Salem

After couple fights I had I can say that some skills are useless for various reasons and some are designed to just spam and win imho few balance changes would be nice to have more interesting combat.

First stances En garde, Guard and Run (I know it is not stance, but many people are using it as such)...

1. En garde - gives us ability to use Parry most useless skill in game and that makes this stance useless too, my sugestions about it:
- en garde should decrease cooldown of thrust,
- after successful parry opponent should get some amount of imbalance or reeling and next thrust (for char that used parry) should be faster,
- en garde should decrease reeling penalty for each thrust (lets say that without this stance you get 10% reeling bar, then with en garde on you should get less than 10%, because you are ready to fight and your character got right position to make damage),
- you should recive more damage from other attacks like punch, uppercut or stomp, because you are not ready for hand to hand combat only for sword fight,

2. Guard
- reduce damage (as it is right now and that is good, just angle should be closer to 180 deg in front imho),
- we should be able to use parry in guard stance, but then our character should recive some amount of imbalance (even after successful parry),
- thrusts cooldown should be increased than with en garde and should fill reeling bar much faster,
- characters using guard should recive reduced imbalance from leap at or leg sweap (if made in front or left or right side), because they are expecting to get some hits, so they are standing hard on ground and it is harder to imbalance them (at least imho in RL fight it works like that),
- any skill that requires fists should have reduces cooldown while using guard (look at animation you even got your hands in right position to make punch or uppercut),


3. Run
- any combat skill should increase a lot imbalance and reeling (in case of thrusts) used by character in run mode (why? the faster you are, the easier you can make wrong steps and lose your balance),
- any combat skill used against character in run mode should also have increased penalty to running character (so leap at used on running char should fill imbalance bar much faster than on character in other stances),
- so what would be advantage of using run? imho speed is enough bonus to reward all penalties (slower fights = longer fights, so more time to know your opponent and to find some counter tactic),


Some skills:
- round house kick should make larger dmg to imbalanced target that thrust!!!
- leg sweap increase imbalance taken by target,
- we should be able to cancel skill execution, but after that char should get imbalance bar filled by some amount (depends how much time left to finish skill, more time, more imbalance recived),



Combat UI:
I was thinking about config of my combat bars and it sucks, we have few skills that are useful, but you need monkey keyboard moves to handle 1-6 and F1-F6 :/
Imho we should get toolbars changing when we change stance, so without combat I got standard bars as example: 1. lift, 2. dig, 3. destroy etc etc,
but when I switch to run I get 1.thrust, 2. leap at, bullrun etc...
guard 1. uppercut, 2. stomp, 3. punch ...
en guarde 1. thrust, 2. parry, 3. leap at...

On F-keys we could get different stances, so during fights we could just press 1-4 and F1-F4

In the main these changes just make combat more complicated, which doesn't necessarily translate into it being more fun. I agree parry and roundhouse kick might need tweaking though. Honestly I preferred haven combat though.

It would take more time to master all stances and different combinations... but it would also encourage people to use something else than run->leap at->thrust->thrust->leap at->thrust->win... I hate haven combat mechanic

Combat mechanics can be simple but still have a high skill cap.

I actually like this idea, and agree with pretty much everything darnokpl suggested here.

The one thing I don't really understand is: "- round house kick should make larger dmg to imbalanced target that thrust!!!" I'm pretty sure I could do more damage with a sword than I could with my foot, regardless of how imbalanced my opponent was.

P.S. L2havemonkeykeyboardmoves

Mushibag wrote:The one thing I don't really understand is: "- round house kick should make larger dmg to imbalanced target that thrust!!!" I'm pretty sure I could do more damage with a sword than I could with my foot, regardless of how imbalanced my opponent was.

You right and single bullet should kill

I agree with these changes, roundkick included because it really needs a major buff.

As for round kick I see it like this
first you try to imbalance opponent,
when it succeded, trying to use 3 skills that would give you max possible dmg, so most people would pick round kick (talking about skills after suggested changes), but key word in this skill is "it imbalances you more than other skills", so imho after 3 round kicks in a row you should have imbalance bar full

That should give combat little more tactic (but won't make it much more complicated @_Gunnar) and people would stop spam 3xthrust to imbalanced opponents,
instead it would be nice to use 2xround kick + thrust + regen to lower imbalance bar or some similar combo.