06/04/2020 - Feedback Request - Creature Balance

I would like feedback on all creatures if possible. Are specific creatures too hard, too easy or just right? What variables do you think need adjustment?

Here are some of my goals:

-------------------------------------------------

- Small creatures should be easy to kill, even for low skilled new players.

- The toughest small creatures (adult, high power) may be a challenge for a newbie or medium skilled player but still easy for a high skilled veteran player.

- Large regular creatures should be difficult but manageable to kill solo by a high skilled veteran player. Full legendary adult bears may require two or more tough players to kill.

- Mutants of all ages should be a challenge and require a group of medium skilled players. Young mutants would be as strong as an adult bear with at least medium combat power.

- Old age and legendary mutants should be difficult and require a group of veteran players to kill.

-------------------------------------------------

- All creatures that you attack should fight back. (If not let me know what specific creature did not attack back).

- As creatures take damage there is a chance they will run. There is a greater chance for small and weak creatures to do so.

- You should be able to turn and sprint away from a creature easily.

- It should be difficult or impossible to simply turn and run away at your normal pace.

- It should be impossible to simply back up to avoid attacks.

-------------------------------------------------

Variables need to be adjusted for all of this. Please provide feedback on creatures that seem too easy or difficult based on these goals.

Here are variables I can easily adjust:

- Creature hit points
- Creature base damage
- Creature attack ranges
- Creature attack rates (time between attacks)
- Creature rotation speed during combat
- Creature movement speed (walk, run, max speed)
- Creature healing rate
- Creature attack and defense variables based on age and power. Basically the difference between a new born and an adult or a creature with no combat power vs a legendary combat power creature.
- Creature aggro and reactions. Do any creature reactions seem off?

- Player weapons base damage
- Player weapon ranges
- Player weapon speeds (delay between attacks)
- Duration of stun effects

Please let me know if a specific creature seems too easy or too difficult based on my general goals or if you think any of the variables need adjustment for a specific creature or weapon type.

General feedback (For example: Bears are too strong) is fine. The more specific the feedback, the easier it will be for me to adjust the variables (For example: young raccoons should do 10 damage and have 40 life).

It may take a few rounds of adjusting variables but with the current system all of this is very easy to adjust.

Please stick to just creature feedback in this thread. I will start another for PvP and combat actions like dodge and parry.

Thanks!

Most currently do not fight back.

Turn rate on most mobs are pretty good.

Range on some mobs are pretty good some are too far. (Getting hit by 15m from a bear)

Damage from players (at least at max skill / weapons) is very high. I would rather attack faster than have high numbers per attack. This allows for better skilling too and more fun in combat.
Killing a bear in 3 to 4 hits. (8seconds) Not fun. (This is max skill). Killing a bear in 12 hits (8 seconds) is more fun.

You lowered the charge up power (from 180% to 100%), I would like to see charge up take longer. Like 2x longer, but give 180% again. This will allow for people to do better hit and run tactics but take longer to kill than a DPSer who can stay on target attacking fast.
Currently attacking fast is about 4x to 8x faster than charge up, almost no reason to use charge up attacks.

Parry stun seems a good timer. I have 100 parry and it works just fine.

Dodge seems fine to me also. I have 92 dodge and I can spin behind mobs based on current rotation.

I would like to see the attack range on player weapons to be a little be longer. Maybe 25%. Likely picks/shovels do not need this adjusted as much, but very hard to hit stuff with blades and axes. (no one uses clubs really)

I would like to see mutants higher HP keep their damage like it is (much lower than before) but maybe 3x or 4x the HP they have now. The reason is to allow fights last longer and less resting needed but increases the fun. So they wont be much harder and more newer players can be in the "group" fighting them.
One big problem we had before was the 1 hit kills on newer players that would go hunting. They get hit for 35 to 70 damage, and be instant dead. No way to get away. If you lower the damage they do per attack but increase the HP. It makes it so groups can hunt without newer people being sent home in 1 hit.

good suggestions from MrDDT

Let players level faster life points in the initial period up to a certain point?

Fought mostly with Ravelli (armed and blades skill in 90's) and some with Lil (moderate pick skills around 50). Dodge skill started at 5 and went no higher than 10.

You are missing on some of your goals.

Small creatures, even rats and marmots are not fighting back or are not attacking until being hit 2-3 times by which time they are dead. My dodge started off at 5 and I was still able to get behind most creatures, specially on level paved surfaces.

Was jumped from behind by large bears (no time to con them) several times when I couldn't sprint. Did not take damage but had screens of missed attacks at 5-6 m ranges. This is with 100 run skill an between 40-50% encumbrance.

Low level mutants were not difficult to kill except when they joined a fight already in progress. E.g. a 122 hp 40% hornback marmot was easier than a 122 hp green (60%) coyote.

Old habits die hard and at times I backed up and charged my attack. This didn't totally avoid attacks, but was able to trade one fully charged attack for a smaller return attack. As DDT said, charging attacks doesn't pay in the current system, excepting the first player attack. My best success came from putting a blade in both hands and right/left clicking as fast as I could. At least with high skilled blade attacks there doesn't seem to be any delay.

Turning on creatures may be a little slow, specially for smaller creatures. It is still better than the old system where a large bear could instantly spin to attack the nearest character.

I've updated the Test Server with a few changes to check:

1) Creature reactions when attacked adjusted. Basically non-aggressive creatures were too wimpy and running away / losing aggro too easily when losing a lot of health the first time they get hit. I lowered the chance of creatures running away when in combat. Let me know how it seems now.

2) Player weapon ranges increased by 25%

3) Blocking for some building parts adjusted. If you see a creature going through the wall (on the Test Server)

Comments / Questions:

1) Weapon damage: Before I adjust player weapon damage or creature hp, I have a question. How is weapon damage for PvP? I'd like to make sure weapon damage is balanced first for PvP, then I can adjust creature hp and armor to achieve the desired results.

2) Charged attacks: The main problem is that almost all new players don't use charged attacks. This has been making creatures seem especially difficult to kill for newbies. I was considering removing charged attacks entirely because of this, but it would mess up parrying.

If I set up charged attacks to increase damage as before, I'm stuck with the same problem as before: Creatures will be balanced based on players using charged attacks always. New players won't use charged attacks and will find combat too hard.

Maybe I need to do something to make the charging up more obvious to new players, but I'm not sure what.

Can any of you recommend another similar game that used charged attacks? If I could see what other survival games do in this case I could better adjust things to match what new players have come to expect.

3) About running away from a bear and not getting hit, I'll check the speeds in that type of case. You may be faster than a bear even with encumbrance.

4) About creature attack ranges, I'll look into those and adjust them a bit. Right now they scale linearly with creature size so the ranges for large creatures may end up being too much.

Thanks!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Xsyon

1) Weapon damage: Before I adjust player weapon damage or creature hp, I have a question. How is weapon damage for PvP? I'd like to make sure weapon damage is balanced first for PvP, then I can adjust creature hp and armor to achieve the desired results.

2) Charged attacks: The main problem is that almost all new players don't use charged attacks. This has been making creatures seem especially difficult to kill for newbies. I was considering removing charged attacks entirely because of this, but it would mess up parrying.

If I set up charged attacks to increase damage as before, I'm stuck with the same problem as before: Creatures will be balanced based on players using charged attacks always. New players won't use charged attacks and will find combat too hard.

Maybe I need to do something to make the charging up more obvious to new players, but I'm not sure what.

---

1)
PVP damage looks pretty good.
Currently, new players (35 to 70 HP no armor) will die to vets (Players with 100 skill and 100 STR) in 1 to 3 hits though. I do not see any way around this as such is the way of skill based games.

2)
I agree new players will not understand to use charged attacks. However, you can either remove them fully for the game or balance them so they are useful in some way. Currently, they serve no one. My suggestion is if you do want to balance them, you need to increase the timer on them and the % of power. Really the timer increase can be pretty great because if you using charged attacks, you are likely really running around. This would be if you are swooping in for a hit and leaving.

Balancing creatures on charged attacks would be fine IF you base it on longer charge up timers. So currently it takes about 2 seconds to charge up to 100% damage. If you made that 4 seconds for 180% damage you are effectively nerfing charge up DPS by 20%. However I can see it being useful. There are times where doing 2x damage is helpful even though it takes 4 seconds to charge up.
I expect most people will use the faster DPS system of fast attacking.
This will not effect "backing" up and attacking. It will effect parry charge to full hit, parry again. Which it should.

This will also make it so the need for new players to charge up attacks are not needed. They will do more DPS if they can attack faster, however, if they do want to get a good jump start on the fight they can charge up their first attack. Or if working in a group they can do swoop in attacks with fully charged.

Ok, how about if I reduce base weapon damage a bit (so that newbies can take 2-4 hits for example instead of 1-3)? Then I can increase the charged attack power to 150% or so and I will increase the time to charge the attack as suggested. I think 180% is still too much of a difference.

Then I can balance creatures based on on those attack values.

Also are there any survival / sandbox games that I could check out that have charged attacks? I took a look at a few games last night but seemed like combat was just click, click, click, no charge, special attacks or defensive moves at all. (unless I was missing something). Honestly I think Xsyon's combat system is better than the games I took at look at. I couldn't tell how much damage I was doing or how strong my opponent was. Kind of frustrating to see when those games are hugely popular and Xsyon is not. lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Xsyon

Ok, how about if I reduce base weapon damage a bit (so that newbies can take 2-4 hits for example instead of 1-3)? Then I can increase the charged attack power to 150% or so and I will increase the time to charge the attack as suggested. I think 180% is still too much of a difference.

Then I can balance creatures based on on those attack values.

Also are there any survival / sandbox games that I could check out that have charged attacks? I took a look at a few games last night but seemed like combat was just click, click, click, no charge, special attacks or defensive moves at all. (unless I was missing something). Honestly I think Xsyon's combat system is better than the games I took at look at. I couldn't tell how much damage I was doing or how strong my opponent was. Kind of frustrating to see when those games are hugely popular and Xsyon is not. lol

---

Sounds good.

Mount and Blade is a lot like this combat. However, I've never been a fan of Xsyon's directional attacking. It seemed like a good idea on paper, but because of ping and server delays. It's just not possible in MMOs. This is why I believe small server games (like mount and blade) can do it but not MMOs.

I think it would be much better to focus on special attacks (like other mmos) you can do. Thrusts, Power attacks, Stuns, Trips, Snares etc.

agree with DDT
'Range on some mobs are pretty good some are too far. (Getting hit by 15m from a bear)' the range player can hit vs bears distance seems extreme.
Also mobs are hit and miss when they want to attack, sometimes never sometimes have a little nap during fight.
Also hit register sounds from player seem half time register half time mobs loses health but no sound.
Similar to akaRothy post on steam video, but not when mob stuck n rock out in open