Shattered Kingdoms

Except it takes a grand total of thirty seconds and two aliases with a conditional to completely bypass any timing required. Making the lag on trip/bash slightly longer than the victim is prone cannot be bypassed with an alias.

Not everyone uses aliases and triggers to up their game though. Or am the last one?

I still don't

With the addition of more timing-based skills, perhaps it may be rewarding to examine not only HP pools and damage rates, but also the speed at which rounds themselves progress through calculation?

I have observed many rounds of combat, and it would seem that there are plenty which do not see full exploitation by players.

In regards to stances, I think mood aggressive is simply too good and the drawbacks are not enough to warrant use of the other two stances available to everyone besides swashies now. The damage that players take from foregoing defenses, the penalty to parry/dodge.. is simply not enough. Aggressive is still too good.

I guess, after testing and really playing with this new feature of defaulting to neutral by going prone.. not sure why it's needed. And bashing a 25 dex swash standing in hedgehog stance is foolishly easy. Still. And the update just made bash better.

All I have to say is this:

You should be forced to mood neutral for as long as you're bashed, tripped for there's nothing you are doing at the moment other than trying to regain balance, or stand up.
After you do that, your mood should revert back to whatever mood you had before being bashed, tripped etc. It's only logical.

My 2 cents.

After playing with it for a couple days, I think the PE cost on stance changing should be halved and the lag removed. Stance dancing is sort of cool, but the lag is really inhibiting. If you coupled this adjustment with one that forced people who tried to bash prone targets to fall prone themselves, I think it'd make combat a lot more interesting! The "don't bash at prone people" change is such a good idea it's almost a no brainer.

It's easy to kip;stance change as a swash to negate the fact that bash sets you neutral, so what this really is is a major nerf to barbs/mercs that get bashed. Swashes have to deal with the fact that they're swashbucklers so this probably isn't a terrible thing.

Given lag timers, it will probably take a round or two of being mood neutral before a swash can revert back to hedgehog/defensive (by kipping and stance dancing) at which time they will be 1-round away from bashed again. Those two rounds of being neutral results in big damage. So really, hedgehog is impossible to even use against NPCs spamming bash or PCs spamming bash and put you back on the ground before you can even do anything about the damage you've taken by being mood neutral. But you're still going to take a big loss to PE for kipping and changing stance. One solution would be to forego HP trains and dump it all into PE, making the swash even less survivable.

Trip is so hilariously avoidable, the only tactical move that is semi-reasonable for a swash is to try kipping, then disarming and dirting/quaffing.

Well, what I said was contingent upon removing lag from stancing.

Every swash should have max hp and moves. Kip certainly does drain like a motherchucker.

Kip has a nice lag on it too, mind you.