Parry chip damage & stamina management

[Woody]

tl;dr - Break the parry lock by adding chip damage via the hidden blunt damage resist threshold stat, modified based on your current stamina %. The lower your current stamina, the less blunt damage resist you get.

Blunt damage is currently able to chip through parries for some damage. All left, right, and overhead strikes deal a portion of blunt damage. Currently we have a hidden stat called "Blunt Damage Resist" when parrying. You might've remembered in patch 0.1.0.67, that your strength now affects this stat with a higher strength value giving you a higher resist.

My thought process is if there's a felt problem with parrying in the community between equally skilled players, why not give stamina management greater impact in combat other than the consideration of "how close am I to stamming out". As such, making stamina dictate the degree of blunt damage resist a player has across the course of a fight. This can be looked at as simulating becoming "worn down" or "tired" as your active stamina declines - with the eventuality of fully stamming out as it is now.

I suggest adding this simple change into the parry blunt damage resist equation:

Parry blunt damage resist = (Base resist + Strength) * Current stamina %

What this should achieve is that even during the course of a fight where both players are able to parry equally, their stamina management becomes more important as they'll start to take some passive chip damage through their parries.

Pros

• A small enough change to help in breaking the parry lock
• Stamina management skill cap increased
• Chip damage received based on skill (stamina management)
• Slower, heavier weapons (easier to parry) with greater blunt damage get some love, in having more depth to their playstyle in brute forcing through parries.
• Medium armour fighters get a much needed small buff in that they will have greater stamina regeneration in relation to this mechanic.
• High strength foot fighters will already have a higher base parry blunt damage resist, interacting well with this mechanic.
• Higher stamina caps naturally receive greater benefit from this system given the larger scale of stamina to work with.
• Shields could potentially get some love with this mechanic if it is able to mitigate the chip damage further.

 

[Woody]

Link to example of issue for which this suggestion is based off:

1vs1: TTK too long?

Hey, as you might know I'm roaming frequently solo around and I experienced a lot of 1 vs 1 fights that basically lasted forever (nobody was able to kill the other person, and somebody disangaged the fight after 10+ minutes of fighting). IMHO this is mainly due the great working parry system...

mortalonline2.com

 

[Kurbb]

there is chip damage, like a shit load actually. If you have anything above molarium, you will chip. I fought a guy in full steel, blocking all attacks but he could chip through the parry. Like Chip i mean 3-4% of my hp per block. Dude learned this and decided to forgo all defense and swing repeatedly without me being able to get a swing off due to dying from a trade.

So its there, but i do agree the TTK is pretty long reguardless

 

[Woody]

there is chip damage, like a shit load actually. If you have anything above molarium, you will chip. I fought a guy in full steel, blocking all attacks but he could chip through the parry. Like Chip i mean 3-4% of my hp per block. Dude learned this and decided to forgo all defense and swing repeatedly without me being able to get a swing off due to dying from a trade.

So its there, but i do agree the TTK is pretty long reguardless

May I ask what your strength is and what weapon they were using? Because with reasonable levels of strength, you can reliably mitigate against most chip damage, even from heavy 2hs.

This is why I'm advocating for stamina to have more of a role in chip damage resist. By using a % modifier you immediately create a mechanic that fits seamlessly into the current combat implementation; raising the skill ceiling of combat further, while lowering the frustrating and unsatisfying TTK of fights between equally skilled and capable players. The fact it ends up giving small buffs to some weapon and armor types that arguably don't have an as well of a defined playstyle, is just an added bonus in my eyes.

 

[Evelyn]

It varies a lot as-is largely due to weapon choice and race choices. On my character with 108 STR, 80-90 Blocking will suffice for mitigating the majority of chip damage vs swords/poles/spears with a bit from axes and chunks from mauls. On my character with 89 STR, the numbers go up a bit more. On my mage, a Thursar with a good sword can chip me for 15+ on every swing (if he had an axe or a maul it'd be way more I am sure).

The tl;dr of it is that not as much chip is seen because not a lot of people are playing Thursars or using Axes/Mauls. Sword/pole/spear remains the weapon of choice in the majority of scenarios with Human and Alvarin being the most popular races. Your suggestion isn't a bad one but I think it would be hard to implement...instead I suggest maybe changing the curve at which higher STR characters receive chip damage? You wouldn't want to just flat increase it otherwise lower STR characters are just locked out of defending themselves at all. But it might mean that the values at 100-ish STR need to be looked at? idk

 

[Tzone]

The TTK isnt long if you can land hits. Why do you want to be damaged for not making mistakes? If you dont make a mistake then you shouldn't be punished. There are feints and morphs to get around blocks.

TTK isnt too long, there is just a learning curve to the game to getting around parries. People say parry is easy, but start complaining about morphs that are hard to read but still readable. And then again they complain that it takes to long to kill because getting around parries is a higher skill floor then parries.


Parries have a lower skill floor then getting around parries. That is all there is. Adding chips is just allowing a by pass of gaining the skills to get around parries. Same to adding a one button press mechanic like kick to break parries. Its good for the medium skill average of players but not the higher end play.

 

[Woody]

It varies a lot as-is largely due to weapon choice and race choices. On my character with 108 STR, 80-90 Blocking will suffice for mitigating the majority of chip damage vs swords/poles/spears with a bit from axes and chunks from mauls. On my character with 89 STR, the numbers go up a bit more. On my mage, a Thursar with a good sword can chip me for 15+ on every swing (if he had an axe or a maul it'd be way more I am sure).

The tl;dr of it is that not as much chip is seen because not a lot of people are playing Thursars or using Axes/Mauls. Sword/pole/spear remains the weapon of choice in the majority of scenarios with Human and Alvarin being the most popular races. Your suggestion isn't a bad one but I think it would be hard to implement...instead I suggest maybe changing the curve at which higher STR characters receive chip damage? You wouldn't want to just flat increase it otherwise lower STR characters are just locked out of defending themselves at all. But it might mean that the values at 100-ish STR need to be looked at? idk

There is pros and cons at both ends of the strength divide in this scenario though. For example, let's say strength is 1:1 to an arbitrary "R" value of reduction from blunt damage via a parry. We have a 50 str build and a 100 str build. At 50% stamina, their R values respectively are 25 and 50. As such, the proportion of change is the same but the amount of actual mitigation change is different. The higher strength build feels a larger degree of mitigation loss than that of the lower strength build.

This would end up presenting as a mindset change when considering fighting different opponents with different weapons, hence the skill ceiling change. You'd have to certainly be more conservative with your stamina against someone with a heavier/high blunt opponent in order to keep a higher R value throughout the fight but you already have a parry advantage given the speed of their swing.

The actual rate of mitigation change as well would need to be considered by SV given they have access to the formula but as far as I can tell, the scaling checks out.

 

[Evelyn]

There is pros and cons at both ends of the strength divide in this scenario though. For example, let's say strength is 1:1 to an arbitrary "R" value of reduction from blunt damage via a parry. We have a 50 str build and a 100 str build. At 50% stamina, their R values respectively are 25 and 50. As such, the proportion of change is the same but the amount of actual mitigation change is different. The higher strength build feels a larger degree of mitigation loss than that of the lower strength build.

This would end up presenting as a mindset change when considering fighting different opponents with different weapons, hence the skill ceiling change. You'd have to certainly be more conservative with your stamina against someone with a heavier/high blunt opponent in order to keep a higher R value throughout the fight but you already have a parry advantage given the speed of their swing.

The actual rate of mitigation change as well would need to be considered by SV given they have access to the formula but as far as I can tell, the scaling checks out.

I don't think your suggestions is bad, I just don't think it would be all that easy for them to implement so it's unlikely to happen. Maybe if this was how it was built from the ground up or something.

 

[Woody]

The TTK isnt long if you can land hits. Why do you want to be damaged for not making mistakes? If you dont make a mistake then you shouldn't be punished. There are feints and morphs to get around blocks.

TTK isnt too long, there is just a learning curve to the game to getting around parries. People say parry is easy, but start complaining about morphs that are hard to read but still readable. And then again they complain that it takes to long to kill because getting around parries is a higher skill floor then parries.


Parries have a lower skill floor then getting around parries. That is all there is. Adding chips is just allowing a by pass of gaining the skills to get around parries. Same to adding a one button press mechanic like kick to break parries. Its good for the medium skill average of players but not the higher end play.

TTK is actually too long if both opponents don't stamina out during the fight and are both capable of playing defensively. Morphs and feints can help to a degree, but only if the opponent isn't as capable defensively, at which point great. This isn't what is being referred to when discussing parries and the TTK of fights.

If we cast our eyes back to when SV changed the weapon charge damage curve from breakpoint to linear, we had for a patch a new style of combat of low charged, quick chip damage attacks. And as I recall, you actually made a post advocating for it's return. However, this was giving the offensive player full control over the ability to apply some "chip" damage through this method which arguably made the skill cap of combat lower. Instead what this is doing, is giving the defending player of said chip damage the ability to control to the degree of which this occurs, via proper stamina management and in turn, a higher skill cap.

I'd argue that proper stamina management in combat games has a much higher skill ceiling than one's mechanical ability of swinging, morphing, feinting and parrying.

 

[bbihah]

Nice suggestion, should definitely be a balancing angle that SV should look into.

 

[Woody]

Nice suggestion, should definitely be a balancing angle that SV should look into.

I think so too. In theory it's a small enough lever they can add to the formula in order to add a number of buffs across some of the more under-represented and under-performing playstyles, while addressing the perceived issue with TTK as it's been mentioned.