Chaotic Dreams

Folks,

we have seen some threads about balance of the melee weapon. And we have been listening to you. Just at the moment most of the weapons feel equal to us. Here is chart I made that list all of the variable properties of each of our melee weapons:


As you can see we have tried to balance them. The Hammer for instant does the most damage but has the smallest chance of hitting your head, it also has the most momentum transferred. The daggers are on the opposite end, the have the lowest amount of damage, lowest momentum but a fairly decent chance to hit the head. Again some of the values were based on some physical properties of the weapon, there others we set to balance the weapon. So we can use this as a guide to see if any one of them should be tweaked.

Now notice the blockrange is the same for all. That is something we added but never looked at tweaking. The value of 24 represents a good mix for blocking. So we can move this up or down a bit. Remember when you block nothing really happens other than your weapon is moved in front of you (or to a side/back). All of the blocking detection is done in the other persons attack. When some one swings at you the code checks your weapon location vrs theirs and YOUR (not the attackers) blocking var. Thus the higher yours it, the better chance you have to block them. The only rule to this is that we have to set the value in multiplies of 4. Why 4? we reduce the blocking by a factor of 4 when the player is not TRYING to block you

One thing this chart can not show is the animations and the speed. All animations are played at the same speed. However some animations have more frames to them, thus they take a bit longer. So ideally we can balnace out the weapons with the animations as well. For example all dagger moves should be "quick" where as the hammer moves should be "slower". But that is hard to place on an Excel Spread sheet

We never said the melee system is perfect nor the best. But it is a very good approximation, has enough vars to fine tune it and robust enough to add in more features as we see fit. So with this in mind, what do you think we should change? Keep in mind we can not change it for everyone one as one person will say X needs to go up, the next will say the same X needs to go down

Ive got one question.
Is the damage for the dagger calculated for each dagger?
If so, the dagger would do 16 damage a hit because you almost everytime hit with both daggers.
thats it.

The only thing I would suggest is to find a way to make blocking actually useful. At the moment you have to specifically wait for your opponents attack, and even if you do get the block in successfully there's no guarantee you won’t take damage. Attack is the best form of the defence at the moment.

I think blocks should spin off into countermoves. So after blocking an attack, you can respond very quickly. Otherwise what's the point? I would allow attacks to 'flow' from blocks so as you block you can hit the LMB to instantly transform the block into an offensive move. But at the very least, I think you should increase the blocking time.

Yeah maybe you should increase the block radius for all weapons across the board then focus on raising or lowering them from there. Right now blocking really is never even thought of as a viable move in a melee match.

Interesting how the katana is supposed to be getting the most headshots but it never does cause of its poor range. I think that the block range and damage are what stand out the most. Weapons should definitely have different blocking stats because that would really help differentiate them. At the moment the templar is just a cheap B-sword. If the templar had the ability to block everything though many more people would consider it if they liked playing defensively.

jb wrote:
As you can see we have tried to balance them. The Hammer for instant does the most damage but has the smallest chance of hitting your head, it also has the most momentum transferred. The daggers are on the opposite end, the have the lowest amount of damage, lowest momentum but a fairly decent chance to hit the head.

Looks good on paper, but the fact is the length of time of the animation on the hammer overcompensates for its smaller radius, you can actually slide into the warhammer after its swung and still get headshotted, even on a a low ping server/LAN, I think the animation is just so slow, similar to the daggers multiple damage hit points, but when the daggers do multiple, its weak enough where you dont die after the first hit, but since the hammer is soo much more powerful, the multi-hit effect happens so fast and one swing = you are dead, even if that swing was late. Perhaps a little bit of a knockdown on the damage to compensate for its multi-hit slowness. I think this just happens to be an engine anomaly that just happened to come out for this particular weapon.

Also the data on the single axe seems very miscalculated for head shot radius. The normal swing of the axe swings exactly at head shot so much as at any point in the swing that on a flat terrain, you can get the most headshots with this weapon. the full sideways swing from ut2k3 was a little more balanced. The numbers Im sure are accurate as far as coding, but some slightly skewed in reality due to engine nuances.

The hammer does seem to get alot of headshots. I believe its large size more than makes up for its limited headshot radius. Some tweaks may be in order after we are finished with the more critical things.

The only issue I have is all melee weapons have the same Block Range? I don't believe so... I'm able to block more attacks with the Daggers and Battle "Double" Axe than anyother. Also bl00ds33ker brought up a good point that I too would like to know:

Ive got one question.
Is the damage for the dagger calculated for each dagger?
If so, the dagger would do 16 damage a hit because you almost everytime hit with both daggers.
thats it.

If this is true the Dagger's damage should be brought down to 6 for each dagger

I agree with tbe blcoking.. no one uses it.. and what was said about turning your block into som kinda retaliation move.. but also make it so that some who has their attack deflected has a decent chance of blocking the retaliation.. this could make for some very interesting one on one battles.

Katanas range.. woudlnt mind it a lil longer.

dagger damage down to 6 sounds like a good idea. would love a few more specials.