I heard some talk about ideas of toggleable stances that do various things and could even be a rework of aggressive/defensive stance. I also heard some suggestions about how to handle abilities like overhead strike, triple strike etc. I made this thread to be a center of discussion for how these should be handled and also to personally weigh in on what I feel could be interesting or perhaps a better implementation than mo1.
For starters I'd like to bring up the ideas I had heard about stances which I'm rather neutral to currently. I heard somebody suggest that aggressive stance would harm your blocking potential in exchange for greater offensive power. I think a reasonable and balanced approach to this could be to give either a decreased stam cost to attacking or perhaps to decrease the charge time for your weapon. The downsides I think should either be that you can't parry/have a shorter window to parry or that blocking has an increased stamina cost(think like a shield). I think defensive stance could be kinda the opposite. Maybe blocking is cheaper or has a larger parry duration/interval and blocks that aren't parries have a higher damage mitigation. Maybe for downsides it could decrease the max charge percent on non counterattack attacks made while in this mode or have the increased stamina cost or slower charge as the inverse of aggressive. I also don't know how long it should take to swap stance or if it should have a cooldown or if it should have a mana/stamina cost. I don't want players to be able to turn aggressive on when trading instantly and then toggle it off immediately after they get their hit off. Maybe being in either stance slightly decreases stamina regen so there is a benefit to not being in either stance and to make them optional instead of required skills.
The real reason I made this thread was spear stance, it was a cool idea in mo1 but was dysfunctional/broken most of the game. I think the way that it should work is approximately the same idea as mo1 where you plant the spear in the ground and get charged but instead of it being a set duration effect that otherwise stuns you, it could be a toggleable effect with maybe a .3 second time to toggle in and out of it. During this time, the spear should work like aiming a lance more or less and moving your camera should pivot you around the back of the spear which is planted in the ground. As a result you would be able to target either the horse or the rider more independently than you currently can. I think it should still be a rather reliable way to dismount and a usable counter to MCs as foot fighters had the options of either a dismount sledge/axe or to shoot at them with a bow so they have to go heal and temporarily can't hurt you. It should also be useful against players on foot though less damaging and effective, think of it as bracing against a charge. For sake of hitboxes, forcing player choice and also balance it should probably also only be usable for long and sauroter (or whatever the super long shafts are called this game) shafts. I imagine it would be difficult to brace 5ft or so long spear against the ground and have any kind of usable reach to be able to hit a horse or person on a horse. Damage and dismount chance should of course scale with the movement speed of the enemy hit, with an mc's charge on a fast mount being pretty much a guaranteed dismount and likely doing in the realm of 60-80 damage assuming a steel spear and steel armor.
Other moves, like overhead strike, make little sense to maintain in the mo1 state. Overhead strike is now in the base directional combat and should likely just be removed. Triple and double strike I feel would work better as toggleable stances which increase charge times and otherwise have a pattern to their attack directions, they also should only work as left and right attacks probably. As an example idea of how I think triple strike could work is that the first and third attacks are the direction of the attack and the second attack is in the opposite direction eg. right left right or left right left. The charge time for that should likely be about 3x as long and the attacks should execute faster than 3 uncharged attacks. It should also not stun you while you make these attacks. Double strike would be similar but only two attacks and the charge time should be the sum of the left and right attack's charge times. it should also be able to go left right or right left. For sake of balance and preventing spam these should likely either be less stam efficient than making individual attacks or should boot you out of the stance after a single attack and then trigger a cooldown.
Something I had also been thinking about was what these should consume, I thought of an interesting system where there is a fourth resource which is derived from constitution and psyche called focus. Focus would be gained passively and at a greater rate while standing still or resting. It would decrease when hit with an unblocked attack or maybe also from arrows and spells. The advantage of this resource is that it could be used for more than just footfighting, perhaps mages use it to maintain their summons(think the way that skeletons and mummies used to drain the caster's mana), perhaps commanding your animal magnetism pet consumes focus so you can't spam commands to it without consequence. Perhaps the zoom and steadying on an archer's bow could be tied to it. The downside of a system like focus of course, is that not all builds will utilize it and builds that do utilize it will likely be stronger than they were in mo1 and require rebalancing. If for example, steadying a bow no longer drained extra stamina, archers would be significantly better. Perhaps focus would be needed in addition to the other resource but I'm not sure as to how it should be implemented much less IF a system like this should be implemented. It could also place greater strategic importance on using archers to poke at people to prevent them from building up focus. It alternatively could give more uses to pushes/shoves. My greatest concern with a system like this is that it would become somewhat nightmarish to manage. Managing health and stamina as a foot fighter or archer is tricky enough on its own, I can only imagine giving them more to manage. I also thought about saying that it should use mana with the justification that it would increase build diversity and perhaps make you think about maxing size and str or going for more psyche to better utilize these advanced combat techniques and stances. Mana however would pose a great deal of problems for characters like hybrids who would either be able to use a large number of techniques easily due to their high psyche or would result in them being unable to cast as often if they use these stances or techniques. Finally when thinking about either focus or mana when it comes to casting, it could have interesting implications, like certain powerful spells (earthquake, deaths hand, mummies and glacial shard/that fucking magma ball thing that rolls forward and kills you come to mind)draining mana to attempt to cast them or to need focus to cast. Even spells like calm weather could have a focus cost attached to make sure that somebody doesn't just spam that spell to prevent the enemy elementalist from being able to cast any spells with a weather requirement. The focus cost could also dissuade all foot mages from turning on defensive stance and leaving it on for survivability's sake. Some casting using stamina would also be an interesting idea so that lean sheevra's can't just kite all melee characters for all of eternity.
I feel rather confident when it comes to any of these matters except for what they should consume. I tried to lay out all of the pro's and cons for what a changing from stamina and mana costs to a system of using the normally unused resource or focus. I have no idea if the paragraph above contains any points people agree with or if it's just a ridiculous system. I'd love to hear opinions both on what I've said about usable abilities/stances and on what I said about a focus system or using the alternate resource bar. I would also love to hear ideas of possible abilities and stances. One stance that came to mind was a shield stance where your shield is consistently raised in front of you and your attack is thrust only(think spartan or roman spear and gladius use respectively). Another random idea I had was that of grappling/wrestling though I have no clue how or if that could work. Any suggestions of your own or any reactions are welcome.
For starters I'd like to bring up the ideas I had heard about stances which I'm rather neutral to currently. I heard somebody suggest that aggressive stance would harm your blocking potential in exchange for greater offensive power. I think a reasonable and balanced approach to this could be to give either a decreased stam cost to attacking or perhaps to decrease the charge time for your weapon. The downsides I think should either be that you can't parry/have a shorter window to parry or that blocking has an increased stamina cost(think like a shield). I think defensive stance could be kinda the opposite. Maybe blocking is cheaper or has a larger parry duration/interval and blocks that aren't parries have a higher damage mitigation. Maybe for downsides it could decrease the max charge percent on non counterattack attacks made while in this mode or have the increased stamina cost or slower charge as the inverse of aggressive. I also don't know how long it should take to swap stance or if it should have a cooldown or if it should have a mana/stamina cost. I don't want players to be able to turn aggressive on when trading instantly and then toggle it off immediately after they get their hit off. Maybe being in either stance slightly decreases stamina regen so there is a benefit to not being in either stance and to make them optional instead of required skills.
The real reason I made this thread was spear stance, it was a cool idea in mo1 but was dysfunctional/broken most of the game. I think the way that it should work is approximately the same idea as mo1 where you plant the spear in the ground and get charged but instead of it being a set duration effect that otherwise stuns you, it could be a toggleable effect with maybe a .3 second time to toggle in and out of it. During this time, the spear should work like aiming a lance more or less and moving your camera should pivot you around the back of the spear which is planted in the ground. As a result you would be able to target either the horse or the rider more independently than you currently can. I think it should still be a rather reliable way to dismount and a usable counter to MCs as foot fighters had the options of either a dismount sledge/axe or to shoot at them with a bow so they have to go heal and temporarily can't hurt you. It should also be useful against players on foot though less damaging and effective, think of it as bracing against a charge. For sake of hitboxes, forcing player choice and also balance it should probably also only be usable for long and sauroter (or whatever the super long shafts are called this game) shafts. I imagine it would be difficult to brace 5ft or so long spear against the ground and have any kind of usable reach to be able to hit a horse or person on a horse. Damage and dismount chance should of course scale with the movement speed of the enemy hit, with an mc's charge on a fast mount being pretty much a guaranteed dismount and likely doing in the realm of 60-80 damage assuming a steel spear and steel armor.
Other moves, like overhead strike, make little sense to maintain in the mo1 state. Overhead strike is now in the base directional combat and should likely just be removed. Triple and double strike I feel would work better as toggleable stances which increase charge times and otherwise have a pattern to their attack directions, they also should only work as left and right attacks probably. As an example idea of how I think triple strike could work is that the first and third attacks are the direction of the attack and the second attack is in the opposite direction eg. right left right or left right left. The charge time for that should likely be about 3x as long and the attacks should execute faster than 3 uncharged attacks. It should also not stun you while you make these attacks. Double strike would be similar but only two attacks and the charge time should be the sum of the left and right attack's charge times. it should also be able to go left right or right left. For sake of balance and preventing spam these should likely either be less stam efficient than making individual attacks or should boot you out of the stance after a single attack and then trigger a cooldown.
Something I had also been thinking about was what these should consume, I thought of an interesting system where there is a fourth resource which is derived from constitution and psyche called focus. Focus would be gained passively and at a greater rate while standing still or resting. It would decrease when hit with an unblocked attack or maybe also from arrows and spells. The advantage of this resource is that it could be used for more than just footfighting, perhaps mages use it to maintain their summons(think the way that skeletons and mummies used to drain the caster's mana), perhaps commanding your animal magnetism pet consumes focus so you can't spam commands to it without consequence. Perhaps the zoom and steadying on an archer's bow could be tied to it. The downside of a system like focus of course, is that not all builds will utilize it and builds that do utilize it will likely be stronger than they were in mo1 and require rebalancing. If for example, steadying a bow no longer drained extra stamina, archers would be significantly better. Perhaps focus would be needed in addition to the other resource but I'm not sure as to how it should be implemented much less IF a system like this should be implemented. It could also place greater strategic importance on using archers to poke at people to prevent them from building up focus. It alternatively could give more uses to pushes/shoves. My greatest concern with a system like this is that it would become somewhat nightmarish to manage. Managing health and stamina as a foot fighter or archer is tricky enough on its own, I can only imagine giving them more to manage. I also thought about saying that it should use mana with the justification that it would increase build diversity and perhaps make you think about maxing size and str or going for more psyche to better utilize these advanced combat techniques and stances. Mana however would pose a great deal of problems for characters like hybrids who would either be able to use a large number of techniques easily due to their high psyche or would result in them being unable to cast as often if they use these stances or techniques. Finally when thinking about either focus or mana when it comes to casting, it could have interesting implications, like certain powerful spells (earthquake, deaths hand, mummies and glacial shard/that fucking magma ball thing that rolls forward and kills you come to mind)draining mana to attempt to cast them or to need focus to cast. Even spells like calm weather could have a focus cost attached to make sure that somebody doesn't just spam that spell to prevent the enemy elementalist from being able to cast any spells with a weather requirement. The focus cost could also dissuade all foot mages from turning on defensive stance and leaving it on for survivability's sake. Some casting using stamina would also be an interesting idea so that lean sheevra's can't just kite all melee characters for all of eternity.
I feel rather confident when it comes to any of these matters except for what they should consume. I tried to lay out all of the pro's and cons for what a changing from stamina and mana costs to a system of using the normally unused resource or focus. I have no idea if the paragraph above contains any points people agree with or if it's just a ridiculous system. I'd love to hear opinions both on what I've said about usable abilities/stances and on what I said about a focus system or using the alternate resource bar. I would also love to hear ideas of possible abilities and stances. One stance that came to mind was a shield stance where your shield is consistently raised in front of you and your attack is thrust only(think spartan or roman spear and gladius use respectively). Another random idea I had was that of grappling/wrestling though I have no clue how or if that could work. Any suggestions of your own or any reactions are welcome.
