Pistoleer Archive

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Zelos1wrote:

*** Some of this may not be news, I'm not familiar with what information is not already available. This information largely comes from Dave White, one of the main devs on the combat system. Originally posted on Core Systems forum, but reposted here since I'm a Fencer myself***

"You will not ever be able to kill yourself"

Here's why: There will now be ability point pools available for Health Action and Mind. These pools are constrained by the maximum size of the corresponding HAM pool (including wounds/buffs) but do not take damage from incoming attacks.Instead, points are only drainable from these pools through the use of specials.

Ability point pools will drain much faster (i.e. costs of specials increased) but will regen much faster as well. The same secondary stats will affect ability pool drain/regen as affect the HAM drain/regen. Ability point pools can not be used to incap/kill a player.

"Nobody will attack specific pools."

Further explanation revealed this is sort of true. Professions will still keep torso/health, leg/action and head/mind shots. However, these shots have a substantially decreased accuracy modifier and are not guaranteed to hit the pool targetted, though they are likely to. All three pools will be healable, though he specifically noted that this might NOT be through stimpacks by a Medic. For those who would argue that this is status quo due to Combat Medic healing, the words he used at one point were "we need to make mind damage healable" - which presumably means he doesn't consider it effectively healable now.

"Slow weapons will be slow even when used by masters, just not as slow as when used by novices."

All weapon speed calaculations are being redone. In fact, the existing speed formulas are being tossed out entirely.

Not all players will move at the same speed. An example given was if someone has a rifle equipped that "he's gonna have to put it away to move at full speed".

Equipping and unequippingweapons and armorwill now enter the combat queue so that they do not happen instantaneously. The possibility of additional delay on these actions was mentioned but details were not given.

One special mentioned was the ability to stand after a knockdown at a significant ability point cost. Another was a melee rifelman tactic. It is unclear whether these are examples of what will be in the system or just what MIGHT be in the system.

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This throws an interesting question up - will the speeds on our current weapons change?

Hmmm very interesting info. I do like the sounds of the new HAM system. I'm not so sure I like the idea of limiting Pool Specific specials. It seems that it was something making different profession unique, but also could make then unbalanced. With out making Pool specific damage the major difference between combat professions, I sure hope they give ALL of us cool unique types of specials. If they dont' do that, then all combat professions will be pretty much the same, except for the type of weapon you can use. Which is not very fun to me.

I have heard similar info about the seed formula stuff from FF reports. That everyone is going to be slowed down, and they want everyone to be going much slower as far as attacks go. Which is fine, so long as it's balanced out with damage output between professions. ie rifleman have higher damage then us, but shoot slower then us. For real.

I love the part about moving/running slower depending on what weapon you have in your hands. Thats freaking cool if they can actually code it. If you think about it, it will change how combat, especially PvP is done for all combat classes. We as pistoleers and carrying one of the smallest, if not the smallest, weapons "should" be the most mobile combatants. So if we change our combat/play style with that in mind, it could be great to be a pistoleer.

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WesBelden wrote:

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Zelos1wrote:

One special mentioned was the ability to stand after a knockdown at a significant ability point cost. Another was a melee rifelman tactic. It is unclear whether these are examples of what will be in the system or just what MIGHT be in the system.

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Hallelujah!

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X Machine'Zed X
Obsidian Dagger Squadron

with this change, i expect pistoleer health/bodyshots to be useless. ifrandom HAMattacks hit health 70% of the time, and health attack hit health say 80% of the time, then you will get much better results using the higher power, random HAM attacks.

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BZebub wrote:

with this change, i expect pistoleer health/bodyshots to be useless. ifrandom HAMattacks hit health 70% of the time, and health attack hit health say 80% of the time, then you will get much better results using the higher power, random HAM attacks.

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BZebub wrote:

with this change, i expect pistoleer health/bodyshots to be useless. ifrandom HAMattacks hit health 70% of the time, and health attack hit health say 80% of the time, then you will get much better results using the higher power, random HAM attacks.

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Actually with this change it seems that just about all pool targeting hits will be worthless. The random HAM attacks generally have better damage multipliers so as you state, you are better off using the random attack. This will probably happen to all the pool targeting attacks though.

Based on what was said, the Torso would be the EASIEST one to target. So if Pistoleers find it not effective to target that pool it will be even worse for those that target Action and Mind since those will be even more difficult to hit.

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KzinKiller wrote:

Well ... this kind of thing makes me really nervous.

Because it basically says, 'Instead of fine-tuning the many many flaws in the existing system that our customers have discovered and pointed out to us (loudly & repeatedly), we're going to build an entirely different (untested) system and just pray that it's better, and then listen to another nine months of input from our customers about what's broken in that (and fix it at the same rate we fixed the last broken system, which is to say, not at all).'

There is nothing about the process of testing code that tells me this will be any improvement AT ALL. They just have a new theory of how combat damage should work, and instead of implementing it in pieces and seeing how the pieces work, they're going to throw the whole (buggy) mess at us at one time, and spend another six months picking up the pieces ... only they won't have any resources to do that, because the minute they dump the Balance on us they'll send all those devs over to JtL and we won't see any significant fixes to broken core systems until the Twelfth of Never, just like all the other broken systems in the game that are currently languishing because of inadequate coding/dev resources.

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Bingo. Which is why as some of you know from the Smuggler boards, the Smugglers are highly upset. The combat revamp is going to get dumped on us with little prior warning of what it's actually suppose to do. It's going to be buggy. That's going to be a given.

Then right after the JTL is suppose to come out. Yet another system with all it's bugs. Now as the new kid on the block we know JTL is going to get most of the attention. It's going to have lots of bugs, balance issue, and exploits that will need to get fixed.

Which is why the Smugglers are predicting a revamp that was promised late last year not occuring until early NEXT year sometime.