Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

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Rokal
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Joined: Tue May 18, 2021 3:55 pm

Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Rokal »

After a conversation on Chat in-game, multiple of us came up with a discussion about stagger stacking, and further more, technique spamming.


First, Technique spamming: In a group fight agaisnt AI mobs, many of us experience several enemies using feint on us at the same time. This can nuke balance into the negatives riduclously fast. My thought on this is that techniques like this should give the target 'immunity' to such until the cooldown of the intial user of it rolls over and finishes, or otherwise offers some sort of diminishing effect. This could also apply to things like disarming blows, or other techniques similar.

Then, stagger stacking. THis is the ultimate meta of combat right now, staggering someone hits balance, makes them unable to act. In some ways, I get some classes are meant to do that, dreaddie staggering blow + followup punch, or counterpunch into follow up punch. But stagger should only stack up to a certain limit in my opinon, and also further more should probably as additonal stagger builds up, have a natural chance to be resisted.

Stagger should max out at 10 seconds at most, around there, and it is harder to add more stagger, and once it hits 10 seconds, no additonal stagger can be added. These are the idea's I have currently, if anyone has suggestions or ideas based on this, I'd love to hear them. Lets Brainstorm!

An after thought: Maybe feint has a maxium it can lower balance to, if not an 'immunity' effect.
Heron
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Heron »

Rokal dragged me from the grave for a post.

So the problem with stagger is threefold: One, you can't fight back, two your rolls are negged so far that you are almost certainly going to be hit for maximum damage, and three, it's very spammable.

All this serves to essentially negate the chance factor from combat: once you stagger someone, they stop fighting back and you hit them for somewhere between very high to max damage until they die, barring bad luck.

Staggering blow has already been recognized as a problem move. To a lesser extent, sweep and dirtkick are also offenders. I guess tackle is the biggest offender of them all? Staggers over 10 seconds long is a uniquely dreadnought problem outside of groups so I wouldn't expect the proposed cap to do much of anything.

If we look back to the dice post, just 4 neg rerolls gives you a 75% chance of rolling in your bottom 30%. The current iteration of stagger can easily land you with like, 8 or more neg rolls. 8 neg rerolls is a roughly 92% chance of rolling under 30%. This essentially negates character skill: I was killing ~300-defroll hill guardians with around 80 melee skill because catching them off-balance is -2 to their rerolls and tackle gives +1. As soon as you get a leg fracture (with your mace, accept no substitutes besides maybe sling) your victory is practically mathematically assured. Another fracture is coming soon, and your attacks have good odds of hitting at -4, -6, -8 and so on no matter what the enemy rolls.

It's kind of crazy how many rerolls are handed out when even one is a massive swing, probability-wise. My best guess is that we never really crunched the numbers that hard, and that the posts that do are incomprehensible to people who don't like math. Friendly reminder to all readers that you can see your odds of rolling in any given percentile by going to https://anydice.com/ and pasting in the code without quotes: 'output [highest 1 of xd10]' where X is the number of rolls you have. Highest 1 of 2d10 would give you the numbers for one positive reroll plus your default roll. Lowest 1 of 2d10 is one negative reroll. Etc etc.


So what do I think?

Final reroll value should probably be capped, and negative rerolls from stagger/prone should be gently trimmed. Possibly tackle could be given bonus effects or work by degrees of success as well. If you only get the big knockdown stagger if you roll super high, it's not as big of a deal. Tackle should lose its free +1 reroll, which makes the maneuver actually risky instead of more reliable than your attacks. A single positive reroll makes it so you have a 25% chance of rolling under 50%, and 75% of rolling over.

I don't think rerolls should go over +/- 4, either way, and positive rerolls are very good about this but the negative ones go as deep as they like. Flat percentage-based boons and penalties should be considered too, like how dodge is reduced by encumbrance.

The effect pool of stagger moves should increase or be changed (Like a wechuge's fear), or opponents should be stagger-resistant after one for a while, or their cooldowns and costs should be hiked up.

For example:
Tackle could alternate between inflicting the user with prone (Very bad roll), inflicting both targets with prone and stagger (bad roll), inflict both targets with TUSSLING (medium roll), inflict the opponent with a short stagger but not prone as you manage to off-balance them (high roll), or the current effect (very high roll). Something like that.

TUSSLING could be a status effect where you're unable to attack with weapons a certain size and up because you have your arms full with your opponent. Daggers would be advantageous here; those without appropriate weapons will default to punches and kicks. Ranged weapons will fail to work entirely. Someone should come up with a better name.

Dirtkick could inflict an inability to aim as well as balance loss instead of stagger, but I believe it already has a cooldown between activations? It's probably fine. I like the no-aim idea since it's a big swing without preventing the opponent from fighting back though.

Sweep is hands-down the worst staggering move, where the duration is short and you just don't get that much out of it. It has no free reroll, and if you sweep someone not in roundtime they will actually recover and stand back up before you can even get an attack in. This is what a stagger should look like, and I tentatively believe it's fine in its current iteration. I'm (again, tentatively) for it staying as-is if tackle is toned down.

I'm not qualified to speak on staggering blow, but my belief is that it's a rapid-fire easily chained stun that does great damage on top. All the dreaddies I've spoken to seem to believe it has a bit too much going for it. I'm even less qualified to speak on the shield maneuvers, but they look nutty and maybe someone else could weigh in.


Feints fooling people on a cooldown I do like, though. Group gang-feints are goofy.
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Lexx416
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Lexx416 »

Heron wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 2:12 pm I'm not qualified to speak on staggering blow, but my belief is that it's a rapid-fire easily chained stun that does great damage on top. All the dreaddies I've spoken to seem to believe it has a bit too much going for it. I'm even less qualified to speak on the shield maneuvers, but they look nutty and maybe someone else could weigh in.


I've been pretty vocal about staggering blow (and stagger in general) on VCs in the past. I posted my thoughts on how playing a berserker feels back in June.
My tactics currently consist of: Stalk the target, Circle, Stunning Blow, Feint, Circle, Stunning Blow, Feint, Stunning blow, etc. until the target is dead. I picked up Mighty Blow to help end fights a little faster, and that's also been working pretty well. I think for the most part my strategy as a berserker can probably carry me all the way to Wechuge fairly easily, but I had a few ideas I wanted to post up regarding berserkers, that could make them more interesting and fun by offering viable alternatives to "stagger everything until it dies".

And this still holds true. I can basically just Stunning Blow forever since the cooldown is very short and there's no true downsides to using it (except it can't be used in negative balance). It's more boring to hunt that way, so I usually don't, but if I were fighting 100% optimally all the time, I'd just cycle between Circle, Stunning Blow, and Feint forever (circle to maintain positive balance in case I want to tackle). I can regularly get 8-14 negative rerolls on an opponent that I'm fighting solo just through stagger locking them to the ground.

Shield Bash is also pretty phenomenal. I usually favor Staggering Blow + Feint, but I do keep a shield on my berserker to help out Flipping Friends, since if I ever get staggered into negative balance, I can take out my shield and start shield bashing fools.



I don't know that I agree that negative rerolls should have a hard cap - being beat on by a bunch of people should probably really suck for the person getting beat on. But I do think negative rerolls need to be handled differently in some way. I'm always an advocate of diminishing returns, and I wonder if negative rerolls should simply just be much harder to obtain, after a certain limit. Ex - Once you hit 4 negative reroll, the 5th one is harder to get, then the 6th, 7th, etc., until you hit a point where effectively there's a hard cap on negative since the likelihood of getting once is so small.
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
Rokal
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Rokal »

I really, really, really like heron's idea with tackle, especially the tussling part. If only for the cinematic brawling that could happen from it. That seems like something berserkers or dreadnoughts would thrive in!

Im not so sure on capping rerolls, but I can understand the reason for it. I agree on sweep, and that's how I see how staggers should be working as a whole.
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Rias
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Rias »

I was hoping to introduce some more moves before increasing cooldown of Staggering Blow and some of the others, but maybe it'd be better to just do it now so we don't have more people getting used to being able to staggerlock.
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saladbowl
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by saladbowl »

Thought about a way to handle tussling/grappling.
  • The one grappled will constantly make invisible break attempts when not in RT. The one who initiated grappling will not, unless they input break, in which case the grapple ends immediately. Maintaining a grapple becomes more and more difficult over time, and the maintain check will eventually fail.
  • If the initiator attacks a different target, it will break the grapple. The one grappled cannot attack another target, and will continue attempting to break the grapple instead.
  • When grappled, the rules for weapon ranges are flipped. Extreme range weapons will have suitably extreme difficulty hitting someone tussling with a dagger.
  • Open hands (unarmed attacks) are able to ward off attacks as negligible range weapons.
Some abilities might only work when in a tussle/grapple, able to wrench control from one person to another, or have extra effects which only occur when tussling. I really like the idea of a Berserker clawing and gouging at whatever exposed skin their nails can find, a Dreadnought receiving training to voluntarily choke up on their weapon and reduce its range, a Marauder having different specialized wrestling techniques, and so forth.
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Lexx416
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Re: Stagger Locking/Technique 'Spamming'.

Post by Lexx416 »

Something I thought of tonight that might be a good way to help balance out stagger-locking a little bit. A new, "lesser" version of stagger called "Dazed" - lasts about the same amount of time potentially, but instead of locking you out of actions makes all actions induce a little Travel Time for the duration, as well as giving a few (1-3) negative rerolls.

Make it so that an attack that has a chance to stagger (whether it be through "damage threshold" or an ability) either staggers or dazes depending on the endroll result of an attack. Sub 50% and it dazes, over 50% and it staggers.
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
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