Before I get into the post – this is not to kick up controversy, nor get attention or any such, just some feedback on the surge PVP system after trying it out for a couple days. I also realize it may be way too late into development to make any changes based off of this feedback, and that it might just get disregarded. But then, oh well, I’ve already wasted my time writing it.
I like surge this far even though I’m way worse at it than 1.8 pvp. I hope it stays relatively even with equipment differences as to avoid another Axios situation. But there’s a few flaws, and a few suggestions I’d like to give.
Firstly, chainmail and piercing weapons.
At the moment the only piercing weapon is ranged, and ranged isn’t especially dangerous – just rush them down, or shoot back, not a big issue. This means that chainmail is a very safe option in armour, and to prove this, is the most widely used in the current beta, gambeson being a close second with plate a distant, distant third.
To help shake up the dominance of chainmail, and to add on the versatility of using the surge weapons as proxies for RP weapons, I’d suggest adding one of two meele piercing weapons. Maybe a thrusting sword and a spear, a ravens beak, or even a trident. This would change the armour balance a lot, add a few new options, and diversify the weapons.
To add more onto ranged – at least in the now, I feel it needs a buff. It doesn’t provide a noticable threat and does maybe three or four hearts of damage before meele begins. Of course you shouldn’t be able to kill someone from afar without them having options, but adding a bit more damage so you need to consider how to counter ranged would maybe add something to combat.
To touch on anti-ranged, and combat in general, shields see very little use. This is because of two reasons I think. Firstly, they take up a weapon slot, which leaves you with far less options in gear if you take a shield. And secondly, two-handed weapons are powerful to the point that taking a one-handed weapon and a shield is just giving yourself a gigantic disadvantage. Buffing one-handed weapons (perhaps by giving them a much shorter cooldown to allow some basic combos) and buffing ranged would change this a lot as shields would now be more viable.
Alternatively, just give shields their own slot so that you can carry three weapons and a shield, or make shields take up the fifth armour slot right now used for reserve armour.
I’ll also briefly touch on the warhammer – it is right now by far the most dominant weapon due to its incredibly high crit damage.
This leaves other weapons behind, and a lot of users, since it’s hard to get the timing correct, especially when its lagging, which is a fair bit of the time. Maybe lowering crit damage in general to make them a good tool but not absolutely essential could fix this, and make combat a bit more fair between those skilled and not skilled.
And this is where my post veers off into the purely theoretical – mounted combat.
We haven’t seen any mounted combat yet, but I’m concerned about it nontheless purely from reading lances and pikes.
Firstly, the new pvp system is based heavily around crits, which you get from jumping and then striking the opponent on the downwards arch of your jump. As you may notice, this is very hard on a horse.
This leads the main option for horsemen to work as horse archers, and as I mentioned above - ranged combat just isn’t especially powerful.
A fix to this that’s of course heavily theoretical, but would lean into historical precedent, is to give lances an incredibly high damage, but stupidly long cooldown. Let’s say straight off a fourth or third of your health, but with a six second cooldown. This would add a niche for mounted combat as opportunistic high-risk high-reward gambling, as if you charge in and land your lance you’ll likely deal massive damage to your opponent. If however, they hit you with their pike to dismount you, or you miss, you’re done for since your weapon still has a six second cooldown til it can be used again.
Such a long cooldown also allows time for countering, by shooting them from range, backing up and eating to heal since healing is pretty quick with enough saturation, backing up to join your group again, etc, etc.
This would give cavalry an active and interesting role, make pikes a viable thing to carry around to counter this, and add something realistic – lancers, heavy cavalry, shock cavalry, whatever you want to call it. Something very real in the late-medieval-ish era we find ourselves in on lotc.
It would also make cohesion very important, since the best counter to high single target damage is to swamp them with numbers, in this case a mass of pikemen counter-charging the cavalryman to dismount them. Which is also realistic, but leans into the current dynamic of group PVP – cohesion and coordination is extremely important, and this would only enforce that even more.
But those are my thoughts, I’ll probably come back and add more to this when I remember something or come up with something new, I’d encourage others to give their thoughts as well, this changing of the pvp system si very important and will lead to a lot of changes within the community.
(also, @nickrocky213 sorry mate, thought it best to ping you, if I wasn’t supposed to, very sorry about that, have a good day)