Explain redraw for me?

Heya,

I was wondering if anybody could explain redraw for me because I have a hard time understanding it.

Like, why does it exist and what does it do exactly, gameplay wise?

It seems to me when playing that it's just a strange weakness that weapon sets have that non-weapon sets do not have to deal with and it makes no sense to me to penalise some sets just because they use weapon concepts?

Can somebody clear it up for me?

It exists because they didn't want to have to do tens of extra power animations per set in order to account for people using powers with a weapon still in their hand.

Gameplay-wise it has the effect of adding a slight delay to power activation if you have to redraw your weapon. To counter this, however, weapon sets have an accuracy bonus over the non-weapon sets. This is also why you can't have "optional" weapons, because you'd have to sacrifice that bonus to make it balanced.

This is actually no longer true.
The animation times have been standardized so that the time it takes to draw your weapon is actually removed from the animation time of the attack going off.

If you dont have your weapon out, the shortened animation will play.
If you already have your weapon drawn, the standard animation will play.

How it used to work:

Redraw: 1s
Animation: 3s

Weapon Out: Animate power (3s) then sit in the idle position (1s)
Weapon Sheathed: Animate redraw (1s) then animate power (3s)

Result: Power always takes 4s to animate. The redraw penalty is baked into every attack, but there is no cost to redraw when playing.

How it works now:

Redraw: 1s
Animation: 3s

Weapon Out: Animate power (3s)
Weapon Sheathed: Animate redraw (1s) then animate power (3s)

Result: Power is much stronger because it doesn't have a built in delay. There is now a cost to redrawing your weapons when playing.

Thanks for the explanations guys.

I still can't shake that there's something really wierd about certain powersets having game mechanical penalities just because they have weapon concepts though.

Do Spines or Thorny Assault have redraw?

Eh, you'll get a final answer, and probably make a post about it, and get hundreds of page views and scores of replies. But you'll still encounter people who insist it's the other way around and eagerly share that misinformation.

The current way is a much better way of doing it in any case. There SHOULD be a penalty conceptually anyway each time you draw your sword, so having there be one in game is no problem. I think it is a nice effect and good design that you should plan to having the weapon out for extended periods of time rather than constantly switching.

There are all sorts of motifs in movies or whatever (gunfights with guns in holsters, etc.) where it takes time to get the weapon out, and having it actually be that way is fine.

What was not fine was having a silly delay after each and every attack if the weapon was already out.

It is interesting though that it is so hard to tell if there is a delay or not, and that there is so much debate on the subject. It shows that it is pretty hard for the naked eye to tell the difference, and how much our preconceptions color our perceptions (myself definitely included.)

*Shrug* I don't think it's all that bad of a system as currently implemented to be honest.

Yes, they should animate sheathing a weapon as well. Yes, there should be sheaths and holsters in game so you can see the gun/sword there even when you are not holding it. Yes, some things could be done with a sword in hand and some shouldn't. i.e., you could probably shoot eyebeams while holding your sword but you would probably have to put the sword away before taking out your med kit.

So obviously there is a lot of animation work that would need to be done to make things accurate. But the current system isn't that bad. It preserves the conceptual idea that it takes time to draw a weapon, even if it isn't perfect and doesn't address all of the idiosyncrasies that would actually occur as to how different items would interact with each other.

I can certainly see your point though, which is that because the system isn't sufficiently realistic you would prefer that they just threw the whole thing out and just delete all of the redraw animations from the game.