I picked the worst damn day and time to go run errands; this thing literally dropped as I was heading out to get a haircut (I was dangerously deep into pre-mullet phase) and buying cat food.
So, new approach to traits. They took care of the three bullet points on my trait revamp; traits can be changed anywhere, can be changed for free, and the point distribution is made easier. I had also toyed with the idea of spreading the more powerful "Skill shift" traits to trainers hidden around the world, but this is doing just about the same thing.
The Guardian trait is a step in the wrong direction though, it is literally "have more stat!" Otherwise, everything looks good and I'm eager to try that Warrior trait, as I encountered a rather nasty dual-axe warrior in WvW last night who didn't give me a chance to even hit her.
I had a big, long rant on the MMOChamp forums way back when about how shitty WoW's status effects were, and how I would group them into a single category (for example, WoW had like 7 or 8 different flavors of 'Blind') and give them less 'mathy' effects and more 'gamey' effects. Here's what I ended up with;
Status effects would be applied in duration-based increments; inflicts 3 seconds of Poisoned, or inflicts 9 seconds of slowed. The UI element used rings to signify how much time was left; 3 seconds is one ring, 6 is two, 9 is three, so you can quickly understand the severity based just on the size of the icons. The Status icons were always kept on-screen and color-coded, so seeing them grow in relation to each other allowed you to quickly grasp the situation without having to look at the icon or a numerical timer / stack indicator.
But more importantly, each status also had real effects on gameplay you could see, feel and quickly understand, modeled on FPSers and platformers. Blind, for example, is modeled heavily on Rainbow Six 3's Flashbang effect; at 1-3 seconds it makes everything blurry so it's harder to see. At 4-6 seconds, big black splotches appear on your screen and then slowly fade away. At the 7-9 second mark, your screen was just completely black. At no point did you ever lose your target in that process, you just couldn't see where they are or what they're doing. Which sounds insane, but much more interesting than what WoW was doing (simple stat reduction) or even GW2 (a single attack is negated).
They all worked like that; "Slowed" didn't actually make your movement speed slower. It made your controls 'muddy' and slow to respond. You'd hold down the movement key and it would take a fraction of a second longer to respond. The more duration, the muddier it felt. Of course your character also gained a funny walk to boot.
"Disarmed" made your attack button feel sluggish; you'd hit it and there'd be a slight delay, but it never actually made your attack speed slower. The more duration, the worse it felt, sometimes actually ignoring inputs. Same story as slowed; your characters attacks took on a different look.
"Shocked" was fun; 1-3 seconds reversed your forward and backwards input. 4-6 reversed your left and right. 7-9 flat-out scrambled them (up is left, right is up, etc.). You could totally compensate for it, just like old games where your controls were flipped.
"Poisoned" was less interesting, because it was mostly mechanic; whenever you moved, you lost health and energy in larger and larger chunks the higher the duration. It was the one I was least happy with, because the only 'gamey' element was that your screen just grew more washed out color-wise until everything was sickly-green grayscale.
This is already long, and pointless, but one of the cool things that made the approach interesting (while giving it a way to avoid being too unfair) is that you could apply more than 9 seconds of a status, but anything over caused it to 'burst' and a new effect to occur. For example, Blind made your screen completely white for 1 second and then everything faded and blurred over the span of 2 seconds, but more importantly you lost your target lock. And then the condition immediately reset and the player was even made immune to it for a short period. So the enemy had to carefully keep the applications up to keep you in the 'sweet spot', or could 'burst' the condition to make something worse happen, at the expense of having to start applying all over again. A stealth-oriented character would enjoy keeping you blind so he could slink behind you, but his victim could still see the target reticule and kind of track him (though not see what he was doing effectively enough to evade or block it). If friends showed up to help or he just wanted to disappear for whatever reason, causing the effect to burst so his target couldn't track him was useful.
Those effects were all very fun too. Slowed actually unbalanced you and made you fall onto your back in a prone position where enemies could spike you for more damage. Disarmed made your weapon fly away from your character in a random direction and you had to walk over it to re-equip it. Shocked made your controls scramble a different every two seconds for a little while.
And there were lots of nuances to it too; you could find skills that softened the effects (one of my favorite was "Blind Fighting" which caused a 'wireframe ghost' of your target to remain clearly visible no matter how blind you were). There were medicines you could make that let you resist a number of applications entirely.
Sorry, long post, but your comment reminded me of how much fun I had bringing RPG Status effects into the realm of tangible gameplay effects.
So, new approach to traits. They took care of the three bullet points on my trait revamp; traits can be changed anywhere, can be changed for free, and the point distribution is made easier. I had also toyed with the idea of spreading the more powerful "Skill shift" traits to trainers hidden around the world, but this is doing just about the same thing.
The Guardian trait is a step in the wrong direction though, it is literally "have more stat!" Otherwise, everything looks good and I'm eager to try that Warrior trait, as I encountered a rather nasty dual-axe warrior in WvW last night who didn't give me a chance to even hit her.
I had a big, long rant on the MMOChamp forums way back when about how shitty WoW's status effects were, and how I would group them into a single category (for example, WoW had like 7 or 8 different flavors of 'Blind') and give them less 'mathy' effects and more 'gamey' effects. Here's what I ended up with;
Status effects would be applied in duration-based increments; inflicts 3 seconds of Poisoned, or inflicts 9 seconds of slowed. The UI element used rings to signify how much time was left; 3 seconds is one ring, 6 is two, 9 is three, so you can quickly understand the severity based just on the size of the icons. The Status icons were always kept on-screen and color-coded, so seeing them grow in relation to each other allowed you to quickly grasp the situation without having to look at the icon or a numerical timer / stack indicator.
But more importantly, each status also had real effects on gameplay you could see, feel and quickly understand, modeled on FPSers and platformers. Blind, for example, is modeled heavily on Rainbow Six 3's Flashbang effect; at 1-3 seconds it makes everything blurry so it's harder to see. At 4-6 seconds, big black splotches appear on your screen and then slowly fade away. At the 7-9 second mark, your screen was just completely black. At no point did you ever lose your target in that process, you just couldn't see where they are or what they're doing. Which sounds insane, but much more interesting than what WoW was doing (simple stat reduction) or even GW2 (a single attack is negated).
They all worked like that; "Slowed" didn't actually make your movement speed slower. It made your controls 'muddy' and slow to respond. You'd hold down the movement key and it would take a fraction of a second longer to respond. The more duration, the muddier it felt. Of course your character also gained a funny walk to boot.
"Disarmed" made your attack button feel sluggish; you'd hit it and there'd be a slight delay, but it never actually made your attack speed slower. The more duration, the worse it felt, sometimes actually ignoring inputs. Same story as slowed; your characters attacks took on a different look.
"Shocked" was fun; 1-3 seconds reversed your forward and backwards input. 4-6 reversed your left and right. 7-9 flat-out scrambled them (up is left, right is up, etc.). You could totally compensate for it, just like old games where your controls were flipped.
"Poisoned" was less interesting, because it was mostly mechanic; whenever you moved, you lost health and energy in larger and larger chunks the higher the duration. It was the one I was least happy with, because the only 'gamey' element was that your screen just grew more washed out color-wise until everything was sickly-green grayscale.
This is already long, and pointless, but one of the cool things that made the approach interesting (while giving it a way to avoid being too unfair) is that you could apply more than 9 seconds of a status, but anything over caused it to 'burst' and a new effect to occur. For example, Blind made your screen completely white for 1 second and then everything faded and blurred over the span of 2 seconds, but more importantly you lost your target lock. And then the condition immediately reset and the player was even made immune to it for a short period. So the enemy had to carefully keep the applications up to keep you in the 'sweet spot', or could 'burst' the condition to make something worse happen, at the expense of having to start applying all over again. A stealth-oriented character would enjoy keeping you blind so he could slink behind you, but his victim could still see the target reticule and kind of track him (though not see what he was doing effectively enough to evade or block it). If friends showed up to help or he just wanted to disappear for whatever reason, causing the effect to burst so his target couldn't track him was useful.
Those effects were all very fun too. Slowed actually unbalanced you and made you fall onto your back in a prone position where enemies could spike you for more damage. Disarmed made your weapon fly away from your character in a random direction and you had to walk over it to re-equip it. Shocked made your controls scramble a different every two seconds for a little while.
And there were lots of nuances to it too; you could find skills that softened the effects (one of my favorite was "Blind Fighting" which caused a 'wireframe ghost' of your target to remain clearly visible no matter how blind you were). There were medicines you could make that let you resist a number of applications entirely.
Sorry, long post, but your comment reminded me of how much fun I had bringing RPG Status effects into the realm of tangible gameplay effects.
