Swordsman Archive
Thread: I'm against the talked about 'speed caps'
Some of you might know,thecombat designer mention something about possiblymakingprofessions have different attack speed limits., ieTK / fencer = .5 second or 1 second, pike = 3 second, swordsman = maybe 2 seconds.
I know all of this is stillin the planning and discussion stages, butI'm voicing my opposition to the idea right now, at least for the melee classes.
Myobjection is thatall melee, in general, should be fast,not a slowly choreographed dance.I don't know about you, but I don't want to be limited to 2 seconds, even withmaster levelspeedand aspeed sliced 2h curved sword, and I don't want to see the pikemen limited to3 secondsbetween attacks -that's an eternity! Also consider that a KD (swordsmen, if you don't have master brawler for 2hLunge2 and the extra speed and toughness, you have no idea what you're missing) without dizzy lasts what, 5 seconds? How fair would it be to pikeman to KD something and waste 3 out of those 5 seconds standing there doing nothing,getting one chance to hit while the KD lasts,while a TK or fencer can get in multiple hits? As swordsman, we would suffer a similar handicap.
I think the present system is pretty good, because it's flexibleand lets us create our own attack styles. For example,you can do a powerful special with a hammer every 3 or 4 seconds, or switch to acleaver or 2h curved and hit really fast, but with less damage.This kind of versatility and choice makes for fun gameplay.Limiting us to an arbitrary number like two seconds, will make combat feel ponderous and awkward, and would be astep in the wrong direction.
But different speeds is good.
It's good to have different professions with different capabilities. Speed is a good way to differentiate, given that it is balanced. You should be doing more damage for that time and should be losing flexibility.
The idea of changing the speed to a different number is silly. It isn't a very effective change. It will still have many problems.
What should happen instead is that overall speed should be calculated using a formula that has no meaningful cap. Two formulas that I like are:
speed = normal_speed * (1/(1+speed_bonus/100))
speed = normal_speed * .99 ^ k*speed_bonus [for some constant k, probably between 0 and 1]
I prefer the latter myself. The former means that there is a linear increase in dps with increased speed bonuses. The latter means that there is a linear increase in overall performance gain with increased speed bonus. That isn't a great way of saying what I mean. To use an example, with the second equation, if k = 1, then +50 to speed will result in roughly a 40% decrease in delay. +50 more speed will lead to a further 40% decrease. So +100 speed would be 60%*60% = 36% of the original delay or a 64% decrease.
The beauty of either of these equations is that they give decreasing or equal returns in effectiveness and they would allow high speed bonuses with no cap. As the speed formula currently stands, the last few points give much more dramatic increases in damage. The difference between a 90 and 95 speed bonus would be a halving of your actual delay or a doubling of speed where the difference beteen 0 and 5 is only a 5.3% overall increase in speed.
--- Flynn and Gaffyn + The Brothers McDonnell ---
Should be "changing the speed cap".
And why is this bad? Because it still will boil many or most weapons down to a cap making damage the only variable on a weapon worth looking at. It will still give high damage, low delay weapons an artificial boost at the end of the skill tree that has no purpose for the game. And it will make reduce weapon novelty as many or most weapons will still be basically firing at the same rate. Better to have some some smooth formula that continues to create differences between weapon speeds over continually larger speed bonuses and does so in a way that doesn't require capping but simply naturally "caps" itself at some viable growth rate for effectiveness.
--- Flynn and Gaffyn + The Brothers McDonnell ---
Falator wrote:
Lol i agree that this would suck. No way they will make us do 4 times the damage per hit as a tka since we don't do much more than them now. oh and thanks to the tkas insane speed mods, they will be able to easily hit away at the speed cap no matter what it is.
Ummm... We outdamage TKA's hit-per-hit by a mile. However, they hit a lot faster (assuming you're basing this on the power hammer) than we do. WIth a curved sword we're about equal, maybe.