Combat Spam and Skillsets
Ambrose
Texas
I saw some mention of this over on the Experience Loss thread and didn't want to derail it further, but as far as reducing combat spam, it strikes me that a lot of that is tied to certain passive skills. The ones that come to mind in a big way immediately are Hunting (as an Outrider, I'm biased here) and devotion rites. And probably a few others that don't come to mind right now. As a lot of these skills are holdovers from other IRE games and Imperian seems to be trying to separate itself as a bit more unique in regards to a lot of that, and was wondering if the idea was on the table to overhaul some of these skills?
I haven't been back long enough to see how the balance out or anything like that so I am not going to put anything solid on the table, but I do enjoy the ideas behind a lot of what is happening to edit current secondary skills with making them more active (Hunter's basilisk... Mage's secondary skills... etc). I like the added control of these instead of 'summon posse' 'order posse smash the heathen' and then poke with a sharp, pointy stick as necessary and really just bide my time to let the bleed pet do his work or shoot for hypothermia stacks to let loose death on someone.
I know these aren't simple overhauls, and Priests and Outriders both seem to have had (fairly?) recent overhauls with other skill sets already, but was just curious about thoughts on that or other ways to reduce combat spam that you guys have.
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"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Ahkan orders a small wildebeast to attack you.
Ahkan orders a fat woodling to attack you.
Ahkan orders Olanre to eye laser you.
Devotion isn't that spammy. I'm not sure what the issue is there. As a victim of it, most messages are on line that I'd like to keep. For the devotion user, they're all pretty small...I guess you could thin them down to +20, revitlization. Affliction healed (healing).
Also, if you want to thin down on combat spam we need to direct more people to use separators, because it makes you look pro. I'm not sure how to look at newbies and say, "SEPARATORS ARE YOUR FRIEND. SEPARATORS ARE FRIENDS OF YOUR FRIENDS"
We already lost learning messages (which I liked the flavor of), lets not trim any more than the somewhat excessive "X orders y to pulverize you," please
A lot of the problem stems from the added complexity of the new Imperian classes being combo attacks. My average Druid combo is TWELVE lines of text on my side, with a 120 wrapwidth.
Condense the wisp summon and wisp attack into one line. Condense the envenom, stab, and empower messages into one line. Drop the empowerments message, which nobody tracks like that. Let me track elemental powers from the prompt.
We've just cut my combo's lines in half without any real loss. Well. My messages suck, but if you made good ones, there wouldn't be any real loss.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
On the topic of separators, and while I haven't done yet the new tutorial, wouldn't be there space to show newbies how to set and use a simple one? Like a task where something drops when you do an action, but resets when you send an individual command to pick it up. Then a lil fairy would appear and go like 'Hey, listen! Looks like you can use separators here.'
I also admit that I'm guilty of not using separators yet for all my attacks. Going slowly there.
He connects to the right leg!
Septus balls up one fist and hammerfists Lionas.
He connects to the right leg!
This has always bothered me. It is just plain annoying.
DSL and weapon attacks rebounding been a different message.
Anyone with knowledge about a #gag command will forever ignore Predator stance changes. I don't know WHY I should see their stance dance.
As far as separators go, I think it would be worthwhile to introduce a default separator like "\\" and work it into the intro, especially for classes that have combo attacks.
The separator is an awesome thing that is full of awesomeness. It's also combat mandatory in many aspects, as it completely removes the ability for the opponent to slide a parry inside your feint/punch/punch combo, or a juniper in after your DSL but before your bcry. It also massively reduces your spam and may possibly cure cancer.
But by the time people are informed about the separator, they've quite likely got a system full of freaking semicolons, and they can't be bothered to change it, because they either don't care about the performance increase or don't realize it exists. Making it clear that the separator exists from the start would let them start building it into their aliases and such right away.
It would also be pretty awesome if the in-game alias system could be modified to allow for the use of separators and multi-command internal aliases. Something like "setalias dslcry ((dsl &target oxalis strychnine\\battlecry target))", using the parenthesis to indicate the the separator is part of the alias, and not meant to be immediately parsed.
If you teach them things like this early on, they won't have to go unlearn all their bad habits and change all their existing code when they later realize that they did it completely wrong because you failed to tell them about such an important feature.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
You could probably hack this in by adding the damage source to CONFIG HEALTHINFO.
So it would look like :
Orc100456 : 45 cutting (90 raw)
And the affliction message would come afterward. You might not be able to identify the attack with that alone, but you'll know what's happening to you.
There are three ways to reduce the effect of combat spam :
1. Slow things down, which gives player time to read.
2. Have less messages, which gives the player less to read, and thus more time.
3. Give the players skills that work reliably over time, which allows players to ignore most messages.
I tend to prefer the third option, and many of the current ents are a good example. You simple sic them on your target, and they do their thing until it either falls dead or the ent is killed. That counts as a constant affliction on the target which you don't have to keep track of. We should all be so lucky.
Conversely, it's a pain in the ass for the person on the receiving end, who doesn't know what's going on.
I tend to see the trend toward damage dealing abilities as a good sign. Then all the player has to do is heal or prevent damage.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Not gonna lie, this isn't the responsibility of the game. Reading speeds vary. Comprehension may vary.You log fights. You can enjoy all the subtle nuances of your health bar plummeting against a druid while you do everything in the world to avoid it. As for combat. Highlights. Subs. They're my friends. They should be yours too.
2. Have less messages, which gives the player less to read, and thus more time.
Less messages really means less information. I want to know that Tiala is spamming judge. I want to know that Sarrius is at 49% mana, it lets me know that the malignist we have isn't going to catharsis. I want to see the blinking lights that say "Your teammate left to the west" and "Your teammate is dead." That's when I need to switch my playlist to something heroic so I can die awesomely. Good combatants need this information. How about, less information in these messages. I don't need to know that Bathan's sword is inky and black when it's hitting me. It's a damned sword.
3. Give the players skills that work reliably over time, which allows players to ignore most messages.
My skills work all the time. All day, erryday. Not sure what class you're playing. Maybe you mean DoT battles? Snoozer.
DSL AULANI *bounce bounce* DRINK HEALTH *bounce* EAT TOADSTOOL *BOUNCE* WRITHE *bounce* DRINK HEALTH *bounce bounce*
EDIT: I'd also like to see DSL slashes have one, uniform message, just for gagging purposes.
Just, Bathan slashes into NAME!
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
Toxin stacks are a good example of the third option, and the sort of thing that I tend to like. You merely iterate on what's already present. (By the way, that's the only part I really argued for. I don't like the other 2, but they are consistently used. Thanks for wasting whitespace, though.)
However, toxin stacks are an offensive mechanic, and what we do with triggers, subs, and highlights is largely defensive. That's the part I'd like to whittle down with game mechanics, as curing is currently a very linear process.
Moving on to things we can change right now, one tweek that I would positively love to have is the option to highlight our own actions in-game. In the middle of a fight, it can be hard to distinguish your actions from your enemy's, especially if they fight similarly. In the middle of a team fight, it can be hard to distinguish your attack from three or four of your allies' attacks. That combined with the variable length of many attack messages can make it hard to highlight in a manner that doesn't make you want to cut out your eyes.
It the combat spam, I don't even see that because it's white on black. Thus, it is not important to my winning/surviving. Honestly, I don't even see that message that often. I see it afking and bashing. S'bout it.
Honestly, it's stuff like this that I'm worried about losing. This is nice flavor. The arghpee nerds would call this immersion. We're talking about combat spam here, kids.
Ahkan hits you for four lines of blahblahblah.
Lionas hits you with four lines of impeccable grammar.
We're not talking about rare messages.
Most of my combat spam is my own doing. There's no avoiding it. I'm going to assume most your combat spam is your own. My screen has 34 lines of text available.
Things I think we can do to make this less stupid.
-For the love of all the is holy, remove the absolute spam wagon derp fest that is aconite, replace it with like 1-48 unique messages telling me how dumb I am, that only I see. Also remove taking off pants and armor. Uncool.
Dsl ziat
You ponder the mysteries of the word "doughnut."