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Happy new year everyone.
I sometimes get the urge to labour in vain, for a few hours entertaining a hope that we can make progress in the saber system and solve some of the now almost decade old problems with it. This list is one such self-indulgent type-up. I could've continued adding 'wishes' and details, but I think 25 roughly outlined ideas will suffice to illustrate the quite extensive improvements that are possible.
Also disclaimer, if I accidentally offend someone with the way I write, it's nothing personal kid, just me being passionate about MBII dueling.
In no particular order, with explanations below:
1. Reliable skill-based counter-attacking.
2. No feeling of being 'locked-out' of playing by spam (for example, blue).
3. A clear distinction between bodyhits, saberhits and perfect blocks.
4. A removal or great reduction in the role of ACM in dueling.
5. Rewards for executing skill-based mechanics.
6. Lightsaber form-based perks independent of lightsaber styles, similar to FA perks on characters.
7. A reduction in unblockable bullshit like facehug insta-DFA's and other special attacks.
8. More fluidity added to special attacks to incorporate them into lightsaber fighting flow.
9. An equalization of swing-speed to roughly match yellow.
10. Duels must feel intense and fast, and have the potential to end quickly or drag out for many minutes based on the skill of the combatants.
11. It should be possible to recover from a mistake with perfect play.
12. Replace cyan and purple's stance with penekemation one?
13. Each style should work as a comfortable stand-alone, like yellow (the golden standard).
14. More force-power use in dueling, fluidly, not obnoxiously.
15. The ability to choose different playstyles based on form-based perks and combat approach.
16. A further reduction in the importance of slap in dueling, in favour of other mechanics.
17. Make more distinct the different combat distances (face-hug, mid-range etc)
18. Generally consistent and predictable mechanical interactions.
19. Make unviable senseless 0 BP spam as a survival strategy.
20. A more sensible style-design (fixing duals, blue, cyan, purple, red)
21. A limited nudge mechanic with a cooldown (like slap, perhaps also mutually exclusive)
22. Hand-picked distinct saber sounds that indicate subtle mechanical differences.
23. Momentum based PB for certain styles?
24. Return subtleties.
25. HP and force.
#1:Reliable skill-based counter-attacking.
Nothing is more awful than getting a perfect block along with the correct timing for a counter, and yet the opponent just bulldozes through with a facehug insta combo that interrupts your proper counter regardless. Idiotic flailing spam winning out over skill, like a button masher winning against a practiced expert in tekken by the very virtue of button mashing. Obviously an absurd state of affairs that must be remedied sooner rather than later. It's time to fix this by ensuring that when you perfect block, or at the very least mblock properly, that you can counter reliably as a reward.
It doesn't matter if this counter mechanic creates 'instas' because there's plenty of retarded insta-shit in the current buggy system, and all of those instas are not based on skill. It takes far more skill to properly execute an mblock counter, and by its very nature, an MBC restricts the counterer as well, so it never really becomes overwhelming. When you MBC, you're forced to hold certain movement buttons and so, execute a certain counter off of the opponents attack. This makes the counter-attacks predictable even if they are instant, because there is no time to make another input for the attack, it will be the mblock input that decides the input for the counter-attack.
One of the big reasons why people are playing 1.4.8 is that it has reliable counter-attacks. It's so absurd that we don't have this simple mechanic in place in modern sabering.
#2: No feeling of being 'locked-out' of playing by spam (for example, blue).
There are certain ways of playing that, if chained together properly, can feel like they completely lock you out of responding. This issue will be partially resolved by adding a reliable way to counter, like mblock-countering but we should go further to ensure that senseless spam or pre-applied combinations do not lock someone out of the game for several seconds, unable to reply.
One of the most understandable examples of this is the kicking bug that allowed a delayed insta into another combo. The adversary would spam a full combo in your face then kick with a delayed, bugged insta-hit that would interrupt if you attempted to reply, and then flow into a second full combo, basically getting off eight attacks and resetting their slap cd, before you have a chance to respond.
A non-bug version of the above can be achieved with proper slap-timing too, essentially making it frustratingly hard to respond to the opponent. The only viable way to reply to those who just spam and run away is to chase and be ready to tap crouch, and to stop on a dime in case of a legsweep.
There's also blue spam, or two hit yellow combos that end on a D-swing. These types of attacks make the combo recovery almost non-existent, allowing basically infinite attack chains with no gaps. With yellow, you can do WA+D or SA+D and combo reset infinitely with the same timing as a halfswing, basically breaking dueling flow.
There are also styles like duals, who seem to just rely on flailing spam and take no real skill to use since you can just parry to live at 0 bp.
#3: A clear distinction between bodyhits, saberhits and perfect blocks.
Currently, you can counter off of a bodyhit just as smoothly if not even faster, than off of a perfect block. It has been this way for like 8 years or more. It's extremely disgusting.
Bodyhits should drain the most BP and make it impossible to just reply without a pb/mbc. It should also pause bp regen for one tick. In a system using ACM, bodyhitting someone should drain ACM while giving ACM to the opponent.
Saberhits should drain less BP than a bodyhit, and allow for more smooth replies than bodyhits (although you're not pblocking, you're catching their attack on your blade and so should be able to 'riposte' or whatever you want to call it). This will go a long way to enable good replies to senseless spam and fix those who rely on cheesy hit-and-run tip-touching ACM grinding. In a system with ACM, saberhits should be neutral, neither giving or taking ACM.
Ever since aimed-pb was introduced and saber-based pb was thrown out, I've always felt disgusted with the lack of distinction between hitting someone's saber and their body. If you're in facehug digging your saber into their gut, you should clearly do more damage than if you're dancing around at distance and hitting the tip of the opponents lightsaber (really, it should not deal much dmg, but I'll compromise here and say that bodyhits = full damage, saberhits = 80% dmg. Something like a 20 percent damage reduction here seems apt.)
Then there's perfect blocking. A skill-based mechanic that for some reason often feels less rewarding than just dodging, and more crippling than being bodyhit due to it almost making it harder to counter off of pbs than bodyhits in current patch. This is obviously twisted the wrong way around. When you perfect block, you should be rewarded. Perfect blocking should be more rewarding than dodging a swing because it's more risky. I propose to add one tick of bp regen as a reward for pb, which counter-balaces the bp regen punishment on bodyhit. There should be a good synergy between these two mechanics to reward skill. In an ACM-based system, perfect blocking should, in addition to providing a regen tick, remove an ACM from the opponent.
#4: A removal or great reduction in the role of ACM in dueling.
ACM is a crutch to fix bad system design and fosters annoying playstyles, sometimes even forcing them on people. If the most efffective way to win is to be passive, then 4 hit counter-parry and last hit, congratulations! You've fostered a passive and cringe way to play. If ACM is more valuable than BP due to regen and other factors, you again have a problem. People can spend BP by using wild hit-and-run flails, and even deploy no bp parries if need be until they get to catch their breath. Then they can rinse and repeat until they start the engagement with an overwhelming ACM advantage. The mere existence of the mechanic itself, if unmitigated by safeguards such as enabling PB to reduce the opponents ACM, it leads to this type of strategy more often than not. It's only by gentlemen agreement that people don't use the 4 hit parry hit and run acm grind strat to win duels.
I'll also mention that fair fight resets are not a problem. If BP regen is adjusted properly, you'll get some of the effect of having an ACM advantage if the opponent is clearly worse than you, through them taking more bodyhits and so, having a lower regen, and them not PB'ing enough, so not having the extra BP regen. In addition, you could further separate out regens so that when someone falls below 1/4 or 1/5 bp, their regen slows down rather a lot, which would help end one-sided duels faster.
If you need ACM to break through passive play, then ACM is just a superficial symptomatic fix. The underlying issue is elsewhere, either with the lack of skill of the aggressor, or the system design.
Passive play should by no means be rewarded, but if someone is able to put up such an air-tight defense that the opponent cannot break through, then that is how it should be. They are clearly better. ACM shouldn't force the superior duelist to strike out wildly in an attempt to equalize ACM. It should be permitted to wait strategically and not over-expose yourself. If someone runs up to you and starts 4 hit spamming you for ACM (running away and using parries etc), you are at a GREAT disadvantage if you play properly and rely on perfect blocking and measured counter-attacks. You're all but forced to reply in kind, often chasing recklessly and tapping crouch as a counter-measure to un-SB-able chase slap timings.
This is a disgusting state of affairs. Someone who plays properly should be rewarded for their efforts and someone who plays like a noob should not. Which brings us onto the next point.
#5: Rewards for executing skill-based mechanics.
Current dueling leaves much to be desired for the simple fact that unskilled flailing and stupid DFA bugs are unduly rewarded, whereas skilfully executing mechanics such as PB and SB are completely overlooked. It feels scuffed. I hope I don't need to elucidate this point further, as it should be clear from the ACM section why it's an issue to indirectly reward the way of the noob by not properly rewarding skilful use of mechanics.
First of all, swingblocking. In the past, stassin thought it was a good idea to make non-swingblocked attacks deal more damage than swingblocked ones, which goes directly against the decree to reward skilful play. It should be the opposite.
The successful swingblock should reward the user not just with slap and disarm resistance, but a full damage attack and the opposite of just holding mouse 1 and flailing, should make attacks deal less damage in addition to them being open to slaps and mblocks.
By making it so that the person who swingblocks more, deals more damage, we reward skill and encourage people to play properly. We encourage them to rise, to ascend. There is a clear goal to reach, that of being able to properly swingblock full combos. I will accept no counter-argument here. There is nothing else to be said for it. Swingblocking should OBVIOUSLY be rewarded over the m1 flailing noob, just like how I think that precise attacks that avoid the opponents lightsaber to dig into their body should be rewarded over tip-to-tip exchanges.
Indeed, a further way to reward skilful attacking is to distinguish bodyhits from saberhits as I have said before, even if this is done simply by a damage reduction. Then, it PAYS to aim your attacks with your mouse, and it PAYS to choose to swing at the open side. I cannot see any demerit to this approach. It is clearly better to reward skilful play this way, than to indirectly reward trash flailing by omitting such rewards.
The more you reward skilful use of mechanics, the better.
Reward people for perfect blocking by giving then a regen tick.
Reward people for mblocking by giving them access to an instant counter.
Reward people for bodyhitting the opponent by making it block their regen for a tick.
Reward people for using distance to defend themselves, by adding dmg reduction to saberhits.
Reward people for swingblocking by ensuring that it is the strongest way to attack.
Conversely, we must not just reward good play, but punish bad play.
Punish people for excessive running by making it so that if they are hit while running, their BP regen is crippled for a few ticks regardless of whether it's a saberhit or a bodyhit.
Punish people for not swingblocking by making their attacks deal less damage.
Punish people for attacking at a distance instead of angling into the opponents open side, by making saberhits distinct from bodyhits so that tip-to-tip nonsense is not a way to end a duel, and does not deal threatening damage.
Punish people for missing a slap by making them take more damage (we already have this, but why not make this even more severe, instead of reducting the impact of being slapped down, increase the risk of slapping).
I haven't talked about interrupts yet, but it's no a positive, actively executed technique to be rewarded. Interrupts are mistakes by the one getting interrupted, and so, should be punished by taking increased damage, stopping the combo, and some bp regen tick or ACM stuff depending on your system approach.
I could continue, but I believe I've made my point.
#6: Lightsaber form-based perks independent of lightsaber styles, similar to FA perks on characters.
You choose these like you choose a saber style. They are stand-alone, and provide a benefit and a drawback in line with star wars lightsaber form lore. They are a bit like FA perks.
A good example would be the ataru FA perk that makes jumps not drain any BP. We would take it further and make it so that you have limited BP regen while running and 1 tick force jumps, but we would cap regen to this value to force the ataru user to run and jump more. We could also make it so that perfect blocks do not remove ACM, or do not grant additional BP regen ticks. Ataru is the aggression form, and meant for all out assaults but is prone to tiring quickly.
The above illustrates my general idea. I won't spend too much time here because this, unlike many of my other points, is a rather vain hope. Tempest could easily include most of my other fixes such as the saberhit distinction and the various rewards/punishments for mechanics, but this would require a bit more, so I am not expecting it to be implemented like I almost demand for point 1, consistent counters.
#7&8: A reduction in unblockable bullshit like facehug insta-DFA's and other special attacks & More fluidity added to special attacks to incorporate them into lightsaber fighting flow.
Special attacks make no sense. Most of them are bugged and either work too good as absurd facehug instas that drain more than half of the opponents BP, or they bug out and don't work at all like purple stab or blue lunge if hit early.
Previously, you could +use kick to parry the absurdly powerful YDFA, but now this has been 'fixed' leaving no recouse to deal with these high-damage, no-skill, absurd and out of place attacks.
The fix is not to add a big cost to them. They remain obnoxious thereby, and simply make those who use the attacks feel bad in addition to those who take the unblockable attacks.
In the past, you could time a normal swing to parry an YDFA or an RDFA even. I don't know when or why this changed, and these specials became unblockable pieces of shit, but at the very least we should return to a state where it's possible to parry a DFA with a well-timed normal attack.
The design of special attacks in general, is gross and out of place. They either deal a lot of damage, or act as obnoxious knockbacks to be abused at the end of spam to gain distance. They're bugged into instas in facehug, and can be chained into or used at the end of a combo, and the opponent cannot just swing into someone that has finished an YDFA because the swing can retro-actively bug-activate and still instagib half damage for no reason. I've also seen the old RDFA bug where it drains all your BP even though it doesn't hit you.
I honestly don't see why these attacks should be in the game. It would be better to remove them, then later re-introduce them only when the entire special system has been revamped, which brings me to point 8.
The ideal way to incorporate special attacks would be to make them swift, fluid parts of continuos combat, not high-damage, buggy game-over moves that disrupt dueling flow and fuck everything up.
For example, envision the stabbing special attack as a quick and fluid move similar to a normal chain attack. If we have a 4 hit yellow speed style, and we can do a combo like this SA+stab+WD+WA in one smooth motion, where the stab is just the replacement for another combo swing like SD, then it would add greatly to dueling instead of detracting from it as it currently does. The same can be said of things like YDFA and RDFA. If you make the execution swift, deal normal swing damage and unlock it, you could similarly flow into an YDFA while comboing. SD+YDFA+WA+WD+SD+sidekick. You could add combo-restrictions, such as mandating that only uppercuts can combo into YDFA. I am here envisioning YDFA as part of a combo attack, as a replacement for a normal attack. Add a severe force cost or a cooldown on slap of 10 seconds or something, to make it undesirable to spam but good to use for variety on occasion. Regarding RDFA, it can be changed to use penekemations palpy-spin instead, and could be limited to a combo-starter and not something you chain into mid combo. So those who use red or whatever other style gets it, can use it as a starter. Red/purple as aggressive styles, could get it, and even yellow. You could then give the more acrobatic and sneaky YDFA to cyan, blue and duals (because lets be honest, butterfly attacks are pointless).
This is the basic idea. I hope you understand what I mean. This full implementation of this is unlikely to occur, so I won't do a full write-up of all the attacks, but I'm sure you can understand how delicious it would be to fence with dooku cyan, flowing smoothly from a stab into a combo elegantly. At the very least, though, I want the take-away here to be that all the specials except for stuff like blue lunge to knock ppl off ledges, are in an unacceptable state and should be removed from the game until fixed. The fix is not just slapping on a BP cost, like tempest has done previously. This is just me saying, remove bullshit that takes no skill. There shouldn't be something in dueling against which there is no recourse: this is why I had no qualms about ydfa in the past, since you could just parry YDFA's normally...
#9: An equalization of swing-speed to roughly match yellow.
Ever since cyan and purple was introduced, I've always thought that swing animations should be within a certain speed so as to not be either too slow or too fast. I continue to use yellow as the golden standard speed-wise.
To explain this further. If a style is too fast, it devolves into spam and makes it unpleasant to fight against whilst requiring constraints to make it less fun to use. Think about blue, and the absurd idea to limit it to 2 combo chains and constantly nerf its defense. Think about the ACM provisions taken against it over the years. Tempest foolishly spent many hours absurdly fractioning ACM gain and loss because blue is faster than other styles. Since it's too fast to react to, we must make its swings do noodle damage, and cripple its acm gain. It's a lose-lose situation because blue, being fast, feels like crap to duel against, even if it's weak due to being nerfed, so those who use blue also feel bad since they're using a nerfed style. How this state of affairs is acceptable is unfathomable to me. Just fucking slow it down a bit. It doesn't have to be exactly yellow speed. We also all know that there are other differences such as the speed of recovery after a full chain, as well as the animations in general. An equalization of swing-speeds does not make blue, or cyan or red into yellow.
Slow styles have the opposite problem of yellow. Red is a prime example. Its first swing is so slow that you need to add nudge to it to make it fun to play (imo). Tempest added a stagger to red to compensate for its slow swings, which again just exasperates the problems rather than fixing them. Yes, it makes red stronger, but it also makes it really unpleasant to duel against. All of these absurd contusions are unnecessary. Red should simply be yellow speed and deal slightly more damage but have slightly less defense than it. The rest can remain the same. Red would still have a strength in replying with fast counters, and I also still think nudge would be nice. In OJP I recall red being called Djem-So, and having four hit combos and being roughly yellow speed. Such a red style would feel good to use speed-wise, since it would sit in the goldy-locks zone of yellow, but it would retain its anims and some of its peculiarities. I really think that speed is a superficial characteristic. High-level duelists know that animations and resets are at least as important, and I'm pretty sure that we all know that blue or red would be perfectly distinct from yellow even if they had yellow speeds.
I mentioned before that I started to feel this way after cyan and purple was introduced. This was because, at the time, cyan was only usable on the jedi temple FA, and it was slow. There was also a slow and a fast blue style. The slow cyan in the FA felt better than the fast cyan added later, and I also loved the slow blue better than the fast blue. Styles just play much better when they sit in the goldilocks zone. If they're too fast, you can't react but have to predict, and they become cancer to fight against. If speed is too slow, then you have to react and cannot properly take the initiative, and it becomes cancer to use (red users have to be passive counter-attack bots...). I've proposed nudge to fix red shortcoming of the absurdly slow first swing, but it has always been rejected. Changing swing speeds to all be near yellow, would fix most of the issues that we have with fast and slow styles and would remove the need for idiotic messes like fractional ACM, and drastically different AP/BP values, and if animations and resets are not enough to distinguish styles, you could always add back some perks...
I mean come on, there is so much potential! Fucking start to use it please. Bring back stassin or get tempest to do these things, or get someone else to code them while consulting me and other high level duelists on discord (and don't listen to anyone who isn't high-tier or top-tier).
#10 Duels must feel intense and fast, and have the potential to end quickly or drag out for many minutes based on the skill of the combatants.
The fun factor and the coolness factor of dueling comes from intensity and flow. That's why everyone utterly hated the stagger mechanic in V0, and why I and many others continue to vehemently oppose any and all such mechanics, whether tied to staff mblock perks or special attacks. Putting someone out of commission and preventing them from playing, as I mentioned in point #2 simply does not engender fun.
It is far more fun to flow continuously and intensely, to be able to always have an answer and a counter-reaction, to never feel forced into a gap and into waiting.
In a properly made system, it's possible for the master to swiftly dispatch lesser duelists like insects. In 1.4 which overly relied on ACM for damage, this became hard. It took awhile regardless of skill, because standard attacks were noodle-like without ACM, so even in a duel between a noob and a master, it took some time for the master to win since he had to first grind ACM to do any real damage. This is obviously not ideal, especially for open mode engagements. It should be possible to end duels quickly.
On the other hand, very long and epic engagements should also be possible if both duelists are masters. The way ACM works currently, again makes this difficult. A system of high burst damage without proper regen and rewards on stuff like PB and saberhit damage reduction, just leads to duels where whoever lands the first slap and spam on knockdown wins. An equally problematic mirror to the issue in 1.4.
The properly balanced system, therefore, is one in which you can quickly win against those of lesser skill than your own, and one in which two masters can have epic duels that span many minutes and perhaps even the whole round!
How to accomplish this? It's quite simple if you've been following along with my points so far. You need to reward skill on successful mechanics, and punish mistakes. That way, you add more subtle avenues in which the skilled master can distinguish himself from lesser duelists. A mid-tier might be able to hit 1st and 2nd hit swingblocks reliably, but the master consistently hits SB on all four swings, so he deals a bit more damage. The master is able to pb more than the mid-tier, and the difference in damage taken, regen, and acm if included, quickly adds up as well. That means that we can have a swift end to an uneven duel, but if two combatants are perfectly matched, the duel has the potential to last for a long time.
This sort of approach is to me ideal. Please recall that this is movie battles II. Please remember that this is star wars. Dueling needs to be quick, furious, fun, fast, fluid and cool. We don't want slow spastic wind-ups, staggers, broken bugged DFA garbage -- we want fluid, cool, movie-like duels and I believe that what I've outlined above would achieve this ideal.
#11: It should be possible to recover from a mistake with perfect play.
Nothing feels worse than being clipped by a slap, eating 3 halfswings and suddenly you're at a HUGE acm disadvantage. The only way to recover from such a disadvantage is to start playing like a hit-and-run cretin. We can easily fix this by making successful perfect blocks drain ACM. That way, through skill, you can make a recovery.
#12: Replace cyan and purple's stance with penekemation one?
Another quickie. Pick either cyan or purple and give it the makashi/dooku stance. Iirc, it might be on blue in penekemations. The normal stance of cyan and purple are no distinct enough from each other.
#13: Each style should work as a comfortable stand-alone, like yellow (the golden standard).
This goes hand-in-hand with my previous point about swing-speeds. If the speed is very fast, you're forced to nerf damage, but the main issue arises with slow styles. To compensate for the crippling (and nonsensical) slowness of Red's swings, you have to make it deal a lot of damage. To avoid making red style OP, you nerf its defense but now, you have created something that's more like a tool than a stand-alone style.
If a style is too out of whack either defensively or offensively, you encourage them to become crutches and fall-backs, and mere tools rather than stand-alone styles. When someone is knocked down, you can switch to red and decimate their BP. If you're low on BP, you can switch to a defensive style and recover with passive play, for example, if a style has an mblock stagger perk and high defense, or even if blue has noodle damage, if it has high defense and a blocking perk, you can switch to it and recover. This way of designing a saber system relegates all non-yellow-like styles to gimmicks. Yellow and staff, being mostly balanced, can act as a base, but then you've got red and purple, blue and cyan and duals. All of those, the majority of styles in fact, are not really suitable for stand-alone play when they are best used in conjuction with another style. The famous red/blue combo has taken advantage of this for over ten years. I recall instructing my brother in its use to beat hlev back in the pre-aimed pb era when he was just a little kid. It's always been a potent way to abuse.
What I would like to aim for instead, to make dueling feel smooth and fluid, is to make all styles feel good on their own and not require a supplement. Swing speed equalization is one step on this journey, another is balancing their AP/BP's roughly. Anims and anim-resets still make them distinct, but as I've mentioned before, you can also simply add some little perks to each style like we've done in the past. I actually think the main reason the perk-attempts never stuck was because we lacked swing-speed equalization, but I digress.
#14: More force-power use in dueling, fluidly, not obnoxiously.
Things like mind trick and grip obviously don't work in this context, and never will, but what about making ff push and pull a way to interrupt the opponent. If you ff push an opponent, you could cancel their swing (as if they had reloaded), sending them into a return and ending their chain. It could be an interesting addition, and would also help discourage too much air-swing poking from a distance, and help encourage people to close the distance properly when attacking. To make it evne more viable, you could make it possible to block during push and pull so that it can be attempted more frequently in close-range engagements too. For open, just add an absurd FP cost to this so that it's more punishing than taking a bit of HP dmg.
You could make lightning linger for a moment after casting, and could make it deflectable with mblock, d3 and deflect. Force speed is already in a very good spot, but it is extremely lamentable that sith do not have access to it, at least in dueling mode. Grip and lightning are mostly useless for dueling, speed is the only advanced force power that can be truly abused for an advantage beyond mere tricks like lightning insta ydfa, which if point #7 is heeded, should not be an issue anyway. So yeah, give sith speed in dueling mode...
You could also make sense 3 viable in dueling as a way to see if they are above or below half bp. Nothing too accurate. Could also be more like one color if above 2/3 and one color if below 2/3.
#15: The ability to choose different playstyles based on form-based perks and combat approach.
I already mentioned ataru and how an FA perk could help direct an interesting jump/acrobatics/movement-based play style. That is just the tip of the ice-berg.
A Soresu perk might require holding walk in addition to block to work, and whenever the soresu user runs, he exposes himself more than the normal user to extra damage if hit, etc. He would gain a stability boon when holding walk, helping with something defensive like avoiding slaps, reducing interrupt damage, bolstering saberhit dmg reduction slightly at the cost of remaining less mobile, whatever. The combat approach of Soresu here would be to engage steadily with a focus on defense and in the long run, by hitting more PBS and forcing more saberhits, you would aim to outlast the opponent.
A Djem-So perk would do the opposite and encourage you to attack more at the expense of defense. Perhaps a Djem-so perk would allow someone to counter-attack off of even bodyhits (the normal state of affairs currently, but not as it should be). It would perhaps help the Djem-So user break the defense by reducing saberhit dmg reduction, or by giving a nudge advantage, or by helping avoid slaps outside of facehug, thereby making it easier to chase after runners and stay in their face.
A Makashi perk could break a parry exchange after one or two parries, ensuring that the makashi practitoner would be able to win parry exchanges. They need not be overly fancy or crazy. This alone would suffice to drastically change engagements (recall also that the makashi RP'er would be using a 4 hit slowed cyan, and so it would not be as obnoxious as the insta hit 5 chain mess we currently have. There would also be the ability to integrate stabs smoothly as part of combos, to make for a unique playstyle).
Enough of such speculation. You get the point.
#16: A further reduction in the importance of slap in dueling, in favour of other mechanics.
Again, I can't help but think back to the movies and generally how lightsaber duels proceed. They do not include a gay little backhand that somehow knocks the opponent down every 4-5 seconds. It's a rare manoeuvre, if it occurs at all.
Slap was originally added to counter severe facehug combo spam, when nudge was still a thing. That the little backhand can somehow knock the opponent down is rather absurd. It should at most interrupt a combo, and end the chain, like forcing a +reload faint and a combo reset. If it's on a decent cd like 5-6 seconds, and has this functionality, then I believe it would make more sense than the knockdown mania. I know this idea won't appeal to a lot of people because they've gotten used to slap as a crutch to win duels or cover a gap after a 4 hit combo as I mentioned before, but really, does it make sense that we have a spammable little gay backhand attack that somehow knocks people down. In a real duel, people who attempted to 'slap' MBII style would get their forearm cut off more often than not.
If this is not a chance worth pursuing, could at the very least make it so you take double damage while attempting a slap, not just 20 percent more. This is a better solution to the knockdown problem than reducing dmg taken when on the ground. CD could also be increased. In any case, it kind of goes against the code of cool, fun movie-like fluid dueling to constantly have this little slap to deal with. Of course, I am not expecting anyone to seriously think about removing it or limiting it as I've suggested, but perhaps increase the risk of a slap even further.
#17: Make more distinct the different combat distances (face-hug, mid-range etc).
There are many ways to accomplish this. The easiest is to just implement saberhits so that hitting the tip of the opponents lightsaber does not count as a bodyhit. You could also introduce a modified version of nudge to simulate saber-binding, RC1 style when two block-stance sabers connect in mid-range (tip-touching) and add a distinct saber sound to indicate that such a bind has occured. This can then be used to start an engagement and flow into an attack from saber-to-saber distance, as opposed to facehug.
Another way to make distance more distinct is to ensure that in facehug, you must hit a pb or mbc to counter, whereas in saber-tip distance, you can also counter on a saberhit, as if it were a pb.
Again, it seems so easy, so logical, so tasty, to just implement the saberhit distinction, and tie this kind of mechanic to it rather than having to rely on things like nudge. Making saberhits distinct from bodyhits is the best and most simple way to ensure that mid-range is different from facehug, and that saber-tip attacks aren't actually treated as full bodyhits, in the utterly preposterous manner that they currently are.
#18: Generally consistent and predictable mechanical interactions.
Right now, some parries become instant and interrupt the other more slow parries. I think, but am not sure, that diagonals at distance are superior to same-sides in terms of triggering this insta parry thing.
Then there's countering in general. It's an inconsistent mess as I and many others have said before. You need a bit of leprechaun luck to pull off a counter-attack, especially in close range. If the opponent spams, you generally cannot use a counter to break into their spam and parry, you have to take their combo and only at the end you are permitted to act. This inconsistency is silly. When you pb, you should get an assured slow counter that would at least parry, and when you mblock counter, you should get the same, if not even an insta counter, which also helps with open mode kill disarms. I mean, why the fuck make it so hard to kill off of disarms when it's the best way to handle noobs in open? And of course, again, it's often easier to counter off of being bodyhit than off of a pb, which makes no sense. This incongruity, this awful state of affairs, needs to be cleaned up by making everything act the way it should so that mechanics are predictable. This will also make it easier for new players to understand dueling, since it is clear that they cannot counter off of a bodyhit, but get an insta off of an mbc.
Another great travesty of the current system is the inconsistency in the specials. I've gone over it before, but you used to be able to parry a DFA, but now an YDFA can insta-bug hit you even after it has missed and the opponent has landed on teh ground seemingly defenseless. There's also the weird cartwheel insta attack bug, the old kick insta bug, and many others. We need some goddamn predictability up in here. Mechanics need to be have in one, proper and predictable way. You shouldn't be gambling when you try to punish a missed YDFA...
#19: Make unviable senseless 0 BP spam as a survival strategy.
I am not a fan of parry-drains, but I think that when someone is running on empty, that they should not be able to parry to live. Instead, if you have 0 BP, you should live if you can hit some PBs but not if you just hold m1 and jump up and down like a spastic. My suggested solution for now, is to make parries below 1/5 BP cancel the combo, and if someone is fully drained of BP, make them drop their saber. Nothing more needs to be done, certainly not the re-introduction of the indiscriminate BP drain on parries. We should distringuish between normal parries and those made in desperation at 0 BP. That is enough.
#20: A more sensible style-design (fixing duals, blue, cyan, purple, red).
I've already covered speed equalization, stand-alone philosophy and perks. If you execute these three things, you can make all styles playable like yellow. The important thing here is feeling. It doesn't really matter if a style is overpowered or slightly sub-par. Yellow has ALWAYS been the most popular style, even when other styles were overpowered, like blue, red, staff, duals, cyan etc. Even when the aforementioned styles were at their peak of power, and yellow was comparatively worse, it was still by far the most popular style due to how good it felt to use compared to how awful the other styles were to use and play against. This problem needs to be fixed, mainly, to make the other styles good. It's not about power, balance, being OP, it's purely about them feeling good to use, and feeling good to play against. Speed must be just right and the perks must not be obnxious (like staff mblock perk or blue PB perk).
I won't go into detail here, because it's far-fetched to believe that anything I outline will make it into a new system given my previous experience with tempest (from 2016 to present-day) and it was also an issue with stassin before tempest. For example, stassin reversed my recommendations for 1.5 and basically screwed that patch up completely by disrupting a delicate balance, and then he just disappeared. Subsequently, 1.5 was misunderstood. People thought it was bad for all the wrong reasons, when it was stassin who deliberately reversed a number of crucial things. Anywan, I digress.
I'll just briefly outline my thoughts on each style and move on.
Duals: Two sabers do not mean flailing attacks. It means you can attack with one saber and use the other to cover your body. In other words, it should help with defense more than attack to have two blades.
Blue: People always think of this as Soresu, the defensive style, but although it has noodle-attacks it plays very spammily and aggressively. It makes little sense to think of this style as defensive unless we slow down the swings to yellow levels and make those slowed swings deal slightly less dmg than yellow, but make it stand out a bit by having better defense than yellow. Whether this simply means having a slightly higher defense, or whether it includes other things like perks, can be left to others to decide.
Cyan: It is a retarded mess. First swings are instant and can be abused by noobs that know of no mechanics but have normal reaction times, to just parry and spam. This aspect of cyan is by far the least charming, and must be remedied immediately by properly tempering its swingspeeds. Once that is in place, we can then start to think about how it can be turned into a more elegant, makashi-like fencing style by incorporating the stab as I've mentioned before, among other things but the main thing to fix here is cyans stupid ability to insta-activate t-rex arm attacks for parry. In the past, in 1.3, cyan was an extremely overpowered noob style due to it having a BP drain perk on parry, which meant you could just spam the opponent down with no skill whatsoever. It should move in exactly the opposite direction of this. Cyan should be for precision, counters, stabs, and elegant fencing, not retarded noob flailing.
Purple: Its main weakness is that it has only three hits, and so can be defeated by someone abusing 4 hit styles to parry and last hit it until it runs out of BP. Fucking retarded design. It's better on first hit than red due to swings like SA being basically as fast as unyawed yellow firsts, but there is great inconsistency in its swing-speeds, which is not a good thing. Make all of purples swings equal speed, matching yellow, and give it 4 hits instead of 3. This style should be thought of as a more aggressive yellow, but between it and red in terms of offense/defense bias. Some people like to assign this to vaapad, but that requires complicated perk design. It would be easier to tie this and cyan to gether into being two sides of makashi, one more defensive, the other more offensive.
Red: Basically, this style has not been fun since nudge was removed from the game. it's first swings are so fucking slow that you have to be a masochist to use it. The best way to play red is to just stand there like a bot and wait for the opponent to attack so you can counter, then, you can make 3 blindingly fast attacks. Again, this speed discrepancy is very bad. Super slow first swing, very fast combos. Like purple, red is also extremely susceptible to just being parry-last-hit due to it only having 3 attacks in a chain. This should be upped to 4 like other styles, and speed equalized to near yellow, perhaps slightly faster, defense suitably adjusted down. Note how I didn't make what is supposedly Djem-So into a fucking slow wind-up clown style. It does not make sense. If you want an aggressive style, it must by nature be fast and explosive. Current red is passive and defensive, despite its big damage it plays more like Soresu, whereas blue/cyan plays more like djem-so. It's high-time this absurd contradiction is fixed and Red is made into a proper aggressive Djem-so style, whether by nudge as I've always favoured, or by fixing its first swing speed and chain issue.
#21: Limited nudge mechanic with a cooldown (like slap, perhaps also mutually exclusive).
Before you recoil in horror, hear me out.
After we have sensibly introduced the distinction between bodyhits and saberhits, it would not be too far-fetched to think on how two blocking sabers coming into contact with one another would react. In RC1, nudge continuously bound you in a brief mblock-like anim out of which you could, with the correct timing, attack with halfswing speed. I greatly enjoyed this, and exploited it to dominate everyone in that build, but few others were able to get the timing to do the same. I know for a fact that this can be replicated, and that we can expand the window so that it is smooth sailing to attack out of this brief saber animation. You can think of it like a short saber-bind or saber-lock, out of which both of you can start an attack. This would only occur once on a long timer, like 8 seconds, and it would also share a CD with slap, putting it on CD and allowing for people to engage in an actual fight right from the get go. This would also only be triggered by sabers touching, not by sticking the saber into the opponents body, an important distinction because it means you can avoid it by manipulating your saber out of the way, use different saber stances etc. Back when nudge was a thing, it worked by sticking the saber into the opponents body, then there was a horrible bounce anim and from it, you could start a first swing with halfswing speed. This was a good way to break the defense of passive numpties, but looked like ass, and I've always prefered the aesthetic and wonderful RC1 nudge anims. If properly adjusted, these can work well, you just need to find the correct gap timing. I can't recall who was messing with it, but some devs/beta-testers know what I'm talking about. You can get this right without it feeling like you're locked out. It can be a brief, smooth bind anim after touching sabers at a distance, into attacking to activate the fight. If it also only happens on a long CD, it will not be a spammable, abusive mechanic but just a means to get teh fight started from mid-range while also being cool. Tie a nice, distinct saber sound to the RC1 nudge saber-bind and voila, a recipe for success.
Don't knock it before you try it, and remember the CD, it can always be increased. Nudge can also be a perk, activating only for a few styles but not all (for example, yellow, purple and red but not blue, cyan, staff and duals.)
#22: Hand-picked distinct saber sounds that indicate subtle mechanical differences.
Having graphical green circles and red splotches flashing on your crosshair constantly is no replacement for good sound design that tells you at once whether you've bodyhit the opponent, hit his saber, been perfect blocked, mblocked or parried. Seriously. One distinct sound should be picked for each mechanic. You can even make SB and non-SB distinct! Call this competitive sound and replace one of the defunct console commands with it. cg_enablecompetitiveduelingsounds 1.
#23: Momentum based PB for certain styles?
In stassin's saber beta, which was very fun to play and could've been polished into something great, there were several different ways to PB. One of them was momentum based. Instead of hitting a PB-zone, you'd drag your mouse in the PB-zone direction to PB. It was very fun and I am sad that this has not been explored or mentioned much since. It would not be very hard to add this style of PB'ing to a few styles. I do not know whether it should be for aggressive styles like red and purple or for cyan and purple, or whether it should be simply for Blue as Soresu PB, or for cyan/purple as makashi momentum style, riposte-feeling PB. Leave your thoughts on this below. In any case, it bears mentioning because, recall, that aimed PB is not the only way to do perfect blocking. There is PB based on saberhit, PB based on mblock timing and pb based on mouse movement! Make the system more fun to play!
#24: Return subtleties.
In the pre-aimed PB systems, you could angle your returns over your shoulders to catch upper swings since PB was based on the lightsaber blade alone. If we assume a sensible approach to sabering going forward, which includes distinguishing between bodyhit, saberhit and pb, we can incorporate this into returns as well.
If you're hit in any return, it can either be a bodyhit or a saberhit. If bodyhit, it'll hurt more than if it's a saberhit. It could also cancel the chain, preventing a halfswing, whereas if you catch the opponents attack on your own blade, it might enable the continuation of your chain with a halfswing.
We can also make a distinction between mid-chain returns and end-of-chain returns. Whether being hit in those should be less or more punishing. This depends on how much you want to curtail halfswing spam vs 4 hit spam.
This is one of those high-level nuances that we lost with the aimed pb system, and that I've always wanted back.
We can even take this a step further and tie this to feints/+reload swing cancels. We could, for instance, make it so that if someone feints and the opponent's attack hits their blade in the return, it would enable a counter similar to an MBC, which would probably make those who idolize makashi cream their pants. An interesting mechanic to think about implementing, but only possible if the saber system designers finally merge pre-aimed and post-aimed pb eras by making bodyhits and saberhits distinct.
#25: HP and force.
Health has been a redundant mechanic in dueling since about RC1, but in b18 and previous builds, the lightsaber would steadily drain FP if stuck into the opponents body. This made it feel dangerous. Now, it's just a glorified lazer pointer when not attacking.
I would love to see a return of HP damage on attacks, and HP damage whenever a lightsaber touches someone else. There's a lot of reasons why this would be interesting. First of all, it would make facehugging quite different from mid-range. We could also make slap/kick/legsweep etc take additional HP damage instead of BP damage as punishment, but just the idea that you can't just stand there like a dummy in facehug with a lightsaber through your gut, but that time is ticking when this happens, really changes the dynamic. Of course, the HP damage should tick fairly slowly, like 1 per second or two, so that it doesn't completely cripple engagements.
Some additional changes must be made along with this to make this additional flavour feasible.
Force heal and (force speed) must return to being neutral force powers. Add force telekinesis as a light side version of grip and be done with it, or substitute in something else if you wish.
The old argument against heal in open does not hold when there is no real dmg reduction, and a tapped jedi/sith dies very easily. In the old days, there was significant dmg reduction that made it hard to kill jedi/sith unless you could whittle their hp down, and heal would extend the round. It doesn't function like that in modern MBII open mode, as anyone with a brain will tell you. It makes little difference if a jedi is at 100 HP or 50, but if we add back hp damage on sabers along with heal, HP would become a more important stat for jedi/sith again. In any case, I think it would be interesting to try in dueling along with a heal lvl 3 that enables you to regen with the saber out but at great fp cost, so that you can keep dueling but have to periodically sac your fp for hp in long duels, opening you up to gunners and other force powers. We need to try new things, and sometimes new things means taking an old idea and making it better, whether its taking the MBC from 1.4.8 or this HP mechanic.
Duelists, think about it. One of the most annoying things is the eternal facehugger that can only hold W. It's a very strong strategy, and quite easy to beat people with. But if facehugging meant losing HP due to lightsaber-sizzles ticking away the HP, it makes it more intense, more risky, less of a singular mode of engagement and more of an all-out strat. Then there's nudge and mbc and saberhits. If they are also implemented, it gives the duelist so many options to play off of. Facehugging remains viable, but has good counter-play. The HP thing is another aspect of realistic lightsabering that I find I am missing more and more as the years pass, similar to the distinction between bodyhits and saberhits (because, just like it's retarded that the tip of one's lightsaber counts as a bodyhit, so too is it retarded that sticking a lightsaber into someone does 0 damage and has 0 effect. It should drain their HP! and both jedi and sith should be able to counter-act this with the neutral force power of heal).
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That is it for now. Let this be the springboard for discussion, but most important, please vocalize your support for the ideas with which you agree, so that the devs can finally get it through their thick skulls that certain things need to happen (such as consistent counters).
I sometimes get the urge to labour in vain, for a few hours entertaining a hope that we can make progress in the saber system and solve some of the now almost decade old problems with it. This list is one such self-indulgent type-up. I could've continued adding 'wishes' and details, but I think 25 roughly outlined ideas will suffice to illustrate the quite extensive improvements that are possible.
Also disclaimer, if I accidentally offend someone with the way I write, it's nothing personal kid, just me being passionate about MBII dueling.
In no particular order, with explanations below:
1. Reliable skill-based counter-attacking.
2. No feeling of being 'locked-out' of playing by spam (for example, blue).
3. A clear distinction between bodyhits, saberhits and perfect blocks.
4. A removal or great reduction in the role of ACM in dueling.
5. Rewards for executing skill-based mechanics.
6. Lightsaber form-based perks independent of lightsaber styles, similar to FA perks on characters.
7. A reduction in unblockable bullshit like facehug insta-DFA's and other special attacks.
8. More fluidity added to special attacks to incorporate them into lightsaber fighting flow.
9. An equalization of swing-speed to roughly match yellow.
10. Duels must feel intense and fast, and have the potential to end quickly or drag out for many minutes based on the skill of the combatants.
11. It should be possible to recover from a mistake with perfect play.
12. Replace cyan and purple's stance with penekemation one?
13. Each style should work as a comfortable stand-alone, like yellow (the golden standard).
14. More force-power use in dueling, fluidly, not obnoxiously.
15. The ability to choose different playstyles based on form-based perks and combat approach.
16. A further reduction in the importance of slap in dueling, in favour of other mechanics.
17. Make more distinct the different combat distances (face-hug, mid-range etc)
18. Generally consistent and predictable mechanical interactions.
19. Make unviable senseless 0 BP spam as a survival strategy.
20. A more sensible style-design (fixing duals, blue, cyan, purple, red)
21. A limited nudge mechanic with a cooldown (like slap, perhaps also mutually exclusive)
22. Hand-picked distinct saber sounds that indicate subtle mechanical differences.
23. Momentum based PB for certain styles?
24. Return subtleties.
25. HP and force.
#1:Reliable skill-based counter-attacking.
Nothing is more awful than getting a perfect block along with the correct timing for a counter, and yet the opponent just bulldozes through with a facehug insta combo that interrupts your proper counter regardless. Idiotic flailing spam winning out over skill, like a button masher winning against a practiced expert in tekken by the very virtue of button mashing. Obviously an absurd state of affairs that must be remedied sooner rather than later. It's time to fix this by ensuring that when you perfect block, or at the very least mblock properly, that you can counter reliably as a reward.
It doesn't matter if this counter mechanic creates 'instas' because there's plenty of retarded insta-shit in the current buggy system, and all of those instas are not based on skill. It takes far more skill to properly execute an mblock counter, and by its very nature, an MBC restricts the counterer as well, so it never really becomes overwhelming. When you MBC, you're forced to hold certain movement buttons and so, execute a certain counter off of the opponents attack. This makes the counter-attacks predictable even if they are instant, because there is no time to make another input for the attack, it will be the mblock input that decides the input for the counter-attack.
One of the big reasons why people are playing 1.4.8 is that it has reliable counter-attacks. It's so absurd that we don't have this simple mechanic in place in modern sabering.
#2: No feeling of being 'locked-out' of playing by spam (for example, blue).
There are certain ways of playing that, if chained together properly, can feel like they completely lock you out of responding. This issue will be partially resolved by adding a reliable way to counter, like mblock-countering but we should go further to ensure that senseless spam or pre-applied combinations do not lock someone out of the game for several seconds, unable to reply.
One of the most understandable examples of this is the kicking bug that allowed a delayed insta into another combo. The adversary would spam a full combo in your face then kick with a delayed, bugged insta-hit that would interrupt if you attempted to reply, and then flow into a second full combo, basically getting off eight attacks and resetting their slap cd, before you have a chance to respond.
A non-bug version of the above can be achieved with proper slap-timing too, essentially making it frustratingly hard to respond to the opponent. The only viable way to reply to those who just spam and run away is to chase and be ready to tap crouch, and to stop on a dime in case of a legsweep.
There's also blue spam, or two hit yellow combos that end on a D-swing. These types of attacks make the combo recovery almost non-existent, allowing basically infinite attack chains with no gaps. With yellow, you can do WA+D or SA+D and combo reset infinitely with the same timing as a halfswing, basically breaking dueling flow.
There are also styles like duals, who seem to just rely on flailing spam and take no real skill to use since you can just parry to live at 0 bp.
#3: A clear distinction between bodyhits, saberhits and perfect blocks.
Currently, you can counter off of a bodyhit just as smoothly if not even faster, than off of a perfect block. It has been this way for like 8 years or more. It's extremely disgusting.
Bodyhits should drain the most BP and make it impossible to just reply without a pb/mbc. It should also pause bp regen for one tick. In a system using ACM, bodyhitting someone should drain ACM while giving ACM to the opponent.
Saberhits should drain less BP than a bodyhit, and allow for more smooth replies than bodyhits (although you're not pblocking, you're catching their attack on your blade and so should be able to 'riposte' or whatever you want to call it). This will go a long way to enable good replies to senseless spam and fix those who rely on cheesy hit-and-run tip-touching ACM grinding. In a system with ACM, saberhits should be neutral, neither giving or taking ACM.
Ever since aimed-pb was introduced and saber-based pb was thrown out, I've always felt disgusted with the lack of distinction between hitting someone's saber and their body. If you're in facehug digging your saber into their gut, you should clearly do more damage than if you're dancing around at distance and hitting the tip of the opponents lightsaber (really, it should not deal much dmg, but I'll compromise here and say that bodyhits = full damage, saberhits = 80% dmg. Something like a 20 percent damage reduction here seems apt.)
Then there's perfect blocking. A skill-based mechanic that for some reason often feels less rewarding than just dodging, and more crippling than being bodyhit due to it almost making it harder to counter off of pbs than bodyhits in current patch. This is obviously twisted the wrong way around. When you perfect block, you should be rewarded. Perfect blocking should be more rewarding than dodging a swing because it's more risky. I propose to add one tick of bp regen as a reward for pb, which counter-balaces the bp regen punishment on bodyhit. There should be a good synergy between these two mechanics to reward skill. In an ACM-based system, perfect blocking should, in addition to providing a regen tick, remove an ACM from the opponent.
#4: A removal or great reduction in the role of ACM in dueling.
ACM is a crutch to fix bad system design and fosters annoying playstyles, sometimes even forcing them on people. If the most efffective way to win is to be passive, then 4 hit counter-parry and last hit, congratulations! You've fostered a passive and cringe way to play. If ACM is more valuable than BP due to regen and other factors, you again have a problem. People can spend BP by using wild hit-and-run flails, and even deploy no bp parries if need be until they get to catch their breath. Then they can rinse and repeat until they start the engagement with an overwhelming ACM advantage. The mere existence of the mechanic itself, if unmitigated by safeguards such as enabling PB to reduce the opponents ACM, it leads to this type of strategy more often than not. It's only by gentlemen agreement that people don't use the 4 hit parry hit and run acm grind strat to win duels.
I'll also mention that fair fight resets are not a problem. If BP regen is adjusted properly, you'll get some of the effect of having an ACM advantage if the opponent is clearly worse than you, through them taking more bodyhits and so, having a lower regen, and them not PB'ing enough, so not having the extra BP regen. In addition, you could further separate out regens so that when someone falls below 1/4 or 1/5 bp, their regen slows down rather a lot, which would help end one-sided duels faster.
If you need ACM to break through passive play, then ACM is just a superficial symptomatic fix. The underlying issue is elsewhere, either with the lack of skill of the aggressor, or the system design.
Passive play should by no means be rewarded, but if someone is able to put up such an air-tight defense that the opponent cannot break through, then that is how it should be. They are clearly better. ACM shouldn't force the superior duelist to strike out wildly in an attempt to equalize ACM. It should be permitted to wait strategically and not over-expose yourself. If someone runs up to you and starts 4 hit spamming you for ACM (running away and using parries etc), you are at a GREAT disadvantage if you play properly and rely on perfect blocking and measured counter-attacks. You're all but forced to reply in kind, often chasing recklessly and tapping crouch as a counter-measure to un-SB-able chase slap timings.
This is a disgusting state of affairs. Someone who plays properly should be rewarded for their efforts and someone who plays like a noob should not. Which brings us onto the next point.
#5: Rewards for executing skill-based mechanics.
Current dueling leaves much to be desired for the simple fact that unskilled flailing and stupid DFA bugs are unduly rewarded, whereas skilfully executing mechanics such as PB and SB are completely overlooked. It feels scuffed. I hope I don't need to elucidate this point further, as it should be clear from the ACM section why it's an issue to indirectly reward the way of the noob by not properly rewarding skilful use of mechanics.
First of all, swingblocking. In the past, stassin thought it was a good idea to make non-swingblocked attacks deal more damage than swingblocked ones, which goes directly against the decree to reward skilful play. It should be the opposite.
The successful swingblock should reward the user not just with slap and disarm resistance, but a full damage attack and the opposite of just holding mouse 1 and flailing, should make attacks deal less damage in addition to them being open to slaps and mblocks.
By making it so that the person who swingblocks more, deals more damage, we reward skill and encourage people to play properly. We encourage them to rise, to ascend. There is a clear goal to reach, that of being able to properly swingblock full combos. I will accept no counter-argument here. There is nothing else to be said for it. Swingblocking should OBVIOUSLY be rewarded over the m1 flailing noob, just like how I think that precise attacks that avoid the opponents lightsaber to dig into their body should be rewarded over tip-to-tip exchanges.
Indeed, a further way to reward skilful attacking is to distinguish bodyhits from saberhits as I have said before, even if this is done simply by a damage reduction. Then, it PAYS to aim your attacks with your mouse, and it PAYS to choose to swing at the open side. I cannot see any demerit to this approach. It is clearly better to reward skilful play this way, than to indirectly reward trash flailing by omitting such rewards.
The more you reward skilful use of mechanics, the better.
Reward people for perfect blocking by giving then a regen tick.
Reward people for mblocking by giving them access to an instant counter.
Reward people for bodyhitting the opponent by making it block their regen for a tick.
Reward people for using distance to defend themselves, by adding dmg reduction to saberhits.
Reward people for swingblocking by ensuring that it is the strongest way to attack.
Conversely, we must not just reward good play, but punish bad play.
Punish people for excessive running by making it so that if they are hit while running, their BP regen is crippled for a few ticks regardless of whether it's a saberhit or a bodyhit.
Punish people for not swingblocking by making their attacks deal less damage.
Punish people for attacking at a distance instead of angling into the opponents open side, by making saberhits distinct from bodyhits so that tip-to-tip nonsense is not a way to end a duel, and does not deal threatening damage.
Punish people for missing a slap by making them take more damage (we already have this, but why not make this even more severe, instead of reducting the impact of being slapped down, increase the risk of slapping).
I haven't talked about interrupts yet, but it's no a positive, actively executed technique to be rewarded. Interrupts are mistakes by the one getting interrupted, and so, should be punished by taking increased damage, stopping the combo, and some bp regen tick or ACM stuff depending on your system approach.
I could continue, but I believe I've made my point.
#6: Lightsaber form-based perks independent of lightsaber styles, similar to FA perks on characters.
You choose these like you choose a saber style. They are stand-alone, and provide a benefit and a drawback in line with star wars lightsaber form lore. They are a bit like FA perks.
A good example would be the ataru FA perk that makes jumps not drain any BP. We would take it further and make it so that you have limited BP regen while running and 1 tick force jumps, but we would cap regen to this value to force the ataru user to run and jump more. We could also make it so that perfect blocks do not remove ACM, or do not grant additional BP regen ticks. Ataru is the aggression form, and meant for all out assaults but is prone to tiring quickly.
The above illustrates my general idea. I won't spend too much time here because this, unlike many of my other points, is a rather vain hope. Tempest could easily include most of my other fixes such as the saberhit distinction and the various rewards/punishments for mechanics, but this would require a bit more, so I am not expecting it to be implemented like I almost demand for point 1, consistent counters.
#7&8: A reduction in unblockable bullshit like facehug insta-DFA's and other special attacks & More fluidity added to special attacks to incorporate them into lightsaber fighting flow.
Special attacks make no sense. Most of them are bugged and either work too good as absurd facehug instas that drain more than half of the opponents BP, or they bug out and don't work at all like purple stab or blue lunge if hit early.
Previously, you could +use kick to parry the absurdly powerful YDFA, but now this has been 'fixed' leaving no recouse to deal with these high-damage, no-skill, absurd and out of place attacks.
The fix is not to add a big cost to them. They remain obnoxious thereby, and simply make those who use the attacks feel bad in addition to those who take the unblockable attacks.
In the past, you could time a normal swing to parry an YDFA or an RDFA even. I don't know when or why this changed, and these specials became unblockable pieces of shit, but at the very least we should return to a state where it's possible to parry a DFA with a well-timed normal attack.
The design of special attacks in general, is gross and out of place. They either deal a lot of damage, or act as obnoxious knockbacks to be abused at the end of spam to gain distance. They're bugged into instas in facehug, and can be chained into or used at the end of a combo, and the opponent cannot just swing into someone that has finished an YDFA because the swing can retro-actively bug-activate and still instagib half damage for no reason. I've also seen the old RDFA bug where it drains all your BP even though it doesn't hit you.
I honestly don't see why these attacks should be in the game. It would be better to remove them, then later re-introduce them only when the entire special system has been revamped, which brings me to point 8.
The ideal way to incorporate special attacks would be to make them swift, fluid parts of continuos combat, not high-damage, buggy game-over moves that disrupt dueling flow and fuck everything up.
For example, envision the stabbing special attack as a quick and fluid move similar to a normal chain attack. If we have a 4 hit yellow speed style, and we can do a combo like this SA+stab+WD+WA in one smooth motion, where the stab is just the replacement for another combo swing like SD, then it would add greatly to dueling instead of detracting from it as it currently does. The same can be said of things like YDFA and RDFA. If you make the execution swift, deal normal swing damage and unlock it, you could similarly flow into an YDFA while comboing. SD+YDFA+WA+WD+SD+sidekick. You could add combo-restrictions, such as mandating that only uppercuts can combo into YDFA. I am here envisioning YDFA as part of a combo attack, as a replacement for a normal attack. Add a severe force cost or a cooldown on slap of 10 seconds or something, to make it undesirable to spam but good to use for variety on occasion. Regarding RDFA, it can be changed to use penekemations palpy-spin instead, and could be limited to a combo-starter and not something you chain into mid combo. So those who use red or whatever other style gets it, can use it as a starter. Red/purple as aggressive styles, could get it, and even yellow. You could then give the more acrobatic and sneaky YDFA to cyan, blue and duals (because lets be honest, butterfly attacks are pointless).
This is the basic idea. I hope you understand what I mean. This full implementation of this is unlikely to occur, so I won't do a full write-up of all the attacks, but I'm sure you can understand how delicious it would be to fence with dooku cyan, flowing smoothly from a stab into a combo elegantly. At the very least, though, I want the take-away here to be that all the specials except for stuff like blue lunge to knock ppl off ledges, are in an unacceptable state and should be removed from the game until fixed. The fix is not just slapping on a BP cost, like tempest has done previously. This is just me saying, remove bullshit that takes no skill. There shouldn't be something in dueling against which there is no recourse: this is why I had no qualms about ydfa in the past, since you could just parry YDFA's normally...
#9: An equalization of swing-speed to roughly match yellow.
Ever since cyan and purple was introduced, I've always thought that swing animations should be within a certain speed so as to not be either too slow or too fast. I continue to use yellow as the golden standard speed-wise.
To explain this further. If a style is too fast, it devolves into spam and makes it unpleasant to fight against whilst requiring constraints to make it less fun to use. Think about blue, and the absurd idea to limit it to 2 combo chains and constantly nerf its defense. Think about the ACM provisions taken against it over the years. Tempest foolishly spent many hours absurdly fractioning ACM gain and loss because blue is faster than other styles. Since it's too fast to react to, we must make its swings do noodle damage, and cripple its acm gain. It's a lose-lose situation because blue, being fast, feels like crap to duel against, even if it's weak due to being nerfed, so those who use blue also feel bad since they're using a nerfed style. How this state of affairs is acceptable is unfathomable to me. Just fucking slow it down a bit. It doesn't have to be exactly yellow speed. We also all know that there are other differences such as the speed of recovery after a full chain, as well as the animations in general. An equalization of swing-speeds does not make blue, or cyan or red into yellow.
Slow styles have the opposite problem of yellow. Red is a prime example. Its first swing is so slow that you need to add nudge to it to make it fun to play (imo). Tempest added a stagger to red to compensate for its slow swings, which again just exasperates the problems rather than fixing them. Yes, it makes red stronger, but it also makes it really unpleasant to duel against. All of these absurd contusions are unnecessary. Red should simply be yellow speed and deal slightly more damage but have slightly less defense than it. The rest can remain the same. Red would still have a strength in replying with fast counters, and I also still think nudge would be nice. In OJP I recall red being called Djem-So, and having four hit combos and being roughly yellow speed. Such a red style would feel good to use speed-wise, since it would sit in the goldy-locks zone of yellow, but it would retain its anims and some of its peculiarities. I really think that speed is a superficial characteristic. High-level duelists know that animations and resets are at least as important, and I'm pretty sure that we all know that blue or red would be perfectly distinct from yellow even if they had yellow speeds.
I mentioned before that I started to feel this way after cyan and purple was introduced. This was because, at the time, cyan was only usable on the jedi temple FA, and it was slow. There was also a slow and a fast blue style. The slow cyan in the FA felt better than the fast cyan added later, and I also loved the slow blue better than the fast blue. Styles just play much better when they sit in the goldilocks zone. If they're too fast, you can't react but have to predict, and they become cancer to fight against. If speed is too slow, then you have to react and cannot properly take the initiative, and it becomes cancer to use (red users have to be passive counter-attack bots...). I've proposed nudge to fix red shortcoming of the absurdly slow first swing, but it has always been rejected. Changing swing speeds to all be near yellow, would fix most of the issues that we have with fast and slow styles and would remove the need for idiotic messes like fractional ACM, and drastically different AP/BP values, and if animations and resets are not enough to distinguish styles, you could always add back some perks...
I mean come on, there is so much potential! Fucking start to use it please. Bring back stassin or get tempest to do these things, or get someone else to code them while consulting me and other high level duelists on discord (and don't listen to anyone who isn't high-tier or top-tier).
#10 Duels must feel intense and fast, and have the potential to end quickly or drag out for many minutes based on the skill of the combatants.
The fun factor and the coolness factor of dueling comes from intensity and flow. That's why everyone utterly hated the stagger mechanic in V0, and why I and many others continue to vehemently oppose any and all such mechanics, whether tied to staff mblock perks or special attacks. Putting someone out of commission and preventing them from playing, as I mentioned in point #2 simply does not engender fun.
It is far more fun to flow continuously and intensely, to be able to always have an answer and a counter-reaction, to never feel forced into a gap and into waiting.
In a properly made system, it's possible for the master to swiftly dispatch lesser duelists like insects. In 1.4 which overly relied on ACM for damage, this became hard. It took awhile regardless of skill, because standard attacks were noodle-like without ACM, so even in a duel between a noob and a master, it took some time for the master to win since he had to first grind ACM to do any real damage. This is obviously not ideal, especially for open mode engagements. It should be possible to end duels quickly.
On the other hand, very long and epic engagements should also be possible if both duelists are masters. The way ACM works currently, again makes this difficult. A system of high burst damage without proper regen and rewards on stuff like PB and saberhit damage reduction, just leads to duels where whoever lands the first slap and spam on knockdown wins. An equally problematic mirror to the issue in 1.4.
The properly balanced system, therefore, is one in which you can quickly win against those of lesser skill than your own, and one in which two masters can have epic duels that span many minutes and perhaps even the whole round!
How to accomplish this? It's quite simple if you've been following along with my points so far. You need to reward skill on successful mechanics, and punish mistakes. That way, you add more subtle avenues in which the skilled master can distinguish himself from lesser duelists. A mid-tier might be able to hit 1st and 2nd hit swingblocks reliably, but the master consistently hits SB on all four swings, so he deals a bit more damage. The master is able to pb more than the mid-tier, and the difference in damage taken, regen, and acm if included, quickly adds up as well. That means that we can have a swift end to an uneven duel, but if two combatants are perfectly matched, the duel has the potential to last for a long time.
This sort of approach is to me ideal. Please recall that this is movie battles II. Please remember that this is star wars. Dueling needs to be quick, furious, fun, fast, fluid and cool. We don't want slow spastic wind-ups, staggers, broken bugged DFA garbage -- we want fluid, cool, movie-like duels and I believe that what I've outlined above would achieve this ideal.
#11: It should be possible to recover from a mistake with perfect play.
Nothing feels worse than being clipped by a slap, eating 3 halfswings and suddenly you're at a HUGE acm disadvantage. The only way to recover from such a disadvantage is to start playing like a hit-and-run cretin. We can easily fix this by making successful perfect blocks drain ACM. That way, through skill, you can make a recovery.
#12: Replace cyan and purple's stance with penekemation one?
Another quickie. Pick either cyan or purple and give it the makashi/dooku stance. Iirc, it might be on blue in penekemations. The normal stance of cyan and purple are no distinct enough from each other.
#13: Each style should work as a comfortable stand-alone, like yellow (the golden standard).
This goes hand-in-hand with my previous point about swing-speeds. If the speed is very fast, you're forced to nerf damage, but the main issue arises with slow styles. To compensate for the crippling (and nonsensical) slowness of Red's swings, you have to make it deal a lot of damage. To avoid making red style OP, you nerf its defense but now, you have created something that's more like a tool than a stand-alone style.
If a style is too out of whack either defensively or offensively, you encourage them to become crutches and fall-backs, and mere tools rather than stand-alone styles. When someone is knocked down, you can switch to red and decimate their BP. If you're low on BP, you can switch to a defensive style and recover with passive play, for example, if a style has an mblock stagger perk and high defense, or even if blue has noodle damage, if it has high defense and a blocking perk, you can switch to it and recover. This way of designing a saber system relegates all non-yellow-like styles to gimmicks. Yellow and staff, being mostly balanced, can act as a base, but then you've got red and purple, blue and cyan and duals. All of those, the majority of styles in fact, are not really suitable for stand-alone play when they are best used in conjuction with another style. The famous red/blue combo has taken advantage of this for over ten years. I recall instructing my brother in its use to beat hlev back in the pre-aimed pb era when he was just a little kid. It's always been a potent way to abuse.
What I would like to aim for instead, to make dueling feel smooth and fluid, is to make all styles feel good on their own and not require a supplement. Swing speed equalization is one step on this journey, another is balancing their AP/BP's roughly. Anims and anim-resets still make them distinct, but as I've mentioned before, you can also simply add some little perks to each style like we've done in the past. I actually think the main reason the perk-attempts never stuck was because we lacked swing-speed equalization, but I digress.
#14: More force-power use in dueling, fluidly, not obnoxiously.
Things like mind trick and grip obviously don't work in this context, and never will, but what about making ff push and pull a way to interrupt the opponent. If you ff push an opponent, you could cancel their swing (as if they had reloaded), sending them into a return and ending their chain. It could be an interesting addition, and would also help discourage too much air-swing poking from a distance, and help encourage people to close the distance properly when attacking. To make it evne more viable, you could make it possible to block during push and pull so that it can be attempted more frequently in close-range engagements too. For open, just add an absurd FP cost to this so that it's more punishing than taking a bit of HP dmg.
You could make lightning linger for a moment after casting, and could make it deflectable with mblock, d3 and deflect. Force speed is already in a very good spot, but it is extremely lamentable that sith do not have access to it, at least in dueling mode. Grip and lightning are mostly useless for dueling, speed is the only advanced force power that can be truly abused for an advantage beyond mere tricks like lightning insta ydfa, which if point #7 is heeded, should not be an issue anyway. So yeah, give sith speed in dueling mode...
You could also make sense 3 viable in dueling as a way to see if they are above or below half bp. Nothing too accurate. Could also be more like one color if above 2/3 and one color if below 2/3.
#15: The ability to choose different playstyles based on form-based perks and combat approach.
I already mentioned ataru and how an FA perk could help direct an interesting jump/acrobatics/movement-based play style. That is just the tip of the ice-berg.
A Soresu perk might require holding walk in addition to block to work, and whenever the soresu user runs, he exposes himself more than the normal user to extra damage if hit, etc. He would gain a stability boon when holding walk, helping with something defensive like avoiding slaps, reducing interrupt damage, bolstering saberhit dmg reduction slightly at the cost of remaining less mobile, whatever. The combat approach of Soresu here would be to engage steadily with a focus on defense and in the long run, by hitting more PBS and forcing more saberhits, you would aim to outlast the opponent.
A Djem-So perk would do the opposite and encourage you to attack more at the expense of defense. Perhaps a Djem-so perk would allow someone to counter-attack off of even bodyhits (the normal state of affairs currently, but not as it should be). It would perhaps help the Djem-So user break the defense by reducing saberhit dmg reduction, or by giving a nudge advantage, or by helping avoid slaps outside of facehug, thereby making it easier to chase after runners and stay in their face.
A Makashi perk could break a parry exchange after one or two parries, ensuring that the makashi practitoner would be able to win parry exchanges. They need not be overly fancy or crazy. This alone would suffice to drastically change engagements (recall also that the makashi RP'er would be using a 4 hit slowed cyan, and so it would not be as obnoxious as the insta hit 5 chain mess we currently have. There would also be the ability to integrate stabs smoothly as part of combos, to make for a unique playstyle).
Enough of such speculation. You get the point.
#16: A further reduction in the importance of slap in dueling, in favour of other mechanics.
Again, I can't help but think back to the movies and generally how lightsaber duels proceed. They do not include a gay little backhand that somehow knocks the opponent down every 4-5 seconds. It's a rare manoeuvre, if it occurs at all.
Slap was originally added to counter severe facehug combo spam, when nudge was still a thing. That the little backhand can somehow knock the opponent down is rather absurd. It should at most interrupt a combo, and end the chain, like forcing a +reload faint and a combo reset. If it's on a decent cd like 5-6 seconds, and has this functionality, then I believe it would make more sense than the knockdown mania. I know this idea won't appeal to a lot of people because they've gotten used to slap as a crutch to win duels or cover a gap after a 4 hit combo as I mentioned before, but really, does it make sense that we have a spammable little gay backhand attack that somehow knocks people down. In a real duel, people who attempted to 'slap' MBII style would get their forearm cut off more often than not.
If this is not a chance worth pursuing, could at the very least make it so you take double damage while attempting a slap, not just 20 percent more. This is a better solution to the knockdown problem than reducing dmg taken when on the ground. CD could also be increased. In any case, it kind of goes against the code of cool, fun movie-like fluid dueling to constantly have this little slap to deal with. Of course, I am not expecting anyone to seriously think about removing it or limiting it as I've suggested, but perhaps increase the risk of a slap even further.
#17: Make more distinct the different combat distances (face-hug, mid-range etc).
There are many ways to accomplish this. The easiest is to just implement saberhits so that hitting the tip of the opponents lightsaber does not count as a bodyhit. You could also introduce a modified version of nudge to simulate saber-binding, RC1 style when two block-stance sabers connect in mid-range (tip-touching) and add a distinct saber sound to indicate that such a bind has occured. This can then be used to start an engagement and flow into an attack from saber-to-saber distance, as opposed to facehug.
Another way to make distance more distinct is to ensure that in facehug, you must hit a pb or mbc to counter, whereas in saber-tip distance, you can also counter on a saberhit, as if it were a pb.
Again, it seems so easy, so logical, so tasty, to just implement the saberhit distinction, and tie this kind of mechanic to it rather than having to rely on things like nudge. Making saberhits distinct from bodyhits is the best and most simple way to ensure that mid-range is different from facehug, and that saber-tip attacks aren't actually treated as full bodyhits, in the utterly preposterous manner that they currently are.
#18: Generally consistent and predictable mechanical interactions.
Right now, some parries become instant and interrupt the other more slow parries. I think, but am not sure, that diagonals at distance are superior to same-sides in terms of triggering this insta parry thing.
Then there's countering in general. It's an inconsistent mess as I and many others have said before. You need a bit of leprechaun luck to pull off a counter-attack, especially in close range. If the opponent spams, you generally cannot use a counter to break into their spam and parry, you have to take their combo and only at the end you are permitted to act. This inconsistency is silly. When you pb, you should get an assured slow counter that would at least parry, and when you mblock counter, you should get the same, if not even an insta counter, which also helps with open mode kill disarms. I mean, why the fuck make it so hard to kill off of disarms when it's the best way to handle noobs in open? And of course, again, it's often easier to counter off of being bodyhit than off of a pb, which makes no sense. This incongruity, this awful state of affairs, needs to be cleaned up by making everything act the way it should so that mechanics are predictable. This will also make it easier for new players to understand dueling, since it is clear that they cannot counter off of a bodyhit, but get an insta off of an mbc.
Another great travesty of the current system is the inconsistency in the specials. I've gone over it before, but you used to be able to parry a DFA, but now an YDFA can insta-bug hit you even after it has missed and the opponent has landed on teh ground seemingly defenseless. There's also the weird cartwheel insta attack bug, the old kick insta bug, and many others. We need some goddamn predictability up in here. Mechanics need to be have in one, proper and predictable way. You shouldn't be gambling when you try to punish a missed YDFA...
#19: Make unviable senseless 0 BP spam as a survival strategy.
I am not a fan of parry-drains, but I think that when someone is running on empty, that they should not be able to parry to live. Instead, if you have 0 BP, you should live if you can hit some PBs but not if you just hold m1 and jump up and down like a spastic. My suggested solution for now, is to make parries below 1/5 BP cancel the combo, and if someone is fully drained of BP, make them drop their saber. Nothing more needs to be done, certainly not the re-introduction of the indiscriminate BP drain on parries. We should distringuish between normal parries and those made in desperation at 0 BP. That is enough.
#20: A more sensible style-design (fixing duals, blue, cyan, purple, red).
I've already covered speed equalization, stand-alone philosophy and perks. If you execute these three things, you can make all styles playable like yellow. The important thing here is feeling. It doesn't really matter if a style is overpowered or slightly sub-par. Yellow has ALWAYS been the most popular style, even when other styles were overpowered, like blue, red, staff, duals, cyan etc. Even when the aforementioned styles were at their peak of power, and yellow was comparatively worse, it was still by far the most popular style due to how good it felt to use compared to how awful the other styles were to use and play against. This problem needs to be fixed, mainly, to make the other styles good. It's not about power, balance, being OP, it's purely about them feeling good to use, and feeling good to play against. Speed must be just right and the perks must not be obnxious (like staff mblock perk or blue PB perk).
I won't go into detail here, because it's far-fetched to believe that anything I outline will make it into a new system given my previous experience with tempest (from 2016 to present-day) and it was also an issue with stassin before tempest. For example, stassin reversed my recommendations for 1.5 and basically screwed that patch up completely by disrupting a delicate balance, and then he just disappeared. Subsequently, 1.5 was misunderstood. People thought it was bad for all the wrong reasons, when it was stassin who deliberately reversed a number of crucial things. Anywan, I digress.
I'll just briefly outline my thoughts on each style and move on.
Duals: Two sabers do not mean flailing attacks. It means you can attack with one saber and use the other to cover your body. In other words, it should help with defense more than attack to have two blades.
Blue: People always think of this as Soresu, the defensive style, but although it has noodle-attacks it plays very spammily and aggressively. It makes little sense to think of this style as defensive unless we slow down the swings to yellow levels and make those slowed swings deal slightly less dmg than yellow, but make it stand out a bit by having better defense than yellow. Whether this simply means having a slightly higher defense, or whether it includes other things like perks, can be left to others to decide.
Cyan: It is a retarded mess. First swings are instant and can be abused by noobs that know of no mechanics but have normal reaction times, to just parry and spam. This aspect of cyan is by far the least charming, and must be remedied immediately by properly tempering its swingspeeds. Once that is in place, we can then start to think about how it can be turned into a more elegant, makashi-like fencing style by incorporating the stab as I've mentioned before, among other things but the main thing to fix here is cyans stupid ability to insta-activate t-rex arm attacks for parry. In the past, in 1.3, cyan was an extremely overpowered noob style due to it having a BP drain perk on parry, which meant you could just spam the opponent down with no skill whatsoever. It should move in exactly the opposite direction of this. Cyan should be for precision, counters, stabs, and elegant fencing, not retarded noob flailing.
Purple: Its main weakness is that it has only three hits, and so can be defeated by someone abusing 4 hit styles to parry and last hit it until it runs out of BP. Fucking retarded design. It's better on first hit than red due to swings like SA being basically as fast as unyawed yellow firsts, but there is great inconsistency in its swing-speeds, which is not a good thing. Make all of purples swings equal speed, matching yellow, and give it 4 hits instead of 3. This style should be thought of as a more aggressive yellow, but between it and red in terms of offense/defense bias. Some people like to assign this to vaapad, but that requires complicated perk design. It would be easier to tie this and cyan to gether into being two sides of makashi, one more defensive, the other more offensive.
Red: Basically, this style has not been fun since nudge was removed from the game. it's first swings are so fucking slow that you have to be a masochist to use it. The best way to play red is to just stand there like a bot and wait for the opponent to attack so you can counter, then, you can make 3 blindingly fast attacks. Again, this speed discrepancy is very bad. Super slow first swing, very fast combos. Like purple, red is also extremely susceptible to just being parry-last-hit due to it only having 3 attacks in a chain. This should be upped to 4 like other styles, and speed equalized to near yellow, perhaps slightly faster, defense suitably adjusted down. Note how I didn't make what is supposedly Djem-So into a fucking slow wind-up clown style. It does not make sense. If you want an aggressive style, it must by nature be fast and explosive. Current red is passive and defensive, despite its big damage it plays more like Soresu, whereas blue/cyan plays more like djem-so. It's high-time this absurd contradiction is fixed and Red is made into a proper aggressive Djem-so style, whether by nudge as I've always favoured, or by fixing its first swing speed and chain issue.
#21: Limited nudge mechanic with a cooldown (like slap, perhaps also mutually exclusive).
Before you recoil in horror, hear me out.
After we have sensibly introduced the distinction between bodyhits and saberhits, it would not be too far-fetched to think on how two blocking sabers coming into contact with one another would react. In RC1, nudge continuously bound you in a brief mblock-like anim out of which you could, with the correct timing, attack with halfswing speed. I greatly enjoyed this, and exploited it to dominate everyone in that build, but few others were able to get the timing to do the same. I know for a fact that this can be replicated, and that we can expand the window so that it is smooth sailing to attack out of this brief saber animation. You can think of it like a short saber-bind or saber-lock, out of which both of you can start an attack. This would only occur once on a long timer, like 8 seconds, and it would also share a CD with slap, putting it on CD and allowing for people to engage in an actual fight right from the get go. This would also only be triggered by sabers touching, not by sticking the saber into the opponents body, an important distinction because it means you can avoid it by manipulating your saber out of the way, use different saber stances etc. Back when nudge was a thing, it worked by sticking the saber into the opponents body, then there was a horrible bounce anim and from it, you could start a first swing with halfswing speed. This was a good way to break the defense of passive numpties, but looked like ass, and I've always prefered the aesthetic and wonderful RC1 nudge anims. If properly adjusted, these can work well, you just need to find the correct gap timing. I can't recall who was messing with it, but some devs/beta-testers know what I'm talking about. You can get this right without it feeling like you're locked out. It can be a brief, smooth bind anim after touching sabers at a distance, into attacking to activate the fight. If it also only happens on a long CD, it will not be a spammable, abusive mechanic but just a means to get teh fight started from mid-range while also being cool. Tie a nice, distinct saber sound to the RC1 nudge saber-bind and voila, a recipe for success.
Don't knock it before you try it, and remember the CD, it can always be increased. Nudge can also be a perk, activating only for a few styles but not all (for example, yellow, purple and red but not blue, cyan, staff and duals.)
#22: Hand-picked distinct saber sounds that indicate subtle mechanical differences.
Having graphical green circles and red splotches flashing on your crosshair constantly is no replacement for good sound design that tells you at once whether you've bodyhit the opponent, hit his saber, been perfect blocked, mblocked or parried. Seriously. One distinct sound should be picked for each mechanic. You can even make SB and non-SB distinct! Call this competitive sound and replace one of the defunct console commands with it. cg_enablecompetitiveduelingsounds 1.
#23: Momentum based PB for certain styles?
In stassin's saber beta, which was very fun to play and could've been polished into something great, there were several different ways to PB. One of them was momentum based. Instead of hitting a PB-zone, you'd drag your mouse in the PB-zone direction to PB. It was very fun and I am sad that this has not been explored or mentioned much since. It would not be very hard to add this style of PB'ing to a few styles. I do not know whether it should be for aggressive styles like red and purple or for cyan and purple, or whether it should be simply for Blue as Soresu PB, or for cyan/purple as makashi momentum style, riposte-feeling PB. Leave your thoughts on this below. In any case, it bears mentioning because, recall, that aimed PB is not the only way to do perfect blocking. There is PB based on saberhit, PB based on mblock timing and pb based on mouse movement! Make the system more fun to play!
#24: Return subtleties.
In the pre-aimed PB systems, you could angle your returns over your shoulders to catch upper swings since PB was based on the lightsaber blade alone. If we assume a sensible approach to sabering going forward, which includes distinguishing between bodyhit, saberhit and pb, we can incorporate this into returns as well.
If you're hit in any return, it can either be a bodyhit or a saberhit. If bodyhit, it'll hurt more than if it's a saberhit. It could also cancel the chain, preventing a halfswing, whereas if you catch the opponents attack on your own blade, it might enable the continuation of your chain with a halfswing.
We can also make a distinction between mid-chain returns and end-of-chain returns. Whether being hit in those should be less or more punishing. This depends on how much you want to curtail halfswing spam vs 4 hit spam.
This is one of those high-level nuances that we lost with the aimed pb system, and that I've always wanted back.
We can even take this a step further and tie this to feints/+reload swing cancels. We could, for instance, make it so that if someone feints and the opponent's attack hits their blade in the return, it would enable a counter similar to an MBC, which would probably make those who idolize makashi cream their pants. An interesting mechanic to think about implementing, but only possible if the saber system designers finally merge pre-aimed and post-aimed pb eras by making bodyhits and saberhits distinct.
#25: HP and force.
Health has been a redundant mechanic in dueling since about RC1, but in b18 and previous builds, the lightsaber would steadily drain FP if stuck into the opponents body. This made it feel dangerous. Now, it's just a glorified lazer pointer when not attacking.
I would love to see a return of HP damage on attacks, and HP damage whenever a lightsaber touches someone else. There's a lot of reasons why this would be interesting. First of all, it would make facehugging quite different from mid-range. We could also make slap/kick/legsweep etc take additional HP damage instead of BP damage as punishment, but just the idea that you can't just stand there like a dummy in facehug with a lightsaber through your gut, but that time is ticking when this happens, really changes the dynamic. Of course, the HP damage should tick fairly slowly, like 1 per second or two, so that it doesn't completely cripple engagements.
Some additional changes must be made along with this to make this additional flavour feasible.
Force heal and (force speed) must return to being neutral force powers. Add force telekinesis as a light side version of grip and be done with it, or substitute in something else if you wish.
The old argument against heal in open does not hold when there is no real dmg reduction, and a tapped jedi/sith dies very easily. In the old days, there was significant dmg reduction that made it hard to kill jedi/sith unless you could whittle their hp down, and heal would extend the round. It doesn't function like that in modern MBII open mode, as anyone with a brain will tell you. It makes little difference if a jedi is at 100 HP or 50, but if we add back hp damage on sabers along with heal, HP would become a more important stat for jedi/sith again. In any case, I think it would be interesting to try in dueling along with a heal lvl 3 that enables you to regen with the saber out but at great fp cost, so that you can keep dueling but have to periodically sac your fp for hp in long duels, opening you up to gunners and other force powers. We need to try new things, and sometimes new things means taking an old idea and making it better, whether its taking the MBC from 1.4.8 or this HP mechanic.
Duelists, think about it. One of the most annoying things is the eternal facehugger that can only hold W. It's a very strong strategy, and quite easy to beat people with. But if facehugging meant losing HP due to lightsaber-sizzles ticking away the HP, it makes it more intense, more risky, less of a singular mode of engagement and more of an all-out strat. Then there's nudge and mbc and saberhits. If they are also implemented, it gives the duelist so many options to play off of. Facehugging remains viable, but has good counter-play. The HP thing is another aspect of realistic lightsabering that I find I am missing more and more as the years pass, similar to the distinction between bodyhits and saberhits (because, just like it's retarded that the tip of one's lightsaber counts as a bodyhit, so too is it retarded that sticking a lightsaber into someone does 0 damage and has 0 effect. It should drain their HP! and both jedi and sith should be able to counter-act this with the neutral force power of heal).
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That is it for now. Let this be the springboard for discussion, but most important, please vocalize your support for the ideas with which you agree, so that the devs can finally get it through their thick skulls that certain things need to happen (such as consistent counters).
