A.) Combat Week!
1.) Combat Week!
*.) Combat Week!
If you picked "Combat Week" then congratulations, you win! And you win big. Your prize is going to be a much faster and "funnerer" melee combat system. We have been listening to your feedback and are digging into the "feel" of combat. We are fixing that weird animation glitch where you start swinging your weapon again if you keep hitting the button. We are also removing some of the floaty animation making melee attacks 2X faster. This will make your default swing do moderate damage and your big attacks be much MORE BIG! We are also working on timing issues-- primarily around when damage is applied, death, and when particle effects happen on hit. Yergen built a "enemy monster is hit" effect which we are going to try applying onto monsters. It will further help illustrate when your attacks connect with your foe.
Currently, most players feel the Mage class is the most fun to play-- our goal is to make the melee classes just as fun. On the topic of mages.. we have also seen some skillful Mages able to solo boss monsters by kiting them around in circles. We have no intention of nerfing mages.. but do expect monsters to get smarter :D This is going to be very important, especially because we have started designing bows-- which means ranged archer classes.
The 1st pass at the Guardian Class has been in testing on the development server for a while now. We are still making major changes, but we intend to release an early version of it for everyone who got the AQ3D Guardian package through the Kickstarter pretty soon -- ideally by the end of next week. (Check to see if you have the Guardian badge on your character page.) The Guardian class has a fun mechanic. Every attack you make has a chance to put a "Guardian Mark" on your enemy. they stack -- which means you can put a bunch of them on the same enemy. There is even a Guardian Strike skill which has a 100% chance to add another Guardian Marks on your foe. These marks work like currency for all of the Guardian's Special skills. The more Guardian marks on your target, the more damage your special attacks will do! Or... if you use Healing Strike, the more it will heal you! All of the marks are consumed when you use a special attack, so using them with strategy is key.
When I started writing this post I had no idea where to start. Everything is moving so rapidly in all directions-- it would be fair to calling this a flurry of development. But it is hard to get constructive feedback when looking at... EVERYTHING all at once. It is sort of like a President asking for everyone to just tell them "everything that needs fixed in the entire world." That much scattered feedback just turns into random noise. So one of my major goals this week was to make special (and very focused) posts to get your feedback on the specific things we are working on! For example, the next week-and-a-half we will be very focused on combat. So getting our whole video game community to lock onto the topic of combat and work with the team on making the combat the very best it can be should be priority one. But then it dawned on me, that not everyone knows how to be a good coach and give constructive feedback. What I mean is... most people on the internet are not used to people actually listening to them. So instead of offering suggestions on how to make something better, they just get vocal about what they do not like. It is really easy to hate on something, especially if it makes the poster feel superior. But the only way to make progress is to answer the question "What can I suggest to make it better?" It may sound like something everyone would do, but giving truly constructive "coaching" is hard for a lot of people. Probably because most people do not expect anyone to actually listen to them. Or sometimes, they know they do not like something, but they do not know what they would like. Which, honestly, takes some serious thinking. So I would like to make a video... using some tips from my Martial Arts school... on how you can be a great coach to the AQ3D Team! Which brings us to this post's challenge!
Tell a story in the comment section below of a time you posted something online that made a positive change, helped someone, or it got noticed and made a difference! (It is also OK to post that no one ever paid attention to your posts before if that is really true.)
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