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My Hot Take on Why Knocks Need To Get Redone

bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
edited February 2018 in Suggestions Box
This discussion comes up in the wake of the Unarmed MA update, which stands as a set directly adjacent to Might in what it does - powerful melee crushing damage, with a lot of synergy and tie-ins with Might's debuffs such as Demolish and Disorient. There's also the general concern about the state of Crushing Damage sets, and how many of the debuffs, such as Armor-Piercing, Burn Through, and No Quarter, can just stack crushing debuff on top of one another, generally making most of those sets a prime suspect for a recheck. In the process of this, Force also seems like a likely candidate for a rehaul as well. Regardless of how you look at it, though, both Might and Force share something in common that defines them so strongly that they include it to their own detriment: Knock Effects.


I am talking specifically about Knock Back. In fact in general knock effects are usually beneficial if they are not this. Knock-To effects are now fairly common in melee sets as an ability to draw a target in... Sometimes. Knock-Up effects are both extremely reliable and maintain the benefit of inflicting fall damage on lower-rank enemies, as well as the bonus damage on knock-resistant targets. Knockdown is similar and just emphasizes the most straight-forward benefits of a knock; it interrupts an enemy and stops them from damaging you for a split second. Then we get to the puzzling Knockback, which combines this interruption with an unquestionably detrimental effect: knocking your target out of your own target range, and often away from your allies, other nearby enemies that could be hit with AoEs, and away from allies that might be using shorter-ranged attacks. And if you're melee, then you're just knocking the targets away from your own attacks!

The situation becomes more complex when considering that one of the major balancing aspects of adjusting powersets is calculating energy cost - simply put, each individual effect has some kind of energy cost modifier. Now answer this: would the modifier for a knockback be positive or negative? Or in other words, would a knockback attack cost less or more energy than an attack that otherwise did the same amount of damage? Well, on one hand it's an attack that will be interrupting and disrupting the enemy's ability to strike you, and it certainly serves a purpose for creating buffer space for certain fighting styles. It also generates extra damage when striking knock-resistant enemies. But on the other hand, it also prevents what would otherwise be a rapidfire attack from being effective on specific targets (consider what using something like Dragon's Wrath would be like if every stab knocked back like Annihilation). Especially if you consider it for something like an AoE it suddenly turns the attack into a completely unviable ability for reliably and consistently destroying clustered enemies, and then just becomes a troll ability provided it fails to kill all its targets. Is having such a situational effect right when energy costs need to be calculated carefully? It'd undoubtedly be much simpler if the effect was somehow changed to be much more beneficial on whole rather than an obstacle.

So why not just make things simpler by removing knockback altogether?

Well the thing about knockback is that it's very much in a similar situation as the 'pick up object' feature is in: It's integral, maybe even essential to the superhero game genre, but it's very poorly integrated into the game's core mechanics. Object throwing has a purpose - ranged damage for melee builds high in strength, and a quick access to travel-power removal - but it's bogged down by extremely substandard damage output, slow pickup speeds, and environmental factors, to the point that there have been zero attempts to rebalance it to something usable. That said, Object-throwing is a rebalance that can wait or possibly just be forgotten entirely simply because no core playstyle is really balanced or designed to utilize it in depth. The same cannot be said for Might and Force, and Knockback. What on earth does having Haymaker without having the target fly back 400 feet look and feel like? What really is Force Cascade without it sending an entire crowd of enemies careening back like bowling pins? Will all the powersets then just be remade to act exactly the same? For the sake of even hoping to keep the game appealing as a superhero-styled game, Knock's going to need to stay around, but it's going to need some help, some justification, if it's going to have any place in the game's meta as it gets rebalanced.

Solution 1: Make it easier to chase enemies down

The big issue with Knocks comes in its relation to powersets with limited range, especially melee. What, realistically, can a melee powerset do about an enemy flying away? Well, most melee builds include a lunge, which would be great if the lunge actually would put the user's final position at where the enemy would land instead of on just the frame at which the lunge is activated. The problem's even worse when considering: the maximum distance of a lunge is 60 feet. Most knocks, especially those coming out of might, and ESPECIALLY those that are built with Strength, are going to be generating knocks much further than that.

One way to get to this paradigm is to upgrade lunges. How? Well there's a variety of possibilities. It could be the case that lunges triangulate where an enemy might land, and have the endpoint of the player's movement be calculated based on how the target is moving, but that would be both difficult to calculate and could result in unintended behavior (as if stopping short of your target wasn't one). Or maybe lunges could have the ability to cancel knocks as soon as they're activated, causing your target to stop dead in midair as soon as you land your lunge, which could cause you and your target to land in the same spot. Maybe lunges could inflict a temporary fall-speed cancel that causes you and your target to float in midair instead as you land more attacks! It could be possible to play to the limitations and have it so that lunges only work on grounded, still targets, in which case it would be beneficial to have a range increase so that the lunge can be used to completely close distance. Maybe knocks inflict a lunge buff that will increase their range for chasedown? Who knows what would be thought up if that were the solution?

Alternatively, and perhaps more key, is making travel powers more relevant to combat. So little of combat generally encourages the use of these travel powers, as they often induce significant energy debuffs and a good margin of travel powers aren't suitable for this function at all - flight is literally no faster in combat than it is than walking, and superjump's lateral speed drops to such abyssmal levels that really its only purpose in a fight is to make it so that you don't take fall damage. This also points out a fundamental imbalance between how many of the travel powers work, so much so that the developers have made it the standard in most major Cosmic battles to just have your foes disable travel powers altogether in some way. Not that this is a huge issue in relation to knocks since none of the cosmics are vulnerable to it, but still. Even then, making the travel powers capable of closing distance rapidly in combat would be one simple, and highly-controllable way for players not only to catch up to their targets, but also to more carefully control which direction they can knock the targets.

A concept I've tossed around in relation to this is having combat travel powers, which would be balanced more carefully to be usable in combat as a standard. Most importantly would be that these wouldn't impose any kind of energy disadvantage whatsoever and would change fundamentally how the game plays with more emphasis on evasion. That'd be probably the most complex solution to implement however.

Solution 2: Light Knockback is Control. Heavy Knockback is Fatal.
In most superhero situations, a person hit by a haymaker powerful enough to send them flying 160 feet probably won't be up and walking back at you unless they're real serious. In CO, that'd be real nice considering that anything below supervillain status can be vulnerable to this and usually anything that low level is pretty easy to beat one-on-one against a player character. Except when knocks enter the picture for a Master Villain it just sends them flying and then they take no fall damage.

What if Knockback became mainly a solution for quickly deleting enemies? At low levels, Roomsweeper essentially embodies this in spades, simply because the fall damage seems to scale so well to henchmen, combined with the fairly minimal damage required by the attack itself to lower them into kill-zone HP.

I importantly make the distinction between a light-knock and a heavy-knock. Light knocks likely would work in the following way:
  • Poor distance scaling
  • Will rarely, if ever, exceed even 50 feet
  • Slower falling and deal less fall damage?
  • Enemies take longer to get back to their feet when hit by this?
These knocks are designed to keep an enemy out of the fight for as long as possible, while also emphasizing lesser damage. Basically a control effect for a mob. Important is maybe implementing an alternate animation here where the enemy would take longer to get back to their feet and mobile. Would be an effect that makes more sense for attacks such as Pillar of Poz (which doesn't even knockback by default anymore), or Hurricane.

Heavy knocks on the other hand:
  • Excellent distance scaling, the more STR/EGO, the much better they get
  • Can knock back extreme ranges
  • Deal very high fall damage, will often kill anything that can be knocked.
  • Automatically disables flight when landed
So getting back to the intro blurb, this is what Might and Force would be all about. If an enemy can be knocked like this, they need to basically die. Most importantly is the change that this knock type disables flight - this is important, because consider also that knocks are even more useless on flying targets - they only suffer half the downtime of a knock, they don't take fall damage, and hey if you're melee now they're just flying in the air out of range!

More accurately, the way to likely put this into play is to just make it so that Master Villains are not resistant to fall damage anymore when knocked, and also have the fall damage scale up much faster with distance fallen. I believe this would be one of the fastest fixes to implement, but could be difficult to balance without making knock-heavy sets incredibly powerful. This also ties back into calculating energy costs, with massive knocks like this possibly ramping up energy costs incredibly high - and maybe in fact not balancing out well against the knock-resistant targets either!

Solution 3: Environmental tie-ins, AoE secondary effect...
What if, by some chance, a knocked enemy became a projectile? Realistically an enemy sent flying into another enemy would do damage, right? Then there's also the idea of getting stopped by more than just the ground. Maybe splatting an enemy into a wall is going to cause even more damage. So with that, suddenly, knocks become double-faceted. Maybe you can use that increased knock-distance and recovery time to keep an enemy busy while you fight others. Or maybe you can utilize your knockback similarly to how you use it for increased damage on huge, un-knockable targets, and suddenly your enemies are being deleted because they're crashing into other enemies, causing more damage, or into walls and being stopped by solid objects. How difficult would this be? Idunno.

So that's all my ideas for solutions, but I also have a list of other asides that are only marginally related to the main point of this post:


Aside A: Making knock-to more reliable
Only marginally related to the main point here, but why is it that Knockback, Knockup, and Knockdown just about always work, but Knock-to almost never does? Is the value of a 25-knock-to effect, when you likely are already well within aggro range of the rest of a group, so broken that having it work reliably would be detrimental? In my unprofessional paltry opinion, at that distance it's just much more easier to get into range and lay into enemies with a lunge, Doubly so considering enemies like to just move back to where they came from after a knock-to. Maybe could use a root?? I don't know, maybe I just find a reliable 60-foot jump attack with an added debuff a little more appealing than a 25-foot knock-to that doesn't even work half the time when I use it within aggro range, and then on top of that doesn't root or snare at all. Saying this now maybe they'll nerf lunges so that they're 20 feet to balance it out. I dunno maybe it'll give me an excuse to stop playing and then reflect on what exactly I've been doing with my life for the past 7 years wow im saltier than the dead sea itself, good thing this is in the middle of a gigantic paragraph nobody is going to read because wow this post is long and aint nobody got time fo that. Basically, maybe make them just a little more reliable please.

Aside B: Balancing the effects of a knock on an NPC against a Player


So the idea of a knock-recovery animation taking longer on an enemy kind of scratches the surface of this. I passive-aggressively posted about this issue in the past which accomplished nothing (as most passive-aggressive things do.) But the ""perfectly"" mirrored control-effect clauses for players and enemies just don't work out. I put ""perfectly"" in quotes because I mean at a glance both Players and (sub-supervillain) NPCs work on the same rules: you build up 3 stacks of hold/knock/etc resistance and then you're immune for 15 seconds. Okay great mirrored, sure. Except for the fact that:
  • Knocks that enemies resist will build a stack of knock resistance, while holds you resist, either through blocking or passively through chance, don't.
  • The extremely unintuitive delay on when knock and hold resistance kicks in for blocks.
  • Knock stacks are going to build faster for enemies by nature because players can use knocking abilities much more frequently.
  • Not all attacks enemies use that knock, generate knock resistance. Like VIPER power armor rockets (that are generated randomly and instantly)
  • ENEMIES TAKE WAY LESS FALL DAMAGE THAN PLAYERS.
Consider this as well: in most cases a lot more enemies are fighting a single player, especially in normal missions. Enemies also are going to have much more openings to hit their player target, simply because those knocks and holds are going to force the player to block. So why not throw the player a bone? Why not have those stacks build through a block, so that even for just 15 seconds they have an opening where they can counterattack their enemies without having to deal with being sent flying? Just a consideration. Obviously in major fights, it would be tailored so that many cosmic hold/knock attempts would likely ignore this (not that it'd matter because the time between these effects is often way longer than 15 seconds.) This'd go hand-in-hand with a slower enemy knock recovery animation for getting up from prone (which I'm SURE COH had implemented.) In fact, many of the problems I'm pointing out here would go nicely with the suggestions posted above.

Aside C: FIX THESE CRATES


tldr im a huge baby that hates how knocks work
thats all thanks for your time reading this mess
also the forum ate my first draft because I used weird fonts.
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Comments

  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    Enh, the basics seem fine. One thing I've noticed that seems off is how the disable caused by a knock will sometimes persist longer than the knock. Also some knock abilities have a ridiculous level of knock. Some will literally knock you from point blank to out of attack range.
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  • omnilord#8416 omnilord Posts: 348 Arc User
    The Harmon Labs Custom Alert has me convinced knock resist for players doesn't really exist. Not when many, many, MANY times I experience a situation of I'm knocked, I get up, I run back into the fight, I'm instantly knocked again, I get up, I run back into the fight, I'm instantly knocked again, repeat ad infinitum. I practically feel like all my toons are knocked 3 times for every 1 NPC.

    Blocking for the resist is sort of useless too because of the pure number of enemies in the start of each area. You'd never thin them out because you'd be blocking almost all the time. Maybe getting it a potshot with an energy builder, or a quick tap attack. If everyone else is doing it as well, then it would take like 45 minutes to complete one run on the alert.
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    I think Harmon is particularly frustrating because you always have just enough time between fights for resist stacks to fade.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User

    Enh, the basics seem fine. One thing I've noticed that seems off is how the disable caused by a knock will sometimes persist longer than the knock. Also some knock abilities have a ridiculous level of knock. Some will literally knock you from point blank to out of attack range.

    Knockback on its own is manageable at best, but it doesn't really contribute much. It gets way worse when you are teamed up with melee characters however, or you yourself are running a melee. In that case suddenly you're just begging your teammates to stop knocking all the enemies away from you so that you can deal DPS and do your job. In essence it's grounds for trolling.

    So to mitigate a lot of the problem, many of the sets so far that have been rehashed have been steadily getting their inherent knock-flavor neutered entirely in favor of pure utility or alternative knock types, such as knock-to. Pillar of Poz, which I brought up earlier, is a prime example of this. Also consider that PoP was designed to feel large and powerful, it has an explosion sound effect that can be heard from miles away (probably unintentionally). The main issue was it wasn't exactly built this way. This same concern is also something I face whenever I've been considering using a build that utilizes the satisfying, but ultimately disruptive Roomsweeper, and is a similar basis upon which I'm hesitant to make builds that utilize the newly-rehashed Open Palm Strike, precisely because its an AoE knock that can easily knock targets out of its own range.

    I'm strictly of the mind that there's no room to compromise on the current state of knockback. Much like how a lot of earlier Cosmic fights were designed it's trollable by nature, and unlike the enemies, that won't fly. There needs to be a concrete reason to knock just about anything back - be it into bottomless pits, or actually causing collateral damage worthy of the description of 'knockback', or forming some kind of beneficial combo system - anything, but it has to contribute significantly to the main objective of the game, and that's to defeat villains. Anything less, and the mechanic used wrong can easily tilt other players on your team.
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  • pwestolemynamepwestolemyname Posts: 978 Arc User
    A well-written description of the issue and potential solutions. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

    1) Henchies should not be able to knock PC heroes, ever, period. Have you ever seen any hero in any comic book ever thrown 30 feet by a shotgun blast? Sidekicks, pets, sure, but not heroes. That's that.

    2) The main issue with player-knocks is mostly inconvenience. Knocking an enemy across the map rarely results in a wipe. It just slows the fight considerably, not fun for anyone. Some of this can be mitigated by smart play. Just aim the KB at a nearby wall, but that is not always an option, especially in alerts. Maybe some guides need to be written about how to manage your knockback.

    3) One solution that fits well within the super-hero milieu would be to greatly reduce the knock distance on enemies that are not KO'd by the knock attack. If the knock target is still awake and aware, they are going to be resisting the knock, so it makes sense they would go less distance than someone unconscious. It shouldn't take much extra computing power. Just calculate damage received like normal, then if damage < HP, divide KB by 3, or if damage > HP, regular KB.

    4) I do like the "you're outta here!!!" idea, as well. If a henchie gets punted 150+ feet, he's gonna be toast, period. Nobody survives that kind of fall without serious super-powers. Henchies are pointless chafe, anyway, so who cares if they die faster.

    5) Match the KB distance closer to the damage done. My Might Tank tosses the baddies the same distance a same-STR Might DPS would, but does way, way less damage. How does this even make sense? Not only would this method make more sense, but it would make it more likely that enemies tossed a ridiculous distance out of range would land KO'd, mitigating the need to chase them down the street.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    edited March 2018

    A well-written description of the issue and potential solutions. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

    1) Henchies should not be able to knock PC heroes, ever, period. Have you ever seen any hero in any comic book ever thrown 30 feet by a shotgun blast? Sidekicks, pets, sure, but not heroes. That's that.

    While I agree with this sentiment majorly (including how Destroids can now use Rifle Butt to stun you without warning... great design there), a lot of that also hinges on the genre of hero the player is trying to go for. Shoot a buckshot at the Hulk and he just gets angry at you and slams you to the pavement. Shoot buckshot at Superman and then it just bounces off his chest and unblinking eyelid because he's that difficult to damage. Now, fire a buckshot at somenone like Batman and they're likely going to be sent reeling at some propensity from the attack. I think this part of the issue isn't that major, because only a really narrow selection of henchmen-rank enemies use knocks anyways. Mostly it's the villain rank that's the problem. From a gameplay standpoint the solution really is to just make it possible to have a consistent opening for the player to strike back, especially if they've blocked and defended properly against those attacks.

    2) The main issue with player-knocks is mostly inconvenience. Knocking an enemy across the map rarely results in a wipe. It just slows the fight considerably, not fun for anyone. Some of this can be mitigated by smart play. Just aim the KB at a nearby wall, but that is not always an option, especially in alerts. Maybe some guides need to be written about how to manage your knockback.

    Aiming at walls is a solution I sometimes resort to, but obviously not one that can always be counted on due to geography. Now consider the possibility if knocks into walls dealt extra impact damage (i.e. like how Doomfist in Overwatch works when someone's hit by his rocket punch) - as it goes, it's not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop at the end. If that kind of logic is applied then it's not necessary to just have a fall damage algorithm used, you add velocity for the knock, and when that speed changes suddenly you deal extra damage. That could possibly both encourage more strategic use of knocks and perhaps provide a starting point for making knock-falls more deadly to enemies.

    3) One solution that fits well within the super-hero milieu would be to greatly reduce the knock distance on enemies that are not KO'd by the knock attack. If the knock target is still awake and aware, they are going to be resisting the knock, so it makes sense they would go less distance than someone unconscious. It shouldn't take much extra computing power. Just calculate damage received like normal, then if damage < HP, divide KB by 3, or if damage > HP, regular KB.

    I generally like this idea, though it could work against some of the other points I've tried to make about KB. I did consider the possibility of maybe just having Knockback be an 'on death' special effect to make the defeat of big crowds look cooler.

    5) Match the KB distance closer to the damage done. My Might Tank tosses the baddies the same distance a same-STR Might DPS would, but does way, way less damage. How does this even make sense? Not only would this method make more sense, but it would make it more likely that enemies tossed a ridiculous distance out of range would land KO'd, mitigating the need to chase them down the street.

    With everything else brought up I feel like this makes more of a damage-dealing divide between Tank and DPS, one of which is already exacerbated by the differences in role, passive, equipment, spec trees... If a smart damage-dealing system was put into effect for knocks then this could be mitigated. Handled poorly then lower-damage knocks from tanks would probably have the same issues as they do now, while high-power DPS knocks would mop the floor with enemies.


    also as an aside I find it really annoying that for a game that has several knocks, there's really only one map in the whole game that has a bottomless pit in it (Hi-Pan Fury of the Dragon) and it doesn't even kill enemies, just causes them to respawn several seconds later. What???
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  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    bluhman said:

    also as an aside I find it really annoying that for a game that has several knocks, there's really only one map in the whole game that has a bottomless pit in it (Hi-Pan Fury of the Dragon) and it doesn't even kill enemies, just causes them to respawn several seconds later. What???

    It does the same thing to players; there's no floor, just a region that forces a respawn.
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User

    bluhman said:

    also as an aside I find it really annoying that for a game that has several knocks, there's really only one map in the whole game that has a bottomless pit in it (Hi-Pan Fury of the Dragon) and it doesn't even kill enemies, just causes them to respawn several seconds later. What???

    It does the same thing to players; there's no floor, just a region that forces a respawn.
    I'd say there's a pretty significant difference between a player dying and an enemy dying, considering one already returns to spawn anyways with one less star, and the other usually stays dead. So in that case, it really doesn't make much sense that both players and NPCs get the same treatment in that scenario.
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User

    A well-written description of the issue and potential solutions. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.

    1) Henchies should not be able to knock PC heroes, ever, period. Have you ever seen any hero in any comic book ever thrown 30 feet by a shotgun blast? Sidekicks, pets, sure, but not heroes. That's that.

    Yeah, massive knocks in comics are a way of showing how powerful an enemy is. Bottom tier mooks are not.
    2) The main issue with player-knocks is mostly inconvenience. Knocking an enemy across the map rarely results in a wipe. It just slows the fight considerably, not fun for anyone. Some of this can be mitigated by smart play. Just aim the KB at a nearby wall, but that is not always an option, especially in alerts. Maybe some guides need to be written about how to manage your knockback.
    Actually, if it's planned properly, it's a useful CC tool. Haymaker enemy A, swap targets, Haymaker B before A comes back(if it does), repeat! The trick is to not chase after them in the meantime.
    3) One solution that fits well within the super-hero milieu would be to greatly reduce the knock distance on enemies that are not KO'd by the knock attack. If the knock target is still awake and aware, they are going to be resisting the knock, so it makes sense they would go less distance than someone unconscious. It shouldn't take much extra computing power. Just calculate damage received like normal, then if damage < HP, divide KB by 3, or if damage > HP, regular KB.
    I like the idea of having them take fall damage when I bounce them off walls.
    4) I do like the "you're outta here!!!" idea, as well. If a henchie gets punted 150+ feet, he's gonna be toast, period. Nobody survives that kind of fall without serious super-powers. Henchies are pointless chafe, anyway, so who cares if they die faster.
    Well, when Tanya haymakers henchmen sometimes the punch one-shots them. And if it doesn't the fall damage might. If they take fall damage, which they don't if they bounce off a wall or something.
    5) Match the KB distance closer to the damage done. My Might Tank tosses the baddies the same distance a same-STR Might DPS would, but does way, way less damage. How does this even make sense? Not only would this method make more sense, but it would make it more likely that enemies tossed a ridiculous distance out of range would land KO'd, mitigating the need to chase them down the street.
    Yeah, really. Getting dinged for 10 damage and ragdolled across the map is dumb. Nailing an enemy with a fully charged Haymaker for 9k+? That makes sense to send them flying so far you can't see them anymore.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?
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  • pantagruel01pantagruel01 Posts: 7,091 Arc User
    bluhman wrote: »
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?
    Because powers have to be fixed individually.
  • avianosavianos Posts: 6,021 Arc User
    edited October 2018
    bluhman wrote: »
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?
    This goes beyond the Knock issue, the backpack is acting like an individual enemy entity which doesn't follow the game's rules. Even when you CC the Viper PA, his backpack will charge and be ready to blast the moment he breaks free

    Done an entire thread about it years ago, I was so tired about it I gave up​​
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  • beezeezebeezeeze Posts: 927 Arc User
    Sorry bluhman I haven't read the entire thread yet, I'll catch up later.

    I'm just down here to comment on how extremely annoying I find it when those damn powerhouse dummies disappear at the slightest hint of a knockback effect. If nothing else I would love to see that get fixed!

  • kaiserin#0958 kaiserin Posts: 3,077 Cryptic Developer
    edited October 2018
    bluhman wrote: »
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?

    Reminder that if a npc has a power that knocks but doesn't grant knock res, to submit that to the bugs section. This isn't something we can fix in a wave or search for quickly, it's done on a per power basis. If we aren't aware of it, it won't get fixed.

    (As an aside I went and stickied an old thread in the bugs section listing some, please include any others there)​​
  • 3) One solution that fits well within the super-hero milieu would be to greatly reduce the knock distance on enemies that are not KO'd by the knock attack. If the knock target is still awake and aware, they are going to be resisting the knock, so it makes sense they would go less distance than someone unconscious. It shouldn't take much extra computing power. Just calculate damage received like normal, then if damage < HP, divide KB by 3, or if damage > HP, regular KB.

    This is the ideal solution, I think. If it isn't feasible for whatever reason, a simpler solution would be to simply put a cap on KB distances (50 or 60 feet should do the trick).

  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Huh... look at that necro. Guess I'll respond to it cause it's something I care about.

    Knock Back is a form of crowd control. It is superior in this regard to Knock Ups because enemies will be unable to attack you for longer, due to flight time and the distance they have to get back to you - even moreso if your knock places them behind a barrier of some sort or somewhere they will be unable to get to you. I use knock backs in this fashion to great effect.

    Reducing knock back distance would in effect neuter this utility. For no real reason either. Knocking someone really far is iconic to the genre, and there are already in-game solutions to the problem of "oh no, I knocked something out of my own attack range!", chief among them being "just don't do that".​​
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    spinnytop wrote: »
    Huh... look at that necro. Guess I'll respond to it cause it's something I care about.

    Knock Back is a form of crowd control. It is superior in this regard to Knock Ups because enemies will be unable to attack you for longer, due to flight time and the distance they have to get back to you - even moreso if your knock places them behind a barrier of some sort or somewhere they will be unable to get to you. I use knock backs in this fashion to great effect.

    Reducing knock back distance would in effect neuter this utility. For no real reason either. Knocking someone really far is iconic to the genre, and there are already in-game solutions to the problem of "oh no, I knocked something out of my own attack range!", chief among them being "just don't do that".​​

    I'd be more inclined to agree with this if it weren't the fact that every single enemy has access to ranged attacks with incredibly long reach. So as soon as those knife-men land and don't die, they just start trundling towards you and tossing knives at you from 100 feet away. In the time that I'm trying to run after the scattered mob or defend or whatever, I could've prepared another knock-up attack to directly follow up the previous one, or I could've been hitting them the whole time that they were stunned. If it is CC, it's really crappy CC.

    It's literally a tier below Sleep as a CC in team situations because at least in that case sleep just applies a lasting debuff to everyone and then doesn't otherwise really disrupt the formation of the whole mob.

    There are ways to design enemies so that knockback does help a ton in making their fights easier: Most simply would be making it so that not every enemy in the game has a cursory ability to do some kind of ranged attack. More nuanced would be having more mobs that are like destroids or nightmares, ones which project visible enemy-team auras, so that punching them way out of range then starves other enemies of their buffs. It still really isn't getting to the heart of the problem though.

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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    In my experience, many enemies deal less damage with ranged attacks than they do melee attacks, so add "damage debuff" to the list of functions that Knock Backs perform. They're really quite strong, and it'd be a shame to try to get them removed because some people just can't help themselves and use knock back when they don't want their target to be knocked back.​​
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    edited October 2018
    "Reduced damage from ranged villain attacks" is still infinitely more damage than "most melee builds which do not have ranged attacks." The point of a battle in any RPG is to "reduce the enemy's numbers faster than they can reduce yours". If the enemy can hit you and you can't, that's a losing battle, period.

    This is usually the same logic by which some weird new-player tactics, such as "constantly moving away from the enemy while you have aggro" and "trying to use flight to escape a fight" don't work. Which, I mean, I'd be happy if those were viable tactics, but the fact that all enemies have sniper-range attacks isn't doing it much favor.
    spinnytop wrote: »
    try to get them removed ​​

    Also at what point did I suggest this was a thread to get rid of knocks? I mean my apologies if everything typed here made it seem like I wanted them gone 100% but the title does say why they need to be redone, and by all means I want to make knocks a feature in this game I'd be having fun using.
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    I love using enemy things for golf balls! So I have fun with it as-is.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    Some more minor points I've discovered since posting this rant:
    1. Level Geometry

      Many of the environments' walls, both interior and exterior, feature geometries that have lots of microscopic ledges that characters can stand and dangle off of. Strategically speaking, these can potentially cancel out some of the benefits of trying to knock enemies into walls, because of a few prior points made:
      • Enemies globally have ranged attacks
      • Enemies might not take fall damage (and are especially less likely if landing on an elevated ledge)
      as the attack's backwards force will cause the enemy to land on this ledge, still further out of the way of some attack ranges. Then there's also the major point that these ledges mean, since it's likely an enemy will land on the ground sooner than if they just slid down to the base of a wall, it means that this is also less downtime spent when the enemy is unable to attack you.
    2. Implications of a knock for a player vs. an enemy

      More an extension of points already made, there's other inherent differences in how a player and an NPC operate that greatly differentiates how drastically one is affected by a knock compared to another:
      • NPCs use Recharges, Players use Energy: Time spent being knocked back is time spent having attack cooldown reduce. Time spent being knocked back isn't time spent building energy!
      • Players have stats, NPCs have... hidden stats? As a rule-of-thumb, players should use knocks under the assumption that they can fail, and protect against NPC knocks under the assumption they always succeed.
        For example: Hitting a brickbuster charging their brickbuster cannon with Crashing Wave Kick (stun) is a guaranteed stop to the attack. Hitting the brickbuster with Roomsweeper (knock) is not a guaranteed stop, as the attack might only succeed in repelling the brickbuster, or possibly not even deal a knock at all.
        The point is critical because even high-strength characters are not guaranteed ever to resist an unblocked knock attack, just as they're never guaranteed to be able to knock even a non-knock-resistant target.
      • Players work under the rules of blocking. NPCs don't. This is an implication that extends to beyond just knocks, as this further increases the risks of failing to resist a knock: this is time that a player is spending unable to attack, and unable to block, which means that this is a period of time where NPCs will be able to score some extremely powerful hits. In some cases (such as with Teleios Ascendant - Doing a Shockwave into a TK Maelstrom) this can be a guaranteed death situation if you fail to resist the knock.
    3. The implication of what a HOLD means to an NPC and a player is already being considered in design, but not knocks...

      What I mean by this is that there's already some rather drastic and fairly standardized rules that are being implemented between enemies and players when it comes to how Holds are implemented on these entities. For the most part (aside from some very minor, rather egregious examples) enemies absolutely need to charge an attack to hold or stun you. Mostly, this is also paired with a visible tell via an attack icon. Players (and especially melee sets) meanwhile have gained access to plenty of instantaneously-activatable interrupts and holds.

      These click-activate stuns on player characters? These are essential to gameplay... Especially considering some cosmic content (Kigatilik Dog pulling requires a quick, precisely-timed hold or interrupt to stop their howl from waking other dogs and throwing them into a Buff death spiral.)

      A click-activate stun on an enemy? Unthinkable. But the instances in where they're found stand out hard. Let me ask you, does it feel fair to fight VIPER soldiers or Destroid henchmen in melee distance? This is a low-rank enemy with access to an untelegraphed, instantaneous stun. What does that mean if they activate this attack while you're using an ability such as a self-heal? While you're using a maintained ultimate?

      This is an unstated rule that is implicitly enforced in almost every case of PvE gameplay. So why can't this logic be applied to knocks?
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    kaizerin wrote: »
    bluhman wrote: »
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?

    Reminder that if a npc has a power that knocks but doesn't grant knock res, to submit that to the bugs section. This isn't something we can fix in a wave or search for quickly, it's done on a per power basis. If we aren't aware of it, it won't get fixed.

    (As an aside I went and stickied an old thread in the bugs section listing some, please include any others there)​​

    also this still isn't fixed even after it's been brought up in the corresponding bug thread, four months ago.
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    bluhman wrote: »
    kaizerin wrote: »
    bluhman wrote: »
    bump because why does getting hit by Viper Power Armor rocket spam 3 times in a row still not build a single stack of knock resist?

    Reminder that if a npc has a power that knocks but doesn't grant knock res, to submit that to the bugs section. This isn't something we can fix in a wave or search for quickly, it's done on a per power basis. If we aren't aware of it, it won't get fixed.

    (As an aside I went and stickied an old thread in the bugs section listing some, please include any others there)​​

    also this still isn't fixed even after it's been brought up in the corresponding bug thread, four months ago.

    ok now it's fixed.

    I can confirm it because ever since I've tried recording and keeping track of footage to try and catch those Viper Power ARmor guys in the act it's never happened where they just unleashed a million untelegraphed missiles at me 3 times in a row.


    On a different note, reminder that this is still in the game
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkzWg5BoUMs
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  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    Ok some more concrete things I'd like to see from this:
    • Make characters slip and fall off of surfaces that aren't wide enough to carry them. The reason for this is because: when knocking enemies in indoor maps (i.e. the bank), usually they don't take nearly as much damage from a fall due to catching on a small piece of geometry on a wall. Then they just perch up there and shoot you while you try to hop and reach them. Solution is to make that 'perch' not something that should be stood upon - that's just common sense.
    • Tough Mobs must take fall damage. End of discussion. If it's knockable, it must take fall damage. That's it.
    • Have 'fall' damage on knocked characters be calculated differently: do it by deceleration rate: so the faster they suddenly stop, the more damage they take. Haymakering an enemy into an office wall would splatter them if it normally would knockback something like 320 feet for example.
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  • panthrax77panthrax77 Posts: 309 Arc User
    I think one of the best solutions for knocks on the player induced side is already in the game, just not enough of it. Gravity well is like glue for mobs and is honestly almost required in some circumstances. Adding this affect to other force powers would make the set actually usable. For other sets, there need to be other ways to pull or utilize that knock as well. Earth could certainly have some rooting and pulling mechanics, and with some creativity the other brick sets can find solutions for them.

    As far as technicality goes, this seems like the easiest fix to knocks from players.
  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    Man, they sure are playing fast and loose with the necro rules on this one.
  • bluhmanbluhman Posts: 2,410 Arc User
    panthrax77 wrote: »
    I think one of the best solutions for knocks on the player induced side is already in the game, just not enough of it. Gravity well is like glue for mobs and is honestly almost required in some circumstances. Adding this affect to other force powers would make the set actually usable. For other sets, there need to be other ways to pull or utilize that knock as well. Earth could certainly have some rooting and pulling mechanics, and with some creativity the other brick sets can find solutions for them.

    As far as technicality goes, this seems like the easiest fix to knocks from players.

    Well, keep in mind the main argument I'm making here is to preserve the visual effect and feel of knock, because that's still a really big deal about making fights in this game actually look and feel distinct from basically any other MMO. The situation could easily be solved by just removing knock, but then what's even the point. If Gravity Well were to be placed in more locations that would kind of defeat the purpose of having knocks in the first place.

    Already there's also a lot of sets that are moving more and more of their effects over to just a vertical knock, which in some cases for attacks that clearly look like they should be smashing people backwards, doesn't make much cohesive sense. Having more rooting or deliberate knock-resist application on a set like Earth and perhaps Force could work, but for others such as say Munitions or Might there aren't as clean answers to how to, essentially, hamfist the mechanic of knockback into a way that doesn't look or feel natural anymore. The fact they've already forced even more random Might attacks to do knockdowns or knockups instead of raw knockback is a sign of just how little of an idea the team has for how to even address the issues it inherently creates.
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Posts: 4,915 Arc User
    I personally like using Haymaker to play golf with enemies, but It's easy to understand why people wouldn't want a full set of attacks that do that exact effect.
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  • spinnytopspinnytop Posts: 16,450 Arc User
    edited February 2020
    I'd say they know exactly how to address the issues of knockback, and the might revamp shows that. Creating conditions where knock backs instead knock up is the perfect solution - it means you have access to both when you need them. In a way it actually implemented that suggestion Bluh made about how attacks should chain into one another to create different effects. If I want to send everything flying, I go right into Roomsweeper. If I want everything to stay put, I do Thunderclap into Roomsweeper. Combined with the Brawler Specialization this makes all sorts of flowchart possibilities for combinations of powers depending on build and situation. After I realized this recently it made my Might character super fun. It actually surpassed my Unarmed toon for most fun - it actually seems like the devs are getting better at power revamps the more they do them. It's almost to the point where I think they need to go in and revisit earlier revamps to make sure they live up to the standards of the newer ones!

    I mean we all know some sort of massive overhaul of knocks isn't gonna happen, but what they're doing is functionally just as good.
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