Farwoods Vignette #1 feedback thread

GM Ethos

Staff

This was our first large-scale combat playtesting event! Please post any combat feedback and suggestions you may have here. Here's my thoughts:

Armor needs a bit of a nerf; I'm not sure if that should come in the form of it blocking damage less often, blocking less damage, or a complete rework. I don't want to raise weapon damage to compensate because 2H iron weapons already one-shot most unarmored
The movement systems are a placeholder and we intend to implement something more fluid in the beta without characters clipping through each other when they walk into each other. It's hard to differentiate a hit being dropped from the swing cooldown, in fairness; we should probably add a UI indicator for the duration your attack is on cooldown. Combat will always have some jankiness because it's a tile-based game distantly descended from the BYOND framework, but we want to make it as accessible as possible.
Root definitely needs a nerf in either duration, or the amount it slows you while the effect is active, since it was routinely immobilizing people entirely
Dispel might need a buff in Mind cost to make it viable, though it wasn't really intended for mid-combat casting per se

What do you all think? How would you improve things?

Apr 04, 2022 12:30 UTC

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Apr 04, 2022 12:37 UTC

GM Ethos

Staff

I'm leaning towards shield blocking costing 2 Stamina atm. It's less than parrying or dodging, but not completely free, and it still costs about the same to swing a two-handed sword as to block and swing a one-handed sword.

We do need to add some kind of indicator for swing cooldown. And we intend to expand the hotbar in the new client; there will be separate hotbars for friendly and hostile intent, and you will be able to bind spells to it directly.

Oh, and a Spell Resistance rework is on the table. I want even a small investment into it to be worthwhile, so I'm thinking it will become a passive skill which applies a penalty to casting malicious spells on you, with the penalty based on your Magic stat and skill rank. This will make it worth investing into even as a non-mage character if you wanna chuck a few spare skill points at it.

Black magic is, I think always gonna be kind of overpowered for combat because it's long-term curse magic. Maybe your vision could gradually fade out with Blind rather than instantly going black?

Apr 04, 2022 12:57 UTC

Nix

White magic felt absolutely pitiful in this combat. Dispel is incredibly expensive, and assuming the difficulty of dispelling is based on the power of the cast spell (and assuming Ritts didn't have mundane), then one or two (assuming I was hexed and not made aware of that fact) costing 6 (root, slow) or 12 (blind) cost me 45 to remove. That's 3/4 of the available mind pool. Even with hex, though, that would be 12-18 cast to make me pay 45.

Having to dispel (15) burn (8 mind) to stay alive longer than like 6 seconds also prevented 2-3 casts (15 spent, heal costs 6) of heal.

Yellow never even got an opportunity to be used by me because the hostile magics felt so much more powerful than white, and white had to do something none the less.

First combat I at least got to heal someone at some point, but the next time I was granted the same character, I cast 4 spells, two of which fizzled, and all were dispel. While being taken down to half health in one hit in that time, because the other magics are that damning that you have to deal with them and sometimes risk taking hits instead of being entirely mobile. Being blind both removes the target you were tracking, and then also makes you have to self cast which is still as far as I know, cursor dependent.

As for melee:

Defense is very powerful, but that's nothing new to me. I do worry that adding cost to block might risk making it objectively worse than dodge or parry, unless the chance to activate is higher (all other things equal). Block never mitigates the full damage of a strong attack, but dodge and parry will; and it has the added cost of requiring a shield. That's not to say it's not too strong as it is. I personally feel it bests 2H almost every time in a 1V1, though it's clear some folks disagree with that.

Perhaps (assuming it feels instead too weak after this change) when you don't have enough stamina then blocks are instead weaker and/or at a lower chance? Then potentially parry and maybe dodge could get the same treatment. I know parries have partial successes.

Apr 04, 2022 01:32 UTC*