Finally, the darn thing spams our beloved combat log. Just look at this:

 

 

 

Also looking at that combat log, for the Rogue he had 12 attacks with 8 grazes (~66%), 2 hits (~16%) and 2 crits (~16%, one or more of these was converted from a hit I suspect, via Dirty fighting). While it's a little hard to tell as the sample size is small with those numbers it looks like the enemy may have had between 10-20 points better defence (makes me thing bug pos on your accuracy) than you had attack, and the rest of your party was even worse in BG you would have been looking at a lot of misses in a similar circumstance.

 

 

Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, Crit ...

Misses are sometimes frustrating. Attrition is always boring.

 

Take your pick.

 

Yes. This is the crux of it. I'd prefer the former any day.

 

 

While I find that completely immersion breaking, it pisses me off in BG2 when your highly trained fighters are swinging away like crazy and constantly missing, what are they Drunk?

 

I can understand if there weapon connects but they do little damage because of the defence but when a trained fighter who's only job is to be good at hitting things with a weapon constantly completely misses, then there is a problem with the mechanic. It's especially obvious when you gang up on one enemy if they've got 6 chars attacking them there is no where to dodge all those attacks (unless the they're completely incompetent) so they should get hit, how if there defence is really good they won't take much damage from the blows, but they will get hit.

In fact, grazes would be OK if they happened much less often. Make 80% of misses actual misses and 20% grazes. Problem solved.

a trained fighter who's only job is to be good at hitting things

will sooner or later hit things pretty hard. Not necessarily during every 6-seconds round though.

 

You problem is that you want instant gratification.

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by prodigydancer

 

 

While I find that completely immersion breaking, it pisses me off in BG2 when your highly trained fighters are swinging away like crazy and constantly missing, what are they Drunk?

 

 

 

 

I applaud Josh & Co for trying to avid those swing and swoosh fests that especially characterize higher-level D&D CRPGs. BG2, obviously, but also NWN2. I once made a cleric with too a weak to hit capabilities that met some undead fella in NWN2 MotB - and she had to swing at it for over ten minutes before it died a second death out of sheer boredom!   

 

 

 

Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, Crit ...

Misses are sometimes frustrating. Attrition is always boring.

 

Take your pick.

 

Yes. This is the crux of it. I'd prefer the former any day.

 

 

While I find that completely immersion breaking, it pisses me off in BG2 when your highly trained fighters are swinging away like crazy and constantly missing, what are they Drunk?

 

I can understand if there weapon connects but they do little damage because of the defence but when a trained fighter who's only job is to be good at hitting things with a weapon constantly completely misses, then there is a problem with the mechanic. It's especially obvious when you gang up on one enemy if they've got 6 chars attacking them there is no where to dodge all those attacks (unless the they're completely incompetent) so they should get hit, how if there defence is really good they won't take much damage from the blows, but they will get hit.

 

 

You do understand that in BG2 the animations were not in sync with your actual attacks in either timing or number?

I think the purpose of graze is to normalize damage in combat, and make things less binary, particularly at low levels.  For example, everyone remembers that first encounter with the wolves at the start of Baldur's Gate.  There your party stands, merrily swinging away (except for Xzar, who cast's Larloch's Minor Drain, then swings), and missing completely 75%-95% of the time.  Suddenly, the wolf hits Xzar!  He dies instantly.  You reload.  Now after 13 swings, Imoen gets a lucky crit, killing the wolf instantly.  No party member even takes any damage.

 

With a graze system in place, ideally around the same amount of damage is dealt (or maybe even more), but is spread out a bit more.  Rather than your damage output being:

 

0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 6, 8, 0, 0, 0, 4

 

it's

 

0, 1, 0, 3, 2, 0, 1, 6, 8, 0, 2, 0, 4

 

Or whatever.  You're more likely to do SOME damage with every attack, even if it's not very much.  This makes outcomes more predictable, and less random.  Does that make sense?

 

Also, I'm confused by the idea that a graze mechanic leads to more "attrition," where attrition is defined as wearing someone/something down slowly over time.  The only way battles would feature more attrition is if 1) everyone involved has more eHP, or 2) everyone involved has lower dps.  1) is related to defensive stats, not graze, and (2) doesn't apply here either, because unless I'm mistaken, adding in graze actually increases dps.  At least, it does if rather than a 25% hit/75% miss chance (Thac0 15), you have 25% hit/25% graze/50% miss (roll of 15+ hits, 10-14 grazes).  Even if graze does actually lower dps currently, it would be very easy to change this by increasing the size of either the hit or graze chance.  For instance, 25% miss, 50% graze, 25% hit, or whatever, should lead to higher dps than 75% miss, 25% hit.  It might just SEEM like combat takes longer/has more attrition because you have lots of little hits, when your actual dps is equivalent or even higher.

 

Please note that I am not actually in the beta, this is just my understanding of the system from dev updates/forum posts.  Also, I think this mechanic is a perfect example of "all that is gold does not glitter."  Shout out to Wanderon.

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by Srex

For example, everyone remembers that first encounter with the wolves at the start of Baldur's Gate.  There your party stands, merrily swinging away (except for Xzar, who cast's Larloch's Minor Drain, then swings), and missing completely 75%-95% of the time.  Suddenly, the wolf hits Xzar!  He dies instantly.  You reload.  Now after 13 swings, Imoen gets a lucky crit, killing the wolf instantly.  No party member even takes any damage.

Why would I reload to get Xzar back? Besides, wolves didn't have ranged attacks so you could kite them forever without getting hit.

 

To make things less binary you need to balance HP and damage output. Make sure a single crit isn't usually lethal even at level 1. In BG it was impossible because ADnD was balanced differently and BioWare had to follow ADnD ruleset.

 

And if you don't have enough HP, grazes don't even get you closer to solving the problem because eating an unlucky crit still kills your character outright.

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by prodigydancer

 

a trained fighter who's only job is to be good at hitting things

will sooner or later hit things pretty hard. Not necessarily during every 6-seconds round though.

 

You problem is that you want instant gratification.

 

 

Nope what I want is a combat system that doesn't have a "fantastical" armour/combat system that means that a good proportion of the time the armour actually does something realist like turn a blow so it slides off the character with minor effect, rather than a combat system where your armour effectively phases you out of reality or magically makes you really really good at avoiding blows so the enemy can never hit you.

 

If your attacking a guy in a steel suit or a Dragon or some other creature you should be able to get your weapon to touch them, just most of the time it's going to do very little because you don't have the angle, force or surface area to cut against under your weapon...

 

 

 

 

You do understand that in BG2 the animations were not in sync with your actual attacks in either timing or number?

 

 

Yep, which is why I pay more attention to the combat log than the animations...

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by aeonsim

I like grazes in two areas.  One it allows ability usage to still be potentially viable on tougher enemies, just with shorter duration.  It works out well for some spells since the game uses a defense system over a save system - so there is no 'half damage on save' built in otherwise.

Just remember if they take out grazes then they likely put in miss mechanics.  So instead of "graze for crappy damage" it turns into "miss for zero damage".

There is already a miss mechanics in place. And yeah, replacing graze with misses will reduce the needless attrition. That is the entire point: Grazes add nothing but a passive attrition mechanics that need not be there at all. 

 

Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, Hit, miss, miss, Crit ...

Misses are sometimes frustrating. Attrition is always boring.

 

Take your pick.

 

 

Soo, of those 12 missses, only a few are frustrating, some of them are 'meh' and few are 'hey this is pretty damn cool'. No seriously, how does that make any sense.

 

And some please explain how grazes lead to attriton, to me

 

 

You're more likely to do SOME damage with every attack, even if it's not very much.  This makes outcomes more predictable, and less random.

 

Also, I'm confused by the idea that a graze mechanic leads to more "attrition," where attrition is defined as wearing someone/something down slowly over time.  The only way battles would feature more attrition is if 1) everyone involved has more eHP, or 2) everyone involved has lower dps.  1) is related to defensive stats, not graze, and (2) doesn't apply here either, because unless I'm mistaken, adding in graze actually increases dps.  At least, it does if rather than a 25% hit/75% miss chance (Thac0 15), you have 25% hit/25% graze/50% miss (roll of 15+ hits, 10-14 grazes).  Even if graze does actually lower dps currently, it would be very easy to change this by increasing the size of either the hit or graze chance.  For instance, 25% miss, 50% graze, 25% hit, or whatever, should lead to higher dps than 75% miss, 25% hit.  It might just SEEM like combat takes longer/has more attrition because you have lots of little hits, when your actual dps is equivalent or even higher.

 

makes perfect sense.

 

Replacing grazes with misses makes combat even longer. Instead of some damage you deal no damage.

Replacing grazes with another similarly balanced system, will by definition, result in the same lengths of battles.

Grazes don't make combat longer in and of themselves. "Combat takes too long" (which I assume is what people mean by 'attrition', honestly I don't know) is a largely independent problem and can also be solved by reducing enemies' HP.

 

So, yeah, I don't get the argument.

I like graze. The people who hate it hate it for contradictory reasons - half of them think it makes health go down too fast and the other half thinks it turns things into a slow slow battle of attrition. So replacing grazes with hits will make the first half mad and replacing them with misses will make the second half mad. There's also this bizarre complaint that they're cluttering up the combat log. There's nothing about the graze system that contributes to that. An entry is made every time an attack happens - grazes have nothing to do with it.

 

All in all, I don't see the case for changing it. It's a cool system that tries to bring some level of vermisulitude (sp?) to the combat. It also makes combat a bit more predictable than the "miss miss miss HIT miss miss" of the IE games, while still keeping the excitement of critting (I dare you not to be excited when you crit for 30 after grazing and hitting for 0.6 and 10). Sure, the combat feedback needs to be improved a bit, with crits having a more exciting animation and maybe grazes having a less exciting one. I can also see the case for tweaking the base percentages to allow for less grazes by default - though they'd have to be careful in how they do it if they want to please both the "grazes make combat take too long" AND the "grazes make health go down too fast" crowds.

 

I've rambled on long enough, but I hope I've made at least a few coherent points as to why removing graze wouldn't be a good idea.

Matt516: In all fairness, you missed the point of it being superfluous and redundant.

That's entirely YMMV though. I don't find it superfluous or redundant, I personally like that there's a middle ground between hitting and missing. Like I said, maybe they'll want to make grazes less prevalent, but I like them in principle.

The less random spike damage, that may force reloads from a xvart crit or make battles a miss-fest, the better. Lets please focus the fun of the game on the tactics and the epicness, not on the dice rolls.

The less random spike damage, that may force reloads from a xvart crit or make battles a miss-fest, the better. Lets please focus the fun of the game on the tactics and the epicness, not on the dice rolls.

This thinking has created so many crappy MMO systems that are not half the quality or fun one BG1 has.

Wasteland 2 works perfect with hit/miss system. Grazes are not needed in a REAL RPG game.

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by archangel979

. Grazes are not needed in a REAL RPG game.

LoL

Lets just say I don't have a high opinion of MMORPGs. I played 3 of them (DDO, SWTOR, Neverwinter) and they didn't shine well in this.

And constant damage, getting rid of RNG is staple of all those MMORPG

Edited September 27, 201411 yr by archangel979

Rostere: Sure, heterogenous and realistic can do well in computer games - heck, even stuff bordering on the esoteric (think EU or Crusader Kings). But most games actually do tend to simplify feedback when there are much stuff going on in real time. It's party-based combat vs several opponents we're talking about here, folks. Btw, I have never played WoW - so you just have to explain what makes a call for simplicity worthy of the tag "WoW".

Not to mention the IE games never had grazing. Were they WoW?

Lets just say I don't have a high opinion of MMORPGs. I played 3 of them (DDO, SWTOR, Neverwinter) and they didn't shine well in this.

And constant damage, getting rid of RNG is staple of all those MMORPG

 

So x is bad, x does y, hence y is bad. This argument is ... bad.

 

 

So since peoples here tend to argue that grazes are redundant and that there's no benefit to them (except making things less random), I drew a picture http://i.imgur.com/VrNMCXe.png

The point being, converting half of the grazes to hits and half to misses results in similar overall damage (ignoring DT). However the benefit of increasing accuracy by 1 point decreases a lot quicker than with grazes. Granted this only makes a difference for pretty low accuracy.

Also, mechanically the bg2 system is pretty bad.

 

Aaalso, taking DT into account having grazes should make might more valuable unless the damage is far beyond the threshold. And I personally like having interactions between things.

The less random spike damage, that may force reloads from a xvart crit or make battles a miss-fest, the better. Lets please focus the fun of the game on the tactics and the epicness, not on the dice rolls.

That is practically what is MMO thinking. Bringing all gameplay down to banal but "balanced" level. You can have consistent gameplay there, true. But it is also assured to be boring and repetitive. 

 

The less random spike damage, that may force reloads from a xvart crit or make battles a miss-fest, the better. Lets please focus the fun of the game on the tactics and the epicness, not on the dice rolls.

That is practically what is MMO thinking. Bringing all gameplay down to banal but "balanced" level. You can have consistent gameplay there, true. But it is also assured to be boring and repetitive. 

 

If only I could give 2 likes...

Using MMO as a pejorative isn't really useful. Some features of MMOs are good and some are bad. If you don't like the more normalized damage, criticize it on those terms, not by calling it "MMOish" and expecting that to settle the argument.

 

Also realize that it really is a matter of personal preference. Some people prefer more random combat, some people prefer less. Myself personally, I like a balance. I found the BG combat system far too RNG for my liking. Any system in which a battle can have an entirely different outcome purely based on RNG is flawed IMO. I shouldn't be playing my fights by reloading until the dice roll in my favor (which is what BG demanded in many cases). That said, I do like a bit of RNG and lucky crits are fun. Hence why I like the current system.

 

But this is all personal preference - as is yours. We can talk all day about why we have our preferences, but it's important to recognize that there's not necessarily a "best" way to do it.