Combat Expertise

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Brokenbone
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Brokenbone »

Timing keystrokes / mouseclicks to negate game design feels maybe just warn-worthy, beats me if patterns would show up in some kind of logs to say "you were warned, and you did it anyhow, here's your cheating strike(s)/ban."

So yeah, warn away.

The thing though about "the negative to attack rolls" which you'd expect with CE being kind of under-implemented (if it doesn't hit spell/ability related rolls, maybe ranged / ranged touch are it, I wonder if a cleric trying to inflict wounds counts as melee?), then yeah, that sounds like a separate kind of problem.

I admit when I went over to the SRD, I thought to myself, "why not give everyone, even with sub 13 intelligence PCs, the ability to exploit too with Fighting Defensively, the -4 AB / +2 AC version that you don't need a feat for?"

That means we can all exploit together.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by rorax »

While i agree with the change that will be implemented for CE, it should be noted that using CE for ranged touched attack is NOT useful as it is for melee characters. When you use CE during melee you enjoy the AC bonus but you also get OOP, which means all foes attack you one more time.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Ronan »

Zelknolf wrote:Reproducing the bug:
Connect to a remote server; spam. You'll get it soon enough. If you're keen on finding people who've seen it in action, you can search our forums; it has been reported and re-reported here.
Yeah, you told me of the bug before. I just can't reproduce it via subdual (or a timed CE) spam. From my reading it looks like its pretty hit-or-miss, some people see it and others don't?

Obviously if cooldown timers occasionally break then they really aren't an option; I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise.
Zelknolf wrote:AC Inflation:
What's your benchmark for that?
Just that a single feat should probably not give +3 AC with no drawbacks to spellcasting. The attack rolls required to hit PCs using combat expertise get very high. Obviously toggling during a single round of melee is an exploit, but its also silly powerful for PCs who are primarily casters, which I assume is why it requires an attack action in 3.5.

For example, take a wizard with 16 dex (or 14 dex with LoH or something) and mage armor:
Level 1:
AC of 17 without and 20 with CE
vs. CR1 ghoul with a +2 AB: Attack roll needed: 15/18, CE effectively doubles hitpoints
vs. ftr1 with +4 AB: Attack roll needed: 13/16, CE increases hp by 60%

Level 3:
AC of 18 without and 21 with ICE,
vs. CR3 ghast with a +5 AB: Attack roll needed: 13/16, CE effectively increases hp by 60%
vs. ftr3 with +7 AB: Attack roll needed: 11/14, ICE effectively increases hp by 42%

Add protection from evil for more brokenness (increases to 4x and 2x for gouls/ghasts on level 1/3 mages). Compare this to say, the dodge feat. Combat casting? Concentration checks? Who needs that crap when a good build and spell selection makes the mobs you're likely to face need a 20 to hit you?

In 3.5 this wouldn't work of course, because you need to attack with melee to use CE, and you can only add AC up to your BAB.

Clerics tend to have higher ACs, so they'd gain more tankiness from CE. But they also depend less on spellcasting for dealing damage, so CE is probably more of a "toggle to heal" button for them. A mage however can easily go through their career doing nothing of significance with a weapon and barely using any touch attack spells.

Now I play a rog/wiz with a relatively high AC (was 19 at level 1, so I'd benefit more from CE), and I'd love to be able to cast in CE. Without sneak attacks or spells, my PC does crap for damage. If I could turn on I/CE and throw spells when enemies target me directly, that'd be awesome. It'd feel like total cheese doing it, but it would be uber. To be honest I'd just assumed that ALFA had turned of I/CE during spellcasting just as it had in NWN1.

It does suck that CE and ICE are two seperate feats, instead of one with an adjustable effect. But doesn't NWN also allow CE to be used outside of melee? So you can walk around with it on. CE can also be used with any BAB in NWN(although ICE is restricted to PCs with a BAB of 6+).
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Zelknolf »

That's all well and good, I kinda feel like that's an entire derailing of the points previous:
Zelknolf wrote:But if there's some sort of intent of implementing all of the PnP restrictions to combat expertise, I would also like to get all of the PnP powers of combat expertise.
But you seem to be arguing against a point I'm not making; your original point, if I read correctly, was that we ought to turn CE off when we note an activity that is clearly not attacking. Namely, casting a spell. I say "Alright! But can I actually have my five AC for five AB and can I choose how much AB to sacrafice for it, instead of being wedged into a flat three?" There seems to be no response to this.

And
Ronan wrote:In my experience DMing, AC inflation is a bigger problem than HP inflation
II say [citation needed], and note that a pen-and-paper tank has higher AC than a NWN2 tank, but the response seems to be about showing that combat expertise would reduce incoming damage? This strikes as nonsequitor.

And:
In terms of this sort of ruling, is there an admin saying this somewhere?
We can go on all day about how pen and paper is totally different from ALFA (it is; and I grump about it too), but if I may speak from a verbose experience of assuming that pen and paper rules were a good thing (tm)-- the only hak rollback since I joined in 2004 was to revert a pen and paper rule (paladins and rangers cast at caster level of 1/2 class level) back to the ridiculous and overpowered NWN1 interpretation (paladins and rangers cast at caster level = class level), with speckling of harrassment based on the changes toward pen and paper implemented by previous tech staff. Perhaps this is a bit of once bitten / twice shy, but I really don't think the three most active here have the authority to say that a feat doing what it says it does is inherently expoitative (excepting the instance where it fails to do what it says it does; that's pretty clear cut). If we're going to assert that NWN2's description and implementation of Combat Expertise is inherently wrong and that the pen and paper description of it would be the holy grail of functioning, then we ought to get an admin in here to say that pen and paper is how it should be implemented, rather than having a thread full of peons saying that a wide swath of its behavior is all exploits.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Ronan »

Zelknolf wrote:But if there's some sort of intent of implementing all of the PnP restrictions to combat expertise, I would also like to get all of the PnP powers of combat expertise.
I wasn't trying to dodge this. Its a valid point. I did mention you get something with NWN2 CE that you don't get in 3.5: the ability to activate it outside of melee. This is pretty important if you're ambushed, or are running away. Most the later. You can also raise your AC greater than your BAB. I assume you think this isn't enough to make up for having to take two feats and getting less overall flexibility? I'd agree. I'm not sure its enough to make up for the uberness of casting in CE, though.
Zelknolf wrote:
Ronan wrote:In my experience DMing, AC inflation is a bigger problem than HP inflation
II say [citation needed], and note that a pen-and-paper tank has higher AC than a NWN2 tank, but the response seems to be about showing that combat expertise would reduce incoming damage? This strikes as nonsequitor.
I've never played pen-and-paper. I generally would prefer to follow its rules because I assume its far better playtested than NWN. But I have DMed in NWN2 where many of the level-appropriate mobs I've spawned needed 20s to hit multiple PCs in the party. Specifically, Piggy's old Spirit Shaman PC Misshep would heal (with expertise on) while being nigh-invulnerable.

We had more problems back in NWN1 BG, but that was with higher level PCs with multiple non-canon AC items like amulets of natural armor or boots of dodge (and tumble AC; do we still have dodge boots?).

I posted the math because I think casting with CE on is omgwtfloluber.

As far as exploits go, I think its pretty obvious that toggling CE in combat rounds is exploitive. Using it while casting is certainly not any obvious exploit. Obviously admin has the word here.

I agree switching back to NWN1 ranger/paladin caster levels is crazy.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Blindhamsterman »

For what it's worth, I actually spoke to DMA about this BEFORE posting anything here. And he agreed that a) switching CE on and off in combat to get the AC buff without the AB penalty is an exploit. I'll not name names on whom I know does (or has done) this. But DMA would like to see it fixed. Not only that but that makes two out of three live HDMs that do as well (as HDM paazin was also in agreement).

Casting spells with CE on was also agreed by the above to be dodgy as hell, especially with warlocks ranged touch attacks (or a wizards lesser orb or a clerics inflict wounds) as none of those get the AB penalty.

I'd love to see CE become a range of 1 - 5 and Improved CE bump the range up to a possible 10. That'd be lovely. Not sure how easy/difficult it is to do. But I know it'd benefit plenty of characters as plenty use CE atm.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Ronan »

Blindhamsterman wrote:I'd love to see CE become a range of 1 - 5 and Improved CE bump the range up to a possible 10. That'd be lovely. Not sure how easy/difficult it is to do. But I know it'd benefit plenty of characters as plenty use CE atm.
Agreed. It should be do-able.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Blindhamsterman »

not to derail it too much...

but I guess it'd just use one mode (which would give a new menu - akin to bardic music?) and an if statement to determine the range? (bare with me this will be terrible but seeing if I have a rough idea of the logic not the exact syntax)

if (player.getfeat(Improved Combat expertise))
{
Set Range Max = 10
}
else
{
Set Range Max = 5
}

and then probably another if statement to check if BAB was less than range max, if it is set range max to bab else use range max?

kinda thing?

Either way though...

turning the mode off if spellcasting (including ranged touch attacks) is used should be done. Possibly don't add the cooldown if it's going to break things (i've never had the error either though). Just go with a trust thing that players wont abuse it now that it's been stated it is an abuse?
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Brokenbone
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Brokenbone »

I can picture different CE systems to give anywhere between 1 and 5 (or 1 and 10) points of change to AB & AC. A horrible sloppy way to do it could include "here's 5 feats" or even "here's 10 feats", any of which could maybe be dragged to the quickbar, I do not know if the mode bar has enough real estate. One of the feats being -1/+1, next -2/+2, and so on.

A funny thing though is that this might be a real pain in the butt for low level play, if the BAB requirements were imposed. At first, everyone's bab is terrible, so I guess you'd usually be looking at -1/+1 and no better. Fighters would quickly be able to go up to -2/+2 and all that, but the mid BAB and low BAB guys would be taking a lot longer. While on the one hand, I really quite like feats that get more and more useful with level, this might be a "cut off the nose to spite the face" type of thing, say "hey we noticed an exploit and a separate shortcoming, so not only are we fixing those, but we're enhancing to have even more utility (for high level use) which sort of somewhat nerfs low level utility too, sorry!"

Balancing act I'm sure. Still, you'd figure lots of classes with a fundamentally low BAB would like CE quite a bit, they tend to be badly armored and can't hit the broad side of a barn on the best of days in melee (missiles and high dex being a different story), so why not voluntarily take a big AB hit for precious AC?

Mind boggles at ways we could quite non-intuitively screw this up in non-fun ways. Super-warrior at the front, hewing away in nothing but melee, gets a bad break and finds himself needing to chug a cure potion, all the while in CE mode, maybe chugging a potion not only attracts an AoO but it is interpreted as "something other than fighting, your AC is worse now, make sure to remember to re-click CE in order to keep on fighting which was your intention all along..."

Bah. Warnings about exploiting rhythm and technical thinking of the pros and cons of some kind of way to detect being in melee and "letting" CE be on then, and creep into lots of other design thoughts likely at this point. Unless topics just be addressed one at a time, i.e., DMA (or local HDM) warning of "some things are exploity, don't do them, we may introduce tech changes in the future to make this impossible anyhow", possibly to be stuck into load screens for non-forum users.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Adanu »

Wildshape, if you put it in the quickbar, has the ability to choose different forms. Would this be something hardcoded, or would it be possible to use this system for CE?
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Zelknolf »

re: AC inflation
Yes. That should happen. Tanks who build to tank tankily causing CR-appropriate mobs to need to roll in the 20s to hit is part of the game. One might note that my example of a tanky tank of a level 10 pen and paper character has exactly enough AC to make CR 10 bad guys roll 20s to hit (at the expense of being able to hit back as effectively, of course-- one's attack bonus is reduced to bonuses from weapons/ feats/ strength under such an arrangement).

re: Implementation of CE
We'd be better off going the route of BHM's suggestion; if it's a series of feats in subradials, a la wildshape, it will start gnawing on actions and can easily start wriggling around in the action queue to most-destructive ends (which would make it less useful than if we just killed it in the spellhooking and ignored all else). We could reasonably build out a combat expertise UI that can be tucked into the corner of the screen and only revealed buttons for the valid uses (as it's restricted by BAB and feat selection; not something we'd have to adjust by very frequently... except, amusingly-enough, when spell casting is involved-- divine power and tenser's transformation come to mind.) It might be trickier to get it to work like bard song, but I could look into that. Regardless, if it's a tweakable list like we see in bard songs, defensive fighting would be a plausible addition for non-feat-taking tanky sorts, and our primary challenge is in mathing the AC bonuses out such that they play nice with the dodge AC cap and racial abilities that also contribute to such.

Brokenbone's example is entirely valid, by the by-- if we kill CE as part of spellhooking, potions, wands, scrolls, and other such doodads would also kill it, unless we made special handling to make it not do so. If the goal is pen and paper, that would be part of it. But we don't really have anything more concrete than "This is shady, and people don't like it." to assemble the details of implementation.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Ronan »

Adanu wrote:Wildshape, if you put it in the quickbar, has the ability to choose different forms. Would this be something hardcoded, or would it be possible to use this system for CE?
Its actually one feat, which references multiple "spells" in spells.2da. This is certainly the easiest way to implement it, but I don't think its possible to quickslot any of these individual choices (+1, +4, etc) in NWN2. That adds an extra click to using CE (i.e., you click on the feat in your toolbar, then click on which increment you want to use). You could eliminate this extra click with 5 separate feats, or a custom UI like Zelk mentioned.

Having pots not kill CE is easy, if desired.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by Brokenbone »

We all realize that tying "dynamic" choose your 1-5 or 1-10 point versions is really hard on low BAB PCs, right? Yes, pnp like, but it should also come with some kind of "free feat for all" of Fighting Defensively which I guess for many PCs might be a better bet even if the have the CE feat (think low BAB guys prior to them having 2 AB to trade for the AC).

I don't necessarily care what turns CE or FD off. Any action that isn't melee related like attacking or using an active combat feat like Disarm or something, may be fair to disable. Dude with sword and shield doing CE somehow managing to down a potion, yeah that's AoO time, explain how your awesome defense works unless the potion is in a Camelback and you got a long straw.

Anyhow, weird how exploit and bug become possible redesign. For now though, maybe local Hdm warnings about rhythm exploiting, rebuild offers for warlocks or whatever, might be prudent.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by t-ice »

Combat Expertise is only supposed to work when you're actively engaged in melee combat. In NWN2 not only does it work whenever wielding a melee weapon (actually not sure if it works against arrows and other ranged attacks?). And like said, you can cast with it, which is totally against the purpose. (Though you can't cast defensively, but extra AC tends to help against those AoOs)

The worst exploit of CE is that you can click it on and off in-between the 6second turn cycle, making attacks without penalty, and then putting CE up again. A engine-enforced way to counter this is much favored to "Oh, it's in the player rules buried somewhere".

So it's a given I'd agree with a way to somehow remove the unintended aspects of CE. (Perhaps even more so for knockdown, btw) A toggling cooldown of 6 seconds (or perhaps ~10 for leeway) is one clear way. At least this removes the worst exploit.

Dropping CE when casting is also very good. Having the feat protect casters is totally against what it's supposed to be.

Better way perhaps would be to apply the AC bonus and AB penalty only when the PC makes a melee attack, and drop the effects if the PC hasn't made a melee attack in the last, say, 10seconds, to give for some leeway. Perhaps this isn't possible, though?
If it's made to not work ranged, then maybe the range of AC/AB effects could be upped. But at least the SRD doesn't include improved combat expertise, which already increases the max from 5 to 6.

All in all, I wouldn't think a complex system to enact choosing of how many AB to trade for AC has much need. Just make CE give the max effect, and it'll be plenty good enough. Remember that PCs aren't supposed to know the AC/AB of their enemies and tweak the number so that the enemy just needs a 20.
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Re: Combat Expertise

Post by DMyles »

A simple solution would be to limit it to pure fighters.

Mages and warlocks have no business taking it in the first place.

If you are a barbarian or a big bruiser type you wouldn't be dancing around on your tip toes trying not to get hit. Be a man! Use power attack.

As far as shields you should be able to drop one, but putting it on would be a full round action so doing that in combat is bad form.

Another easily exploitable mode is parry. Not only can you parry ranged attacks, but you can leave parry on all the time. You can parry while casting spells. You can parry while throwing projectiles like acid flask. You can parry while drinking healing potions and if something gets an attack of opportunity on you for using a potion you get to parry that too.
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