Pikeman Archive
Thread: Information from the Devs Intimidate/Warcry, Tanking, animations
- Warcry and Intimidate are fairly weak, can they be improved?
They asked for oursuggestions on this.
- Animations were changed and the community would like to know if the old ones can be restored, or if better ones can be implemented
They said animations should be changed in the "near future"
- Tanks can't hold agro at all. Can the hate system be changed to allow tanks to hold agro?
Taunt and Agro control are on thier list. They asked us to provide examples of how we would like it to work.
Please leave your suggestions below, thanks!
Message Edited by Gunman21 on 05-03-2005 02:18 PM
As for the aggro issue...2 Options that seem easy enough (provided the game engine will allow it) :
1. Make Taunt stronger and lastlonger. I've had cases were I will taunt, the creature would attack me once, then immidiately aggro the rifleman in my group again.
2. Make melee have a stronger aggro effect. Basically, AI would be more likely to aggro something that attacked it with a melee attack. This makes it easier on tanks to hold the aggro, but doesn't give melee characters a choice of whether or not they want aggro, so in that area it might be better to go with option 1.
Message Edited by RPMayhem on 05-03-2005 05:42 PM
And for the warcry intimate thingie, maybe they can implement a way that melee warcry on a critter can only be overridden by another melee and not by a ranged figure.
The most obvious suggestion for intimidate is to make it decrease damage more than it currently does. Improved intimidate right now is a 20% damage reduction and sticks poorly in a lot of cases. For a role-defining master-level skill that's pretty sad. Knock it up to 40% while leaving normal intimidate weak.
I'm still unclear on how warcry is supposed to work (the skill onion and the icon shown in combat have different descriptions). Assuming the icon is correct, with improved warcry speed is decreased by 15 points for 20 seconds. That's totally ineffective against any higher-level opponent, since the difference between 100 and 115 speed is negligible.
It's highly questionable whether a speed decrease has any use period, but it at least needs to be a percentage-based decrease and not a point-based decrease. A 15% speed decrease would still be fairly weak though, it ought to be bumped up to at least 25%. Overall, I'd rather see it changed to a delay similar to that in the smuggler's concussion shot.
Aggro issues could be solved entirely if proximity was just taken into account. If I'm 4 meters away and hitting something for 100 DPS it should create more aggro than someone who's 60m away and hitting for 400 DPS. Taunt then simply needs to increase the aggro level for 15 seconds or so in order to draw the mob over to close-quarters combat with you.
Yay for animations!
Message Edited by annelid0 on 05-03-2005 09:36 PM
Improved intimidate really needs to have a much higher chance of sticking or a lower cooldown on it. I didn't realise it was just a 20% reduction either , seems kind of low. A lot of melee hybrids will take the basic intimidate line in pikeman but a master level skill should be a considerable improvement on a tier X skill.
Intimidate needs to be more reliable at master. More often than not I set it off, get all the particle effects but it doesn't stick on the creature. Warcrysounds good per discription but it simply DOES NOT WORK, not much else to say about that one...
Taunt needs to be more effective at holding aggro, problem is that in queing the ability, I loose the opportunity to attack and with the taunt registering so low I will likely be outdamaged at the next opportunity. So, take into consideration my need as a tank to set off CoB, Intimidate, posture change and Riposite as well as get a heal in every now and then or try to capture any and all additional aggro...I have riflemen sitting off in the cut pounding on the mob. Now, in a perfect world the rifleman would not unleash like that to allow an aggro balance, but, regardless even with lower level players while I am doing all of the above crowd control and stating to ensure my survivabilty, someone will outdamage the aggro acheived by a taunt which is on such a timer that I cannot regain aggro before they get knocked around.
Animations don't seem all to bad, I'm constantly bouncing back and forth and I've seen some of the same animations which we used to get. Certainly not as high on the list as our broken abilities.
There are some SERIOUS latency issues on live atm. I find myself checking the group status when that happens to see who is taking damage...then when I find them I run to them and start attacking, so even if the mob is 60meters away on screen the game thinks it is right in front of the rifleman. Then I attack fine
Grati wrote:
Has anyone else noticed that while you are attacking and you are on top of your target, all of a sudden it say's "Too far"??? The damn thing is right on top of you. But if you run to your ranged groups, you start hitting again? Even though the creature is about 20M from you. Then he dies and slides the 20M's to your feet.
Sup with that?
antares
Taunt animation needs to be the pikeman dropping his pants and mooning the creature braveheart style.
True story.
I'd kinda like to see something at least as useful as Warcry used to be. Either an unavoidable delay in attacking or a melee version of Rooting perhaps (minus the bug, of course).