I want to come up with a system to have the ability to dodge-attacks or if you want to think of it in another way, your left-click spams have a chance to 'miss'.
Here's the reasoning:
- Increase and deepen combat, so we can have skills increase / decrease miss chance (similar to Curse)
- Possible abilities triggered after a successful dodge or something similar.
- Melee/casters less dependent on just swinging their weapon and more on planning and using skills.
- Weapon stats that will increase chance-to-hit or miss (if its cursed)
- Attributes later on that will affect your ability to dodge incoming attacks.
Example: Ninja has a base chance of 10-15% to dodge attacks. Paladin could have 5% - not when I state "attacks" I mean left-click melee swings.
Let me know what you think.
To be honest, I'm pretty against this idea. I understand that randomized stuff like this is really prevelant in RPG's, but I really don't like the way that it functions in Herocraft, or Minecraft in general.
Stuff like Dodge chances, Miss chances, and Critical Hit chances definitely give off the impression of adding depth to a combat system, and in some cases, they do. But for Herocraft, I think the actuality is far from the impression.
I personally enjoy my games being "skill based" rather than RNG based. If I go into an "evenly matched" fight against another player and I'm the one with the better skill level, then I should win. Plain and simple. For me, losing a fight because I missed attacks over and over or because they got a lucky dodge is one of the crappiest feelings in the world.
Unlike most MMORPG's, Herocraft
revolves around melee attacks. Games like World of Warcraft, Vanguard, or EQ II all have dodge chances, miss chances, and critical hits, but those games do not focus entirely around auto attacking. EQ I had a bit more emphasis on it, but it did not focus on PVP as much as later MMO's did. In these MMO's, there is a very large emphasis on skill usage that determines the strength of your character. The RNG is a minor part of the system.
Herocraft does not function this way. Yes, there is a decent amount of skill usage, but a lot of the skill usage is only a means to get more left clicks out.
Everything is based around "auto attacks" on Herocraft. Adding in randomization in Herocraft is like adding in RNG to WoW's skill system. Imagine if every time you activated a skill, there was a chance that it didn't work "just cause". Yeah...I doubt that would fly. (EDIT: I know that certain skills can still be dodged in WoW, but I wanted to emphasize that the "feeling" of having your left clicks miss would be similar to watching your skills not work for no reason when you activated them.)
Additionally, the RNG in these games is perfected to the extreme. I have no doubt that a 20% chance to crit in WoW is a 20% chance to crit. But in Herocraft? Not so much. Some may not want to hear this, but from what I've seen Herocraft hasn't ever had the best RNG mechanics. 10% chance is
not a 10% chance. It's more like a 10% chance to be 70% chance for the next few seconds. There have been tweaks to the system from what I've heard, but nothing ever seems to improve with it. Curse and Blackjack are
not accurate in their percentages to trigger. Maybe this is Minecraft's fault, maybe it's Bukkit's fault, maybe it's the Herocraft's network's fault, maybe it's Herocraft's coders fault, who knows. I certainly have no idea, but I
do know that something isn't right with it, and until it is fixed, I can't really approve of adding in anymore RNG to the server. Even if it is improved, I still don't think I'd like to see this added.
I hate to be such a naysayer in all this, but I really don't think this idea will turn out as well as some people are wanting it to. It will be a pain to experience, it will be a pain to balance, and it will be a pain to implement a proper RNG system that works with it.