The combat system in Age of Conan will soon have a few significant changes made to it. The director for Age of Conan, Craig Morrison, shared a number of details on the game's official forums.
There is a lot of additional information in the forum posting that should be looked at if you're a fan of Conan. Details on the retooled PVP system and GUI changes were also detailed.
Firstly the way how crowd control and immunities work has been adjusted. This change now will cause players to break stuns, fears, roots, snares and charms when they have lost a certain amount of health. This should give players a fair chance to withstand these spells and fight back.
We are in this patch making some changes to combos which will affect melee and ranged classes. The background for this is split in two; first we saw a problem where the longest combos generated damage spikes that were too big. This is due to the combo length being the most important factor in defining the damage of the combo. Players had also taken to firing the first stages of their combos ‘into thin air’ to better land a big blow at the end. For the longest combos this strategy would deal a lot of damage - even though the majority of the strikes of the combo did not land on the target. This just didn’t feel quite right, and we felt that we needed to adjust the system to provide the right reward for executing your combos effectively, while also ensuring they aren’t cumbersome to pull in PVP.
This patch will fix these two issues by changing, across the board, lots of combos to have fewer steps. As they will take shorter time to execute, and then deal less damage, the DPS should not be significantly different. The damage you deal should merely be distributed more evenly throughout battle than before. The second change we are making is to introduce a penalty when you miss with your directional combo strikes. This penalty will increase with the number of missed strikes the following way: If you miss one strike, you get a 5% damage penalty. For each additional strike you miss, you will get another 10% penalty on the finishing blow. As an example, if you have a four-step combo (including your finishing blow) and you miss with two strikes, you will get a total of 15% damage penalty on your finishing blow.
We have also received feedback that too many combos were too long to perform, where players felt that hitting directional keys was dominating the game-play more than it should. Reducing the number of steps on the longer combos should hopefully rectify this feeling.
Obviously this move does affect the potential damage players do, and given that we also wanted to start addressing the effectiveness of healing in combat. We approached this by giving some classes utilities to make the healing of others less efficient. As a result, the Ranger, the Demonologist and the Herald of Xotli have all received healing debuff abilities.
For those who hate lengthy walls of text, take this away from it: There will be shorter combos, DPS should be around the same, and some healing abilities will be nerfed.We are in this patch making some changes to combos which will affect melee and ranged classes. The background for this is split in two; first we saw a problem where the longest combos generated damage spikes that were too big. This is due to the combo length being the most important factor in defining the damage of the combo. Players had also taken to firing the first stages of their combos ‘into thin air’ to better land a big blow at the end. For the longest combos this strategy would deal a lot of damage - even though the majority of the strikes of the combo did not land on the target. This just didn’t feel quite right, and we felt that we needed to adjust the system to provide the right reward for executing your combos effectively, while also ensuring they aren’t cumbersome to pull in PVP.
This patch will fix these two issues by changing, across the board, lots of combos to have fewer steps. As they will take shorter time to execute, and then deal less damage, the DPS should not be significantly different. The damage you deal should merely be distributed more evenly throughout battle than before. The second change we are making is to introduce a penalty when you miss with your directional combo strikes. This penalty will increase with the number of missed strikes the following way: If you miss one strike, you get a 5% damage penalty. For each additional strike you miss, you will get another 10% penalty on the finishing blow. As an example, if you have a four-step combo (including your finishing blow) and you miss with two strikes, you will get a total of 15% damage penalty on your finishing blow.
We have also received feedback that too many combos were too long to perform, where players felt that hitting directional keys was dominating the game-play more than it should. Reducing the number of steps on the longer combos should hopefully rectify this feeling.
Obviously this move does affect the potential damage players do, and given that we also wanted to start addressing the effectiveness of healing in combat. We approached this by giving some classes utilities to make the healing of others less efficient. As a result, the Ranger, the Demonologist and the Herald of Xotli have all received healing debuff abilities.
There is a lot of additional information in the forum posting that should be looked at if you're a fan of Conan. Details on the retooled PVP system and GUI changes were also detailed.