Discussion About Unavoidable & "Elapsed/Triggered" Damage Over Time (New Ability?)
Tiemilios
Member Posts: 337 ★
Dear all,
This is a post to provoke thoughtful discussion about damage over time, whether considered avoidable or not and with or without specific triggers. This applies to any damage over time node buff or character ability/debuff, but in my examples, I focus on various degeneration buffs/abilities (whether triggered to cause, triggered to remove or prevent, or no trigger at all and just unavoidable). However, this does also apply to general DoT bleed/poison/incinerate/etc. debuffs as well.
Here are the problems in my mind:
1) There is damage that is either unavoidable (Starburst, Degeneration, etc.) that you can do nothing to avoid
2) There is damage that is potentially avoidable, but conditions have to be met for you to avoid it, such as:
4) The established method of block-breaking (heavy attack), I personally feel, is not adequate to reliably work and leaves you too vulnerable in a very difficult fight. In my experience, the vast majority of times I've tried to do a heavy attack when an opponent is blocking, they counter very quickly and interrupt in anything over medium difficulty level. To me, there is no reliable way, currently to penetrate a block in that case. You are very lucky if you are able to land a heavy while the opponent is blocking unless you know that they are very likely to continue blocking and not interrupt you (i.e. Mordo during power gain, though that is not DoT...that's just another case of a block one would try to penetrate with a heavy attack). In most cases, when the opponent is playing defensively, and you have a DoT debuff that is affecting you significantly (Act 5, for example), you are likely to die to the DoT or you will die trying to penetrate their block with a heavy and being interrupted.
NEW ABILITY (for all champs) Discussion: Could we possibly consider another way to break their block? Do you feel this would be useful? In other games, which may or may not have Damage over Time, there usually is an option such as Grab and maybe a Throw or something. I love using Super Smash Bros as an example, just because it's a ton of fun, though the format of fighting is a bit different. That game actually represents two potential options:
1) A block that decays over time (you can only reliably block a certain number of shots before your block is broken)
2) You can grab the opponent and then either:
Something like this is useful to possibly be able to:
My ultimate question is: Do you feel that something like this (and feel free to suggest something different) would help the game? What are your thoughts?
Please avoid any trolling or belittling comments.
Kind regards,
Tiemilios
This is a post to provoke thoughtful discussion about damage over time, whether considered avoidable or not and with or without specific triggers. This applies to any damage over time node buff or character ability/debuff, but in my examples, I focus on various degeneration buffs/abilities (whether triggered to cause, triggered to remove or prevent, or no trigger at all and just unavoidable). However, this does also apply to general DoT bleed/poison/incinerate/etc. debuffs as well.
Here are the problems in my mind:
1) There is damage that is either unavoidable (Starburst, Degeneration, etc.) that you can do nothing to avoid
2) There is damage that is potentially avoidable, but conditions have to be met for you to avoid it, such as:
- Brute Force: Need to hit the enemy within 6 seconds of the last hit
- Bane: Need to hit the enemy initially and after 10 seconds elapse (as well as not get hit)
- Explosive Personality: A newer buff I've seen where the enemy gets stacks of Armor Up if they block shots which then, over a stack of 5, explode and remove 25% of attacker's health. Basically, don't hit the enemy's block.
- VOID (as a character-specific example) with his Intimidating Presence debuffs. You need to reach a combo level of 10 to purify them.
4) The established method of block-breaking (heavy attack), I personally feel, is not adequate to reliably work and leaves you too vulnerable in a very difficult fight. In my experience, the vast majority of times I've tried to do a heavy attack when an opponent is blocking, they counter very quickly and interrupt in anything over medium difficulty level. To me, there is no reliable way, currently to penetrate a block in that case. You are very lucky if you are able to land a heavy while the opponent is blocking unless you know that they are very likely to continue blocking and not interrupt you (i.e. Mordo during power gain, though that is not DoT...that's just another case of a block one would try to penetrate with a heavy attack). In most cases, when the opponent is playing defensively, and you have a DoT debuff that is affecting you significantly (Act 5, for example), you are likely to die to the DoT or you will die trying to penetrate their block with a heavy and being interrupted.
NEW ABILITY (for all champs) Discussion: Could we possibly consider another way to break their block? Do you feel this would be useful? In other games, which may or may not have Damage over Time, there usually is an option such as Grab and maybe a Throw or something. I love using Super Smash Bros as an example, just because it's a ton of fun, though the format of fighting is a bit different. That game actually represents two potential options:
1) A block that decays over time (you can only reliably block a certain number of shots before your block is broken)
2) You can grab the opponent and then either:
- hit the enemy a limited number of times before they shake loose (and they don't do much damage) OR
- throw the enemy
Something like this is useful to possibly be able to:
- Counter DoT that you need a trigger to remove
- Try to penetrate a block to kill an enemy before you die from the DoT (or do as much damage as possible)
My ultimate question is: Do you feel that something like this (and feel free to suggest something different) would help the game? What are your thoughts?
Please avoid any trolling or belittling comments.
Kind regards,
Tiemilios
2
Comments
Completely agree, @Grimmbear , that it would take balance and we would not want to make blocking too unreliable in the process. Really appreciate your comment and insight on this.
I like the idea @Tiemilios of either instituting a degenerating block success rate mechanism that should apply to both the player AND the AI. There is no fun in trying to fight a high level champ that just blocks the whole time, then you ultimately get hit with a Dot effect like Degeneration just because a time rule passed where you were unable to land a hit since the AI held block the whole time.
Building a "Throw" element would be a very cool feature to the game to break an opponent out of block. This could be animated or not (raises the "cool" factor). Damage could be equal to a light or medium attack...still need room for heavy attacks to be relevant...with a chance to crit same as other attacks. Also, throw moves could be built in to have a % success rate on breaking a block where a failed attempt could equal a counter by the opponent.
Straight DoT game mechanics (not ones where the player can avoid by triggering a time/condition rule or by getting very lucky opening the necessary immune champs from crystals) are a cheap shot attempt of raising the game difficulty level. I'm referring to 100% DoT debuffs/buffs that the player is unable to avoid or recover from entirely. These involve no additional skill to avoid by the player other than how fast you can pull out your wallet.
The grab and/or throw element is a bit tricky. If you can grab your opponent, there are several things you can try to do. What I find the most tricky here is that anything the player should be able to do, the AI would need to be able to do as well, and that might compromise the ability to hit them and achieve the goal of this post, the reversal of DoT damage based on a condition or to be able to try to break block and kill the enemy before DoT before death.
Here are some thoughts on the issue:
>There should be the ability to dodge a grab
>Once an opponent is grabbed you have a couple options:
- Hit the opponent (I think this option should do very little damage, light attack or even less)
- Throw the opponent (could do medium attack damage)
>A grab should be very limited in possible duration before the opponent "shakes loose">Possibly, there could be a mechanism to "shake loose" from a grab sooner.
Basically, there should be a counter for anything that can be done. So this does create a problem with fighting an AI, because the AI could be programmed to counter as well. I still think it would be nice, though, if there are a variety of options you could use, with each enemy having a possible weakness that you might be able to capitalize on. So, for example, the enemy reacts quickly to dodging a heavy, but might be slow to react to a grab. Etc. you can then use your intuition and test out to see what works best against an enemy with the variety of options you have.
You also should not be able to break block with one combo or one special attack. That wouldn't make sense at all. So, it would have to exceed that. Much of the SKILL involved with the block break approach could very well be managing your attack against their block so that you can break it when you need to. For example, planning to attack them a certain amount of times against block.
LOL, this makes me shudder a bit against a champ like MorningStar given that she can bleed you for that. Those sorts of things do make it very interesting. Of course, evaders can always evade out of block which also adds to the fun. In my opinion, you should be able to break the block sooner for those types of champs with those abilities or similar.
Continuous attack on opponents block gradually reduces their block (displayed as green to yellow then red and break)
This could be a cool concept and could definitely be something great for champs reliant on block like mordo or blade
This would bring skill into play. When you see your block turn yellow you have to start evading and fighting smarter
Overall this is a wonderful idea
@Primmer79 I agree. I don't seek to turn the game upside down. I just want to find ways to enhance skill and allow skill to help overcome various challenges. I think any type of grab and throw option would be more of an overhaul. A degenerating block wouldn't be such a big change, I think. Thanks for your thoughts!
Thanks @belli300 . I can't agree more. I think something like this would bring more fun to the game and give us more tools to use in a fight. We'd also have to ensure that we develop the necessary skill to not become victim to the same from the enemy.
Another option is to make Rhino's Charge more reliable and adding it to other charging champions (like Juggernaut).
What would also be nice is when you break through a block with a heavy attack, some champions have a chance to Crush and making blocking unavailable for 6-8 seconds. Thor and Ronan are good candidates for such ability.
For the Skilled champions I suggest something like a Bypass ability: their superior fighting skills makes it able to go past a block after X number of hits.
Personally, I use heavy attacks all the time. When pinned to the wall, you can keep on using a heavy attack and the AI can't do a damn thing. But then again, this might not work with more difficult AI (I noticed that in AQ and AW).
Again, I do make the heavy attack work sometimes, it's just that in the most important or difficult fights, they never do...lol
Your ideas really add a lot of color to this though. There really are so many other things we can do, either general or champion-specific. I admit I was mostly trying to keep it simple, though. I do not want to make block obsolete or ineffective like the V12 patch did...I very much want to avoid that! You make me think of other possibilities though, such as instead of a block breaking after a certain point, when the block gauge gets low, block proficiency is reduced X% or something. However, I'm not sure that solves the original problem.
Remember that the goal of this post was a new way to bypass block and get an enemy down before an over time event or death from "unavoidable" damage occurs or to stop something from occurring that you need to hit the opponent to stop. So, whatever we do, I want to still achieve the original goals of the post.