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Post by shakes on Feb 1, 2019 15:09:24 GMT -5
parry_skill_success(CHAR_DATA *ch, int offense, int defense) { int skill = 0;
// if they have the parry skill if( has_skill(ch, SKILL_PARRY) ) { skill = get_skill_percentage(ch, SKILL_PARRY); } // otherwise base chance based on agility else { skill = GET_AGL(ch) / 4; }
// mod parry check by difference between offense and defense skill -= (offense - defense) / 50; return skill_success(ch, NULL, skill); }
Breaking this down, if you have the parry skill ... you use that. If you don't, then you use your agility divided by 4. Since agility only goes up to around 20 for a human, without the parry skill your base chance is only ever going to be about 5%.
HOWEVER, the attacker's offense and the victim's defense come heavily into play.
Offense minus defense, and then cut in half.
So let's take this to advanced, which is about where most guilds top out at anyway.
Middle of advanced is about 70 points.
That's a base chance of 70 to parry.
By the time you get that, I'd hope your defense is about 50. If the guy attacking you is some ancient type who has been doing a lot of sparring, maybe his offense is about 75. That's a 25 difference, divided by two.
So you now have 70-12 % chance of parrying, or 58%.
Granted, a lot of other nebulous dice rolls go into combat, but I thought this would be a good point to open the discussion with.
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pinkerdlu
Shartist
The evil bad guy of a desert sex simulator. Real Necker
Posts: 515
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Post by pinkerdlu on Feb 1, 2019 15:36:39 GMT -5
You will max out parry LONG, LONG before you ever get to 50 in defense.
Parry raises a lot faster than you think, and defense raises a lot slower than you think.
This is important because it just makes parry that much more powerful. Most characters will never get their defense that high (it takes a lot of time and grinding), while they can max out parry relatively quickly and have a somewhat capable combat char. With a grain of salt, of course.
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Post by shakes on Feb 1, 2019 17:12:03 GMT -5
I find it frustrating that off/def numbers are obscured. In this day and age of Wikis and whole reddit forums devoted to the game mechanics of whatever you're playing, obscuring the numbers and code is obnoxious.
Between two equally skilled characters, off/def look like it's going to come out as a wash. But when do two equally skilled people fight outside of a sparring circle? Never. If there's real blood on the table then long-lived players are going to run.
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Post by Prime Minister Sinister on Feb 2, 2019 6:15:44 GMT -5
so if you have the parry skill, agility is not taken into account?
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pinkerdlu
Shartist
The evil bad guy of a desert sex simulator. Real Necker
Posts: 515
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Post by pinkerdlu on Feb 2, 2019 7:33:20 GMT -5
so if you have the parry skill, agility is not taken into account? Agility and defense are taken into account if you fail your parry. Just like parry is only taken into account if you fail your shield-use check. As far as I know...
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Post by lechuck on Feb 2, 2019 9:28:54 GMT -5
Parry only goes up to 65 at the highest. Mid-advanced isn't 70. Pretty sure it goes:
0-14: novice 15-29: apprentice 30-44: journeyman 45-59: advanced 60-65: master
Can't be bothered to scour the codedump again, but I was also pretty sure that there was a bit in it where you get your agility's react substat applied to parry and/or defense. I know it applies to defense but not sure if it double-dips with parry on top. Either way, it's a negligible amount unless you're an elf with high agility.
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Post by shakes on Feb 2, 2019 12:40:10 GMT -5
Yeah, the number for parry I threw out isn't gospel. I just glanced at the chart for normal skills and picked a spot.
That's the full routine I posted for the parry code, and I don't see an agility check. Anything related to agility must be taking place elsewhere in the code.
Really, it's a muddled mess so I don't want to give the impression I'm 100% positive if I post something. I post it to start discussion on it and hopefully by the end of the thread there will have been some general agreement.
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Post by lechuck on Feb 2, 2019 14:37:21 GMT -5
There's a lot of code for offense and defense. Bunch of random crap like modifiers for position, encumberance, ride skill, wielding configurations etc. These all tie into the parry calculation and there's bits and pieces littered throughout the codedump. Interestingly, warriors got a +5d4 bonus to all offense checks and so were harder to parry against. Don't know if this carries over to the new heavy combat classes.
Agility:
/* agility mods for ch and victim */
off += agl_app[GET_AGL(ch)].reaction;
def += agl_app[GET_AGL(victim)].reaction;
This only really gets high for elves with top agility. For humans it's +5 at 16 agility (VG), +10 at 19 (EX is 18-19), and no additional bonus at AI. Elf with EX agility gets +20, +25 or +28 depending on where they fall within the EX range (24-26). No additional bonus for AI. With the inflated starting offense of some of the new classes, something like an elf enforcer with EX agility might struggle to raise weapon skills even from the beginning. Good luck ever branching backstab from mid-advanced piercing if you have +28 offense from agility.
This is a big part of the reason why agility is a sub-par combat stat: all fighting characters eventually reach a point where they plateau because they can no longer miss the things they normally fight. The higher your offense, the earlier you plateau. Defensive skills don't really plateau the same way because you can always get hit, but considering all the things that factor into this, the agility bonus is pretty small. For humans it's basically unnoticeable even if you have top agility. Getting a 5 or 10 point bonus is really nothing.
Staff have systematically been eliminating the traditional methods of skilling up past the plateau. Stilt lizards and other similar animals were nerfed, being drunk and encumbered now reduces or completely eliminates the chance to skill up, halflings were removed, and recently they added code to make it so your offense vs opponent's defense determines whether or not you can gain. This means that missing isn't enough anymore, you need to miss against something that has enough defense for you to qualify for skillgains. That rules out blindfighting in gortok dens and things like that. I'm pretty sure it's just about impossible nowadays to hit master in a weapon skill unless you can spar frequently against someone else who's similarly skilled. If you get a huge offense bonus from agility, I'd be surprised if you can even hit advanced.
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Post by shakes on Feb 2, 2019 15:00:38 GMT -5
I never am going to hit the plateau you guys hit, but a method for me at about 3 days played when the normal fare gets too easy is to look for large mobs of creatures that assist each other and then jump into that. For example, a gith may no longer manage to land a hit on me, even dismounted and prone after failing a bash, but for whatever reason 5 silthawks will manage to peck me at least once or twice. Somewhere in the code is a bonus due to numerical advantage but I haven't found it. I almost never clan up and I never spar so the most I ever see is about apprentice or journeyman on weapon skills, but I've found that with decent stats, by the time I hit jman I'm able to take out everything in the desert short of meks and mets. I don't generally twink the combat game too hard. I focus on shield/parry and ride and all my utility skills but I expect combat is just going to go up to a matter of course. And then I try to avoid fights with those 100+ days played combat gods. That isn't too hard since most of them sit in the Gaj but when you ended up in a fight with their mudsex buddy they come pouring out of the city and literally pursue you from the west gate of Nak to the furthest hills east of the grasslands. You can run 300 rooms away from them, log off, and then come back the following day and within 10 seconds you're getting the Way and disconnect and them suddenly a cloaked figure comes riding in to charge you down. Understanding the code game is all well and good, but when it comes to PK the metagame these guys play is what will kill you.
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Post by lechuck on Feb 2, 2019 15:45:03 GMT -5
The plateau is really easy to hit. It's at journeyman weapon skill, basically. Exact numbers depend on stats and weapon choice. That's the point where you can no longer miss any of the things that are practical to fight. Long-lived fighters might be able to dodge you a little longer than that, but to hit the upper levels, you pretty much need to do weird shit like fight a mantis with the worst weapon you can find while sitting down. Technically you can spar the whole way up, but there's almost never going to be anyone with the right skills and a willingness to spar frequently. Most people stop showing up for training once they're at the point where they get nothing out of sparring the other people in their clan, which means it's usually just a bunch of new characters who can't dodge eachother. Sparring is awful if you don't have the once-in-a-lifetime luxury of being clanned with someone like sirra who will put 50 days into maxing their defense and continue training people. In the past, certain kinds of NPCs could be used to get past the plateau. Stilt lizards were the most popular ones, but they were nerfed. Halflings were great as well but they don't exist anymore. If you had scan, you could also attack hidden NPCs which makes you much more likely to miss, but these tend not to have high defense so you probably can't gain on those after the plateau point. There are still certain NPCs that have high defense and agility and can actually be fought without risking your life every time, but they tend to be NPCs that you can't really justify attacking, like random tribal camp guards and stuff like that. For the most part, the things you can feasibly fight will get you no higher than journeyman, and at any given time there's between zero and three PCs in the game who have high defense and will actually spar on a regular basis. Defense was a bit easier to raise than weapons/offense because you always have the option of fighting seated and unarmed, but now it's probably going to be capped at whatever amount of offense are on the things you can safely get hit by. You can't exactly take on a salt worm unarmed. Depending on how much leeway they put into the new skillgain system, it may just be that nobody's going to have really high combat skills anymore. The way combat works, a target needs to have a lot more defense than your offense in order for you to miss often enough to see any real gains, because your attacks are offense plus weaponskill plus hidden race skills, while dodging is basically just defense. Instead they'll just parry and block you all day which gives you nothing. I suspect this means that fighters will just languish at some halfway point forever. We don't know exactly how it works and these changes went in after the code was leaked, so we can only guess. I'm just looking at what I know about the code, and I can't see what could really be done now to raise these skills past a certain point. You can get to advanced weapon skills in a few specific ways, but that's not actually very high--weapon skills hit advanced at like 50 or something like that. At that point, there's essentially nothing left in the game that will dodge you and has high defense. You might then spar with someone for months while their defense goes up, but will it go up high enough for them to start dodging you, or will it stop when it's just a bit higher than your offense? Before, your skills just needed to fail in order to go up. Now they need to fail and not be higher than the opponent's. If they designed this with a lot of leeway, it might not be a big deal; but knowing staff's tendency to systematically crack down on any and all methods used to train combat skills past the halfway point, I doubt they've erred on the side of leniency here. Considering how hard it is to scrounge up a miss even at journeyman weapon skill, I just can't see what could possibly have enough defense to take you all the way to master. You don't merely need to find something/someone that'll dodge you, you also need to be able to fight that opponent again and again and again over a long period of time. That's the only way to do it, and as far as I know, there are no NPCs in the game that will do it when none of the old tricks work (fighting blind, drunk etc.) So if that means you can't raise weaponskills and offense to the upper end, can you train someone else's defense past your plateau point? I suspect you can't. I suspect you'll train them up to where your offensive skills are at, which won't be enough for them to dodge you, and then you're both stuck. Technically it doesn't really matter how high these skills can be trained, because if nobody can get past a certain point, that's effectively the maximum. But it is very strange game design. Instead of making it obtainable for anyone who puts in the time and plays the type of character who should be one of the elite fighters of the world, they made it something you have to cheat at. They made the "right way" (sparring, hunting sensible targets) ineffective and then complained that players were doing it the "wrong way" (grinding in dark gortok dens and shit like that) to compensate for a flawed system, so they made the wrong way no longer work. If they just made the right way work, ambitious players wouldn't have a need to look for bizarre tricks. It's like not feeding your cat enough, asking it to stop obsessing about food, and getting mad when it goes looking for pigeons. Armageddon has this really backwards way of looking at player trends. You see the same thing with the stat system. They made that system wildly random with a chance to roll exceptionally good stats, and then asked players not to care about stats. Training combat skills past a certain point requires some very nebulous actions that you need to know a lot about the combat system to utilize, and then they tell players it's wrong to want to know a lot about the combat system. Makes no sense. They could completely eliminate the player trends that they're against by fixing these systems, but they won't. Where they really fucked up was when they started adding skill branches to weapon skills. The soldier ones probably aren't that bad because they cap their weapons at advanced so they most likely branch at journeyman, but enforcers, according to Brokkr, need to get to just below where warriors used to branch their special skills. That was high advanced, so let's say mid-advanced for enforcers, and they branch class-defining skills from these. Enforcer is a pretty tame class without backstab and sap. Making these skills branch from high weapon skills and then telling players they shouldn't be thinking about getting high weapon skills is probably the best example of Armageddon's dysfunctional staffing mentality. It's just pure nonsense on their part.
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Post by shakes on Feb 2, 2019 17:30:37 GMT -5
On some of the classes, the branch point is very low. I don't know about the specific weapons skills, but I know I looked at stuff that was max skill level master and it would then branch its skill somewhere just before it hit advanced. Enforcer is the one that looks like it really got the shaft.
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