Try to limit the amount of braindead and anti-fun CC that is stuns. There are better alternatives.

The issue I have with @Dreoh's original argument is that it overgeneralizes stuns as if they are all the same as implemented in x game. I don't like See's chocolate, but I still like chocolate. I think the more productive conversation is the direction @Noaani started moving - i.e. what would an appropriate stun mechanic look like in AoC? What attributes would it have? What cool down would it have? How would other cc balance out?

If you're concerned about being stunned then globaled from 100% to zero, that's not going to happen in AoC. I think it's important to be specific about what implementation of stuns you're referring to, so we can discuss what works about that specific instance of cc instead of painting one tactic with such a broad brush.

For example, I liked the hilt bash stun (I think from Rift, but it might be GW2) that was a 1.5 sec cc. it had a medium cd, but was incredibly useful without being OP.

An example of crappy stuns would be WoW windwalker monks. Chaining multiple cc's are also an issue that we can discuss - i.e. stun-locking is silly.

CROW3 wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

I for one am tired of games making poor design decisions because 'people are used to them' or 'they always have this mechanic', so until someone justifies 'yes we need exactly this ability that fully stops everything', no matter how short you set it to, there will be people who ask 'but why did you need it to be full Stun'?

Stuns appears in games because stunning an opponent is an effective martial tactic. Boxing someone's ears, hitting them with the butt of a rifle, or using a taser are all forms of stunning an opponent. So arguing that stuns are some gaming anachronism isn't a winnable position.

In game, balancing one type of cc versus another is a different story.

I said nothing to indicate that stuns are not realistic. The argument is that stuns are not fun. And when game mechanics are not fun, the games are less popular. And when MMOs are less popular, they fail.

So if one's aim is to 'win' by 'having a successful MMO that more people like without compromising the gameplay requirements, then 'full stun is bad' is a functional argument.

But by the logic presented, no one who 'doesn't instantly die from a sword swing that potentially hit their head' should be stunnable at all by practically any ability. If you could 'box ears' or 'rifle butt' then you could apply sharp edge to cranium and the fight should be over.

Azherae wrote: »

I said nothing to indicate that stuns are not realistic.

Agreed. But that wasn't my point. You said they are 'an unnecessary evil' - I disagree since they can be very necessary and are neither evil nor good.

Azherae wrote: »

But by the logic presented, no one who 'doesn't instantly die from a sword swing that potentially hit their head' should be stunnable at all by practically any ability. If you could 'box ears' or 'rifle butt' then you could apply sharp edge to cranium and the fight should be over.

Maybe you can say more on that first point, I didn't follow your thought?

To the second point, speaking about RL combat, those tactics are intentionally not lethal since not all fights require an opponent to be killed. Being subdued is a perfectly valid way to end a fight.

In games, I've used stuns as much to get away from a fight as to lay into the red guy.

Which is great, but the entire reason they don't work properly in game situations is because a bunch of other things have been changed away from realism for the purpose of fun or balance. Also, other unrealistic things fully capable of replacing stuns have been added.

I'm not arguing against CC. As @Dreoh is, I'm arguing against full stun.

You did not explain why stuns are necessary. You explained that they are an effective martial tactic. This does not make them necessary for a game, it only makes them 'realistic'. If you have any goal with a Stun that is not 'make my opponent entirely unable to play', you can substitute a CC that gives them an option while still achieving your own goal.

Azherae wrote: »

You did not explain why stuns are necessary.

Well, I'm not making an argument to change the status quo, so the onus isn't on me to explain anything. But here are a few scenarios where stuns are extremely useful:

1) If I'm a tank and a heavy-hitting mob turns on my healer and my taunt is on cd, I can stun a mob and generate threat without it continuing to attack (and possibly kill) my healer.

2) If I'm a healer and one of my group is feared with AOE ground mechanics that could kill them or the group (e.g. Shade of Aran) I can stun that player to reduce the risk of failure.

3) I'm a bleed spec solo'ing content and need to keep a mob still while bleeds tick and I can survive the fight.

Very well, I don't expect that trying to condense down decades of game design theory into forum posts is going to be any more convincing than it usually is, so I will just join others in hoping that between them, Intrepid's developers have the cumulative equivalent of those decades of experience. If your point is 'design inertia puts the onus on the opponent of this mechanic', then your point stands, by definition.

Answers to your point though:
1. This is handled almost perfectly by the spell 'Flash' in FFXI. basically reduce enemy accuracy to nothing, generate high threat.

2. This can be handled by any knockdown that interrupts a mechanic, or a short term 'prevent special ability'. Enemy can still move. In PvE, still as effective, not as crippling in PvP.

3. Root/Bind/Sleep, whichever of these doesn't break upon enemy receiving bleed damage. Enemy can't reach you with most attacks, can still use long range ones, healing, defense buffs. This is the particular case I feel is the more suspect one. You said 'so I can survive the fight'. If one can't survive the fight because the opponent can still act at all, then your method of winning is 'prevent my opponent from getting to do things until I have enough advantage that they die'. Common. Sometimes correct. Usually hard to balance, usually not correct either.

RocketFarmer

Perhaps stuns would not be needed if there were a way to take control of the tempo of a fight. Such tempo effects the ability to get your hit in without them getting theirs.

How that might work, hit chances and dodge or block probabilities increase as you control the tempo and decrease as you lose tempo. Doesn’t have to be huge numbers to change the outcome.

To gain control of tempo there is a battle within the battle that I refer to as the Contest of Tempo, or Contest of Time. Within this contest is a rock-paper-scissors of player actions based on the choices of Striking First, Countering, and Striking last. Countering beats Striking First; Striking Last beats Countering; Striking First beats Striking Last. The buffs go to the winner, debuffs go to the loser and no bonuses apply for ties.

The basis of this are descriptions in medieval fighting manuals. Other such contests are the Contest of Space/movement and the Contest of the Bind (when opponents are applying techniques of close quarter combat with windings, grapples, push, pull, etc. Ideally you would want to win the Contest of Space by out maneuvering your opponent. Then win the Contest of Time/Tempo to get your hit in and move away from the responding attack. The basic unit of combat is the exchange, where each combatant acts. These contests would occur during each exchange, with the “winner” of the previous exchange generally having the upper hand on the next exchange. These exchanges occur naturally whether the game intentionally designs them in or not (obvious exception being turn-based combat).

The above applies to melee combatants. When discussing ranged combatants or ranged vs melee, there would be other factors, obviously.

First, the contest becomes the distance the ranged character can maintain, the damage they inflict at that range and their stamina to maintain their distance. For the melee combatant it becomes a chase, their ability to withstand the ranged damage (uh, shield freaking work well at this) and their stamina to maintain the chase.

Ranged attacks should lose their potency based on the greater distance. When it doesn’t the game has a built in advantage to the ranged character. Not enough potency at reasonable distances means advantage to the melee character. This of course excludes things such as cover and terrain.

Once a ranged character gets within reach of the melee character, the melee character has a much greater advantage. It’s for this reason that archers abandoned their bows once the opponent got past the kill zone, between the effective range of the bow and the point the next shot could be launched before a charging opponent was on top of the archer. Also, as these archers were less armored individuals they were at the mercy of their opponent not to cleave them in half (although not as bad as depicted in movies). By the way, a similar situation occurs among melee opponents with respect to pole arms when entering CQC. I would imagine similar situations for wands and staves, although you could view wands as the equivalent to hand guns, staves as a rifle. These inferior melee or non-CQC weapons would then fall under the fate of Take, Break, or Disarm, or simply be totally ineffective.

Also in melee to CQC range the melee combatant, if they are not trying to eliminate the ranged attacker’s weapon, would most definitely attempt to restrict the ability of the opponent to move or get away. This then becomes a similar melee contest where the Contest of Space and Contest of Time come into play. So rather than have something like an auto stun or auto slow/maime/etc. you have a method of introducing buffs and debuffs based on the skill of the players. To me this would be a very active contest, which I imagine would be more entertaining than auto stun, auto slow, etc. And perhaps stacked debuffs lead to these more debilitating conditions. In other words, to lose actions you would have to lose more than one contest. And the fight could turn dramatically from an opponent apparently at a disadvantage turning the tables on their opponent.

The easy way is apply stuns.

RocketFarmer wrote: »

To gain control of tempo there is a battle within the battle that I refer to as the Contest of Tempo, or Contest of Time. Within this contest is a rock-paper-scissors of player actions based on the choices of Striking First, Countering, and Striking last. Countering beats Striking First; Striking Last beats Countering; Striking First beats Striking Last. The buffs go to the winner, debuffs go to the loser and no bonuses apply for ties.

Interesting idea. Do you see this as a proxy for taking/giving line?

The difficulty with translating actual melee combat (say swords, since that's what I train with) into the game is that 'melee range' is so broad a brush that you lose the real economies of distance, line, shape, motion, timing, etc. I like the direction your thinking on 'tempo' and 'time' is headed, though I wonder if a R/P/S model may be too RNG (is there a way to mitigate the probability with skills/knowledge/etc?), and the macro level question of over-burdening combat with that calculation v. just having a stun (your last point).

What manuals are you referencing?

Menda Goodbody

I'm pro stun. I'm pro any combat moves in pvp. Why limit us?

Maezriel

Menda Goodbody wrote: »

I'm pro stun. I'm pro any combat moves in pvp. Why limit us?

B/c stuns are very boring for those who are stunned. IMO combat shouldn't encourage someone to just twiddle their thumbs and wait

McShave

Rock paper scissors with cc that is not stun. Silence>root>slow. There is no need for a stun, but i would be very ok with mini-stuns that last less than a second.

Menda Goodbody wrote: »

I'm pro stun. I'm pro any combat moves in pvp. Why limit us?

Many others and I have provided many strong arguments why they should be limited. Please read more than just the title lmao.

@Dygz Both blind and fear are better than Stuns yes. You can still move while blinded. It's absolutely no different than the silence/disarm example from my original post. Of course extremes are never good, but arguing from the extreme is never a good argument anyways. Minute long blinds are worse than 2 second stuns as @Aerlana said.
I agree fear is not really fun but it's still better than outright stuns since you run away from the attacker and usually exit fear after taking damage.

@Tyranthraxus Nobody here is arguing against CC. This post is against stuns. If anything, this is an argument for more and more varied CC.

@veyrah None of what you said can't be done through other CC options, which was the entire purpose of my post.

@CROW3 So lets add broken limbs and concussions and your character becoming paraplegic. Realism only goes so far towards good game design. Stuns are not good game design in pvp. If you don't understand why, read the original post.

As for me overgeneralizing stuns? No, I absolutely am not. My entire argument is that stuns remove all player agency, which is against the core principle of playing a game. I recognize it could be an extreme opinion, but it's also very true that any scenario you give me where a stun would be needed could be replaced by other viable CC's that don't take away player agency.

Stuns are absolutely never necessary. Necessary means there's no other option. There are plenty of other options.

Also, Tradition is never solely a good argument for something.

Tl;Dr: People not reading the original post, and thinking this is an argument against all CC, or people having the opinion that stuns are necessary for some reason.

Just to add another option to the 'no stuns' side:

An enemy doing a big attack that could wipe your group isn't even best countered by a Stun in this type of game (where the option is also available in PvP). The best counter design wise is an 'Addle' or something that drastically reduces the damage of the enemy's next attack, and you just put that on a 'CC cooldown' the same way you'd have had to do for the stun.

This way, bosses like the Poison Dragon and Ice Dragon still get to use their own CCs and utility abilities and poisons, without the group having to worry about insta-wipe due to high damage, yet PvP doesn't need a stun. The ability in question is even still useful in PvP if it applies to everything because you can use it to stop big spells and channeled abilities in the same way.

I won't say there's always better options, but 99% of the time there's better options.

Maezriel

Azherae wrote: »

Just to add another option to the 'no stuns' side:

An enemy doing a big attack that could wipe your group isn't even best countered by a Stun in this type of game (where the option is also available in PvP). The best counter design wise is an 'Addle' or something that drastically reduces the damage of the enemy's next attack, and you just put that on a 'CC cooldown' the same way you'd have had to do for the stun.

This way, bosses like the Poison Dragon and Ice Dragon still get to use their own CCs and utility abilities and poisons, without the group having to worry about insta-wipe due to high damage, yet PvP doesn't need a stun. The ability in question is even still useful in PvP if it applies to everything because you can use it to stop big spells and channeled abilities in the same way.

I won't say there's always better options, but 99% of the time there's better options.

Hell many MMOs just make big mobs immune to stuns b/c of how strong they are.

Maezriel wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Just to add another option to the 'no stuns' side:

An enemy doing a big attack that could wipe your group isn't even best countered by a Stun in this type of game (where the option is also available in PvP). The best counter design wise is an 'Addle' or something that drastically reduces the damage of the enemy's next attack, and you just put that on a 'CC cooldown' the same way you'd have had to do for the stun.

This way, bosses like the Poison Dragon and Ice Dragon still get to use their own CCs and utility abilities and poisons, without the group having to worry about insta-wipe due to high damage, yet PvP doesn't need a stun. The ability in question is even still useful in PvP if it applies to everything because you can use it to stop big spells and channeled abilities in the same way.

I won't say there's always better options, but 99% of the time there's better options.

Hell many MMOs just make big mobs immune to stuns b/c of how strong they are.

I think defiance bars have been the best alternative to boss CC immunity.
I've seen both Wildstar and GW2 use defiance bars and they reward good team effort and makes every CC viable in a boss fight.

RocketFarmer

There were a number of manuals I pulled from.

Primary influences were Liechtenhauer, Talhoffer, Fiore and George Silver. I found they had the most usable content.

Great resource:
https://www.wiktenauer.com/

Worked on a tabletop RPG for a home brew campaign trying to draw on the themes and concepts of the old art. Modeled it out and even created some playing aids (custom playing cards depicting guards, tactics, targets, etc.). Was not a successful implementation because the players did not want to be overwhelmed with choices. Some are perfectly happy spamming the same action over and over, or having a couple of choices compared to what you could consider as 3D chess. But for a computer game or even an MMO RPG such choices can be provided more organically. Movement is already this way in games.

That system includes a couple of rock-paper-scissor choices. The speed of the attack (First-Counter-Last). The “feel” or strength of the attack (Strong-Medium-Weak).

Used starting and ending guards plus the option of each strike to determine the line. As for shape, that’s a deeper level I just don’t think you can get to in a relatively simple model. Both opponents used a 3x3 matrix for defense and attack locations (which could determine the line of attack and defense). So there are nine strikes, but realistically maybe six or seven because some combinations are less optimal. But they could be used to surprise the opponent, although you better be prepared to move for cover or else the surprise is on you. If an attack line crosses a defense line, then that attack is set aside or they come into a bind should each side choose to press. But essentially your attack line is also your defense line.

Each exchange starts with the presentation of a guard. The ending guard of the last exchange being the starting guard to the next. Players have the option to change guards based on where the next guard is located compared to the current guard. Each guard being a 3x3 matrix, or tick-tac-toe board, moving more than one square presents disadvantage. The player who won the previous exchange starts the current exchange with advantage. They can give up that advantage in exchange for a more elaborate change of guard or take that advantage into one of the contests.

Each guard had its own identification of where that guard was stronger or weaker in terms of attack or defense. So guards mattered.

As for skill, that would most likely increase or decrease the modifiers. Perhaps some skills (wrt Actions) would involve combinations and some of the more advanced techniques.

As for weapons, different weapon classes have their own set of guards, reach, advantages, limitations, etc. Shields and dual weapons became interesting, but also need greater consideration or else your opponent could use your own shield or weapon against you. Not as easy as one might think. More often than not these came into play in the bind. Example, for sword and shield, the shield tends to be the primary weapon to bind an opponent in order for the sword to do the dirty work. Weapons like daggers and rondels are more for the killing blow when you have them down on the ground and are on top of them. So let’s say for a Tank that a Mage has been harassing gets him to the ground and takes that damn wand and sticks it in the Mage’s…eye. Not sure we’ll be seeing that in AoC, but it would be pretty cool.

Where such combat gets tricky for a game is what exactly is Hybrid combat? Something like this probably doesn’t work for a pure tab targeting unless you break the character hit boxes into segments (9 mini hit boxes selected by clicking Shift-Tab). A bit easier for action combat because you can aim at different body locations. Strength of an attack can be achieved by how the key is pressed (quick for weak, normal for medium, longer for strong). Perhaps the same approach for speed could be used when pressing the left mouse button. And yeah, that’s still a lot to process between two different styles they plan to have in their hybrid system. Perhaps for the Tab targeting system it would use an algorithm to be the “3D chess player” with respect to combat. Click a button or two and the algorithm does the rest. For the tab targeting player it would just look like you have a wider variety of attack animations.

It all depends on how many additional years you want to wait on this game to release. Some major game developers spend a considerable amount of resources on this area and have little to nothing to show for it. So the choice might be 2023 release with stuns or maybe 2030 release with something else that might not work.

Changing stuns to other forms of CC is not a 7-year dev-time difference lmao, even if you're just being hyperbolic you're very much overestimating the dev time required for such things.

Changing the mechanics of spells is extremely simple, unless they are using spaghetti code, which I highly doubt. The biggest time sink would be balancing, and that's an iterative and necessary process no matter what game it is or if you use stuns or not. Balancing is also usually done by a separate balancing team.

Add the fact that they are balancing for team play and not 1v1's and balance suddenly becomes incredibly more lenient.

Dreoh wrote: »

Both blind and fear are better than Stuns yes. You can still move while blinded. It's absolutely no different than the silence/disarm example from my original post. I agree fear is not really fun but it's still better than outright stuns since you run away from the attacker and usually exit fear after taking damage.

Depending on how a blind is implemented. In WoW a blind is a stun broken with damage. In Witcher 3, you can move but can't attack. In WoW fear is a stun (you have no control over your character). If your definition of a stun (and why they need to be cut) is that you lose complete control of your character than both Blind and Fears should be cut too.

Dreoh wrote: »

@CROW3 So lets add broken limbs and concussions and your character becoming paraplegic. Realism only goes so far towards good game design.

Nice strawman. I wasn't arguing that realism is the way to go, only that stuns are present in actual combat which is why they are part of simulated combat. But if you want to go there, broken limbs and concussions have also been implemented in good game design. Look at Insurgency - they implemented both concussions and broken limbs as temporary effects and it works. Can that carry over to AoC, sure - but that gets to my point about approaching cc in a more specific way.

Dreoh wrote: »

Stuns are not good game design in pvp. If you don't understand why, read the original post.

I understand your opinion, I just don't agree with you.

Dreoh wrote: »

As for me overgeneralizing stuns? No, I absolutely am not. My entire argument is that stuns remove all player agency, which is against the core principle of playing a game. I recognize it could be an extreme opinion, but it's also very true that any scenario you give me where a stun would be needed could be replaced by other viable CC's that don't take away player agency.

All stuns are all bad all the time. Got it. No over-generalizations at all.

Dreoh wrote: »

Tradition is never solely a good argument for something.

Agreed, but if you're interested in disrupting convention understand that there is an inertia you need to overcome with a disproportionately convincing argument as an alternative. Unfortunately, your arguments continually just come back to 'I don't like being stunned.'

RocketFarmer

Biggest issue with these games is just how much size and scale matters.

A larger human combatant will have a more than distinct advantage in melee with all other things considered.

Introduce monsters and dragons and that size and scale leads to an even greater mismatch. A dragon would wipe whole parties with just a swing of its tail. Not even getting to its thermonuclear warfare breath weapon. The only possible advantage might be they don’t fight like humans/humanoids or have a limited attention span or ability to handle multiple opponents.

You could argue that despite their size and power dragons tend to “turtle” into a more defensive position, making them less optimal than they are when they are out flying around hunting or strafing cattle (or villages). But then maybe that dragon was bullied as a dragonling and you can’t really expect them all to behave the same way. Plenty of room for personality to determine how a creature might fight or when and why they might do so. Makes it interesting.