"the fight continues"

We've had plenty of time to get use to this new mechanic that was implemented to tune-down flee/murder. I'm very curious what everybody thinks about it. It's a pain in the ass being blinded and continually fleeing and walking back into your opponent. It's also very nice when you have your opponent dirted, hobbled or on the ropes and they walk back into you. This mechanic has worked more in my favor than not and has made it easier for me to secure some kills. I haven't been killed because of it either.

Overall, I'm not sure I like it. For one, I think it favors fighter classes. Specifically those who can hobble, bash, or trip.


What do you guys think? Please leave a comment if you vote. It's not required of course, but is nice to see specific feedback from the players. Thanks.

So I have two ideas here; one: let it be for thieves/shadows/bards only.. some sort of skill they can toggle to chase people down. The second idea I have is to remove it entirely and add a two round cooldown for murder. But then you would have to rollback the murder changes as well.

I see the battle continuing being advantageous for any class with lag skills/hobble, and any class with pets. I.E. fighters and mages minus invoker.

On the contrary, I find that this "fight continues" mechanic actually is a nerf to fighter class. Because of the continuation of fights this way, fighter classes cannot flee/murder anymore which significantly reduces the damage output, especially against mages/clerics.

I don't understand what is the hate against fighters and why there is a need to buff rogues (thieves/shadows). Thieves are already annoying as fuck and shadows are actually pk-effective, they are not weak, it's just that they are not as popular.

I would love for the flee/murder mechanic to return, but that's me, because personally I do not like the nerf. On the other hand, my 200ms lag doesn't favor me flee/murdering anyway, so...

I've had a lot of fun with this new mechanic. I think it's actually showcasing all the skills that each class has to offer, instead of relying on getting decked and flee/murder your opponent to death. It also shifts the strategy significantly for where you fight and how you go about inputting your skills. On Thelrin's graveyard, Hotun mentioned that he purposefully wouldn't input anything so he could chase Thelrin down instantly when he fled. This makes securing kills for classes without lag skills a good bit easier as well, so not just fighter classes. In short, I'm game.

Flee/murder seems a rather poor mechanic to rely on, regardless. Anything that helps mitigate that mechanic is a shift in the right direction.

fix healers

I'm not really sure to make of this thread. It was obviously not going to win a popular vote to remove it from the game, flee-murder hurts the mage classes a lot. So, what was the point? If there are classes that overly depended on flee-murder to the point we think the previous implementors have neglected them on purpose (knowing they have viable strategy) then just go open some patch discussion.

Uh..I was curious what the community thought? This change has only helped me overall. Not trying to get it removed.

Well, I was expecting to see some feedback bubble up. Like for example, berserkers. That class took a hit from no longer getting in the raged murders. It is probably justifiable now for rage to add decent damage reduction, maybe becoming a medium armor class that depends more on mobility than warriors do. We do need to get past "I like this" / "I dont like this" before there is any point talking about which classes need work now I guess. I just figured we did already. Even in testing it, the testers said "Not 100% sure but seems great so please dont remove it". Its an obviously novel idea, and "flee murder" can still be done but is more difficult to execute. Also, trying to balance spellcasters without addressing it clearly wasn't working.

Having played around with this a bit, I'm ready to provide a bit of feedback. I feel like there's always going to be some grumbling with big changes like this. The game very much rewards the murder flee style, with only really hard counters being counter (2/3rds of a pun intended) and autosneak or simply being faster and better, which is something we should reward people for.

That being said I do have some constructive criticism, some of which you will undoubtably just say I don't understand the mechanic properly, which is also probably true.

It doesn't make sense in some instances. A clumsy and battle inept spellcaster or a bulky high strength low dex warrior (paladin, whatever). Probably wouldn't have the reflexes to pull this off, so it maybe doesn't make sense here. It also punishes classes that have abilities that are required to initiate combat (rangers, rogues, probably some others I'm forgetting) that essentially make several skills less useful or only useful in specific instances. A bit of a disparity there, and probably not intentional, just something I wanted to point out.

What I like about it. It is a nice counter to the flee murder mechanic. The way to fight with a warrior used to be dirt, disarm, bash bash bash, flee if you get dirted too and sleep off dirt. It was a breath of fresh air when dirt kicking was changed and combat styles were added. It was unimaginative and doesn't allow for literally any other play style. Do I 100% feel flee murder was boring. Ehh yes and no, for reasons already stated.

If for some reason I were found to be in charge I would make it class (or maybe race specific given I just said higher dex) specific and throw it into a toggleable mode like reflex for warriors or something, then everyone would get mad at me for not having enough skill points on their already 50 characters and people still wouldn't be happy.

That's my two cents, I'm sure the more logs are posted and people fight we can get an idea of what skills (aside from mashing that murder target button) this impacts.

Sense in a fantasy world. This is something i am still failing to grapple with. Sometimes i think you guys are putting too much "sense" into game mechanics.

A prime example would be the bash change. Oh, once you bash the guy is on the floor. Makes sense not to be able to bash again until he gets up. You cannot bash someone sleeping.

But a fighting round can happen when he's bashed on the ground? What the guy is doing ninjutsu on the ground swinging axes and maces slashing at people?

I just think we should not waste too much time on sense. If a warrior catches you sleeping, the bash should hit and 100% hit chance. You should die for getting caught with your pants down. That's my opinion.

Inept spellcaster low dex, nah, the game mechanic should apply across the board. This is a general mechanic.

Yeah I get it, a game like this requires suspending some belief. There's probably a happy medium there where we can "because magic" stuff and sense stuff. I'm with you there. I'm not going to try to change your mind/opinion, I don't think I'll get anywhere with that. Maybe I can share why I feel the way I do though. This game obviously has immersion as one if its core values though. RP is strictly enforced, good RP is rewarded. Am I resting my entire case of "mechanics should make sense" on that argument, absolutely not. Game mechanics should be fun and fair to (mostly) everyone. That's really the bigger picture. Yeah it doesn't make sense for someone to be able to attack nearly as well after being on the ground (because bash) but bash would be way too overpowered if it had that ability. Rule of cool says regular attacks can still happen because of that, and as far as I know the game has always been that way.

Not being able to bash someone who is still on the ground (after being bashed) or sleeping. That's more likely a balance thing and I can't speak to why the imps decided on that change.

Again you're welcome to view this as a "well if I agreed with you we'd both be wrong" sort of situation, and that's fine. We're not going to agree on everything.

Ehh, we can do a dex roll if you guys want. Roll 10 + dex-15 to see if you continue fighting an opponent or something. That way its 50% for giants and 100% for pixies. Then haste/slow can make it better or worse each way. There's plenty of precedent to draw on to choose numbers that make sense. Checking for the dodge ability is a good way to ensure mages are caught for instance, but they can have spells (like blur) too

this fight continues shit is fucking retarded

Yeah, all it took was one person abusing the mechanic with a trigger to make me agree. This sucks.

The worst part is - I really like what 'the fighting continues' did to fighting in general. Flee/murder spam sucked because it wasn't optimal for many classes to use their actual abilities - just get decked and flee murder to victory. Boring.

Maybe there's a fix here, but a lot of damage is done already.

I agree. Don't want to go back to spamming flee/murder but knowing how easily the new mechanic can be abused is disheartening. Spitballing ideas but maybe there can be some sort of built in lag for the aggressor to follow a fleeing victim if the aggressor isn't inputting commands besides cardinal directions.

i already put a surgical tweak, give it a chance.

I came across some example where my "tweak" was not working too great, damned superfast mud clients. I added another tweak for this and I'm going to provide some info here to help deal with it.

1. Currently (and this has not changed) your fight will get resumed if you walk back into the player you fled from.
2. Also (and this has not changed) if the player pursues and walks in on you, if you get resumed on but flee again before they actually strike, i.e. you just type flee;flee, combat no longer resumes.
3. (Changed) if the person walks in on you chasing, resuming instead requires a longer range weapons. So any two handed weapon, or a bow. I gave it a chance to work, rather than 100%

What is the reason for this change you may ask, well it is simple, I tested this for an hour using the webclient in my development environment but unbeknownst to me (and this is also a warning I guess?) the webclient triggers do not execute as quickly as a real mud client. So I was under the false impression you can walk out of this, and put in a simple flee tweak for something which I couldnt even reproduce. So now I saw another side of it and would rather have something to make sure bots don't easy exploit. Weapon restriction and having a chance to fail will definitely make a follow bot unreliable enough to sometimes cause the bot to just be standing still and letting the opponent get away, which will be too unreliable for high lvl pk'ing. n.b. I do not want to smash it to pieces completely as I like the strategy of fighting in single-exit rooms and guessing the direction. I am assuming from the lack of response that the earlier tweak was pretty helpful but regardless I'd rather tighten this up a bit more on the chasing side, as its one thing to scramble and flee back into your assailant, another to have some fol script.

Apologies if this has been pissing off anybody. I was not realizing the way I was testing it was apparently completely trash. This is honestly the first time I have ran into a difference between mud client like this. The more recent test was done with JMC client which has a fast reputation.

TLDR summary: chasing to resume now requires 2H and can fail, two flees will usually wriggle you out of this (unless you got struck), which was the existing way out of trouble

Fleeing multiple times should have a consequence, too many times people just run around and especially with mounts the amount of chasing that is required is insane. instead of have 380mv people seem to have unlimited movement. Mounts used to be reserved for cabals, dkns, paladins.

This is an exploited mechanic to make pking insane. Especially now when people can just press a button and fly through the game with preloaded macros.

Maybe add to the flee;flee if you are below pretty hurt you leave a trail of blood behind that is similar to the yellow brick road.

Mounts will be dealt with, they are too OP in their current form with all the pros and none of the cons. Give it time Ozaru, Dav has things in workings.

Fleeing multiple times has consequences when dirted but some classes rely on excessive fleeing - hit+run tactics, changing that will just favor "bursty" classes like serkers over shamans.

This change was somewhat bandaid to counter literal triggerbotting. You would not wanna go and play CS:GO match with a dude holding down his trigger button on AWP shooting you at 0.1ms each time you poke your nose out, would you? This was/is an excessive exploit and anyone who resorts to such shit should be frowned upon.

Except for cabal mounts, other mounts die in 1 or 2 combat rounds depending on your class.

If mounts still is an issue to you, play invokers or DKs / classes with powerful aoe. Aoe twice mounts are no longer an issue.

I agree the mounts can use a bit more work but we should really discuss it more formally. And yes I have 8 different nerfs I *could* roll out but lets not forget there is a more diminished ability to recall AND a tracking command, so its not really resonating with me that having to chase a dude around is unreasonable. But anyway that's for another thread.