Fencer Archive

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original ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Aye, i do as well.

This sounds terrific..

The speed issue looks good so long as the HAM costs of special attacks are scaled in a way that that lets fencers use special attacks more often to compensate for their inability to generate competitive damage. I am delighted to see that there will be a weapon review. Maybe we will get a needle to go with the butter knife! I want a vibrorapier! Or a vibrocutlass! Maybe we will even get useful stun batons.

Unfortunately, the news is not all good.

I think how they are treating defensive abilities is not so good. They as much as admitted that they completely negated our defensive bonuses. Wehave among the highest defensive bonuses in the game with +50 against melee(+25 melee defense and +25 dodge) and +49 against ranged (+24 ranged defense and +25 dodge). A one-size-fits-all timed defensive skill plus active defensive special moves means that we get nothing for our defensive bonuses and need to consume HAM to buy the defense we are supposed to have anyway.

The big fly in the ointment here is that fencer needs to last longer for its lower damagedealing to catch up. Changing how weapon speed works is going tonarrow the gap between us and other meleebut unless there is an accross the board scaling up of damage on fencer weapons, we are never going to be as effective if the defensive bonuses do not work.

Q-3PO recited "game balance" concerns as the reason not to make existing defensive bonuses work. When you look at who has the defensive bonuses, and who does not, it tracks pretty closely which classes are strong or weak. Melee top the list of defensive bonuses and commandos and bounty hunters are at the bottom. Anyone see a pattern there?

Finally, we and other melee users are always going to be impaired as long as they do not fix the combat stutter step, the no attack during movement bug and the targeting problems caused by defects in using /follow to stay in range of a target. I think the plan to increase melee range will help, but if you have ever fought on a hillside, you know that /follow makes you run in a circle without ever attacking and that without /follow, you need to constantly adjust position to keep range and interrupt your attacks whenever you do. There definitely has to be a way to engage a target and keep it in range so long as it does not have a substantial speed advantage (like using burst run for example).

Eh, it's an improvement

wOOt! More stabitty items to go stabitty stab with!

Well this is a good thing. It looks like there are still issues even after they implement these changes that they mentioned, but at least they are working on it and I think that eventually they will get to everything. A little bit at a time is better than all at once. That way it can be tested and made sure that it works accordingly. I have faith in the devs. They will do their job and make everything fair.

AHHH!, OOHHHH, OMG! UH oh.. I just wet my self.

Ilooli:

There's another post by Dan today clarifying the defensive moves, and I like the idea more than I did before. It won't negate our other defensive bonus. Check it out:

Tanking ability:

So the new command I was describing will actually make your "active passive defensive moves" fire more often. What it will actually do is dramatically increase your saving throw roll for those types of moves for a duration. So a fencer will dodge, pikemen will counterattack and Teras Kasi will get one of each. Addition of this move doesn’t preclude a general increase of these defensive moves.

He also said some other things, including:

Fencers:

We hate you. (KIDDING). Same as the Pikemen.

Pikemen:
I’m aware of the problems your class is having. Until I finish redefining the new melee baseline I won’t be able to offer a full list of changes I’m going to apply to your class, but rest assured I will work until I feel I have brought your class in line with the rest of the more popular professions.

Speed Caps:

So .5 second for pistoleers was an example. It’s not guranteed to be that.. It might still be 1.0 seconds due to server performance.

Any weapon that has it’s attacks slowed down due to the speed cap will have a commensurate damage increase to go along with it.

:-)

I won't go as far as saying that if all of these changes are implimented that all will be fixed, but these do seem to be changes for the better. Better is always... well... better.

What impresses me is that this doesn't appear to be the same old "one-across-the-board-generic-fix" scenario that is often implimented. There are a number of proposals here covering a wide range of issues that have plagued our profession, both as a melee and as a Fencer. It demonstrates quite a bit of thought, and suggests that the devs ARE interested in helping our profession to be more competant.

We'll likely still need tuning after these changes, but I like the direction they are going.

~Lyahpar~

La Femme Fencer

"Thrust if you love Fencers!"

Actually, they were going to do ALOT of adjustments on the speed/damage mods in general. Its sounded like they didnt think that melee was doing enough damage PERIOD, so he said that fencers where going to get a speed adjustment AND an increase in damage. It was also mentioned that most all HAM costs where going to be lowered.

Something involving a combo system as well might be instituded. So combos like dizzy/lunge will be made a standard, and the more consecutive hits you make with varying specials, they will get increasingly more effect until you miss.

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Dillos wrote:

Ilooli:

There's another post by Dan today clarifying the defensive moves, and I like the idea more than I did before. It won't negate our other defensive bonus. Check it out:

Tanking ability:

So the new command I was describing will actually make your "active passive defensive moves" fire more often. What it will actually do is dramatically increase your saving throw roll for those types of moves for a duration. So a fencer will dodge, pikemen will counterattack and Teras Kasi will get one of each. Addition of this move doesn’t preclude a general increase of these defensive moves.

He also said some other things, including:

Fencers:

We hate you. (KIDDING). Same as the Pikemen.

Pikemen:
I’m aware of the problems your class is having. Until I finish redefining the new melee baseline I won’t be able to offer a full list of changes I’m going to apply to your class, but rest assured I will work until I feel I have brought your class in line with the rest of the more popular professions.

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Iread the post. I presume that "active passive" refers only to dodge, block and counterattack. The post does not address the damage avoidance of melee and ranged defense. They comprise one half of fencer defensive ability against melee and ranged respectively. Moreover, if the underlying dodge ability remains broken and you need to rely on the new defensive command toget that ability a significant level, the result is still that fencers will remain deprived of a large part of the skills that supposedly compensate for the low damage. We should have adequate defense WITHOUT needing new commands and defensive specials.