If you give a mouse a cookie…

If this is intended, it is significantly messing up combos and so if it’s necessary, we need the weapon combos redone so that we aren’t advancing our attacks away past the target.

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Besides lock-on. Arrow math is pretty advanced. Those NPCs have to aim, and arrow math fits right in there for doing more than what’s expected from arrow math. :partying_face:

Bless you Andy, but the turning momentum mechanic is the cherry atop a parfait of really poorly considered combat changes. Community feedback has been fairly strong over the course of Age of War’s development. The insular nature of the development cycle is causing these problems.

Regarding the turning change in specific, the issue with it is that gameplay is artificially slowed to a crawl unless you’re exclusively using q-lock to target enemies, which sort of kills the aiming element of skill expression. People who enable controller style movement can no longer take advantage of free-aim, which is vital for dealing with enemies to your rear.

Melee gameplay presently feels more awkward and frustrating to engage in when compared to prior game versions. You jerk from target to target and poking/thrusting weapons are made far less useful when every combo set forces you to move in one direction.

Under the current set up, the optimal method of combat is to use a bow and lock on to enemies to hit them at medium range. With the changes to spear, the hard counter to bow use (dodging and poking) is missing. Roll-catching is also far more difficult. If a bow user rolls behind you, you can no longer turn quickly enough to catch them when they exit that dodge, meaning that all they need to do is roll behind you and use the Rolling Thrust perk to achieve clean and easy damage.

The change definitely mitigated the roll-poke meta that so many players took issue with, but now melee viability in general is suffering from the loss of free-aim attacking.

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This was beautifully said.

It does not matter how intended or not intended this particular change was. The main problem is that majority of players is displeased about it. So is really the good way to just shrug it off and say “you’re gonna get used to it”?

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Sadly this is no fix - not at all.
What you get is a clumsier and clunkier version of something that “looks” a bit alike of how it was before. It is sluggish and very unenjoyable, though.

There is also a good reason why most people who also PVP use controller style movement.

This is an utterly unneeded change, that makes fighting way worse. There also is no known bug, that would be adressed by that change.

As only a very few players come here to give feedback: Am on 3 major RP/PVP servers, and if you read their discord: 100% frustration about that change, not a single positive reaction to it.

So please, reconsider that change. It is sad that the good and enjoyable things brought with the new patch are overshadowed by that huge, ugly toad to be swallowed. And that now the general feeling is: we are all off way worse than before.

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As always your contributions are succinct and intelligent, thank you!

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I’m actually wondering if playing the game in first person would be better with this new set up.

This must be changed back immediately.

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If I read one more comment about how this change is to cater to consoles, I am gonna write this forum off as a hive-mind pcmr circle-jerk.

Repeat after me: Consoles do not have tank controls. God of War does not have tank controls. Nobody on consoles is used to these controls except for fans of God Hand from PS2.

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Yeah not sure why people act like these changes don’t suck for consoles as well. Not being able to turn fast enough to react to someone rolling behind you is kind of a universally lame system of combat.

Things like q-lock do pander to consoles a bit more, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good mechanic for consoles or that console players like suddenly losing out on the aiming aspect of the game.

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Mhm. So it is. And what is the desired outcome? People going bow with q-lock, or daggers with q-lock? All in, just trade blows, with heavy armor, and hope your gear is just a tiny bit better? Not certain what is expected to work…

Issue I have, the servers I play on not have q-lock enabled, for a reason. … and the big question remains: Why? Just why? Who gains from making combat clumsy? Found no answer yet…

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https://www.google.com/search?q=xbox+controller+for+pc

a.k.a. cross-play (enabler)

Funcom, and Dennis in particular, don’t actually have an end-goal for combat. That would require a reasonable grasp of how the game mechanics work, and how players leverage those mechanics to express skill in combat.

The actual process for these design changes, meanwhile, is that a tiny team of devs playtest things in isolation and brainstorm the easiest possible methods of making NPCs feel more difficult. The quickest way of doing that is to take away avenues of skill expression that better players can use to their advantage.

Hyper armor removal, burst-damage, instant stamina regeneration, and now turning momentum are all tailored specifically to make it so that Funcom’s braindead NPCs don’t get mulched because they strolled right into a player spinning around with an axe.

Giving NPCs better pathfinding, the ability to dodge, the ability to just NOT walk into an active moveset, or some other form of strategic behavior would require testing and analysis to implement. Instead, Funcom has opted to just remove things until AI feels like a challenge.

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:thinking: …huh. In my personal humble opinion, PVE on conan is… really not why so many people still play the game. It is outdated in respects to the engine. PVE is there, but who really cares? If I look at the most populated servers, it is RP servers, and PVP servers, and the highest up on the list are the ones who combine both.
I allow myself to doubt that it would be a good decission, to sacrifice the joy the majority of players have, for some rather irrelevant PVE considerations.

P.S.: State of combat mechanics was fine in Age of Sorcery. All changes thereafter did not make things better. But whatever, you also get used to a worse mechanic. That last step now gimped it to a degree where it becomes super iffy. And all that not helped PVE, not even the pure PVE players who never get into any PVP, did say “now is better for us”. Just my observation. But certainly a limited one.

Personally, I share your sentiment. I only bought Conan to check out the RP scene, and stayed because I enjoyed the PvP on those servers. I’d never play vanilla because the core gameplay loop just isn’t that appealing to me. On a PvE server you run dungeons with zero risk of an external threat, and in vanilla PvP you farm all day so some epic gamer can offline raid you.

That said, consoles make up the majority of the market for people who play Conan. Of that demographic, an overwhelming majority of players play on PvE servers. Moreover, consoles lack access to mods, so the only way that console players can get new armor, build pieces, etc is to buy from the Bazaar. With that in mind, tailoring content towards consoles is actually a good idea for Funcom.

Now all that said, these changes are still terrible and I can’t imagine that turning momentum somehow makes the console experience more engaging. At the end of the day, consoles are losing an element of skill expression that made the game more fun to play.

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Today I noticed elephants turn without it being instant. Sure, some fixes still needed, like running into a wall and not turning as a consequence. It’s positive. :tipping_hand_man: I think it took about a year to include/distribute newly related code and to get it working.

Well yes… why is it assumed console players like it more sluggish and clumsy? Maybe there is data…dunno… console players are in average over 60 years old, and prefer a slow pace. And the average PC player is 35, likes it faster, but they are only 20% of the market? Can be, can not be. But change makes it not easier for PVE, and makes it worse for the rest. I not see who´s benefit lies in those changes, yet :woman_shrugging:

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Honestly, it’s just the result of rushed development. The changes don’t really benefit anyone, but the development team isn’t looking at player feedback when making these changes.

The problem is that it takes time and effort to understand community input. Funcom’s Conan team is incredibly small right now. They don’t have the time or the manpower to engage with players and still meet that 3 month content requirement each quarter.

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Generation gap: I pointed out some instances awhile ago, but “nobody” seems to believe it. 60? I think it is 50. I don’t play fortnite, or Ark, or WoW… which really shows the gap. Here, you can look at the user’s icons for a hint.

Hmm, that sounds like a very reasonable explanation. Devils advocate then would ask: why change things that are totally fine? If you “fix” things that are not broken, you take unexpected results as a given. Usually not leading to less work load, but to more work load.
Simply put, like a lot of things added with the patch, like the tavern keeper, as one example. Like to see, Conan is not all dead yet, at least some still keep it alive. But really messing up combat outweighs it all, and not in a good way.
…oh well…