Kick vs. Jump Kick

So, I was looking at these two powers today, and I realized something very disturbing; Jump Kick seems to be blatantly superior to Kick in almost every way. Since Kick is part of the Fighting power pool I would have assumed Kick to be the better all-round attack, but for some reason it's totally reversed.

One thing that I'm sure anyone would assume, because it seems so obvious, would be that Kick has a faster animation than Jump Kick, but it doesn't. Jump Kick has the character doing a crazy roll and a kick springing off your hands followed by a second, completely unnecessary, second roll, while Kick is just an ordinary straight kick.
Yet Jump Kick is actually faster by a whole 1/3rd of a second, because for some reason the character kicks like a turtle, taking what looks like an eternity to pull off a very straight-forward gesture.
Not only is the animation faster, but it even recharges 0.2 seconds faster.
If you use Brawl with Dual Blades your character performs nearly the same animation as Kick, but it has an entire second shaved off the animation time.

Another point is that Jump Kick does more damage; ~18%.
Kick does a base 55 damage at 50 while Jump Kick does a base 65 damage at 50. Combined with the faster animation and recharge, this means the attack inside the "Fighting" power pool does not only less damage, but significantly less DPS.

Both powers cause a knock effect, but Jump Kick has 2 and 2/3rds TIMES the magnitude of Kick, meaning it's WAY more likely to actually affect someone, and I think it disables them for longer when it does. On top of that, it has an extra 5% chance to occur.
It also uses Knock Up rather than Knockback, which is valuable to a larger range of characters (such as melees).

The only point worse in Jump Kick than Kick is that it costs roughly 0.5 more endurance to use, which is a pathetic difference.

This obviously isn't a big issue, but I'm curious why it's set up this way.
Has anything been said about this before, like whether or not it's going to be fixed?

On a side note, it makes no sense to me that the "Fighting" power pool attacks force redraw, especially Kick. But at the moment, as far as I know, every power that isn't from the same pool as your weapon forces redraw (except for Brawl and Origin attacks for some completely inexplicable reason), even heals and such from your secondary.

Since I've gone on this long, I may as well give my own suggestion to fix it
I think it should be given the DB Brawl animation. That way it'll look practically the same, but it'll have the animation duration reduced by a second and it should no longer force redraw.
Leave the damage the same, since it should do less than Jump Kick. Keep the knockback magnitude low (maybe up it to 2.0, that should allow it to affect Lieutenants, right?) but up the chance of knockback to like 25%.
And finally, shave another second off the reset time.

A few points:
[*]Jump Kick provides KnockUP instead of KnockBACK like Kick does. This means that the higher magnitude simply pushes the mob in the air farther and actually makes it even better.
[*]0.54 difference in base endurance cost isn't much, but it'll add up. Especially with a higher cycle time due to faster animation/shorter recharge.
[*]The kicking "Brawl" animation is actually longer than the normal punch animation, so it's not a full second faster. I forget the exact time, but Arcanaville had it posted somewhere in a discussion (it came up when talking about differences in male/female animation times) where she was timing them by going frame-by-frame.
[*]Brawl and the Origin attacks are the most complex animations because it has to have so many different ones to account for the weapons, switching hands when hitting, and so on. Back Alley Brawler posted on this a couple of times (regarding Boxing iirc) and said that if changes were made to any of the pool powers to not cause redraw it would create a cascade effect that would tie up the animation department for a while doing nothing but eliminating redraw on pool powers, then someone would start complaining about secondaries causing redraw too... it's a nice little can of worms that will keep them busy for a long, long time when they could be working on new auras, powersets (the animations for them anyway), creatures, and so on.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

Are you sure they've actually gotta wire each animation individually to include the specific weapon, basically making a new one for each weapon?

I don't know about other weapons, but I know that with Katanas you can pull them out during any regular animation by pressing a katana attack power during it.
You can see me doing that here.
It even works during the Secondary power animations.

I don't know about how actually forcing redraw on animations works, but I'm pretty sure every weapon has a spot on the character it's bound to where it'll appear when it's out regardless of animations, and weapon specific animations simply alter the weapon directly or cause the character to move in a way that deliberately uses the visible weapon, and either animations or the powers themselves should basically just have something that says "weapon visible/not visible", and allowing it to be visible without changing up the animation would at worst just cause the hand to not be clasped around the handle, and in some cases move the hand in such a way that the weapon clips through the character for a moment.
That's why I thought using the DB Brawl animation would work; it's already used with a weapon, so the hand would be clasped around the handle and it wouldn't clip.

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Are you sure they've actually gotta wire each animation individually to include the specific weapon, basically making a new one for each weapon?

[/ QUOTE ]Yes, because BABs has stated it's a "state-based animation engine". Basically means that any power, if it is to be used in more than one "state" needs a separate animation for each "state". Brawl now has animations for Shield, RH weapon, LH weapon, RH Weapon + Shield, Two Weapons, as well as 3 times that for Male/Female/Huge, then twice that for Flight/Non-flight.

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That's why I thought using the DB Brawl animation would work; it's already used with a weapon, so the hand would be clasped around the handle and it wouldn't clip.

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In short, this would have to require Kick to work differently from every other attack in the game. Right now Kick does the Kick animation, but it forces the weapon to be sheathed. This would have to be changed so that Kick does the Kick animation, but does not force the weapon to be sheathed. And every other attack in the game would have to be left as it is, sheating the weapon.

Brawl is unique, that's why Brawl works as it does. Making Punch and Kick work like Brawl would mean they would have to be made to work like Brawl. Which is more difficult than just changing a few entries in a table.

That said, I would not mind Punch and Kick being given a special exemption allowing them to not redraw. Punch and Kick have faster recharge than Air Superiority and Flurry, and Jump Kick's recharge time was actually a kludge to make Jump Kick more attractive back when it's animation time was 3 seconds. They eventually cut Jump Kick's animation time in half (actually, they just made it interruptable, the animation time really hasn't changed) but they neglected to put the recharge time back where it was.

Actually, now that I think about it, the time between attacks is actually cast time + recharge, because the recharge doesn't start until the attack finished animating. I actually don't know if the recharge starts for Jump Kick once it is interrupted, or until it waits until the full cast time has expired. If the former is the case, then Jump Kick's recharge time is 4.3 s, if the latter, then it's 5.8 s. Kick takes 4.8 seconds to recharge, so that's only slower than Jump Kick in the former case.

Of course, damage and End cost are usually in proportion to recharge, not recharge + cast time, so in comparison to other attacks, Jump Kick (and Flurry) should have a longer recharge time. (Around 4 sec, not really that much longer)

IMO, I'd prefer Kick and Punch to be ditched from the fighting pool and simply replaced with a powered up version of Brawl, same animation, able to work with everything without redraw, with higher damage/recharge/cost/etc.

Then add another power, perhaps some sort of passive to Fighting to round it out. I have no suggestion for that. I'd just really like to see a version of brawl I might actually use once out of the tutorial.

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I'd just really like to see a version of brawl I might actually use once out of the tutorial.

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Play a Brute?

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I think it'd be more reasonable to just make Brawl a viable ability; I don't understand why it's so bad as is.
Besides, I play Katana and the Brawl animation for Katana is as lame as it gets, so I'd be left out

they both stink, but at least jump kick looks cool.

Of Jump Kick, I can only say this: Of all the Pool Powers I have encountered in CoX, it was the most...human.

WARNING: I bold names.

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While I generally only use Kick as a novelty attack on certain characters that suit the animation, on the characters that it does suit I get great glee from kicking enemies across the room with that stupid, sluggish, lumbering boot to the stomach.

So the change I'd really want to see is to greatly increase the chance of knockback from the piddly small value it has now. That's not to say I'd object to more damage or eliminating redraw, but I'd actually prefer the animation stay as it is.

More knockback for Kick!

I don't mind the animation for Kick, although I'd like it to respond a touch faster. Like you I too love sending foes flying with it

Jump Kick's animation, however, is an abomination. I really wish they'd change it to something that looked a little less like it was being executed by a brain-damaged, daredevil lemur after having drank down an entire case of Mountain Dew and Surge.

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I don't mind the animation for Kick, although I'd like it to respond a touch faster. Like you I too love sending foes flying with it

Jump Kick's animation, however, is an abomination. I really wish they'd change it to something that looked a little less like it was being executed by a brain-damaged, daredevil lemur after having drank down an entire case of Mountain Dew and Surge.

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How'd you know they made that power for me?

In other news, greenish-brown crap is slightly less disgusting than greenish-yellow crap.

But they're both still crap.

Ya, I took it for my martial artist, and have sorely regretted it. It looks goofy as blazes.