ArtifeX Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Check out the new *ASC* website for my new saber guide that covers all of the changes to lightsaber fighting in the v1.03 patch. Make sure to let me know if you think I missed something. http://www.oculis.org/asc/ The old v1.02 saber and force power guides are posted as well, so check them out too if you haven't read them yet! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackDove Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 "The page cannot be found" I guess its my browser... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
power_ed Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 thats actually a pretty nice site ::/Ed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheDarkSide Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Thanks a bunch Artifex! For an ASC'er, you're OK in my book Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackDove Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Overall Thoughts on the Patch When speaking about just the changes to saber combat in the v1.03 patch, I'd say that Raven failed (in part) to accomplish what they set out to do, which was (I hope) to make the game more fun by giving the players more winning tactical options to choose from. Reasons I believe this: Things That Were Done Right The removal of self-defeating spin swings from Medium style is a big step in the right direction. Think of it this way: if you're spinning 360-degrees through a swing, then you're spending half of your time with your saber pointed in the wrong direction. With regular swings, that happens much less. Plus, those spin swings are S-L-O-W and do the exact same amount of damage as the normal, faster ones. The addition of Strong Style combos. This simply means you can add more attack options to your repertoire while using Strong Style. That's never a bad thing. Repairing (not Nerfing) the DFA. Now you can't get killed instantly by a saber buried so far in the ground that you can't see it. Yay! Making the Light Backstab and the Medium Finisher more deadly. Both of these moves were hard to do and left you open forever. Now they have the damage to balance out the risk. Good job! Adding more duel maps! Things That Were Done Wrong Previously the ratios of attack damage were 30 damage for Light, 60 damage for Medium and 100 damage for Strong (reduced, 3/6/10). Now, damage has been lowered for all three, but look at the new ratios: 20-30 for Light, 30 for Medium, 40-60 for Strong. If you look at the minimums, you come up with 20/30/40 (reduced, 2/3/4); certainly more balanced, but if you look at the maximums you get: 30/30/60 (reduced, 1/1/2). How does this expand on viable choices of Stance? Looking at solely damage, why would you use Light or Medium over Strong? You can do double damage with Strong! More importantly, why use Medium over Light? It does the exact same maximum damage! What has been done here is narrow the number of winning choices, not expand upon them. One useful tactic (maybe too useful) has been heartily nerfed: the DFA. Many will cheer this change that had difficulty defending against it, or were just annoyed by its constant use, but ask yourself how many times you've used it successfully in the new version. Would you still say it's useful? Maybe, but you will have to agree it is much less useful than before. Again, a narrowing of options. The addition of Saber Throwing to No-Force games is ludicrous. It will just turn into a blockable boomerang fight, mark my words. Don't you think the addition of kicking into No-Force games would have been more interesting and fun? I just don't understand Raven's move on this one. Why keep the Light Crouch Lunge swing from turning during execution? Did anyone have a problem with it? I sure didn't. Anyone? This will just cut down further on the people who actually try to use Light Stance. That==Narrowing of options. All swings do less damage except for the backswings, which actually do so much more than before that they're almost always 1-hit kills. I've heard people tell of servers where people run around backwards trying to land these swings. That's a pretty strong statement about how much more effective these attacks are than all the others. If I gave you a butter knife, bag of rocks and a Rocket Launcher, and told you to go kill someone, which tool would you use for the job? There might be an occasional circumstance where you might use a bag of rocks, but how often would you use it in comparison to the rocket launcher? One percent? Half a percent? ...Narrowing,...Narrowing... Double-tap Kicking. The technical problems of using this with a laggy connection and the extreme difficulty of kicking someone who is crouched forces me to give this a big thumbs-down. Now those people with modem connections or who simply have difficulty hitting their key that fast won't be able to use this attack. How does that give us more options? Slowing down Medium swings. As if there weren't enough reason to give Medium a miss. Why was this done? To empower Light? Read carefully: Don't empower a Style by Nerfing the others! If you want to empower it, then just make it do more damage, give it more range, give it Defense Breaking, or any other number of things! Lowered Damage for normal swings. Why lower the damage on swings that almost never connect? Light and Medium both can be blocked 100%! What difference does it make if you lower the damage? This only made sense in the case of Strong style which now requires 3 hits to kill in a duel rather than the old 2-hit kill. Light and Medium both now require at least 5 hits to kill if there is no Healing. That's a moot point when you consider that those hits will never land! Uhh, you rule, that one should go to Raven, and they should fix all that in the next patch in my opinion...we can set up a poll for this Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArtifeX Posted May 13, 2002 Author Share Posted May 13, 2002 Glad you guys liked the guide. As far as sending the link to Raven, feel free. I'd actually encourage anyone that agrees with it to do so. They'll start paying attention if they get buried in email with links to the site. The force power guide is going up soon! Watch for it! _____ ArtifeX *ASC* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tree Posted May 13, 2002 Share Posted May 13, 2002 Making the Light Backstab and the Medium Finisher more deadly. Both of these moves were hard to do and left you open forever. Now they have the damage to balance out the risk. Good job! No No No backswings are being abused. Theres no risk. lol Even less of a risk in a FFA. If you have 100 health plus protect it will still kill you. Ass fighters are destroying this game. I can't believe you are applauding this. One useful tactic (maybe too useful) has been heartily nerfed: the DFA. Many will cheer this change that had difficulty defending against it, or were just annoyed by its constant use, but ask yourself how many times you've used it successfully in the new version. Would you still say it's useful? Maybe, but you will have to agree it is much less useful than before. Again, a narrowing of options. Yes I agree that was the whole point of changing it for the patch. I have seen people use it, but now you actually have to aim. The risk vs reward factor is now balanced. Double-tap Kicking. The technical problems of using this with a laggy connection and the extreme difficulty of kicking someone who is crouched forces me to give this a big thumbs-down. Now those people with modem connections or who simply have difficulty hitting their key that fast won't be able to use this attack. How does that give us more options? There were a lot of kick whores before. Not that they were good just boring as all hell to play against, they only did that one move usually combined with pull. Even if you swung and hit someone they could still kick you. It was WAY to easy and it usually forced the other person into a kick whore match. 1 less whore. Want to hit someone who is crouching? Throw your saber behind them and bring it back through their gay ass. The no force duel saber throw can be turned off. If our wonderfull admins would realize NO ONE likes saber throw on NF duel servers. Maybe they will do something about it. I think before 1.03 you were a defender of heavy stance. Do you have a laggy connection? You on 56k? I got that impression. I think it colors some of your ideas if you are. Whenever I play and I see someone using what I consider "cheap tactics" they usually have a **** connection. If you had broadband I think it might change a lot of your opinions. I don't know if its the only way 56kers can compete or what. But I have never seen someone that I would call a good saberist with high ping. They usually rely on other things and they used to rely on heavy stance pre-patch. Raven made a lot of changes to balance things. I think they have balalnced the saber stances. They have done even more to get rid of whores and THANK GOD. I dunno bout force powers. All they need to do as far as sabers is blalance the backswings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrCrusher Posted May 13, 2002 Share Posted May 13, 2002 Nice work! Although I watched this player name "Chewy" use DFA very effectively last night on a FFA server. I just switched to blue stance and harassed him throughly I could also "jam" his attack by charging him on the wind-up. A lot of other players did not figure out a counter thus died consistently. If your "really" good at it, DFA still seems effective. Its just not easy. There are NF servers without sabre throw they have the large red X icon next to them. Admins just need to figure out the settings. cg_disableForcePower 262143 Quote - ChangKhan[Raven] Medium Stance: Medium was not meant to be the whirling dervish style, so it was made so that, if you do the same exact move over and over again, you cannot chain as many attacks as if you mix it up a little. "Spinning top" fighters should use fast style. This is the *only* change to medium style. Are you sure its slower?......... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morbrion Posted May 13, 2002 Share Posted May 13, 2002 Am I the only one who think Artifex is leaving out one important factor in his guide? The amount of time it takes to swing, and your movement speed while swinging? While Blue's range is very short, you can wait for the big red swing to start, crouch, chop or swing, and roll away before they can complete their swing. In the games I have seen, Red isn't used a lot now. Blue can 'buzzsaw' a Red player, wait for them to begin an attack, move in, attack, and move out before their swing completes. While Artifex says that Yellow only does 30 damage, I have seen duelers with 100 health fall dead from a single yellow swing (it may have hit both coming and going, but that would still only equal 60 damage...) To me, the most important thing in a duel is to NOT GET HIT. I am not as concerned as causing the most damage in a single attack, as I am in my ability to attack quickly and move out of my opponent's attack range. While entertaining, I wouldn't say that his guide has alot of useful information in it. It is full of his biased 'Red style rulz' type attitude, and not a lot else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmcdavel Posted May 14, 2002 Share Posted May 14, 2002 Needs more meat to it, but a good read. I think its important to note that strong attacks benefit the most when your opponent stays in the swing for a second or two (this is what causes those overhead chop one hit kills you see sometimes). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArtifeX Posted May 15, 2002 Author Share Posted May 15, 2002 Originally posted by Tree No No No backswings are being abused. Theres no risk. lol Even less of a risk in a FFA. If you have 100 health plus protect it will still kill you. Ass fighters are destroying this game. I can't believe you are applauding this. Yes, there is a risk associated with doing the backstab/sweep--if you miss, you should be dead. A simple Push/Pull backweep or DFA will turn the tables on you. Also, I was more speaking of the blue stance backstab than the sweeps of Yellow and Red. The damage of the sweeps really hasn't changed much. I'll edit my post to clarify that. Yes I agree that was the whole point of changing it for the patch. I have seen people use it, but now you actually have to aim. The risk vs reward factor is now balanced. I still have never seen it used well. Until I do, my conclusion stands. All moves should be useful, otherwise they're just a waste of development time. The DFA is definitely not the only move that needs some attention. I grant you that the DFA is much closer to balance than it was before, however. There were a lot of kick whores before. Not that they were good just boring as all hell to play against, they only did that one move usually combined with pull. Even if you swung and hit someone they could still kick you. It was WAY to easy and it usually forced the other person into a kick whore match. 1 less whore. Want to hit someone who is crouching? Throw your saber behind them and bring it back through their gay ass. Kicks are very easy to defend against. Someone who tries them over and over never lasts long against me or any of the other good players I've seen. The Pull/Kick combo only works on you at extreme close range, at slightly longer range while you're moving, or when you are below Minimum Usable Force for Push/Pull. The no force duel saber throw can be turned off. If our wonderfull admins would realize NO ONE likes saber throw on NF duel servers. Maybe they will do something about it. I think before 1.03 you were a defender of heavy stance. If you mean I thought Strong stance was the most effective, then you're right. I still do. Do you have a laggy connection? You on 56k? I got that impression. I think it colors some of your ideas if you are. Whenever I play and I see someone using what I consider "cheap tactics" they usually have a **** connection. If you had broadband I think it might change a lot of your opinions. I don't know if its the only way 56kers can compete or what. But I have never seen someone that I would call a good saberist with high ping. They usually rely on other things and they used to rely on heavy stance pre-patch. No, I have broadband. I just hopped into servers where I had a high ping and lowered my rate to test the double-tap jumping. It fails 100% with a ping of over 150ms. Raven made a lot of changes to balance things. I think they have balalnced the saber stances. They have done even more to get rid of whores and THANK GOD. I dunno bout force powers. All they need to do as far as sabers is blalance the backswings. I'm sorry, but I have the polar opposite opinion of this patch. I think that it is by far less balanced than before. Absorb and Push/Pull are now the only useful powers in the game. Backstab/sweep is now the only useful (comparatively) saber swing. Light and Medium styles are complete trash now that they can be blocked 100% even while moving and Light can be blocked 100% even while using a force power such as lightning or drain. How is that more balanced? If Raven just nerfs the backstab/sweep, then people will just resort to the Strong Axe Chop (forward+attack) after knocking someone down. It has the ability to do over 100 damage at close range. What then? Nerf it too? That would just render all of the saber moves equally useless and increase the time it takes to complete a duel. Everyone would just run away to Heal after every little nick they suffer. I'm going to write up an article today on exactly what I think would return the game to a balanced state. Hopefully you guys will drop by and let me know what you think of it. http://www.oculis.org/asc/ _______ ArtifeX Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArtifeX Posted May 15, 2002 Author Share Posted May 15, 2002 Originally posted by MrCrusher Nice work! Although I watched this player name "Chewy" use DFA very effectively last night on a FFA server. I just switched to blue stance and harassed him throughly I could also "jam" his attack by charging him on the wind-up. A lot of other players did not figure out a counter thus died consistently. If your "really" good at it, DFA still seems effective. Its just not easy. There are NF servers without sabre throw they have the large red X icon next to them. Admins just need to figure out the settings. cg_disableForcePower 262143 Quote - ChangKhan[Raven] Are you sure its slower?......... I'm sorry, but ChangKhan is wrong on this one. I know he's from Raven and supposedly knows his stuff, but testing proves that he neglected to mention that the damage for Medium has been cut in half. The style is slower because, as ChangKhan mentioned, of the removal of the faster combo swings; namely, the forward+right+attack swing that used to hit twice withing one swing animation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackDove Posted May 15, 2002 Share Posted May 15, 2002 Of course the Yellow is now slower...there is no question about it... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ArtifeX Posted May 15, 2002 Author Share Posted May 15, 2002 Originally posted by Morbrion Am I the only one who think Artifex is leaving out one important factor in his guide? The amount of time it takes to swing, and your movement speed while swinging? No, actually I did mention that in the General Notes section. While Blue's range is very short, you can wait for the big red swing to start, crouch, chop or swing, and roll away before they can complete their swing. In the games I have seen, Red isn't used a lot now. Blue can 'buzzsaw' a Red player, wait for them to begin an attack, move in, attack, and move out before their swing completes. I have yet to see this happen. If you use the range of Red properly, then a Blue player will never get within striking range. If you screw up and he does, then you can kick him even while you're in the middle of a Strong Swing. I still have an open challenge to anyone who thinks they can beat me with Blue. While Artifex says that Yellow only does 30 damage, I have seen duelers with 100 health fall dead from a single yellow swing (it may have hit both coming and going, but that would still only equal 60 damage...) Give me some data on which swing was used and whether the target was stationary, etc., and I'll investigate. In my testing, every medium swing did 30 points of damage exactly with the exception of the Finisher and the Backsweep. To me, the most important thing in a duel is to NOT GET HIT. I am not as concerned as causing the most damage in a single attack, as I am in my ability to attack quickly and move out of my opponent's attack range. As my guide stated, the easiest way to "NOT GET HIT" is to use Strong style because of its resistance to having its defense broken by a swing. Light and Medium sabers can be batted around like child's toys with any of the Strong swings, leaving you open for a very fast counter-attack coming off of the repelled swing. As far at getting out of the opponent's range goes, if you keep proper distance with Strong, then you will never be inside a Light or Medium user's range. While entertaining, I wouldn't say that his guide has alot of useful information in it. It is full of his biased 'Red style rulz' type attitude, and not a lot else. Strong Stance is the most effective stance currently in the game. If you have evidence to the contrary, present it to everyone as I have done. Or, of course, you could challenge me, my Strong stance vs. your Light stance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tekken Posted May 15, 2002 Share Posted May 15, 2002 Strong is the most effective stance, Strong + Light is the most effective strategy.... Medium is a POS now, and it pains me to admit that, being a medium-stance pre-patch player..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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