Warrior Preview Blog Post

We may end up keeping similar fight-specific mechanics that have other things about them like the pillars or stalactites which you hide behind, yeah. I agree that it’s a fun mechanic.

The part that we decided we didn’t like was specifically relying on the Warrior’s shield being planted as the only way to do the mechanic successfully. It was just too confusing since the shield when planted had different properties than the one when held, and there wasn’t really a great ‘obvious’ way to know what you’re supposed to do.

I think given your example, hiding behind the pillars or something in the environment is a much better mechanic and it’s more obvious what needs to happen. So we would definitely (and likely will) include similar mechanics in the future.

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Really like a lot of the changes, especially the addition of combos to the sword attacks. My only question is why “Up” was chosen for the combo instead of “Down”. An overhead chop attack, or “Down” is an extremely common attack in sword fighting, at least the kind that most of us are exposed to in movies, etc. It’s the classic power attack, how many movies have their sword fights end with one guy wailing away with overhead attacks while the other guy is attempting to block / cowering behind a shield. On the other hand, an uppercut, or “Up” is much less common, especially a perfectly vertical attack as shown in the example gif. The reason for this is twofold. First, you can’t get as much power behind an attack swinging upward. Second, and most relevant to the game, is that your arm/hand angle rarely allows for a perfect upward vertical strike.

I’ll try and explain. The bottom of your hand always leads the top in sword strikes. This is basically required to ensure that the impact of the strike does not knock the sword from your hand; it pushes in the sword into the palm of your hand instead of into the fingers. It also allows your elbow/tricep to both add speed/power to an attack and recoil on impact. If you lead an attack with the top of your hand, you may hyper-extend your elbow on impact.

How does all this relate to the “Up” attack in the combo? Well, I can’t figure out a way to ever attack “Up” in a perfect vertical motion without either having the top of my hand lead the bottom, or by having the attack start on the left side of my body (I’m right handed), with my entire body turned to the left, essentially my side/back to the target and swinging up from there. And that still tends to be a lower left to upper right diagonal. I suppose you could get a vertical “Up” attack that starts on your right side by turning your arm inward and down to initiate the attack, but this seems really complicated to perform with a full length sword without chopping into your own legs. Now try and string two of these “Up” attacks together for Cleave… Super awkward shoulder rotations required.

Yes, this is a VR game and melee has no force feedback and there is no full length sword to navigate around your body and therefore a vertical “Up” attack where the top of your hand leads the bottom is easy to accomplish and there is very little risk of dropping your sword or chopping off your own limbs… But it just feels wrong. And a vertical “Down” attack is a seemingly easy, realistic alternative.

All that to say, can we swap “Up” for “Down”?

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For what it’s worth I enjoyed reading through your descriptions here. I would agree that a “down” strike would be more natural. With that motion your swing goes with gravity instead of against it and could lead to reduced fatigue for our warriors.

I don’t know if it makes enough difference to rework the entire combo system, but since warrior is already a very physically taxing class to play I think it’s an excellent point.

I also really agree with Pontifi. Mainly for me because a vertical “Up” strike just feels weird and a “Down” strike just feels right. (also love the science behind his explanation)

Maybe “Up” was chosen to prevent people from hitting their ceilings? I know I would be a candidate for hitting the ceiling with a “Down” strike if a battle gets intense :stuck_out_tongue: (Just have to train my brain not to do that)

But seriously, using a “Down” strike feels just way more rewarding and I (and probably many more people) would prefer that instead of the “Up” strike.

My initial reaction when I read “up” was “why not down?” If the system is loose enough then up works (from my experimenting the moves irl) but down would probably be easier to adapt to. I care more about how the combos link together to maintain a fluid feel

At first I was also thinking that slashing upwards is kind of unnatural, however when you think about it, it is a great thing. Normally you would swing downwards, which means that comboes would be more likely to be executed “accidently”, this also means that comboes take extra effort compared to just randomly slashing your foes. I like the idea of it, however I can also understand that slashing downwards feels more natural.

So we originally planned to use Top to Bottom (“Down”) instead of the current Up, but we ran into all kinds of issues with mis-detection. In our testing, it’s incredibly natural to slice at a sort-of 45 degree angle (making a “X” pattern) when doing left and right alternating strikes. And it’s even more common when you’re fighting something that’s low to the ground, like the Wererabbits, for example.

So basically by using Up instead, you can be pretty darn loose with your Left/Right swings, including swinging at 45 degree angles, swinging at things that are smaller than you, etc, and it still registers just fine as a Left/Right swing. Then we can also be pretty loose with the “Up” detection as well, because as you have pointed out, it’s very unlikely you would swing upwards unless you were intending to do it as a combo move.

So, I guess long story short is, in our actual testing we found that using Up was much more reliable for detecting the strokes for the combo moves, and it makes it very clear that it’s what you intended to do, whereas Down is something you end up working into your natural swinging motion way too easily/often for it to be a reliable indicator of a combo move.

I think this is one of those things where you’re just going to have to try it and see what it’s like when the test starts. It’s not that I wouldn’t change it, it’s just that I think based on actual testing it makes a lot more sense than it might seem on paper.

EDIT: To be clear, doing it this way allows us to, I think, match the looseness of the detection to the natural motion of your swings. You don’t by any means have to slice upwards vertically perfectly, really just about any mostly-upward motion should register as an upward strike.

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Thank you for the clarification. I’m really glad it’s like this now that I know. The more flexible and reliable the detection, the less frustration. And more fun!

Fair enough. Thanks for the insight into that development process! We were also just discussing the tightness of the movement detection and how that will affect this system in the discord so I appreciate that note as well.

Overall very excited to test things out. Thanks again for all your work and quick responses to these topics!

If you do end up doing this, would the Warrior be able to use his new charge to get to a party member instead of an enemy. I’m assuming you’ll need a target for this ability since it teleports you within melee range.
IE:
Tank is on the left side of boss using ability.
Ally is on the right and not gong to make it.
Charge to ally, pop super.
Have that player owe you a life debt.
Gain a personal slav… err wait… scratch the last two…

PS Booo no more exploring new areas before they’re released! :sob:

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Thanks for the clarification. Good to hear that combo detection will be much more loosely applied. I guess I will just have to wait and see how it feels in the Beta (or wait and read other’s impressions, hah!)

So we talked about this, and the problem we foresaw with allowing you to use it to teleport to allies is that it would make it really, really easy to just kite enemies around. If you had two Runemages, for example, set up on opposite ends of the room, you could just get aggro, teleport to one, rinse, repeat, etc. By restricting it to only enemies, it makes it a lot less likely that you can do this since enemies will more naturally all “condense” together if you have aggro on all of them. But again, this is the type of thing I’d totally be willing to experiment with in the future, because I do like the idea of the Warrior being able to rush to an ally’s aid.

You have a very nice stuff going! I have a few ideas, since you’re using these different motions for combos and stuff, can you use it for other stuff as well?

Namely, I thought it would be cool if instead of blowing a horn, battlecry could be you raising both the shield and sword up above your head for a few seconds (the way they do it in the movies you know)

Taunt - banging your sword on your shield a few times, maybe for the aoe taunt

Sword rush - not sure how you handle activating abilities ingame right now, but this could be activated by holding your sword above your head pointing up for some period of time, then lowering it to shoulder height and pointing it towards the enemy.

Vanguard (high CD ability) - kneel with your sword down and shield “slammed” to the floor, greatly enlarging and bolstering the shield for a period of time. Do not perform any significant action or the effect breaks off early.

Just a few ideas, not sure how possible / viable / reasonable they are :slight_smile. It’s just very cool how instead of pressing button to do a certain effect on enemy you just hit them from different sides, it this could be incorporated in some more than just combat it would be amazing for immersion imo :slight_smile:

What about if teleporting to enemies had a short cooldown, and if you teleport to allies, the cooldown would be greatly increased? Just food for thought.

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Hmm I think the whole teleport system is designed around zipping from enemy to enemy. It’s a core mechanic. If you increased the cooldown for going to teammates you would be getting rid of such an important part of the class. Sort of like how the big shield disable the normal shield. The tradeoff usually wasn’t worth it.

Hey Tom! Welcome to the forums! I think you’re​ exactly right that being able to replace button usage with physical movements is a huge draw and greatly increases the immersion. I think the devs do a great job of incorporating physical movements whenever possible. If you’re interested in more examples of this I’d recommend checking out the runemage class mechanics or the fishing profession.

To provide some feedback on your comments I think the vanguard ability you described is very similar to the shield plant ability that warriors used to have. They would just push their shield into the ground creating an actual wall with it that blocked damage. That was removed with the rework for reasons described here and in the dev blog though it sounds like the warrior ultimate may have done of the same functionality (we’ll just have to wait and see). I definitely think this ability is on point with you class identity though.

The sword rush idea is neat, but I would be concerned that the time it takes holding the sword above your head to be recognized would weaken the skill. It would be useful as an opener to a fight, but might not be able to be activated fast enough to save an aggro-stealing runemage - as a member of this group that is vitally important to me.

Finally, I believe the battle cry that you activate with the horn had a taunt mechanism built in, but perhaps I’m mistaken. Either way, I have no problem with using the horn as is. Plus it gives the warrior another tool to add to their belt. Now it’s just the poor, neglected runemage who doesn’t get any fun toys to activate from their body (sarcasm).

I hope all of this doesn’t sound too negative, just trying to provide some constructive feedback.

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Thanks for the welcome, and your comments are on point I guess :slight_smile: I haven’t actually played this game yet, I wanted to but the one time I knew there was a beta since I got my Vive I had the flu and couldn’t participate :frowning: hence my comment “not sure how practical the ideas are”. How did the vanguard thing work ingame?

I honestly think you wouldn’t need to hold the sword above your head for that long, since a part of the entire sequence is also aiming afterwards, the recognition could include the lowering to shoulder and aiming portion. Could add an instahit after teleport to compensate for the delay.

Honestly I’m just providing food for thought at this point :slight_smile: maybe more useful stuff will occur it me if I get into some future beta.

Also, I could very well see using 1 button like the trigger + some specific criteria to use an ability. So for example for the sword rush, point sword towards an enemy while placing the shield controller on the opposite shoulder (the one which holds the sword), then hit a button to execute (or alternatively, hold trigger while you perform a sequence, then release when you’re finished and the ability will be executed afterwards). So, you wouldn’t have to select skill then use, you’d “select” through a specific posture / sequence and still have finer controller of when the ability goes off (so to do it faster as you said, or even to delay it and then unleash at perfect moment) - you fight, see oh fudge someone needs help, squeeze the trigger on your sword controller, cross your shield arm across your body, touch your shoulder, raise the sword hand towards the enemy and release).

Perhaps a second cooldown timer on the same ability for teleporting to allies that’s 5x or 10x the cooldown. That way it’s possible, but you really want to save it for oh sh!t situations?

Just a thought. I’m all for making sure the game stays challenging and weeding out cheezy tactics.

Ignore the bugs that have since been fixed. This is just the best example I could find while at work. I’m sure there are some better examples in some of those videos somewhere… You just smashed your shield into the ground and up popped a much larger version.

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Thats the point. To add an alternative, a split second, difficult choice. “If i go go save my team now will the cooldown be back up in time for the adds that will be coming soon?”