C'mon CODOG... say or do something!

[DSL]

To balance that, and make it interesting, I think we should have spell arrows/bolts, where when you fire it, it fires a spell like fireball. Or at the very least exploding ammunition. Somewhere where if you fire it, it goes boom and may affect 3 closeknit enemies.

Kobolds have long had exploding ammunition, no reason why we can't.

That would be fun... Fireball on a hit, or a mini-chain lightning. However, I don't think that kobold flaming tarballs explode in any area-damage sense, or at least I don't ever remember taking damage from someone else being hit by them.

[Missing_Minds]

I need to head off to the development cave again for a while. I hope to be a little more active a little more often with you all on these forums. Thanks for being respectful and for your patience. I will follow this thread through the week and may find time to respond after work hours.

Thanks, Codog. We really do appricate the huge amount of feedback you've been giving us. Reminds me how the devs used to be which part of the reason why I enjoy this game.

Oh yeah, just noticed some of the times you were posting. Please make sure you've got time for your family and sleep.

[tihocan]

Yes. There are some speed differences between the two. Basicallly different weapon styles will have some minor variants in their animation times. Ideally, I would have wanted these to be super uniform (which we did try at one point). However, the aesthetics of having a one handed dagger swinging at the same speed as a huge honking axe made things look pretty silly.

First of all thanks for your involvement in this thread, and for acknowledging this particular issue, which had been brought tons of times on the forums in the past with no dev answer.

I'm not sure what the problem with the animations is exactly, but it seems to me there are many parameters you can tune in order to make the animation lengths more or less uniform, like:
- the animation itself
- the speed at which it is played
- the time interval between two consecutive swinging animations

Is there really no way to tweak them so as to minimize the differences? It's really sad that some weapons like greatswords and falchions are not popular for the single reason that their swing rate is lower.
Please note I'm not saying the swing rate should be EXACTLY equal. But it should be similar enough so that it does not impact your DPS to the point it makes some weapons obsolete.

[Mad_Bombardier]

Is there really no way to tweak them so as to minimize the differences? It's really sad that some weapons like greatswords and falchions are not popular for the single reason that their swing rate is lower.
Please note I'm not saying the swing rate should be EXACTLY equal. But it should be similar enough so that it does not impact your DPS to the point it makes some weapons obsolete.

Agreed. I can understand the difference between a Greataxe and a Dagger. But, there should be no difference between a Greataxe and a Falchion.

For me, the big killer discrepancy here is the TWF animation. Not only is TWF perpetually behind on number of attacks (due to leveling differences in attacks/BAB compared to feat levels), TWF is further penalized with slower animation. Maybe we should just give up, leave the animation as is, and just rename it "1.5 Weapon Fighting," because that's the effective attacks per minute. However, I'd prefer a real fix.

[Borror0]

Maybe we should just give up, leave the animation as is, and just rename it "1.5 Weapon Fighting," because that's the effective attacks per minute.

Now, that would be sig worthy! Sad I only got 4 little lines..

EDIT: Oh, by the way, glad you've regained consiousness Codog! Sorry about that..

[Mad_Bombardier]

Now, that would be sig worthy! Sad I only got 4 little lines..

EDIT: Oh, by the way, glad you've regained consiousness Codog! Sorry about that..

Bah, there's space! Who needs to reference the DDOwiki, anyway?

And upon rereading, it appears my above post was a bit more antagonistic than I intended. I was trying to state a simple, unfortunate gameplay fact in a mildly sarcastic manner. I very much appreciate the dedication Codog has shown to the topic of Ranged Combat and hope that he will one day address TWF animations/rate of attack.

[Riggs]

Rapid shot and rapid reload do stack.
Rapid shot and quickdraw stack as well.

And no... I'm not even beginning to hate anybody here. I hate bugs in the game, not the fine residents of Stormreach. Although that Lord Goodblade character, I don't trust that guy. He has shifty, small hands, and smells like enigmatic stew.

It is planned that ranged combat speed will increase with BAB all the way through level 20. However, you won't be seeing increases like 2X and 3X the current speed. (just to set some expectations)

Best wishes,

Codog

Awesome, any increase is a good thing.

And yeah, getting a detailed response to a long standing set of issues is great. Even if something is not possible, being told why it is not possible is far better than silence.

[Asal]

CODOG is my favorite Developer of any game I have ever played

[moorewr]

CODOG is my favorite Developer of any game I have ever played

/signed by another fan club member

[DragonKiller]

Codog... once again. Thank you! This has to be one of the best (if not THE best) developer/community postings I have ever seen. My hats off to you!

I am also encouraged that ranged combat will be taken a closer look at. My main (well.. co-main) is a 12/2 Ranger/Fighter. While I love the ranger in him, I find the ranged to be to ineffective all too often and that was the main reason I went with 2 levels of fighter; so that I could make his meele more effective and make him loved in parties .

For those 20 seconds when his multi-shot is on and the right bow his DPS is very high, but after that.... Ehhh. Only real reason for his bows still is because things like Smiting, Disrupting, etc.. These are highly effective in a given situation, but when the level cap increases and the bad buys get higher and higher CR, their saves will make them all but immune to these weapon effects. At that point, only DPS will count (unless you have something like Greater Smiting, Greater Disrupting, etc...).

Again.. THANK you for the honest feed back. It is plainly obvious you take this game, and your job serious. It is awesome to see, and gives me hope for DDO and Turbine.

[Borror0]

Bah, there's space! Who needs to reference the DDOwiki, anyway?

DDOwiki reference? Where's that? I don't see any DDOwiki reference anywhere!

Do you? If so, I'd like the url...

Why would it there be, it's not like we're needing editors to edit the DDOwiki!

And honestly Mad B, I'm not the kind of person to do a shameless plug about my wiki, even if it's the best source of DDO information.

Well, since we've mentioned it, I'll put a link here just for others to know what we're talking about, but I don't like that. I really hate when ppl plug there stuff, even if it's the best around!!

Sorry about that DDOwiki stuff, back to the topic!






EDIT: I feel really guilty of put that link there:

Well, since we've mentioned it, I'll put a link here just for others.

I really feel bad. I really don't like to put links like this. Even if it was just one.

I feel like I'm forcing people to click on the --> link <--. It's not my type. I really think the forums would be better without such linkage.

Again, I'm really, really sorry for posting that single little link of nothing... but it's a lot to me.

I really hate links.

Sorry again for that link.

[GAULSTON]

Codog, thank you Sir for your speedy and informative responses to our questions and concerns. I do think you've gone above and beyond the title of this thread. Not sayin it's information overload, because I get a better understandin of the problem with your more detailed explanations.

Thank you for enlightenin us about the design issues in your earlier post (#43). At least now I have a different mind set for ranged combat. Thanks for your explanation of the "physics" aspect and the skill to hit before an actuall to hit roll. A lot more skill required there than just the old "You must face your target...". I feel sorry for the players who don't use mouse look mode tho. Can't immagine tryin to play a first person shooter without mouselook mode. I will surely take your advice and go to manual untargeted mode vs autoattack tab target. Not sure what the term "twitch" means, but am I to assume that requiring a degree of first person shooter skill is involved? I think most of us just got used to having the tab target autoattack system do all the work for us. Then BAM, changes to the combat system, WHAWHAWHAT?! lol. You know how well we take to changes to our confort zones, lol.

It does pose another question from me tho. In melee combat, suppose I'm swingin a great sword at a mob of untargetted monsters around me. Regardin the die rolls *crosses fingers* C'MON TWENTY! , does the die roll apply to the monster that is mainly infront of me, or all within glancin blow area? I noticed that every once in a while, I will vorpal a mobbie, from a glancin blow, who's not the monster most directly in front of me. Have'nt taken cleave yet either. How does the combat design take into effect the die roll as pertainin to untargetted mobs?

Thanks again Sir for all your time and efforts.

[Codog]

Codog, thank you Sir for your speedy and informative responses to our questions and concerns. I do think you've gone above and beyond the title of this thread. Not sayin it's information overload, because I get a better understandin of the problem with your more detailed explanations.

Thank you for enlightenin us about the design issues in your earlier post (#43). At least now I have a different mind set for ranged combat. Thanks for your explanation of the "physics" aspect and the skill to hit before an actuall to hit roll. A lot more skill required there than just the old "You must face your target...". I feel sorry for the players who don't use mouse look mode tho. Can't immagine tryin to play a first person shooter without mouselook mode. I will surely take your advice and go to manual untargeted mode vs autoattack tab target. Not sure what the term "twitch" means, but am I to assume that requiring a degree of first person shooter skill is involved? I think most of us just got used to having the tab target autoattack system do all the work for us. Then BAM, changes to the combat system, WHAWHAWHAT?! lol. You know how well we take to changes to our confort zones, lol.

It does pose another question from me tho. In melee combat, suppose I'm swingin a great sword at a mob of untargetted monsters around me. Regardin the die rolls *crosses fingers* C'MON TWENTY! , does the die roll apply to the monster that is mainly infront of me, or all within glancin blow area? I noticed that every once in a while, I will vorpal a mobbie, from a glancin blow, who's not the monster most directly in front of me. Have'nt taken cleave yet either. How does the combat design take into effect the die roll as pertainin to untargetted mobs?

Thanks again Sir for all your time and efforts.

We don't show die feedback for the glancing blows (an independent die is rolled for each hit or miss). The die roll you are seeing is for the primary attack. We decided that it was too spammy to see all those die rolls back to back with the die UI. This being said, untargeted attacks pick an arbitrary target in the affected weapon swing detection box. If you have a target selected, it puts that target first in the list for the primary hit. If you aren't remotely facing that target and they don't show up in the weapon swing physics detection box, it picks an arbitrary target in the affected area as a primary target.

I'm glad I can help out,

Codog

[Borror0]

Talking about Glancing blows... what do the feats do exactly... not clear at all..

I mean:

• Two-handed fighting
• Improved two-handed fighting
• Greater two-handed fighting

Better to ask the Dev while we know he might answer, huh?

EDIT: we have this, this and this on the wiki... any truth?

[Wulf_Ratbane]

If you have a target selected, it puts that target first in the list for the primary hit. If you aren't remotely facing that target and they don't show up in the weapon swing physics detection box, it picks an arbitrary target in the affected area as a primary target.

I guess I've just sort of intuitively known this through gameplay. It's pretty evident when you actually do it.

When I am in a big pack of mobs-- say, hobgoblins-- and there's one caster in the group, I wade in and start swinging, turning in place or tumbling to try to keep the caster front and center, all while hitting TAB until he's actually the primary target.

No swing is "wasted," I'm always pounding on somebody, and more often than not, it's the caster. I might have one or two "stray" swings in there.

Now, when you're talking about a mixed mob of oozes, skeletons, and zombies, things get more complicated. In those instances you have a lot of mixed DR and some mobs you really don't want to hit with slashing weapons...

[Codog]

First of all thanks for your involvement in this thread, and for acknowledging this particular issue, which had been brought tons of times on the forums in the past with no dev answer.

I'm not sure what the problem with the animations is exactly, but it seems to me there are many parameters you can tune in order to make the animation lengths more or less uniform, like:
- the animation itself
- the speed at which it is played
- the time interval between two consecutive swinging animations

Is there really no way to tweak them so as to minimize the differences? It's really sad that some weapons like greatswords and falchions are not popular for the single reason that their swing rate is lower.
Please note I'm not saying the swing rate should be EXACTLY equal. But it should be similar enough so that it does not impact your DPS to the point it makes some weapons obsolete.

I wrote this last night, but I lost power in a thunderstorm. Luckily I write responses in notepad and save often.

Bullet #1 - Ah.. yes. These bullet points above were very much my response to being handed these animations as well. Ideally speaking, if I could redo all the animations in the game for combat, I would certainly change a lot of things. I don't know if anybody has noticed, but our avatars skeletons are unique in height, width, and other dimensions. Because the D&D intellectual property is very specific about anatomical details of its races, we couldn't do cheaty art budget saving features like avatar scaling. So every weapon swing in the game is animated for 9 different avatars. Given 11 different melee attack swings (2 mobile attack, 5 standing attacks, 1 sneak attack, cleave, great cleave, and whirlwind) times 9 different avatars times 7 weapon styles, you can see that this adds up quite quickly. It took many man months of animation time to get our animations complete. I believe the animators took and animated the whole sequences of attacks and disected them into the individual attack animations with a lot of direction from design about attack hook times and combat cadence. Net out from this that it would take a lot of time to single out a swing and reanimate and have the flow of the animation not be broken. ( We don't have the original animator any longer who did the combat animations so the change might be too noticable. )

Bullet #2 - Scaling of individual animations to make their speeds more uniform. Believe it or not, I tried this. Let's just say that changing the pace of individual sequences in the combat chain makes it jerky, inconsistent, and look like total ****. I wish I had a fraps video of this experiment for you.

Bullet #3 - Our combat model was built upon the idea of responsive attack swings with the click of the mouse and freedom of movement. When we add artificial delays (which we've tried a number of times and in different ways) into the combat chain, the result is very dissatisfying from a user gameplay standpoint. You hammer on the attack button waiting and waiting and hoping that your attack is queued. Not only does this feel bad... it doesn't work. You can roll, you can jump, and you can move to interupt your combat chain and avoid these delays. There was a fantastic thread about this prior to module 3 for those who have been around for a while. If it is done by a hidden or visible cooldown timer, the resulting gameplay feels really bad. Your avatar is standing there doing nothing on the screen... you are hammering the mouse... then boom... he's responsive again for a few seconds. If we were an autoattack only game, this wouldn't be an issue so much. Since positional and temporal tactics matter in this game, it was far better to keep the attack times responsive with the click of the mouse.

The unfortunate truth to this is that when decisions were being made about the aesthetic look and feel of combat, not enough regard for the intellectual property and how advancement works in D&D was taken into account. The lead designer and creative director at the time wanted the combat chain to build from "chopping wood" swings into very heroic and complicated moves (which subsequently take more time to complete). This left systems design with a troublesome set of animations to wrap D&D combat and advancement around.

This being said, we often supplement these weapon styles with glancing blows and feats that add more attack hooks for offhand and glancing blows.

With two handed weapons,

Attack 1 with two handed weapons has a primary attack hook plus glancing attack hooks.
Greater Twohanded Weapon Fighting adds a glancing blow to attack 4
Superior Twohanded Weapon Fighting adds a glancing blow to attack 5 (when we get there)

With two weapon fighting,

Attack 1 has RH attack hook.
Attack 2 has RH, LH attack hook.
Attack 3 has RH attack hook
Attack 4 has RH attack hook
Attack 5 has RH, LH attack hook.

Improved TWF adds a LH attack hook to attack 3.
Greater TWF adds a LH attack hook to moving attack 1 (weird that it doesn't for standing... I'll be checking with design) and LH to attack 4.
Superior TWF adds another RH attack to attack 5.

Rangers get a lot of the TWF feats for free as they level up. If you are a fighter that likes splash damage, two handed weapons might be for you. If you are a targeted precise fighter, 1h fighting is great for you. If you like lighting up a target with different weapon effects and/or using wounding weapons dual wielding has advantages for you. Aside from TWF at early levels, with optimal feat choices, your DPS curves aren't terribly out of balance. A fellow in QA and I spent a long time running statistical analysis at every level with every different set of feat choices in the game with every weapon style using level appropriate weapons and monsters.

One of the great open problems we're talking about right now is how flexible our advancement system is in the game. There are a number of really good choices you can make and a disportionately large number of bad choices you can make. As a beginner to the game, people regrettably make some bad choices that really make their gameplay experience not as much fun as it could be. That being said, some of the "bad" choices if you know what you are doing with a build can be great choices under different multiclass builds.

I hope this helps.

Codog

PS. 1.5 Handed Fighting... LOL... if I had another margarita last night at dinner, I would be explaining to the QA manager this morning why I changed all the feats names and descriptions. "Improved 1.5 Weapon Fighting" *chuckles* You cracked me up. I wish that guy at DDO1Liners was still making his comic. He would have a field day with that.

[mocat]

Wow.

Awesome communication Codog!

From here on out, you are hereby promoted to Cokobold.

[Codog]

Talking about Glancing blows... what do the feats do exactly... not clear at all..

I mean:

• Two-handed fighting
• Improved two-handed fighting
• Greater two-handed fighting

Better to ask the Dev while we know he might answer, huh?

EDIT: we have this, this and this on the wiki... any truth?

You have officially surpassed my four year old in questions per day! I'm not sure whose are harder to answer. This morning in the kitchen while getting the girls ready for school this conversation was overheard in my household.

Audrey: "Can you get mommy pregnant so that she has a puppy?" I snarfed my latte up my nose when she asked that one. My wife won't appreciate my answer. ( She reads my posts! )

Codog: "Technically, it is probably possible with the marvels of modern science."

And for once I can say, I already answered your question in another reply on this thread. Seriously though, a mentor of mine used to say that the only stupid question is the one left unasked. I especially appreciate your efforts to clarify things that are ambiguous in our game. I'll be looking through the feat descriptions sometime to see if we can clarify them some more.

Best regards,

Codog

[Cinwulf]

LOL Funny Kids say the darndest things! Don't you just luv them?

[Garth_of_Sarlona]

Codog,

Thanks for the great communication

Can you confirm whether the combo chains lists on the DDO wiki here are correct?

People keep telling me that I wasted a feat on Greater Two Weapon fighting (maybe I made one of the 'large number of bad choices you can make'?) as they say I don't actually get seven attacks - but I count them and I do appear to get seven and the wiki confirms this...

Will I go up to 9 automatically once the level cap is raised and I get to level 15?

Garth