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TL;DR - increase the cancel window on heavy attacks and their attack speed, and chip damage. Remove guaranteed guard breaks from basic parries. Add a counter-parry mechanic to parry parries, give this counter a punishable recovery time if used when a parry did not happen. Remove the flashing from the attack indicator to make feints more convincing. Reduce the timing window on guard breaks and maybe make some other changes such as a more noticeable icon, greater stamina cost, cannot interrupt heavy attacks, or reduced throw distance. Nerf deflections. Nerf storm rush so Orochi have a reason to do something else. Myriad of minor class tweaks. More friendly fire and narrow hallways to keep numbers reasonable, and a 2-tiered revenge system to better balance the mechanic. Various control preferences with an alternate control scheme to help with guard break and cancel responsiveness. A plea to have gear be cosmetic with a redesign of the system in case it is not.
I wanted to make a post like this after watching a ton of skilled footage but after going through about 30 hours of footage it has largely confirmed my initial suppositions i had at the end of the alpha, so i’ve opted to make this post now and i will post an updated version at a much later date after i have viewed all available footage if seeing said footage changes my opinion on anything (at this point i have around 50 hours worth of additional footage, and increasing daily, to get through).
I personally did not get to play much during this alpha due in large part to some pretty severe insomnia i’ve been suffering from recently and since i gave the bulk of my feedback based on my own experiences last test i opted to focus on my feedback this test on watching other people play with emphasis given to high level balance. I also made a point of consulting with several players who’ve made appearances on the leaderboards to keep this post from being exclusive to my own personal experiences, which (in my own opinion) is based on a ‘decent but not great’ skill level. But before i detail the meta as it stands now i want to stress a couple things.
Firstly, only half the meta is present. There are an additional six classes none of us have seen yet and they could have abilities that shift the meta one way or the other. So it’s important to note that ALL feedback given by the community is based purely on our collective experiences with the six classes we have available to us. Secondly, how people perceive game balance is heavily influenced by the their own skill level and the skill level of their opponents, and this can even vary from platform to platform. Having viewed around 30 hours of footage so far I have noticed that the level of competition seems to be slightly higher on the PC compared to the PS4 due to many of the experiences players from previous tests being on PC, for example. Ultimately the problems with the meta at the highest skill levels will be the same on any platform but it will be more or less pronounced based on the community you happen to find yourself in.
Lastly, I’ve found that the general player base has a very aggressive playstyle which is simply not present at the highest skill levels because, as i will detail below, the meta heavily favors defensive play. This means that most players will be dealing with issues such as a player spamming guard breaks for constant damage that is simply not present at the highest levels of play. With that said it’s important to note that such complaints cannot be ignored even if it is partially, or even entirely, explainable with a responce of ‘you just need to git gud’. There are ways to balance things so that the general player base sees a big impact while the highest levels of play see very little impact. The devs cannot, and should not, tailor this game exclusively to the top 1% of players nor should they exclude the top 1% of players. So, with all that said, let’s dive in.
After watching as much gameplay as i could manage in the time i had i have come to conclusion that combat in for honor can be divided into two groups:
Group A: General player base - hyper aggressive, tend to build strategies around strength in numbers with lots of light attacks with constant guard break attempts thrown in to keep the opponent overwhelmed and off balance.
Group B: Hardcore duelists - hyper defensive, tend to build strategies around parrying into guaranteed guard breaks then throwing their enemy into a wall to guarantee a heavy attack. The strategy is built around min-maxing risks, with the hyper defensive play punishing any attack the opponent makes while risking little to no damage in retaliation.
So why did this meta come about? There are a few contributing factors. Firstly, the tutorial sucks. Not only does it not teach the mechanics that are vital to dealing with aggressive playstyle of group A, it doesn’t even mention them! Countering guard breaks and how to do parries is never discussed or even mentioned save for the videos tucked away in the heroes section of the menu. To find those videos you got to go from the main menu to a different tab, go to the heroes menu, click on a hero, click on how to play, and there are the videos. Then the videos are so crammed with information that it completely overwhelms a new player with information. Watching a lot of videos of first time players i saw most of them completely miss the videos, then find out about them from someone else only to watch the videos and stop halfway through because it was too much info at once, opting instead to just learn the hard way by experimenting in actual matches. The result is a player pool full of people who have no idea how to tech guard breaks (or even how to identify one is happening before it’s too late), parry, feint, organize incoming attacks into something defensible, etc. Naturally with a such a poor explanation of survival techniques you’re going to have a meta built around aggression, numbers, and overwhelming offence.
What about the hardcore duelists? How did a hyper-defensive meta when the general player base seemed to develop in such an aggressive direction? In my opinion it has to do with the fact that duels and brawls are a more ‘controlled environment’. You don’t have points to cap, minions to slay, or 1v3’s to run away from. You just have you, maybe a teammate, and your opponent(s). Free of distraction, players were able to focus more on learning mechanics, learning that attack X is safe in situation Y and Z, learning when things are risky and when they are not. In that environment, a number of discoveries come to light:
- being out of stamina doesn’t impact your defences, therefor being out of stamina is not risky.
- guard breaks are very easy to tech once you know what to look for.
- heavy attacks are slow, obvious, and easily parried.
- full attack chains are limited, predictable, and easily parried.
- whiffing a parry too early results in a heavy attack. Late parries simply result in a block followed by a heavy attack. Heavy attacks can be cancelled if cancel is pressed quickly. Connecting with the parry causes the cancel button to do nothing. Therefore, if i press cancel quickly after i try to parry one of three things will happen.
1. I parry and then press cancel unnecessarily
2. I immediately cancel my early heavy attack then block the incoming attack
3. I block the attack then cancel my late heavy attack
- the attack indicator flashes during the parry timing, making it hard to mistime
- If i stand next to a wall or pit and always wait for an attack to parry I can turn any parried attack into a guaranteed heavy attack or kill.
- 99% of players are too impatient to wait for you to leave the wall as long as you’re willing to let the timer run out and result in a tie.
- Feints are cancelled heavy attacks. They can only be cancelled during the early part of the animation, before the flashing parry window. Light attack animations are different from heavy attack animations. Light attacks start flashing almost immediately, especially the fastest light attacks. Therefore, if i see an incoming attack and it is flashing almost immediately, it is a light attack and i can parry it without risking a feint. If there is no flash it is a heavy attack and I have time to wait for him to either cancel it or commit to the attack, which i then parry (and convert into a safe heavy attack).
- it takes only 3-4 heavy attacks to kill a player at full health. Therefore i need only parry 3-4 attacks to win.
The result is a player who stands by a wall. Does nothing until you approach. Does not fall for feints, techs every guard break, parries every attack into a heavy attack. Will he be able to prevent every guard break, and parry every single attack? Probably not, but he will prevent enough and parry enough that he will kill you long before you can kill him. Given how predictable heavy attacks are, how easy guard breaks are to tech, and how unconvincing feints are, you are likely only getting in with the occasional light attack, maybe a combo of two. Meanwhile he needs only to parry you 3 times and you die. It’s even worse against a berserker who can deflect into an untechable guard break, which highlights the well known problems with deflections. Now you may argue, “playing like that sounds really boring and not fun.” You’d be right, it’s not fun...but you win a lot, and it’s a staple of gaming culture that players are more likely to play a boring way to win and stop playing altogether when they bore of it rather than play the less optimal ‘fun’ way. Is that stupid? Probably, but there’s no avoiding it so it simply must be solved through design.
Fortunately that’s actually pretty straightforward (if a lot of work for the devs, hats off to you guys!). The problems are largely due to improper risk/reward incentives. If i try to guard break i either get teched, hit with a light attack, or get in safe damage. If i attack i risk a parry or my attack is blocked or i get in 1 hit. If i try to deflect and fail, i lose nothing as i simply block the attack. If i try to parry too soon or too late i can usually quickly cancel my heavy attack before i can be punished for my slip up. With guard breaks being so easily teched my opponent is forced to attack to win or they must accept a tie. Simply by accepting that you might get a tie you will find your patient will almost always outweigh your opponents. With your opponent forced to attack, and your parries so safe to do, the result is pretty obvious. You’ll either win or get a tie, and you’ll do it by doing the lowest risk moves that yield the highest reward, which happen to be all defensive moves. So the way to fix this meta is to make those low risk moves riskier, or make them less rewarding, or make the other moves more rewarding, or less risky, or some combination of those options.
Let’s first tackle the whole issue of ‘wall camping’. I find it amusing that berserkers are supposed to be these fierce aggressive warriors but the best duelists that play them are usually found by a wall or pit, loitering. There are basically two ways to prevent hyper-defensive play in general.
Method A “The deadline”: The deadline is straightforward, one side is winning by default. If the time runs out, that side wins. This forces the other side into action. Players take turns on each side to keep things even. This is the approach games like Counter-Strike take.
Method B “The race”: The race presents players with a simple reality, the first one to act is winning. This is the approach games like Starcraft take, the sooner you tech up, expand your control of the map, build your army, the sooner you will win. Fall behind and you lose.
Most games take a combination of the two methods, for example For Honor’s own dominion mode combines these methods. Dominion is straightforward, you need points to win. You get more points by controlling zones and killing minions, so the first team to control the zones and kill the minions is winning. This forces the teams to race to the zones and fight for control of them. Once a team has a majority of zones it shifts to the deadline method, one team is winning and the other team must act or lose. If the front ever goes to neutral while both sides have equal points it shifts back to the race, the first team to cap the front is winning again.
What i suggest is two changes, one of which may already been in the game (never seen 2 players agree to be patient enough to let the time run out).
1. The player with the highest health (by percentage, no cheesing you dirty conquerors :P) will win if the time runs out. This simply incentives players to value a balance of offence and defence.
2. The time limit in duels is reduced from 5 minutes to 3 minutes. You may argue that you’ve had some duels run into the four minute mark but i would argue that such a duel is a by product of the defensive meta and will be getting changed by my other suggestions.
I find that in brawls the fact that your teammate could get killed and land you in a 2v1 is enough of an incentive to engage in combat and, with the other changes i intend to suggest, should be sufficient incentive to attack. These two changes cause an obvious playstyle to develop: Whoever has the highest health will behave in the safest manner possible in order to maintain their lead (and i intent to make that safest manner possible be: attack), the lower health player is forced to attack order to take the lead away from the higher health player. Both players are forced to at least attack once in order to gain a health advantage (the race method), once a health advantage is achieved it forces the losing player to act (the deadline).
Now this suggestion only works if attacking is indeed the ‘the safest manner possible’ to achieve a health advantage. There are a number of changes that need to made in order for this to happen:
1. Feints need to not suck.
2. Parrying needs to have a risk to suit its reward, or a reward that suits its risk.
3. Deflections need to have a risk to suit its reward, or a reward that suits its risk.
4. Guard breaks need to get in against good players sometimes.
5. Heavy attacks need to be viable.
6. Every class needs either a good fast poke attack, or a good mix up to get in damage. Preferably both and to different degrees for each class to keep them varied and feeling different.
The original design of the mechanics is pretty clear. Players can do an attack chain, feint, or guard break. The opponent can either block, or parry the attack, or tech the guard break. If players attacked a lot they get parried and punished. If players feinted a lot they would do no damage. If players guard broke a lot they would get teched constantly. If players blocked a lot they would get guard broken and punished. If players parried a lot they would get fooled by a feint and punished. If players teched guard breaks a lot they would get attacked. It’s basically a game of rock/paper/scissors, but with longswords. I have a hard time imagining how to better improve the game
The problem became feints were built around canceling heavy attacks and failed parries resulted in heavy attacks. Which allowed for a window where you could cancel a failed parry if you were quick, which most top duelists are. This meant parries would become super safe unless the cancel window was short. But since the cancel window was short the feint couldn’t last long which made them unconvincing. Guard breaks getting teched a lot is honestly a lesser problem and a straightforward one to fix i’ll detail later in the post. Once deflections were added it merely compounded the problem, but the bulk of the balance issue is simply due to how parries and feints interact with heavy attacks so i’ll focus on that first.
I ran a number of ideas through some mock scenarios in my head and all encountered various problems. Removing the cancel and feints have to be completely reworked, and there’s not much they could be reworked into. Reducing the parry timing just makes it harder to learn and negatively impacts dominion mode’s larger player count but once players get the hang of it you end up with the same problem. Making parrying less rewarding just makes players block instead, which is progress but but is essentially rendering the mechanic useless and making combat in general less fun. So i searched the forums for inspiration, mostly found threads complaining about guard break spam and the orochi plague (i will address both in this post), but there were a couple threads noting the same issues i was noticing in the combat that suggested that one could parry a parry as a means of making parries riskier. I liked the base premise but it had a number of flaws, in order for a parry to be parryable you’d have to make parries force an attack if whiffed, which screws with the canceling of heavies making them even less viable than they were before and causes some problems with outnumbered fights (you need to parry to create openings and if a parry forces an attack that could really screw you in that situation). I could go on but for the sake of brevity i’ll just say i didn’t like the way people were suggesting it be implemented, though i still liked the idea. Stumped, i visited my parents who live a few blocks away from my place. They’re both casual gamers and my step father is ex-military and a former wargames enthusiast, so i often find just bouncing ideas off them is beneficial. They have an xbox one so while i was chatting with them i hopped on and started fooling around in Killer Instinct. Killer Instinct is a very mind game heavy fighting game where a player executes a combo and the opposing player must play a guessing game to break out of the combo at a specific time, but the comboing player can counter that break if he predicts when it will happen but if his prediction is incorrect he drops the combo and is stuck in a long recovery animation for easy punishment. It goes deeper with other mechanics of the game but the basic premise is players play a mind game around breakers and counter-breakers. I realised a very similar mechanic would fit the whole parryable parries thing i wanted to work and that is the solution i will be presenting. The mechanic works as follows:
Parries work exactly as they do now with two exceptions, the attack indicator no longer flashes so feints can afford to be more convincing, and you can no longer get a guaranteed guard break off any parry. You can still attempt the guard break but it’s techable now. This is to make it so if you want that free heavy from the parry, you have to parry light attacks. This incentives riskier parries. Parrying is currently a 4 frame window by my estimates and i suggest it stays that way.
The attacking player can, during any parryable attack, press the heavy attack button to attempt a counter-parry. This counter-parry immediately cancels your current attack into a special parry animation, this animation should have a 4-frame window (maybe less?) where if any parry happens within that window it is instantly parried, this counter-parry counts as a parrying a light in terms of how much stagger it causes. The drawback is that if the opponent doesn’t parry during the counter-parry window, the player is stuck in a long recovery animation where they can be punished by light, heavy, or guard break, all free. This creates an escalating amount of risk built around a mind game. It also naturally encourages attacking over defending. I’ll detail some theoretical examples after i explain the feint, heavy attack, and guard break changes.
Feints remain as simply a cancelable heavy attack. Only since the punishment for parries is immediate with the counter-parry mechanic, the timing can afford to be much more liberal and later in the animation. I’d also recommend having heavy attacks simply be faster in general and deal significantly more chip damage when blocked. This makes heavy attacks far scarier since you have less time to deal with a cancelable into just about anything, damage-through-blocks, attack coming toward your face. The cancel-ability is simply to make them less predictable and feints more convincing and the increased damage is to encourage more heavy attacks at the higher levels of play and to encourage players to attempt to parry or deflect them in order to avoid the chip damage, which ties back into our counter-parry mechanic.
The guard break change is pretty straightforward. The timing is too liberal, shorten it by, say, 30%. See how that timing pans out next test. “But what about everyone having so much trouble with guard break spam?” Two things. Firstly, the timing absolutely cannot be any later than it currently is which means that the changes have to be elsewhere to help people who struggle with the timing. Secondly, if they’re not hitting the timing now then making it shorter isn’t going to make them hit it any less. To help these people i think the solutions needs to be more indirect. Having teching guard breaks be detailed in the tutorial with some actual practice for it would do wonders for people, and maybe give guard breaking a sound cue or have the broken shield icon flash will help people recognize that it’s happening, because i honestly believe that is what most people struggle with about guard breaks. Newbies have difficulty even recognizing that the guard break is happening before it’s too late, so simply making it more noticeable with a more robust tutorial is gonna do wonders for the general player base. If people still struggle with it, maybe reduce the throw distance by a few feet so they have to be closer to traps to use them, will reduce how frequently they’re spammed. The devs could also make it so opening heavy attacks aren’t interrupted by a guard break during their wind up, this would help further encourage heavy attacks. One interesting option is to simply bind it to a different button, preferably one that you don’t have to take your thumb off of the right stick for on a controller. My vote is for L3 with sprint bound to B(xbox controller) so feint/cancel can be bound to L1. This allows for more responsive guard breaks and feints while quick chat and sprinting get sidelined in favor of the combat abilities because those are abilities you need to press quickly. You’re not sprinting in the middle of a melee, you are at the very least rolling away first so it’s not as important as guard break or feint. I wouldn’t recommend this as the default control scheme though as i doubt newbies will appreciate the importance of having guard break readily accessible. Another change that could be made is to drastically increase its stamina cost. This would impact the general player base a lot more than the top players because the top players don’t spam guard breaks, if guard breaks weren’t so easily teched they would still be used frequently but at the higher levels of play if players are encouraged to attack you’re gonna see less guard break spamming and more reliance on good mixups and feints to complete attack chains so upping the stamina cost is going to have a greater impact on the general player base than it would at the highest levels of play. I want to detail some stamina changes later that will tie into my combat changes as well as detail the much need changes to deflections, but i first want to finish discussing the counter-parry by providing some examples of how combat could potentially play out to address some concerns i expect people to have with the system.
Let’s say you have a raider who wants to hit a very skilled warden who is wall camping. With the current combat system the raider would be in a bad spot. If he charges and attempts a grab the warden can simply dodge and initiate his own shoulder bash or toss out a fast light attack to chain into his shoulder bash/guard break mix up, or he can just do nothing after the dodge and wait for the raider to attack. If the raider tries to guard break he simply gets teched. If he tries to attack he will very probably get parried and if the first attack doesn’t get parried the second one very probably will, and then the warden will guard break him and toss him into the wall for a free top heavy or do his side light combo to chain into his shoulder bash/guard break mix up to try to keep the raider pinned against the wall for more free hits, if he’s playing defensive he’ll opt for the heavy then go back to waiting. If the raider feints the warden simply checks to see if it’s a light attack, if it is he parries, if not he waits till its out of the cancel window then he parries. The raider could try some wonky strat of retreating to charge again, or try to mix up his heavies with his top light stun attack to attack at greater range than most would suspect, but this is a very skilled warden who is likely seen these tricks before and is unlikely to fall for them. The warden simply dodges the charge just like the first time, and blocks the top light stun attack then parries any followup attack. The raider is pretty much screwed.
Now let’s run through that same scenario but with my suggested changes. If the raider charges he’s still in the same boat he was before as the warden can still just dodge it into various options. If the raider goes for a guard break he has a better chance of getting in than he did before but in this scenario the warden is very skilled so it’s unlikely he would fall for a guard break opener as it is a pretty common move against a defensive opponent so my changes don’t have an impact on this front either for this specific scenario. But what if the raider attacks? Well, now we have some more options. If he tries to mix up his heavies with his top light stun attack it puts the warden in a tight spot as the heavy attack can be cancelled much later now given him less time to adapt to mix up, the chip damage from the heavy if followed through is of minor concern to this warden as it is the beginning of the fight so the warden has ample health to worth with and can afford to lose a bit to chip damage so it’s likely not worth the risk of parrying. If the raider does switch to his top light to warden will likely just block it given that he doesn’t want to risk getting counter parried until he has a better understanding of this raider’s playstyle, the raider also doesn’t want to risk whiffing a counter parry as he thinks the warden is unlikely to parry an opening attack. So let’s say the raider follows through with the heavy because he doesn’t want to risk doing a top attack against a warden but the heavy is blocked by the warden, that’s fine, the raider can go into a light attack next to prevent the warden from guard breaking or going for an attack of his own and keep him on his toes. Before it would have been an obvious and easy parry into a heavy attack punish, but now there’s the risk of a counter parry. In this case, the warden wagers that the raider will want to follow up the light attack with his unblockable and is less likely to try to counter-parry his unblockable because doing so would cancel the attack and leave him vulnerable of the warden opted for the more likely dodge (which the raider intends to punish with a cancel into another attack) so the warden blocks the light then sees the unblockable start, moves toward it as if to motion to dodge under the blow but instead goes for the parry, the raider did not expect this so it goes off, it’s a heavy parry so the warden does not get a heavy attack or a guaranteed guard break so he opts for his side light combo into his shoulder bash/guard break mix up which the raider successfully escapes from. Now the warden has the health advantage having only taken the chip damage of 1 heavy while dishing out 2 light attacks which forces the raider into action. The warden continuing his strategy of safe plays opts to go on the offensive, why? Because the warden can transition from his fast top light into his shoulder bash mixup and chain that with his side lights infinitely, risking a parry on the opening strike only. He views this as safer than defending because on defence he would have to worry about the raider chipping him with heavy damage and mixups until the warden was forced to try a parry which would be a predictable parry attempt and thus likely to get counter-parried. So he opts for the fast top light which the raider parries into a heavy attack followed a light attack, the warden tries to parry the followup in an attempt to regain the health advantage only to get counter-parried by the raider who predicted the desperation parry. The counter-parry allows the raider a free heavy attack which the raider follows up with another heavy that he cancels into a guard break, the warden keeps his cool and punishes the guard break with a top light into a shoulder bash mix up, which the raider avoids and tries to counter with a light attack. The raider, expecting the warden to do another desperation parry, goes for the counter-parry only to have it whiff as the warden merely moved to block the light attack. The warden then punishes the whiffed counter-parry with a top heavy into another top heavy that he cancels into a guard break that he follows with a side light combo/shoulder bash chain for the win.
This is of course a specific example of one small fight and the result was the same as the first example. The more skilled warden, playing a defensive game built around making the safest moves possible, won the round. But there were a lot more mind games at play and the raider had more offensive options thanks to a later feint window and the threat of counter- parries in his offence. Had the raider been better with his reads he could have won the round.
On to stamina! I think stamina in general is fine. People complain that you don’t ever really run out of stamina but that has a lot to do with the fact that most people are **** at blocking, and blocking is what reduces the bulk of your stamina (along with the occasional parry). A lot of people argue that sprinting should consume stamina. The main motive for doing this seems to be to discourage people from running away, which is a sentiment i never understood. If sprinting drains stamina then it works both ways and all he’s gotta do is block a couple attacks so he has more stamina than you and then run and then he could run away even better than before! With that said i think the solution is to have stamina drain from sprinting but very, very slowly, and then have a stamina cost increase to sprinting when below 50% and a steeper cost increase when down to 1 bar of health so a wounded opponent can’t run forever. As far as combat is concerned i’m personally happy with how stamina is managed with one exception, and that is when you run completely out of stamina. There is no defence penalty for being out of stamina. Why the hell not? Why does my character struggle to toss out an attack when out of stamina but can parry and dodge with his usual precise, lightning-fast reflexes? Having no penalty to your defences while out of stamina makes it very hard to penalise a player for bad stamina management, especially if that player is relatively skilled at parries. I think the best solution here is to have being out of stamina make you unable to parry, take increased chip damage from heavy attacks, and have a minimum of a 3 second cooldown between dodge dashes. This forces the player to dodge the first swing then block the next which will likely deal a lot of chip damage. Mix in some guard breaks and you could punish a clumsy player pretty hard. Though keep in mind that my suggested combat changes will likely result in less parries and more blocks overall so stamina will be draining more frequently on average.
Deflections...are completely broken. Hmm, let’s give a 3rd of the classes in the game a defence that negates all blockable damage, only risks damage if you’re really bad at the game, and gives free hits, and all you need to do is time a block. Seems legit right? As much as people complain about the orochi’s deflection the berserker’s guard break off the deflection is far worse. It’s just that the berserker is harder to play in general due to their unique light-heavy-light chain, and they don’t have a 2nd completely broken ability like the orochi’s storm rush. So just like before we have a simple risk vs reward issue where the risk is minimal and the reward is free damage. Just for future reference to the devs, a player should never EVER get free damage without having a serious risk of taking damage in return. You may say, well if you time it late you get hit, and sure, you’re not wrong about that but why would i time it late? If i time it early i block, if i time it properly i deflect and if i time it late i get hit so i’m going to err on the side of early so really, i’m either gonna block or deflect. Timing it late is very, very rare for anyone who is even remotely good at the game. It’s not a hard timing to learn, it’s easy to err in a way that doesn’t risk damage, and it gives free damage in return. And the berserker one is just insane, if he’s by a wall (which any good berserker will be because of how powerful it is) he can turn any deflection into a guaranteed heavy. Every unsafe attack gets immediately punished with a heavy, and he risks essentially nothing by doing so. That is hands down, the most powerful ability in the game. I’ll be ranting about how broken storm rush is later in this post but honestly, the berserker’s deflect is more broken. So there’s two ways we can deal with this: we can either make the deflection far riskier to match it’s free damage, or we can nerf the **** out of it so it’s reward matches its lack of risk. While a lot of the people suggest that deflections work more like parries i personally dislike that suggestion because it devalues the warden’s counter-strike ability. I’d rather go the route of less reward to match its risk. With that in mind i am suggesting the following changes:
Baseline - deflection negates all blockable damage, including the chip damage from heavy attacks, but the timing is a bit narrower. You can go immediately into a light attack but the attack is both blockable and parryable at the baseline level.
Orochi - light attack deflection - Same as baseline light attack but faster. Rather than have powerful deflections i’ll be giving the orochi some goodies that tie into the counter-parry mechanic because i think given how accessible the orochi are in general they would benefit from having their more powerful abilities behind a few more ‘design hoops’ (basically i want to earn that power), so i’ve deliberately suggested that the orochi have ‘lackluster’ deflection attacks in order to shift their counter attack power into their specials and counter-parries.
Orochi - heavy attack deflection - Given that this ability is already countered by any light attack i thinks largely fine as is, though there are situations where you can guarantee it, so i would simply suggest that the ability be parryable (and by extension counter-parryable) like any unblockable and that it be given the unblockable icon when attacking so newbies learn quickly that you can’t block it.
Berserker - guard break deflection - There’s no way to nerf this without breaking it. Either the guard break is guaranteed in which case it’s completely overpowered or it’s techable in which case it will always be teched. The nearest balance i can think of is to allow the berserker to do a side light attack in addition to a techable guard break so he has at least some kind of mixup at play to keep the guard break from being teched every single time, but honestly berserkers are my weakest class and i didn’t get to see many good ones use their full arsenal because they were too busy loitering by walls, so you’ll have to consult with players more knowledgeable about the class than i.
Class changes I’d like to see. Wardens: I’ve heard a lot of people complain the Warden is too bland, and they may have a point but personally their moveset is so strong i’m hesitant to suggest adding anything to it. They’re the only class without deflections that i would consider to be top tier. Maybe a different opener? A sidegrade of sorts to give them variety without actually giving them more combat options. Perhaps something that lets them smoothly chain an opening heavy into their shoulder bash mix up?
Conquerors. A lot of people claim he’s overpowered. Personally, i disagree. They have two good attacks and those are the heavy counter into the shoulder bash and the top light attack to start the infinite light chain (which usually ends up being a ‘do two lights then get parried or quit while you’re ahead’ chain). And all you need to do to block the heavy counter is not toss obvious heavy attacks out at a tank like a *******. Given the conqueror’s immensely limited offensive toolset i feel perfectly fine with how they operate now. Sure a particularly tanky one can be super annoying but i think that has more to do with the hyper defensive meta game going on currently than any actual power in the class. In fact if my suggestions for combat are followed i have concerns that the conqueror may fall behind the rest of the classes’ more offensive toolsets. I also have no clue how the flail should interact with the counter-parry mechanic. I’ll leave that one for the devs to figure out. One thing that is probably worthwhile is to change the top light poke to a fast side light mix up to help the conqueror start the infinite chain a bit easier. It would be a minor buff but given how offensive the meta is likely to shift in the future he may need such a change to stay relevant. One thing that i almost forgot to mention. Conquerors consistently score lower on the scoreboards despite leading games with takedowns, and objectives taken/held. The conqueror needs to earn renown faster for boosting sites and needs more points in general for player kills and holding sites. Good conquerors are team players and deserve credit for their good plays.
I do not feel familiar enough with Berserkers, Raiders, or Kensei to feel like commenting on them much. Both Raiders and Kensei seem to focus on reach and damage at the cost of speed. But they both have very predictable mid attacks in their chains. Honestly i think they will benefit the most of the counter-parry idea because the more predictable an attack is, the easier it is to parry, but the easier it is to parry the more likely it is to get parried, which then means it’s a good candidate for counter-parries, which deters parrying. So really, these predictable mid attacks in chains end up exemplifying the mind games that surround the counter-parry mechanic and i’m hesitant to recommend changes because of that.
Cancer, er, I meant to say Orochi. As much as people rage about this class the only really overpowered abilities are their deflections, which i already covered, and their storm rush. But those two abilities are so ‘safe’ to use and so spammable and consistent that there is literally no reason for an orochi to ever use any other move in his moveset. Dodgeable? Dodge into a storm rush and punish during their recovery. Not dodgeable or an easy block? Deflect for free damage. Want to get in? Storm rush in then cancel into a guard break, top light, or just back off and storm rush again! Confident he’ll block the attack? Cancel and reset the storm rush! This ability is so safe it’s absurd. Since i opted to nerf the deflections I will suggest that orochi’s get guaranteed guard breaks of counter-parries because it ties into their flavour as the kings of countering. This will allow them to reposition more easily against a high skill opponent who would otherwise be difficult to guard break without getting teched. The storm rush needs to be assigned a roll and needs to be nerfed so it stays in that roll. Riptide strike is for punishing whiffed heavies. Zephyr strikes should be the orochi’s bread and butter. Dodge, hit, dodge, hit. Storm rush should be the orochi’s main opener and a means to reposition around clumsy opponents. I’ve heard discussion about things like giving it more recovery on blocks, making the followup double top lights blockable 100% of the time or just straight up removing the ability. Of those the only one i’d agree with is the blockable double top lights. The combined damage is just too much otherwise. Giving it more recovery on block doesn’t actually solve the issue with it (the fact that it’s so safe and efficient), and removing it is just silly when there are so many other alternatives to try. The issues with it are its safety and efficiency. So the nerfs should target its safety and efficiency! Allowing the double top light followup to be blockable is a good start, but a greater stamina cost will help with the spamming. I also think it should be given a small pause just like the riptide strike but longer (so it’s not replacing riptide strike in its role), this is to keep it from replacing riptide strike and zephyr strike as the go to ability for dodging an attack. Without the pause it has a better mix up than zephyr strike and better speed than riptide strike, and with the double top light followup it deals significantly more damage than both on success, essentially replacing both abilities. So those are changes to that need to made to keep storm rush from stepping on the toes of its brother abilities. Now onto the big nerf. The biggest issue with storm rush is that the cancel is responsive and active during almost the entire animation, this means the orochi can constantly reset the storm rush if he feels that the attack unlikely to succeed. The result is that the ability becomes ultra safe to use in response to nearly any action the opponent takes. So the changes i’m suggesting is this:
1. Reduce its hit priority. It has a habit of tanking light attacks as if it had armor in certain situations, that has to go.
2. Make the charge un-cancelable. You can cancel during your pose, and you can switch your side heavy into a guard break or top light at any time, but you cannot just stop running. Once you activate that charge you are committing to one of three things: side heavy, guard break, top light. That’s an excellent mix up and all the orochi needs to get in, but without the running cancel the orochi cannot simply decide he doesn’t want to attack today and stop whatever he was doing. The storm rush should be a conscious decision to go in. The orochi must commit to the mix up or cancel the storm rush during the pose.
With these changes i think the orochi will still prove to be a very strong class but will at least appear to be more fair and require its players to use ALL the tools at their disposal to defeat their enemies.
Member
PART 2:
Outnumbered fights! I’ve suggested some of the stuff i’ll be mentioning below but it’s worth repeating because i don’t see a lot of it suggested by others in the forums in spite of the positive feedback i have gotten for suggesting them during the TT and others, which implies i have a unique outlook on the subject. The issues with outnumbered fights can be boiled down to a few key issues:
1. Overwhelming aggression from two or more fast classes is nigh impossible for newbies to deal with.
2. Players will mindlessly hunt and swarm lone enemies, kill stealing and sucker punching players for points.
3. Revenge mode is either completely insane or laughably insufficient, depending on player skill and the number of enemies.
4. It’s easy to react to 1v1’s on the battlefield and surround lone enemies.
5. To win when outnumbered a player needs to have the tools to control the pace of combat (without the tools doing it for him, he needs an aid not a magic button), out damage his opponents through skill and clever play, and reposition if necessary.
With these issues in mind I am going to suggest the following changes:
1. Add more narrow hallways in and around objectives. The narrow hallway naturally limits the larger forces number advantage without ever impacting 1v1 combat any more than a simple wall would. If you want a perfect example check out the A site on Citadel Gate (the armory i think it is), it has that small dead end room at the back with the only access being a relatively narrow hallway. Perfect for limiting numbers without obstructing the swings of the face-to-face players. I’d like to see a lot more such geography at objectives on other maps.
2. Reduced points for kill stealing. While getting killing blows is useful for certain classes renown, the bulk of the points should go to the player who dealt the most damage to the enemy. Orochi and raiders often dominate the scoreboards because even with the penalties to sucker punching killing blows the consistency that they can do it with far outweighs the amount of points any other class can get sticking to their favoured roll.
3. Better, more in depth tutorial for dealing with multiple attackers. The best way to learn to deal with multiple attackers right now without facing actual players is to fight the wardens that spawn at the end of the tutorial. Unfortunately these AI are far more timid than actual players and isn’t gonna train you to deal with the orochi running hit and run shots on you from off screen while two berserkers try to get dauntless off of you. I’ll detail this in the tutorial revamp section near the end of the post.
4. Up the friendly fire. The number one argument i hear against this is that it would encourage griefing. They’re not wrong, but i think the benefits far outweigh the risks. Auto kick anyone who team hits within the first 15 seconds, and issue 2 warnings then a kick for team hits that happen more than 20 feet (or however much distance the devs deem reasonable) from any kind of enemy. Add a ‘report griefing’ option to players in the menu and make sure there’s a recent player list available at all times for easy friend adding and the reporting of various problems. Also if a player is thrown into a teammates swing that swing should count as enemy damage dealt from the player who threw him (so no friend fire damage reduction and if he dies it counts as a kill for the thrower). Throwing enemies into other enemies is a clever tactic and one i think should be better rewarded by the mechanics of the game.
5. The camera controls suck when there are more than two enemies. Adding a little white dot the player you would switch to if you switched targets would help a lot, and putting some more precise target switching to clicking R3 would be a great boon to managing 3 players as well.
6. This deserves it own section honestly:
Redesign of revenge mode. Before i forget, revenge mode should be disabled in duel mode and the 1v3 tier should be disabled in brawls.Revenge mode currently has two problems. It’s frequently overpowered in 1v2’s and slightly underpowered for 1v3’s, and it doesn’t help the lone player control his spacing as much as it needs to. I believe the solution is to divide revenge mode into two tiers. One balanced for 1v2’s and the other balanced for 1v3’s.
The purpose of this change is to allow the devs to more precisely fine tune revenge mode to achieve its original goal of a player aid for outnumbered fights without turning the player into the medieval version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjNQLXXwYfw
First, let’s look at what revenge mode does currently. It provides a moderate amount of healing, greatly reduces damage taken (to the point where a lone player’s light attacks are about as threatening as a roll of toilet paper), provides hyperarmor for its duration (i don’t care what you call it in game, it’s hyperarmor/superarmor in every fighting game ever so i’m sticking with that), gives infinite stamina for the duration, automatically parries any attacking enemy on activation and causes parries to knock enemies prone and gives guard breaks priority over pretty much everything and makes throws also knock enemies prone.
On paper, that’s pretty nuts. In practice, it ends up being an automatic win in a lot of cases where both enemy players are close to or below half health. Against 3 players who are heavily injured it’s a pretty even fight, but if at least two of those players are full health it rarely helps enough to carry you to victory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As i said, it should be an aid, not an auto-win. The main issue when there are 3 or more players seems to be the ‘swarm’ tactic. This is where all 3 players converge from 3 directions and spam the **** out of top light and heavy attacks in an attempt to overwhelm and panic the defender with numbers, speed, and force. It’s the age old tactic of ‘zerging’. The auto parry on activation, i feel, is sufficient for creating space in a 1v2. Though, i do still wish the animation was just a normal parry and not this silly roar thing the devs got goin’ on. 1v3’s are a different story. Sure it creates space initially, but the players can typically just swarm right back in within a few seconds and there’s not much the defending player can do about it. Sure he can toss out a few parries and guard breaks to keep a player or two on the ground but he’s not gonna have enough of an opening to ever land meaningful damage and will likely never win. Part of dealing with that is good positioning but as i mentioned before i don’t think there are enough narrow hallways to allow a smart player to mitigate numbers without exploiting the guard break throw into death trap tactic. As far as base mechanics outside of revenge mode that help with outnumbered fights are concerned, i find them sufficiently helpful without giving me an objective edge, my only complaints on this front is that the unblockable attack icon should appear for unblockable attacks from sources you’re not locked onto, and some more precise camera controls when switching targets would do wonders. So far, this is what i think revenge mode should be:
Tier 1. Fills when outnumbered, lasts 10 seconds. Provides a small health bonus, a 30% reduction in incoming damage (i think the current is 50%?), hyperarmor for the duration, 50% reduced stamina costs, the auto-parry on activation, parries and counter-parries knock enemies prone, and guard break throws knock enemies prone (it does NOT give guard break priority though, hyperarmor will have to be enough).
Tier 2. Fills when attacked by 3 or more players, and is VERY difficult to fill when being attacked by fewer than 3 players. Lasts an additional 10 seconds, provides a moderate health bonus (equal to what it provides now), greatly reduces damage taken (equal to what it provides now), hyperarmor for its duration, infinite stamina for its duration, the auto-parry on activation, causes parries and counter-parries to knock enemies prone, gives guard breaks priority over pretty much everything, makes throws also knock enemies prone, makes zone attacks knock enemies prone if not blocked, if parried has no effect, if blocked it knocks the enemy back as if thrown but does not knock them prone (this gives the larger force the chance to keep up the pressure with smart play but punishes mindless aggression, it also makes zone attacks useful when outnumbered, which is really a first despite the devs efforts to make it useful in these situations, and most importantly: it creates space which directly translates into spatial control with smart play).
Something that needs to be discussed is the potential impact of the counter-parry mechanic when outnumbered. Naturally parries are one of the main ways the lone player has to even the numbers. Giving that ability a hard counter makes it far less reliable. Personally, i think the benefits it has to 1v1’s, duel and brawl mode are worth the additional troubles given to outnumbered fights, in spite of the game’s constant struggle with this issue. If it proves to be too problematic one can simply give revenge mode counter-parry immunity as an unimaginative brute force approach (hey, if it works and nothing better shows up work with what you got). I think increased friendly fire especially, will greatly discourage the mindless swarm tactics and force the game into a more organised ‘wolf pack’-style tactic (striking where the player is not looking) for dealing with lone players, with the zone attack change i think creating and maintaining space will be easier which in turn will make things like guard breaks, shoulder bashes, and counter-parries more manageable.
Controls! I’ve suggested a number of alternate control schemes over the past few tests but i wanted to preset another one. Recently i’ve been investigating the impact of controllers with programmable buttons/paddles on the underside (such as on an xbox one elite controller) can have on the game and there seems to be a clear advantage to gain in terms of responding to guard breaks and quickly canceling feints. The benefits of being able to tech a guard break or quickly cancel a failed parry attempt without ever taking your fingers off your sticks and shoulder buttons can be immense. Unfortunately i can see no way of dealing with this technical advantage other than providing some alternate control schemes to players to help close the gap in response time. Naturally one cannot hope to truly compete with a controller designed specifically for this purpose but i do think the gap can be closed enough to make the difference negligible at most levels of play. The main advantage of such controllers is to allow for guard break techs and cancels without taking your thumb off the right stick. Looking at the default controls i realised that really both feint/cancel and guard break really want to be bound to L1 (currently quickchat for some inexplicable reason). Naturally only one can be assigned there so i looked at other controls that could be switched. I thought about assigning guard break to R3 but i would really, REALLY prefer that some better camera controls get bound there so the next best option is really L3, currently sprint. Sprinting is not something you do in combat, at least, not without rolling first. So rebinding it to something less time-sensitive is reasonable. This alternate control scheme would look like this:
L2 - lock on/quick switch targets
L1 - cancel/feint
R2 - heavy attack/parry/counter-parry
R1- light attack
L3 - move/guard break/guard break tech
R3 - look/stances/switch targets
D-pad - feats
A - dodge
B - sprint
X - quickchat/call for help/execution
Y - emotes/revenge mode/execution
One final note that the devs are probably already aware, on ps4 i found the amount you had to move the right stick to switch stance greater than it needed to be, resulting in controls that at times felt unresponsive. I’ve seen other players note similar experiences so hopefully it’s something that will be addressed in future versions. I also found the zone attack difficult to execute on the orochi, oddly i had no trouble with the conqueror or warden’s zone attack. The conqueror ease is likely due to its ‘hold to use’ nature, but i am at a loss as to why i had such difficulty with the orochi’s zone attack yet did not have a similar problem with the warden. Just mentioning it as something to look out for
UI changes. I’m not going to go into crazy detail here as good UI is not something i feel confident commenting on. Fortunately the For Honor UI isn’t good so i can comment on it at least a bit *shots fired*. I’m mostly gonna suggest you make as much of the UI toggle-able as possible. In addition there are a few things i think are obviously in need of change:
A. I don’t need a team icon next to my health bar, I should already know what team i’m on. Just have it pop up with revenge fills and keep it off the screen ‘till then.
B. Remove the team icon over the enemy i’m targeting. If he weren’t an enemy, I wouldn’t be able to target him now would I? :P
C. The banner zone effect should just show the ring and keep the ground clear. It doesn’t need to turn the entire floor into blue/green/red goo. And my god i don’t know what feat raiders get that puts a green aoe buff that follows them around but holy **** is that buff bright. I’m not even sure it was a raider at the center of it, it may have been a warden, or Jesus Christ himself. It was hard to tell.
D. The healing effect. I get that people weren’t noticing that they were getting healed but my god, you went from barely noticeable to covering half my screen with green. It’s especially annoying with the feat that heals you for killing minions. It’s just a constant wall of green around my screen. It’s not even locked to the camera, if you look left or right you can briefly look into the effect and cover your entire screen in green plus signs. Green plus signs around the far edges of the screen plus the green aura on my character is more than enough to make it noticeable. Tone it down to that.
The nightmarish cluster**** that is non-cosmetic gear. Please, please, please, please, please, pleeeeeease make gear cosmetic only in multiplayer. The odds that you guys will have gear perfectly balanced for release and maintain that balance post release to the degree that it would need to adhere to is very unlikely (no slight intended upon your skills as developers, i’m just of the opinion that it’s so difficult as to be essentially impossible). I love min-maxing and stats with big numbers as much as the next gamer but i recognise when, as fun as it can be, it is not healthy for the game. This is one of those times. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to balance the gear currently in the game, that balance will get thrown out of whack the instant you want to add a new kind of stat, or higher levels of gear, or just new gear with minor differences, or (*shudders*) when you want to put microtransactions in the game. Having a cosmetic only system justifies hiding the shinier stuff behind a playtime barrier, prevents balance issues from arising, allows for cosmetic microtransactions without massive backlash (especially if coupled with the promise of free dlc, hint hint), builds consumer confidence, i could go on. It’s just a better system.
But just in case you choose to foolishly ignore the outcry for cosmetic only gear i have gone over the current gear system and am going to point out all that i can find wrong with it, and oh boy is there a lot wrong with it!
Firstly, gear stats need to be removed from for duels, brawls, and the 4v4 mode with no revives. I’d rather have it removed from all modes obviously but if i must choose, that would be the division. I have zero tolerance for gear in those modes and will not touch them on release if gear stats are an influence in those modes. ‘But we’ll match you against equal geared players!’ If that is anything like every skill based matchmaking system ever, it will frequently match me against over/undergeared players when necessary, resulting in an unfair advantage. No matchmaking system is perfect, expecting it to adequately compensate for imbalances in the gear system is foolish.
Secondly, the progression system is unfair to new players. Locking blue gear to renown 3 and purples to renown 5 gives fresh player a clear and obvious disadvantage in combat, especially when those blue and purples are objectively superior (more on that in a bit) to your base gear of NOTHING. If you insist on having rarities, then all rarities must be possible to collect right from the start. If you want to have the drop chance of said rare gear get progressively higher as renowns are hit, fine. That is a concession i can live with.
Thirdly, stats are only downgraded in reaction to upgrading other stats some of the time. If you’re going for the philosophy of ‘side grades not upgrades’ then commit to that. I equipped a lvl1 sword into an empty slot on the first day of the test and saw a whopping 0 stat reduction in anything, and fully upgrading it to level 6, enough to have a meaningful impact in every fight i participate in, saw 0 additional stat reduction. That is a clear and blatant power advantage over a fresh player, and one that is so easily avoided (at least in principle) because rarer gear does reduce other stats. Why not do that from the start!? If you want gear to be balanced then ANY increase that has ANY sort of meaningful impact on the outcome of ANY event in ANY match needs to be viewed as an imbalance and flaw in the system, with the simple first step to solving problem being: if a stat goes up by any amount, another stat must immediately go down by an equal or greater amount. It should not matter what rarity, or level the gear is.
Fourthly, steel is gained too slowly to allow for smooth upgrading, further slowing the progression and prolonging the gap between a fresh player and a renown 5 player, and the whole gear packs for steel thing makes people wary of microtransactions for in game power, which ubisoft does have a history of doing. If you do not intend to have such power creep in the game i suggest you release a public statement declaring that to be the case as soon as possible. Also the packs suck, there is no reason to buy any pack other than the premium one with the guaranteed upgrade unless you have maxed out epic gear in every armor or weapon slot. It’s nice that the options are there but if you’re gonna go with the random pack route, have all of them guarantee 1 item of higher level and have the premium offer an additional equal level item for a total of 5 equal level items + 1 higher level item. This would be a more fair and balanced approach that would better encourage players to spend their steel on slots they need items for rather than just only buying premium packs and eventually getting what they are after. Yes, this would all result in acquiring gear faster than the pace currently set in the game, that’s a good thing. It reduces the power gap.
Fifthly, the stat bonuses at max level are too damn high. ‘But at max the other stats will be at the bottom of their bars to balance it!’ Cool, too bad the stats aren’t weighted appropriately to their power. It’s hard to give a **** about my garbage block damage stat when i’m parrying into heavies for half his health bar. A lvl11 attack blade seems to deal the equivalent of two light attacks worth of damage from what i could gather from footage (though various stats seemed to be bugged so i’m hesitant to place any confidence in these numbers, but just in case they are accurate they deserve to be scrutinized). That is the ABSOLUTE limit of what i expect a lvl18 attack blade to do, the idea of a blade doing a full attack chain’s worth of damage is WAY too much power to dish out even with massive reductions in other stats. You could drop my block damage, revenge state attack, debuff resist, execution regen and maybe even feats cooldown reduction to rock bottom and i would still seriously consider and probably take the attack increase. It is that potent. The same goes for defence!
Lastly, let’s go through each individual stat and point out everything that’s wrong with them.
1. Attack, block damage, revenge state attack
Attack should be renamed damage so it’s function is clear, and block damage should be renamed to something that clarifies its function. Even i’m not 100% certain what i does, i’m reasonably certain it’s how much chip damage you deal when the enemy blocks. Revenge state attack i suspect only affects the bonus attack (rename to damage again) given during revenge mode and not the base attack (rename to damage) value during revenge, which could conceivably result in a negative damage modifier during revenge mode. If you want gear to be balanced follow these two rules: NEVER put raw damage as a stat, and NEVER put raw damage reduction as a stat. There’s two possibilities when these stats exist, either the stat is good in which case i am forced as a player to take it because it is superior to the other stats, or the stat is inferior is avoided completely or stated only to its maximum useful value on average. ‘What if we manage to find a good weighting for damage in relation to the other stats that makes it very balanced?’ Good luck with that! Honestly you’re probably better off changing these stats into something more well balanced. Here’s an alternative idea:
- armor pen (affects damage vs heavies/heavy hybrids), precision (affects damage vs vanguards/vanguard hybrids), flexibility (affects damage vs assassins/assassin hybrids)
These stat values change with the meta, lots of assassins? Flex blade is probably better but a party with lots of heavies will give you trouble. There will still be a ‘best’ stat but at least it will change from time to time.
2. Stamina cost reduction, max stamina, stamina regen
Oh my god a relatively equal weighted stat choice. Mainly because they all do the same thing but there are minor differences between the them. Cost reduction and max stamina essentially do the exact same thing. Interesting question: how can these stats be weighted properly? If cost reduction worsened my max stamina stat am i not just reducing a cost by say 5 and reducing my max stamina by 5 at the same time? Are you not forced to have the stats NOT be equally weighted so that a reduction in cost of 5 would reduce my max stamina by 2? Stamina regen is the odd man out, upping it increases cost and reduces max stamina and so is likely the worst of the 3 stats, it could work if max and cost reduction were consolidated into one stat. Here’s an alternative stat list:
- max stamina (greater pool, worse regen), stamina regen (smaller pool, better regen), sprint speed
Max stamina and stamina regen are in equilibrium and honestly i’d rather have just the two stats on this slot since they are actually fairly balanced, but since gear apparently must have 3 stats i moved sprint speed over here from the illogical chest slot to the equally illogical guard slot. Sprint speed is probably the worst stat so i have this stat weighted less than the other stats (maybe 2:1 tradeoff). Basically, it’s ****tier so it’s cheaper in a sense.
3. Hit revenge gain, defence revenge gain, revenge state duration
Gain vs duration could be a fair tradeoff but it runs into a few problems. Firstly revenge gain can really only be reduced to a certain point before it becomes functionally useless and once it does duration becomes useless (the state you never enter lasts a long time, not exactly a good idea), but duration can also only be reduced to a certain point, where it essentially becomes a spammable auto-parry button when outnumbered. Defence gain is better than hit gain, if you have time to throw out attacks you can’t be that bad off and every outnumbered fight i’ve ever been in you need to defend may more often than attack. Hit could be useful if your looking to use revenge to seal a victory in a 1v1. But i’m not sure that should even be possible so having a stat for it rubs me the wrong way (well, more than stats do in general). How about this tradeoff?
- revenge gain, revenge state duration, revenge state power (impacts attack and defence)
Which do you want? A frequent auto parry, a long revenge state, or a powerful revenge state. There’s a tradeoff. I’d weigh duration a bit less due to its natural reduction of its two most important elements and gain a bit more due to the power of that auto-parry activation.
4. Defence, revenge state defence, sprint speed
What idiot would max sprint speed in this scenario? Yeah, you can run to your death REALLY fast, or be that ******* that runs past his desperate teammates to cap the unguarded point in dominion, ooooh. You’ll be making friends all over. I’ve already talked about the obvious superiority of defence, and have suggested revenge state defence and sprint speed get allocated elsewhere so i’m going to suggest defence gets the same treatment i gave to attack.
- thickness (affects reduction vs heavies/heavy hybrids), comfort (affects reduction vs assassins/assassin hybrids), form (affects reduction vs vanguards/vanguard hybrids)
Forgot to mention if a hybrid is in one stat that your weak against and one your strong against then the damage wins out over reduction, so it’ll be your worst reduction stat of the two vs his best (or only relevant) stat, and your best damage stat vs his worst (or only relevant) reduction stat. Same principle as damage just reversed. Always one best stat based on the meta but with damage winning over defence a more balanced stat distribution will likely be prefered.
5. Block damage resist, revive speed, throw distance
The current meta favors parrying and dodges over blocking too much to make block damage resist ever relevant. Throw distance can result in more kills and the base revive speed is plenty fast (perhaps too fast), and most revives do not happen during combat where time is sensitive enough to matter, so throw distance is the superior stat here. Why my suggested changes (including increased chip damage on blocks) block damage resist will have more weight but i doubt it will be enough to compete with throw distance. Here’s my suggestion:
- throw distance, revive health bonus (impacts how much health people have when you revive them, default is 50%, a MUCH needed nerf), feat cooldown reduction
Feat cooldown reduction should be weighted more heavily than the others and revive health bonus a bit more than throw distance. Amusingly, this list shifts throw distance from the best stat of the three to the worst stat of the three. Throw distance is only useful up to a point. Max reduced health bonus revives players with 1 bar, max increased revives with 1 bar short of max health. That’s an impactful stat that has a very meaningful but indirect impact on the match. Throw distance of course sometimes kill faster, and so does feat cooldown reduction.
6. Debuff resist, execution regen, feats cooldown reduction
There aren’t enough debuffs in the game currently to make it a worthwhile stat, unless stuns count as a debuff or unless multiple popular classes have tier 2 or lower feats with good debuffs I am not going to value this stat at all. If stuns do count as a debuff then i’d be wary of lowering it far but the default recovery time is sufficient for avoiding the incoming attacks. Feats cooldown reduction is the clear best stat here as execution regen is merely a ‘nice to have’, in dominion anyways. Brawl would be a different story but stats won’t matter in brawl (RIGHT!?).
- execution regen, debuff resist, debuff power (impacts the duration and general power of debuffs)
Weigh execution regen at a discount compared to the debuff stats as long as the debuff stats impact stuns.
There ya go. Those stats are at least somewhat better than what you had before. Still inferior to just cosmetic gear though
Final thoughts: Please for the love of God have dedicated servers and some kind of client and server side anti-cheat and cosmetic only gear on launch! And vary up those game modes, you guys got tons of suggestions for great game modes yet you’re launching with what is basically 1 objective mode and 4 different kinds of deathmatch? What happened!? Despite this massive rant of a post and occasional heavy dose of cynicism, i am very much looking forward to the game and have been very pleased with how much player feedback seems to be directly influencing the game. Best of luck to the devs, i’ll see you on the battlefield
