Brawler Archive
Thread: The new HAM system (posted on TC) is garbage!!
According to the awesome fencer correspondent (not sarcastic, I love her to death) it now takes 25 seconds to fully heal our maximum HAM pools for each special usage? c'mon. battles against a single creature (save for the big nasties) hardly last 25 seconds currently.
Those of uswho make use ofthe brawling skills to compliment their elite profession (in mycase fencer) are now in a dilly of a pickle as said skills are still VERY much broken and with the new HAM system it'll be near impossible to make good use of them. Case in point, I am a master brawler and love to make use of both intimidate and warcry and yes, even taunt. These in fact take more ham away than any other special i use (i only special with a vibroblade).
Both intimidate and warcry are still broken in their success rates, despite being proclaimed as fixed. So now, if i warcry2 for eg, it costs me 171 ham, if i miss, i like trying it again, sometimes it actually takes me about 4-5 tries to connect (broken, b/c I have many fear releases in my clothes and it still has the long spells of failures far too often), then all i have to do is heal up. Now if i miss, i have to wait 50 secs (i can only imagine using it twice in a row) to try it again? not to mention the fact that i still intend to use intim2 and at least a lunge2, a dizzy2, and both health hits somewhere along this process? WOW, gj devs. this doesn't make it more strategic, it just makes it much more time consuming 
since our new defenses (which are sounding quite nice indeed) combined with our current ones will most likely keep us alive to allow for the regeneration.
I am aware that this is indeed only phase 1 of the HAM fixes, but if the following phases have similar "strategic" intentions as this one, I'm switching to master chef (not meant as a joke, i heard they are being made awesome now).
In short, I currently am godly on Test Center. I can spam most of my specials indefinitely. In full armor. Without buffs. In fact I think it is very much so overpowered at the moment.
In general I think this system has a lot of promise. We'll see about how the details work out, but I'm personally really glad to see the HAM system evolving.
StGabe.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 11-27-2003 04:13 AM
Say I hit something with a special that costs 50 from each HAM bar and say I have 800 max in each statistic. Oh, and I'm full health.
I will drop from 800/800 to 750/750.
But it's not really damage in that I will quickly regen that and it will come back as actual hit points. So if I wait until my next tick (which happens very quickly, at every second or so), I will be at 755/755 or something like that.
This means that if you kill things quickly you will effectively take no damage from specials. For me it has been nothing short of uberness. But currently the regen rate is way too fast. Nothing like 25 seconds at all. So fast that I can effectively spam specials indefinitely (in this case, spamming Unarmed Hit 2).
Note that anything you hear is based off of one of the following:
- Preliminary discussion with the developers themselves that may have included numbers that are far different from what has been implemented.
- The current code on Test Center which may be tweaked and updated at any moment. In fact I expect it to be. I expect it to be toned down and made less powerful not more.
Either way it should be taken as only in the preliminary stages. There's a lot of discussion going on regarding this system right now and we'll have to see what comes of it.
StGabe.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 11-27-2003 04:21 AM
StGabe I am sorry for jumping to conclusions, and thank you for your insight. Can you try making more use of the brawler specials to see how well they work? I make use of all five usually (cob, bserk, intim, warcry, taunt) and oh mama do they make your ham disappear, and i rely on the stims to keep me alive.
Keep up the good work, and please try and take a look into the specials in question.
What's the point of the 3rd sub stats if they regen so quickly? Unless you get hit, you will need to wait to heal at all. And if you play smart as a brawler, usually you don't get hit, the dmg you see is the dmg you do to urself.
I use intim2, warcry2, lunge2, and stun quite often.
Let me put it this way. At the moment I could definitely keep up CoB if I wanted but I don't even need to bother!
I just warcry2, lunge2, spam uh2 and everything just dies. I just earned about 50k xps in 8 minutes solo'ing a huurton lair with 0 downtime. Right now it's broken. There's no use talking about the current system because the current system is way overpowered.
StGabe.
StGab,
Carbineers are saying the new system is worse than the old system. There appears to be a big difference between the starter classes and the elite classes in terms of HAM usage.
I'm playing as TKA, not a starter class. =)
Heh.
Basically I can't figure out how this is happening. The only way for this to happen is for carbine specials to be sooooo out of whack with TKA specials (using a VK) that they are effectively unable to be balanced together. In other words, if carbines are having problems with the current system then they are simply borked and the current system is still overpowered.
The ONLY way that I can find to actually have HAM limit me is if I spam warcry2 in full armor with no buffs. That costs basically 125 to each of my health and action pools (i.e. it costs a lot). Spamming that I have to stop after 5 or so. But if I just wait for a bit I can spam some more. That seems to be about what is intended.
Most of the time I am spamming specials as fast as I can (so I'm spamming UnarmedHit2 at one shot every second) and no matter what I can't see an appreciable loss in HAM.
StGabe.
StGabriel,
What is the cost of your UnarmedHit2?
Carbineer specials cost alot. Using a standard laser carbine and 400/400 strength/quickness, we are talking crippleshot (our most damaging shot) costing 130ish and burstshot1 (our lowest) costing 100ish per shot.
Then only way that carbineers have been playable to date is through Doctor buffs (chef buffs alone are not enough) or the use of medic skills.
I very much appreciate your input as the carbineer correspondent seems to be MIA. I made a character on TC to test but I can't find a carbine worth using.
my friend is a master pikewoman, her hits 3s cost 200+ham (unarmored) and soon she will be able to attack at the 1 spd cap. This isnt tka pple I'm a master brawler tka, i know our ham costs are pretty low except hit3, pikemans almost every special has goddamn high ham costs..
With the new system (i have tried it with novice brawler), id say that if she wants to spam about 8 specials shell be left fighting with 150-200 ham in both pools which is a 1 hit kill for any decent lvl target.
I like the new system but carbineers are right to curse it. Pikeman are right to hate it.
Melees haöm costs need to go down... With this sytem a rifleman hiding behind his pets can spam all those mind hits cause hes safe, and maximum 100 mind wont kill him.. But when one of our order especially a swordsman or a pikeman will try to spam any move in battle for strained periods of time ( 6 or more hits) oour ham will be screwed, and u know this ham is also used to absorb all the damage the tank receives... This will hurt us brawlers who take it like a man very weak in terms of damage output.
We will have to sacrifice our special hits in order to stay alive... As I said this wont happen for ranged users because they know that their chances of getting hit for that 150 when their ham is down to their minimum due to their spam of 100s of specials wont come, because they got us or pets to tank for them.
I will state it here BOLDLY that this new system favors ranged users in many ways, itwont ever stop their spam in pve, because they alrdy have tanks and thanks to soe theyll now get an infinite pool (altho low like 150 maybe) to spam their specials while brawlers will be stuck in between fighting with low ham to which they take hits(due to usin specials), or using normal attacks which extends the duration of combat and makes us take even more wounds and damage that needs to be healed. Overall medic will still be a must for any melee character and this new system will render any melee class with ham costs greater then 150 useless.
ps: btw fellow tkas, u might forget using knucklers with specials to get quick kills.. our 220 ham costs with specials will cause our ham pools to go below a safe limit, that is a limit where any good shot or any 2 consecutive shots will incap us, and this time our medic skills wont help either...
so the devs way of thinking is if every fighter needs medic in order to fight good and spends 15 points in there, why not make medic useless then so their points dont get stuck in there (sarcasm)
I'm gettin really pissed of here the more i write and come to think about this... I fear the future of my friends who play pikeman or swordsman, i will still manage it as a tka by using hit2 without knucklers, but these other classes will be helpless against this new system...
I really hope I am proven a wrong fool
Like I said, I'm spamming warcry2 which hits health/action for about 125-150 each in full armor (if it were all three stats that would be like a 375-450 HAM special). That has essentially 0 delay. I can get about 5 off and then I need to rest for a bit. Then I can fire some more if I want. The intention is that spamming them indefinitely should not be possible.
Personally I wish that your HAM bar did not shrink, but that's just me. I'd prefer if there was truly a second pool that took damage with the main pool as well as from using specials and regenned at a slightly accelerated rate.
I made 1.2 million TKA xps in 6 hours tonight. That's a third of the TKA class in 6 hours . . . and I stopped to eat dinner in the middle too. Ok, I'll be the first to admit that TKA's are very powerful right now (perhaps, I'll dare to say, too powerful). But all the same, the current incarnation of the system is too much. I could do almost the same with a swordsman if I wanted to. If pikemen and carbineers still don't work with this system then I fear that they simply need their weapons reworked (and I hope that this will be happening soon whatever the result of this current system). We can't expect this system to fix every problem in the combat all at once.
The more important message is: this system still has a lot of tweaking left. It will be most constructive to talk about whether this system seems to work in general then to get caught up in the nitty gritty details of every problem for every weapon for every profession. It's also important to make sure that you understand the system, as it's tricky, before you judge it.
StGabe.
Message Edited by StGabriel on 11-27-2003 11:20 PM
This change makes a lot of sense to me. Alot, more sense than having specials cause damage. You'll still take damage from mobs so damage regen will be important.
The fact that specials cause damage is very exploitable and makes leveling a healing class trivial.
This change will most likely have the greatest impact on healers since there'll be a lot less damage to heal.
Isis
The system works well in that respect...
bıt whatever tweaking is done, this system will always favor ranged players with pets unless our ham costs go down even more, I'll not even get into the pikeman issue... a carbineer ch will still manage it in pve.