Does combat get better?

[Echo Weaver]

23 minutes ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

If the blackguard is doing his/her job, then the hunter can safely stand at a distance and just plink away at the enemies with spears or a bow.

Thought we're not an optimal class pair (Hunter and Clockmaker rather than Blackguard), my teen and I try to do this sort of tank-and-range synergy. I don the heavy-duty armor, shield, and falx, and she hangs back with the bow. The problem with this is that I'm still not terribly good at it, and she reverse kites well enough that I'm not always sure why I'm there. We also don't bring enough healing, and we've never found sulfur, so we can't max out our poultice effectiveness. 

Mostly, we need practice. Maybe we'll get it in the Resonance Archives. I don't know how difficult they will be, but we're way over-geared, so there's that.

[LadyWYT]

In fairness, it's difficult to tank as a Blackguard when the hunter is seemingly the tastiest thing the enemies have ever seen. It's not unusual for the hunter to be running around screaming in terror while I'm trucking along behind desperately trying to catch up and dispatch whatever beasty is giving chase.

[Tom Cantine]

15 hours ago, Lame Fox said:

My issue with treating it as pure survival is that once we are over the initial difficulty of starting with nothing and not knowing what to do, survival becomes routine. And to be fair this isn't a unique problem to VS, it's been true of every survival game I've ever played.

I get that, but I've never had a problem with it myself, because I'm always finding interesting projects. In TOBG, I would build roads between all the villages I found, and develop geographically appropriate infrastructure. And that never ends.

In VS I can do that with traders, establish roads or sea routes between them, develop villages near each and pretend there are unseen human NPCs populating them, and so on.

But in multiplayer the possibilities absolutely explode. I have long thought about how much fun it would be to build a theatre (perhaps modeled after the period-appropriate Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day), and then actually -- ACTUALLY -- put on performances there with other players. I mean, there are already SO many costume pieces and props available, the game includes a few emotes, and I've even found scraps of an actual script for a play in the lore of the game itself. 

On TOPS, I built a university with an astronomical observatory, which I actually use to measure and calculate the movements of the stars and the sun and how they change with season and latitude. I've invited other players to conduct original research in geology, agriculture, entomology (there are 169 unique specimens of Lepidoptera in the game to collect if you're so inclined), and there's work to be done in physics and the VS-specific field of temporal studies. I excavated a ruin and I'm going to be preserving it as a museum, having logged all the contents of the vessels and bony soil (of course I saved the bones for proper respectful burial).

I've been thinking about ways to establish something approximating a legal system, with courts to resolve disputes between players and enforce contracts. You could run a courier service, or a commodities broker, or shipping. There are art museums on this server, with genuine works of art, and quite a few players spend most or all of their time just chiseling magnificent creations.

When you can engage with other players on a server, you will never run out of things to do.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Tom Cantine said:

But in multiplayer the possibilities absolutely explode. I have long thought about how much fun it would be to build a theatre (perhaps modeled after the period-appropriate Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day), and then actually -- ACTUALLY -- put on performances there with other players. I mean, there are already SO many costume pieces and props available, the game includes a few emotes, and I've even found scraps of an actual script for a play in the lore of the game itself. 

DO IT! It's an absolute blast! I will note that I've not done the theater performance specifically, however, I played on a roleplaying server in my Warcraft days and there was a guild that played the part of a theatrical group and would put on plays about various lore events in the game. Very creative, very entertaining to watch, and something even the shy types and non-roleplayers can into easily simply by being the audience.

[Tom Cantine]

29 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

DO IT! It's an absolute blast! I will note that I've not done the theater performance specifically, however, I played on a roleplaying server in my Warcraft days and there was a guild that played the part of a theatrical group and would put on plays about various lore events in the game. Very creative, very entertaining to watch, and something even the shy types and non-roleplayers can into easily simply by being the audience.

I'm busy running a university! How am I gonna have time for a career in the theatah?

 

[LadyWYT]

12 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

I'm busy running a university! How am I gonna have time for a career in the theatah?

 

Simple, just open a coffee shop and the theater kids will take care of the rest. 

[ifoz]

4 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

and then actually -- ACTUALLY -- put on performances there with other players. I mean, there are already SO many costume pieces and props available, the game includes a few emotes, and I've even found scraps of an actual script for a play in the lore of the game itself. 

That would be incredibly cool, seeing Brief Discussions with the Traveller performed in-world. 

[Lame Fox]

13 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Yeah, I get that. For storms, the spawns could be tweaked to prevent them from spawning right on top of the player, but otherwise temporal storms are meant to have erratic monster spawns so I don't expect much change on that front. For caving, the close quarters and limited visibility is also why I recommend relying more on melee while underground, instead of ranged. It's very easy for the monsters to scuttle back into the dark, where they are hard to shoot.

I guess but that doesn't seem to leave much use for ranged as combat in general since most relevant enemies only seem to spawn underground or in storms.

13 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

One thing to check before you go caving though is the rift weather, since that does affect underground spawns. On days with calm or low activity, there shouldn't be more than the occasional couple of monsters to deal with, but any higher rift activity than that and you may want to save the spelunking for another day in order to avoid dealing with too many monsters. If you're already caving, it's a good idea to keep an eye on rift activity, and head for the surface if it starts to increase.

This may be part of why we get so many then, I hadn't been checking it since I assumed the rift weather affects, well, rifts. I've never seen any down there AFAIK, so I had no idea the two concepts were even related.

 

13 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Like I said, temporal storms are quite erratic in regards to spawns--if there is space for a monster to fit it's possible for one to spawn, although smaller well-lit rooms are less susceptible than wide open spaces. As for storms being bugged regarding number of spawns...that I don't know. I don't think they are, but it's always possible. If you are using mods at all I would check to make sure there's not possible interference there, but otherwise I would suspect it could also be the particular pattern of enemies the storm brings, as it can vary. I believe one of the possible storm patterns spawns predominantly shivers and few, if any, drifters or bowtorn. Since shivers run around like crazy, it's possible they could be spawning and running off before they notice you, which makes it seem like the storm isn't spawning enemies.

No mods presently. On enemy types, we've had all sorts spawn in the house so I think they have room. Although I guess it's possible they are just a more "expensive" enemy or something, and it generates fewer of them. I've actually had a medium storm while writing this though that also seems to have spawned very few enemies, to the point I went outside to look for them when normally that would be a somewhat poor idea. So I'm not sure what has happened, we're just getting few of them now.

 

12 hours ago, Teh Pizza Lady said:

Hunter and blackguard do synergize well and here's why: Blackguard can take point and do the majority of the damage. Hunter can shoot around the blackguard. Since most enemies will be focusing on the blackguard, they can hunker down, keep the shield up and use the higher health pool to absorb the brunt of the damage while attacking in melee in between the enemy's hits. This where the hunter comes in handy. If the blackguard is doing his/her job, then the hunter can safely stand at a distance and just plink away at the enemies with spears or a bow.

That is how I expected it to work but in practice I find that the enemies don't necessarily prioritize the blackguard, even though it's the closer character. Then more also likely appear in places we've previously cleared and attack from behind, so without controlling them via fences we end up fighting two separate melee battles.

 

Regarding multiplayer, I usually stick to things like LAN unless it's a game type that is very tolerant of lag, because my ping to anywhere with populated servers tends to be terrible.

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Lame Fox said:

I guess but that doesn't seem to leave much use for ranged as combat in general since most relevant enemies only seem to spawn underground or in storms.

Ranged is still more relevant than you think. It's useful for softening up surface enemies like bears and wolves(if not dispatching them entirely with ranged), as well as softening up monsters in temporal storms or dealing with straggling bowtorns at daybreak. There's also one major enemy where ranged is an absolute must.

Overall, I do think ranged combat could be a bit stronger, but I don't think changing the existing aim/fire system or adding stronger weapons is necessary. Currently, ranged weapons should be the pick when it comes to hunting, however, half the time I don't need a ranged weapon at all since it's so easy to walk up to creatures like pigs, bighorns and provoke a fight, or shoot a male deer once to provoke a fight. I think a better option to make ranged combat a bit stronger(without making it so strong it outclasses everything else), is to tweak animal behavior so that wild animals will avoid the player if they can, and only attack if they're particularly aggressive or cornered and panicked. That way, the player actually has to track down their kill, instead of walking up and starting a fight.

9 hours ago, Lame Fox said:

This may be part of why we get so many then, I hadn't been checking it since I assumed the rift weather affects, well, rifts. I've never seen any down there AFAIK, so I had no idea the two concepts were even related.

Yeah it's definitely something I would check. Rifts don't spawn underground, but I do think more unstable portions of cave have higher spawn chances.

 

9 hours ago, Lame Fox said:

No mods presently. On enemy types, we've had all sorts spawn in the house so I think they have room. Although I guess it's possible they are just a more "expensive" enemy or something, and it generates fewer of them. I've actually had a medium storm while writing this though that also seems to have spawned very few enemies, to the point I went outside to look for them when normally that would be a somewhat poor idea. So I'm not sure what has happened, we're just getting few of them now.

Hmmm, not sure then. I would definitely keep an eye on it, and consider submitting a bug report if there's heavy storms but just no enemies(or very few) at all.

[Lame Fox]

On the surface enemy types: he's actually told me wolves aren't an issue. Apparently the small knockback from hitting them is enough to be able to fight them indefinitely. For bears we had been using traps, since they seemed to hit through our early armours very easily. We haven't really had much to do with them lately though so I'm not sure to what extent we might fight them in the open going ahead.