COGG BBS

Melee ambush attacks against a target with a Perception of 120% or lower than the attacker's Stealth will now cause the target to be "Surprised" for 3 seconds, preventing immediate retaliation. The "surprised" status is similar to being Staggered in that it prevents most actions and also prevents roundtime from going down, but doesn't cause any balance loss or affect combat rolls.

This is primarily to try and make melee ambushes feel less like willingly opening oneself up to an immediate counterattack with no defense. After the 3 seconds of Surprise are up, you should have some decent defense only being at 2 seconds of roundtime yourself at that point in most cases.

Stealthy melee ambushers, get a feel for it and let me know if it feels like too much or too little.

Rias wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 2:31 pmMelee ambush attacks against a target with a Perception of 120% or lower than the attacker's Stealth

Is that based on flat skill ranks, or the stealth and perception rolls at the time of the attack?

It's just a flat skill comparison, no rolls. The point of this is to make ambushes feel more viable to attempt, and I felt that making it a roll with a chance of failure would make people remain hesitant to use it for fear of that chance of being retaliated against instantly at minimum defense.

Why there's a skill comparison at all is because I didn't think it would be right to have perceptive characters being "surprised" by those of far less relevant skill.

I've played with this a small amount with a "not really a combat character" and found that I'm often successfully counter-attacked even with just 2 seconds of roundtime remaining so I'd rather approach seen and have no roundtime. However, I'd love to hear from a nightblade, a dreadnought, and maybe a marauder, as any of them will be much more suited to benefit from this.

I've been working with combat for a while longer now and can definitely opine. With melee it seemed slow compared to ranged because I'd need to hide, attack, flee, hide, return, and repeat to take maximum advantage of stealth. It was slow. So I changed to ranged, and I've gotten used to seeing ranged. Then with some prompting I noticed that melee with stealth is VERY inferior in another aspect, and that's the ambush rerolls.
The quarterstaff swing was from stealth while stalking, the first sling is without stalking, and the second sling is with stalking. I tried several times to get better than a (-1!) with melee, but got no better. I could try for a few hours, but I suspect I'll find the same, and that suggests that either stealth ranged is over powered or stealth melee is significantly underpowered.

So after doing some pretty extensive testing with Nobody today, I can verify that I'm able to replicate these numbers. Stalking is not giving an additional ambush reroll for melee and gives 2 additional rerolls for ranged. I know ranged is supposed to have an extra reroll right now but I'm getting up to 3 versus melee.

This testing started because I was not seeming to get an extra ambush reroll from Mark. I'm now convinced that I'm not getting it through that skill either (in addition to not getting the stalking reroll).

As it stands now, ranged seems way too high and melee too low. I managed to easily kill a militiaman (hitting about 50% of the time with multithrow) with only 20 ranged skill...

I'll have to try and think of a better way to word it. When it says bonuses to ambush rerolls, it means rerolls for the roll that decides whether the ambush is successful or not. Not the attack roll.

Rias wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 12:40 pm I'll have to try and think of a better way to word it. When it says bonuses to ambush rerolls, it means rerolls for the roll that decides whether the ambush is successful or not. Not the attack roll.

Ah. That makes sense. Still though... max surprise rolls that you can get with melee is -1! (no change for stalking) and it's -4! for ranged (-2! no stalking to -4! with stalking). Is that intended?

Hrrm, there's definitely a bug causing ambush melee attacks to not consider the fact that you're stalking the target. Looking into it.

Melee pushdown when stalking has been fixed. Enjoy those -3! pushdowns!