Light Sith's View: Heavy Stance Clipping

[Xilimyth]

DISCLAIMER: Consider this part II of my heavy stance post. Again, let me reiterate that there is NOTHING wrong with Heavy Stance's damage output, the speed of the attacks offsets that.

 

Everyone seems to complain about Heavy Stance, except of course those that use it. I was just recently in a game today, which was demo recorded of myself on Red Team fighting against blue team. In game, EVERY attack my opponent made with heavy was a near instant kill, as it should be. The problem was, during each of the attacks, the saber itself never touched my character.

 

When I brought this up, my opponent's response was, "Then your computer must suck". (Yes yes, my Pentium IV 1.5ghz with 768 megs of PC1000 RDRam and a Geforce4 TI4400 128 meg video card sucks I know, but we'll discuss that later, as that's not the issue) A half-thought remark from, someone that didn't see the other side of the picture.

 

Anyways, after the fight, I watched the demo 4 or 5 times to justify my claim. And in the playback, only on one occasion, a cross-slash, did the saber actually strike my character. All the other times, I was dead long before the saber arrived in which case I should have had plenty of time to roll.

 

Why is this? The answer is, as it stands right now, heavy style has a slight clipping problem that needs to be addressed. A Safe/Diagnostic mode a friend showed me illustrates this greatly. Are you aware that in Heavy Stance when pulling the Death from Above move, that the damage area extends two "blocks" AWAY from the saber itself? This means, that when you get killed, you're dead before the saber arrives... Most heavy style moves are like this and MAY be to counter it's slowness or simulate the effects of what it's supposed to do. However, this is, again in my opinion, what aggrivates people most. The one shot kills are fair, but dying when you SHOULD be able to react isn't.

 

This also may be used to account for why Heavy Stance is "so damn hard to block". Sabers only actually block when the saber models touch, so how can you block an attack if you're being delt damage before the weapon hits.

 

A second problem with Heavy Stance's clipping accounts from the fact that the saber's damage area extends underground. This means, that even if the heavy stancer missed you and is recovering from the "Death from above" move, if you approach from the front or if he turns to face you before rising to his / her feet, you'll still be considered attacked by the game, and standing right in the damage zone, you'll take the damage as if you were actually hit.

 

So it's my opinion that Heavy Stancers definately have skill in their stance, after all, being able to hit something with that slow of an attack NEEDs skills, but they also have an slight advantage due to these above clipping issues. So for all the Light- and Medium-stancers, or multi-stancers like myself, just be careful and take heed of these warnings. I have written an email to RavenSoft about this, but made it clear that if they change this clipping issue, they'll need to speed up heavy stance slightly to compensate and not make Heavy-Stance useless. Thanks for listening.

 

About The poll:

 

I decided to put a poll on this post just to see reactions of people. As I'm playing this game, I do notice a lot of Hot Topics floating around. To help out, I try to take a neutral stance on each situation to help out the community, hence these posts to rationalize things to the players. I was debating asking for a "column" to write in on jediknightii.net, but just wanted to see how the community feels about my approach.

[Ae0N]

I vote, no thank's..

[Abom|nation]

Well, can we see this demo then?

[gravehead]

I've seen that heavy dfa plenty of times to know to get out of the way early. And have gotten pissed because of dieing well before the saber was even close to me. Always thought it was lag on my part, but now I know. Thanks for info!!

[Xilimyth]

Just something I learned in Statistics class, I'll join up with multiple servers of different pings to get a larger testbase. The above incident happened on a pinged server of 103 (myself on DSL). I'll get together a set of demo files from the 51 ping servers to the 500 ping servers (the highest I get) and post them for viewing.

 

I also emailed my friend asking for how he saw the actual clipping boxes of where damage is dealt. I'll post it for everyone as soon as I get a response.

[[h]dedcat]

that would explain a few things. i normally just attributed some the the "dfa kills while 5 steps away" to lag even tho i normally have a 30-60 ping. and ya... the kill with dfa recovery should be looked at.. do some dmg yes.. but just the regular touch damage.

[WarteX]

Good post, ive seen this "Death from above" when u get fragged b4 u even get hit...but with the "360 heavy swing" its different, ive experienced that when do the 360 swing and the blade goes through my opponent no damage is inflicted. I hope raven fix the heavy stance and makes u need more skill to use it, im getting pretty tired of the flames against heavies

[Xilimyth]

True. Something I forgot to put in my post. The laterally swung heavy stance swings don't have the clipping issue, they deal damage when the saber hits. It's ONLY the vertical swings that have the clipping issue.

 

BTW: I haven't gotten a response, but the clipping regions might be shown in Safe Mode. Being I never used safe mode, I deleted the shortcuts. Anyone about to test this? or have the command line for safemode? Oh, Demo's should be ready for Posting after I study for my Accounting Test tomorrow....ugh....

[Mertado]

Safe Mode:

 

"D:\Star Wars JK II Jedi Outcast\GameData\jk2mp.exe" safe

 

Same for SP.

[Xilimyth]

Thanks. I'll get some demos recorded using that (if it's what shows the damage clip range)...

 

again, after Accounting *sighs*.

 

Nope didn't show it. I'll get it for everyone though. The boxes of the clip regions definately show this.

[Skidrowpunk]

You sir, hit the nail on the head. Almost nothing about JK2 MP annoys me, but this is the one thing that does. Now, when i got to attack a vulnerable DFA'er, and get a hit , i usually do. But its when you face the smart ones that turn twords you that it gets bad. And more and more people learn this every day. This is, infact, the only true bug i think needs to be fixed, other than some minor ones.

[GooglyMoogly]

Originally posted by WarteX

...ive experienced that when do the 360 swing and the blade goes through my opponent no damage is inflicted.

 

I think this is either a lag or net code issue. I use yellow almost exclusively and I can't count the number of times MULTIPLE swings in a row have simply passed right through my opponent.

 

This happens ALL the time for me so I assume it is just my bad connection or my opponents.

[Xilimyth]

I'd rather see a Death From Above move recover quicker, then them spin with their saber in the ground and kill me that way :/ That's frustrating.