Combat Responsiveness, Broken Piercing Damage and...

[Razsius]

...why Crystal Eater Spiders SUCK!!

 

Okay so i've been browsing the threads and doing my own testing and it appears that some (though i'm sure not all) are missing some vital information that PoE does actually give you.

 

When i first started playing combat felt way too fast, horribly unresponsive and combat mechanics felt clear as mud and here's why:

 

In any of the IE game series, anyone that played on a non-trivial difficulty level intrinsically understood that there was a hidden global cooldown in those games that would bar you from spamming your abilities and such (potions and spells being the worst offenders).  This was, i suspect, in large part due to the hidden rounds that the AD&D ruleset was balanced around.  Personally, to me this was perhaps the most irritating aspect of the IE series in general.  This mechanic is actually back in a slightly different form... I call this "recovery time" or maybe RT for short.  Every action you do has a recovery time from a swing of your sword to a cast of a spell to an "instant" fighter, barbarian or paladin ability.  This information is displayed in a little bar directly below your health bar when you are in combat.  Unfortunately, it does not show up at all outside of combat. 

 

The problem is that there are various bugs involving movement and ability use that will create a RT that is well outside of anything that is remotely reasonable.  Move and activate the fighter's defense buff and you might suddenly find your fighter unable to attack at all until that extremely slow depleting bar hits 0 (and the buff is finally used).  In the meantime, the monsters will naturally be chewing your face off.  There also seems to be an auto attack bug that includes never actually getting to the next action you recover from (namely your next attack) which means you watch your character sit there staring the monster to death but that's neither here nor there.  The real problem is thus: using an ability will reset this recovery bar.  What i mean is this.  Assuming your RT bar was halfway depleted toward your next action (say another auto attack), if you used the Rogue's Crippling Strike you would lose said RT bar and instead work toward the next one.  An example would be your Rogue using an Arbalast in the "reload" animation would begin said animation yet again before firing the crippling strike (with the exception that a bug actually prevents that but...).  If you remember I did state at the beginning that this was present in the IE games in the form of that hidden global cooldown.  If you pumped a potion a little too quick your fighter would stop all that he was doing to wait and use that potion.  I am SO glad that apparently after 15 years of "progress" a worse form of this is currently in the game .

 

Needless to say the recovery system (bugs aside) as it stands right now is ridiculous.  Arbitrary delays to ability use is about my least favorite way of balancing a game system.  I, for one, would not mind this system taking a hike or finding itself completely redone.

 

As for the next order of business, as it stands the damage type system shouldn't even have been implimented into the beta at all.  Why do I state this?  Because of piercing damage.  Piercing damage for some inexplicable reason has a 10 DT ignore.  In laymen's terms this means only BB Fighter, BB Priest and potentially any character you create will have any armor at all.  BB Fighter starts with 12 DT (and a buggy talent that makes it higher... sometimes), BB Priest starts with 11, BB Mage starts with 8 and BB Rogue starts with 6.  That means BB Fighter has 2 DT and BB Priest has 1 DT when facing a piercing attack.  That's right 5/6 of BB Fighters entire amount of armor is negated by an attack type and BB Priest is even worse off everyone else can fight naked and suffer the exact same amount of damage.  "But Raz!" you say "There shouldn't be too many monsters that use piercing." If that was the case it wouldn't be so bad but wolves, beetles and spiders all use piercing attacks and that accounts for an entire map if not more of encounters. I don't even *want* to know how this made it by QA because this is well outside the realm of reasonable and borders more on the "we went to Planet Absurd." To be honest, if I take this as a serious tester of the beta than i am more than a little insulted because the only feedback I can even give in this case is "My armor does absolutely nothing in combat."  There you guys go there's my combat feedback .

 

I'd be curious to know what everyone else has uncovered in regards to the beta's dirty little secrets.  I also know that critical damage seems to be being calculated incorrectly if the combat log is to be gone off.  Nothing like seeing "Critical hit! 64 - 9 = 39" in there which would mean criticals are probably supposed to be gutting us even harder than they already are.

[Gromnir]

am admitting that 'tween bugs that prevent us from attacking and the combat log feedback that is often counter-intuitive, am getting a wee bit frustrated with PoE combat. for the time being, am gonna hold off to genuine rip into what we see as flawed combat mechanics as we can't tell mistakes from mindless at this point... give 'em til first patch.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Matt516]

Where does your information that piercing damage ignores 10 DT come from? From what I've seen and read, different armor suits will have different % weakness to different damage types - but other than certain very specific weapons (one dagger I know of) I don't think there's anything that says piercing just gets to ignore flat DT. It should ignore a % of DT equal to the armor's weakness to that damage type, right?

[Razsius]

Yea you'd really think so wouldn't you...

 

Mainly the combat log as well as the damage i'm actually taking while playing are the 2 culprits.  If you mouseover any particular damage transaction it'll say something along the lines of "Accuracy - Deflection = X. X + Roll = 87 Hit! 35 - 0 (your DT should be here) = 35 damage." I was getting 0 DT reading whenever a wolf or beetle was eating me alive on my Barbarian who *should* have had 8 DT in leather.  Now I know that there should be some % form of damage improvement based on type but... that's a tad much.  Meanwhile, BB Fighter was only absorbing 2 damage and he's got a 12 DT plate mail equipped + a buggy ability that should add 5 more DT but mainly just does what it pleases and only works when it feels like it. When I started the playthrough it was adding 3 additional DT.

 

Now the irony is after I posted that I ended up fighting spiders that were doing crushing not piercing damage and largely got the same "where the hell's my DT!" results.  So to be honest, I don't know what's going on with the damage threshold calculations right now (or criticals for that matter). That aside the damage types are either broken as hell or buggy as hell and really shouldn't have been added into the beta because it's certainly rather difficult to get a feel for combat at all considering.  I'd do some more testing but I ran into the "suddenly everything is easy" bug and monsters no longer have DT themselves and can't hit me for more than single digit damage (which might be why some posters think the beta is easy).

 

Either way it's a mess.

Edited August 24, 2014 by Razsius

[Yonjuro]

Yea you'd really think so wouldn't you...

 

Mainly the combat log as well as the damage i'm actually taking while playing are the 2 culprits.  If you mouseover any particular damage transaction it'll say something along the lines of "Accuracy - Deflection = X. X + Roll = 87 Hit! 35 - 0 (your DT should be here) = 35 damage." I was getting 0 DT reading whenever a wolf or beetle was eating me alive on my Barbarian who *should* have had 8 DT in leather.  Now I know that there should be some % form of damage improvement based on type but... that's a tad much.  Meanwhile, BB Fighter was only absorbing 2 damage and he's got a 12 DT plate mail equipped + a buggy ability that should add 5 more DT but mainly just does what it pleases and only works when it feels like it. When I started the playthrough it was adding 3 additional DT.

 

Now the irony is after I posted that I ended up fighting spiders that were doing crushing not piercing damage and largely got the same "where the hell's my DT!" results.  So to be honest, I don't know what's going on with the damage threshold calculations right now (or criticals for that matter). That aside the damage types are either broken as hell or buggy as hell and really shouldn't have been added into the beta because it's certainly rather difficult to get a feel for combat at all considering.  I'd do some more testing but I ran into the "suddenly everything is easy" bug and monsters no longer have DT themselves and can't hit me for more than single digit damage (which might be why some posters think the beta is easy).

 

Either way it's a mess.

 

 Somebody posted a bug in the beta bugs forum about DT being reset to zero. (I think it was) after reloading on a map, the DT for encounters on that map would be wrong.

[Razsius]

That bug only affects the mobs on that particular map and it does more than just make DT hit 0. I play on hard so i notice almost immediately when it hits me. Not only do mobs drop like flys but they can't seem to hit or do any reasonable damage to you anymore after that. I kept getting my arse handed to me in the spider cave (because petrify is absolutely stupid) but decided to bail and head back to town and restock.  When i came back to the spider pull before the ogre I screwed it up and my party utterly destroyed them regardless.  Mind you during all this BB Fighter was still absorbing 2 points of damage rather than the 12 he should've been. If his DT *had* been reset to 0, he wouldn't have been absorbing anything at all.  Regardless this happens with or without the prior mentioned bug.