RE: Patch 1 combat improvements

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Originally Posted by MagicianBlade

I highly doubt that damages are in any way influenced by the animations. At least in a networked environment, that means that the client is determining hit status for a server, which is just plain an absolute no-no, especially when you have many different clients that could all be running at different speeds. If that is actually the case, then I'm not sure I have any respect for the designers of that system.

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Originally Posted by MagicianBlade

"attack hooks"? so, animation speed does actually determine hits? Is this animation run on the server,a s well as the client? Dependign on client-side animations is a big no-no, when you're dealing with multitudes of hardware.

There really should be different animations, designed for differing speeds. As is now, they are playing (for my 8th level cleric) like they are broken. You're running along at a normal clip, then you start swinging your weapon or casting, and it's like you've moved into The Matrix, but it's incredibly obvious, that the aniamtions were built to play at a much faster clip than what they actually are.

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Hits and damages are indeed tied to the attack animations. For THF and S&B each animation corresponds to 1 attack, for TWF some offhand attack animations have 2 and 3 attacks.

The client doesn't keep state, it just sends hits to the server whenever you complete an attack. You can see this when there is sufficient lag (you just attack and attack but see no damage numbers but then all of a sudden your screen is flooded with lots of damage numbers).

And yes, the animations were indeed designed for faster speeds.

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Originally Posted by Turial

Looks like all combat but ranged got a boost.

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After Mod 9, a hasted ranger with the capstone at lvl 20 did 77 shots per minute.
The day after patch one it fell back down to 70 shots per minute.

So not only did ranged get no boost...it was nerfed once again. Not sure if this was intentional or not but it's a fact that it was slowed significantly once again.

Melee attacks are in fact controlled by hooks in the animations. Most games function this way.

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Originally Posted by Invalid_50

Yeah this was for balance. Course you could also have balanced the game by pulling the plug. It’s not just about “doing the math” fellas, if the game “feels” slow and stupid people wont like it. You guys really need to hire some R-directed people, and kick the number crunchers to the curb when it comes to single handedly making fundamental changes to one of the most important aspects of your game.

Fine, the whole “twitch” thing was out of whack, so lets just slow the game down to molasses pace to fix it, and then show us mathematical formula to prove to us the game is still fun and engaging!

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The impression i get (considering the speed with which they came out with this change) is that they hadn't given it much thought.

I agree with them that attack speed should not decrease as you increase in BAB and that "twitch" attacks shouldn't be completely out of wack....But there's also the FUN factor.

SLOW is not fun.
Fast paced exciting action is fun.

Even haste movement speed has been reduced to the speed of 30 striding boots in Mod 9.

They should be doing all they can to make this game more fun and that means speeding things up, getting people into the game and excited about playing.

They're too much into the number crunching and I suspect do not seek the advice of their own testers to figure out what would make the game actually more fun to play.

They have all but "balanced" the fun out of ranged and that remains broken. Guess they want to do the same with "the heart pounding action of DDO's Combat system."

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Originally Posted by Maximus1

The impression i get (considering the speed with which they came out with this change) is that they hadn't given it much thought.

I agree with them that attack speed should not decrease as you increase in BAB and that "twitch" attacks shouldn't be completely out of wack....But there's also the FUN factor.

SLOW is not fun.
Fast paced exciting action is fun.

Even haste movement speed has been reduced to the speed of 30 striding boots in Mod 9.

They should be doing all they can to make this game more fun and that means speeding things up, getting people into the game and excited about playing.

They're too much into the number crunching and I suspect do not seek the advice of their own testers to figure out what would make the game actually more fun to play.

They have all but "balanced" the fun out of ranged and that remains broken. Guess they want to do the same with "the heart pounding action of DDO's Combat system."

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I agree with the notion (although I'd tend to think they are looking at it from a different perspective other than a micro-managing perspective).


Regardless... if they are indeed wanting to cater towards the F2P/Casual market, they need to be more cautious about how things are perceived in terms of not only the "fairness of the game" (which to my knowledge, that was what they were trying to achieve with the attack speed increments for two handed weapons), but also the pacing and the overall action rpg feel versus sluggish pseudo turn-based feel.

It would be such a shame for them to lose it now after all the work they've seemingly put into marketing Module 9 as well as sprucing up the graphics.

I still say the 5th animation should be reserved for special manuevers like trip, sunder & smite. (whatever happens)

That way if you want to do a special manuever, yes you may well slow yourself down a fraction, but you also get to see the spiffy 5th animation.

That way all that animation effort is NOT wasted. Normal attacking wouldnt be affected by this.

Just the times you do a smite, trip, improved feint or sunder.

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Originally Posted by Chaosprism

I still say the 5th animation should be reserved for special manuevers like trip, sunder & smite. (whatever happens)

That way if you want to do a special manuever, yes you may well slow yourself down a fraction, but you also get to see the spiffy 5th animation.

That way all that animation effort is NOT wasted. Normal attacking wouldnt be affected by this.

Just the times you do a smite, trip, improved feint or sunder.

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Well i think that would suck because the way i fight with my paladin i do more special attacks than regular attacks, trip, sunder, divine sacrifice, smite, normal attack (while cooldowns reset), repeat...