Dodging

[zanzibar]

The light armour skill should be renamed to dodging.

There isn\'t a dodging skill, and light armour only seems to affect dodging and your probability of taking hits for no damage.  Doding is its own skill in real life so why is it attached to your knowledge of the correct way to wear not only armour but a specific class of armour?

You could make the argument that light armour reflects your ability to operate and move while wearing different kinds of armour.  The idea of being accustomed to different kinds of armour might make sense, but your ability to swing and parry should also be affected if the various armour skills are kept.

Still, it would make more sense if dodging was its own skill and if these rather vague armour skills were less of a factor in dodging.  It doesn\'t make sense to be able to dodge everything that comes your way in light armour, but suddenly you\'re almost useless when it comes to chain mail.  And if you can\'t dodge a thing when you\'re wearing street clothes, there isn\'t a chance of your ability to dodge improving once you throw on a suit of armour.  Dodging needs to be its own skill.

I\'m not saying that the type of armour you wear shouldn\'t be a big factor.  With heavier armours, you should be able to dodge far less but take far less damage when you\'re hit.  Light armour means more damage when you\'re hit, but you\'re hit far less often.

[SuburbanPlankton]

I have a different take on the issue.

We already have the Agility stat.  That should do the same thing as your Dodging skill.

As for the armor skills, I think we should get rid of Light, Medium, and Heavy Armor skills, and replace them with a single Armor skill.

Your Agility, Strength, and Endurance stats should determine your effectiveness in dodging attacks and avoiding damage while unarmored.  Each type of armor should decrease the effectiveness of your stats.  The heavier the armor, the more of a negative impact they cause.  Studying  Armor should help to minimize the negative impact on your stats from wearing that armor.

[Ethan]

There is three different armor skills because the armor are different and so a character may know how to use thick leather clothes but not full plate. Each skills \"reflects your ability to operate and move while wearing different kinds of armour\" but also the armor\'s effectiveness i.e. the attacker will try to aim point of the thinest armor whereas the defender will try to pary with the thickest. Off course this is not obvious and you need some experience, different for each style of armor.

So I don\'t see the aim of making a single skill, neither deleting the light\'s one.

But I am agree, it should be a dodging skill.

In fact you should have three choice:
- parry with a bucler : First it is damage vs bucler\'s armor and if the bucler is broken, vs your amor (You are using armor skill with a penality since firstly you didn\'t intent to use it.)
- dodging : take all damage or nothing, if miss you might have the time like with parry to move a little and so to use the armor skill but with a penality.
- nothing : you are not defending yourself but your are using armor skill fully

[Zan]

I don\'t see the need for a dodging skill but I would like to see dodging become an active effort in the game.

Simplified you\'d have to press a button in order to dodge a blow, here timing comes into play but that could provide problems with all the lag around.

You could also say if you press a button the next hit has a chance be dodged, related to your agility and armor skill.

Or we could create different buttons, one for each area that can be hit: hand, feet,arms, legs, torso, head. So you basically have to guess where your opponent is going to hit you, if you guess right you dodge their blow automatically, else you don\'t.

Some quick ideas ... in short I\'d just like to see some more involvement in the fighting system than just clicking the attack button and waiting till one of the two dies.

[Draklar]

Hmm... This topic isn\'t so black&white... For one I don\'t feel much difference when I wear chainmail and when not. Granted it\'s heavy, but that\'s just about strength I guess. However there are parts like helmets, which require you to know how to use them. Plus those things make it hard to figure out distance and things like that at start.

Originally posted by Zan
Or we could create different buttons, one for each area that can be hit: hand, feet,arms, legs, torso, head. So you basically have to guess where your opponent is going to hit you, if you guess right you dodge their blow automatically, else you don\'t.

Fencing was never a guessing game. I believe this should be left to the skills of the character.

[SuburbanPlankton]

Originally posted by Ethan
There is three different armor skills because the armor are different and so a character may know how to use thick leather clothes but not full plate. Each skills \"reflects your ability to operate and move while wearing different kinds of armour\" but also the armor\'s effectiveness i.e. the attacker will try to aim point of the thinest armor whereas the defender will try to pary with the thickest. Off course this is not obvious and you need some experience, different for each style of armor.

I started off with this same line of reasoning, then changed my mind.  My thought being that training in one type of armor should carry over to some extent to any other type.  Granted, there are great differences between wearing leather armor and wearing full plate.  But the mechanics of moving while armored are not entirely dissimilar.  It seems that it would be \"unfair\" for someone to train very hard to learn to use their chain mail, and then forget every single thing they learned because they switched to plate.

How about a combination of the two ideas?  Have a generic Armor skill.  At the beginning, this would be the only thing you could learn.  This would grant basic knowledge of movement and tactics while armored.  After training to a certain level, you could then choose to study a particular type of armor.  Doing so would grant greater knowledge for that specific type, but would not help you in  general.

For example, say that training one level in Armor increased your player\'s effective skill level by 2%.  Make the type-specific skills grant a 3% increase, but only to that armor type.  So training to level 6 in Armor gets you a 12% increase, no matter which type of armor you are wearing.  But training to level 3 in Armor and then training 3 levels in Medium Armor would grant a 15% increase while wearing Chain Mail, but only a 6% increase while wearing Leather or Plate.

This allows for learning specific knowledge, while decreasing the penalty for eliminating general knowledge.  I think this sort of knowledge system could be applied to many different aspects of learning within PS.

[Nikodemus]

Bah, i gues i\'m too tired and have not enough patience to understan S-Plankton way of thinking. But i want to add somethink to this topic. I would like to explain how skill system has been solved in Project Entropia (evil) game. It is mostly crappy commercial product, but even crappy games have few good ideas.
There was numerous skills and these was used when you was trying to perform some action. Eg, if you wanted to fight with sword, skills which ws used was eg accuracy, damage inflicting, and some other. I dont remmeber well.
But it isn\'t the point to write which skills was in PE, but to describe the pattern.
In PS if you train light armor a lot and start using medium, you will have no bonuses at all. But the fact is, using light armnor you dont train only this, but some other skills which are used if you equip medium armor and heavy armor.
In effect if you was training with use light armor only, when you equip heavy or medium armor, you will have some knowledge in using these too, but not as great as with light armor.
That is why i propose to make from all three armor skills, more basic skills which would be used in different importance when we have equiped eighter light, medium or heavy armor. Skills like dodge, skill to avoid being hit in weak parts and so on.

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by SuburbanPlankton
We already have the Agility stat.  That should do the same thing as your Dodging skill.

No, because dodging requires its own kind of intelligence apart from being quick, flexible, and dexterous.  I think that dodging should be an agility and intelligence based skill, but that doesn\'t mean that when you stretch in the morning that you\'re also practicing how to dodge an arrow.

Originally posted by Ethan
Each skills \"reflects your ability to operate and move while wearing different kinds of armour\" but also the armor\'s effectiveness i.e. the attacker will try to aim point of the thinest armor whereas the defender will try to pary with the thickest.

I really don\'t like the armour skills.... but in the end I agree that they should stay for exactly that reason.

I also like your idea of being able to set defense, much in the same way that presently we set different kinds of attacks.  It would add more strategy and colour to PVP.

Originally posted by Zan
Some quick ideas ... in short I\'d just like to see some more involvement in the fighting system than just clicking the attack button and waiting till one of the two dies.

Speaking as an avid PVPer, there is a lot more that goes into fighting.  However, it involves the use of potions, and the exploitating of game mechanics.

[SuburbanPlankton]

I just don\'t like the idea of a separate skill for Dodging.  How would one train for such a skill?  For Weapons skills, you train by practicing with the weapon.  For Armor skills, you train by learning how to maneuver in your armor, and by learning its strong and weak points.  But I can\'t figure out how you would train Dodging.

It seems to me that you would learn to dodge either while weapons training, or while learning to best use your armor, or most likely a combination of both.  Making it a separate skill seems to be to be a bit contrived.

I do agree now that we need multiple Armor skills; however, I still don\'t like the idea that none of your knowledge carries over from one type of armor to another.  Both my idea of a \"generic\" Armor skill in addition to the \"specific\" skills, and Nikodemus\' idea of a skill system that affects the underlying base stats both address this issue.

One more thing:  How about doing away with \"Light\", \"Medium\", and \"Heavy\" armor, and replacing them with \"Leather\", \"Chain\", \"Plate\", etc.?  Each specific kind of armor requires its own skill set to best utilize.  Two different types of armor, both of the same \"weight\", might require drastically different fighting styles.

[Draklar]

Originally posted by SuburbanPlankton
I just don\'t like the idea of a separate skill for Dodging.  How would one train for such a skill?  For Weapons skills, you train by practicing with the weapon.  For Armor skills, you train by learning how to maneuver in your armor, and by learning its strong and weak points.  But I can\'t figure out how you would train Dodging.

By dodging blows during combat...

[Ethan]

I do agree now that we need multiple Armor skills; however, I still don\'t like the idea that none of your knowledge carries over from one type of armor to another.  Both my idea of a \"generic\" Armor skill in addition to the \"specific\" skills, and Nikodemus\' idea of a skill system that affects the underlying base stats both address this issue.

The character should\'nt know the difference. One solution is also skill\'s tree. In short, if you gain/lose experience in a specific skill, you will gain/lose experience in the parent skill. Of course the end of this tree will change a lot, the nodes less.

One more thing:  How about doing away with \"Light\", \"Medium\", and \"Heavy\" armor, and replacing them with \"Leather\", \"Chain\", \"Plate\", etc.?  Each specific kind of armor requires its own skill set to best utilize.  Two different types of armor, both of the same \"weight\", might require drastically different fighting styles.

True but I thought it was only a beginning but as Draklar pointed this system has to be improve a lot in order to allow player to wear different armor at the same time e.g. gladiators.

[zanzibar]

I understand the rationalization behind armour skills, but really.... how much experience and training do you really need in using plate armour before it starts to help you?  If anything, the skill should be meaningless unless the other guy has training in it as well.  That is to say, skill in armour allows you to put up a deffense against someone who is also skilled in that armour.  Reason being that the other guy will go after the weak points in the armour or use offensive techniques appropriate to that type of armour.  So if both fighters have equal skill, then there\'s no real modifier.  However, if one persons skill exceeds the other persons, they will be able to put up a better deffense, and at the same time they\'ll go for the weaker areas on the other person more intelligently.

The thing is, in other games I\'ve played -- pretty much every other game I\'ve played -- armour is just something you throw on and forget unless it breaks or you find something better.  The idea of knowing the weak points of a particular armour is exotic and interesting, but it also seems very complicated.



What\'s the word from the devs on this issue?

[Rage McCloud]

well... my input is that agility does see if you \"dodge\" or not... it\'s your agility and the monsters agility... the server compares and yadda yadda...

[zanzibar]

Originally posted by Rage McCloud
well... my input is that agility does see if you \"dodge\" or not... it\'s your agility and the monsters agility... the server compares and yadda yadda...

Yes, that\'s the way things are, but our interest also lies in what could be.

[SuburbanPlankton]

Originally posted by Draklar

Originally posted by SuburbanPlankton
I just don\'t like the idea of a separate skill for Dodging.  How would one train for such a skill?  For Weapons skills, you train by practicing with the weapon.  For Armor skills, you train by learning how to maneuver in your armor, and by learning its strong and weak points.  But I can\'t figure out how you would train Dodging.

By dodging blows during combat...

That\'s not training, it\'s survival  

Seriously, I just can\'t see Dodging as a skill (meaning, in this case, something which you are taught in exchange for money/experience).  When is comes down to it, \"dodging\" is really just \"trying to keep out of the way of the other guy\'s weapon\".

You could say that Dodging involves the study of combat techniques, and learning to anticipate your opponent\'s moves so as to be able to avoid them.  But in this case, dodging would be something that would be learned as part of your weapons training.  Or you could say that Dodging involves learning how to best use your armor to minimize the effectiveness of your opponent\'s blows; now dodging becomes part of Armor training.  If Dodging is its own entity, then it seems to be dependent on how well you can get out of the way.  Now we are back to Agility.