@Snake Skin said:
Im suprised the keybind that inverts the direction of attacks works for keybound attacks but doesnt work for mouse bound attacks.

Yeah, that seemed odd to me as well. Maybe I should make a suggestion thread.

@Mittsies said:
It doesn't matter how hard you personally find 240 to be, it provides an inherent mechanical advantage.

What mechanical advantage, specifically? The pressing less buttons thing? That's an advantage yes, but one that is just good game design. It would be stupid to bind every movement angle to a different key, wouldn't it? That would take so many more keypresses to accomplish the same task that WSAD does.

To their credit, binds do provide a similar advantage, in that your attack input is just a keypress, requiring no extra movements or attention. This allows more of your consciousness to be applied to other things, like defense and footwork (as long as you don't have to remove fingers from WSAD to perform the attack).

That's cool and beneficial, but the main game-ruining advantage that binds have are that they also allow your view movements to be completely independent of your attacks, which in turn allows you to perform crazy, animation distorting aim changes without hindrance. This is the part I hate about binds. You simply can't do many of those movements as violently with 240 because part of your view control must be devoted to attack direction selection.

@Mittsies said:
Furthermore, you can use auto-hotkey to emulate a bind with any 240 angle. For instance, you could pick the most ugly-looking 240 overhead angle and make it so mousewheel down always performs that exact angle. Not only does this mean binds are essentially impossible to take out of the game, it further highlights the issues with 240 as a system.

Didn't know about this. I don't mess around with macros. But to clarify, I'm not asking that binds be removed from the game. That would hurt the population. I just wish they'd never been added. I have to live with it, but that's not gonna stop me from bitching about it.

@Mittsies said:
If you become comfortable enough with 240 that the control scheme doesn't hinder you anymore, then it's objectively better than binds.

So if you become skilled, you have an advantage - and this is bad?

@Naleaus said:

I'm not sure if you're arguing about the same thing.

My bad, I should format that differently. The larger, divided portion of that post was intended mostly to address the issue of binds vs 240, not as a reply to your comments.

@Naleaus said:

The degree of control as far as current 240 implementation really doesn't add much to the game.

Again, this is all moot. Nothing is going to change this late in the game.

Yeah, I don't think having the full procedural 240 was really necessary. It's a cool achievement in animation and game design, but it's probably a little excessive. However, it does make me feel like you're really swinging a weapon and not just executing a predefined attack type.

But yes, they're not going to make any radical changes now. I just wanted to weigh in on why I think binds are bad for the game.

@Naleaus said:

But besides the ability to make angles more difficult to discern, there's really no advantage to the extra "freedom" you get from 240.

The reasoning to not use procedural animations is because then each angle can have a very distinctive animation-

That's a good thing though - making angles more variable. Without that, with binds alone, chambering and parrying become entirely a timing test because you already know what angle they're using.

@Mittsies said:

There shouldn't exist a control scheme that provides advantages to its user outside of comfort and preference IMO.

The irony of a binds user saying this. Surely you know how difficult it is to consistently execute a max angle underhand or overhead with 240. Yet binds give you the advantage of performing these superior attacks with ease.

Regarding binds vs 240:

Without 240 much of the perception tests of Mordhau combat are gone, and defense becomes simplified. With only the 6 bind angles to discern between, recognizing angles becomes much easier. It would then be mostly a timing-based game, and the main way to get through the defense of a seasoned player would be to accel/drag... or to distort your animations with contortions and spastic gyrations such as jumps, facehugging, torso twisting, head bobbing, and spinning. You already see this with many players. Do we really want to encourage that style of offense?

We've played that game already. Without 240, Mordhau is just a Chivalry expansion.

"The combat is the absolute core of this game. It is something we've prototyped and tested over more than a year to make sure it is designed to encourage fights that look like fights and not ballet auditions. That it is easy to pick up and difficult to master and that it works smoothly online. The controls are the first step. Since tastes differ, we plan to offer a variety of control schemes to make those with experience in previous melee games feel at home."

-Marox
https://youtu.be/p-B4AwgArwA?t=53

So there it is: the word from on high subtly stating that binds are only in the game to give Chiv players a familiar control method.

The 240 system is the foundation of Mordhau combat. Binds corrupt everything.

1. Binds allow all of that contorting and spazzing, the ballet auditions that the devs wanted to avoid. Try doing all that with 240. Try even doing a fully accelerated lookdown overhead riposte; it's really hard. This is GOOD. Lookdown overhead ripostes are too easy to perform with binds for how potent they are. The same goes for many other ugly moves that are difficult to perform without binds.
2. "That it is easy to pick up and difficult to master-" Binds are easy to pick up, sure. But they aren't difficult to master. Only the 240 system fits that description. Binds greatly simplify offense.

IMHO, binds are the main flaw of Mordhau. Binds encourage fights that don't look like fights, they lower the skill floor and the skill ceiling, and they discourage attack variety.

If I were king, binds would be removed. But then the long-term population of Mordhau would suffer, because the vast majority of new players will never have the patience to master 240.

I do at least hope, for the above reasons, that binds be limited in the variety of attacks they can deliver. Players should be encouraged to use 240, not allowed to abandon it entirely. I know where that road leads.

@Punzybobo said:
game is fine, stop attacking mordhau

don't you all have anything better to do than meme on a dead forum?

I encountered the bug again. It seems to occur when you cycle through waist patterns.

I think it's good for difficult-to-read movements to have difficult-to-execute commands. Otherwise eventually experienced players will just key out the most subtle and unreadable morphs and ripostes with mindless ease (cough unchamberable overhead accel ripostes cough). I know they'll never remove binds, but I think the game would play better for it. With one simple change the skill ceiling would be elevated greatly (and the population diminished greatly).

I'm off-topic ranting though.

On-topic: If there were a bind for every attack type you would probably need two keyboards. There has to be a better way.

Yep I've seen it a few times this patch. Don't know the trigger. I found that clicking on a setup without that waist item can fix it, but sometimes it doesn't.

I would say that it's stats are very strong, probably too strong for its point value. (can 1-2 hit everything? 8 pts? really?) But its true strength is in crap animations.

People exploit the fact that a horizontal slash looks like an overhead when you look down, so you think you're chambering an overhead, but its not one and you get hit.

It also has a very wide, violent strike that can be easily body feinted to look like a release.

The violent animation also lends itself well to starting in an accel OH position, then dragging it out to the end of release.
All around the best weapon for the body-feinting, spazzing dragger playstyle.

EDIT: I just want to add something I noticed recently - that right side feints with the bardiche are extra effective because its windup pulls quite far back from idle, which means when you feint out, the blade comes forward quickly back to idle at the speed and orientation of an actual attack; its feint return looks exactly like a release.

@Q said:

@GIRUGIRU said:
...there NEEDS to be a spreadsheet like this i have no idea how triternion expect to balance without one

I second this. Would be nice to have an official data-sheet.

Or better yet, build the base weapon stats into the weapon selection UI, both damage and timings.

Cool, thanks for this. It's hard to read though.

I'm noticing that some weapon's damages are different that one would expect between body parts.

For example, the billhook alt grip slash says 40 dmg to unarmored chest, yet 100 damage for unarmored head. The head hit here is doing at least 2.5x damage, which is far more than most other head-hit multipliers. Is it incorrect data or can body part damages be set independently?

Good writeup.

I agree with your assessment of animations and chambering. These are the biggest things holding the gameplay back right now. Chambering is the coolest thing in Mordhau, but it needs to be consistent and rewarding. The 240 animations are too ambiguous to read consistently, especially on certain weapons like battleaxe. Weird drags and windup zigzags can make it damn near impossible to chamber.

The overhead drags to foot are icky and I don't like them.