My issues with Kick, and also NPCs

[Elven Mul]

After having had the bejeesus kicked out of my warrior by just about every race out there, I've had it with the kick skill. It was one thing to have a gith kick me for 15 damage or more. Gith are unrealistically strong, uber-creatures designed solely to make life hard for players and thin out the player base. OK, check.

But elves, and even _halflings_??? Come on. Two kicks delivered by ultra-skilled NPCs, even if they are weakling races, can incite most people to run away even if they are actually winning the fight weapon to weapon. And that's through armour, I hesitate to think of the damage without protection.

In fact, kicks frequently seem to do more damage than weapons in a given fight, which is a bit ridiculous. I suggest kick be toned down a little bit, especially for NPCs that seem to kick especially fast and never ever miss a kick. Think of the consequences if you face two or three such NPCs, you die in a matter of 30 seconds from kicks alone even if the NPCs have trouble getting past your defences. Two raptors can kill an experienced warrior with their kicks even if they'll never touch him otherwise.

My other problem with kick is that it seems to leave blood stains on clothing and armor very easily. I guess because of the high damage it delivers, but it doesn't seem right.

[Glowworm]

While I agree that many NPC's are unrealistically strong, many would argue that they are this way to discourage players from slaughtering hundreds of NPC's and also to create an overall harsher atmosphere.  

As for kick being overpowered...I'm not quite sure.  The force that someone can produce with their leg (unless they are grossly mutated, which may be the case for some in zalanthas) far exeeds the force that someone can produce with their arms simply because the muscles are larger and stronger.  I'd argue that being hit with a well placed kick is akin to being hit really hard with a club in the same location.

As far as kicks doing more damage than weapons - I'm not certain of the coding, but I believe weapon damage is not only modified by where you strike and what weapon you are using, but also by your offensive skill, weapon skill and how well your opponents armor protects against your weapon type.  Kicks, as far as I have seen, almost always land on the head and neck in the game, which are the two highest damage locations.
Kicks are also blunt-based attacks, which I assume does significant amounts of damage regardless of armor type.  The same cannot be said for all weapons - they randomly land on body locations, and they are not all blunt-type weapons.

While I do not agree that kick is overpowered, I think that kicks should randomly land on body locations as weapon-based attacks do and produce damage accordingly.  I'd also like to see sucsessful kicks and bashes resulting in stun damage, if it isn't already coded so.

[Eleven Mul]

The message you see when kicks are flying about always says to the head or to the waist (double over, whatever that is) but I am not sure that means they are actually necessarily landing in those spots. It may just be the messages. I have noticed armor other than body and head locations becoming bloodied after suffering some kicks, that is why I say that.

Sorry, but there is no way that your average raptor, halfling, gith, elf, etc NPC has ANY excuse to kick that hard. I don't care how strong their leg muscles are, it's simply silly. A mul or a half-giant or maybe even a dwarf I could understand as being fearsomely strong and kicking as hard as NPCs kick now, but not much else. Here I am hacking at an opponent with a big, sharp bastard sword, and their kicks on me do more damage than I manage to land on them with my big sword and decades of training? It's silly. Especially because in many cases (such as raptors) these NPCs are not skilled enough to land a single blow on my character otherwise, yet their kicks can put me out of commission in a matter of moments.

At that point kicks ought to be calculated in a similar manner to combat, anything to whittle down the ridiculous amounts of damage at present. So if you kick an opponent who is skilled in kick, and who has a high defence skill, that should have an impact on the damage that is actually delivered (plus armor and location of course). Something like that. Right now kick is ridiculous. Not necessarily on the PC side, but the NPC side (these guys almost never miss a kick and they just keep them coming).

Yes, kick already does quite a bit of stun damage. I THINK that at the moment kick does more stun damage than a humanoid bash, or about the same.

[creeper386]

Try being a person WITHOUT the kick skill, it seems to mean you have less defence against it, and it can hit harder, I've seen often also that someones weapons can't get anywhere past someones defence, there is a good chance that a skilled "kicker" with a well placed kick well end up with a weapon to their leg the same as their weapons get.

I don't agree that the damage should be reduced, because legs period, of any creature tend to be strong, no matter how small, out of shape, or whatever else they are, legs are almost always used, and that is shown through stronger muscles.

But I can see it being looked into about how it's determined kicks land, it seems if you don't know how to kick good you get hit almost all the time, even though I'm sure most the equation is well agility and defensive skill(Or at least should be, something like kick or bash I don't much like skill in it being determined to avoid it, but then it could not be and everything I've seen came acrossed in a twisted matter)

Creeper who says what must be said even if people don't like it, moo!

[Summer]

Kicks aimed at people's heads are also pretty slow, and they put people off balance unless they are pretty damned skilled at fighting hand to hand. Most hand to hand really comes down to wrestling, because if you are big and strong, the best way to hurt someone is get them in a hold and then apply pressure. A kick simply puts you off balance and at risk of someone rushing into you, grabbing you and throwing you to the ground. I think there should be a rather large defensive penalty while kicking.

[the halfling]

Gith are unrealistically strong, uber-creatures designed solely to make life hard for players

It's a beautiful thing.
But I do agree, the gith in Arm are by far way to strong compared to the gith on earth.  It's completly unrealistic.

I still think there should be hidden super NPCs hunting people!
Make them kick twice a round.  Give them four legs!
That's a joke with the two kicks a round, incase you didn't know.
Though I still want hidden NPCs sitting there waiting to eat you.

[John]

Okay, here's an idea. From what I've read here, the main reason kicks are so powerful and can kill people in 3 kicks, is because they always aim for the head. Why not have kicks aim for the legs more often then they aim for the head? I'm not saying make head blows impossible, just not as common. And if someone is lying on the ground, then the chance of a head kick would increase.

All just my opinion, I know nothing about combat, so just ignore this post.

[Ezikel]

Hmm, from what i gather from this is that a kick will do more damage than a large blunt object depening on your skills, and your opponents skill.  Well, if someone tries to kick me in the head, but i clock them with a 2X4 no matter how skilled i am, who do you tink will be worse off?  

Leg muscles have got nothing to do with it, unless you are Kung foo master then i dont see how they would land a kick to your head anyway.  Sorry but Gith/halflings etc dont come accross as martial artists to me.

[Elven Mul]

Creeper, do you ever read over what you post? Because I can't seem to grasp your output. I won't go into what you are talking about with kicking and "weapon to their legs the same as their weapons get" because frankly I can make no sense out of that and most of your post.

Your suggestion that kick ought to have high damage because the legs of any creature tend to be strong has some merit. My point was that the kicks of a "weakling" race such as halflings or elves, races with overall quite lower strength and mass than the others, should be more limited in damage. Like I said in my earlier post, I can kind of conceive that a half-giant's kick ought to hurt like hell. But a halfling's???

Whatever your point, kick as it stands is hardly a sensible thing. Take two "kicking" NPCs, match them against a strong experienced warrior, and before the warrior can kill them off he will have sufferred significant damage just from bloody kicks (one on one this is tolerable, but two or more opponents will kill you by kicking in a matter of moments, as I also said before). That ought not to happen. I have noticed no difference in the success rate in kicks when the target is a skilled kicker or not, so your own skill in kicking may have little effect on defending you from others' kicks (my 17 day warrior gets kicked ALL the time, I rarely see an NPC attempt fail). Frankly I am not sure of the mechanics involved in kick, but I suspect they are not as refined as the rest of the combat system.

Right now, if your kick skill is substantially better than the person kicking you, it is possible to pull funky moves such as grabbing the kicking leg and knocking the person down before the kick can connect on your delicate head (works like a successful bash). Guess who is really good at this? Gith :evil: . That is the only form of "kick defence" I am aware of, and you won't be seeing it until your character is 15-25 days old or so (because all NPCs that kick seem to be great at it, so you have to get realllly good first).

I can understand if an ultimate master of the kicking arts could deliver deadly kicks in spite of being a halfling or elf or human or whatnot. But that every single NPC be such a master kicker is patently ridiculous. Kick needs to be modified in some way. And some NPCs need to slow down on their kicks and the success rate of their kicks, and especially the damage delivered.

[Summer]

If kicks are doing that much damage, it's pretty silly. A circle kick to the head? That would take ages and would easily be seen coming, what is probably more effective are kicks to the knees that can be done quickly while stepping forward, these could conceivably cripple someone in that leg.

Also I'm not sure, but are there any weak gith or halflings?

[Elven Mul]

weak, in the sense of physically weak (strength). Gith are supposed to be roughly between elves and humans in terms of strength, but of course they are powerhouses in the actual game. Halflings are physically very weak.

Of course, both races are currently NPC only, and both, particularly the gith, are very skilled. In the case of halflings you may actually be able to tell during combat that the little guys aren't physically strong. In the case of gith you'd think you're fighting an enraged mul gladiator!

[Elven Mul]

it's good that you keep yourself amused by posting puerile humour making fun of other people. You come across as smugly superior, which I don't doubt is your intent, but seeing the same crap from you worded differently over these boards is, you know, pretty boring.

[Summer]

Isn't that somewhat unrealistic? None of us start out as combat monsters, why do all Gith and Halflings? I guess I can see it from an OOC perspective.... but even then it seems a bit dodgy.

[Synthesis]

I'm surprised nobody has yet pointed out the obvious difference between inflicting damage with a weapon and a kick.

With a weapon, you're slamming an inanimate object against your target.  If you miss, oh well.  If you connect, yay.  And if your opponent viciously whacks it out of the way with his equally inanimate object, no problem.

With a kick, you're trying to slam a living piece of your precious body against your target.  If you miss, it probably means you're going to get hurt. Unlike a typical martial-arts sparring match where your kick simply fails to connect and you keep on kicking, in a real fight, if your kick fails to connect, you're probably going to pull or strain something, and your opponent is probably going to do something nasty to you.

So from a "realism" standpoint, I would say kicking is just plain stupid, unless you're sweeping at your opponent's legs, where his ability to do something nasty to your offending extremity is slightly more limited.  (And kicking at your opponent's legs would have more of a bash-like effect, anyway...low damage and a knockdown.)

From a gameplay perspective, kick is annoying for us non-warriors, but it's not too horribly unbalancing. If the gith are kicking you, just kick them back, or bash them so they can't kick in the first place, or disarm them so you can actually hit them with your weapons. There are a lot of nastier things on Zalanthas than a gith kick, believe me.

[Twilight]

Kick used to be an almost totally worthless skill for most races.  As a human with a fairly badass kick, you could do 1 or 2 damage a kick.  That was it.  On the other hand, gith, if they could succeed in kicking you, also did 1-2 damage.

I much prefer the current version, where kick is actually useful.  Under the old system, I had a character that killed a gith by kicking it to death once.  That was fifty or sixty kicks that landed on it.  Trust me, that takes forever.  Forever.  Much better now.

[Bestatte]

Caveat: I know diddly about the game's combat system. I DO, however, have a fairly good understanding of good old logic and common sense.

Halflings are short. We're talking under 4 feet tall on average. A halfling should be *incapable* of kicking a half-giant in the head. It shouldn't be physically possible, period. A halfling should have to be under an inordinate amount of physical strain to clock an elf, and that would be a short elf. At close range, with the halfling asking the elf to stand still for a moment while he stretches his leg upward toward the elf's chin.

A halfling would, I'm guessing, be able to do serious damage to a short human, but would miss the head on a taller one more often than he connects.

In summary, if halflings exist according to the help file's description in the manual, they should not be particularly good at kicking anyone in the head, except for other halflings.

[Angela Christine]

In summary, if halflings exist according to the help file's description in the manual, they should not be particularly good at kicking anyone in the head, except for other halflings.

Maybe they get a run at it?    A running, flying kick could hit higher.  Or maybe the sprint, squrell-like, up a tree and launch their tiny feet at your head from above?

Dwarves have the same problem.  They are short and stocky, being stocky I picture them as being even less likely to effectively kick higher than their own waists than most people.  I believe dwarves can kick hard, but it will usually be a kick in the legs.  A dwarf kicking a half-elf in the head is hard to picture.

Speaking of kicking, why doesn't anyone ever aim for the groin?  Even in the byn where you see a lot of humanoid vs. humanoid sparring, you don't see groin shots.  I assume this is because most of the coders have been male.   :wink:  

Angela Christine

[X-D]

Well, I was not gonna post on this string but oh well.

I know most things are opinion here But I sometimes wish people would do a little more real life research before posting.


One spot of raptor kick being too strong, I say look at one, IRL an ostrich could kill or disembowel you with a single kick and it is much smaller and lighter then a raptor, many other RL animals have devistating kicks and they cannot be nearly as tough as arm critters.


I myself can say with 100% certainty that I could kill or maim a person IRL with a single kick, and have on the maim part, and that is without wearing a big heavy armor plated boot.

I think kicks in arm are way under powered for the most part but work well for game play and balance.

Bash on the other hand....... :twisted:

[Carnage]

I'd rather see the damage have a lower cap or a disadvantage added.

I'm pretty neutral in these arguments, because kick isn't something too unbalancing. I'd like to see a slight disadvantage added (be more open for a hit? Or if you critically fail, your opponent hits you in the leg as an added attack) and have it tested to make sure that it was pretty balanced.

Other than that, I think kick is something easy enough to live with. If someone's spamming it during a fight, I'd consider that to be slightly twinky and would keep a log to send it into the MUD. You've got nothing to lose that way.

What is a circle kick anyway? If it's anything like what I'm thinking of, that would be a ridiculous kick to try and pull off in combat, because it would entail you putting your leg out, spinning on your other foot and.. well, slapping them with your boot. I would imagine side kicks, front kicks and knees would be a lot more common in Arm.

[John]

I had a character that killed a gith by kicking it to death once.  That was fifty or sixty kicks that landed on it.  Trust me, that takes forever.  Forever.  Much better now.

So your saying you like kick because it's more powerful? I'm sorry, but if your determined to kick someone to death, then you should have to land 60 blows, because I don't care how many times I'm kicked by someone my age, it's going to take a long time before they can kick me to death. And yes I know, Zalanthan warriors are stronger then us weak Earthlings, but because they're stronger, they should be able to handle kicks more then we could, so all in all, it evens out.

As for whoever said that a kick would be easy to see coming, it is hard to land a good kick on someone when your just starting out with the skill, only uber-powerful kickers can do a lot of damage, so if the Imms don't want to change the kick skill, lower NPCs ability in it.

Although I'd like to see kick do a little bit of damage to the person if they miss once they're skill reaches 30% It shouldn't hurt people when they're first starting out because they're pretty slow, but it should when they get better at it.

ALL IMO.

Nah, once they're down they should be messed up pretty badly by kicks. Seen Akira? You know when Tetsuo was beating on that clown guy, and Kaneda yells at him for kicking him twice, asking if he wanted to kill him? Obviously a couple more would've killed the guy, because.. well, he was on the ground, Tetsuo just kicks him in the face a couple of times and crushes his skull.

[Carnage]

No offense, but I wouldn't consult an anime where people mutate overnight for realism.

[creeper386]

Try being a person WITHOUT the kick skill, it seems to mean you have less defence against it, and it can hit harder, I've seen often also that someones weapons can't get anywhere past someones defence, there is a good chance that a skilled "kicker" with a well placed kick well end up with a weapon to their leg the same as their weapons get.

First, since I've seen before on most other skills your defence deals at least alittle with your skill in the skill, and it's acctually backed up that you can knock people down when you have a high kick skill, with a low parry you parry, with a higher parry you toss the person weapon out of the room. It's similar with most other skills the better you get the more benefits and ussually you have some benefits at the begining.

Now, what I was saying, was if they can't get past your weapons with their own weapons(IE Your defence skills and parry and everything is alot higher then the other person) Their kicks still get through, and it seems your defensive skills don't help a whole lot. It seems to me it's more of a kick skill and agility vs. kick skill and agility, but I don't know the code so can't say for sure.

I would like to see more things with kick, first of all, penelties to your attacks after a kick, if not at least one round of no attacks for the kicker. Also leaving a stun effect of the same length if the kick lands.

Second of all, the chance of kicks being reduced, rather by making defensive skills more of a benefit for avoiding a kick. It seems now if you are really good at kicking you can kick anyone no matter how skilled they are, and again may be wrong but it seems the less skilled they are with kick the more easier it's to kick them.

Although I'm sure just the above would balance it out, without reducing the damage done at all, I could see also some sort of damage done to the kicker if he really fails, meaning he mistimes it and there is a weapon in the area that isn't doing anything else and can do harm to the leg. Though I think this should only be done if the kick skill is low and the other person is skilled in both offense/defense.


8)Creeper now wonders who all is going to say he is absolutely wrong.

[EvilRoeSlade]

I don't have much to add to the conversation besides this.  My current character, who doesn't have the kick skill, got into a fight with a gith who tried to kick him on six seperate occasions.  None of the kicks landed.

All I can think of is that your character must be a wuss, so quit your whining  :P.