Inspired by Lithmeria

Ciaran

TLDR: A proposed system to break down group combat into smaller engagements by granting a scaling dodge to increasingly focused targets (if targeted by 3 or more people, you get a natural dodge)

I have been poking around Lithmeria a bunch lately, and I have to say, their positioning idea is simply brilliant for group combat.  They built a whole combat system around the idea that too many attackers has significantly diminishing returns.  This turns any big group fights (which never happen because they don't have enough population) into smaller sub-fights (groups of 2 focusing down targets), which is much more dynamic and interesting than zerg 1 vs zerg 2.

Lusternia of course is my one true love, so I got to thinking, how could we steal that dynamic system for breaking down group fights into smaller more interesting engagements, and make it work for Lusternia?

Problem: Group combat in Lusternia amounts to getting as big a group of people as you can together, teaching them to all target the same person and using one of your 3 most powerful spells to lock them down and kill them extremely quickly.  The biggest counter to this strategy is to break up the group, or pull single people out of the group and into your own zerg.  For a combat as deep and complex as Lusternia offers, the actual group combat strategies are extremely simple.

Solution:

Server side targeting -- Requires full balances but doesn't take balance.

Syntax: ENGAGE <target>

Most combat skills will use your engage target, PUNCH <target> for example would just turn into PUNCH [To save rewriting ABs: PUNCH <target> could be an optional syntax that engages & attacks simultaneously.]

Some skills could still be target-able, working outside of the engagement system.  Of course, these skills would be rare and very valuable.  Gust seems like a spell that would fall in this category.

edit: Bolded because people weren't seeing this line apparently:

Skills that hit all enemies would obviously work outside of the engagement system.  Some may need to be toned down for certain classes to not become extra imba in groups.

Add a skill 'Combat Awareness'

Syntax: SURVEY BATTLEFIELD 

Shows all of the people in the room, and who is engaging them

ex:

Ciaran is engaged by: Ushaara, Shedrin, Vivet

Ushaara is engaged by: Ciaran

Shedrin is unengaged

Vivet is unengaged

Syntax: ENGAGEMENTS <person>

Shows all of the people currently engaging the person

Finally, the juicy part:

Number of people engaging one person: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Chance of an attack to fail (dodge): 0% 0% 15% 30% 45% 60% 75% --- capped

Flavor wise, it would represent attackers jostling for position to make strikes against the target.  The fail message would be something along the lines of being knocked off balance by [whoever else is engaging].

It should be noted, this system would also allow people to try to game it by having them engage their allies, in essence giving them defenders.  This would also disable most of the defenders' ability to attack back however. It becomes a more dynamic process of keeping the someone engaged by allies, while the attackers try to kill off the defenders.  Obviously, it's a serious trade off to have 3 of your group engaging an ally in order to give them a dodge bonus.

Finally, I know we all hate dodge, but theoretically this system would encourage people to spread out their targeting more, avoiding dodge all together in favor of being more individually effective.

Daedalion

There are numerous reasons why this just wouldn't work. Most of which are all the area effect and group targetting abilities the game has. Not to mention demesnes themselves. Putting this in would be a major rework on the entire combat system and 50% of the skills.

Lithmeria has a unique combat setup completely different from Lusternia and all of the skills are built with that feature in mind.

Ciaran

Would you care to be more specific?

I stated group hitting abilities (Allies/Enemies based) would work outside of this system.

How would this rework any of the combat system?  1v1, 2v1, and 2v2 would be literally identical to how they are now.  These effects would only come into play in larger groups.

Edit: I should be more clear.  The goal of this change would be to significantly change the large group combat metagame.  Large group combat is pretty simple and unrewarding right now.  This change would make large group fights take more time, involve more decision making, and hopefully, be more fun.

The second goal was to not affect 1v1 combat at all, as this is what Lusternia is balanced around.  I don't want to touch that because it would require so much work to stabilize.

Kio

Gotta agree with Daedalion.  Especially with the advent of *chemancers and *woods.

This would utterly destroy what little use they have.  Also, how does someone dodge a room-wide attack?  Better yet, how does your ally swinging their sword make an advanced psionics user (who can sense people's minds without having to even be in the same room) miss their attacks?

Daedalion

Okay, I must have missed the part where area effects are outside this system.

But that brings up another question. If we're excluding demesne, chem/wood nukes and any and all ally/enemy hitting abilities. What's the point? This would effect monks/warriors and anyone else hitting with a direct attack. We'll all just switch to indirect and you'll still probably die just as quickly.

Ciaran

Kio said:

*chemancers and *woods.

This would utterly destroy what little use they have.  Also, how does someone dodge a room-wide attack?  Better yet, how does your ally swinging their sword make an advanced psionics user (who can sense people's minds without having to even be in the same room) miss their attacks?

That's a good point Kio, this change would probably make *chemancers and *woods more useless. I hadn't thought of that but it's true.  That's mainly symptomatic of chems and woods being really poor 1v1, which needs to be fixed anyway.  The issue there isn't my proposal, but specifically lacking skillsets.

Considering there are dodges that work against my psionics attacks, I see no issue with multiple people ganging up on one person distracting a psionicist's focus, flavor wise.

Ciaran

Daedalion said:

Okay, I must have missed the part where area effects are outside this system.

But that brings up another question. If we're excluding demesne, chem/wood nukes and any and all ally/enemy hitting abilities. What's the point? This would effect monks/warriors and anyone else hitting with a direct attack. We'll all just switch to indirect and you'll still probably die just as quickly.

First off: Warriors are already under the gun for crazy wound stacking in groups.

I assure you, killing someone with just indirect abilities would be much more difficult.  I'm ok with that, in my opinion it would be an improvement.

The idea here is to change group combat, not keep it the same.  Opening up new avenues for group strategy is a plus, not a minus.

Daedalion

Ciaran said:

I assure you, killing someone with just indirect abilities would be much more difficult.  I'm ok with that, in my opinion it would be an improvement.

It's not hard to kill someone with balestone, which is an indirect ability, just pointing that out. :P

Ciaran

Yeah, it would be on my list of "Some may need to be toned down for certain classes to not become extra imba in groups"

Alban

I like this idea. It builds an infrastructure that throttles the pace of the game somewhat and limits how "fast" you can go. This would, in the long run, let admins go a bit crazy and do more with abilities without worrying about it being too powerful in group combat. A big problem with IRE combat as a whole is that the only throttling mechanism is equilibrium/balance, which doesn't take into account groups at all.

Also, the flavour makes sense. 10 enemies shouldn't have room to hit 1 person at the same time. XD

I would also like to encourage future criticism to please read the whole post.  I've noticed in a lot of idea threads lately, like this one, the pvp currency, and the combat rankings thread, someone will propose something and then spend the next 5 replies restating portions of the post because people just read the subject. It just clutters up the thread and distracts from the main argument.

Synkarin

Lithmeria group combat, even with positioning doesn't last any longer than Lusternia group combat. It isn't any more thought out, strategized or anything. The only major difference is you say 'you two, take so and so, you two on so and so2 etc' 

It doesn't make it anymore interesting, dynamic or anything. These tactics are also already being used in Lusternia. There's been several group fights where we'll have certain people target and hinder warriors, while the rest of the group picks off other targets. 

Also, being able to still attack and afflict is part of what makes it work in Lithmeria, you're just doing so at a weaker strength. so 3 people are dealing 90% damage, that's still 270%, even at 5 doing 250% damage overall (50% from each person), is still better than missing 3 of 4 attacks. Missing attacks means more time to cure, heal up, shield up, serpent run away etc, where it doesn't really mean that in Lithmeria, you're still being super afflicted. 

I'm not really a fan of this proposal, in this form. 

Eventru

Without commenting on the design suggested itself, a cursory glance suggests it'd be a lot (a lot) of work with a very high likelihood for serious redesign/fixes for every class and skillset – all something to keep in mind when coming up with ideas.

Mainly, though, I just wanted to point out I've moved it to the Ideas board, since it probably belongs there a bit more than Common Grounds.

Ciaran

This isn't really about Lithmeria, but anyway your numbers are way off:

(Lithmeria positioning)

Attackers       1 2 3       4      5      6   

Effective%   100%  100%  66%  50% 40%  33%

You seem to ignore that three people attacking someone with a 15% dodge rate still will be much more effective than 2 people attacking someone with a 0% dodge rate.

The numbers could be tweaked, I put what seemed to be reasonable.

Synkarin said:

Even at 5 doing 250% damage overall (50% from each person), is still better than missing 3 of 4 attacks. 

You must have misread.  My proposal was for 5 attackers to have a 45% miss rate.  If you thought I scaled it up to 5 attackers having a 75% misrate, I would understand why you thought it was going overboard.

Ciaran

Eventru said:

Without commenting on the design suggested itself, a cursory glance suggests it'd be a lot (a lot) of work with a very high likelihood for serious redesign/fixes for every class and skillset – all something to keep in mind when coming up with ideas. Mainly, though, I just wanted to point out I've moved it to the Ideas board, since it probably belongs there a bit more than Common Grounds.

It would revamp group combat of sizes 3v3 or larger, but otherwise the whole goal was not to require significant changes to any skillsets.  A few skills like the aforementioned Balestone would need some tweaking most likely.

Synkarin

Ciaran said:

This isn't really about Lithmeria, but anyway your numbers are way off:

(Lithmeria positioning)

Attackers       1 2 3       4      5      6   

Effective%   100%  100%  66%  50% 40%  33%

You seem to ignore that three people attacking someone with a 15% dodge rate still will be much more effective than 2 people attacking someone with a 0% dodge rate.

The numbers could be tweaked, I put what seemed to be reasonable.

Synkarin said:

Even at 5 doing 250% damage overall (50% from each person), is still better than missing 3 of 4 attacks. 

You must have misread.  My proposal was for 5 attackers to have a 45% miss rate.  If you thought I scaled it up to 5 attackers having a 75% misrate, I would understand why you thought it was going overboard.

The numbers itself aren't really important, missing 1 of 2 attacks is still pretty crazy, especially if RNG doesn't go your way.

They also don't make it any more interesting, the only reason I brought up Lithmeria and their implementation against what you are suggesting was to show the comparison and to show why it works better there than this implementation would here. The group combat there isn't really any more interesting than it is here, even with positioning. There isn't all that more strategy beyond your specific class skills whether it's 1v1 or groups. Yes, you'll use certain attacks more or less depending on who you are partnered with, but the general flow is the same.

 I happen to enjoy leading a smaller group to beat a larger group. It's one of the reasons we tend to fight to the very end if it's not a huge disparity. I don't feel this would change things, just shift tactics in general and push people to group damage classes.

Ciaran

Fair enough!  I think this system would reward pairs or triplets that were really well coordinated against even larger groups.  Ultimately it's difficult and subjective to say how this change would really impact combat. I think it'd be a positive change, whereas you think it'd be negative!

Strongly disagree with this though.  How can you even say this?

Synkarin said:

The numbers (themselves) aren't really important

Xenthos

Ciaran said:

Fair enough!  I think this system would reward pairs or triplets that were really well coordinated against even larger groups.  Ultimately it's difficult and subjective to say how this change would really impact combat. I think it'd be a positive change, whereas you think it'd be negative!

Strongly disagree with this though.  How can you even say this?

Synkarin said:

The numbers (themselves) aren't really important

Why should three people get "more of an advantage" against a larger group?  Does this group of three really need to be given a further edge?

Edit: Because usually when this is done currently, it is a group of three people who have a great deal of skill versus a cluster of people who are only semi-capable.  Those three already have an advantage.  I don't see why the larger group should be rendered less effective in this manner.

Ciaran

Not trying to get into a semantics argument with you here Xenthos, but mitigating the disadvantages of having a numbers deficit isn't the same as giving the advantage to the smaller group.

3v6 is still strongly favoring the group of 6.  It's not like all 6 of them have to target one person for a huge miss rate.  They split their targets, hindering two of the opposing 3 and killing them........

Kio

I simply can't stand the idea of dodge rates being that for any circumstance. A reduction in damage, sure. But one person accidentally engaging and triggering that dodge rate can spell immediate disaster for strategies that involve pinpoint timing or affliction stacking.

Does this mean a higher skill cap for group combat? Yea, sure. But does the skill cap for group combat need to be raised? I don't think so.

Group combat is, even with big groups trying to focus down one person, innately complex by virtue of the text involved. The skill doesn't only come from strategies, but learning how to use them while being assaulted by the text wall of China.

This only adds another thing we have to learn to track, sort, and react upon during combat spam. This makes combat exponentially harder than it already is, and that seems to be something people don't want.

Synkarin

Per Xenthos example, a group fo 3 skilled combatants against a group of 6 semi-capable combatants, the 3 skilled ones are in pretty good shape to begin with, especially if they are working well together. Giving them a further advantage in raiding by causing the defenders to miss even at 15% isn't really going to help them. 

Also, I can say that the numbers aren't important because they aren't, you are suggesting that this will make group combat more exciting, thoughtful, strategic and just in general better. I don't think it will, whatever the numbers are. The combat in Lithmeria isn't any more interesting than it is here. Maybe it is to you since maybe it's got that new feel or whatever (I don't know how long you've been playing), but to me, I never changed strategies ever, even with certain partners, and we'd typically beat the other group, even with fewer numbers. If anything, the combat there was more montonous because I didn't need to change strategies whatsoever. 

Lerad

Yeah, dodge rate is bad. Lowering damage is the best way to go. Turn your percentages into extra dmp or something, that'd be a better idea, and affect way less things. 45% miss rate is horrendous. Beyond horrendous, it's ridiculous. No, beyond ridiculous, it's plain idiotic. With a 45% miss rate, 5 person hitting 1 person is less effective than 2 person hitting 1 person. This is illogical.

Diminishing return systems should be just that: diminishing returns. It means that poor strategy and planning should result in lower efficiency and thus a chance of losing the fight against more efficiently planned teams. Not negative efficiency. 5 people attacking the same guy should still hit harder and stronger than 4 people (which should hit harder than 3 people, which should hit harder than 2 people etc) but they should not stack linearly, but diminishingly.

When you put dodge into the system, you pretty much make this a negative returns system. It's no less than a soft limit on how many people you can have on a single target - the moment the dodge comes in, it's negative. You're coding in a "maximum 2 person hitting one target" soft limit, which is plain ridiculous. You'll definitely need to revise that part and then rethink the idea from that point on.

Xenthos

Ciaran said:

Not trying to get into a semantics argument with you here Xenthos, but mitigating the disadvantages of having a numbers deficit isn't the same as giving the advantage to the smaller group.

3v6 is still strongly favoring the group of 6.  It's not like all 6 of them have to target one person for a huge miss rate.  They split their targets, hindering two of the opposing 3 and killing them........

3v6 is not favouring the group of six by default (much less strongly so).  It is entirely based on who comprises the 3 and the 6.  Combat is not entirely down to the numbers.  Never has been and never will be.  Skill and coordination are a huge part of the equation.

Therefore, when certain people are proud of the fact that they raid 3vX and do well, it is very hard to see this sort of suggestion as anything but "we want to do even better when we're outnumbered but grossly outmatching the opponents in ability".

Sorry, but I just don't see any need for that.

Alacardael

Per 3v6:

The group of 6 don't need to hit the 15% dodge rate -- it seems like all of you are assuming that they will. All they need to do is divide up their targets so that 2 of them would hit 1 target.

However, I agree that the Lithmerian combat system would be useless in Lusternia. Lusternian combat was already built upon the idea that, in a 3v6, all the people on 6 would hit one person on the 3 and work their way down (as evidenced by the posts above mine that seem to assume that the 6 people would always hit 15% malus). On the other hand, Lithmerian combat is being designed with Positioning in mind.

Enyalida

The problem is that many of the afflictions in Lusternia are binary, and in Lithmeria, they are not. That means that in Lith, you can easily introduce a sliding mechanism wherein damage and afflictions are toned down by a percent - because afflictions already are tracked just like damage, with a numerical value based on your attack strength and their defense, and so on. The only way to replicate that sort of thing here for afflictions is dodging them entirely, which sucks because some attacks and afflictions should definitely have priority and would be dodged away because someone else is punching the target. 

Ciaran

Yes, the binary afflictions are an issue I was trying to overcome.

I think the overall idea is a good one, the execution has evident drawbacks, but I would like to do something to slow down the death rate in large group combat.  It sucks when you're first target, get crucifieded and bursted down by 10 people in under 10s...

This has happened to me.

Rivius

Well, do all afflictions need a general dodge rate per person hitting? I believe Veyrzhul had a report up that suggested making damage, mana/ego drains, vessels and so forth just have a reduction per people hitting you. Not entirely sold on anything, but it seems like a better idea and needs less of an overhaul of combat mechanics.