RIP riposte, Thank God


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Post Tuesday, 31st August 2021, 20:18

RIP riposte, Thank God

While I'd love to see Riposte go onto gloves as a rarely generating ego like archery, and even go in the way it is now, the mechanic has something of a flaw. If your shield value is above 0, your successful blocks will eliminate any extra damage riposte could potentially apply. A flat damage increase was the best solution for now because I wasn't about to stop playing long blades on formicids
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Post Friday, 10th September 2021, 23:30

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

So long blades are just maces that can cut hydra heads now? That's quite a bit less interesting.

I get that not everyone liked the riposte mechanic, but I think having the two blades skills synergize with dexterity builds was quite nice, since they cross-train together. It made hybrid long- and short- blade builds an attractive strategy. If riposte doesn't come back, I hope we can at least get some other dex synergy (not stealth-related) for long-blades. Maybe parry? Something like, if a melee attack bypasses your EV defense, you roll another EV and a to-hit (not an actual attack), and if both succeed, you parry the melee attack, max one successful parry between consecutive player turns.

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Post Saturday, 11th September 2021, 04:45

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

It seems to me like increasing the base damage was an improvement over having a strange riposte mechanism that suffered a lot in it's interaction with shields, but I was also confused why the mechanism couldn't have simply taken place in advance of the shield block check.

Monster swings at you, you evade --- you riposte.
*Check for shield block irrelevant, you already evaded*
Monster swings at you, you fail to evade -- you don't riposte
*Check for shield block

Instead, it seems like we had:
Monster swings at you, check for shield block, if blocked stop.
If shield block failed, check for evasion, and if true then riposte.

Unless I'm missing something, couldn't it have been a simple adjustment so that riposte didn't clash with shields?

Currently, I have noticed the arbitrary selection between say an evening star or a double blade. The choice between those seems more like it comes down to, do you want to be stabbing or cleaving? If stabbing is the answer, then I wonder how high STR will be, because if it's not very high, either the swap to a double blade won't perform very well or you'll be missing DEX for stealth. The double-sword seems now like a weaker backup for a stabber if they need just a bit more armor piercing capability, but not as good as a primary weapon in terms of options and cross-training.

Roll back the clock, we had an interesting solution that differentiated the weapons (granted not with a huge impact), called Weighting so damage was based on %'s of dex and str per weapon type. It made a lot of sense to me, and given the argument that it was removed because it had too little impact, I think it should have just had it's impact increased. I remember after the change, where STR boosted damage from a dagger as it did a great mace, it became a pretty silly choice not to almost always use a high accuracy weapon at low skill and with big STR boosting for at least the opening/mid game. Sorry, it's an old rant, but I see it coming full circle back again.

Now, making shields not getting benefited so much from STR was a smart move, back in the right direction.
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Post Saturday, 11th September 2021, 13:56

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

"do something with shields"

do what?

If you check dodging before blocking, and you evade a missile you could have instead blocked and reflected, then shields take a hit. I'm almost exclusively playing long blade formicids with high shields and I want my reflection chance left alone.

Re. other suggestions , parry, etc. Even a weapon of protection has to be used before the benefit shows up. A weapon with a blanket chance to outright block an attack just because you're wielding does not sound like a good idea to me. And really, how many defenses are you going to stack? Reflection, AC, EV, SH, on top of that add even a 5% chance for that weapon to stop attacks and its super OP.
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Post Saturday, 11th September 2021, 14:16

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

twelwe wrote:"do something with shields"

do what?

If you check dodging before blocking, and you evade a missile you could have instead blocked and reflected, then shields take a hit. I'm almost exclusively playing long blade formicids with high shields and I want my reflection chance left alone.

Re. other suggestions , parry, etc. Even a weapon of protection has to be used before the benefit shows up. A weapon with a blanket chance to outright block an attack just because you're wielding does not sound like a good idea to me. And really, how many defenses are you going to stack? Reflection, AC, EV, SH, on top of that add even a 5% chance for that weapon to stop attacks and its super OP.


How about then, in the case of a missile, shield is checked before evasion. In the case of a melee attack against you EV is checked before shields. It wouldn't solve missiles getting reflected from range 1, but it would all the rest since you're not going to riposte at range anyhow right?

Beyond that, there's no technical reason a riposte or reflection couldn't trigger based upon "what would have happened" if both ev and block are checked all the time even when one of them worked before the other. It would be weird though, because riposte would then just trigger when you blocked "but would have evaded if you had not blocked". I don't hink it's much weirder than the fixed "you always block before you evade". Intuitively, it seems like if you were going to evade something, you'd evade it first before blocking, not "oh shoot I missed blocking that with my shield, let me jump out of the way" - but that's just flavor I suppose.

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Post Saturday, 11th September 2021, 16:10

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

I never saw the shield timing as a big deal; it was just an extra layer of defense on top of evasion and whatever perks you might have gotten from a riposte. If the shield preempted the process, you didn't take any damage anyway, and could keep attacking normally. If the shield didn't stop the attack, you'd have the same chances to dodge and riposte as you would if you weren't using a shield. Sure, it would have been nice if you could riposte off a shield block, but even without it, having the shield was just an extra bonus chance to avoid damage, and unless you were doing something silly like standing around waiting to dodge attacks wearing an amulet of the acrobat, that was a good thing.
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Post Saturday, 11th September 2021, 18:44

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

Thats kind of how I feel, too. I was still playing long blade shield formicids while fully aware that riposte was taking a hit from my blocking. Thats why I want to see the effect going on gloves just like archery. The mechanic is fine, it just doesn't "belong" on long blades in this form
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Post Sunday, 12th September 2021, 01:15

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

Nekoatl wrote:I never saw the shield timing as a big deal; it was just an extra layer of defense on top of evasion and whatever perks you might have gotten from a riposte. If the shield preempted the process, you didn't take any damage anyway, and could keep attacking normally. If the shield didn't stop the attack, you'd have the same chances to dodge and riposte as you would if you weren't using a shield. Sure, it would have been nice if you could riposte off a shield block, but even without it, having the shield was just an extra bonus chance to avoid damage, and unless you were doing something silly like standing around waiting to dodge attacks wearing an amulet of the acrobat, that was a good thing.


This is also how I basically feel, except now I don't feel as bad when I find a great artefact long blade, but feel the pull to use maces/axes anyhow. I have a proposed solution to consider that would preserve distinction and seems like it wouldn't be hard to try out:

That would be to give long blades either a reduced stabbing effect (in terms of damage), or a chance to stab (lower than short blades), or both. This would let stabbers have a path forward to be able to deal with higher AC enemies (though not as effectively as an all-out melee focus), without back-peddling out of stealth, or however they built their character (as much), and many degrees of variation in-between.

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Post Sunday, 12th September 2021, 03:24

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

When I first started playing crawl, long blades did function as stabbing weapons with a lower multiplier, but they couldn't compete with short blades when performing a stab. I can't imagine a situation where this approach were attempted again that didn't result in either stabbers ignoring the weaker long blade multiplier because it doesn't compare to that of short blades, or short blades being ignored because the combination of the weaker multiplier but higher base damage from long blades outclassed short blades. I mean, if you have a means of (semi-)consistently setting up stabs, it's going to be better to just use short blades, or there's no reason for short blades to exist. And if you can't, then it's better to use a weapon type that isn't marginally weaker than other weapons when not stabbing.

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Post Sunday, 12th September 2021, 15:16

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

Nekoatl wrote:When I first started playing crawl, long blades did function as stabbing weapons with a lower multiplier, but they couldn't compete with short blades when performing a stab. I can't imagine a situation where this approach were attempted again that didn't result in either stabbers ignoring the weaker long blade multiplier because it doesn't compare to that of short blades, or short blades being ignored because the combination of the weaker multiplier but higher base damage from long blades outclassed short blades. I mean, if you have a means of (semi-)consistently setting up stabs, it's going to be better to just use short blades, or there's no reason for short blades to exist. And if you can't, then it's better to use a weapon type that isn't marginally weaker than other weapons when not stabbing.


I'd imagine a flow could go something like this:

Stealthy character is going for sleep stabs with their short blade wielded. If they get a stab, they go on to the next (repeat). If a monster wakes up, and several others all wake up also as a result, there aren't going to be any sleep stabs most likely and the types of monsters could be varied. If they are all highly evasive, the character might leave a short blade wielded, but supposing one or more are heavily armoured, they might need their long blade out to finish the fight. A stabbing build is likely to try to find ways to get things to be confused, distracted, or lose track of the player. It's not as good as a sleep stab which is an almost guaranteed kill, but they have a lesser chance to stab against the wandering monsters. It then becomes a tactical decision if the player wants to go for a powerful stab with less chance of success against the wandering monster(s), or try their hand with their long blade and maybe get some less effective stabs, but if they fail, they'll at least be guaranteed to do a bit more damage. There could be lots of opportunities for interesting tactical decisions what to use and why. The proposal doesn't have to stop at a simple rewind to a prior game state. If could be further detailed in the interest of being made more interesting or fixing players being tempted to go all one way or the other; for example, perhaps long blades wouldn't get nearly the same impact on a sleep stab as a short blade, even though they would be improved for stabbing against distracted monsters.
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Post Sunday, 12th September 2021, 16:28

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

My dream scenario is long blades have their base damage reverted and have a chance to apply a scorch-like debuff on hit corresponding with the weapon ego. Would open long blades up to spellcasters
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Post Sunday, 12th September 2021, 17:58

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

Spellcasters should melee with magical staves, to the extent that they should melee at all. Long blades are STR-dependent for damage, scorch-debuff or no, and spellcasters generally need to invest in INT, not STR.
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Post Monday, 13th September 2021, 02:20

Re: RIP riposte, Thank God

The idea is to mix in melee with an ego debuff desirable for any elemental damage. It isn't "for" any build. You know what, nevermind, I'm not tossing out ideas like this outside IRC anymore
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