Board Thread:Feedback/@comment-27179278-20151108191022

              It’s finally here. Beta 25 brings so many new features that even Mevans himself can’t remember everything that it contains. Among the new features, and perhaps the most eagerly anticipated, is the new combat system. Higher on-hit cooldowns, variable weapon range and attack speed, plus new models all add the potential for more diversity and depth in PvP and RP.

Despite the obvious benefits of this new system, some changes seem necessary to affectively allow this new system to fix the lack of diversity in gear used for PvP and RP. On testing several of these weapons, it became clear that some numbers must be changed if players are going to be able to compete with all of these weapons.

Using the Blue Dwarven gear and some additional items, these numbers were pulled together. The ‘x’ in the ‘attack speed’ column is the base attack speed, which is currently approximately one attack per second. *These values were provided by Kawolski_VII. Many thanks!

Looking at these numbers, the High Elven bow takes the place as the number one melee weapon. That’s right, with the current numbers a HE bow can out-damage any melee weapon at any range. Kawolski_VII calculated the DPS of a mithril dagger to be 14 DPS, which is the current maximum DPS for any melee weapon. Daggers deal out more than twice as much damage in a unit of time than hammers, battle-scythes, or lances.

Why is this a problem? Anyone who wants to win combat will take bows over any other weapon. Daggers might be used as a backup, but no other melee weapon is even worth considering. Increased range, while it might have been useful, cannot successfully keep a dagger wielding enemy at bay, as the attack speed is too slow. The same is true for hammers with their knockback. In addition, this means that evil aligned players will either have to use good aligned gear, or concede defeat to any good aligned player who uses galvorn armor and bows.

Thankfully, despite these issues, the new combat system itself seems to be sound. All that is necessary is for some of the numbers to be changed to allow for a more balanced combat experience. Here are some numbers that I came up with: 

While the DPS of every weapon is not on equal terms, every weapon that has lower DPS has some special factor that could level the playing field when used correctly. Two things to note: firstly, ‘block’ has been removed from daggers, and replaced with extra critical damage. I believe that this will be more realistic, as a dagger should offer less protection than a sword, and this means that using a dagger in an ambush will have more affect than just in a straight fight.

Secondly, these numbers are balanced around ‘x’, or the base attack speed, being approximately one attack per second. Where this number to be increased, which I personally believe that it should, then certain specials would gain more ‘relative worth’. If you can attack faster, increased range will allow you to more effectively keep an enemy out of reach. The same goes for knockback. Blocking would become less worthwhile, as blocking single, powerful attacks has less negative consequences (such as not being able to strike and halving your movement speed) than when your enemy has multiple smaller attacks.

Lastly, you may have noticed that I didn’t try and balance bows. This was deliberate. Bows have been incredibly strong for quite some time now, and I believe that they need a serious rework. A dedicated archer should need to work to avoid melee combat. This means that a melee warrior who manages to close the gap between himself and the archer should gain a significant advantage, not the other way around. Currently, and in the past, this has not been the case. An archer lost no advantages when an enemy closed on them, but the melee warrior suddenly found that his ability to duck and weave to avoid projectiles has been lost. While I won’t go so far as to say that bows were always OP, they certainly were very strong.

All that I can contribute on this front are some suggestions to open discussion on the matter. Firstly, nocking an arrow while engaged in close quarters combat is well-nigh impossible. Bows tend to be rather large and delicate, attempting to string an arrow through your bow without allowing your enemy to snap either the arrow or the bow is difficult. A possible fix would be to decrease bow damage across the board, and make it so that archers had certain other advantages at their disposal. Faster draw rate on a low damage bow would mean that you had more time to move and draw out the ranged phase of combat. A bow that granted a minor movement speed or stealth buff when fired would encourage players to keep their distance and ambush enemies. There are numerous possibilities to solving this problem, and if there is one thing that Mevans has proven in the past, it is that he is adept at finding creative solutions to current problems.

'' Áva márië! ''

 Snoopy  