W.I.P. Combat Balance - Jump Canceling Solutions

Hello,

There has been a great deal of feedback and discussion between us and the team as Mepps and I proxy your concerns to them. I think it would be helpful to better define the problem that we are trying to solve. We've got two primary things we keep in mind when we are sifting through the comments and trying to figure out how to solve the balance & messaging issues we're seeing. At the end of this post, we will be asking for your suggestions, but please consider the information below first.

Let me outline our top two things we are trying to solve:

1. Balance - There are rules in place for clipping and how it works. There is a hierarchy of ability trumping that makes clipping work while remaining balanced. These rules need to be enforced and loopholes that circumvent them are very problematic.
2. Messaging - With clipping in the game, it is never possible to see every attack. We like having clipping in for advanced players, and feel the Counter Mechanic Icons go a long way in making sure the messaging is there for people to see how to combat it, but it does make the game faster - and we like that.

And that is where Jump Canceling comes into play. Jump canceling breaks both of these two aspects of combat. Let me illustrate how.

Here are the types of attacks that matter for clipping:



In a nut shell, Beneficial Superpowers are the only thing that are supposed to clip itself in the clipping system. Let me chain some of these together now before we move on to Jump Canceling being used to clip.

Keep in mind all of the examples I am about to mock up aren't meant to be specific use cases; rather, they are merely examples of sequences of events and how they are designed to fit together to enforce balance and messaging.

Let's look at a Combat Sequence without clipping. Time goes from left to right to indicate that this sequence takes time to pull off without clipping.



It is pretty clear to see that all of the animations of the abilities play out and can easily be seen by another player. All of the vulnerability windows match the animation/ability being played, and there is little doubt what is happening. Whether or not you end the sequence on the first Beneficial or keep doing more beneficial powers, there is always a resolution after a beneficial is used for the last time. But, in the end, this is slow.

Now let's look at this same sequence but throw in clipping. The sequence I laid out is ideal - Each ability can clip the thing before it. You can see how using clipping speeds things up greatly.



Once you reach the Beneficial, you can let it play out to end the sequence or continue to spam beneficial powers to continue, but, at some point, the chain ends with the beneficial playing out completely before you can initiate another action. But what is happening here? What does the player see? Well, not much as far as the animations go. The clipping is masking the activity of each thing that came before it. Performed fast enough, you only see the animation for the Beneficial Super Power. But all the game mechanics are playing out normally. So, the player can still be countered from the Weapon Finisher, and is still launching the Offensive Super Power's effect at an enemy.We're okay with this "masking" of moves so that the game can be fast an snappy. Now that we have the Counter Mechanic Icons in, it is easy to see what happened from the Weapon Finisher that was clipped by the Offensive Super Power. The stealthiest action is the Offensive Super Power. But, this is a single move that must be followed by a beneficial.

If you were to chain together a ridiculously long string of abilities and clipped where you could to see how they work together (i.e. what can and can't clip what) it might look something like this.




Now as I said earlier, this is just made up sequences to try and put the rules into perspective so we can talk about the real issue we need to solve. Notice above how everything is very clippable. But, it takes more time when you have back to back Offensive Super Powers, and that is by design. It is also the problem we are here to discuss with jump cancel.


Here's something you would never do, play out a jump cancel sequence without actually clipping or jump canceling - just playing each action in sequence. Let's take a look.



You could remove the jump, and this would be an entirely normal, although not optimal series of attacks that would be perfectly fine due to the time it takes to perform it all (balance) and the fact that you see each attack (messaging). But if you did this all at once, as if clipping, you would get this.



The areas of concern come with the fourth and fifth moves in the sequence. under normal clipping rules that were meant to govern combat, you could not reduce the anim time of an offensive Super Power with another Offensive Super Power. It had to be a beneficial. But, if you use a certain type of Offensive Ability that can be canceled with jump, you can dump another basic attack and then hit another Offensive Super Power before finishing the sequence with a beneficial. Now, instead of masking two attacks, you are masking four. Depending on your Weapon and Super Power combination the results can create extreme imbalance.

Not all Super Powers and Weapon choices do this well, and not all legends characters can take advantage of such rotations as either. We feel that clipping masking an attack or two is okay, it speeds the game up and we have messaging in place to handle it, but masking three to four in the blink of an eye is simply too much to message and too hard to balance against. In short, we have reached a tipping point with this mechanic if we are going to move forward with a healthy balanced game.

What we have proposed to get back to the normal clipping hierarchy is an enforced resolution to an action, essentially the dovetail animation of the ability being canceled, to ensure that you can't "clip" offensive powers with each other, and sneak in an extra attack to boot. What we want to know from you is:

Do you see another solution to this that would yield the same result?

Let us know here. We've certainly discussed a lot of options internally, but this one seemed the best route to us. Perhaps we missed something, so we would love to hear ideas from you.

I want to get ahead of this bit of valid, but already explored feedback. We have looked into it and here is our take away.

• Make all powers have jump cancel.
  • We dismissed this option because it doesn't resolve our messaging issue. Dumping four attacks in the blink of an eye is simply too much to overcome and or process.
  • The scope of work to go this route is also quite staggering. We would have to redesign many legends characters, super powers and weapons to make everything equal. That leads us back to an even more dire situation regarding the above bullet.

This piece of your quote is the sentiment behind what I was saying. Not all Powers find an equal benefit from it, so significant changes would need to be made to make it optimal for all. Additionally, there are advantages with certain weapons over others in regards to the Phantom Triangle and counter mechanics. So, accommodating it in that regard means making things play the same just to accommodate the JC. It's a tricky situation.

This is a big problem when trying to achieve legends balance. Again, a major overhaul to lots of legends characters would need to occur just to accommodate JC on the ones that have it. Not to mention the same issue of choice of weapon. Certain Lantern and Rifle Characters come to mind.

That's what happens now - the power is cancelled immediately. This would not fix the loophole of being able to chain clip Offensive Super Powers.

An interesting idea. Thanks for the suggestion. I will bring it up with the team. My initial thoughts are that sometimes you might not want to move. Perhaps you are looking to block an incoming attack and you have fire to the right and left of you - or some other hazard. Anyway, I'll ponder.

The actual act of Jump Cancelling doesn't change. The proposal affects what happens after. So, in our current thinking, the action of doing a jump cancel has the same effect on the current ability as it does now - it is cancelled immediately.

Ah, I miss those days. I used to play a controller exclusively before that happened. hehe. In fact, that's why I chose the name. Had I known that change was going to happen at the 11th hour, I would have called them "Energizers", or something less litigious, that got the point across.

In all seriousness, that's a tougher challenge at this point. I wish we could find a balance where both types of trollers are needed to be effective, and people would appreciate having both types. CC'ing is becoming more and more useful.

Thanks for laying this all out. I think it was necessary to help some people understand the rationale. Not to say that it will make the change easier to accept, because many players have gotten used to the current JC as an accepted game mechanic and have built their rotations around it. I agree that what you're proposing seems to be the best approach. When it comes down to it, JC is really the core issue. Trying to fix other things to preserve JC in it's current form doesn't make a lot of sense. What I'm sure everyone is eagerly anticipating is a number. How many milliseconds will this dovetail be? How much will this change slow down game play? Until you can talk about that, there will still be a lot of anxiety.

P.S., I think your second diagram is supposed to have the "repeat" arrow going all the way back to the weapon finisher.

I think that arrow would come from the "end" as you need to wait for the resolution. I meant the repeat as a way to indicate you can continue to clip with more beneficials. Trying to keep it simple but there is still a lot of complexity. Hehe.

Oh, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.

The flowcharts really help give a visual to the issue. I hope that now more people will be able to understand what is happening, and more positive feedback can come flowing in.

I still agree the dovetail is the most rational option. Regardless of what happens, I am happy to see the community involved and it's refreshing to see so many people learning clipping rotations for the first time because of this discussion.

Yes you pointed out alot of things and answered many questions. However the big question is do you plan on taking out JC completely as to go back to the normal way of clipping, which is fine, there would just be some tweaks to powers later on. Last time you wanted us to give you a time for the tail, rather mostly people would choose anywhere from .3s to .5s.

Is that option still available, or are we merely discussing getting rid of JC completely?

I can not think of any other way that addresses both the balance and messaging issues that dont create new problems. Besides its hard to evaluate options when we havent heard how much of a resolution delay you are adding.

I mentioned this in the other thread(s), but I think ~300 milliseconds sounds reasonable for a dovetail. DPS notwithstanding, JC needs to remain a viable means of interrupting an action to avoid a possibly lethal attack. Since the messaging window for such attacks is usually ~1 second, you need time to visually process the attack indicator (e.g., skull), decide on a course of action (e.g., JC, block & roll), and implement it. If the dovetail is too long, you won't have enough time to make use of JC as a survival tactic, and you might as well remove it completely.

Its a radical idea but would diminishing returns on the damage of offensive powers after a jump cancel work? Maybe something with the damage mod of the next ability. It would not really get rid of jump canceling but it would have to cause players to find different ways to perform combos to maximize damage output. So you could still JC you would just not do as much damage as you could be doing.

I agree 100% with how and why you guys want to balance jump canceling. Jump canceling has been exploited for way too long and I for one am glad it is finally being fixed.

The way I feel jump canceling should work is you guys should A) place a 1 to 1.2 second hard cool down on what cannot be used after something is jump canceled, and B) all damage from the attack that was canceled should cease.

Here is how it would work from a practical example in game. I was not clear enough for some people in the last thread so I thought I would give examples. A simple example is Banes venom shout in legends. The second you jump cancel it, the damage is stopped. Now jump canceling should work this way by default but it should also be treated as power itself. For example, I am a gadgets player. Say I want to jump cancel fear gas, when I jump cancel its animation, I am able to cancel its animation but now for 1 to 1.2 seconds after the cancel I am only limited to anything flagged beneficial. After 1 to 1.2 seconds passes then I regain access to my weapon and attacks flagged utilities.

I have always been a firm believer that jump canceling is a self explanatory process. You as a player choose to jump so that you can cancel the animation to defend yourself properly by forfeiting the spoils from the canceled utility power. This would ensure that jump canceling is only ever used for the purpose of avoided imminent death. It would not allow anyone to use jump canceling to front load damage, but would still allow support roles to function as they always have.

I believe this needs to be implemented for the sake of balance between power sets. I know all animations will eventually be reduced to 1 to 1.2 seconds, so the slower animations will become faster. However, I feel this is needed to make balancing the power sets easier. I am 100% for anything that helps balance all the power sets, and I feel that if all power sets are limited in the same way, it will be easier to see what needs to be fixed, rather than balancing around whether or not someone should jump cancel to be effective.

That really doesn't fix the messaging issue, though. I think the proposed change is more about that than the damage itself.

To be clear all powersets have that, there's not a single powerset in the game that doesn't have, so that's already in the game.

Things to consider when tackling this mechanic:
1. People find utilising it fun
2. It is a huge power drain in fact it effectively double the power in of a normal dps rotation.
3. It takes significantly more effort to play this way during the course of an instance.
4. To continuosly utilise it you need a certain group setup ensuring suficient power supply.
5. While it doubles the resource drain the dmg gain is not nearly as high- in perfect execution and only certain powersets You're ooking at a maximum of 30% gain, if performed poorly You can slip into diminishing returns(easier for some powersets then others).

Areas of the game where jcing is relevant:
1. High end raiding content with a custom group setup
2. Legends pvp, as unlike for the powersets not every toon has access to it and it can in some cases significantly bump up a toons potential.

For everything else- there's not enough power and it's too predictable.

With all animations becoming 1 to 1.2 seconds jump cancelling should simply cancel the power. No dovetail is needed; no lockout of powers it just ends the power with no damage or cuts the damage off.

As you said, the imbalance is hiding other powers but if you only get a partial effect the "toll is paid" so to speak. On a channel obviously the power ends with no effect (and perhaps no cost in power) and on a multi-hit only the first couple of hits go off. This allows people to jump cancel to save themselves from dangerous situations but I don't think locking them out of offensive abilities for 1 second is the answer either Giggles.

Will this slow down gameplay? Yes, but in what way?

It WILL slow down the amount of outgoing Damage per second. This is going to be felt the greatest and that's probably OK. With enemies dieing more slowly fights will last longer allowing more dynamic content events and for other roles like CC, tanks and healers to shine. Combat taking longer is OK.

I fear that the real problem about the granade/jump is the number of rifle shots that lanterns can implement in one extremelly short rotation. Green lanterns can put 3 shots in one 2 power rotation, like this: rifle shot, fan, shot, jump, snap, fan, shot jump. One overpowered friend of mine uses shot, fan, shot, jump, entrap, shot, minigun, shot, snap...
The way i see you could increment power cost for some skills, reduce damage for rifle or reduce damage for some skills, cant think of anything better right now...

Scrap the channeling powers completely. No need for them after this nerf.

I really can't think of any other solution except to have a forced animation.

You can't get rid of JCing or you remove its intended purpose and you can't keep it the same because it bypasses clipping mechanics.

But what I am curious about is what kind of results you guys have had with testing different timing windows.

Just to emphasize on what you said:
1. People also find utilizing it decidedly NOT fun.
2. - 5. It doesn't matter if its a custom setup; if no other playstyle can compete for raw effectiveness then it becomes the ONLY playstyle.

People who want to include weapon combo's and play the game without jump cancelling should and do have just as much right to have a viable playstyle. I am sorry it has to be at the expense of yours but there is no other way to balance it.

If they don't slow you down then I can't have my fun either. You still have your viable normal clipping but now I can also use my weapon combos into powers effectively as well. For both of us to have our playstyle then concessions need to be made on both ends (if I could I'd make jump cancelling end the power straight up). But I'm willing to find a middle ground.

Agreed. JC should just cancel the power. At any rate JC should be more of an evasive maneuver than an exploit. Since you are changing all animation times to be within a certain window. Might at well make JC cancel the power since animations wont be as long as they used to be.

Well, considering all the factors mentioned by Spytle, I think the "dovetail" approach is good. The questions is: How long it should be? My personal vote goes to 0.3 or 0.4 seconds.


About other alternatives, the one thing I can come up with is...


ROLL CANCEL

What if Jump Cancel was replaced with "Roll Cancel" ?

I feel rolling is a bit under used in this game. I'm guessing the point of programming the roll move in the first place was to avoid attacks, right? And wasn't that the original purpose of jump cancel as well?

Roll has a non interruptible animation (as far as I know, please correct me if I'm wrong) so no other moves can be performed while rolling. So, the messaging would be very clear and it would enforce the intended clipping mechanics. And the only thing to do would be to allow rolling (press block AND a direction, just blocking would get us to the current JC situation again) in the middle of an attack like JC currently does.

In short, replace jump with roll because roll, unlike jump, has an unavoidable animation.

The problem I see with this idea is that currently, blocking and rolling often feel a little clunky, not to mention issues like the infamous "block sticking". But I guess this idea would also provide with an opportunity to check and correct those issues.

Just an idea I had.


As a side note, and independently from my idea, I suggest allowing us to roll twice in a row.