Btw,
0.1.3 (prior to stagger patch) was nice. Remind me, why can't we have it back?
If you played that now after having experienced post-v1.1 for years, you'd feel how ultra inconsistent it was. All halfswings except 1 or 2 directions were ultra slow and useless, the drains were so high and PB so inconsistent you'd either lose half BP in 1hit when interrupted or be lucky and not lose anything because your saber happened to be in the way of the enemy attack even though you were initiating a swing yourself. Those kinds of things. I did test v0.1.9 with Spaghetti once when we were trying to fix saber lag bugs or something, it felt really slow because of those useless halfswings and hyper inconsistent.
Animations were far more fluid and reactive in RC1 and prior. Some questionable changes were made during my army absence, but I am not entirely sure when. Largely related to changes in rules for how sabers clash passively with each other.
In RC1 passive saber clashes would trigger blocking animations from which you could do instacounters. I did try to put that in again in v1.4.3 (with non-insta counters though) but it's bad now because i massively reduced the amount of time you'd get stuck in such a blocking anim, it's very quick now (in RC1 it was REALLY slow, which could feel good in a different era and whatever, but kinda reduces some depth).
@Tempest
The times where just swinging at someone didn't provide you blanket protection unless you also had the timing behind it (current parrying vs old parrying respectively, which allowed you to get body hits during swings in some cases).
Pre-v1.1 parries would occur inconsistently since they were reliant on sabers actually clashing. This allowed for more precise timing, and so when sabers didn't clash, mutual bodyhit exchanges would occur repeatedly (because interruptions didn't work, your swing would just continue on when you got hit during it), which drained insane BP for both sides and made "parry spam" scary. But for the sake of better consistency and actually properly bringing interruptions back in (with those blocking anims), i think it's much cleaner to have the current parrying system aswell as the current PBing system; but of course parries need to drain sufficient BP and be scary too - and by the way, the 50% bodyhit dmg i introduced in v1.4.3 wasn't even close to what we had pre-v1.1 with actual MUTUAL bodyhits (100% dmg). The old parries and PBs might have felt like they had depth, but a non-negligible part of it was actual inconsistency that you wouldn't control no matter how good you were, and that's not something i want to see back in. It felt particularly bad in open mode where you couldn't afford to just back off and redo an exchange when you got unlucky. The only thing needed now is having sufficient BP drains on current parries to avoid the "blanket protection".
The times where attacking and defending were symmetrical mechanically (both attacking and defending were all fast swings regardless of situation; saber blocking was very clear for both sides as to where to be aiming with your swings or your blocking).
Yeah, if only that was true. Saber blocking was inconsistent as fk and that was aggravated by how only 1 or 2 halfswing directions had decent speed, so all blocking came down to was looking at the ground and in 1 or 2 directions where only the fast swings would come from - and hoping that'd work, because you'd actually get a PB 50% of the time only, or less, even when you did all that. Too random. Current PB is much better to simulate "needing to aim at the incoming saber attack", which was always what people believed was needed (because then in theory, in a perfect world, your own saber should get in the way of the attack, which hardly ever worked in practice, only very inconsistently), despite only relying on angle zones with respect to the player-player axis.
Current parries are also far cleaner to simulate attack exchanges, as long as they drain enough BP. Yeah timing mattered slightly more with the old ones, but in reality that made no difference in almost all cases except when a player would get hit first with too low BP (he'd instantly die first then), because the attack from the player who got hit first would go on uninterrupted and still hit right after. The only other case where that mattered was when the player who scored a hit first would manage to barely dodge the other guy's attack when both of them were at max distance - but what would that encourage ? "shadowswinging" i.e. hit and run at long distances, try and spam to get those hits in at the correct timing ? Bleh.
I miss when sabering was straightforward and simple but still had lots of depth. The times where it wasn't mostly designed around 1v1 scenarios. The times when the only difference between styles was how hard they hit, how much damage they reduced when attacked, their animations, and the people using them.
If you really mean all that, then by all freaking means, do it already. Remove all those perks and FP/BP damage tweaks everywhere that you added in your saber branch (i dunno exactly what but just from a glance i can tell you added things like that). Please. It's literally what i wrote in SeV's thread:
"Remove all perks, meaning that the differences between styles in all situations should be only ever be the stance, AP, BP, HP dmg, swing animations & speeds, chaining differences (max swings in a chain and chaining direction restrictions). Nothing else, nothing tied to mblocks nor parries nor PBs nor semi-PBs nor NB nor force powers nor being knocked down or anything."
The times where timing actually made the biggest differences (right now you actually take less damage when hit in the starts of your swings-an interrupt- and the vast majority of damage actually just comes from being hit when you aren't holding the block button).
Not sure what you mean by all that beacuse these things should still be true. It should be non-blocking + attacking > non-blocking + not attacking > blocking + attacking > blocking, where > means "taking higher BP dmg". The only problem is that BP drains are too low, and maybe the multipliers at play for these situations aren't different enough, it could be good to make some more punishing yes.
