Increasing Viability of Swordsman

[Nekorin]

Disclaimer: Below is my personal thoughts and opinions about the swordsman class.

There has been lot of threads on how bad the swordsman tree is compared to the rest of the other 3 base classes. I myself have a swordie up to level 181. The experience of leveling up is not really that fantastic compared to the other classes, and now she is just in town 95% of the time selling repairs. This kind of led me into thinking, why is this class tree so unpopular compared to the others? Is it the DPS output? the skills? or something else? The answer I arrived at is relatively simple.

The swordsman feels too clunky to play.

What does clunky mean? In the world of top down action games, ranged often truimph melees due to the fact that it is easier for the mob to be in range of the player’s attack. If a melee attacker reaches a monster, plants both his feet on the ground, strike a posture and shout a “Hahhh” then attack… chances the monster would already have moved out of the attack range and the swordsman is just hitting air. How many of us experience hitting a skill like syncho thrust only to have it miss completely due to the monster move a few pixels away?

This becomes more evident in PVPs scenes where players are always on the move. If bash takes 0.5secs startup frames, by the time our poor swordsman does his homerun attack the opponent would have moved out of our bash range. Pathetic us. This is perhaps the real reason why cata is the most favorable class in the swordsman tree for pvp, they have skills that work while closing in on the opponent.

Swordsmen need the fluidity to remain competitive.

What is fluidity? See the video below, we can easily imagine how much better the entire tree of swordsman will be like if they can move like that.

The key difference between the video (Ys) and ToS is the melees can attack while moving. Just having this solves a lot of things. No longer will melee attacks like syncho thrust, bash or spear lunge miss just because the monster moves away a few pixels while we are performing the move. In PVP also makes it harder for other classes to jump or run away from swordsmen, making them fearsome up close. Isn’t this what swordsmen are supposed to be?

Another improvement is a rework on a mechanic that is only available to swordsman, dashing.

It just feels too weird to dash then stop and do an attack.

Swordsman should be able to cancel his dash into a move. The dash can further augment the move by increasing its range, aoe attack ratio, effects and damage, while giving the player more recoil (recovery stance). This leds to a lot of additional strategies and choices for the swordsman, which each and every skill the entire swordsman tree having a dash variant attack.

An example will be a dash bash having +4 aoe attack ratio and greater damage than a regular standing bash, but comes with a 0.3sec recovery in which the player can’t do anything.

In all, just having these 2 mechanics revisited for swordsman (and to an extent melee clerics) will lead to an improvement in the outlook of these melee classes.

[hienng1991]

Swordman can jump and do basic attack. But I get your point, using skill while jumping and moving is cool but here in TOS we have a few problems:

1. Animation. All skills even buffs take a small amount of time to cast and execute. At the moment, we have no idea to cancel the whole animation altogether, only a small portion of it… Just install the skill tootip addon and try to Orb-walk. Unless IMC decided to implement Aspd to smooth those animation.

2. Cast time. Catar Stroke has 0.5 sec increased cast time each level. That’s why in the most recent kTOS patch, IMC reduced it by half. Also, only Wiz 3 has access to quick cast so unless you have Spiritual Chain. No way for Swordman to use it. And I have no idea whether it’s effective or not.

3. Hitbox. This one is easy. Many were buffed recently in the big update

[Queue]

Although your suggestions would certainly help and improve the current imbalances, the issues run much deeper than just feeling clunky. This change would be welcome though.

[greyhiem]

Agree.

My main issue with Physical Melee is I am too vulnerable when I have to perform my small hitbox attack animations in melee combat, movement locked. The risk-reward is badly balanced. If you risk getting hit a lot, and CC’d a lot, your attacks will be interrupted a lot or you die. Having higher max HP than other classes isn’t sufficient.

Should have more or similar ways to confirm damage like their ranged counterpart archers, which specialize in physical mobile damage from far (safe). Swordie damage should reflect their risk of having to be melee and immobile (less safe than range), and getting a lot of hits. Since both swordies and archers have bad team utility/support/CC, they should be specialized in their roles. Ranged, mobile, dps. And melee, high HP hit soaker, dps.

Currently swordies feel too much like only a high HP hit soaker with mediocre damage or non-confirmable dps. Since they offer little else, most parties will take a high HP hit soaker with CC or utility instead, when possible.

[kyokahn]

OP is right, it’s not the load/cast time itself, it’s the need to outright stop to perform a melee attack. Example, you load earth wave, a skill that only works while being mounted, WHYYYY would you need to stop when you release the attack? it’s 0.5 seconds , enough for anyone keen enough to jump out of the hitbox. I agree after the attack there must be a pause, the spear hits the ground as you push down, but BEFORE landing it? it makes no sense. Wonder why Rush is the only really scary skill of swordsmen? because you still move!

There’s no reason why you’d need to physically stop and plant your feet to perform a bash… none at all. After the bash, there’s recoil and physics say you’d need to pause for a bit, but not before the hit, running SHOULD help.

The OP video is a bit extreme in that sense, but that fluidity is what would actually fix the swordsman tree. If you have it at range, opponents should feel that “oops, too late”, not just wait for them to try to load their attacks while casting some nasty spell on their head.

[hienng1991]

Nah, that moment when your character stops to execute skills is largely ping dependent. When you have less than 100 ping, it is hardly noticeable.

While I do agree that Swordman should be able to cast skills on the move (except for some such as Stabbing), the animation remains mostly responsible for how clunky Swordman skills are. For example, Barbarian’s Seism: You have to jump up and slam your weapon. Have fun wasting a charge because you were staggered. Or Spear Throw? It’s over 1 second to execute even at point blank.

Many Swordman skills have long animation that can make you vunerable. I really hate it when I’m stuck in the middle of an animation and the boss 360 no scoped me. RKO outta no where

[Nekorin]

It is not ping dependent, here is a clip of bash at 30-35ms.

The 0.5 sec startup animation/load is definitely noticeable. It locks the player in place and an opponent/mob can just get out of the range during this time.

[thedojin]

One of real problem of this game.
Archer/Mage type have missile attack(Can’t avoid by Player skill). But swordman don’t have any close gap skill (dash, dash stab, duck in to target, rolling , side step, jump slash target ect). even swordman don’t have any skill for close gap the target. But archer can have hiding skill like clocking easily by choose scout in the build.
They add one jump skill in rank 8 but meh… rank 8?? what about other class? run and run?

[haukinyau]

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[hienng1991]

Well I did say it’s the animation, didn’t I? The stop moment was ping dependent, not animation.

Here is an example to illustrate my point:

• A Barb dashed directly to his opponent
• He stopped for a brief moment (hardly noticeable) and immediately used Helm Chopper (1.2s animation time, cancelable after 0.8s)
• He can not move for at least 0.8s

[Artreides]

problem is even if we do have some form of dodging (like what you have mentioned, rolling, side step) we can only dodge our melee counterparts. archers have auto-lock on. some wizards skills are homing or has large aoe. giving the dodging ability some sort of iframe would be too op.

[haukinyau]

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[F4r1nha]

I miss those cabal online times with my force blader flying knee skill with stun, love gap closers

[hienng1991]

Easy. Increase ASPD to smooth out animation. And of course Dex will increase Aspd thus balance the Str and Dex.

2 birds with 1 stone

[haukinyau]

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[hienng1991]

Sorry, just a proposal, not an in game feature. Please wait till IMC brings more and more RO stuffs to TOS

[Nekorin]

@hienng1991 Icic, pardon me for reading wrongly. Yes, the startup animation of the skill is the ‘culprit’ which makes things feel so clunky.

Personally I don’t think introducing aspd (attack speed??) will help though. Even under the influence of chronomancer’s haste I don’t think the startup animation will decrease.

@haukinyau

Here it is, very awkward to use bash or other skills when dashing cuz it gets that animation/i-want-stable-footing pause.

The animation is so slow that it is easily countered just by an enemy attack unless we are on pain barrier buff all the time.

[Artreides]

basically we are playing RO (with the additional feature of jump slash and dash) without a proper Endure and GTB card.

[hienng1991]

Well Aspd helps reduce animation by a lot in RO. I hope IMC does the same. There is nothing wrong to bring the features of your old game to your new one.

@migzzz: And how many players do you think have access to GTB card? Maybe quite many on mid to high rate servers but definitely not to official and low rate servers

[haukinyau]

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