Weekly Update 235 – Improving Combat Dynamics & Positioning!

Even though we're in the middle of the current ranking season, after having many discussions in our Discord regarding the planned changes to combat, we’ve decided to not wait to implement them for the end of the season. We’ve just introduced them in this update and gave you a free Ability Reset – read below for details!

See you in battle!

Changelog v.0.9.4.2

Combat Changes:

As some of you might have seen, lately there was a global test server open for everyone. We have been testing some changes widely discussed over our Discord channel. Very important part of the combat is having a responsive controller, but at the same time, as Gloria Victis is an MMORPG game, the timings need to be adjusted to fit the player reactions and average ping.

While blocking enemy attacks, we either do that with Shield or Weapon – weapon has its "power bar" while blocking which allows us to save stamina while blocking on Red power bar, but also inflict the longer "attack cooldown" on the enemy attack. The attack cooldown is the part of our game, without which it would be full spam-to-win, because it gives the blocking person time for a counter-attack.

Inside our team, we use the "Perfect Block and Imperfect Block" terms. The Perfect Block saves stamina and until now was putting 1.4 seconds of enemy attack cooldown, while Imperfect Block [blocked with a weapon, outside the red blocking power bar] until now was putting 1 second of enemy attack cooldown.

Every similar game, like Warband, Mordhau or even The Witcher, has the attack cooldown for those obvious counter attack reasons, but at the same time due to length of attack cooldown in our game [which is much longer than in any of above games], it makes much of the “clunky” feeling, same time making 1v1 battles much more stale – as you can successfully start blocking while having the attack cooldown.

The attack timers in Gloria Victis vary about 800-1300ms, depending on weapon type, attack side, power bar, etc. When we successfully block, if we want to counter-attack – there goes half of ping + frame time of both client and server (let's use 75ms as average amount) – we need to react (let's say its 250ms for average player) and after we do that we need to click the attack to the server to proceed (half of ping + frame time of both client and server so another 75ms as average amount).

In total, we already used 400ms, which is a reliable time at full focus, not including choosing the attack side or simply playing on the higher ping. So let's use 500ms for further calculations. Difference between fastest dagger attack and slowest two-handed spear attack is those 500ms – so it means that already we need to make sure the very minimal attack cooldown would need to be longer, at least 750ms, but it is still 250ms lower than what we have already.

For the reason of speeding up the combat, we set both Perfect and Imperfect Blocks attack delay’s into 750ms [which would make battles, especially 1v1 more dynamic].

At the same time, we knew that we needed to do further changes, as on the bigger scale battles could get a bit more spammy. After lots of chat with the community together we found potentially best further changes that should make combat more position related.

Those changes are:

– Hits which went through ally won't be interrupting further hits [which will require proper positioning of forces while fighting, and give some additional chances while fighting outnumbered and enemies hitting through their forces] – Cleave hits through enemies were not interrupting them on the server-side at the global servers already, but we found out the client-side representation was bugged which led