Less Tricks, More Swordsmanship Please | Forums

[Specter2One]

I'm a Kensei player. In fact, at Rep 8 I haven't even taken another class into PvP yet. While I'm not great at the game I like to think I'm pretty decent at the combat system, especially in a straight up fight. I planned to play the Kensei exclusively ever since the reveal of the game, thinking that this class and maybe the Warden were the two best examples of true classic swordsmen.

4v4 Dominion takes the majority of my time. I see most people complaining about OP class mechanics (looking at you, Centurian) and gank tactics. While I feel their pain and don't wish to discount their views, I feel the biggest issues are tricks and ploys that, IMHO, seriously undermine the combat system. For instance, I once outmatched an Orochi in Dominion. With 10% or so health remaining and having only scored a single light attack against me, he simply dashed backwards and shot me twice, once with the bow and once with the shuriken. Please forgive me if I have the order of these backwards. The simple truth is that with these two renown perks he was able to defeat me regardless of his lackluster ability in the combat system.

Using Arrow volleys and cannon balls in similar instances is along these same lines and it just feels wrong. Sure, I have arrow storm or whatever its called slotted as my fourth unlock. But unlike most players I use it to turn the tide of B point (usually its B) if the enemy's minions are currently holding the zone. After all, the bots can't complain if I kill all 20 or so of them with a volley, and it doesn't make me feel bad to kill minions in this way.

These tricks, along with the smoke bombs and whatever bomb the Lawbringer and Warden are using to daze and drain my stamina are becoming commonplace on the battlefield. Obviously, everyone wants to win and I try to exploit advantages when I can, but these tricks are too much in my opinion, and take away from what seemed to be the original selling point of the game, which is the robust and enjoyable combat system. If someone beats me with their sword or other melee weapon, I may not be thrilled, but at least I died the way the game was advertised, and not to some petty trick.

Anyone else feel the same? How would we balance this problem. Removal? That unlikely... Nerfing? Maybe...

[Eisenwolf.]

I once outmatched an Orochi in Dominion. With 10% or so health remaining and having only scored a single light attack against me, he simply dashed backwards and shot me twice, once with the bow and once with the shuriken. Please forgive me if I have the order of these backwards. The simple truth is that with these two renown perks he was able to defeat me regardless of his lackluster ability in the combat system.

FYI: Long Bow and Kunai (Shuriken is Shinobi) are dodgable, it just needs some practice (especially 1st one is damn easy to dodge).

At some point feats need to be changed, but just because there are really bad and really good ones, and the gap between them (and factions) is currently too huge.

[SpaceJim12]

I could say, you'll never see Sworsmanship until devs don't stop feint spam. For real, cancel button should be remove from the game.

[Veerdin-Wraith]

Feats have been a point of contention for the community for a long time, but sadly the developers (or at least, the community representatives, who honestly don't seem to be able to really tell us much) have basically gone on record saying that they have no current plans to change them any time soon. We've had the stock-standard "We've made a note of your concerns!" response a bunch of times, now. But the amount of times I've seen that copy+pasted into community rep' posts vs the amount of actual changes that have come about as a result? Yeah, it kind of feels disingenuous.

On one hand, I'm absolutely with you that the "trickery" of combat, especially in bigger 4v4 games, does detract from some good ol' fashioned swordsmanship. But I feel that, in a 4v4 at least (especially the more goal-oriented modes like Dominion and Tribute) expecting an "honorable" or "fair" fight is a one-way-ticket to disappointment.

I find it's best to treat Duel and Brawl as being contests of honor while Dominion, Tribute and Skirmish are more like "real" high-stakes battles. Elimination sits somewhere in between, but hardly anybody plays that mode, anyway.

If you want a fair fight, the best option is to go for Duel or Brawl mode. Yes, they aren't as rewarding in terms of steel or xp, but they're much more skill focused fights and they're over far quicker. In the big, 4v4 objective modes, though? When your enemy fights dirty, you can either complain about it and lose, or fight dirtier and win. Everything goes in a gamemode like that; feats, ledge throws, ganking, running, ect... The game might be called "For Honor", but expecting to find any in Dominion or Tribute mode is a fools errand.

I could say, you'll never see Sworsmanship until devs don't stop feint spam. For real, cancel button should be remove from the game.

Feinting and redirecting attacks midway through swings are both real and legitimate tactics in real life, so in actuality, the classes that can do them are a lot more "realistic" than the ones that are more limited.

I will say, however, that the way feints work right now is very odd and unrealistic. When you feint an attack, you're essentially stopping a swing short, and that takes a lot more energy than simply following through with the swing does, and also leaves you open as you recover. In For Honor, though, the stamina drain and recovery time for Feints now seems basically nonexistent. People feint attacks within fractions of a second and immediately follow up with totally different attacks. In real life, trying to do that (especially with heavier weapons like Lawbringer's pole axe) would snap your arms in two from the sheer torque stress you'd be putting them under!

In addition, redirecting attacks midway through swinging (soft feinting/mixups in game) is, while a valid real-world tactic, not without its flaws. You need to expend energy to change the direction of an attack that's already moving, and in doing so, you actually take energy away from the initial swing. Right now, mixups do cost a bit more stamina, which is good, but they also still deal the same amount of damage as the initial hit would have done, which is less good. The stamina cost alone is usually so trivial that there's basically no reason not to spam mixups and sotf feints all the time.

Feints and mixups should be used more sparingly than they are right now, but with how For Honor is set up? They get spammed because they're low risk but high reward. Meanwhile we have all these other issues that make things more complicated, too, like unlockables that cancel into chained attacks, or regular moves that cancel into unblockables. Attacks with wild, wonky hit detection and unpredictable timing, hyperarmour that causes all sorts of issues, and so on...

The combat system is, at the moment, a bit of a mess.