Saber Damage Patch

[FK | unnamed]

DFA Unblockable?

 

Maybe, I’ve had a few “bump sabers” and deflect with 0 damage.

 

Worth the risk/force cost if it lands?

 

Not at all.

 

 

I'm not saying the across the board damage scale needs to be messed with, I'm talking the way the damage/risk/ratio system was done; it seems kind of ass-backwards.

 

A logical system:

 

Basic simple button mash swings (any style) = small damage.

 

Basic well aimed swings = decent damage.

 

Basic specials that cost force and put you at risk = very high damage, if not a 1 hit kill, then damn close to it.

 

The "uber move" Kata that eats 1/2 your pool, locks your player in place and puts him at tremendous risk of retaliation = one hit kill.

 

 

 

 

But in reality we have:

 

Basic simple button mash swings (staff) = massive (at times) damage.

 

 

Basic well aimed swings = decent damage.

 

Basic specials that cost force and put you at risk = extremely low damage.

 

The "uber move" Kata that eats 1/2 your pool, locks your player in place and puts him at tremendous risk of retaliation = the damage rate the "basic specials" should have.

 

 

Not to mention that ghoul2 (or whatever they are calling it now) is making the "if I land my shot here, X damage will result" factor very erratic.

 

G2 was in JO and people refused to run it because of this very reason. No one really likes watching a well timed swing pass right through the neck of an opponent and not register.

 

And the argument of lag is no longer applicable unless the poster is playing his first MP game.

 

After nearly a decade of online gaming, I think I've gotten a pretty good understanding of "lag" and how to adapt to it when present. As have the majority of online gamers.

 

 

I played JO MP for a year and a half straight and never once even looked at SP.

 

In the last month or so I played JO I messed around with SP for the first time.

 

I was amazed at how "forgiving" the collision detection was.

 

I would swing and just sit there in amazement and watched shots that never should have landed, register.

 

It was almost like a "just swing in the general direction and we'll let Ghoul 2 do the rest for ya" system.

 

 

Now that this is in MP by default, I can definitely see why people who pride themselves on being precise with their duel skills getting a little bent out of shape when a "get close enough and it counts" system is in place.

[BSSiphilus]

Ghoul2? is that like a location damgage table, something will hurt more if you hit a specific point? that might be causing alot of my woes. Now I can take the time to learn the locations if thats actually true.

 

Is it?

[FK | unnamed]

Yes and no.

 

Ghoul2 is the reason people are getting weird results, but there is no "learning it".

 

At least not on a very precise scale.

 

It was designed for games like Soldier of Fortune 2 and the tiny 90000 mph projectiles in a game like that.

 

In a game where your weapon in a 50 pound, 4 foot long, lead pipe (think heavy swings), it has very erratic results.

 

It was in Jedi Outcast but most servers refused to run it due to the erratic results players got with it.

[Prime]

Since I find that the single saber is just as effective as the other two (or even moreso), does that mean I am uber-good?

[WhiteShdw]

Originally posted by FK | unnamed

DFA Unblockable?

 

Maybe, I’ve had a few “bump sabers” and deflect with 0 damage.

 

Worth the risk/force cost if it lands?

 

Not at all.

 

 

I'm not saying the across the board damage scale needs to be messed with, I'm talking the way the damage/risk/ratio system was done; it seems kind of ass-backwards.

 

A logical system:

 

Basic simple button mash swings (any style) = small damage.

 

Basic well aimed swings = decent damage.

 

Basic specials that cost force and put you at risk = very high damage, if not a 1 hit kill, then damn close to it.

 

The "uber move" Kata that eats 1/2 your pool, locks your player in place and puts him at tremendous risk of retaliation = one hit kill.

 

I've got to agree here. Moves that have risk and take skill to pull of should do more damage, maybe even a 1 hit kill.

 

JO MP was fun when moves like DFA and backslashes did a lot of damage. Sure a lot of people started spamming those moves, but a skilled player could usually(after dying a 100 times, like me ) see them coming and use an appropriate counter or defense.

 

I never minded being killed by a DFA or backslash. If someone was skilled enough to actually hit me with one, he deserved to win.

 

Sadly though, some of the execution of the specials in JA has been simplified taking away a bit of the skill. Knowing when to pull them of still requires skill though.

[BSSiphilus]

Originally posted by FK | unnamed

Yes and no.

 

Ghoul2 is the reason people are getting weird results, but there is no "learning it".

 

It was in Jedi Outcast but most servers refused to run it due to the erratic results players got with it.

 

People refused to run it? Is there a way to turn it off? or would that throw off the new system all together?

[FK | unnamed]

dunno.

 

It had a 1/0 cvar in JO, not sure now.

 

Ghoul2 is not a bad thing; I love it in SoF 2.

 

But in Jedi, as do the vast majority of serious duelers from Outcast, I simply do not like the erratic "what I just saw should not have happened" results when it is used with sabers.

[Dethsaint]

From my experiences with dueling on JA, I must say that I feel the only real damaging move with Single Saber is the Kata which in turn might as well be a suicide move as an attack.

 

The only thing worth doing against Staff and Dual Saber users are single red stance swings or pulling off the suicidal katas when you are 98% sure your opponent will die from it - otherwise they'll just do the "twirling" moves and you'll be in more pieces than an unassembled Lego set

 

What I'd like to see is one or more of following things:

 

1 - Nerf the staff damage to actually match yellow stance blows. Sometimes they do as much damage as red stance blow.

 

2 - Give the single saber a damage bonus. I figure two hands on one weapon deliver more damage than two hands on two seperate weapons. (Like the difference between Claymores and Longswords in extreme cases)

 

3 - The dual and staff saber special moves take more force power than the single saber moves, due to the fact that it take more concentration to wield two sabers and not hurting yourself.

 

This is how I feel about it. I find JA as it is now challenging when I'm up against Staff and Dual Saber users, but I still enjoy the game. The satisfaction is just so much greater when I finally kill them...

[Master William]

I always win against dual- and staff wielders with my trust single saber.

 

Red stance owns all.

 

Oh and, not everyone creates a server Kurgan, I rarely do, I enter other servers... You know

 

I recall some guy telling us to 'shut the **** up' and do that g_saberdamagescale or whatever it was.

 

Once again, not everyone creates servers, 2-3 clients in my server and bam everyone gets a ping of 999 and disconnects.

[Master DarkStar]

Anyone who wants to experince what affect ghoul2 has on JKA duals can head over to any server that ends with @BWN (You can get a full listing at http://www.bladeworks.net).

 

Ghoul2 changes duals in a number of ways. It increases the amount saber damage done by quiet a bit. We have decreased the damage scale to .45 to off set this. It also increases the speed of sabers (seems much closer to JK2) and seems to increase the users control over when a saber changes direction.

 

Blocking becomes a less common occurance, I believe this is mostly because saber animations are shorter, much like in JK2.

[BSSiphilus]

Ya unnamed, I love SOF 2, heh I the sadistic type of person who shoots people they carves and sculpts peices off thier faces with the knife .

 

Dethsaint, all those ideas are very good, tho all 3 together would make it a completely different game, hopefully they'll listen if they make a JK4. Even if they changed the first one, staff does regular yellow damage, I'd be happy.

 

Master William, red is mah fav!

 

Master Darkstar, I'll stop by and check out those servers when I get outta work. See how the settings work out.

 

I'll look for the 1/0 cvar for ghoul2 and post it here if I find one.

[DarthCobra]

The new sabers are broke. The game is full of staff ppl who just random butterfly constantly taking out everyone in their path. Aside from avoiding the butterfly there is no real good counter. Its normal swings can kill instantly without warning an without much skill needed. The same can be said about the double saber but more so on the staff. I do expect this to be fix'd in comming patches as it is broke an needs fixing. Now everyone can flame my skills and brag about how l33t they are with the staff. These new sabers are for n00bs that want easy kills. Its quite pathetic to watch them play. SINGLE IS THE ONLY SABER FOR THE SKILLED SABERIST!

[Lord Sokar]

How come I have yet to meet all these 'unbeatable single-saber users'? Seems that everytime I meet a single-saber player when I have a staff, they spend an inordinate amount of time running backwards from me (until I find a good cliff to push them off of).

 

And, while you may think staff butterfly's are random, they are anything but if you know when and where to turn on the available pivot-points (feet touch the ground).

[Kurgan]

It's unblockable? Who gives a crap, it never hits, and even if it does it doesn't do nearly as much damage as it should. If you ramp up the damage of an already off scale, it will just make the one hit random kills even more random.

 

So let's see... an unblockable move that kills in 1 hit. How about we make it so you can spin around with it too?

 

There, now it's just like it was in JK2 1.02. The community collectively whined to have that "nerfed" remember? It was considered way too powerful.

 

There seem to be two camps with the DFA, those who want it super powerful so they can use it, and those that complain that its too powerful and people use nothing but. The same problem exists with any powerful move... if a move is considered good, it will be "abused" (spammed, whatever) and people will whine to have it "nerfed" so that "spammers" can't win with it. You'll never resolve this, since its based on personal preferences.

 

The way some people talk, unless the DFA kills in 1 hit, it's a useless move and without it they can never win a duel again.

 

And what moves actually take "skill"?

 

All you're doing is hitting 1-3 keys at max and just hoping it hits. Any move that is timed wrong leaves you open to attack, any move timed correctly will hit your opponent. I don't get why that is a bad thing.

 

This isn't a real sword fight, it's a video game, and a video game that's online and realtime and by virtue of that, has to deal with lag all the time.

 

The whole thing about skill in real sword fights is that even in real life, it's possible for an amateur to throw off a master, because they do not do what is expected, whereas a master is used to a certain formula to play off of.

 

How come I have yet to meet all these 'unbeatable single-saber users'? Seems that everytime I meet a single-saber player when I have a staff, they spend an inordinate amount of time running backwards from me (until I find a good cliff to push them off of).

 

And, while you may think staff butterfly's are random, they are anything but if you know when and where to turn on the available pivot-points (feet touch the ground).

 

There are 55,000+ people registered on these forums (granted, not all of them are active and not all of them play JA, but you get the idea).

 

JA lists over 2,000,000 players having connected to the master server (granted, many of these are probably repeat players and for all we know some many never connect again).

 

Surely there are lots of players you will statistically NEVER meet in game...

 

That's why I laugh whenever I hear people say "what, you've never heard of <fill in name of clan/good player>?"

[SpDTheadkeFor]

LOL, Kirgan, I would love to see you go play on a JK2 NF Duel server against someone from lets say, SDF (I'm not in their clan, and I don't especially like their attitudes, but they had some if not the best saber handlers in JO). Anyway, you will see just how much skill JK2 actually took, I doubt you could even win one duel let alone even get close to winning.

 

Anyway, back on topic, the randomness of the damage system in JA completely offsets the whole idea that you need skill to win. In JK2, sure, someone with less skill could beat you, but it was very rare, if you were better you were going to win. In JA, the randomness of the saber damage can allow a complete noob to beat someone who knows what they are doing. While some might like that, people who play competively find it really, really, really, really annoying. Good players will still eventually find ways to win but the parries and hit damage are still too unpredictable. Frick i sound like a broken recordplayer. I must admit JA is growing on me as far as moves, but the damage system always manages to piss me off. If not that, its the specials being spammed.

 

For example, the butterfly moves are all beautiful. And I agree, most times they are easibly dogable. But it is by far the most spammed move in JA. I really don't have a problem with most the other specials because they rely on your oppents stupidity. But butterflies are a move that can be done basically without conciquence where as the others require a certain amount of risk. As far as I know you cant block a butterfly, if you're in range your going to get hit. All I want is to be able to auto block the sucker if I'm not swinging so I don't get screwed, that or have the attackers force pool cut in half or completely taken away to cut down on spamming. But I'm sure the FFAer's would hate that, so why not have a patch so that you can block them when you aren't swinging.

 

I would encourage some of you to get a friend and experiment with the damage, have one person turn off their saber and have the other hit them repeatidly with the same attack at the same place. From what I've seen the damage is so inconsistant it makes me want to puke. But I still haven't gotten to experiment with this in slowmotion, but from the prelims it looks really dumb.

 

Also Kirgan, yes its impossible to know or meet everyone who plays a game. I don't expect FFAers and CTF people to know who the good dueling clans were in JK2. But if you dueled in JK2 and didn't know who the best clans where, then you had your head in the sand.

[DividedByZero]

ARG, Kurgan, the move may be unblockable, but it a) rarely hits, and b) NEVER does enough damage to make it worth the force and risk it puts you in, it is useless. If you disagree that it needs balanceing, I see no way to reason with you becuase you're way outta line.

 

Sokar... wanna know why the single saber users run? cause you can kill us in one hit with a swing that is twice as fast as one of our hits. Like I said before, I pretty much never use the staff, I was so mad, I got it, went into our server, and just ran around waveing the staff, and people were dieing right and left from one hit kills, and I didn't spam at all. I just cant do that with a single saber as fast, and that is what is wrong.

[Kurgan]

ARG, Kurgan, the move may be unblockable, but it a) rarely hits,

 

It hits if you time it properly.

 

and b) NEVER does enough damage to make it worth the force and risk it puts you in, it is useless.

 

You're entitled to your opinion. How much damage does it need to do to make it "worth the force"? As I said you can always up the damage of sabers if you think any move is too weak...

 

If you disagree that it needs balanceing, I see no way to reason with you becuase you're way outta line.

 

So if I disagree with you I'm "way outta line" and therefore not worthy to be reasoned with? Great logic there, you sure convinced me! [/sarcasm] Since when is having an opinion about a game "outta line"?

 

The move is much weaker than it was in JK2 1.02, I'll grant you that. But who's to say it needs to be stronger? (you I suppose). I pointed out how it wasn't "useless" because its unblockable. It's not a one hit kill move and uses force, so it must therefore be "useless" to you...

 

If you make it stronger (or make it so you can "pivot" with it like you could in JK2 1.02 and in Single Player), you'll just have people whine again like they did in JK2 that it was "too powerful" and "spammed by people with no skill."

 

I honestly don't use it very much, but prefer the various normal swings of Strong Stance, but that's my personal preference.

[FK | unnamed]

well myth and I were just dueling and screwing around and I took a look at the dfa.

 

takes 3 dead on dfa's to kill a guy who is afk (this was in duel mode, not a ffa duel)...

 

keep in mind these are right down the middle head on in the face right through the belly shots.

 

3?

 

that's just...

 

sad.

 

as a side note, it seems the basic light stance lunge is the same as the dfa now, it took me 3 to kill him while he was typing.

 

[Kurgan]

Interesting stats there unnamed.

 

What saberdamagescale value were you guys using? (the default on most servers seems to still be 1)

 

If it was "1" then we could theorize that 3 would mean it would kill in 1 hit (the same way you did it, to the head).

 

Since it was duel, that means you had no shields too I'm assuming.

[DividedByZero]

I'm saying you're way out of line if you cannot see that the move is useless. JO 1.04, it could not pivot, but it did enough damage to make it worth it if you had someone cornered. The god damned saber staff user can do a butterfly which lets them jump and bounce all over the place, choose what direction they wanna go in, change direction, and if that saber happens to touch you, you often die imediately. That's retarded. In JO 1.04 they had the DFA perfect. Now the freaking blue lunge is better, I've been killed by that when I was at 100/100!!!! WTF is up with that?!

 

It is clearly useless if it's ineffective against even afk people, going up and doing one heavy hit is more usefull.

[Kurgan]

I'm saying you're way out of line if you cannot see that the move is useless.

 

That's your subjective opinion, nothing more. I pointed out a way it was useful, and you just poo-pooed it.

 

Everything is useful in the game, in this particular instance it's just not as useful as you want it to be (I assume you prefer how it was in JK2 1.02).

 

Since it's one opinion vs. another, you can't really say that I'm wrong, now can you?

 

JO 1.04, it could not pivot, but it did enough damage to make it worth it if you had someone cornered.

 

And it still can do that much damage if you have your settings changed and stop using saberdamagescale 1...

 

If I didn't make that clear before, I'm saying it again.

 

The god damned saber staff user can do a butterfly which lets them jump and bounce all over the place, choose what direction they wanna go in, change direction, and if that saber happens to touch you, you often die imediately.

 

Only if it hits. You can see the move coming a mile away, it uses up mana, and if the person times it wrong, they go flying off a cliff. Hardly unstoppable. I have done it to people in duels (on saberdamagescale 2 and had them survive, so it's definately not a guarenteed 1 hit kill). Plus you can't fully control your direction. You can choose only the starting direction. It always moves forward, but you can only "turn" with it at certain points in the move. So its still very easy to dodge.

 

That's retarded. In JO 1.04 they had the DFA perfect.

 

So just up the saberdamage and you'll have it back, except it uses up mana. But if you make it not use mana, then you'll have to take away the mana usage of the other special moves, or it'll be unbalanced. An unblockable move that kills in one hit and uses no mana... heh. ; )

 

Now the freaking blue lunge is better, I've been killed by that when I was at 100/100!!!! WTF is up with that?!

 

Sabers killing in one hit? How horrible! [/sarcasm]

 

Again, saberdamagescale is your friend. Turn it down to 0.5 and sabers will only do half damage. ; ) Plus turn up the blocking and moves like this won't be killing you all the time (if you bother to block that is).

 

Remember that a move like the butterfly IS blockable. They all are, except for the backstab, and DFA if I'm not mistaken. Kicks are not blockable of course, so the staff moves that have those as part of the move can break through, depending on if they hit you or not. But as you know, kicks are notoriously weak, but have the potential to knock you down or off a cliff.

 

It is clearly useless if it's ineffective against even afk people, going up and doing one heavy hit is more usefull.

 

afk matters not. What matters is if they are blocking or not blocking. If they are blocking then the DFA will damage them, but other swings will not (if it hits their blocking blade).

 

A person who has their saber off, is swinging, or moving or using the force is NOT blocking as often or at all, whereas a person just standing there IS blocking and they will deflect a lot more attacks. Plus if the server has sabertracesaberfirst turned on then they'll block even more stuff than before. All the more reason to have an unblockable move like the DFA around...