We still need to
fix counters: I got interrupted too often when I hit a perfect, juicy MBC on uppercuts in facehug (WA/WD counters) which would, in a good patch like the 1.4.5-1.4.9 iterations, result in a counter, yet here, my dude did a spastic mblock anim and I was punished for playing properly. The uppercut counters to overheads while backing away seem to work better, as do A/D counters while stafing left and right at distance.
Meanwhile, countering without mbc/pb, off of parry or even after being bodyhit, is faster, which is a problem I've been complaining about since at least 2017. Pbc/mbc should be consistent and work flawlessly so you can trust in the mechanic, and if the counters have to be instant to accomplish this, then so be it -- plus it would be good for open mode to kill disarmed players swiftly with insta counters off of the disarm.
Counter swing SHOULD trigger even if you've passed your style's swing count.
Counter swings SHOULD ALWAYS at least be on pace to parry an opponent during a combo.
We need
CONSISTENT COUNTERS BASED OFF OF SKILL MECHANICS SUCH AS PB AND MB.
Spamming feels too strong, and
playing skilled defense is not rewarded enough. This is in large part due to the counters not functioning, because the good stuff is tied to them. I still think there should be some mild ACM drain on PB to alleviate the insane strength of flailing spam and run tactics, and if not acm, at least some bp regen to foster the
lacking comeback potential.
There is no reason to not have PB in return: its absence forces people to hit and run, shoe-horning them into one playstyle and making that playstyle far more powerful than a more stationary one. This is in part due to the fact that it builds partial ACM, and the ACM is overpoweringly dominant in determining victory or defeat.
I'm not sure I like the way the ACM works (when it works). It comes with a massive problem. If someone gets a slight ACM lead, the other has to contort himself into pringles trying to re-capture the lead or he will lose by default even with reasonable exchanges, because there is no way to adequately drain it defensively (such as pb, mb): this basically means that you have to spam and hope for the best, which is very bad.
I prefer a no acm system, but if you're going to keep this kind of ACM in the game, we absolutely need to bleed it off on perfect blocks so that you're not forced to hit and run spam like a noob.
PB should drain ACM, an Mblock should drain more ACM, and an Mblock+attack, i.e, mblock counter, should drain and then the counter should deal more damage and give more acm than a normal swing.
I'd even be happy to see a BP reward on top of the acm drain, because it means skilled people can go toe-to-toe for longer while dispatching swiftly those of lesser skill.
Right now, there is a distinct lack of reward for skill imo.
Tie defensive rewards to defensive mechanics (PB, MB), because just mitigating bp damage is not enough of a reward in the contest of such rapidly ramping ACM; and tie the offensive rewards (attacking) to counters: this is intuitive and would go a long way towards fixing the biggest problem with the ACM system. If not ACM, defensive actions should at the very least reward BP or something - it is much harder to PB a competent player than just flail and run away.
Reward skill mechanics like swingblock and pb, mb and countering to deincentivize bad play and reward skilled play - why this fundamental principle is ignored is beyond me.
Nobody wants a system that rewards noobs and punishes skilled players. Top-tiers will be very dissatisfied, but so will noobs when they learn that all there is to dueling is spam and run tactics; we want more subtle skill mechanics at the top, not a dumbed down, flat system with no nuances beyond weird, arbitrary nerfs to certain skillsets like pb and 'whiffs' into insta-hits (which is a cool and advanced tactic that takes far more skill to execute than just flailing, and so should actually be rewarded and not punished...)
I still think slap knockdown is too strong due to the current damage multipliers. A single slap can end the duel since there is no come-back potential.
It's a shame there is no comeback potential. Need consistent counters and pb acm drain for this to be the case. The damage multiplier on knockdowns also make groundstab ridiculously strong; it should be nerfed further.
I felt that hit-registration was very bad/slow to update. I experienced many cases of dodging by running far away, only to leave my hitbox behind and get hit by a ghost-swing. I don't know if the code is super slow, or if server needs to run at higher snaps, but this was a consistent issue. Hit-reg could not catch up with me moving away. It's a bit like the old counter-strike issue of getting shot after you've gone behind a wall due to lag compensation. Please look into fixing this, since the old code felt more responsive and good in this regard. It is a downgrade. You want it to be crisp, and register small micrododging to allow for skilled manoeuvering on the battlefield (who dares karus-crouch under a swing with these hitboxes?).
I liked the airswings from the previous iteration better - more fun and creative ways to engage, and chasing felt better with the faster air-chains. Bring it back!
The parry window is too tight. I can say this conclusively after testing more. One issue happens at long-range, tip-to-tip engagements, where the swing should be a parry, but ends up somehow bodyhitting one guy and causing him damage despite the fact that he is almost two lightsaber-lengths away from the enemy. It feels extremely bad and plastering it over with a larger parry window would be preferable to the current proliferation of ghosting hits.
It would be ideal to extend only the last bit of the swing to guarantee parries, while keeping the tight interrupt window at the start, but if you have to sacrifice the interrupt window and extend the middle-portion of the swing where a parry happens, do it, because
it's better to have consistency with things like parries and counters, than adding a lot of weird variables that on paper sound nice but in practice ends up producing inconsistency and borked interactions.
Special attacks are pretty fucked up in general. I experienced the old bug of hitting someone after their YDFA missed, only to get hit by an invisible insta ydfa hit. It's weird why they have to be so bugged when you could just parry them in the old days. I think we should still be able to just parry them with a normal swing, funky specials should not dominate dueling, so having a clean way of dealing with them, i.e, parry, would be ideal. It's good that ydfa doesn't do as much damage though, because you can still insta facehug bug it, and I imagine you can also hit the facehug RDFA insta. Special attacks hitting multiple times leads to bugged exchanges, for example, I saw purple stab hit once, and then again to kill the opponent. This kind of buggy interaction should be eliminated from the game.
It feels bad to die from a frontal attack or a swing exchange that should've been a parry in the old system when you still have BP left, especially when you're quite far away from the opponent.
Duals are too weak and I am not a fan of the perk. It'd be better to copy the staff spin perk to duals, since it also has some interesting ways to spin, give it 4 hit combo like a normal style, and give it medium def and off values. Its other perk could be to give it the ability to block and pb when disarmed (since it still has one saber present). This could apply to open mode blaster blocking too.
Staff's spins are really elegant and a fun way to play, but I still think the halfswing spins should be sped up and damage lowered a bit to compensate. Also, staff's mblock stagger perk should also activate stagger on direction only (without pb) when the opponent is not swingblocking to help mitigate run-spam, which would also work well in a 2v1 situation against lesser skilled players trying to flank.
The way to play staff currently is to sit passively and wait for an attack, then mbc and just spam fast facehug combos (WA/WD) into the opponent until you have an acm advantage. In other words,
the most cool and skilled mechanic for staff, the spin-attacks, is hardly ever worth it and doesn't happen often in actual play, whereas just spamming completely overshadows it. This should be reversed, so that staff spins define the style and the spam is not a necessary component of playing staff skilfully.
Cyan and
purple are in a good spot, and both are possibly slightly stronger than yellow. Some might want this to be the case.
Yellow would have more of a chance with proper counters in the game, so I don't think the balance skew is too bad. I do think that the perk activating on ACM is a bit underwhelming.
Perks should define a style, not be inconsequential additions that are overlooked; to learn a style proper should be to learn and play around the perk.
I still like the design and feel of
red style, which is a bit unexpected since I am not a fan of stagger mechanics. It bleeds a lot of dmg through PBs though, and its crouch attack still looks retarded. Can you not give it some other attack, or maybe butterflies like staff, to lean into it being ataru/basejka-style -
having red play more acrobatically would also help people coming over from the base game to adjust to MBII, which is a nice bonus.
I don't have much to say about
blue, because I like that it's a bit weak due to how cancerous it is to fight against. Buff its defensive capabilities by allowing blue to drain more acm and regen more bp on pbs and mbs. Right now, you're shoe-horned into spamming back with all you got and cannot focus on a deliberate defensive strategy, which in my opinion should be the crux of blue style's game. Ideally, I'd want momentum based perfect block like stassin developed, and have blue-style be a fortress and a way to recover and come-back in duels. This sort of design would promote
style switching, and you'd still have acrobatic red bleeding through defenses to overcome the switch to blue when low bp.
Dropping the saber when you have insufficient BP seems a bit bugged and not working very well. Sometimes, saber drops when you have plenty of BP. I would prefer if it were just a stagger instead, since the complete disarm seems a bit iffy atm.
It might be a good idea to make mblock defense stagger or at least flinch (short stagger) people who do not swingblock, so as to further mitigate noob run spam. In other words, if someone just runs at you in facehug and does WA/WD spam while moving to shift pb zones, you could at least mblock defense to stagger and break the noob spam. It could be a flinch for all style mblock defense vs non-sb swings, and for staff, a longer stagger for the same mechanic.
I still think we should add the momentum-based PB to at least one style, because it's an interesting variation and switches things up. Blue is the prime candidate for it. I also want one style with nudge as a perk -- adding such things as a perk to a style will fundamentally change how it plays, which is exactly how a perk should function. By leaning into a perk, it should make the style better. The perk should not be an inconsequential addition, but something that is meaningful to use and play around -- in other words, perks should define a style or not exist at all.
Neutral block should be added to the game to distinguish between hitting the saber and the body. It's bizarre and bad that hitting the opponents lightsaber counts as a bodyhit. I don't even care how you balance it. Even if it's just a 10% dmg reduction, or a slight reduction of the ACM gained by an attack, but please just fucking add this distinction so that hitting the tip of someone's lightsaber isn't the same as digging your lightsaber into their gut.
Running into someone and holding m1 and WA/WD is overly rewarding in comparison to defending properly and attacking with carefully timed and aimed attacks. I find this particularly gross.
SKILL NEEDS TO BE REWARDED MORE.
This means buff pb and mb with rewards like acm drain or bp regen, and give extra oomph to counters while also making counters reliably executable, none of that bullshit making them inconsistent, just have them happen...
It feels like there's too much bullshit and buggery going on under the hood that nerfs skill and lowers the skill ceiling, like the fucking mblock animation that happens sometimes and locks you out of playing, and the arbitrary and completely horrible 30% reduction in damage from certain insta-attacks - that in combination with lowering the impact of highly skilfully executed mechanics such as pb, mb and mbc, and the buffing of spam due to the high damage, compounds into a big but luckily solvable problem that can be solved by rewarding skilful play.
I also think that the general inconsistency in the damage profile is a problem. It's going to have the opposite effect to the desired outcome, since eventually, the meta will become extremely narrow and everyone will be forced to play the same way.
Things like not allowing people to full pb in returns or reply after the chain limit have a profound impact on the meta-generation. The absence of pb in return promotes spamming and running away to get an acm advantage; the inability to reply after your chain promotes passive play where you wait for the opponent to strike, and then mbc into a full counter-combo and run away. These two things combine into an ugly core of basically rewarding the one that gets attacked, spams and then runs away and just repeats this tactic over and over again. The cure to this malady of the saber system is quite simple: allow pb in returns, and make it so you can continue with singles after your chain, so that active play is promoted. It's a major issue that you can't attack and then last hit with a single after initiating the exchange, to snipe ppl that run away after a combo and keep the flow of the duel going. Without this mechanic, dueling stalls and becomes a cat and mouse game. There was a good reason why stassin added it back in the day and I agree with the reasoning for the addition even if the ACM system has changed.
Video of testing session:
