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Greetings,
It's been long overdue, but we have finally taken the first step
towards reintroducing PVP-abilities in Genesis. For those of you
who don't know why they were disabled in the first place, here is
a brief recap.
A couple of years ago, me and Carnak (who was AoB at the time)
decided to adjust how melee combat works. Before, your special attack
would do most of the damage in a fight, and normal hits (often called
"white hits") with a weapon or unarmed would account for a fairly
small part of your damage output. This was something we wanted to
change in order to create a better balance between our different
classes of guilds. Basically, we didn't want DPS to be everything
you need to be successful in a fight, which had been the case for a
long time.
I won't go into all the details about the pros and cons of this change,
however, one unintended problem with this combat change was the effect
it had on movement hindering abilities. When everyone started hitting
each other more often with normal hits, it also meant some movement
stun effects would hit more often. Combat also became quicker in general,
meaning the length of movement stuns were in some cases quite unrealistic
with the new and much shorter fights. Now, as most of you know, the speed
of combat was later adjusted to be more similar to how it was before the
big combat change, but at the time, due to the quick combat, we took the
decision to temporarily disable all movement hindering abilities to
prevent a lot of unfair and unbalanced deaths. These abilities were
supposed to only be disabled for a short time, giving us time to
review the abilities and tweak those that needed tweaking based on
the new combat system. Then, life got in the way. Other stuff happened
that took focus, Carnak stepped down as AoB, we got new admin and admin
team members with other ideas and priorities, etc. Fast forward a year
or so, me and Ckrik (the new AoB) decided that since these abilities
had already been disabled for so long anyway, we might as well fix death
and XP-recovery before we enable them again. This further postponed
re-enabling of the movement hindering abilities. However, we're finally
doing it!
We're starting with weapons and items that have movement hindering
effects, and then we will move on to the global block skill and the
guild abilities.
As of now, the following PVP-abilities are enabled again:
- The gigantic steel broadsword from Gont can again stun opponents.
Now, after a review, we did notice that in certain circumstances,
its effect could stack more or less indefinitely, meaning the target
would be prevented from moving for a very long time. Likely much
longer than was originally intended due to the global change to white
hits. So, from now on, the first stun has to pass before the weapon
can stun again. Other than that, there has been no changes to the
weapon.
- The heavy steel club and double morningstar from the goblin caves in
Middle Earth had an unintended side effect for ogres. The problem was
that these weapons can drain mana from the target when you hit them
in the head. This is a cool effect that can render the target
unconscious and unable to move if hit on the head enough times. The
problem was that ogres have basically no mana to begin with, and would
become unconscious at the first hit to the head. With the change to
white hits, fights now produce a lot more hits in general (including
blows to the head), which made this previously fairly unknown problem
a rather extreme death trap for ogres. So, from now on, the thick-
headedness of the ogres will protect them from brain damage caused
by these clubs. Not that there is much brain to protect, but
still. For anyone else, these two clubs will work as they always did.
- The icy brew is working again, and it works exactly as before.
The fourth, and last(?) disabled item are the six-pronged caltrops from
Avenir, and they are going to undergo some recoding before their effects
are enabled again. I will make another announcement when they are
enabled.
As far as we know, there are no other weapons or items in the game
with movement stun effects disabled, but if you know of something,
please contact me. It's possible we have missed something.
Cherek, Keeper of Genesis