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Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2022 2:31 pm
by Spidercat
The ability might be overtuned, but it does show that rerolls contribute far more to damage at the moment. Ignoring it's current state of being something like 6 offense rerolls vs -4 defense, even a +2 -2 split is contributing more damage and can still be gained with far less effort if that were to be the cap.

Also yes, i did once pipe in earlier that there's not a lot of uses for fury offensively right now. but, the majority of the initial observation was that the bonuses currently provided are not as impactful, and not easily used in combat. However, that's more an issue with how combat plays right now rather than the class.


But yeah, I support the suggestions given for those abilities. Especially with more ways to rapidly gain and lose fury and having a higher fury pool to bank to spend on the recovery or resistence abilities for mental/physical status attacks.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2022 2:36 pm
by Karjus
For sure, rerolls are huge which is why they shouldn't be thrown around like cotton candy. No "base" tactics is completely powerful on their own, but the abilities that play off it. They're supposed to give flavor, and be a spring board off of it.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 8:53 am
by Lexx416
Something that would make fury more useful would be if it added bonus damage to hits after a hit occurs, rather than just upping the DF (or even creating a "damage floor" so that you'll always do a minimum amount of damage based on your current fury). Getting a 1 to 10% endroll on a mighty blow feels like such a waste, but if we were calculating damage for endroll and THEN adding additional damage on, that might feel better than spending all of my balance just to hit for single digit damage.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 9:11 am
by Marcuson
Suggested Ability Name: Martial Trance

When you reach your maximum amount of Fury, and you are outnumbered by foes, you will be prompted to enter into a martial trance. While the martial trance lasts, you do not take the usual penalties for fighting multiple foes, and you retain all the benefits of your maximum Fury. When you come out of the martial trance, your fury will be 0 again.

Base Duration: 60 seconds
Max Duration: 300 seconds
Has a cooldown of one hour.

==Attributes==
Intuition: +25%
Agility: +15%
Awareness: +10%

(Yes, I ripped this off straight out of Dwarf Fortress.)

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:04 am
by Spidercat
this might be something two particular subclasses need considering their new fighting style, but one that's been bugging berserkers a lot more often.

Ability name: relentless pursuit

Prereqs: tactics: nightblade or Tactics: berserker

IC Description: Certain disciplins of combat reward a patient fighter. Spending time to find an opening provided by their opponent, improving their own stance and observing moments. Other fighters, however, have no such benefit nor patience for such an approach. Nightblades seeking to end fights quickly, and berserkers relying on the very act of being struck and striking back to empower themselves would rather the bloodlitting start sooner rather than later. And of course, they rather not have their combat partner try to get away and gain some distance...

Ooc Description: combat maneuvers and attacks gain +2-3 bonus rerolls when making the first non-stealthed strike to overcome abilities and positions that would oppose engagement. (I.e: combat avoidence, tumble, flip). Said attack/maneuvers get 1 bonus rerolls to land on the target.
if anyone engaged attempts to flee from the room, or try to switch to combat avoid, the nightblade/berserker make an attempt to use a free hand to grab the person, pulling them off balance/knocked to the ground depending on roll. (nightblades using fist weapons with fist weapon mastery can perform this even when both hands are using dusters/knuckles).


this probably has limited use against mobiles, outside of trying to get a first strike on duelist and bard mobiles. it's more so something I've been noticing with most classes in CVc situations, where fights are mostly standing around circling until someone makes the first strike, and gets tripped up by tumbling/combat avoid. Many classes tend to have a benefit for such standing around, or can use the time to increase balance or utilize other such skills. Alternatively, they have ranged maneuvers like dirt throwing to start things out.

Nightblades forgoing stealth for the new unarmed fighting stuff are actively harmed for standing around, and are prompted to engage and get punished, or use stealth to skip the engage. Berserkers get nothing outside of a single circle standing around, and their fury isn't going up not getting hit/doing the hitting. So they make the first move, get tripped up by the myriad ways to avoid engagement, and then promptly slaughtered for being in roundtime.

So, to subvert current CVc practices out in the open and not making the first move so punishing, these two subclasses can engage easier, and get a bonus for making the first move. If people don't want to suddenly be at the end of a strike with bonus rerolls from the start, they either engage quickly, or hope their rolls overcome the rerolls provided for the aggressor (usually defensive rolls tend to be higher for defense than offense when including attribute bonuses).

the second bit seemed like additional flavor that fit the two classes not wanting to restart the whole song and dance of engagement if someone runs. The grapple can cause a very short stagger, and have a very low chance to knockdown.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2022 8:27 am
by Lexx416
An interesting way to make berserkers scarier in combat without just giving them more offensive rerolls (aside from letting successful hits do a baseline 10-20 damage regardless of endroll percentage, as long as it's not negative) might be in giving them reductions to energy costs for swinging weapons, and/or reductions in RT for attacking.

Personally, I find the damage buff I get from fury to be pretty minimal (which I've already called out in this thread, I'm pretty sure). But if fury reduced weapon RT (nothing major - 1 RT at 10, and 2 RT at 20 fury), I think that might make berserkers feel scarier without turning the combat meta entirely into "who has the most rerolls?".

I think either maintaining the damage buff and getting the aforementioned RT reductions would be good. But I'd, personally, also be okay with losing the damage buff in place of the RT reduction and having weapon energy costs reduced by a bit as well. I'm not sure how to scale that specifically - perhaps dropping energy costs per attack by 1 for every X amount of fury?

I think that either/or/both of these could make it feel a bit scarier to fight a berserker than it probably already is - since damage is tied to accuracy, it's hard to make things that buff damage specifically feel good at times without getting lost to the random factor, but I also don't want each warrior class to ultimately be "how do I get my extra offense rerolls in my own special way". But I believe letting berserkers be a class that just get up in your face and act as an unrelenting force (through more attacks on the aggregate, as a result of really good energy maintenance and faster attacks) would help them shine and stand out a bit more.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 11:37 am
by Teri
An idea of bleeding wounds on berserkers generating some kind of fury (I did scan to see if this was suggested before but didn't read anything similar.)

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 11:44 am
by Lexx416
We were discussing fury and berserkers on #GAME, and I had another idea for how to make it feel a bit better (the general consensus by most folks seems to be that fury doesn't feel very useful).

If the offense rolls of berserker abilities were altered based on fury, that would make them feel a lot better. Example: Cleaving Blow lists that it draws 100% of it's offense roll from Melee. The idea is that for ever 1 fury present at the time of using the ability, Cleaving Blow would increase your accuracy by 1% of your melee skill - so a cleaving blow at 10 fury would use 110% of your melee, and a 25 fury cleaving blow would use 125% of your melee skill to determine your accuracy.

Serity also suggested that fury could simply increase your endroll by an amount equal to your fury in % - so a -10% endroll turns into a 15% endroll at 25 fury.

Either of these (or something similar) would make berserkers feel a bit better to play in terms of being able to actually hit your target, without just dumping positive rerolls onto them.

Edited to add:


In #GAME rias mentioned he was hesitant to give fury persistent combat bonuses, because he didn't want people to hoard it in favor of spending it.

However, fury also degrades on it's own, while balance remains present unless you move from the room (and in super swarmy areas, this is what I did on my berserker, I camped them in stealth to avoid losing/resetting balance) - if you gave fury a consistent bonus to attacks (really, I'd just have it affect non-standard attack abilities like Flurry/etc.), you could increase the out of combat drain on fury closer to what it used to be, and that would encoruage people to spend it *while fighting*.

Berserkers are also supposed to get debuffs to their defenses (which I think is currently bugged), so there's supposed to already be a downside for hoarding fury.

An idea of bleeding wounds on berserkers generating some kind of fury (I did scan to see if this was suggested before but didn't read anything similar.)
I also like this idea.

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:53 pm
by Teri
Pondering my current experiences, for purposely generating fury I attack timing wise so the char is in max roundtime to get hit. I was thinking an ability to purposely give one's character negative rerolls for the next hit to produce fury, while maybe generating balance? The damage will hurt, but maybe literally using the arm to block the attack. Possibly with some defenses against bludgeon/crush because fractures and negative rerolls would be a pain as fractures are fleshed out in the future.
I have many levels to go really have more of the abilities to try things, that said.
(I'm glad you like the bleeding suggestion. With constitution my character currently goes, oh, bleeding, this is fine.)

Re: Berserker feedback and ideas

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 1:14 pm
by Lexx416
Teri wrote: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:53 pm Pondering my current experiences, for purposely generating fury I attack timing wise so the char is in max roundtime to get hit. I was thinking an ability to purposely give one's character negative rerolls for the next hit to produce fury, while maybe generating balance? The damage will hurt, but maybe literally using the arm to block the attack. Possibly with some defenses against bludgeon/crush because fractures and negative rerolls would be a pain as fractures are fleshed out in the future.
I have many levels to go really have more of the abilities to try things, that said.
(I'm glad you like the bleeding suggestion. With constitution my character currently goes, oh, bleeding, this is fine.)
I like the idea of that! I also like the idea of a "come and get me" type thing - where you voluntarily lower your defenses for a bit, and get to strike back with an attack when you get hit (without incurring RT for yourself).