PvP Changes discussion

[Retrograde 12,013]

HI Everyone,

 

This thread will be for the discussion of the PvP changes that do not pertain to numbers and testing on the test server. Discuss the impact of changes, further desired changes, and such here.

 

For feedback regarding bugs with the PvP changes, mechanics numbers, and reporting, please use the Feature Feedback thread here:

Forum rules still apply, keep feedback constructive and civil.

 

Changes as at 07/08:

• Fixed priorities on equip actions. Equipping mid combat should now work properly.
• Increased damage arrows do to boats.
• Only allow shooting arrows at boats that have a commander.
• Repairing a boat that has a commander should no longer be possible.
• Boats speeds should now be updated when damaged or repaired.
• Tweaked boat speeds to be a bit higher, with QL having a larger impact. (5/13 passengers, 8/13 QL)
• Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs.
• Lowered archery difficulty. Please test this one thoroughly in PvP combat, PvE combat and with the different armour penalties.
• Fixed a bug that made special moves use the wrong hit locations and damage amounts.
  • This is what was causing some special moves to deal way too much damage compared to what they were designed for.
• Tweaked special moves to be a bit more balanced, and do a bit more damage compared to their original intended design.
  • The damage amounts will still be a lot lower than they are currently, but still high enough in some instances to be worth using.
  • Stun timers have been significantly reduced, with a range between 2 and 4 seconds now. Was between 3 and 9 seconds.
• Added a stun resistance similar to spell resistance, but with a shorter timer. (2.5 minutes to go from 50% to 0% resistance)
  • Consecutive stuns should have a chance to outright fail depending on the resistance and when the last successful stun occurred.

[Worksock 465]

• Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs.

How is this one relevant to pvp changes? Why is it on the test server?

Feels like it would make more sense to just dump it directly in the live server

Edited August 7, 2016 by Worksock
typo

[Outlaw 697]

2 minutes ago, Worksock said:

• Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs.

How is this one relevant to pvp changes? Why is it on the test server?

Feels like it would make more sense to just dump it directly in the live server

 

That's a pretty huge change, for both PvP and PvE... could do with a post all to its own.

[Lancelot 765]

As far as these changes go, it does little to bridge the player skill gap. s from

Please remove rifts and the Hunt of the Ancients from the pvp servers, as they are both detrimental to the embodiment of player versus player combative gameplay. Let the  people the businesse on pvp servers go about the business of attacking nearby villages and defending what is theirs. 

[Rocklobstar 290]

 

26 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs.

 

Glad this is just under consideration, this is a change i would give my first born son for!

[Alexgopen 2,376]

30 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Fixed a bug that made special moves use the wrong hit locations and damage amounts.

• • This is what was causing some special moves to deal way too much damage compared to what they were designed for.

 

I'm not sure what was changed with this, as we won't see the code until it's pushed to the WU beta branch, but by the sound of it you may be misinterpreting how special moves determine their damage.  specialmovename.damagelocations is not where the damage hits, it's just a poorly named variable for the base damage for each of the woundlocations. 

 

Let's take the highest damaging special move, Winged Fang, as an example.

 

Its attributes are as follows:

        final SpecialMove winged = new SpecialMove(36, "Winged fang", 6, 35, 40.0);
        winged.triggeredStances = new byte[] { 7, 6, 1 };
        winged.damagelocations = new int[] { 27, 26, 21 };
        winged.woundlocations = new byte[] { 2, 2, 2 };
        winged.staminaCost = 15000;
        winged.battleRatingPenalty = 1;
        winged.weaponType = 1;
        winged.kingdom = 2;
        winged.setActorMessage("paint");
        winged.setOthersMessage("paints");
        addMovesByWeapon(winged.weaponType, winged);

 

You perform the move and have some effectiveness determined by how successful you were. 

 

doWoundEffect is then called by doEffect to apply the damage portion of the special move. 

 

For each of the elements in the special move's woundlocations array, it calls setdamage with these arguments:

creature.getCombatHandler().setDamage(defender, weapon, eff / 100.0 * this.damagelocations[w] * 1000.0, this.woundlocations[w], t);

As we can see, the damage is determined as your success rating performing the move as a percent, multiplied by the matching element in damagelocations, multiplied by 1000. 

 

In the case of Winged Fang, we get success*27000 damage in location 2, plus success*26000 damage in location 2, plus success*21000 damage in location 2.  I can't be asked to go look up which body part location 2 corresponds to right now, but as far as I can see this isn't a bug, just how the damage is calculated and using a misleading variable name, and the fact that for Winged Fang the designated wound locations for each of the 3 wounds all happen to be position 2, while most other special moves spread the damage out over multiple locations.

 

If damagelocations has been changed to just match the special move's listed woundlocations, then you've just set arbitrary damage amounts because they match the body position's numerical id. 

 

If you want to change the damage amounts, change the elements in damagelocations, and if you want to change where those damages are applied, change the elements in woundlocations. 

 

Just concerned that damage may have been changed incorrectly, or that variables have been misinterpreted as causing a bug when there is no bug regarding special move wound locations as far as I've been able to tell.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Alexgopen

[Budda 2,675]

5 minutes ago, Alexgopen said:

 

 

        final SpecialMove winged = new SpecialMove(36, "Winged fang", 6, 35, 40.0);
        winged.triggeredStances = new byte[] { 7, 6, 1 };
        winged.damagelocations = new int[] { 27, 26, 21 };
        winged.woundlocations = new byte[] { 2, 2, 2 };
        winged.staminaCost = 15000;
        winged.battleRatingPenalty = 1;
        winged.weaponType = 1;
        winged.kingdom = 2;
        winged.setActorMessage("paint");
        winged.setOthersMessage("paints");
        addMovesByWeapon(winged.weaponType, winged);

 

 

In all of the actual definitions (with original source), damagelocations are the id of the body part where the attack hits, and woundlocations are the damage amounts for each of those parts. 27, 26, 21 are the two shoulders and chest, and 2,2,2 was meant to be the damage to each spot. AS you know the actual calculation uses them the other way around, which is why winged fang could do 74k damage before DR. It was defined to do 6k before DR.

[Alexgopen 2,376]

13 minutes ago, Budda said:

 

In all of the actual definitions (with original source), damagelocations are the id of the body part where the attack hits, and woundlocations are the damage amounts for each of those parts. 27, 26, 21 are the two shoulders and chest, and 2,2,2 was meant to be the damage to each spot. AS you know the actual calculation uses them the other way around, which is why winged fang could do 74k damage before DR. It was defined to do 6k before DR.

 

Alright then so now the roles of damagelocations and woundlocations have been reversed with respect to how they worked in the past?

 

Have the woundlocations values been tweaked upwards now? If not I think special moves won't do enough damage to be worth using due to the the fact that with even a 100% successful, in most cases now you would be doing between 5-7k damage out of 65535 max health, which then gets further reduced by DR which is usually around 75-90% depending on the player you fight, meanwhile the stamina costs of special moves are enough to seriously cripple you in a fight if you can't back out to regen stam.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Alexgopen

[Propheteer 7,139]

With the boats, i'm curious with what this hopes to achieve?

 

It just makes it about numbers to me? You wouldn't even need to test it to see thats the goal as obviously 10 is greater than 5.

 

How would one sailboat ever hope to beat two? Two sailboats will be able to shoot-down a single boat before one boat could even shoot down one of theirs. No movement = no skill involved in the commanders side, and 5 accounts cant beat 10 in a straight up fight with the modern day pvp requirements.

 

The skill of archery doesn't even come into a factor here as it takes less than five hours on Epic to get to 70, and less than a day to get to 70 on Freedom. Anything above 70, accuracy wise, is not even noticeable.

 

 

Also, i would test this, but seeing as how the last time two experienced pvpers put in 8 hours testing something, and when they gave you feedback that wasn't good, you proceeded to delete their post and made a post clearly directed at them saying to go test it.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Propheteer

[Redd 4,281]

Boat fights are all about mobility and evading boats.

 

A highly skilled pilot will be able to put manoeuvre the enemy meaning they can duck into the fight, deal damage, and evade.

 

What Proph is trying to say is that if 10 players are fighting 5, just in terms on simple maths they will theoretically do 2x damage to the other. Meaning the 5 people will be sitting ducks comparatively and as I said before being mobile is everything. Wouldn't this mean that Zerg will be promoted and will completely cut out the skill factor in sail boat fights?

 

Im assuming this will be disregarded as Budda wants us to test, I'm just looking at this from a general view. It's not hard to realise it's a flop idea.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Redd

[Alexgopen 2,376]

7 minutes ago, Redd said:

Im assuming this will be disregarded as Budda wants us to test

 

LFG of 15 people to prove this on the test server

 

Must contain at least 5 xXxh4rdc0rexXx roman boat pvpers

Edited August 7, 2016 by Alexgopen

[Zekezor 3,188]

So.... About the archery vs ships change.

 

2 sailboats (OFF) vs 1 sailboat (DEF), a common pvp dilemma:

 

OFF equip longbows to maximize dmg output vs ships, stay outside dmg range for spells and thus noone is in danger and slow down the enemy ship untill their speed is reduced a substantial ammount (DEF can only do this at half the rate and thus will always lose the slowdown event)

 

Strategy 1)

OFF boom and zoom. aka go in, hit hard and pull out.
Result?

Dead DEF player and one halfwounded OFF player. If the OFF ships are weak then one ship can pull off at a time and thus even with half dps they sustain no casulties.

DEF now has even less speed due to the player loss and thus its even easier to do BOOM AND ZOOM.

OFF has the option to chill outside combat range and cotton up before re-engaging and thus make the risk of losing a player near nonexcistant unless there is a massive power diffrense between the accounts.

 

Strategy 2)

With reduced speed of DEF, one of the OFF ships position itself infront and the other behind (or optionally even more easily on each side of the enemy ship) and thus obtain a unblockable archery angle on the DEF ship and can then without effort archer down any and all players without ever exposing themself to real danger.

Result?

Massacre without risk.

 

 

Effect of the change:

1) Numbers = Victory

2) TOP QL boats is a new requirement

3) Tons of new quivers for every fight (arrows as everyone knows is very hard to retrieve/unretrievable at sea, especially if ships are retreating)

4) If a ship engage another ship on a home server, then their speed will be reduced and thus its easy for backup/zerg to catch them.

5) More skill involved for 1ship vs 1ship fights and almost 0 skill involved for ships facing lesser numbers.

6) Due to the archery nerf on homeservers, fighting native populations ships (not the players on them) becomes harder.

7) Hate paths dmg bonus of 50% becomes very benefitial in player vs boat combat and can be conveniently learned by new accounts along with archery in a very short timeframe.

 

 

Summary:

except the bold part of 5 (and possibly 7 dependant on your views) i see no positive gains from the change.... and a lot of negative effects.

 

 

sidenote1: what prevents a organised ship to swiftly have their captain jump off their ship a brief moment and everyone repair their ship and then drive again at high speeds...? Unless the enemy ships does the same they will be outrunned shortly thereafter.

sidenote2: convo shortly after the update post http://pastebin.com/rDt0DZ1a

Edited August 7, 2016 by Zekezor

[changer 459]

2 hours ago, Retrograde said:

HI Everyone,

 

This thread will be for the discussion of the PvP changes that do not pertain to numbers and testing on the test server. Discuss the impact of changes, further desired changes, and such here.

 

For feedback regarding bugs with the PvP changes, mechanics numbers, and reporting, please use the Feature Feedback thread here:

Forum rules still apply, keep feedback constructive and civil.

 

Changes as at 07/08:

• Fixed priorities on equip actions. Equipping mid combat should now work properly. - ok
• Increased damage arrows do to boats.- no reason to have this mechanic 
• Only allow shooting arrows at boats that have a commander.- see above
• Repairing a boat that has a commander should no longer be possible. see 2 above
• Boats speeds should now be updated when damaged or repaired. ok
• Tweaked boat speeds to be a bit higher, with QL having a larger impact. (5/13 passengers, 8/13 QL) - say hello to more things to grind before you're pvp ready
• Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs. - what's the negative side for priests now, everyone will become priests and just keep an alt for crafting, bad idea
• Lowered archery difficulty. Please test this one thoroughly in PvP combat, PvE combat and with the different armour penalties. - yes
• Added a stun resistance similar to spell resistance, but with a shorter timer. (2.5 minutes to go from 50% to 0% resistance)
  • Consecutive stuns should have a chance to outright fail depending on the resistance and when the last successful stun occurred. - shield bashing will be useless, ganking will be even harder? sounds like more stagnation

 from what i've gathered from all other kingdoms the only desired change from this list is the archery change, bretty much everything else will only further stagnate the servers and repel people from going aggressive again, I see nothing about valrei, nothing about water gates, nothing about local, nothing significant at all that could change the current stagnation, just a minor archery change, what matters is incentives for people to go out there and do ######, if it means goods like items in rewards or in mechanics such as shortening the local or reverting all the shitty changes like water buildings the past 1-2 years, pvpers plays this game and comes back because pvp happens, not because they can slave away in order to feel more safe in their deed or get the latest cosmetics, it's too late now to do anything, the damage is done, the items is stacked and the servers are stagnated, the only thing that can put some life in wurm pvp now is some meteors to reset the pvp server(s)

 

see the 20 other threads created all over this forums or the one which was moved to the woodscraps section if you want pvp "discussion", there's already tons out there that contains the proper information and ideas

 

 

Edited August 7, 2016 by changer

[Retrograde 12,013]

Tweaked boat speeds to be a bit higher, with QL having a larger impact. (5/13 passengers, 8/13 QL) - say hello to more things to grind before you're pvp ready  (not everyone needs to grind shipbuilding to 90)

Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs. - what's the negative side for priests now, everyone will become priests and just keep an alt for crafting, bad idea (Imping is still the best for stats, this doesn't make it smarter to have a priest that grinds stats, just less stupid)

Consecutive stuns should have a chance to outright fail depending on the resistance and when the last successful stun occurred. - shield bashing will be useless, ganking will be even harder? sounds like more stagnation  (perhaps stunlock and ganking shouldn't be the gameplay?)

[Wargasm 1,928]

Retro beat me to it... lol.

 

 

 

[Hexproof 496]

speical moves need cooldowns.. say 1 minute?

 

gates and buildings underwater is really bad for pvp aswell

Edited August 7, 2016 by Hexproof

[MrGARY 12,421]

10 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs. - what's the negative side for priests now, everyone will become priests and just keep an alt for crafting, bad idea (Imping is still the best for stats, this doesn't make it smarter to have a priest that grinds stats, just less stupid)

 

how does a priest woodcutting getting the same stats as a follower woodcutting which they both already are allowed to dopresent a scenario where everyone will become priests

 

 

edit:  I'd be for removing water gates/walls if off deed.  On deed doesn't really change anything at all

Edited August 7, 2016 by MrGARY

[changer 459]

24 minutes ago, Retrograde said:

Tweaked boat speeds to be a bit higher, with QL having a larger impact. (5/13 passengers, 8/13 QL) - say hello to more things to grind before you're pvp ready  (not everyone needs to grind shipbuilding to 90)

Removed priest characteristic gain nerfs. - what's the negative side for priests now, everyone will become priests and just keep an alt for crafting, bad idea (Imping is still the best for stats, this doesn't make it smarter to have a priest that grinds stats, just less stupid)

Consecutive stuns should have a chance to outright fail depending on the resistance and when the last successful stun occurred. - shield bashing will be useless, ganking will be even harder? sounds like more stagnation  (perhaps stunlock and ganking shouldn't be the gameplay?)

no of course not, but a few has to, you can't count on 1 person to be able to do whatever during every timezone, that means atleast a dozen players per timezone which has to grind it, in the end nothing will change as every major faction will have top ql boats while the plebian factions and newbies in general will suffer

 

and regarding to priests, pvpers priests their main because priests are very powerful when used correctly, if they can improve their character while also being powerful, they'll do it, the difference between crafting and mining/digging/woodcutting is negligible, generally it's easier to afk while digging/mining, while wc gives body stam while crafting doesn't (not efficiently atleast) on epic, so players will mine or dig while semi-afk rather than craft if the difference in skillgain is negligible while the difference in effort is big (gathering wood or materials for the forge, steel/iron etc for materials, crafting new things after every round of items is done etc, while all you need to dig or mine is bsbs, tabbing in and holding down a button for 0.5 sec, tabbing out and watching back 1-2 min later

 

ganking IS the gameplay currently because players don't want to lose their valuable equipment and epeen among other things, groups/players which thinks that they are in a disadvantage will disengage while the group/player that thinks it is in an advantage will engage, the tactics required to toy around with the positioning in order to abuse this isn't efficient as huge locals + fast horses + bad engagement mechanics (archery is currently ######) means that you have a monotous environment where tactics & strategies means very little, you won't be able to engage unless you have cut someone right off no matter how perfect your group positioning is, and even then it doesn't mean much as you might be able to hit a few arrows at best with a group of 10 vs 10 as the enemy is trying to disengage and run to a safe zone at 50kmh, jke might know this as we caught their pants down when they tried to bait vd on the east island and we only caught 2-3 of them, and that has happened alot of times, if there's no stuns then players will be safer, safety means stagnation

Edited August 7, 2016 by changer

[Wargasm 1,928]

17 minutes ago, changer said:

no of course not, but a few has to, you can't count on 1 person to be able to do whatever during every timezone, that means atleast a dozen players per timezone which has to grind it, in the end nothing will change as every major faction will have top ql boats while the plebian factions and newbies in general will suffer

 

Non-sense.  My kingdom will never need a dozen 90 shipbuilders (per time-zone, really?) to be viable in boat PvP.  And to further my argument, our opponents (MRC) frequently use rare/supreme sailboats in PvP, so we already experience the futility of your point.

 

Edited August 7, 2016 by Wargasm

[changer 459]

17 minutes ago, Wargasm said:

 

Non-sense.  My kingdom will never need a dozen 90 shipbuilders (per time-zone, really?) to be viable in boat PvP.  And to further my argument, our opponents (MRC) frequently use rare/supreme sailboats in PvP, so we already experience the futility of your point.

 

how many kills do you have on boats? or kills in general? How successful is your kingdom in pvp? I assume you don't have much experience as generally in a pvp rich environment, boats will be ditched, boats will be used from multiple areas as it's faster to run there and jump on a backup boat, boats will be lost, lets take rome as an example, we have lets see.. atleast 5 deeds which needs atleast 3 sailboats in it where atleast 2 is rare/supreme, which is already filled with nessecary materials for coastguardan, 1 player has to then craft and imp 15 sailboats where 10 are rare/supreme to 99.99999998 quality (or whatever is the absolute max for boat speed + a buffert for damage and repairing, we probably lost 2-3 boats per month during boat pvp prime time during 2014 coastguarding, which means another 2 rare/supreme boat and 1 normal boat per month to 99.9999998 ql, what player do you think would be up for grinding up to 100 shipbuilding, crafting these boats and maintaining them,  do you realize how much time it would take to create as much rare/supremes as this? do you have any examples of A player which have done this? 

Edited August 7, 2016 by changer

[MrGARY 12,421]

While I don't necessarily like the idea of boat ql being important, cap the effectiveness at 90ql?  Easier for everyone to obtain, but yet still leaves us in the situation where vets are gonna all have it anyway and newer/weaker players wont

[TradingAlt 946]

bout fukn time special moves are getting nerfed.

 

 

even though they let me kill so many people with better stats then me (thx 4 da loot)

Edited August 7, 2016 by TradingAlt

[Wargasm 1,928]

11 minutes ago, changer said:

how many kills do you have on boats? or kills in general? How successful is your kingdom in pvp? I assume you don't have much experience as generally in a pvp rich environment, boats will be ditched, boats will be used from multiple areas as it's faster to run there and jump on a backup boat, boats will be lost, lets take rome as an example, we have lets see.. atleast 5 deeds which needs atleast 3 sailboats in it where atleast 2 is rare/supreme, which is already filled with nessecary materials for coastguardan, 1 player has to then craft and imp 15 sailboats where 10 are rare/supreme to 99.99999998 quality (or whatever is the absolute max for boat speed + a buffert for damage and repairing, we probably lost 2-3 boats per month during boat pvp prime time during 2014 coastguarding, which means another 2 rare/supreme boat and 1 normal boat per month to 99.9999998 ql, what player do you think would be up for grinding up to 100 shipbuilding, crafting these boats and maintaining them,  do you realize how much time it would take to create as much rare/supremes as this? do you have any examples of A player which have done this? 

 

Maybe "coastguardan" is a bigger thing on Epic than it is on Chaos, but I'd say 90% of the engagements I've participated in are on land.  A fraction of that 10% involved sailing across the server. 

[changer 459]

8 minutes ago, Wargasm said:

 

Maybe "coastguardan" is a bigger thing on Epic than it is on Chaos, but I'd say 90% of the engagements I've participated in are on land.  A fraction of that 10% involved sailing across the server. 

that's cute, it's not relevant to the discussion about boats though

 

maybe chaos doesn't put as much emphasis on pvp and more on the freedom side compared to epic but when we can make something more efficient or have us perform better, it'll be done (it was done atleast, i don't play this game anymore, maybe once it's playable in terms of pvp where there aren't 59599 mechanics that is designed to reduce pvp more players might come back too)

Edited August 7, 2016 by changer

[Zekezor 3,188]

10 minutes ago, Wargasm said:

 

Maybe "coastguardan" is a bigger thing on Epic than it is on Chaos, but I'd say 90% of the engagements I've participated in are on land.  A fraction of that 10% involved sailing across the server. 

Sea warfare and coastal raiding is a very common element on Epic.

In the past it was the main type of pvp occuring.

After the new feature involving the rarity of ships, the sea combat participation lowered a lot since without a rare/supreme ship you have a severe disadvantage.

Thus those without simply stopped comming.... since it was pretty much suicide.

 

It's one of the many reasons why people keep refering to not hightening the pvp requirements...

It lessens pvp and removes newer players from the battlefield.

Which results in stale servers where only old vets pvp... vets which slowly fade over time without new blood to replace it.

Edited August 7, 2016 by Zekezor