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[cirn0]

I'd like to discuss the state of the game regarding the time it takes to kill in AoP combat.

First aid, superstims and healing rate in conjunction with the very high armor values have resulted in unintended supermen which are able to sustain a lot of fire.
Currently, you either bypass or  find the weapon with the most hit the gaps / best AP modifier for ammo when dealing with normal damage. That's an mistake on our part.

Within now till the next season I'd like to implement these changes to address to the design:
- All normal damage type weapons will be applying bleed damage that is determined by the Ammo. Each ammo will have a direct damage % as well as a bleed %.
For example ( Really just an example, numbers are emphasized to make a point ):

JHP ammo : 80% bleed,  70% direct  ( 150% total )
Ball ammo : 50% bleed,  70% direct, -10% DR, -4 DT ( 120% total )
AP ammo : 80% direct, -30% DR, -10 DT ( 80% total )

- Reduce normal resistance of armors by ~ 20% as that damage will be mostly converted to bleed.
Generally the goal is to increase lethality without pushing it towards instant kill scenarios.

I feel the change to the armors and ammo values will increase viability of a lot of the weapons that are currently short changed due to lack of armor penetrating abilities. Also gives me more methods of making weapons function uniquely and ultimately fun to play.


Combat Healing:

Healing in combat is under a fine scope, and I don't have a particularly strong opinion on it as it is both important attribute to sustaining longer fights. But it is sometimes over the top when healing rate + first aid + super stims are involved. I would like some feedback regarding this. Bandage % is already in consideration for a increase in length, while moving food healing rate buffs to recover from banadaged state faster. I am also entertaining the idea of losing max health points that is only recoverable slowly and not stim / first aid able ( say 20% of damage taken is hard health damage that will recover at X per minute ).  This way, a failed assault no longer feels like you did absolutely nothing to the opponent but rather you've drained them of bandage, which buys time, as well as some hard hit-points.

These changes are geared towards the outpost fights which we want to last for around 1 hour, and eventually exhaustive HQ fights which would be fought with immense attrition. 

As always, I welcome and read all feedback and opinions!

[FrankenStone]

well the idea in general is okey , but the problem i see is balancing it ...

from your example everybody will use JHP ammunition , bleed works fine to kill people u know , even faster than with straight bullets ... i think hollow point bullets should do more bleed but only tu unarmored targets since the rounds wouldnt get into some heavy armor why should there be bleed ?

if u add such thing u need to overwork armor stats aswell , maybe leatherarmor more weak against all bullettypes than combatarmor but imo its really hard to balance well ... otherwise dont forget that u have tourniques aswell as item or bandages , which will take the role of super stimpacks then if u add an overall bleed ...

but all in all i like the idea of general bleeding but the problem will always be the same , people will go with the weapons which have the highest bleed / dmg outcome , this is just a balancing issue ... and imo if u change the system again , the only thing u get is more work ... if you are not happy with some dmg modifiers at the moment u can change them easily .

[S.T.A.L.K.E.R]

What about melee? Will they be able to cause bleed? (other than ripper)

also how about fixing some things before adding new things? (Grenades) :V

[MARXMAN]

What about melee? Will they be able to cause bleed? (other than ripper)

also how about fixing some things before adding new things? (Grenades) :V

I think Cirn0 is right in assuming that the thing 85% of the playerbase uses to kill things needs reworking before grenades.

[cirn0]

What about melee? Will they be able to cause bleed? (other than ripper)

also how about fixing some things before adding new things? (Grenades) :V

Which grenades

[3.14]

At this moment any good character can do about 150 'instant' damage, be it a big gun burst (or two), sniper headshot or 3-4 unaimed shots... some do 200 or 350 but only with luck or low range. 
With 6 people attacking at the same time 3 players will die in the first 5 seconds of the fight - that's why swarms win 9/10.

If guns do more bleed then damage then the first to die will have some extra 5 sec. time-to-live before the bleed kicks in. That's good.

But if every gun will do bleed, I'd want the bleed-o-mater to use numbers.

Also Fast Metabolism will be a pain to have - now you can pump healing rate to 75 or more with food to counter some of the bleed. Without HR food and with bleed all over the place toons with fast meta. will be as crippeled. 

[Myakot]

"I rike it" for the exception of that only all normal weapons will deal bleed, what about explosive ones? Shrapnel is a nasty thing.
Also won't that much bleed counter the purpose of salvaged PA? It has resists only vs DT mod, but not for tiny shrapnel pieces for some reason, which will apply bleed effect.

What about making super-stims like in original Fallout? Just make them have after-effects (more serious ones).
I love the idea about hard-HP. I love pretty much any fighting game-related concept

[paragon]

TL;DR version:
0. Bleed is not IRL bleed. It's magic
1. Problem you stated is not existent, because:
a. Tanks are only tanks because players do not use intended game mechanics.
b. Bleed is untested and not used because players do not use intended game mechanics (it could be actually very good).
2. Making bleed effect the property of all normal damage type is not the best approach IMO. Solution:
a) Dedicated weapon tree
b) New weapon skill (or not used skill e.g. ODM)
c) New mechanics which will be awailable outside of SGs
3. From player side of view I believe that balancing the current system is more important:
e.g. Damage / defence system at armors is developed much better than at other servers, still it's far from perfect. Damage types can be even more differentiated.
I don't see anything bad in having same amount of weapons (or even less), but balanced.
4. Have nothing against damaging max HP / faster bandage for now (but it's not really needed. Battles even with >8 players rarely last longer than 3 minutes if they're actually fighting and not staying in line and waiting)

First, I'd like to say that in-game "bleed" is not the same as in-real life bleed, because armor doesn't defend from it even if it defends from bullet damage. So let's look at it without "reality" but as in-game effect X.

Current tank character state:
Cirn0, I'm afraid you have this opinion relying on current playerbase. It's irrelevant.
Currently tanks can survive sustained fire only for reason of unorganized / inexperienced players / low player base.

In case of concentrated fire (2+ people) with correct build and equipment you'll die in 2-3 animation times (or 100 AP) regardless of SS. (I play one-bullet-one-kill shooters as Insurgency often on top of the board so I have no problems with reaction to apply FA). It's hard to kill only if target is close to cover and can heal itself but you can't follow or... you're playing the game wrong (implying team organization / character build / equipment).

There're no invulnerable characters although it's true that some of them are harder to kill, they still can be put out of the combat depending on which leadership bonuses they are using (crippling) and independently: by knockdown, knockouts, autoknockdown, winding, high penetration weapons, even high poison.

I'm saying this as the user and creator of the "tank" characters which are in action for months. And I didn't meet other tank characters in other factions out of this rule.

If you have any example which can disprove it, I'd gladly discuss it.

Bleed effect on the gameplay in theory:

Mitigating clear damage to bleed damage can give you more abilities to heal / get into the cover and heal. It also will take you to use 1 additional item / skill (+100 AP), which will be safe only if you have that cover / friendlies who are covering your position. Bleed will make you to use AP for healing more often and 2x times more. Combat will become slower if you have a cover and faster if not, more close combat (/flamers /fire) to finish such situation could be required.

UPDATE:

Personally I don't know any instance of playing for high bleed damage. Probably old experienced players are too conservative and new players are not creative enough for it. I heard that you wanted to exclude "bleed chance" and rebalance it by the actual bleed value: it may work as well because you'll need 1 less LDR bonus to use bleed with max potential (now you need 2 LDR bonus leaving you with only 1 defencive which is very aggressive approach).

In general by your decision you're going to introduce damage-over-time ignoring-armor effect.. which makes ability to heal more important than high armor values.
The question here is "Do you want to have this effect to be game-determining?" Or probably it's better to introduce dedicated type of weapon which be specialized in such effect instead of applying so-called-bleed to current weapon base?

I would be actually great to test out the current usefulness of the bleed damage. But I need 4 clients: 2 FTL and 2 followers in minimum to do that and I don't have them. I know that DSR bleed is around decent (makes me worry) and spear bleed is nasty (makes me cry), ripper damage is awful (makes me die) (I'm stating it by overall feeling, result of concrete output of such weapons).

> This way, a failed assault no longer feels like you did absolutely nothing to the opponent but rather you've drained them of bandage, which buys time, as well as some hard hit-points.

This one could happen currently only during the intensive unusually long fight, we had such one and only 1 in my memory when we did enough damage to proper enemy tank characters so they couldn't heal efficiently anymore (I think Siman posted it, it was v-tec-family Gun Runners fight).

Now again back to tank problem:

What do I call by tank character is basically any character which is going to take damage: so it's everyone except: max range snipers (DSR) and sneakers.
There are no other characters which should not care about armor, so they all are tanks and MUST be ready to stack defence modifiers and health by any mean SPECIAL(strength, endurance, charisma, intelligence (to have high FA / DOC), luck), SKILLS(FA/DOC), perks(Life Giver, Nerves of Steel, Critical Agility, Adrenaline Rush, Toughness, Armor efficiency, Medicine Doctor, Faith Healer (8 tank perks)).
Now honestly I've never seen a full tank character like this and can't tell about it's performance, but it's obvious that tank efficiency is not linear and because of being alive doesn't mean being useful there's no particular sense to do it until you have some masochistic pleasure from taking damage.

Spoiler for Hiden:

Currently we have 6 main damage types, and 2 armor types for tank characters: SCAmk3, FLA. I don't consider MAmk2 as close to SCAmk3 and Tesla as weak against normal. I'll put in brackets armor defence to each type correspondingly. I'm not going to consider Adrenaline Rush (average lower than +5 / 2%), also don't forget alternative to use psycho +10/0%.

Normal (18/50%, +0/15% if voodoo) - all bursting weapons (MGs), most of the snipers (Except non-existent bleed snipers / partially BG snipers), shotguns, AR, most of cripplers (which have very important role even if do no damage at all), all melee.
Tanks are effective against it (countered by BG snipers, cripplers, melee). Some weapons are very dangerous: 14mm pistol, SAW, PKS.
Tank in FLA (12/50%) is vulnerable for combat MGs (SAW, PKS, Avenger, MG42, something else).

Laser (5/45%) - Gatling, Laser Rifle... mhh... that's basically it. Tank is laughing at LR.
Tank in FLA (6/45%) is vulnerable to LR.

Fire (12/55%) - scorcher, flamer, grenades. Tank is very vulnerable to all of this.
Tank in FLA.... unkillable.

Plasma (12/50%) - rad rifle, SMG. Tank is vulnerable to this.
Tank in FLA (7%/25%) is very vulnerable to rad SMG.

Electric - forget it.

Explode - grenades (has nasty effects / bleeding), RL, Milkor.
Tank is effective against it in any armor, except RL.


As the result, tank is not a tank ):

I've put TL;DR version in the beginning of the post

[Anza]

I kinda agree with FrankenStone, this new features will require a lot of balancing, and will make so much work. It would be easier to balance weapons as they are now imo, although I love the bleeding idea 

Tanks are fine too, if you think they can stand too much dam, maybe nerf psycho a bit, but I think armors are OK, as in any CA, you still die fast with focus fire, and in PA, you still die if they have the proper weapons to counter it. As Parangon said, it is more a player side issue than a gameplay issue.

[SnowCrash]

I was going to suggest the same about damage reducing the max HP and only able to be recovered over time (may be related to HR).
Lets say by default every 10%-15% of the damage taken will reduce your maxHP, and lets call it Lethal Damage

(New Weapon trait) Lethal Weapon: deals 10% more of his damage as Lethal damage per rank.

Weapons that should have this trait:
-Traps: this will add an additional factor for traps that will make it useful to weaken your enemies before the combat start. Some traps should be even deal 75% of lethal damage (2-5 ranks)
-Plasma guns/grenades (I imagine plasma causing serious wounds) (1-2 ranks)
-Flamers and fire based weapons (burn damage should takes longer to heal) (1 rank as they are they are performing fine)
-Rockets/grenades
-BG Snipers and large calibre guns

Also, ammo modifiers could affect this value, i think that AP ammunition should have less lethal damage amount.

[nailbrain]

weps vs armor balance is somewhat ok what SG guns lack is proper ammo
and the lack of dmg variety is the cause of the brutal norm DR stacking
plasma rifle must have the stats of turbo plasma and TP itself must represent the fabled T3
electrical dmg is noexistent pulse pist and el. rifle are worst AOP jokes
pulse rifle is missing
Entire EW is limited to 4 weapons LasRifleExt , El.Smg , TurboPlasma , G.Laser and 2 of this weps are  only lootable
this narrows the reliable choices for PVP ot LR and ESMG

[cirn0]

Easily stacking to the cap DR isn't acceptable. This is our fault again, with all the compounding buffs ect.

The weapon and armour balance is terrible to work with. It forces a meta of using only the highest armour penetrating weapon & ammo combination. This really limits the ability to balance & diversify weapons without mindlessly adding hit the gaps or making the ammo with higher AP characteristics.

So it's becomes an arms race to get armour bypassing crit, and on the defender side crit resistance against armour bypass. The DT values of all the armours and weapons are a large part of the equation thats been neglected and overshadowed by DR. 

The normal DR ranges are too extreme and unpredictable, without information any target may have an additional 40% DR to normal from drugs. There isn't anything intuitive about that nor is it good design, its a memory/guessing game for veterans and complete mystery for new players.

If every weapon needed hit the gaps to be a contender, why not simply just remove that from the equation.

The redirection of the excessive Normal DR to Bleed, for the time being, is what I perceive as the least drastic transition. Bleed itself will be reworked to be more intuitive, where yes, it is magic armour bypassing at the minute, but It will be change to simply be a portion of your damage dealt as described in the first post. Just treat bleed as another damage type.

So if a hit for 100 damage after all combat calculations with an ammo with 70% bleed, 70% direct would do 70 bleed, and 70 damage.

To expand on the ammo doing component damage, it is in place to also expand to allow weapons to do hybrid damage such as Fire/ Explosive, Normal/Explosive or even Plasma/Normal.

[SnowCrash]

Hybrid damage seems that can be a nice addition to certain weapons. On the top of my head i think electro/rad smg doing normal+electric, frag grenades dealing normal+explo, power fist/cattleprod/energy spear doing normal+electric, plasma grenade doing plasma+explo, plasma spear dealing plasma+normal.

Other factor that we must consider its poison. As much i love poison my foes i will like a more progressive poison system, instead of a static debuff when you are poisoned. May be make it work like the current bleed system, the more poison you have the strongest the debuff will become. And also we need more weapons and traps that inflict poison 

[nailbrain]

but focusing on bleed will promote even more tanknines and race toward putting as much bulets possible regardless of anything just to stack the effect
in effect this will make fast shooting low ap weps even more powerfull and slow shooting hi ap cost weps like snipers and its subderivates even worse
and of now sg sniper/sniperlikes are the worst in dat regard and they already have bleed
now ppl imagine the all favourite deagle stacking unaimed knockdowns and bleed

and consistently avoiding the subject of current EW state is not good

[cirn0]

and consistently avoiding the subject of current EW state is not good

Believe me, I have plans for everything, it is just whether I have the time to make a public statement about them and have focused discussions about one topic at a time.

I didn't think of these changes just today, or this week, but over the months. I simply posted today. Everything you're concerned with and more, I've been concerned with.

The EW problems are a lot simpler and really don't require any discussion to improve.

[FrankenStone]

I'd like to discuss the state of the game regarding the time it takes to kill in AoP combat.

First aid, superstims and healing rate in conjunction with the very high armor values have resulted in unintended supermen which are able to sustain a lot of fire.
Currently, you either bypass or  find the weapon with the most hit the gaps / best AP modifier for ammo when dealing with normal damage. That's an mistake on our part.
[...]
These changes are geared towards the outpost fights which we want to last for around 1 hour, and eventually exhaustive HQ fights which would be fought with immense attrition. 
[...]

what i dont get cirn0 is that u say u have dmg stackers and on the other hand u want fights which last more than 1 hour ? i didnt even noticed it at first read :p u are controverse man ... also i would like to add that in AoP it isnt that bad with dmg stackers , i have seen other servers were it was really annoying but the thing u describe is a problem which comes from low playerbase , unexperienced players , most of all unorganised players and not from gamemechanics if people dont know how to use cover behind a wall or any spot its not the gamemechanics fault its a players fault. why dont you try to change the current system ? u could proove your magic skills with making current system better , because i dont see any changes with making everything new , like i said it will even bring more drama than u think we have already ... plus all known issues , belong to some weapon stats and ammunition modifiers [balancing stuff], are known to comunity , thx to heavy testing . i dont see any point in changing the whole system before fixing the current one ... because i dont see any damage resistance stackers or people that die too fast or not cant really find out what u tryin to say with your post because its kinda contradictory . u wanna nerf tanking but in the same time u want outpost fights which last for an hour ? maybe you should add some pvp training area for noobs with tipps how to use cover , set hotkeys , how to use voice communication etc...

[paragon]

Even if you will have capped DR, as I described in my example it won't help you. Lethality right now is about fine, you can die in less than 5 seconds if 2-3 best guns applied. If you want to have it different way, rebalance armor DR/ ammo modifiers, so you won't need the best Ammo Penetration capabilities to use weapons.

If you want new damage type: fine, but there's no need to connect it to current Tank not-existent problem.

Probably ability to heal invest into tank capabilities much more than stacking DR right now.

[naossano]

I was a bit afraid at the introduction of the OP post, but i see he support attrition and longer fight, which is great.
Longer fight is one of the highlight of the server and it fit well with the size of the city. Instead of summoning a dozen of fast relog that last one minute of the fight, you can keep the one character one hour and fight another character that has good resistance too.

If we except Melee/sneak, most characters avoid instant kill, which is really awesome.

[Einstein]

I did not read all the reviews after cirno questions.

But here are two ideas to solve the problem of superman and the only-using-armor-penetrating weapon ammo:

About the superman: Why not put a timer (like drugs) to the stimpacks and superstimpacks (say, in the case of normal stimpacks time is much smaller than for large ones). That would avoid super healing induced by superstimpacks.

And on the fighting with weapons and ammunition with good AP:
Perhaps already implemented, but do not feel that the higher the AP should make less damage to light armor? (I mean, jacket, combat jacket, etc).
When I say this I am thinking of two ways that a bullet can affect: penetrative, and impact.

I think it would be logical that the ammunition wich is not AP, has far more impact on light armor, while heavy it would be absorbed. And in the case of ammunition penetrative if did not have the expected resistance bullet should spend less damage.

This would make the players to go with two types of ammunition.

Other ideas on grenades:

  should be able to throw grenades through the windows from afar, inward of a building.

It should be possible to launch grenades from one side to It should be possible to launch grenades from side to side of a building (if the force reached). There are other items that do not let grenades pass and it's ridiculous, but I can not remember now.

Putting timer grenades? It would be possible? The delay exploiting most is one of the main causes of which are not used.


Long life to devs of AOP!! We all love u a lot! 

[paragon]

SS are much less effective than FA, you can NOT survive using SS. Unless you're in PA...