Teras Kasi Archive

Issue #1

All of the developers have their craniums firmly implanted in their rectums.

I am EXTREMELY disappointed in Q's response to our pleas; we need to give him paragraph long responses (this is to correspondant) instead of single sentance summaries; because apparently he took alot of what was said WRONG and gave us terrible answers; heres what I think TKA's should have

1. /stick; keep us IN RANGE AT ALL TIMES, server side, so that we are always in range to attack; if we can get in range; we deserve to pulverize them.

2. I know this goes along with a /stick; allow us to attack while moving; and increase our range so we can attack BIG CREATURES; how do we effectively tank if the creature always gets out of our range? 7 meter range ought to do it

3. Give COMBAT MEDICS A JOB!!! Bio engineers are now the only pet healers; why not let melee classes pay a combat medic to tip our vibros (lancers knucklers swords axes and such all included) with disease and poison; they would work like a powerup, add some decreasing effects to the weapon but increase chance of poisoning or disease; so if that kiter wants to run away; let him do it with a 500 HAM 6 second tick; they will stop running away and come back before they die then.

4. Give us a bleed for christ sakes; every class gets a bleed besides us; our thing *SHOULD* be knockdown; alas thus is not true, pistoleers do it for more damage, less HAM, less effect on their weapons, and have a larger range to do it from; not to mention they can already run away so the second we get next to them they say "fine i'll stop *PISTOL WHIP* *runs away*", a bleed attack would equalize us with the attacks all ranged get (carbineer and pistoleer get ranged knockdowns, pistoleer gets melee knockdown and rifle, pistoleer, carbineer all get bleeds and such).

5. Make us like a bounty hunter in the sense of "LET US WIELD MORE THAN A VIBRO KNUCKLER!!!" We are teras kasi, martial artists; NOT UNARMED BRAWLERS!! TKA should be a ninja class; so why not let us use the vibro knucks, nunchucks(sp?), thrown stars (possibly tipped with poison), and small knives that can be thrown at 10 m or so that can induce bleeding; or perhaps just a knife that induces bleeding more;

thats my top 5.

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Might as well copy and paste since these are my top 5 as well. Number 1 is a huge biggie for me.

1) The Attack Range The farthest I've ever been able to connect with an attack is 6m. However, as I've grown bolder and more able, I'm taking on bigger MOB's. The problem is that the bigger MOB's apparently like to be 8+m away for their attacks. As such, I'm consistently being made Out of Range.

2) Unable to Move and Attack at the same time. Ranged players can Run and Shoot all day long. Why is it impossible for me to Run past/up to/away from a MOB and throw a punch at it?

3) The HAM costs for special moves can be pretty harsh. Of course the already written resposnse was "They shouldn't be stringed." Excuse me? I earned those attacks. I should be able to use them much more effectively than every 3rd,4th,5th, etc attack. God forbid I use VK's. At that point the MOB might as well take a smoke break, as I'll effectively kill myself.

4) Still being attacked thru that hill in front of me.

5) When I'm in battle with multiple targets, I'd like to actually be in control of my character. If I wanted him to attack the second, third, whatever MOB then I'd "tell" him to. I don't need or want the game deciding for me, on who/what should be attacked.

My top five: (may have already been answered/posted but it's worth being mentioned a second time)

1) Kiting - let us TKA's control our burst run - make it a tier 1 perkof the power tree perhaps? that is let us toggle its use like we toggle the use of vibroknuckes in a quickslot - this way we can use a short burst run to catch up to a mob member who is kiting us with a ranged weapon, turn off the burst run when we get in range and attack unarmed. Use of the burst run will still be subjective to us getting tired but as we climb the power tree of TKA, the lenght of time it takes to "get tired" will be longer. (Think about the Barbarian class in AD&D - they can run for hours before getting tired because of all the melee combat they do.)

2) make unarmedlunge usefull - every time I've used unarmedlunge I've always missed to the best of my recollection. unarmedlunge is no longer in any quickslot because of this

3) if we are to have vibroknuckes as a weapon, give us some variety - brass/spiked knuckes have been mentioned before (no point in bladed since VK are essentially an electric knife like we had back in the 80's to cut the turkey at Thanksgiving.)

4) Mobs can shoot through hills - last time I pointed my bb gun at the ground and fired, I don't recall it being able to penetrate 40 meters of dirt - I doubt a blaster or carbine in Star Wars would be able to shoot through the ground.

5) improve our defensive manuevers against ranged opponents or show us that we are really dodging the ranged attack in some way - put messages in the combat console showing that our defensive stats are being put to use.

Kruge99.

I too, am mostly PvE based, so I'm not going to comment too much on that side of things. Here are my top five in no particular order:

1)The hit-box issue

2)I've been looking into other melee classes and I understand what the dev's were intending to do: TKA's have the most raw defense, fencers have less defense (but <i>mad</i> defense to things like stun and posture down) but can dodge, swordsman have less defense but can counterattack, and pikeman have less defense but can block. I can't comment on how well the other class' defense is, but if all we get is straight up defense, this needs to be tweaked.

3)Power boost is worthless. Someone said that we should be doing stun damage with our vibroknuckles. I'm not sure if i can agree with that, but how about if power boost changes our damage type instead? If the knuckles are removed from the game, then power boost can be how we get our AP up from 0.

4) Meditation tree still sucks until you get to tier 4.

5.1) I would just like to comment on some of the other posts that I've seen saying that we should have throwing stars or whatever. I think this is not in line with what Teras Kasi (or Steel Hands) is all about. We are not Ninjas. We are martial artists, strictly melee. So, I guess this is a vote against people wanting caltrips or throwing knives or any of that stuff.

5.2) I would also like to say "I loveForce of Will." It has saved me on two occasions. Someone has said that it should be removed if it doesn't work all the time. I most <i>definately</i> don't want it removed, but maybe an increase in it's success rate would be appropriate, since it <i>is</i> a tier 4 skill.

a few points of notice with your issues.

Wait for knockdown 2 if you want your knockdown to do more than pistoleers. I've hit storm troopers for 3250 damage with my 122 VK if they have their rifle out. Over 1600 on regular mobs. Plus it just looks so much better than pistol whip.

not being able to hit while running is a side effect of us having a minimal range. Latency and the fact that yourrange checkstarts at where you were at when you started the attack and finishes closer to when you do the move is the other main problem. All classes suffer mildly from this but it reduces our range to 0.

If you have problems with taking too much damage. All you can do is intimidate (reduces damage by 50-60%) and hope you aren't being attacked by a group.

My issues are:

1. Make defense do something. From blue conning mobs and up, I don't evade. I have 31 melee defense right now. My knockdown defense should prevent me from being knocked down every time in pvp and my ranged defense should allow me to get a bit closer in pvp.

2. Range. Either increase our range to 8 meters so we can fight dino sized creatures or make it so our range check is performed at the closest contact point or make it so they don't run away every time we get in range. Also, for birds, make it check as if they are on land or increase our range so we can hit these. It should also be noted that without a VK (something that would theoretically increase your range) you can hit for 2 more meters of range.

3. Not enough damage types or weapon types. We just need more for variety. Every combat class but TKA has more than 1 weapon. I'm about to get sick if I see another VK and that's not good since it's all i can use.

4. Bring decay rate of VK's in line with pistols. Might be fixed when this patch comes out but I go through my VK's fast already. Took me 9 hours to drop my VK 400 condition. My pistol decays at about 1/4th or 1/5th that speed. Both are sliced. Before this upcoming patch, my VK would wear out in about 124 hours of hunting assuming extreme luck when repairing. If I failed on the first repair, that number would drop to about 22 hours of hunting. After this patch, I'm worried that number is going to drop to between 5 or 6 hours of hunting to 30 hours of hunting. I have enough of a problem finding VK's as is. Now, there won't be nearly enough supply which will raise prices and we'll all go broke while using VK's.

5. Get rid of the useless skills or make them useful. Why would we want to use combo skills when they do less damage than our unarmed hits? Body/Leg/Head shots when they barely do more damage than our regular hits. It's more like i'm tearing off my apendatures to hit them with the ham cost on them.

"5. Get rid of the useless skills or make them useful. Why would we want to use combo skills when they do less damage than our unarmed hits? Body/Leg/Head shots when they barely do more damage than our regular hits. It's more like i'm tearing off my apendatures to hit them with the ham cost on them."

As it stands right now, Combo2 ignores armor (Not sure if this is a bug, because it says it hits for 1 damage in combat log)and causes MASSIVE wounds... it's great for PVP. I can drop any player in 2 hits with VK on. Not to mention... the patch is supposed to "increase our specials." Not sure what that means, but I guess we'll find out.

I personally would like:

(1) The no attacks/specials while moving bug fixed...

(2) A base walk speed bonus for Masters ONLY (that way you can't just go up one branch and get it)

Fix those and we'll talk PVP.

ok ill be realistic

1) attack in transit... this is my biggest bitch

2) improved ranged defense

3) faster specials.. as it stands bounty hunters can use underhandshot faster than we can blink an eye.. arent we supposed to be the masters of close fighting?

4)unarmed lunge needs to actually stop an opponent from running

5)reduced ham costs for moves... right now you can kill yourself using UAlunge after 4 tries without knucklers.. this should be fixed as it does no damage

these are realistic improvements for our profession... it will keep us right where we need to be melee..

oh crap...i forgot my biggest one.

#1, really this time!: make monsters stay down when knocked down instead of their little fall down and stand up after a fraction of a second and then not be able to attack for ever. And make them not slide away and/or run away when knocked down. The devs are fixing knockdown so we use it less and it's less effective but the main reason i want to use knockdown which is to keep them in melee range is hosed and the other reason is because our defensive mods don't do anything so I have to knockdown or intimidate to stay alive through a 1 on 1 battle with a white, yellow, or red con.

Here are my top 5 issues. (Not necessarily the ones going in the report)


1. Defense

I think we need absolute word if these are even active.

2. Ranged combat

Q said..

---

If you can catch something, they’ll die, if not… It’s a trade off for the power of close range.

---

The problem is, even if we catch something, our victory IS NOT assured. Pistoleers with pistol whip can take us down just as easily.

3. The meditate line

I think we should be given Meditation XP. It makes more sense than having Unarmed XP. Xp is gained only through healing, not simply meditating.

4. Greater variety of Knucklers

5. A functioning /stick command

1. We need a /stick command. The TKA designer clearly does not understand this concept based on his response, so allow me to go into detail: first of all, we understand that we have to catch our prey first. I don't believe that there is a single melee player that does not understand this. In fact, I truly consider the designer's response to be an insult to our intelligence, but this is not the time or the place. In any case, the nature of an online game makes tracking an opponent and staying in a certain range an extremely difficult, if not impossible, chore. The developers have admitted that there is an up to 5-meter difference between what the client sees and what the server sees at any given time. There is no reliable way for us to tell how far we are from our opponent.
   
   /Follow is not adequate for this. /Follow is affected by all of the symptoms above, and will usually result in the melee player following his target just outside of melee range. This solves nothing. What is needed is a command that bypasses the client/server resolution of distance between the two entities. Distance needs to be resolved on the server, regardless of what the client sees, or the melee player will never be able to reliably stay in melee range once he gets there.
   
   In addition, the current tools for getting a melee character in range are woefully inadequate. In particular, this refers to unarmed lunge, which was nerfed into uselessness in beta. More than anything, this technique does far too much damage to the melee player to be useful on a regular basis. Either raise the damage output or lower the HAM costs. The double-nerf from beta was going to far; either one would have been sufficient. Also, the posture change output of this technique is useless against human opponents. It provides no benefit, as an aware opponent can simply instruct his character to stand back up and be on his way with little impact. If I have to use lunge more than once to get close to my opponent, then I'm doing far too much damage to myself to justify it.
   
   Finally, there are concerns that a certain pistol-wielding profession is out-meleeing us...


2. HAM costs are ridiculous, and I refuse to back down from this. No other profession (with the possible exception of Carabineer) has HAM costs like ours on special attacks. A pistol user can spam bodyshot2 all day long, incurring maybe 25 points of HAM damage (at the most) per shot. Why do the TKA (and other melee) skills cost double that or more? Q tells us that melee has to rely on their skills to survive. How can I do that when it's my skills that are killing me?


3. Vibro Knucklers are a lazy and incomplete solution for a "weapon system". Vibro Knucklers should not be removed from the game; they are an excellent high-level weapon, and they are appropriate to attacking with one's hands. However, they need to be gated to everyone but TKA's. Unfortunately, doing this removes flavor from the unarmed specialization in Brawler. Ideally, VK's need to become a full-fledged weapon system, with a larger variety of knucklers that can be used by non-TKA unarmed combatants. To be truly well-implemented, VK's should probably be an extremely high-level item, requiring a tier-3 or tier-4 TKA skill to wield, and a mid-range knuckler should be introduced at Novice TKA. This should not preclude the addition of brawler-specific knucklers.
   
   There are also opportunities for other types of equipment here, as well. For example, taking a cue from KOTOR, strength-enhancing powered gauntlets or powered armor may be appropriate.


4. This one is going to sound a lot like class-envy, but there are certain skills in other professions that simply do not make sense. Why does an advanced unarmed profession not have some form of disarming technique? Why is the melee knockdown in the Pistoleer tree superior to the one in the TKA tree? These are huge balance issues that are going to take a lot of effort to sort out. TKA needs some flavorful techniques that do more than apply damage in interesting ways.


5. Somewhat related to the above, TKA is completely lacking in appropriate defensive skills. Where is the evading, blocking, and counterattacking? Something like this would add a bit more flavor (and some much-needed defense) to an otherwise straightforward profession.