Shattered Kingdoms

I currently play a Grand Master human mercenary that is specialized with battle spear and kama. I want to get that out of the way now, since the purpose of this post is to ask that melee damage in general be reviewed to bring it into balance.

If memory serves, the addition of weapon sub-types and the lowering of NPC hit points were to make combat last longer. While that may have been the intent, it is certainly not happening in practice. It is a bit absurd that a heavy armor character can be killed in one or two rounds, with or without being bashed. A character with cloth or light armor has it even worse.

I actually like the weapon sub-types. I think it's a nice touch to make melee characters a little more interesting. However, I don't think the current melee system was balanced around characters being buffed. And by being buffed, I mean the following spells: Haste, Giant Strength, Prayer and Enlarge.

Pretty much any tribunal character has access to those buffs and it's not too difficult for a cabal or non-aligned character to get them either. The following log snippets are not meant to reveal IC information, but show how ridiculously powerful melee is at the moment.

EDIT: I removed the log snippet and I will just link the URL instead.

http://sk.[REDACTED].com/show_log.php?fe ... ml_parse=0

The minotaur dies in the next round. What you have there is two heavy armor wearing characters each dying to what amounts to one round of melee attacks. How is that balanced? Or fun? It is not an isolated log either. My character and another mercenary took Hadaro to awful in one round.

Frankly, it takes almost no skill to play the game right now. All you need is a little patience, spare time and access to buffs. After that, it's just a matter of the RNG because most characters are going to die in a single bash or a couple rounds of melee.

The baseline used to balance melee damage should be a giant mercenary. Why? Because they are size giant and have maximum strength possible. How long does it take a giant mercenary to kill pretty much any character? Not long at all. How much skill does it take? Almost none.

The problem with that? Now take every other mercenary, rogue or barbarian in the game and give them access to giant strength, haste, prayer and enlarge (so they are now size giant too). So pretty much every melee class can be a giant mercenary, without the racial drawbacks, with just a little preparation time.

I heard Dulrik was considering removing the damage modifier when someone is bashed. That's a good start. I have a few ideas that could also help without directly nerfing any single class:

1) Remove auto assist from pkill. That will prevent a massive spam of attacks that can insta-gib a character in one round. It will also make players pick their own target and use a little skill and judgement.

2) Since player will have to pick their own targets, please change the targeting system. It is ridiculously outdated and leads to scenarios in game that are complete non-sense. Aggressive actions should always default to targets other than your own character and characters in your party. That way when everyone is manually assisting, you won't have half your party attacking each other cause they typed kill "green-eyed" to attack Varath, but forgot someone else in their own party has that same adjective and they happened to be 1.green-eyed.

3) Remove the damage multiplier based on size. Base it on race instead, so that giants continue to get a nice bonus and sprites get a penalty.


I think those changes along with the previously proposed change to bash would be a good start. Anyway, time to go back to hacking things to pieces on my mercenary. *chortles*

Why not just make it so that enlarge and shrink don't work on anything but equipment?

Your group should be protected from engaging itself anyway. You can't start combat with a cleave with someone in your group, the code completely prevents it, so why not change that to affect everything else?

That would work too and be a lot easier to code.

That then rules out those group-insta-destruction spells such as confusion and chaos.

I am actually a big fan of the enlarge change idea.



There might be other problems which changing this could lead to also (For example, holy wording with opposite auras in your group, or a necro being unable to cause light his own grouped undead), but this change -may- also be good.

Or you could simply add a few lines of code to address spells that can cause you to lose control of your character and possibly attack party members.

Yeah, I love it.

Implement it!

Casting cause light on undead wouldn't be engaging the group. Cause light heals the undead. They will not attack back unless they are already aggressive.

I do agree though, if you are in the group, you should not be able to target fellow group members.

Yeah, but I was just referring to the fact that even if you cause light undead, it's still considered an aggressive spell -before- it fires (For purposes such as breaking sanc, for example, unless I've been reading the bug forums wrong lately.) I'm sure if Dulrik implemented this non-attackable party members change he would have thought about that, but I was just saying it in case he didn't think of it at the time, and there are surely other nuances of the game that would be affected by this as well.

I personally think that melee damage is OP since both A) the weapon subtypes went in and B) the order for damage reduction now checks against armor MP first, THEN spells such as sanc and prot. As such, I'm still in favor of the enlarge and bash change, but I also believe they would only be small chips in the mountain that melee damage has become lately.

Log of someone taking Hadaro to awful in one round...? Boggling.