Post by Headchef on Aug 29, 2016 23:43:14 GMT
Combat in the new haven has taken inspiration from a combination of the old haven system and dueling card games. The fusion has, as far as I've seen, proven to be quite popular. It's worth noting though, that any Martial school you design should take steps to insulate itself from being too RNG dependent. Losing a fight in pve has serious consequences and losing in pvp will often prove fatal. All attribute/ability level suggestions given here are a touch generous to ensure beginners learning the ropes have room to make some mistakes.
Getting Started
Go to the fourth page of your Character Sheet (Ctrl+T) menu. This brings up the “Martial Arts & Combat Schools” page, where you can see the moves you've unlocked. You will start with some points already allocated, but these are absolutely terrible and make your fights depend on chance whether you have the right move or not.
To understand the combat system this deck will be explained. (Quite general beginner deck).
Each point is like a card in a deck. When a move is used, it's returned to the 'deck' and another move is 'drawn'. Because you get five active moves, and this style only has five moves in total, you always get one of each move at all times. This makes it very reliable for combat.
When you initiate combat by clicking on a mob with the attack cursor active, you will randomly draw 5 moves from your 'deck'. In our case, it's always the same five but the order will be mixed up.
Red backgrounds are attacks, blue backgrounds are defenses. If you're hit with no defense up, all the attack damage will go straight to your soft hitpoints. These moves override your 1-5 hotkeys.
Here's an example of a fight with ants:
When the ants attacked me, their attack applies to my furthest right blocks first. However, you'll see that my Jump block wasn't harmed. This has to do with those coloured triangles you may have noticed on the moves. There are four styles of moves, Striking, Sweeping, Backhanded, Oppressive.
Ants have a single basic attack that is a combo Striking/Backhanded move. Any block with either Striking or Backhanded is able to intercept it. Because Jump is a Sweeping block, the ants attack passed right through it.
Striking = green
Backhanded = blue
Sweeping = yellow
Oppresive = red
Now it's important to note that defenses work whether or not you're standing still, as such putting up defenses, running in to hit the ants, and then backing off is a perfectly sound tactic against slower foes. And the bar on the right shows the current block the ants are using, but since we only have Striking and Backhanded attacks in this school we'll have to beat through them in order to deal damage. As a side note, it's a good time to mention that if you queue an attack against an opponent, or are in pursuit mode (top right corner has a button to activate this), you can use defensive/ranged moves without having to stop moving. If you're not actively engaging a target though, you will need to pause briefly to complete the move.
All moves have something called “Combat Weight”, which is how well the attack is able to penetrate enemy blocks. This stat for our example setup is always just your UA ability compared to the enemies defense ability score (for animals this will always be their UA stat naturally, but players could use blocks with their melee combat ability). In my previous example we see that the ant wasn't able to break my Quick Dodge defense because I had significantly higher UA during the fight (30 to be precise). Quick attacks like the Striking Punch are good at chewing through blocks the ants put up, allowing openings for the more damaging Backhanded Left Hook to hit. And of course, if a style isn't being blocked all damage goes straight to their HP
Note: Other important stats for combat are Agility, Strength, and Constitution. Agility is another relative stat, where your agility compared to your opponent changes how fast your moves execute. Due to the quick paced nature of this combat system, Agility is paramount to winning a fight since it both speeds up your attacks and slows your enemies. Strength acts as a damage multiplier, and while not nearly as crucial as Agi it does make you hit quite a bit harder if you get an attack through their blocks. And naturally constitution giving extra HP is useful for soaking up damage if your blocks get countered or broken through.
Combat Discovery (learning moves)
This is a combat discovery move. It has every attack style, and is weighted with both your UA and MC (melee combat) stats. Since you're unlikely to invest anything in MC at first, this basically means you need to strip away all the enemy's blocks before using this move you successfully land the hit. If you do, you will be awarded with the new move card that is visible on the discovery token. It can be an additional card for a move you already have, or it could be a new move entirely. Farm as many of these as you can when you see them pop up, they will be useful when you get more experienced with the system.
You may notice that ants occasionally have a Sweeping/Oppressive defense stance up. Your beginner school cannot do anything about this for enabling discoveries, so either kill the ant or run around until that block expires. Eventually you should loot a Haymaker Sweeping attack. Swapping out Left Hook for Haymaker should allow you to break these blocks while discovery farming. Once I'd exhausted the discoveries from Beginner Fu, I switched back to left hook since it can be used for UA hunting boars and has a much shorter cooldown.
You can only get one discovery move per battle, per enemy. You are not guaranteed to get one either because it's RNG when it appears.
More complex combat discoveries have a couple requirements to trigger. Specifically, you need to be able to use a combat discovery to have it appear. That means discovering the shield defensive maneuver requires having a shield equipped, and discovering any IP using move will require the correct amount or more IP stockpiled. Furthermore, there is a correlation related to what types of enemies you're fighting and which moves you use. Both of these factors seem to play into your ability to find the most complex moves. Hopefully once the community figures out what each of the requirements are, the wiki will contain all of the required information.
Getting Started
Go to the fourth page of your Character Sheet (Ctrl+T) menu. This brings up the “Martial Arts & Combat Schools” page, where you can see the moves you've unlocked. You will start with some points already allocated, but these are absolutely terrible and make your fights depend on chance whether you have the right move or not.
To understand the combat system this deck will be explained. (Quite general beginner deck).
Each point is like a card in a deck. When a move is used, it's returned to the 'deck' and another move is 'drawn'. Because you get five active moves, and this style only has five moves in total, you always get one of each move at all times. This makes it very reliable for combat.
When you initiate combat by clicking on a mob with the attack cursor active, you will randomly draw 5 moves from your 'deck'. In our case, it's always the same five but the order will be mixed up.
Red backgrounds are attacks, blue backgrounds are defenses. If you're hit with no defense up, all the attack damage will go straight to your soft hitpoints. These moves override your 1-5 hotkeys.
Here's an example of a fight with ants:
When the ants attacked me, their attack applies to my furthest right blocks first. However, you'll see that my Jump block wasn't harmed. This has to do with those coloured triangles you may have noticed on the moves. There are four styles of moves, Striking, Sweeping, Backhanded, Oppressive.
Ants have a single basic attack that is a combo Striking/Backhanded move. Any block with either Striking or Backhanded is able to intercept it. Because Jump is a Sweeping block, the ants attack passed right through it.
Striking = green
Backhanded = blue
Sweeping = yellow
Oppresive = red
Now it's important to note that defenses work whether or not you're standing still, as such putting up defenses, running in to hit the ants, and then backing off is a perfectly sound tactic against slower foes. And the bar on the right shows the current block the ants are using, but since we only have Striking and Backhanded attacks in this school we'll have to beat through them in order to deal damage. As a side note, it's a good time to mention that if you queue an attack against an opponent, or are in pursuit mode (top right corner has a button to activate this), you can use defensive/ranged moves without having to stop moving. If you're not actively engaging a target though, you will need to pause briefly to complete the move.
All moves have something called “Combat Weight”, which is how well the attack is able to penetrate enemy blocks. This stat for our example setup is always just your UA ability compared to the enemies defense ability score (for animals this will always be their UA stat naturally, but players could use blocks with their melee combat ability). In my previous example we see that the ant wasn't able to break my Quick Dodge defense because I had significantly higher UA during the fight (30 to be precise). Quick attacks like the Striking Punch are good at chewing through blocks the ants put up, allowing openings for the more damaging Backhanded Left Hook to hit. And of course, if a style isn't being blocked all damage goes straight to their HP
Note: Other important stats for combat are Agility, Strength, and Constitution. Agility is another relative stat, where your agility compared to your opponent changes how fast your moves execute. Due to the quick paced nature of this combat system, Agility is paramount to winning a fight since it both speeds up your attacks and slows your enemies. Strength acts as a damage multiplier, and while not nearly as crucial as Agi it does make you hit quite a bit harder if you get an attack through their blocks. And naturally constitution giving extra HP is useful for soaking up damage if your blocks get countered or broken through.
Combat Discovery (learning moves)
This is a combat discovery move. It has every attack style, and is weighted with both your UA and MC (melee combat) stats. Since you're unlikely to invest anything in MC at first, this basically means you need to strip away all the enemy's blocks before using this move you successfully land the hit. If you do, you will be awarded with the new move card that is visible on the discovery token. It can be an additional card for a move you already have, or it could be a new move entirely. Farm as many of these as you can when you see them pop up, they will be useful when you get more experienced with the system.
You may notice that ants occasionally have a Sweeping/Oppressive defense stance up. Your beginner school cannot do anything about this for enabling discoveries, so either kill the ant or run around until that block expires. Eventually you should loot a Haymaker Sweeping attack. Swapping out Left Hook for Haymaker should allow you to break these blocks while discovery farming. Once I'd exhausted the discoveries from Beginner Fu, I switched back to left hook since it can be used for UA hunting boars and has a much shorter cooldown.
You can only get one discovery move per battle, per enemy. You are not guaranteed to get one either because it's RNG when it appears.
More complex combat discoveries have a couple requirements to trigger. Specifically, you need to be able to use a combat discovery to have it appear. That means discovering the shield defensive maneuver requires having a shield equipped, and discovering any IP using move will require the correct amount or more IP stockpiled. Furthermore, there is a correlation related to what types of enemies you're fighting and which moves you use. Both of these factors seem to play into your ability to find the most complex moves. Hopefully once the community figures out what each of the requirements are, the wiki will contain all of the required information.
