Shield Like Oblivion?

[ezzetabi]

nowadays the arcade/rpg subdivision is more and more blurry... heck, there are rpg elements even in the shot-n-ups!

Back to topic, maybe some attacks might be available only if you have enough skill level? Or special attacks might fail and success chance increase with skill. Or some kind of ``sword magic'' similar to making spells... I think there might be something to make attacking more exciting and still keeping the rpg feeling where the level is the main factor for success.

[sirherrbatka]

I imagine that while in combat character should gather some kind of success points after successful action, like dodge, parrying, attack etc. After getting enough of this he can perform special move and defeat enemy in one blow (one strong blow > three weak blows).

As for move to be accessed after reaching stats, yes. I would go even further and make this moves to behave like skills. After reaching perfection in disarming player does not need to perform disarm after parrying and when enemy is confuse, he can do it anytime. Learning Chuck Norris Kick would need not only 999999999999 level of hand to hand combat but also mastering all other kicks in game

[Ruarl]

I want to say that allowing to hit every strike is not the way to go. It's pity to see guy with bow first time in his hands able to shoot with accuracy of Robin Hood.

We need to increase chance to hit so the game is no longer frustrating but this is simply not the way to go.

I'm posting this because I want to highlight the importance of focus on whole game, not just one aspect. There are armors. Some are heavy and grants great dmg reduction. But why to ignore players who want to fight without any armor? There should be some kind of benefit from fighting without this bloat that can at least partially balance the game.

If I could change how Morrowind calculates chance to hit & damage reduction, I would do it like this:

Armors

At the moment all armors in Morrowind is based on damage reduction. Even if you go unarmored, if the enemy has a high weapon skill he would continuously hit you. That is not logical imo.

It would introduce (sliders/GMST) that determines how much each armor class’s armor rating is used for damage reduction and how much each armor class’s armor rating is used for dodging attacks. In essence armor rating would be split between Damage Reduction rating and a Dodge rating. This is just a quick mockup to illustrate my idea, but these values can be balanced if you wish.

Heavy armor: 100% to damage reduction rating (Like in vanilla Morrowind)
Medium armor: 75% to damage reduction rating + 25% to dodge rating
Light armor: 25% to damage reduction rating + 75% to dodge rating
Unarmored: 100% to dodge rating

Weapons

Instead of chance to hit, we change it to always hit accompanied with the changes to armor as mentioned above. The combat engine compares the attacker’s weapon skill with the defender’s armor skill / creatures combat skill. If the attacker’s weapon skill is lower, the defender gets a dodge bonus.

Marksmanship is the exception to this rule. It should work like vanilla, where a low skill in archery has a lower chance to hit. Also the defender does not get a dodge bonus as mentioned above.

Also it should perhaps ignore dodge rating since: Firstly, by running around in the game you could avoid being hit by projectiles and with heavy armors you run slower so you are hit easier. Secondly, a dodger can perhaps dodge attacks in melee combat, but a fast moving arrow that is aimed correctly hits a dodger as easy as a heavy armor user.

This is not a clean solution, I know, but I can’t see another alternative to a Robin Hood. If you have other ideas on marksmanship, we could discuss it.

What do all these changes cause?

• Low lvl NPCs/creatures easier to hit (Less frustration for beginner) and high lvl NPCs/creatures more dangerous.
• NPCs gets the same advantage, so combat might be somewhat more difficult/risky in the begin game. At least luck is taken out of the equation where NPCs could give lucky consecutive hits.
• Combat with different type of NPCs will feel different because of changes to armor. Some are difficult to hit, some are tanks. This makes combat just a tad more interesting.
• This is close enough to vanilla to sooth MW fans, but an improvement to a broken/boring combat system.

Note: Since creatures do not have an Armor Rating and do not wear armor, changes to armor do not affect creatures. A discussion might be needed to consider if changes need to be made to give creatures Armor Rating and armor types. For example: Mudcrap = Heavy, Rat = Unarmored. For now I would leave it like it is.

Last thought: This would probably be implemented post 1.0, but I wouldn’t mind if it was implemented earlier.

[Chris]

Armors

At the moment all armors in Morrowind is based on damage reduction. Even if you go unarmored, if the enemy has a high weapon skill he would continuously hit you. That is not logical imo.

It would introduce (sliders/GMST) that determines how much each armor class’s armor rating is used for damage reduction and how much each armor class’s armor rating is used for dodging attacks. In essence armor rating would be split between Damage Reduction rating and a Dodge rating.

Dodging is controlled by Agility and Speed.

IMO, it doesn't make sense to make dodging improve with the armor skill because the armor itself is designed to impede your movement. It's designed to protect you against hits, not to help you move away from them. The skill should be about how effective you are at deflecting incoming blows, turning direct hits into glancing scrapes and such, to reduce the damage taken. Agility and Speed should determine how good you are about getting away from attacks, while wearing armor reduces your ability to dodge in favor of being able to take the hits (with heavier armors having a more pronounced effect).

One thing a new/improved combat system needs (again, IMO) is to avoid the whole chance-based hitting. If my attack strikes in the general direction of an opponent it should be a hit, and not miss because the RNG God hated me. For an enemy to dodge, he should actively move away from me and the attack.

[sirherrbatka]

Well, It makes sense from realistic point of view since armor is designed to be literally impossible to pass in some areas (unless a really powerful strike with two handed weapon or something designed for this purpose like horseman's pick).

[Tarius]

Alright, had stuff written out and then another page yanked me after I closed it out so I will shorten what I had.

Interesting ideas. Heres more:
1. Hit every time, but if you would have missed, do no damage.
2. Hit every time, but do a percentage of damage. So, if you were supposed to hit 50% of the time, you instead hit every time and do 50% of the damage.

Talking directly to OpenMW Devs, please make the combat system easy to edit(among other things easy to edit as well). In otherwords, there would be no need to go digging through anything.

[natirips]

Perhaps what Tarius said could be done with a few GMSTs:

f<something>MissChance 1.0 (=miss chance is the same as in vanilla MW, 2.0 would be twice as many misses, 0.0 would be no misses at all)

and/or

f<something>MissDamage 1.0 (="missed" hits still do full damage, 0.0 would be vanilla MW style, 0.5 would be "missed" hits do 50% of damage.)

[sirherrbatka]

I like the idea. Miss = low HP damage and standard stamina damage.

[Ruarl]

Dodging is controlled by Agility and Speed.

IMO, it doesn't make sense to make dodging improve with the armor skill because the armor itself is designed to impede your movement. It's designed to protect you against hits, not to help you move away from them. The skill should be about how effective you are at deflecting incoming blows, turning direct hits into glancing scrapes and such, to reduce the damage taken. Agility and Speed should determine how good you are about getting away from attacks, while wearing armor reduces your ability to dodge in favor of being able to take the hits (with heavier armors having a more pronounced effect).

Although Agility and Speed of a person affects dodging, I would like a player be able to learn how to dodge. Dodging is IMO learned, not part of a physical attribute.

Let’s take the unarmored skill for example. I agree with your thought that the skill should help reduce some of the damage when you are hit, but an unarmored person main defense is dodging the attack of a person. No use trying to deflect a hammer for example.

With Light armor, although impeded, you still have a lot of dodge, but if you do get hit the armor helps reduce some the damage. And like you mentioned, this scales up until you reach the heavy armor class that impedes your movement so much that you can’t dodge attacks at all.

So in essence I personally don’t see a problem with dodging improving with armor skill, since it is skills that is taught how to effectively fight with each armor type.

Remember that frequently players have complained about the inferiority of the lighter armor classes compared to Heavy armor. The unarmored skill in particular. Secondly, in my experience, all the armors feel too similar (The dodge rate seem similar to me with and without armor) and a change like I mentioned above, might help elevate it.

One thing a new/improved combat system needs (again, IMO) is to avoid the whole chance-based hitting. If my attack strikes in the general direction of an opponent it should be a hit, and not miss because the RNG God hated me. For an enemy to dodge, he should actively move away from me and the attack.

This sounds good on paper, but it has some possible problems:

The current movement in Morrowind is too sluggish to effectively implement it. You can’t move away fast enough to avoid the attacks. If OpenMW can fix this, with additional movements like rolling away/ better camera angles/ whatever, then the next hurdle comes to the fore: The AI needs a complex algorithm to handle this new combat, which will take time to create. I am not a technical person, so I might overestimate the work needed for the AI.

I suspect that the OpenMW won’t make drastic changes like this to the code. Most probably a modder would have to do this.

[veepee]

I think the problem with having all that chance-to-hit gameplay with sanctuary spells and whatnot, is that there's no animation that would explain to players what happened. An alternative to replacing it with Oblivion/Skyrim -style mechanics (and ditching some gameplay aspects in the process), would be to fix it with animation.

Let's assume there's a key for blocking actively. With that in mind, for a stealth solution the same button could have a skill/attribute-based chance to activate a dodge maneuver (sp?), that would automatically move the player sideways a bit. Basically the exact same thing as "not hitting", just with visible results. A placeholder animation could be simply moving the PC fast (like a "fixme" console command), until someone makes a proper animation. NPC's in combat would have this calculated for every swing.

For the sanctuary spell the same would happen, execpt in that case i think it would be proper to be automatic (without pressing the block button). Perhaps that would be a tad disorienting, but it might work nicely enough. There would also be cases where the sanctuary spell and agility/speed based active dodging would stack. In that case i think the sanctuary would simply raise the chance for a successful dodge.

This line of thinking probably wouldn't "fix" unarmored in any way. If unarmored were to be implemented as a dodge kinda thing within this mechanic, it would be redundant. But unarmored is kinda stupid anyway, given that the game has blocking and dodging separately, so it's difficult to find an explanation as to what the unarmored corresponds to in real life. Straining your muscles where the hit lands?

Any thoughts on this?