Most melee-primary enemies at higher levels have move speed buffing innate powers.
I would support adding more immobilize and short-duration mezzes even if rooting weren't removed. I think the way mezzes are handled now is entirely out of whack, both for players and for mobs.
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Most melee-primary enemies at higher levels have move speed buffing innate powers.
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Could be more specific?
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I think your definition of "butt ugly" differs from mine. Do you think Team Fortress 2 looks "butt ugly"? Because I don't see a massive difference in animation quality between the simple ranged attacks there and the simple ranged attacks here.
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I haven't played Team Fortress 2, but I didn't know players there could shoot fire and lighting from their hands. And yes, I do indeed believe that most, if not ALL FPS characters look incredibly stupid if you look at them from a third person perspective. To my eyes, that's clearly evident from looking at other people skating around the field in very stupid-looking sideways run animations and firing their guns with but a few frames of animation.
Maybe I'm wrong and Team Fortress 2 is somehow vastly superior, but I doubt it. Quake wasn't, Half-Life wasn't and isn't, Unreal and all of its spawn weren't, aren't and will never be, neither Far Cry nor Far Cry 2 nor Crysis are, er... I'm running out of famous shooters. Counter-Strike is basically Half-Life and I haven't seen Delta Force in years. Oh, Aliens vs. Predator was spectacularly ugly, what with Aliens running around throwing out alien slaps and predators with their funky weapons, and, best of all, Humans were STILL rooted when they fired their miniguns in both the original and its sequel. I can't tell what it looks like in the Battlefield series as running and gunning reduces your accuracy so much you may as well not even aim.
I reiterate - I have not seen it done in such a way that isn't stupid once, and I've played my fair share of shooters. They are most decidedly NOT what I want City of Heroes to look like.
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Most melee-primary enemies at higher levels have move speed buffing innate powers.
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First, that's not actually true, and second, that doesn't really help. As anyone who's chased a running boss knows, it's not catching up to him that's the problem, it's that every time you attack, he runs 50 feet down the hallway before your attack is done animating. Lastly, it just looks stupid for rangers to be able to run and gun but fighters, who are expected to be MORE active, being that they need to be in melee, be rooted in place like chumps. Even ignoring the ugliness of the situation, either you extend this to ALL attacks, or you don't do any of them. A half-[censored] conversion is worse than no conversion at all.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Powers do not root in this game because of a game engine limitation or because it would take too much effort to remove the rooting. Powers root in this game because of a deliberate conscious decision on the part of the devs based on the combined facts that:
a. Unrooted animations are often ugly or weird
b. Rooting is a mitigator to kiting
c. High-velocity unsuppressed movement buffs plus unrooted combat creates exploitable conditions.
Any suggestion to remove rooting must directly address all three concerns without hand-waving** them away.
** Meaning: if you say "well, that's not important because..." - dead on arrival.
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or because it would take too much effort to remove the rooting.
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Well -- yes and no. I pointed out early in the thread that redoing the attack definitions would merely be tedious, not a great challenge. The whole reason it's a lot of work is because of points a, b, and c.
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a. Unrooted animations are often ugly or weird
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There's nothing in particular I can do about that. I would want to say, "simplify melee attacks and then just make the rest root," but that's unbalanced. The most I could do to help is watch a few hours of anime, wuxia, and 80s cartoons and highlight the parts involving moving melee combat. Context sensitive animations are another good answer, and the only one that probably everyone would agree looks good. I don't know how I'd sell that one, though.
I think I'd have to have a more involved discussion with sample video available to identify any specific concerns others have about simple ranged attacks. I don't find many of the games Samuel_Tow mentioned to lack fluidity comparative to CoX; what they lack is the predictable launch position rooting provides for an attack animation, and generally don't compensate appropriately for the barrel vector on fire (often deliberately, as a simplification step for the players). But our grenades already swerve in midair (and may in fact follow you along a horiztonal plane for quite some time), so this would neither be new to CoX nor completely without mitigating factors.
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b. Rooting is a mitigator to kiting
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I can't address that concern, because it's simply a fact. If the concern is, "There must be mitigation for kiting to replace rooting," I did present a suggestion for that.
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c. High-velocity unsuppressed movement buffs plus unrooted combat creates exploitable conditions.
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This seems like an extension of b., unless there's some other exploitable condition besides "being able to strike without being hit back."
Low-level enemy groups don't need to worry about this too much, because the power choices simply aren't available to make a high-damage, high-evasion character. Higher level enemy groups should be coherent, full-spectrum challenges that incorporate buffs and debuffs... and for the most part, I think they are.
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I don't find many of the games Samuel_Tow mentioned to lack fluidity comparative to CoX; what they lack is the predictable launch position rooting provides for an attack animation, and generally don't compensate appropriately for the barrel vector on fire (often deliberately, as a simplification step for the players).
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It's not fluidity they lack, it's visual appeal. I've spent more hours than I should have watching a friend of mine play World of Warcraft, for instance, and I can call up handful of hand waves and I think JUST ONE animation for firing a bow. Essentially, a lot of people swivel their lower body from forward left to forward right and repeat the same gesture with one hand or recycle the same 5-frame bow shot. It's fluent, it just doesn't look good.
Far too many games look like those small animated gif files people use as avatars - too fast, too repetitive, not very interesting. One of the things I LIKE in City of Heroes is that, by and large, our animations are some of the longest in any MMO I've played. WoW has all of these sub-second casts on everything excluding bar-fill-charging attacks, Lineage II relies on attack speed buffs, which just make you swing your sword at five swings a second with the same two stupid hack animations and even 9Dragons, a game I will freely admit has beautiful animations, loops the same three attacks infinitely. In fact, they had to string ALL of their fighting styles together just to produce a 10-second clip of a martial artist shadow-boxing.
By comparison with the above, we have intricate, exciting animations like Full Auto, Sweeping Slice and Vengeful Strike, Head Splitter, Total Focus, Energy Transfer, Shadow Maul, Blazing Bolt, Ripper and so forth. I LOVE the stance Sniper Blast puts you in if used on the ground. I love the Air Superiority animation when used while flying. I adore Foot Stomp, how it looks and what it does. I love these animations, and I cannot imagine even liking them if they were doable while "your legs are running." As a matter of fact, I can't imagine how something like Foot Stomp would look under these circumstances.
Like I said - condition-sensitive animations are the ONLY way I can see this working, but also like I said, I don't see THOSE working without any rooting at all, as games that use them lock you in the direction you were moving anyway. What I do not want to see, most decidedly, is Rune's gameplay of starting an attack, letting it animate a bit and then rushing forward to hit the enemy just as it's coming down. Or, in our case, the ability to start an attack then run away around a corner as it's animating. It's bad enough we can fudge it with jumping even now.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Sadly, until we can actually have fighting game-level interaction and physics in an MMO, animations will always have to fudge a little. And they just need to track far too much data to be possible in a massive environment (without serious compromises somewhere else).
Foot Stomp is a non-targeted melee PBAoE, so my suggestion as written would not remove rooting from it. Sniper Blast is a sniping attack, and Air Superiority I already agreed is a 'heavy' maneuver.
The cone attacks you mention may require a compromise; forcing a full stop when they begin animation (or in some cases, when they reach the 'strike' point of the animation), but only rooting for a fraction of a second. That should be enough to mitigate the worst of the animation woes.
Here's an in-game example of how silly partial rooting can look: Radiation Infection. It's a simple stand with your hand raised animation with an added bonus of radioactive gasses around it. In the middle of that animation, you can start moving. It quickly turns from looking like you're somehow projecting this radiation at the target to running around with a green fist.
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c. High-velocity unsuppressed movement buffs plus unrooted combat creates exploitable conditions.
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This seems like an extension of b., unless there's some other exploitable condition besides "being able to strike without being hit back."
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There are, and its possible to see glimpses of it now, although it was easier to see in the days before unsuppressed travel powers: rapidly weaving in and out of melee range can confuse the AI of the critters sometimes to the point of basically making them inert. Players knowledgeable about how the AI picks attacks can create this situation in other ways as well.
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In that case, I'm not qualified to answer that objection without knowing more about how the AI is designed and implemented. I'm inclined to suspect that any fix for b, however, would at least partially address c.
Um, you can pretty much outrun normal enemies with just Swift. I was never talking about travel powers.
Also, yes, let's completely rework the game to be more annoying in order to support your idea.
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