Re: Weapon skills improvement

[Sunburned]

A simple question.

Do the way weapon skills improve need to be altered, in your opinion?  

Let's not get the thread locked by talking about code mechanics.  At all.

PS - Nyr, I don't think you need to have explicit knowledge of the code to have an opinion on this.

[Nyr]

PS - Nyr, I don't think you need to have explicit knowledge of the code to have an opinion on this.

uh...thank you for letting me know?

[Sunburned]

 

[RogueGunslinger]

Changed how? Made easier? Harder? Different method of training?

I'd never thought of them as being different or special compared to any other skills.

[Kastion]

seems ok to me. I like them to be hard to get so that if you ever do get strong you get to enjoy knowing that you are one of the few total badasses. =P

[Spoon]

They are super grindy. I see good and bad in this.

[Majikal]

Your warrior/ranger can go from fighting Gurth to Raptor to Gith all in the small range of an apprentice weapon skill, of course you have other skills raising too. I like the way it is because once you reach advanced, master, branched weapon skills etc then you are one of the few and it is readily apparent that you're a badarse.

I'm also of the mind that if you made weapon skills change like other skills then you'd have a lot of warriors that get bored at having nothing to improve.

[Majikal]

They are super grindy. I see good and bad in this.

If the grind of this game went away.. I would lose a lot of love for it. It's nicely balanced.

[titansfan]

Stay the same. The grind is what makes training them fun to do.

[Is Friday]

As a player who has fairly limited time to play now compared to what I used to play, I can see both sides of the preference. Personally: I don't have 480 hours (20d playing time) to log into a character in order to consider my character "not kill-able by lame stuff". Understanding, of course, that you're essentially only protecting yourself in that light from the non-poisoning and non-super NPCs. Is that an acceptable amount of time investment to play a combat PC? Maybe to some people who don't have a whole lot of commitments or like to spend obscene amounts of time at the computer.

I get it. I used to play a lot. Now when I do get the chance to play it's usually in a binge so that I can get some decent survivability before I get back to low playtimes. But that's certainly not why I enjoy the game.

I do enjoy some aspects of training, but I'll be honest... the only reason I train skills is so that I can play a character that accurately reflects my vision of them. I'm not training my guys to be absolute bad asses. I'm just training them to be decent hunters, fighters, survivors. You can't do that with piss-poor self-defense skills.

Now, you can certainly play a lot of other roles... but we're talking about weapon skills--the notoriously slowest-to-improve skills.

I don't personally think encouraging people to be mindless drones with their warrior/rangers/assassins is a good thing. You're saying, as admins, that in order to be decent at <thing> you need to grind the fuck out of it. That's not encouraging roleplay-oriented tasks, that's giving people hurdles to jump that have nothing to do with their roles. Sure, there's players like me that can separate the two and understand that "it is what it is" and that these hurdles are in place so that people don't run around abusing them. But for the most part you've got dumbasses running around thinking that it's okay to act like dumbasses because that's what got their character powerful.

/my 2 sids.

[Delirium]

^ that.

[jstorrie]

I don't mind that high-level combat skills require so much grinding given that, as mentioned above, low-level combat skills are sufficient for most non-pvp play in Armageddon. High-level combat skills, which can cause a real ruckus in the hands of an aggressive PC-killer, are almost as fearsome (and rare) as sorcery, and that's sweet. If anything, I wish that all skills had such a range of skill level to them.

[Sunburned]

I don't mind that high-level combat skills require so much grinding given that, as mentioned above, low-level combat skills are sufficient for most non-pvp play in Armageddon. High-level combat skills, which can cause a real ruckus in the hands of an aggressive PC-killer, are almost as fearsome (and rare) as sorcery, and that's sweet. If anything, I wish that all skills had such a range of skill level to them.

It would be nice if this were true.

[Nyr]

You're saying, as admins, that in order to be decent at <thing> you need to grind the fuck out of it.

You can say that about everything in this game.  In order to be good at <thing>, you can probably grind like crazy.  However, we usually notice, we usually note it, and we usually make notorious abusers of things aware of it so that they know to improve.  There's a line that staff tends to walk with regard to abuse--some things we police, some things we prevent.  If we prevent something from being done, it doesn't mean we think all players suck at it, abuse it, or exploit it.  If we police something, it doesn't mean that we give carte blanche to such activities for those that haven't been caught yet.

You can also use CGP to pay for some skill boosts to weapons skills if they are important to your character concept...even if you have no karma, you can special app it.

[Yam]

I kinda think one problem, especially with weapons skills, is that there's a huge rift of improvement between military clans and independent characters who have some OOC knowledge.

You should improve more in clans with a lot of combat training than you do spending your days fighting hawks with daggers. Or at least at the same speed. With the way certain things work, it's a lot more difficult for warriors to improve weapon skills in sparring than hunting even relatively non-dangerous creatures.

I think players can help with that problem by using the teach command more, but I also think the way weapon skills increase should be looked at and possibly modified to make more sense.

[Is Friday]

You can also use CGP to pay for some skill boosts to weapons skills if they are important to your character concept...even if you have no karma, you can special app it.

I'm a big fan of this option for my above-mentioned reservations about grinding. Thanks staff!

[Hot_Dancer]

I enjoy warrior PC play most at roughly the 4-12ish day mark.

At this range I can typically provide adequate defense versus common threats in the Known for my less  melee talented
companions. Combat is still dangerous, still get wounded, still have a solid of variety of RP to encounter. Other Mundanes
will still pick toe to toe fights with me. Lots of excellent opportunities for RP.

I don't mess with the big stuff in game unless a character/story event requires it. Even if I'm more or less running around with
an AI/AI steel wielding 100d warrior freak. I've had a number of strong combat PC's. Only 1 has seen battle with a bahamet
and it was in a group of about 12 Blackmoon with multiple muls and an HG or two. I've never faced off with a Mek. Once the
fabled defense/parry nerf hit the game I pretty much left all the remotely terrible/gigantus stuff alone.

Once I get past 15 and 20 days of play, my combat PC's tend to have to do things that are borderline OOC to me to find a
physical challenge (not really my play style). By reputation, my character will likely not be challenged to a straight fight but be
instakilled by magick/poison/range because of his perceived/likely real threat level. Because of his skill level, if it happens to be
too far ahead  of the party of PC's I'm around the staff will have a more difficult time challenging/threatening/scaring us/getting
our brainz because of wide discrepency in character skill and still creating an event that the whole group can participate in.

I think I'm trying to say that combat-skill advancement is fine and if you're playing a combat pc (warrior classed) you can pretty
much jump into the game and the fights pretty quickly.

[brytta.leofa]

With CGP in place, I don't think I have any complaints at all.  (Yes, thanks, you guys, so much.)

But if you were gonna do something to reduce the grindiness of the game, I would consider this approach:
(1) Increase, slightly, the speed at which the slowest-training skills improve.
(2) Limit the amount of improvement per RL day to about what you can get in three hours of play.

[Synthesis]

The way base offense works with the two-handed skill and the advanced weapon skills needs to be looked at, too.

Basically, by the time you branch an advanced weapon skill, your hit success rate is so high at the lower end of the skill spectrum that it's impossible to actually improve the skill without resorting to somewhat questionable tactics.  To the unwary, this might seem like an academic point (i.e. if you're hitting everything already, why do you need to improve the skill?), but skill level affects other, important things...and it's the deficiencies in those other important things that make the advanced weapon skills too much of a bother to train at all.

It is annoying that weapon skills go up so slowly, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the areas where the wisdom stat matters.

[TheBadSeed]

I'm a huge fan of the CGP being able to be allotted to weapons skills. It does take some of the grinding aspect away, especially if you have a background that says you've been hunting/fighting for years. Not everyone wants to join the game as a fifteen year old kid with no clue what he/she is doing skill wise.

On a side note, one of the most bothersome changes I've seen since I came back to Arm is the fact that you can see your level of mastery in your skills. Yes I know it can be toggled off, but it does seem to shift the focus to the grindy skill raising, rather than the roleplay. Not sure if I'd want it changed back, but it has definitely changed the feel of the game for me, at least.

[Qzzrbl]

I kinda think one problem, especially with weapons skills, is that there's a huge rift of improvement between military clans and independent characters who have some OOC knowledge.

You should improve more in clans with a lot of combat training than you do spending your days fighting hawks with daggers. Or at least at the same speed. With the way certain things work, it's a lot more difficult for warriors to improve weapon skills in sparring than hunting even relatively non-dangerous creatures.

I think players can help with that problem by using the teach command more, but I also think the way weapon skills increase should be looked at and possibly modified to make more sense.

This I agree with.

Alot.

Wish I could say more.

[Spoon]

It is annoying that weapon skills go up so slowly, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the areas where the wisdom stat matters.

I'm thinking it doesn't help much if you fail only once in a blue moon?

Overall, I think change is tricky. It sits well with the game at the moment. I don't see why parried attacks count as 'successful' attacks, but then I think it would mess everything up if lots of people started learning from parrying.

Maybe we just need critical fails to happen a tiny be more often. A tiny, tiny bit more often, just so that people who don't miss shit might be able to increase their skill over a long period of time without chasing kankflies in the dark (sitting down).

[Dan]

Concerning the advanced weapons skills, well, I have not seen them used at all since they were implemented. I don't know of any PCs that have branched a basic weapons skill, quite possibly I just never ran into these people. It is kind of disconcerting that whatever initial play style you pick you will more than likely be stuck with, due to becoming too badass to ever gain any actual skill in any of the other abilities since you will not fail against 99% of the people/stuff that is out there.

Maybe I have just not seen it, or it is as rare as it as supposed to be.

[Romy]

Maybe weapon skills are not weighed heavily enough when fighting?

What I mean is, could it be made so that if you aren't good at a weapon skill you miss more easily, even IF your offense is pretty high?

[jstorrie]

Concerning the advanced weapons skills, well, I have not seen them used at all since they were implemented.

I have seen as many PCs with these skills as I have seen PC sorcerors, basically. I think it's kind of rad that there's that level of potential power for a PC to get in-game through sheer FIGHT.