Fix Combat Gains

[mansa]

My other suggestion is this:

For weapon skills only: change how the game displays your 'proficiency level'.

Do not use the standard "novice, apprentice, journeyman, advanced, master", which can be broken down into 5 "even" brackets of 20 out of 100.

Switch to something like this:
0 - 20 - novice
20 - 35 - apprentice
35 - 45 - journeyman
45 - 50 - advanced
50+ - master

Because the main disagreement appears to be the /display value/ of the skill proficiency, rather than what it actually means against mobs.

[Riev]

Note:

I started with a subguild whose weapon skill started at Jman. Within a couple days played, I was at advanced.

Because you start with dog-balls levels of offense, you do miss a little more often. So you CAN do it, its just that the higher your offense gets, the more you need someone with stacked defense/high levels of agility substat to get your misses.

Master is an illusion anyway, now that it doesn't let you then use knife weapons.

[Roon]

Note:

I started with a subguild whose weapon skill started at Jman. Within a couple days played, I was at advanced.

Because you start with dog-balls levels of offense, you do miss a little more often. So you CAN do it, its just that the higher your offense gets, the more you need someone with stacked defense/high levels of agility substat to get your misses.

Master is an illusion anyway, now that it doesn't let you then use knife weapons.

Yeah, a boost to starting weapon skills is a huge advantage. Doubly so if your class also starts with lower than average offense. Offense is your enemy when it comes to skilling up, so any head start you can get in weapon skills raises your ultimate potential, and so does starting with low offense.

Basically, your offense skill is like an inverse fuel gauge--the higher it gets, the closer you are to the point where you can't get any further. If you pick a subclass that lets you start at journeyman in a weapon skill, it doesn't add whatever amount of offense you'd normally have gained in the process of sparring your way to journeyman. This means your plateau point is higher. Everyone plateaus eventually, but if your subclass gets a boost to weapon skills, you'll plateau at a higher point. You can always push your offense by fighting unarmed or with another weapon type, once you're at the point where you can no longer get misses with your main one.

[Kavrick]

Only in theory. In reality, there usually won't be anyone in any given "sparring clan" who has the skills to get you there. It's rare that there's even anyone who can get you to advanced.

It's really not in theory, even if you're a GMH hunter who has access to the northern compound which has NPC sparring partners you magickally get 10x faster skill gains.

[Roon]

They added the NPC sparring shit to GMHs? Lord have mercy. All the same, the limited availability and the length of time it would take to become a badass that way still wasn't enough to create a paradigm where clanned fighters were the toughest in the land. In most cases, you find the true badasses in the outcast clans where players are free to do whatever they want, while the ones who are supposed to be professional soldiers turn out to be shit.

[Riev]

Southern AoD
Northern Byn
Northern GMH

These are the clans THAT I KNOW OF that allow NPC sparring. And I have seen some people play the "oops I bashed and fell" game against the NPCs as a means of working up defense to the umpteenth degree. Which I'm all for, I prefer defense .... but not all clans have access to this. Southern Byn certainly doesn't. Nor do any southern GMH employees.

[TragicMagick]

I agree with Roon. My strongest PC was skimming out to hunt siltstriders daily. Why? Because you can get a lot of misses from them. Why would I want to bee that strong? If you want to explore you have to be pretty beefy to not be instantly rolled by long lost set pieces and the journey to get to them.

The combat system has improved semi recently, but it's not there yet. I'd like to feasibly be able to hit the max of what my character is capable of in the season model without silly meta strategies to do so. That means the system requires review.

Also fuck the ridiculous grind and time investment. This probably did more to kill the player population than any of the various scandals this game's had.

Also, mansa I don't like that idea. Content is gated by combat prowess. If you think it's only the label you are misunderstanding.

[TragicMagick]

Why not just make the curve straight numbers. To advance at novice is 5 consecutive misses, apprentice 10, jman 15, etc. This does retain a measure of difficulty, as it's more difficult to miss something with a higher level of skill. Wisdom's effect is still preserved as a higher wisdom means the cooldown period for a skillgain is smaller (like all other skills). Get rid of the chance thing and I think, while the problem still remains, it would make it a lot less tedious.

This way, if you're at advanced and you manage to get the odd miss, you KNOW that it is contributing to your learning. I imagine if a grandmaster misses someone that failure on their part doesn't go unnoticed. Doesn't fix the problems with high offence, but I think this could be a piece of the puzzle.

[Dresan]

I've come to believe that the change to mostly locked down combat progression to clan training rooms was a bad idea.

While reducing the incentive to go kill a tregil after 10 days of play makes sense, ultimately it just made the game more pointless to lot of people who enjoy the combat code aspects of the game. The change took away more than it really added.

[Cowboy]

I know that to be true.

[NinjaFruitSalad]

I think all the game really needs is something like a combat stance slider based off of four values: accuracy, power, defense, technique.

Accuracy - obviously affects how frequently your attacks land.
Power - affects how hard your attacks and special abilities hit.
Defense - how much effort you put into dodging, blocking, and parrying.
Technique - how successful your special attacks will be, and how well you resist special attacks.

So then we have this slider, which is more like a pool of 200 points, where each of the above values start off at 50 by default, which is an average, balanced effort. You can just assign the points how you want, with the following rules:

• The higher your skill, the more these values can deviate from 50.
• Minimum value for any category is 5.
• Maximum value is 100.

And presto. Now if you are hitting too often and not learning anything, you can put more effort into your damage or defenses or special abilities so that your accuracy decreases, and you can learn from those mistakes.

Same thing applies to defense. If you're just dodging every attack, you can lower effort put into your defenses for more offense, and while your enemy is also likely to die faster, you at least have a greater chance of learning from the mistakes. And the same for techniques and using special skills.