PvP, Damage, and Crits

[S4NTA]

Hello everyone,

I've been playing the server a lot for a few days, and decided it was time to stop by the forums and make a suggestion for pvp balance. First of all, I know this may be a controversial topic, especially among the established players in the community and those considered to be a top tier fighter, but here it is anyway. Basically I noticed fairly early on the optimal way to fight; hold space-bar, click when you fall. This is unfortunate as it makes movement much less important and strafing nearly obsolete. Sometimes its possible to scrape through some fights without critting, but you need to heavily out skill your opponent to do so. In my own experience, going for crits would get me far more wins than trying to out strafe them, even though at times I would get 2-4x as many fully charged hits as them strafing, just to be out-damaged in a few hits. I believe I can say with consensus from the server that going for crits is by far the best way to fight right now.

So why are crits so strong on loka? From my testing it seemed crits were doing 2.5-3 hearts of damage, whereas regular swings 1.5 hearts. This is double the damage in some cases; why strafe when you can double your damage with spacebar, in the same amount of time? I was looking for threads on this subject and found something similar to what I noticed when joining: https://lokamc.com/forums/index.php?threads/pvp-damage.3399/. In this thread, galaxy says that damage is too high, and while I see where he is coming from, I think the problem are crits, as mentioned. 33% damage increase is great, but it seems to have made crits much too powerful. Without using any crits, you can still kill someone in 6-7 hits, not long at all. Without critting, pvp feels great, time to kill is pretty low, you aren't forced to throw down a full hotbar of health pots just because of lucky/unlucky positioning, potting accurately becomes more important, each player can focus on aiming and strafing increasing the fights complexity, and skill cap. With crits, there is no need to try to juke out your opponent, aim isn't as intensive, and there is generally just less strafing and complex movement. It's not as fun. This is why crits need their damage nerfed.

With ideal and balanced pvp mechanics, players would rely on aim/strafe/potting and pvp knowledge for the majority of the fight, as they always have, without the need of holding space and standing still. Crits would deal an extra half heart, by no means making them worthless, on the contrary, with decreased damage they would still be very useful. Hitting someone next to a wall or potting, being right next to them, getting the first hit as a crit or whenever you see an opportunity would all give you an edge. However, they wouldn't be so broken as to make it essential all the time. Crits like this would allow for more complex fights with strafing and more difficult aim, getting in crits at just the right moment.

Well, i'm not a coder but being optimistic it could be as easy as changing the damage multiplier of crits lower to deal less damage (half heart more than a regular hit, never a heart more). Making this change would be great for the server, making fights more skill based, potentially bringing in more competitive players and not making new ones turn around after trying it out. It would be a more enjoyable PvP experience for everyone.

 

[Thanielle]

I think this suggestion is a great idea, I'd love to see it added to the server!

 

[Skuhoo]

I'll start by saying that none of Loka's features or design choices should be considered off-limits or too controversial to talk about. We highly value criticism and ideas, even if we feel a player is wrong about something.

Now, onto your post:

Basically I noticed fairly early on the optimal way to fight; hold space-bar, click when you fall. This is unfortunate as it makes movement much less important and strafing nearly obsolete.

It's correct that 1.8 pvp skills won't directly translate to Loka's 1.9 combat, but to say that movement and strafing is "nearly obsolete" is just plain false. The movement is different, but it's 100% still there. Prominent pvpers on Loka have learned to both dodge and chain crits, and their abilities at doing so shouldn't be ignored.

why strafe when you can double your damage with spacebar, in the same amount of time?

When you're in the air you lose the ability to strafe, making yourself highly predictable. You can easily back out of someone's reach if they're jumping for a crit, and then use the opportunity to start a combo on them (@_Adzy in particular is pretty good at this). You can't back out of someone going for regular hits, as that just makes it really easy for your opponent to combo you.

aim isn't as intensive

If anything, aiming with crits is more difficult because it adds another axis to the equation because of the need to jump. Instead of just moving your mouse left or right, you also need to move it up and down to crit. I'd also argue that our current system rewards faster potting more than any other version due to how quickly you can lose health during a fight.

With ideal and balanced pvp mechanics, players would rely on aim/strafe/potting and pvp knowledge for the majority of the fight, as they always have, without the need of holding space and standing still.

Crits are very much an important part of vanilla 1.9+ pvp. If you play on any 1.9+ pvp server you'll see that everyone primarily goes for crits, so it isn't as if Loka is changing the meta. Due to the nature of Conquest fights, players need to die easily or it becomes a game of seeing which side can more quickly take out the objective while ignoring their enemies, as was the case between 1.9.2's release and Loka adding the 33% damage boost. Just like 1.8 -> 1.9 pvp, Loka's 33% damage boost is difficult to get used to, but that doesn't make it bad. Galaxy is a great example of someone who came to Loka not used to the 33% boost, but adapted to it and became of the server's best pvpers. Take some time to practice and experience it more and I guarantee you'll see why it's there.


On a side note: Wow, the suggestions forum has been surprisingly active the past week, which is awesome.

 

[Adzy]

I agree with Skuhoo, Strafing is still there and not everybody goes for crits, sure a lot do but not all. And in conquest battles you see mixtures of different types of movements when players pvp. Aim especially is hard when you are trying to fight a group of players at once and you’re getting hit around of pots and trying to deal damage. The 33% damage being removed would make it so hardly anyone died in a conquest fight, right now it makes people worry about keeping an eye on their hearts or whether they should run into a group of 6 alone.

 

[SirMaltier]

I think you guys might have misread, his suggestion is to lower damage on critical hits (if I didn't misread personally), not to lower the 33%. About that, I've already spoken to crypt on it briefly on the possibilities of it, and from a coding perspective there is not anything that says this hit is a crit, so reducing damage from crits is not possible.

Maybe alternatively there could be something done with code that maximizes the damage a player can do, not sure if that's possible either. (I'm not personally familiar with any of minecraft's code so I can't say anything for certain).

However, on that note I'd also be okay with lower damage , the max damage from a crit is 4 hearts, and this does sometimes leads to death from reasonable health (7 hearts) in 2 hits, which is pretty tilting

 

[Mrp]

S4nta makes a lot of really good points in his post. I do think, however, once you participate in more conquest fights you will see that crits are much more difficult to combo and land in a sea of people fighting. I think you are basing most of your thoughts off of the many duels i've seen you doing on loka, dueling is great and fun but the reason we up the damage is for conquest fights. While crits do a lot of damage you quickly learn how to move out of a combo, ender pearl away, use thorns to shake off a chain etc. In massive fights involving 20-30 people it becomes very difficult to drop people in general, lowering the damage would only prolong deaths and make fights drag out longer then they should. Again I think once you fight some other people where you don't outnumber your opponents by an egregious number you will really start to enjoy the amount of damage you can do if you land some quick accurate hits. This is just my opinion but I agree with skubert, just give it some more time and see how you like it after a couple months of playing. Believe me, when strom showed up in Kalros critting my life away I was skeptical of the system same as you but over time I adjusted and them coming made me a lot better even though I still suck

Really like the suggestion though, talking to the Jotun peeps in voice has been great. Glad you guys are enjoying the server and keep up the suggestions, we are in no way perfect or think we have everything figured out the best way it can possibly be. All feedback is great for the server.

 

[S4NTA]

Thanks for all the feedback.

It's correct that 1.8 pvp skills won't directly translate to Loka's 1.9 combat, but to say that movement and strafing is "nearly obsolete" is just plain false. The movement is different, but it's 100% still there. Prominent pvpers on Loka have learned to both dodge and chain crits, and their abilities at doing so shouldn't be ignored.



When you're in the air you lose the ability to strafe, making yourself highly predictable. You can easily back out of someone's reach if they're jumping for a crit, and then use the opportunity to start a combo on them (@_Adzy in particular is pretty good at this). You can't back out of someone going for regular hits, as that just makes it really easy for your opponent to combo you.

This is true, crits can be dodged, by backing up as someone goes for one or trying to side step them, and this seems fine but in actual gameplay anyone pvping at the top level knows it's not enough and actually trying to go for crits is much more valuable than trying to dodge them. Take Malen for example, you can try to dodge crits from him all you want but once he lands one crit he's done way more damage than you and he will continue to crit chain you out. Critting is still far more effective than trying to counter it and thus spacebar is much more effective (yes I have fought adzy).

If anything, aiming with crits is more difficult because it adds another axis to the equation because of the need to jump. Instead of just moving your mouse left or right, you also need to move it up and down to crit. I'd also argue that our current system rewards faster potting more than any other version due to how quickly you can lose health during a fight.

This I disagree with almost fundamentally. I think getting the first hit while trying to crit *IS* more difficult. But just that. There isn't any movement on your end to adjust from, just theirs. You need the initial *flick* aim to hit them, give them some knockback, then easily just continue to chain crits after the first, as the knockback you've done will make it very simple to get another hit, reducing the overall skill required to actually kill someone. Being able to consistently track your opponent over the course of a fight while landing hits multiple times allows for more than just the first hit to matter. Many of times I've gone into a fight where someone can just take the momentum entirely and barely have to do any hard work after starting their combo as their opponent is constantly potting, so I have to disagree with you. As for potting itself, any squishy kit makes quickly repotting more difficult, which with strong crits this is obviously the case and reducing the damage (via crits) will reduce the speed needed to grab potions from your inventory, so I see where you are coming from there. However the skill needed for potting right now consists primarily of that; quickly unloading pots onto the bar, spamming them while getting hit, and moving on. However that doesn't always equal dodging your opponent, and potting to get the full effect of your pots whilst not potting your enemy.

Crits are very much an important part of vanilla 1.9+ pvp. If you play on any 1.9+ pvp server you'll see that everyone primarily goes for crits, so it isn't as if Loka is changing the meta.

I've played a few 1.9 servers and i have noticed criting is more beneficial than on previous versions, but this doesn't mean people should be standing still jumping or crit chaining with no need for sustained aim or strafe, thats a loka thing. Also, i'm less about if loka is changing the meta as to how fun the kit is to actually play.

Due to the nature of Conquest fights, players need to die easily or it becomes a game of seeing which side can more quickly take out the objective while ignoring their enemies...

I agree, and with the 33% damage increase this will still be the case. PvP without crits is still very squishy and anyone trying to rush golems without taking out players first will still get severed punished.

Galaxy is a great example of someone who came to Loka not used to the 33% boost, but adapted to it and became of the server's best pvpers. Take some time to practice and experience it more and I guarantee you'll see why it's there.

As I've said, I do see why it's here, that's not what i'm arguing about, only the crit damage. The point of me linking that post is that a now core member of Loka felt the need to post on the forums about the kit because the pvp wasn't as enjoyable as it could be. Perhaps if he wasn't as passionate about the game type he might of turned away, this is not something the server should be encouraging. Regarding the post, I disagree with his conclusion, that the problem was the damage increase, as i've said many times, but I think it's still important to consider how these new players feel. Adding crits will make the server much more interesting, and as reluctant the "old guard" may be in changing it, it will be a change for the better, making the whole pvp experience more competitive, increase interest in the wider pvp community, and making the game more fun for everyone.

 

[S4NTA]

I think you guys might have misread, his suggestion is to lower damage on critical hits (if I didn't misread personally), not to lower the 33%. About that, I've already spoken to crypt on it briefly on the possibilities of it, and from a coding perspective there is not anything that says this hit is a crit, so reducing damage from crits is not possible.

Maybe alternatively there could be something done with code that maximizes the damage a player can do, not sure if that's possible either. (I'm not personally familiar with any of minecraft's code so I can't say anything for certain).

However, on that note I'd also be okay with lower damage , the max damage from a crit is 4 hearts, and this does sometimes leads to death from reasonable health (7 hearts) in 2 hits, which is pretty tilting

Good to have the perspective of someone who can actually code, I think the damage increase is great but consequently over buffed crits. Maxxing damage would be a very good idea to deal with it instead though.

 

[Cryptite]

I love the depth and thought put into this suggestion, especially from a new player! It's certainly something that could be easy to try.

With what Malt says, it's true that (from a coding perspective), we don't really get a "This hit was a crit" event in the code; but detecting a crit isn't impossible. Frankly, given the Battle Logs, we know that with/without Strength how high the possible damage is and we could theoretically ensure a cap to any of these hits. We're wary about changes like these mostly because Loka is already a fairly deep and complex server for many people to learn. Our intent is to at least try to keep things vanilla so that a person can join our server, knowing it's 1.12, and generally understand that the mechanics of playing the game are very much the same.

The 33% increase is admittedly breaking that thought process (as are a great many other things), but it only ups the damage and doesn't change how PvP mechanically works compared to different servers. Changing crits to be less effective means that the Lokan Experience™ is truly none other. On one hand, players may not have a hard time understanding this so long as they're told by one of our usual Tips that come through. On the other hand, we have players that still spam click because they don't even know what 1.9+ PvP even is and they don't even know that spam clicking isn't a good idea.

Given how "custom" Loka is, It's not out of the question that we'd change something like this, since we've already done a few other things (epearl cd, 33%+ damage, keep-inv), but we have to make sure these things are for the better.

Ultimately, the changes we made to PvP were entirely based around how they work in Conquest. We were faced with a brief dilemma not too long ago; our PvP Pot Duels didn't have the 33% damage, so they were effectively vanilla 1.12 combat. That didn't jive with how PvP works on the normal server, though, and it didn't seem to make sense to have a dueling system where you weren't in the same environment as you would be in Conquest, since the experience should be universal across our Network.

I see this easily implemented in something like Proving Grounds and letting everybody go on and play with it for a day or two, see what they think.

 

[Cryptite]

I think the overall "issue" I have, personally, with pot pvp is that (unmodified) it's very slow, long, and drawn out. That's not something that makes sense from a game like Minecraft, which is supposed to be very basic and (due to the average age of the player) "quick." Prior to our 33% damage, any fights whatsoever took forever. This is not only boring from a spectator standpoint; it's exhausting from a player stand point, and it's a drain from a resources standpoint.

Some of the bigger, longer fights we've had on the server drain immense amounts of resources from the participants, leaving some towns reeling for restocking pots, etc after a fight. The bigger towns can stomach this, as they have surplus resources, but smaller towns can't afford to eat those losses and recover quickly, leaving a "rich get richer, poor get poorer" situation. Doing anything that lengthens the "time in a fight" causes fatigue across the board. I don't disagree that our 33% pvp buff disproportionately buffed crits; it may very well have, but we'll have to keep a tight eye on how much we potentially nerf them.

Nobody (maybe) likes being quickdropped in 1.7, but nobody likes being neverdropped in 1.12 either. There's a happy medium; unfortunately it's up to us, and not Mojang to find the right feel and balance.

 

[S4NTA]

I think the overall "issue" I have, personally, with pot pvp is that (unmodified) it's very slow, long, and drawn out. That's not something that makes sense from a game like Minecraft, which is supposed to be very basic and (due to the average age of the player) "quick." Prior to our 33% damage, any fights whatsoever took forever. This is not only boring from a spectator standpoint; it's exhausting from a player stand point, and it's a drain from a resources standpoint.

Some of the bigger, longer fights we've had on the server drain immense amounts of resources from the participants, leaving some towns reeling for restocking pots, etc after a fight. The bigger towns can stomach this, as they have surplus resources, but smaller towns can't afford to eat those losses and recover quickly, leaving a "rich get richer, poor get poorer" situation. Doing anything that lengthens the "time in a fight" causes fatigue across the board. I don't disagree that our 33% pvp buff disproportionately buffed crits; it may very well have, but we'll have to keep a tight eye on how much we potentially nerf them.

Nobody (maybe) likes being quickdropped in 1.7, but nobody likes being neverdropped in 1.12 either. There's a happy medium; unfortunately it's up to us, and not Mojang to find the right feel and balance.

Thanks for the reply, I definitely agree that unmodified 1.12 pvp is very slow, I feel that way even with crits because of the click speed. But vanilla 1.12 is even worse for sure. As for the amount of resources used in a fight, i'm not entirely sure just how much of an impact a crit nerf would have, the damage would still be high enough to 5 hit someone (with 2 heart cap). Also is Maltier right about 4 heart crits? Because that is insane, from testing I could only get 3 for max with by far an average of 2.5 hearts. and that's already really easy to drop someone. I definitely think it would be fun to to try out pvp in PG with a damage cap; it would be really interesting to see what current and new community members alike think about it. If it did turn out good, and i'm wrong about resources and it draws out fights even longer, perhaps i'm going too far but it seems a big culprit of this is the allowance of shulker boxes/ender chests in T-Gen fights, basically allowing people to fight forever. I actually think it would be interesting to make the pvp a little more hardcore disallowing easy restocking mid-fight, essentially meaning people cant survive forever, could add some strategy. Idk, just some thoughts.

 

[SirMaltier]

It seems to only happen in conquest fights, I haven't been able to recreate it in testing even using str 2 and all that stuff

 

[Cryptite]

There is now a Test Proving Grounds that you can join that I can constantly monitor/tweak for damage values. In it, you will see your damage done to a player as well as if it was capped out. The numbers are subject to heavy change, obviously.

Right now all it does is cap a (base damage) attack over a certain value. Base damage is before mitigation. So a 28 damage hit usually is mitigated down to around 5.3 or so damage in prot IV diamond.

Give it a shot.

 

[JohnFairfax]

The damage values when you're jump critting seems to vary wildly, and RNG is a big no no.

 

[Skuhoo]

The damage values when you're jump critting seems to vary wildly, and RNG is a big no no.

There is no RNG in damage.

Mojang changed the damage formula to remove RNG in 1.9, actually. Previously the enchants from a set of protection IV mitigated between 32% and 64% of a hit, depending on a random number generated between 0.5 and 1. In 1.9+, this RNG was removed and protection IV enchant sets now always mitigate 64% of damage (on top of regular armor mitigation).

Relevant links:
Pre-1.9 damage: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Armor/Before_1.9
Post-1.9 damage: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Armor#Enchantments

 

[Cryptite]

Presumably your damage variation is coming from whether your attacks are fully charged or not? If you look at logs on EldritchBot, you'll see that most attacks are all about the same value each time).