team spirit New commands for Team Spirit as an alternative to blessed sisturn 3 to keep Abigail safe

[Pig Princess]

If you disagree with the idea of removing blessed sisturn 3, you might still be interested in addition of new team spirit commands themselves.

General principle and goal. The first thing that I noticed while trying to come up with command ideas was how difficult it would be to execute should command be more or less complex, especially in the heat of battle. Another problem is that should complex command be written beforehand by someone and executed by AI, it is hard to find middle ground between game playing on it’s own and game sabotaging player (check lunar Abigail threads). Therefore to solve both problems I suggest to give player ability to construct their own command (to an extent) in order for Abigail to hold against lately added bosses that require more complex actions, and do it before battle starts.

Potential new commands:

-        Flower path.

This command would require multiple Abigail’s flowers to be put on the ground and make Abigail dash and attack along the path from first one to the last one in the sequence. Order of flowers could be established by applying mouring glory to each of them (1 mouring glory for first one, 2 for second etc.), flower would remember it’s number in sequence even when put in the inventory, so they would be reusable after initial cost and path could be easily adjusted even during battle. Provided one can keep enemy in one place, is willing to plan the battle and is willing to spend a few seconds for preparation of battle arena, command will allow player to press one button for complex movement without frustrating AI decision-making or spending whole time on command animations. Flowers should float above the ground even if Wendy is far away, for better visibility.

Spoiler

I can see this command being useful for kiting enemies at angle, such as Deerclops and Crystal Deerclops. If instead “attack at” command is used, Abigail has to fly quite far from enemy to avoid hit, which is not always desired, and she can’t effectively circle, because “attack at” command makes Abigail do hit at starting point and thus enemy faces her and targets her; ability to change direction would solve this.  It could also be a mean to make back and forth movement, like in Armored Bearger fight, and give better results provided player plans where Abigail should be at different points in the fight. It’s actually thing that could replace “attack at” command for targets that don’t move and don’t create shock waves or push things (Bearger, Armored Bearger, Toadstool, bone cage attack of Ancient Fuelweaver). With shock waves/ability to push things it would be still usable, just with complications.

Next skill in line could just make Abigail’s flowers used for the path be unable to be pushed and burned.

-        Circling around target.

This command would make Abigail maintain angle between her, target and Wendy. It could be adjustable, so one can make sisters to be at the opposite sides of the enemy or make Abigail maintain any angle behind or before Wendy. When target is switched or another command is executed, command would stop its effect and would need to be applied again.

It could be tuned according player’s needs in game. All kinds of punching bags could have an action pretty much like “hitch” action of beefalo grooming station. In this hitched state Wendy could position herself and Abigail at angle she wants to maintain and press command, which would remember angle and automatically unhitch sisters. Then the only thing one would need in combat is to press command, and Abigail would automatically adjust her position.

Spoiler

Obvious use cases are Bearger and Armored Bearger, but it could be useful against Ancient Fuelweaver so Abigail doesn’t take unnecessary damage because she ended up at the same side as Wendy. In general any enemies that have cone attack area would be good use case. Not Crystal Deerclops though, since it hits small area in true AoE around him. You can use 0 degree angle against rooks to ensure you tank hits instead of Abigail; you could use 0 degree angle to circle around Toadstool and pick position where none of the boomshrooms hit Wendy at Abigail, it would be actually worth it instead of regular kiting. Unlike previous command, it would be easier to use with moving enemies, but it would lack flexibility if more than circling around is needed (you can be more creative though and alternate it and “attack at” or “escape” command). I think it would alleviate a lot of pressure from more casual players, even if this functionality can be already achieved with greater manual skill.

-        Hide behind.

Wendy could command Abigail to instantly appear behind her (enemies would continue to targer her, so it’s not “escape” clone), however, if Abigail is hit and hit comes from the cone area in front of Wendy, Abigail receives 50% of damage. This is an alternative I suggest for blessed sisturn 3 (in additional to improved control due to other commands), and it would allow to both use it as a way to reposition Abigail for those who want to kite and more diverse movements, as well as opportunity to tank (especially AoE) for those willing to tank.

Spoiler

You could break combo hits of Armored Bearger with this command If he targets Abigail, and if you see unavoidable AoE coming (like slam attack of Fuelweaver) it might be a good idea. But first bug that makes entities receive more damage in AoE than they should if several are hit with one attack needs to be fixed. I think it’s still better than sisturn 3 that lets player ignore Abigail, as this skill is active management. It even implies that Abigail is not the only one who doesn’t mind taking hits for Wendy’s sake, but Wendy also protects her sister even if that means taking hit herself.

-        “Attack at” but without attack, so basically “Move” command.

This one is simple, as sometimes player doesn’t need Abigail to hit enemy and just tries to reposition her. This is relevant because currently “attack at” command hits things in starting point as well, meaning that Abigail just can’t be sent away without drawing attention of the enemy she fights. I think “attack at” command should continue to do that and hit things at destination point as well, while “move” command should just move her without attacking.

-        And the last command that could be controversal: “Raise shield”.

Command that raises the shield, as simple as that. Command could use substantial cooldown, but in that case shield elixirs be given the skill in elixir branch that would allow shield to be triggered even if Abigail already has active shield. Distilled vengeance needs recoil damage to match damage that shield blocks as base kit.

Spoiler

In combination with weather pain it could produce great results. Technically “escape” command solves the issue of Celestial Champion attack in phase 3 and positioning solves kiting around Armored Bearger, but I think variety wouldn’t hurt. With distilled vengeance receiving much needed refresh it could be riskier option for more damage as well.

General changes:

-        All kinds of dashes should be affected by vigor mortis.

-        Command animation should be shorter.

-        Cooldown should be separate between commands. It would encourage experimenting with combinations of commands.

-        Commands need keyboard support, i.e. one should have an option to bind them to it, which would be especially useful for people who move with mouse (like me). WASD should not be the only way to move that is considered by developers, I should not be forced to rely on mods in order to fully control character in a way that doesn’t feel frustrating. Besides, pressing key is faster than opening the wheel or clicking something with mouse after moving mouse (good for switching items), which can be valuable to the player, and a reason why this option should extend to character-specific action as well.

A few final thoughts.

Personally, I think what we have is already sufficient to let Abigail participate in the fights without them turning into copy of Wilson fights. However, having more control over Abigail would allow more variety in strategies, and I also really want to see Abigail making intelligent moves during battle (even if Wendy was the one who presented battle plan to Abigail). It just looks so great to see both Wendy and Abigail move in different directions or Abigail moving before Wendy (with “attack at” command currently), it creates unique feeling of a team rather than feelling of Abigail being constantly dragged like a puppet. I would like more of that.

I also think blessed sisturn 3 needs to be removed, and I saw a lot of people who are defending it only because there is no better option (at least they say so). I thought about new possible team spirit skills as something that could salvage this, because I really dislike how one can ignore Abigail with that. However, I understand how one can view current set of commands (that are currently available) as insufficient, not flexible enough and hard to use it battle. By the way, flower path would even allow to control Abigail precisely on controllers.

Overall, I think commands I suggest are a better option, and if you disagree, I would appreciate if you let me know why.

Edit: renamed option "only general suggestions" into "general suggestions", since people seem to use it as another skill suggestion, not something that excludes everything else. Sorry for inconvenience for those who already voted (hopefully you don't mind).

[Debruh]

Thinking about it now, the circle around thing would be amazing for console players. Should have voted for it 

[1007954611]

Circling around and Hide behind, these two commands are great

[YuRinshue]

If there really is such an excellent design, it is definitely competitive. Of course, considering that DST is highly pinged in many periods of time, I am still happy to keep the player tag or have other less excluded forms of fault tolerance guarantee. After all, these instructions and related modification suggestions can clearly feel the sincerity of the designer.

[Pig Princess]

6 hours ago, YuRinshue said:

considering that DST is highly pinged in many periods of time, I am still happy to keep the player tag or have other less excluded forms of fault tolerance guarantee

But isn't this aproblem with game optimization? And if developers balanced the game based on ping, then we would not have bosses that punish player for tanking them, for example: Nightmare Werepig, Bearger, Armored Bearger, Ancient Guardian (requires reaction to avoid shadow tentacles), Crystal Deerclops (requires reaction to both set it on fire in the right moment and evade it's attacks and deal damage). There would be no bosses that do something that requires fast counter from the player, main examples being Ancient Fuelweaver (woven shadows eating, mind control attack), Crab King (when ice breaks one has to quickly deploy boat in suitable location while trying to not slip on ice), Frosjaw (because how difficult it is to move with high ping on ice one would most likely slip very often). And there are also bosses that have high hp but are reasonable to kite, but only with low ping, meaning that in Dragonfly fight bad connection is a game changer. 

Ping of the servers can be so bad that even tree guard attacks would be impossible to avoid. It actually happened to me when I joined some USA and Chineese servers, and I can ensure you it's not a skill issue (on my own server I'm capable of kiting Dragonfly, defeating Ancient Fuelweaver without weather pain/brightshade staff/Abigail etc.). Should we nerf treeguard because of that or buff any character to an extent that tanking it would make no significant difference compared to kiting?

I think it's good that game is not balanced around connection quality because otherwise we would not have all those bosses, as well as interesting fights they bring to the table (interesting compared to tanking small mobs). 

Still, bosses in multiplayer melt so quickly provided players have strategy they discussed beforehand (so everyone knows what they are doing), that I don't think Wendy specifically needs some help against them. However, bosses in multiplayer not posing a challenge should not be used to justify negligence of connection issues. Optimization needs to happen, because otherwise there would always be the case when one can't kite tree guard.

There is one case that needs to be addressed though. There is a bug where entities (including players and followers) can receive higher damage than intended when they both are hit with area of effect attacks. One such case is butt attack of Armored Bearger, Abigail takes twice as much damage if both of you are hit (I experienced it first-hand). But this is a bug and should be fixed, character should not be buffed as a workaround of bug. 

[YuRinshue]

1 hour ago, Pig Princess said:

But isn't this aproblem with game optimization? And if developers balanced the game based on ping, then we would not have bosses that punish player for tanking them, for example: Nightmare Werepig, Bearger, Armored Bearger, Ancient Guardian (requires reaction to avoid shadow tentacles), Crystal Deerclops (requires reaction to both set it on fire in the right moment and evade it's attacks and deal damage). There would be no bosses that do something that requires fast counter from the player, main examples being Ancient Fuelweaver (woven shadows eating, mind control attack), Crab King (when ice breaks one has to quickly deploy boat in suitable location while trying to not slip on ice), Frosjaw (because how difficult it is to move with high ping on ice one would most likely slip very often). And there are also bosses that have high hp but are reasonable to kite, but only with low ping, meaning that in Dragonfly fight bad connection is a game changer. 

Ping of the servers can be so bad that even tree guard attacks would be impossible to avoid. It actually happened to me when I joined some USA and Chineese servers, and I can ensure you it's not a skill issue (on my own server I'm capable of kiting Dragonfly, defeating Ancient Fuelweaver without weather pain/brightshade staff/Abigail etc.). Should we nerf treeguard because of that or buff any character to an extent that tanking it would make no significant difference compared to kiting?

I think it's good that game is not balanced around connection quality because otherwise we would not have all those bosses, as well as interesting fights they bring to the table (interesting compared to tanking small mobs). 

Still, bosses in multiplayer melt so quickly provided players have strategy they discussed beforehand (so everyone knows what they are doing), that I don't think Wendy specifically needs some help against them. However, bosses in multiplayer not posing a challenge should not be used to justify negligence of connection issues. Optimization needs to happen, because otherwise there would always be the case when one can't kite tree guard.

There is one case that needs to be addressed though. There is a bug where entities (including players and followers) can receive higher damage than intended when they both are hit with area of effect attacks. One such case is butt attack of Armored Bearger, Abigail takes twice as much damage if both of you are hit (I experienced it first-hand). But this is a bug and should be fixed, character should not be buffed as a workaround of bug. 

Many summoners have good fault tolerance mechanisms, especially in the field of combat. Reasonable fault tolerance does not mean ignoring injuries, it is just providing a reasonable correction.
For example, like Maxwell's Shadow Gladiator, which has a maximum health of 75 points, it will dodge like a Shadow creature when injured. And it has a single damage limit of 15 points, which will slowly increase during combat. If there is no damage every 2.5 seconds, the damage limit will increase by 5, up to a maximum of 74. I believe no one would think that this kind of fault tolerance is excessive.
And Shadow Gladiator is a very cheap unit, it only needs 1 Nightmare Fuel to summon 5, and it is just one of the many functions of Maxwell. Shadow Gladiator is only used as an output part, but still has such a comprehensive design.
Abigail is Wendy's main association, and I think it can also provide a design similar to 'when Abigail is not attacked within 10 seconds, the next injury will not exceed 75 points'. And most importantly, this requires the excellent content in your post to be implemented first.
A major reason why many people are not aware of the need to retain player tags is that the function of reasonably replacing their status has not been implemented. This is a clear primary secondary relationship, and when implementing reasonable alternative features, it is worth discussing not retaining player tags. I hope you can understand the meaning of my statement.

[Cassielu]

We already have too many buttons on that wheel menu.

[Pig Princess]

1 hour ago, Cassielu said:

We already have too many buttons on that wheel menu.

That is one extra reason to allow them to be binded to keyboard. And inconvenience of current UI shouldn't be something that defines character flexibility. If anything, it's UI that should be changed if game demands it, not game should be hindered because of clunky controls. 

[RussoDaFederal]

4 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

That is one extra reason to allow them to be binded to keyboard. And inconvenience of current UI shouldn't be something that defines character flexibility. If anything, it's UI that should be changed if game demands it, not game should be hindered because of clunky controls. 

What about console players? They'd still be forced to use the wheel

[Pig Princess]

21 minutes ago, RussoDaFederal said:

What about console players? They'd still be forced to use the wheel

How are they playing Maxwell or Willow right now? Some of proposed commands would actually help players with controllers. 

It's also a developer job to develop convenient UI, especially if they claim that controller is fully supported. I'm just giving suggestions about the game; should we discard every suggestion just because author didn't suggest how it could be adapted for controller, or didn't include whole section of possible solutions for controller flexibility in general? We wouldn't have Maxwells spells, lunar flame and even "attack at" command if everyone used this logic. But thankfully it's not the case. 

That actually feels like a deliberate attempt to make someone's suggestion look unappealing by just mentioning controllers - long standing issue that has nothing to do with game itself and persists across many games. Is that your intention? 

And don't you think it's unfair to everyone who uses keyboard&mouse to suffer restraints of game content just because less capable input device exists? I'm all for improvement of controller functionality, but don't you see how twisted is the idea that everyone should be equalized to the weakest element of the set (in this case controller) instead of weak element becoming stronger? 

[RussoDaFederal]

25 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

How are they playing Maxwell or Willow right now?

They still have a lot less commands on their wheels, right? Honest question, I don't play them.

25 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

should we discard every suggestion just because author didn't suggest how it could be adapted for controller, or didn't include whole section of possible solutions for controller flexibility in general?

I don't think we should discard every suggestion, but your suggestion has a flaw that I wouldn't know how to fix if I worked at Klei. How to make the wheel concise for both console and pc players? Keyboard binding only solves the issue for pc players, because a gamepad has way less buttons than a keyboard. I'm just pointing out one problem, I'm not saying we should invalidate everything you said. One possible tweak would be replace the current escape command by your "hide" command, but that has other implications. That's why I said from the very beginning that balancing games is hard.

30 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

It's also a developer job to develop convenient UI, especially if they claim that controller is fully supported.

I completely agree with this, I tried playing on my gamepad for fun and it was anything but fun. Gamepad controls could be improved a lot.

32 minutes ago, Pig Princess said:

And don't you think it's unfair to everyone who uses keyboard&mouse to suffer restraints of game content just because less capable input device exists?

I'm advocating for the opposite, I'm saying gamepad controls should be improved. But I do believe it would be unfair to leave console players with an overly complicated UI in favor of pc players. Gamepad controls should be improved to match that. But how would that be implemented? Add a "shortcut" key, like a trigger for example, and pressing shortcut + something acts as a player defined shortcut? Just throwing ideas.

[Pig Princess]

2 minutes ago, RussoDaFederal said:

But I do believe it would be unfair to leave console players with an overly complicated UI in favor of pc players

But that is what Klei does right now. They stated they are going to improve controller functionaly though, so we'll see what they are going to come up with.

4 minutes ago, RussoDaFederal said:

I'm advocating for the opposite, I'm saying gamepad controls should be improved.

Sorry for going defensive mode then. I saw suggestions to nerf kb&m controls because of "fairness" too many times, and I also saw cases when game originally designed for PC had sequel and just ported controller controls on kb&m without adaptation. Which is why we have horrible things like dozen of buttons required to do a thing that would be as easy as pointing with mouse in slasher or classic rpg.

There is a reason I'm not a game designer, let alone not the one who works on controller compatibility. But the fact that I have neither ability, nor desire to create workaround for controllers doesn't mean it's impossible. Pretty much like I'm good at one thing but am terrible at another; which doesn't mean someone can't handle what I can't. So take what I'm going to say about prospects of controllers with the grain of salt, I'm in no way an expert as I'm far from this topic. 

Spoiler

I don't know much about controllers, but I heard that they could use combination of buttons to make up for less of them. Still, there is only so much combinations you can do with like 8 buttons until pressing combination itself becomes too slow and inconvenient. And there is also no way to point to something smoothly in principle, it seems, because mouse has whole 2D surface for fast navigation and 3rd dimention to readjust it's position, as well as extra buttons that are all moved with this precision...

After some though I made up my mind that if there is a hope for controller in flexibility improvement, it's manufacturers physically altering their product. 

I'll be fair, if I was game developer here and now, I would just sincerely say that my game is incompatible with controller and add kb&m support for consoles.

Also it seems like even console manufacturers are slowly giving up on controllers, as they add kb&m support, even if not for all games. I suppose it's up to developer to allow kb&m be used on controller, from what I can gather. Which raises the question: why can't Klei just allow to use kb&m on consoles? Keyboard and mouse are not that expensive, especially mouses without extra buttons on them, and you don't need mouse with 12 buttons on it for every single game, do you?

On PC it's normal to change equipment such as to buy better mouse and such. So I genuinly don't understand why would anyone stick with their trusty input device, mouse or controller, instead of upgrading as soon as possible. 

I saw some people say that controllers are more convenient to them. But why is that? Because you don't need table? Because you are accustomed? For the latter I can't say much, as I would be willing to break my habit if it was the only upside of using something, but that's me. As for the former, mouse carpet or book can be used as surface. Keyboard is itself surface, you just need to fix it's position somehow. I myself am using laptop while I'm lying in the bed, and I just lay it on the knees, which is comfortable. I just can't see controller advantages that are worth fighting for despite their limitations. 

By the way, if something better than kb&m was released, I would happily transit to that. 

 

[Lardee]

1. I like flower path, it would add something to Wendy's kit that she doesn't have and it looks like something people can get really creative with. 

2. I don't like circling around the target because Wendy can accomplish this already by positioning herself on the opposite of Abigail.

3. I don't like hide behind because Wendy can accomplish this already by commanding Abigail to move behind her with Attack At or your proposed Move command.

4. I like Move without attacking because it gives Wendy the option to position Abigail without her getting targeted, something Wendy can't already do.

5. I like all the General Changes suggested, although I think command animations should also be tailored to the skills. For example, "Attack Here" command requires Wendy to select the command and then tell Abigail where to go. Since it's a 2 step process, I think the animation should be shorter or maybe not even exist. For the command like "Escape" that take less player input (one action) the animation would be longer by comparison.

[Yaorin yon]

The optimized team spirit in this post makes people feel very happy.