weâll see how many heavy attacks you can land (protip, itâs maybe 1 before I kill you, if youâre lucky). You clearly havenât spent hours dueling people with different skill set ups because these would all be glaring issues to you if you had.
My opinion from observation, but @TwinCrows wouldnât mean it in a belittling way. I think he was addressing the room, not just you. Honestly, heâs as exploratory a fighter as you might want to meet â dueling heâs honorable and even avoids potions when w/ fists.
If âaccuracyâ was meant to be a tertiary stat it wouldnât have a stat sink of 50 points and 5 feats.
Encumbrance has the same â but you wouldnât often see somebody making an âEncumbranceâ PvP build. Same with Survival. There are already some attributes that do not mean much in PvP. Accuracy may be another one, along with Grit, as attributes that are âsignificantâ but not the most important ones for PvP.
In the original post, you asked âWhat do you guys think?â Iâm offering my thoughts. You got pissy at Callisis for not offering an argument for why Archery and Daggers were nerfed, so I delivered that argument. Letâs just continue the discussion.
Personally, Iâd be perfectly happy with Archery being confined to its utility for PvE, with a minor significance in PvP. I think that PvP should be done primarily with melee weapons of a similar style: 1-handed Swords, Axes, Maces (depending on the armor type of the enemy, and the weapons they are using).
My hopes for PvP is that it would reach a balance where itâs more about how you use the core weapons, than what weapon you have. But I also think that certain weapons should have very deliberate playstyles (eg. Daggers for flanking, not for head-to-head). 2-handers should be for PvE, along with bows. Thatâs just my ideal game, and where I hope weâre headed for PvP.
Thatâs why I disagree with your argument to revert the balance patch. I think the balance patch is good, and getting closer to my ideal experience.
Balance is always a moving target. The idea of a âperfectly balancedâ game is always a dream. We just had a major rework of combat at a fundamental level so itâs going to start with some big swings that will hopefully get some finer and finer dialing in.
Weapons could stand a little more buffing. More to the point weapon scaling up should be a bit steeper; the stone sword should be a pretty weak weapon for trying to PvP even mid-range players where as a steel sword should be a couple of clean âchainsâ at most to kill a mid-level player in medium armor. Just increase the scaling up of weapons by 2 or 3 points each grade.
Archery needs a buff. Costs were increased, accuracy decreased, rate of fire decreased. Buff damage back up. Currently I can pretty much just ignore a row of archers because one guy with a spear is 10x as deadly as 4 or 5 archers.
Speed up 1h sword a bit.
Slow spears a little bit and reduce damage. Having them be fast and good reach but significantly less deadly per hit than 2h swords and hammers is reasonable. They should be more comparable in damage to 1H weapons.
I get the desire to make javelins crippling (slowing) players on leg hits and archers doing the same being an impetus for making running away viable if you donât have that option but in practice a combo of hitreg and just overall high mobility just donât make that a worthwhile tradeoff. Make dodge a bit slower, have weapon hits of any type slow someone a tiny bit and make leg hits with thrown weapons cut someones speed in half for like 3 seconds; thatâs enough to suddenly make having a couple javelins in the bar worthwhile. Disengaging should be way more about light vs heavy armor and reach (harder to run away from a guy with a spear) than about just being willing to run.
Conversely running as an archer in light armor, turning to pop a shot at pursuers should be a solid means of getting away.
You want to enable players to force a fight; however that needs well balanced vs the ability to avoid one. You want to gank someone ambush him and be set up to limit his escape. If youâre trotting around in heavy with a warhammer and run across some forager in a loincloth and hunting bow of course heâs going to get away.
I like how it feels after the update otherwise. Still some tweaks but the principle is strong. I think itâs a good foundation for a skill based PvP system.
Personally, i think archery needs a slight buff, but nothing like what it was before. It was too powerful and could drop people before they even got in range, making it nearly as strong as a melee weapon without ever needing accuracy points.
I noticed they nerfed a bit of damage out of spears, which was entirely understandable, as their range is the best for melee and had aoe light attacks and long range juggling heavy attacks. It now takes considerable amounts of stamina to fight with this weapon in the current state.
2h swords are now close to where they should be. More powerful than spears and now the aoe is hitting all the targets they should. It could use slightly more forward movement, as the stagger can sometimes put an enemy out of reach for the 3rd part of the combo, where the spear always stays in range.
I donât use sword and board or daggers very often with the new combat. Daggers make me feel too vulnerable with little stagger and needing close range for small damage stacks. I donât use shields because the block mechanic feels clunky to me, but i do like the one hand sword attacks.
My main concern comes in the form of the mace (same animations for truncheon)⊠The range of the attacks are far too short and there is very little forward momentum, with the first part of the combo staggering the enemy out of range for the next 2 hits. This makes knocking out archer thralls a real pain, as theyâre constantly backpedaling.
I have been using sword and board a lot lately. It used to never make sense, which was disappointing since it is a classic technique. Now, the shield actually feels like it blocks. The response time on shields is currently the best it has ever been. Also, you can execute a strike while holding up a shield which means the block drops only when the attack is starting making it a seamless transition from block to strike. I am very happy with these changes. It may not be as powerful as other setups, but it actually feels the way it is supposed to now.
Until you swap your sword and board to a Pike and you can hit any NPC/monster and never get hit yourself. You find that a shield even tho is works well, it never needed (except vis archers)
Since every attack forces you or the NPC to move forward, and pike force them to move back, they will never be in attack rangeâŠPikes are OP at the moment. L10 naken with a pike and killing boss black rinos without taking any damage.
Sure they got the sword and board balance feeling right, but daggers permently stunning bosses (using poison), or pikes never allowing anything to get in attack range makes swords and boardsâŠpointless.
PVP is funny, had a max level guy trying to kill me (I was L10 and you just side step each time they attack and they can not hit you. He gave up after 10 mins of attacking me out of boredom!