Aetolian Combat

Ezalor

Haedyn's AI actually tracks your parry patterns too and abuses it. Some people have insane levels of automation.

For some classes like Praenomen it's almost mandatory to get full use of the class since you have to contemplate at the start of every combo. You don't want to set your attack until after that contemplate has gone through and given you their mana levels. There's also the matter that to get the most out of your affs you don't want to set your affs until the very moment you're able to attack to see what they cure.

Moirean

Oh, well I think anyone with absolve/annhi has a contemplate switch in their basic attack.

I should sit and adjust my venom setup to be more effective - eg instead of just hitting xentio/vernalius, it'll switch in a kalmia if the target has cluminess, or whatever. That seems fairly do-able and it'll probably be a priority when I decide to care about combat again.

I can't even imagine how you'd begin to code parry tracking. I spend a lot of my early offense probing at limbs to figure out individual patterns for parry and pre-resto. Obviously there is human error going on (hey my head gets cluttered!) when I try to mentally translate what I am seeing to what the source pattern for that is  ...a system doing that, with coded precision, would be...wow.

Upon writing this, it occurs to me that I should probably try lycan or monk. NFI why I've never touched either.

Ilyon

Ezalor said:

For some classes like Praenomen it's almost mandatory to get full use of the class since you have to contemplate at the start of every combo. You don't want to set your attack until after that contemplate has gone through and given you their mana levels

That needlessly slows you down. Much more effective to add queue eq/bal comtemplate target to the end of the combo - you lose no time then.

Moirean

#alias {contspam} {#forall @warenemies {contemplate %i}}

That lazy alias got me like...10 levels worth of xp on my Lumi. >_>

Serrice

My problem with lycan is remembering my aliases.

Oh, you wanted to mangle the left arm? Well that was your mangled left leg alias, sorry. You just wasted a bit of balance while they cure the break.

@Moirean: I know a large number of players have fully automated offenses. They go hit a button and go grab a sandwich or something. Some of them even have the combat know how to back up their AIs when you throw a wrench in it.

Moirean

Serrice said:

@Moirean: I know a large number of players have fully automated offenses. They go hit a button and go grab a sandwich or something. Some of them even have the combat know how to back up their AI's when you throw a wrench in it.

That seems nuts - what would be the point of fighting? (Other than obvious xp cheesing that I mentioned above, but I don't really consider that combat)

Serrice

I guess they just like the satisfaction of either tinkering with code, or if they're just using someone else's AI, getting that You have slain so-and-so line. 

Personally, a smart envenomer and some togglables for stuff like auto impale and auto jawlocking are about as far as I'll go in the offensive automation department.

Moirean

I thought I might put some automated stuff in when newSents came out. The first skill I tried to code in automation for was floorsweep. I asked Sibatti to trip me to test it out. 5 minutes later...

Illikaal

I told you to use the same setup that I use, and Aisling happens to also use (because it makes sense.) 

MLL= Mangle Left Leg

MRL= Mangle Right Leg

MRA= Mangle Right Arm

MLA= Mangle Left Arm

Exact same thing with destroys, except swap the M with a D. 

@Moirean: Some people joked about it. Others were serious. Haedyn probably has the best automatic ANYTHING in the game right now. He has all of the afflictions categorized neatly into a folder, and based on what class he's in, it will select the delivery method. For example:

If he's starting his v-lock aff combo, he starts with Paralysis/Stupidity. Templars deliver it via dsl (with w/e weapon.) Therefore, his offense selects 'delivery by dsl/venoms' in a sense. However, if he were a Luminary, it would do the angel battle/chasten (whatever it is luminaries do) on top of the third aff that he is able to deliver according to the stack he was going for. 

He has successfully written a fully automated Luminary, Templar, and Teradrim in which all he has to do is push a button, and watch people die. I believe he's still working on an auto Vampire that will put anyone else's to shame. The guy is nuts. And by the guy, I mean Tina. She coded it all for him. 

Serrice

It's hard to remember! My fingers go places they shouldn't!

Moirean

Now you know why I just always shatter. >_>

Xiuhcoatl

Kaeus said:

Some classes certainly benefit more from an auto-supported offense as well, namely affliction heavy classes. I can't imagine trying to do Syssin manually without having good affliction tracking in helping me make active decisions on dstab, hypnosis, and sleights. 

I do usually also make my offense able to be adjusted to try different methods of attacking with an easy swap so I'm never stuck to just one strategy as well. Even for non-affliction classes, my system will always respond faster and execute an attack than I would be able to do manually. Considering I'm always trying to beat balances, it seems like a necessity when fighting truly good curing.

Having tried to run Lycanthrope manually, I have to say automating it fully was the best thing to do. Granted, I tented to break my offense every once in a while, by adding additional kill routes, but the speed and intelligence a full automated lycan AI can achieve was breath taking. I sat back in a freeforall one day and just watched it auto aquire targets on entry/being attacked and went to town. It held it's own since the start of the FreeForAll until it was forcefully cancelled. Really need to re-write that AI. 

That said, I can see most class' offense being automated, but there are a few where it doesn't seem to make sense. Case and point would be Indorani who are just a pain to play in general. 

Toz

Fight off your numpad for limb classes, if you have one. 8 is a head, 5 is a torso, 4/6 are arms, 1/3 are legs. Then you have 3 whole other number buttons to put utility/extra stuff on. Ctrl+8 or whatever is what I use for the 'heavier' hits - mangle/or destroy, for instance.

Unless I'm in Carnifex. Then every button just throws my hammer.

Damonicus

Serrice has wolf?

Ezalor

Ah. I've just hooked my contemplate onto an able_attack function then triggered my attack block off that.

On the one hand, I don't -think- it has any slow down. On the other hand, I'm still learning to crawl in all this and have no idea what I'm doing .

I haven't actually tested it at all since I'm still spamming macros while trying to figure this all out.

Moirean

That's what I did, kinda. I made my attack alias basically a contemplate and class enable/alarm disable, and inside that was a trigger to attack or absolve, based on what math I got from the contemplate. There was no visible delay, and I'm sure you could clean that up even more these days (since that was coded on zmud). The issue with queuing after your attack is that, unless you also queue the attack with it (which you can't with the game's internal queue system), you're giving yourself a much wider window where the target might sip before your attack goes through. I am assuming you are manually entering the attacks after each bal/eq, maybe it's something you could automate, but like I've said, never tried that. This means you can waste a round trying to absolve when they are above the threshhold. 

/tangent

Illikaal

Damonicus said:

Serrice has wolf?

Yes. For the mudsex. 

#Bahkatuforlyfeyoloswag

Ezalor

Illidan said:

Damonicus said:

Serrice has wolf?

Yes. For the mudsex. 

#Bahkatuforlyfeyoloswag

You know who else has a wolf?

Relandroc.

Esper

Can we please let that one stomach-turning incident die in our memories?

Arbre

So we should talk about Erica, Christina, and a pair of shoes then?

Alastair

I couldn't imagine how much one would be senselessly reapplying toxins and whispers/dstab/etc that the target already has as an affliction class if you don't automate your afflictions based on what the opponent currently has.

And people that can capably code in Imperian kill really really well with aff classes. Gbot is good, it isn't perfect, and there is far more to intelligent defense and mitigating either damage or affliction pressure than just curing reliably, but specifically taking lag out of the equation and giving everyone access to a good baseline has made combat there consist of far more people than at any given point before autocuring. That's just a fact.

E: I'm not saying it should or shouldn't be implemented here at all, just trying to clear misconception. I personally like maintaining my own system again after being spoiled by nothing more than some aliases and simple toggles for my char on Imp.

Illikaal

Some people manual to a certain extent, with what's called smart envenoming. 

However, I just 100% manual (which is why I don't use templar) when it comes to limb classes, and Shaman. 

Moirean

I don't think it's so much about reapplying. In my case, I just have way too many combo aliases and use them based on what the target has, based on my (admittedly bad, combat feels way more spammy these days) own mental tracking. A refinement would be to simplify these and partially automate the venom choices based on affs, eg switch in a different kelp stack venom. Lanira's UI included an aff-tracker, so I like the idea of using that for more precision.

Alastair

My offense tracks what the opponent heals, tracks what it delivers, and I have several different queues. One for tlock, one for sticking reckless/maso, one that takes into account disloyalty for ent classes, etc etc etc. I press a button to run the event, (I have them bound to my function keys), corresponding to the lock queue I want to pursue and it applies affs (both weapon and whisper) in the appropriate order as they are prioritized in the event. I was thinking about making a simpler one for teamfights that focused on sticking unblind for mesmerize xfix, but I haven't gotten around to asking if that's worth it or really what I should be doing in teamfights, so I just spam my lock or reckless queue >.> (because I'm dumb)

E: Grammar

E2: @Illidan - and for a limb break class that's pretty much cool, or one that doesn't really have so many options for what affliction to deliver next. I played an athletic dk for years and just used highlights and aliases and vivisecting the unicorns out of people. That kind of manualing I know and love but I'm trying to do this affliction class thing for once and this is the most optimal way I can really think of.

Moirean

I started replying in the team combat thread but realized, as I was writing this novel, that it would be better here. This thread got me thinking and I've been considering points raised for the last several days, and here are my thoughts:

On a more general note, in my opinion, combat should be "fun" and I mean that in the more esoteric game design sense of the concept. A large part of that fun comes from meaningful and tactical choices, where a player feels like they have an influence in the outcome. Situations where you just have to sit and endure an attack without a way to skillfully avoid it are unfun and anathema to intelligent combat design. When looking at skills, counters then become just as important as the skills themselves. I think, in many ways, Aetolia's skills are very well imagined and implemented in this regard.

However, skills go through an interesting change when put into practice. You have to look at the combat by design as well as the combat as used by players, and sometimes you find that there is dissonance. Player perception of skills is one cause, and places like the forums are great for fixing that by disseminating information about the details of skills and combat. However, and I think this is not often considered, but it is also important - player access is also a factor in  how skills can be balanced by design but unbalanced in practice. Lust is an excellent example of this: many people use systems which autoreject and juggling reject toggles and movement-based-monolith-drops becomes punishingly difficult when compared to other forms of ranged attacks. Should coding ability/difficulty be considered when skills are analyzed?

It's a tricky question for the admin to look at and it really addresses a deeper concept - what level of access do we want for combat? Aetolia is fairly old at this point and, sometimes, it seems like the game is somewhat confused about what it wants to be. 

On one hand, we have a large push to make us friendly to new players, and we have an increasingly wide range of helpful, useful quality-of-life upgrades. On the other, we have PK, which still emphasizes a drastic investment of - more importantly than money - TIME. Time becomes more of a commodity in an aging population, and people these days want different things from their gaming. In addition, younger gamers expect different styles than we, and the older generation before us, expected in our gaming. But combat in MUDs seems latched onto a view towards combat that worked well years ago, when most players were university students or unemployed young adults and the MMO notion of expansive content was grinding two months for fire resist gear.

Learning to PK in Aetolia (and IRE muds in general) is largely a measure of tedium and time sinks, because of the big reliance on systems and system maintenance. I don't think it was DESIGNED that way, but it has evolved into that, and it's been reinforced by the popular notion that getting decent at combat should take a fairly long time. But why should it be? Picking up the abilities themselves and learning the CONCEPTS of combat aren't hard, and someone who is smart and innately GETS the ideas behind PK should be able to hop in and be fairly ok out of the gate, lessons invested aside - almost always, however, the bottleneck is in how you handle your curing. In my opinion, the time investment should be in studying the intricate details of your class, and the counters and options available in battles, not in ensuring you stay alive long enough to try those. Once upon a time, we all cured manually, and curing was also part of combat ability, but these days that simply is not true, and manual curing isn't even a feasible option with the speed and spam of group fights.

Many games have moved on past the tedium=content design and focus instead on providing actual meat to the game, using gated design and cooldowns to slow down content consumption if it's needed, instead of putting stuff behind grinding and tedious tasks to slow down players. MUDs, for some reason, seem to thrive on this grindy design, however, with many basic tasks requiring extra steps (soul consumption, I am looking at you). MMOs have begun to realize that if players use add-ons to bypass part of the game design, it's not popular game design - so why keep it? Aetolia has recognized this to an amazing extent when it comes to utility - the addition of elixlist sorting is a great example of the game updating to help users get past the details of management (and most old players remember the scripts we used to write to deal with potion sorting) to let them dive into the actual gameplay. Combat, however, seems very conflicted on this - we have firstaid, on one hand, giving people a way to compete if they don't have a system, but anyone who fights seriously laughs at that -actually- being useful for combat.

We're reaching a point where a pretty sizable chunk of the game has willingly signed on to just use the same 2-3 systems, because we obviously really aren't interested in sitting and handling the details of managing it ourselves or building our own from scratch. To me, that indicates that the true fun for most players isn't in system coding, but in the combat itself. 

All that being said, MUDs have their own sort of novelty and charm that you don't see in today's graphics-based plug-and-play games anymore. Do we even WANT to be more accessible? At some level, there is an element of satisfaction and enjoyment for doing things the long way, and reducing the "work" too much would remove part of what makes MUDs feel unique.

I'll end this ramble here. I'm mostly just musing over some thoughts that have been in my head, although I do think if system maintenance were removed from the picture we'd see a lot more people diving into combat as well as new players perhaps being less daunted by the curve and sticking around. I suspect any sort of large changes (like the one mentioned about Imperian) which would phase out player-based systems would mean the combat system would have to be drastically adjusted, though, and that would be an immense project (duh). 

IMHO if we ever did see a shift to that, we'd need to see a higher number of tactical skill choices, like abilities with CDs or conditions to reward intelligent combat choices, such as savagery's recklessness to enable a burst of unfettered output at the cost of higher damage take or soul sacrifice, which doesn't work really atm in terms of being a viable combat choice but is a cool concept - trade a cost of some sort for a temporarily improved attack. IMHO, that direction of combat choice is where we should be looking when designing new skills, as that type of design broadens tactical options without introducing new afflictions/conditions to manage. They would increase depth, without demanding even more breadth to be covered as part of "learning." Instead, they would focus on giving us more intelligent, creative combat choices, give us more options and routes to pick from with our offense, and reward smart, clever tactical awareness over well-written automation or the feeling that you're just smashing against someone's code.

Malok

I'm Malok, I've played MUDs for 15-16 years or so now, and I approve Moirean's message. 100% agree.

Angwe

All my upvotes. All of them.

Haven

@Moirean: I wholeheartedly agree.

I would love it if firstaid was fleshed out to take the entirety of the Survival skill set. I've always thought that combat should be about your tactical decisions to determine your survivability as opposed to how it is now where it's largely dependent on your coding ability on top of everything else.