Fencer Archive
Thread: Editorial: Issues with Weapon Speeds in SWG
I think that weapon speeds are one of the main issues facing fencers today. I think we need to be a lot more vocal about this. While I certainly see people here and there that are aware of the screwed up speeds in SWG, I generally don't see a large concensus on the issue (which I think the devs will need if they are to try and rectify things).
The idea of varying weapon speeds is presumably that certain weapons will have an advantage of speed at a disadvantage of damage. A hard cap will always hurt those that begin closest to it (unless it is a cap on a penalty in which case it will hur those furthest away). Furthermore, high speed bonuses rapidly accelerate even very slow weapons towards very short firing rates. These problems all stem from naive or poor mathematics in the system that lies underneath weapon speeds.
Let me explain. Suppose you have a 20% speed boost from base. Now suppose you add 5% to this. You go from 4/5 to 3/4. Overall your speed increases by 1/16th or 6.66%. Ok, not bad. Now assume that you have a 90% speed boost. That same 5% gain will mean that you go to 95% reduction. That HALVES your speed, adding a 5% bonus actually lowers your speed by 50%. This high-end weighting is bad. It means that speeds rapidly accelerate with large bonuses.
It means that if our system is bad now, imagine if speed boosts in sockets every work -- it will be a nightmare. It is because of this rapid acceleration that a speed cap is necessary. But with generally high speed bonuses and the screwed up system, SWG warriors quickly hit the cap and in doing so negate the advantages of those that had high speed weapons to start with.
The solution. No cap. To make this viable, speed needs to decrease firing time in a non-linear fahion (linear in terms of % decrease). A 5% bonus should basically speed you up by around 5% no matter what your prior bonus was. There are many ways to achieve this.
Consider the function f(x) = .99^x. This will mean that at any time gaining a 1% increase in speed means a true 1% increase in speed. If you gained +100 speed you would be at around 36% of your initial speed. If this is too much you can simply scale. For example: f(x) - .99^(x/2). This will be a non-linear function of decreasing returns. As you gain more speed boosts you will always get faster but there will be no rapid acceleration to the speed cap. If a function like this is scaled correctly the speed cap will be unneccessary. If the function is set up correctly it will require incredibly large bonuses to dip into the viscinity of 1s attack rates and even then further bouses will only slightly increase speed beyond this.
We need to push for something like this. One of our main advantages is speed and we are the biggest losers in this unbalanced weapon speed system (pistoleers are at a disadvantage too and it is perhaps only due to their many other advantages that it isn't as big of an issue for them).
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StGabe
delay = delay * (1/(1+speed))
Where speed is the speed mod, in percentage. The reason this is better is because it reflects a pure DPS increase. +100 speed means you're doing double damage over time. +200 speed means you're doing triple damage over time. This is a linear damage increase, and it means that a +5 speed mod is worth the same regardless of what speed you have before you get the bonus. This way, speed mod would be equivalent to the +melee damage mod.
DPS = damage/delay
= damage/(1/(1+speed))
= damage * (1+speed)
As a rifleman, however, I'll note that if you do change the speed equation, you have to rebalance a -lot- of weapons. Many weapons are only competitive at higher levels where the speed mods reduce the delay to acceptible values. The 'big hitter' weapons have very low DPS, to start with, relative to the fast weapons such as fencer swords and pistols. It's only at the high end where the bigger weapons end up being better, and most classes (without considering skill tapes) do not actually get to the high end. +80 speed mod isn't enough to cap anything slower than 5s, and much faster weapons if you're using high delay specials.
IIRC, Fencers actually get the most speed mods of any melee class (possibly of any class, period, other than the BH + pistol/carbine combo). The issue is that most of your weapons are already pretty fast. One way to approach the problem would be to add high damage multiplier, high delay multiplier special moves high in the fencer tree - something a high level fencer could use with relative impunity for good damage, but not too useful for a fencer without enough speed mods to cap.
Again, the lopsided way the speed mods work is pretty much the only way certain classes even function, currently. Changing the speed equation has pretty profound and global effects that need to be considered.
I think you mean to divide speed by 100. That works also. Both functions have nice properties. Mine means that 100 points alwaysscales your dps by some constant (doubling it, increasing it by 50%, etc. -- it depends on how you scale x). Yours means that increased speed always increases dps linearly. Depending on the ease of gaining bonuses, either one might have its merits. Actually I do like yours. Mine was just the first to come to mind when I was thinking about easy-to-understand functions that work for this situation.
I know that some pistoleers have discussed this. That's a blessing and a curse. Let's face it, pistoleers are rather unbalanced in there own ways. It's not necessarily helpful to have a powerful class championing the same cause as your own underpowered class as it can be more difficult to be taken seriously against the natural prejudices that arise. That's why I think that fencers need to get really vocal about this issue.
Certainly, dealing with these issues will force other rebalancing acts to take place. That's unfortunate but necessary. It's really too bad that some of the systems in SWG got created in such crappy manners to begin with. It happens in games like this all the time though. I can't tell you how many games I've played where eventually some exploit arises where someone obtains resistances or some bonus that turn a penalty into a bonus (like the bug with specials adding to HAM if you got your attributes high enough). Game designers just don't pay enough attention to the mathematics of their game systems in games like this. They user overly simple functions when they dont' need to. They don't pay attention to boundary conditions and how bonuses scale. All the calculations go on behind the scenes, there's no reason to make bonuses rely on such simple mechanics.
Another problem with the current system is that greatly penalizes dabbling (gee, what a surprise). With exponentially increasing gains for higher speed bonuses you really have to max out your combat tree to be on par with your peers.
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StGabriel
StGabriel wrote:
I think you mean to divide speed by 100. That works also. Both functions have nice properties. Mine means that 100 points alwaysscales your dps by some constant (doubling it, increasing it by 50%, etc. -- it depends on how you scale x). Yours means that increased speed always increases dps linearly. Depending on the ease of gaining bonuses, either one might have its merits. Actually I do like yours. Mine was just the first to come to mind when I was thinking about easy-to-understand functions that work for this situation.
Well, I said speed expressed a percentage. Which is dividing by 100, yes. The issue with your function is that it *still* benefits higher skills more. 10 points of speed will increase the raw DPS of the higher level player more than the lower level player. This makes it very hard to balance bonuses.Certainly not as extreme asymptotic nature of the current speed function, but nonetheless.
I know that some pistoleers have discussed this. That's a blessing and a curse. Let's face it, pistoleers are rather unbalanced in there own ways. It's not necessarily helpful to have a powerful class championing the same cause as your own underpowered class as it can be more difficult to be taken seriously against the natural prejudices that arise. That's why I think that fencers need to get really vocal about this issue.
Pistoleers aren't unbalanced. That's an image many people have, but it's inaccurate. Without the AE KD on disarm2 and the KD nerf, they're actually one of the weakest ranged classes. Many people also confuse the pistoleer/BH with a pistoleer - one is extremely effective, the other is not. And no, I'm not a pistoleer. I don't see the advantage of reinventing the wheel here.
Certainly, dealing with these issues will force other rebalancing acts to take place. That's unfortunate but necessary. It's really too bad that some of the systems in SWG got created in such crappy manners to begin with. It happens in games like this all the time though. I can't tell you how many games I've played where eventually some exploit arises where someone obtains resistances or some bonus that turn a penalty into a bonus (like the bug with specials adding to HAM if you got your attributes high enough). Game designers just don't pay enough attention to the mathematics of their game systems in games like this. They user overly simple functions when they dont' need to. They don't pay attention to boundary conditions and how bonuses scale. All the calculations go on behind the scenes, there's no reason to make bonuses rely on such simple mechanics.
Another problem with the current system is that greatly penalizes dabbling (gee, what a surprise). With exponentially increasing gains for higher speed bonuses you really have to max out your combat tree to be on par with your peers.
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StGabriel
I quite disagree about needing complex functions. Simple functions are good. There's no reason to get complicated unless it's actually necessary to do so, and it makes analysis that much easier. While I agree that they obviously didn't consider boundary conditions well, that's not an indication that complexity is good - it's an indication they didn't pick good functions for their potential domains.
Finally, the current system does -not- necessarily discourage dabbling, at least not for the reasons you've stated. In most, possibly all,skill trees, the weapon speed is all concentrated in one line and the master/novice boxes. In order to fully take advantage of high end speed, you need slow, high damaging weapons. While in theory going from +99 to +100 is an infinite increase, in practice it's no benefit at all, since nothing is slow enough that you won't hit the cap with the +99 bonus. Not only that, there are classes that have strong synergies - BH, carbineer and pistoleer- which allows -dabblers- to get over +100 speed mod. It's true for -some- weapons that dabbling is bad - rifle and pike, mostly - but other weapons are often better off not mastering. It'd be even less so when speed works, since one could quite easily hit the point where speed mods no longer matter due to available weapon speeds.
My function isn't a problem if skill points become increasingly harder to get. For example, the linear system works if it is essentially just as easy to get from 100 to 150 as it is to get from 0 to 50. This isn't really the case. My system basically says: get 100 more points and they'll do the same as the last 100 points did from where you currently sit.
Re: dabbling
The current system definitely does penalize dabbling by the reasons I gave. Let me flesh it out more. Look at rifles. Say you dable and you only end up with 70 speed. You will be essentially 6 times slower than a rifleman who ends up with 95 speed. You take a HUGE hit dabbling in rifles. Even if you miss just 5 bonus to speed you are TWICE as slow.
Re: simple vs. complex functions
Almost every massive multiplayer game uses very simple functions. Linear functions with caps. They never figure out that it is inherently more difficult to balance systems like these (due to the difficulties I have mentioned: boundary conditions and all kinds of scaling problems) then it would be to simply throw out some better, more mathematically robust functions. The player does not have to understand the functions, they just have to do the job of making the player reasonably better for reasonable effort. Because it is a computer game, you can afford to have complex math behind the scenes. You don't HAVE to if you can find something simple, but you shouldn't be afraid to. It's not D&D, you don't have to roll dice and then look up the right tables, etc.
Re: pistols
Pistols have broken ranges and are just too easy to use with too few drawbacks. Pistol whip is too much and is enough to make any melee person wonder why they bother. While I agree that people do not appreciate the fact that the speed cap hurts pistols and makes them less effective than they seem at first glance, there needs to be some tradeoff for the extreme ease of use. In my opinion, pistols should be much more severely restricted in range. 25'ish meters. Let them be easy to use but also make them in between melee and rifles for having to close.
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StGabriel
I specifically noted rifles were exceptions to the dabbling not being penalized. Also, when/if speed mods on items begin to work, the penalty will be minor, if at all. It should also be noted that +95 rifle is with master rifle/marksman, and most riflemen don't take both because they don't feel it's worth the points to get the +5 bonus - in theory it's a 2x multiplier, but in practice the benefit is smaller since you're already over cap with +90 when not using special moves.
Linear functions are always preferable when considering balance. You WANT a function such that f(a)+f(b) = f(a+b) in whatever final stat that matters. In the case of weapons, the stat that eventually matters is the DPS. You really do want all your mods to affects the DPS of the weapon linearly (which does imply a non-linear change to the -delay-, due to the nature of the relationship between the DPS and the delay). The simplest function which accomplishes what you're looking for is generally the best.
Finally, you should look at the damages pistoleers can do before you claim they are overpowered. The KD nerf affected pistoleers like anyone else with KD. PW is hardly an overpowering move when considering the 30s timer. What other special move do they have that makes them so overpowered? No more AE KD, no status effects, most of their moves are broken, and all or most of their shots have a lower DPS than their marksman 2 special moves. Yes, pistol is easier to use, but that says nothing about them being overpowered.
There's also another good reason for it: having it linear would make it balance with the melee damage bonus mods. +10 damage mod would be effectively equivalent to a +10 speed mod, even if the way they increase DPS is different. This allows a single balancing system to be used for both sets of modifiers, rather than having something different for each.
I don't think a 33% increase in DPS between a master and someone with one branch of a weapon is that much of a problem. 70 to 80 for getting master is pretty reasonable. The 80 to 90 for fencers could be an issue if they had a slow weapon that could take advantage of it. Rifle is the only case where the difference is marked and significant. There just isn't enough speed mods to make much of a difference in other areas. If you allow for tapes, they'd help the dabbler more than the master since they'd allow everyone to cap speeds.
I absolutely agree that the cap and the boundary conditions of the speed equation cause probably undesirable effects, like making the value of master different for different classes. What I disagree with is the statement that dabbling is vastly inferior to mastery given the current situation. It's not, except in the case of rifle. Note that this isn't disagreeing that the speed equation as it stands is problematic. It's disagreeing with what you claim to be a consequence of the speed equation.
When I'm talking about dabblers, I'm generally talking about people who do not take the skill tree fully, that is, to master. This seems like a reasonable definition since the prerequisite for getting any particular box other than master is at most 3 skill boxes (assuming you have the profession at all), while getting the master box has a prerequisite of 16 skills.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that pistoleers are able to do more with fewer penalties. They do have fewer penalties, but they surely do not do more. They have no dizzy, stun, intimidate, posture change, blind or actually any status effect of any kind besides Pistol Whip's KD. They have two AE attacks: Disarm2 and PBAE2. One does little damage, with no special effects (presumed broken, like disarm1) while the other is a moderately damaging, 16m range attack. They have Multitarget shot, which is a -sequencial- attack on a group of enemies. They have one high damage shot, a 5x multiplier move called Stopping Shot, but it comes with a -4x- delay modifier. It's not even their best DPS special due to the huge delay, unless they somehow get their special speed down to near cap.
Master pistoleers get +76 speed (net), which is less than every other combat class besides carbineer (+60). Oh, and Carbineers get a 5x multiplier move also, except it has a shorter delay (Crippling Shot). And Carbineers have access to an AR2 weapon, which is at least a 1.25x bonus over the pistoleer in terms of damage. Not to mention Carbineers getting more AEs and far more status effects than pistoleers, including the AE KD (once it's fixed).
Master riflemen get +90 speed (net). At master, they get a special move called 'Advanced Strafe' (often called strafe2). This is an AE cone attack that reaches the full 64m range, does 5x multiplier and has somewhere between 2 and 2.5x delay multiplier. We also get an AR3 rifle. We also get a 4x damage multiplier AE which adds stun (flushing2), and a lower damage AE attack which adds dizzy (flurry2).
The main reason pistoleers seemed overpowered was because of no KD timer/defenses, Disarm2 -incorrectly- acting as a ranged AE KD, and people who were confusing pistoleers with BH/pistoleer hybrids.
10 points in speed for a master will mean a 10% increase in dps.
I never claimed this was a linear increase in dps, rather it is a linear increase in actual performance increase. If I have twice your speed bonus I will get twice the speedup and twice the DPS.
I don't understand while you're still arguing this. I said right off that your function has merit as well. You still haven't said anything about my reply: that your function is best when each point of speed is as easy to obtain as the prior point. Your function may be too aggressive in restricting the utility of squeezing out the last few points. Both avoid the problem of the current function where %'age increase in performance is effectively exponential.
As for dabbling, the same effect holds for any class. Going from 60 speed to 70 speed means a 33% increase in DPS. Going to 80 would double DPS. Who is going to dabble when there are such huge gains at the end of the road? With my system, going from 60 to 80 would mean an 18% increase in DPS. The same increase you'd get between 40 and 60. For yours you'd get a 12.5% increase in DPS. Your actual bonus to DPS would be the same as as the gain from 40 to 60 although in terms of real performance gains it would be lower.
As for pistols, the ease of use is equal to power. PvE and PvP a pistol just lets you do more with your weapon with nearly no downsides. It's that simple. Too many bonuses, too few penalties. Yes, their uber moves got toned down, but aside from mind damage (a problem of its own) there just aren't really uber moves anymore. Even with the speed differential, pistols aren't that bad in a DPS comparison with non-commando weapons. If/when this needed change to the system goes in, pistols will go through the roof in terms of overall power. This all adds up to a reason why having pistoleers at your side in a call for a change to the system can be both a blessing and a curse.
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StGabriel
And finally, you're using a very bizarre notion of "dabbling" if you consider a BH/Pistoleer to be a dabbler. They are the furthest from it. They have spent every single point into maxxing one ability: pistol fighting. It's about the goal of the build, not the specific profession names. Besides which, bounty hunter is a particularly bizarre profession in that it has mini-dabbles which are in effect not dabbling at all.
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StGabriel