[Senna]

Attempt number two.

Back at it like I never left. Two turning exist and is quite strong in the current turn order.

How often someone is two turned? It happens often in 1v1 if mob support were used and 2v2. It also happens in 4v4/3V3 but that only happens if the enemy team wipes out one/two opponents.

Is it possible to know if you're about to be two turned? Very much so. At the moment, it's a disadvantage to be faster in battles. To know? Once you're outnumbered, A two-turn is coming if the enemy team goes first. Just by reading who's going last and knowing your order in the turn system, you can simply move into position and proceed to prepare your strongest/powerful skill or weaken them from the incoming burst. (Such as Knocking them down or High speed words and Etc.)

Can it be countered? If you don't have something to immobilize them prior? Your only other bet is a well-placed skip at a certain time. Whereas they're not close enough. Outside of those two? No.

Visual example? This is for a 1v1 since its much harder to gather the team for more. It works the same nonetheless.

_____________________________

It's a sad day when a summoner or Engineer is faster than their foe. They're forced to be two turned no matter what if they choose to summon a youkai or bot. They can only hope their tankie enough to withstand the incoming punishment or hope they don't have options to remove/reduce their reduction for the incoming punishment.
So how to go about fixing this? I have two suggestions really.
Firstly, mobs such as summons, bots, and Etc. Similar to the butterflies, let them not affect the turn order team switch around.
Now for players that will more likely be two turned, I would suggest the player's turn order remain static once it has been decided during the Deployment Phase (Or round one). Anyone that was to join the battle after that point will be added beneath the person that goes last on their team.

Team 1
Team 2
Team 1
Team 2

Someone joins teams 2.

Team 1
Team 2
Team 1
Team 2
New Team 2

Someone joins teams 1.

Team 1
Team 2
Team 1
Team 2
New Team 1
New Team 2



So I'd like to hear what the others think about this suggestion? What else would they like to add to it and so on.

[SolAndLuna]

I did mention a few times in various places that a more static turn order would make things less problematic for the exact reasons mentioned here, honestly. The alternating turns help on occasion, but it ultimately means that your team moving first makes it more difficult to win.

To put it simply, if the faster team takes down an opponent, the slower team will suddenly become the faster team next turn, with the now faster team only losing their advantage if they successfully take down 2 opponents now. Inversely, if the slower team takes down an opponent, the faster team will remain faster. So, effectively, the faster team is being punished for winning, while the slower team isn't.

Just to add to the original post... The main issues with the way turn order is currently handled, in my opinion, are simply this:

1. It makes being faster a decidedly worse option in team fights or as specific classes, and something one should actively avoid if they intend for their character to be as powerful as possible. I have mentioned this in the past, but there were a handful of occasions where simply having Auto-Summon taken off, or building for defense and resistance rather than evade so I could be slower than my opponent, would have kept me from losing more than half of my HP, simply because I would have had an opportunity to move or retaliate against someone in a 1v1 or even a team fight at times.

2. It makes turn order more difficult to grasp than it really should be. There have been a number of people asking questions about the turn order system, and there are still some things that people don't understand about it on occasion and ask about it on Discord or in-game. For a simple system that could be crucial to surviving in a fight, it probably shouldn't require numerous questions or constantly thinking about how it'll shift for people to figure out what's going on.

3. It makes things frustrating at times. Taking down a tough opponent on your team, only to then get blasted by an attack from someone that's close to you that you would have been able to avoid if the turn order didn't change, makes it pretty annoying, especially since now you're out of the fight for doing something that brings you closer to the end goal of your team. For that matter, while I'm sure this isn't intended, it actively discourages people from making use of bots or summoning youkai if they're faster, since doing so very quickly leads to them being able to focus on you and deal a lot of damage before you can defend yourself.


As a result, at least in my opinion, I think it would be better if the turn order that was decided on at the start of a fight was the turn order that stayed throughout it, as the original post mentioned, simply skipping over whoever was KO'd instead and adding any extra units to the end of the turn order so it doesn't disrupt anyone else.
While that would bring back multiple people on the same team moving before the opponent, potentially, multiple people moving after the opponent doesn't solve that issue much. It would only happen after someone was KO'd, as well, and it'd likely be preferable to slower teams gaining an edge over faster ones for no real reason.

TL;DR - Turn order definitely needs to change around less than it does right now. The way it is now is confusing, frustrating and provides more reason to simply make a tanky character over an evasive one.

[Maksimum_Fire]

yeah, uh, this thread is a lot of what needs to be said. Thank you all v much.

New turn order still has half a dozen different issues that make PvE much messier than it used to be, and make pvp.... Less fun. For most everyone, from what I can tell.

Solandluna and Senna have covered some important things., so I won't try to re-cover them. But I am gonna call out something small, in addition to this.

Quickdraw passive is monstrously unreliable now since it relies on acting before an enemy. If I'm in a team fight and there's an engineer, a tactician, or a summoner on my team? I can't guarantee the passive from the get go. If we take an enemy down? I lose the passive against one of the enemies.

This stands out especially in PvE and boss fights I want to mention. It's kinda miserable. Combine that with the fact that having more rounds is less important nowadays, and really, it's better to just run Handguns, Autopistols, or Ryesers for akimbo builds. BoNR is good for akimbo as well, but it fills an entirely different niche so I don't think about it much.

Quickdraw's mechanics aren't the only thing that struggles from this, even if it's the most obvious. Effects with low durations(i.e.Silences, especially against heron feathers) lose all usability against opponents that are faster, and when opponents that are slower often become faster than people literally *building* to be fast....

Well, that sucks.

tl;dr if current turn order is here to stay, pls fix status duration effects and weapon passives, specifically calling out quickdraw.

[Autumn]

Quickdraw's weakness is when you cannot be above your opponent in turn order yes, there's no need to change its effects given with it you'll be faster than at least 6 of the 8 maximum player combatants at any point, or however many monster combatants, so to say its monstrously unreliable now is an overstatement since it only applies to 1v1s where your opponent can cheese turn order in a deliberate way. (Like with Dullahan's Soul Burn)

If you want my opinion, turn order should be static from the get-go, as proposed by another user in the past, turn order wildly fluctuating when characters begin to die is the biggest offender of literally all of them, as skip can be used to mitigate the effects of youkai turns. (Though I wager youkai should have mini-turns like the papilion butterflies were proposed to once)

That would mostly mean that if you for some reason started as slot 3 on your team, you would remain within the same bracket as slot 3 of the enemy team, the largest more unpredictable gripes of the turn order system are due to this shifting flow when people start dying, making zerging the dodgy a little less valuable than before.

[Maksimum_Fire]

High turn order priority can dictate whether a player is even affected by certain status effects, with silence being the most egregious egregious example in my mind. Quickdraw is not the only example of things that the new turn order broke- Which I will continue to refer to it as being- especially due to its malfunction in team fights. 1v1s can impose similar situations, but really, I think being able to just hide your low-defense characters from a pick weapon with turn order alone is more silly than that. But if you'd like to make the case re: Quickdraw in another thread, I'd be happy to get into it.

Honestly, my proposed change would be to revert to initiative determining turn order directly. But if the current system was to be kept.

Items and effects need to be reworked.

Cel needs to have something added to it to compensate now that it's honestly more optimal to just run tanky- *especially* in planned team comps, where a single or two points of cel is all that's needed to determine order(or even just an ink or lack thereof!)

Muunden and Geist need serious looks because Boxers can currently be forcibly double turned.

Turn order needs to not get shuffled around when units go down or are summoned. It just makes things messy.

Skip should change in some way, I think, too- But I'm not certain on how so I won't really push about it.

[Autumn]

High turn order priority can dictate whether a player is even affected by certain status effects, with silence being the most egregious egregious example in my mind.  Quickdraw is not the only example of things that the new turn order broke- Which I will continue to refer to it as being- especially due to its malfunction in team fights.  1v1s can impose similar situations, but really, I think being able to just hide your low-defense characters from a pick weapon with turn order alone is more silly than that.  But if you'd like to make the case re: Quickdraw in another thread, I'd be happy to get into it.

Honestly, my proposed change would be to revert to initiative determining turn order directly.  But if the current system was to be kept.

Items and effects need to be reworked.

Cel needs to have something added to it to compensate now that it's honestly more optimal to just run tanky- *especially* in planned team comps, where a single or two points of cel is all that's needed to determine order(or even just an ink or lack thereof!)

Muunden and Geist need serious looks because Boxers can currently be forcibly double turned.

Turn order needs to not get shuffled around when units go down or are summoned.  It just makes things messy.

Skip should change in some way, I think, too- But I'm not certain on how so I won't really push about it.

Some items and effects may need tuning in the future, this is a natural part of the balance of the game and retuning things to further benefit certain strategies or counterplays is almost always necessary anyways.

Turn order in my opinion is more balanced this way with an alternating order, it doesn't make clammering for initiative the king anymore which was a HUGE problem before the new turn order system, I actually very much disliked the race for initiative amongst dodgies, it created such a disparity among them before that I wouldn't like to go back to ever.

Celerity is actually fine as a stat where it is, dodge is strong and rewarding, evasion is basically setting you at a 35-40% DR (Counting baseline APT DEF and RES) globally, and evasion is high enough to where you can reliably dodge basic hits right now, situational immunity to a damage type is very nice to have and will always incentivize dodge as a mechanic, especially when cobra is in play and even makes those basic attackers double dip on hit chances.

There are mechanics that dodgies can avoid better than tanks can like unprotectable damage or vorpal strikes, something like bellowing stag is actually worse vs dodgies than it is tanks by far, given evasion can proc vs them, as long as unrotectable damage remains evasion-able (So a change to bombs and painful grapple might be needed) then I feel as if there's a far larger merit to dodge than people actually give it credit for.

The only issue with dodge at the current moment is how strong knockdown is vs Evasion -- Which has been addressed and discussed before, and I'm sure is to receive some tweaks soon (Likely in the form of removing the interaction all together), so with that sort of security I feel like Celerity is in a good spot, it doesn't need anything else than making knockdown much less overpowered.

Skip is good in team fights, it lets you be able to double turn brackets below your's (IE: if you're first, you can double turn 2 3 4 etc.) and is a seriously underutilized tool in team fights, smart application of it is key, so just turn off muuden when you don't need that skip.

As per my last post I did mention that converting all summonable units to minor units would be insurmountable to the current state of balance in terms of turn order, this should be a necessary addition imo.

[FatherCrixius]

Obligatory boxer post, but after some events today I have no intention to be serious.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your faster than the sack of lard below you, it's one on one.


You press blue button and go forwards, all is cool so far.




Error Numero uno: The enemy is smart, and knows how to cheese you.











The one initiative sack of potatoes now punishes your 3m refund with 7m refunds of their own. Better results with less momentum skills, but 4m -> 3m skills also work, and vice versa.




This works so effectively because it punishes one of the only movement tools boxer has, if they geist Korken the previous turn, as is common, they will be unable to move without expending schwarz- and are guaranteed to be unable to geist. A niche way to abuse the new systems, and isn't too well known about thus far.

Error 2: You equiped muunden you complete and utter buffoon.


I refuse to put a point into this, even for demonstration purposes, so you'll have to use your imagination.
In brief, Muunden forces you to the bottom of the turn order as a skip would, meaning if you use it on a dreii you've not only shot yourself in the foot, but given the enemy an additional turn to dance around your geist. Generally these bad match ups were already not in your favor, as if your in a position to be dreii'ing your probably weren't in good position to begin with. Again, something to be cautious about.

Option three : Your being cheesed by Grandupper and effectively three turned: A combination of option one and new turn order interacting funky with grandupper.
For this to work, you need to be faster than the enemy: Employ trick one if needed.







Fegen -> Grandupper, they were unable to geist after your proc last turn, and if they korkened- impossible to move.


Heal like it's a 'spar'.
And like that, an enemy boxer has lost up to 2 full turns, and potentially has to recover from a KD.

Tldr uh
New initiative system is wack and allows some really weird shit. There's probably ways to abuse this, but I don't care enough to do anything comprehensive test wise. A static system would prevent the first niche thing from being exploited, but I would hope to see an exception for grandupper, because the enemy should be allowed to play. I unironically think the new turn system, while making no sense, has a higher skill ceiling and incentivizes people to prioritise their targets carefully in team fights- And were it a core principal of the fighting system and not on an rp game, I'd be all for keeping it unchanged. Otherwise it feels pretty shitty when combined with Knockdown, grandupper, ect, and makes statuses like stun or dullahans self stun actual fucking buffs. Like I said, not intuitive, but mechanically interesting I guess.

[Maksimum_Fire]

@crixius- I love your post and a lot of things it elucidates, thank you for dropping in.  I don't completely disagree re: your comments on turn order,

@spo

I'd argue that evasion being effective doesn't necessarily imply celerity is good.  Word from dev himself is:



And this shows.  Celerity does give us two evade per point, so it's more effective than Luck at granting evade....  But, particularly with Evasion, that's not necessarily that beneficial.


(Extensive evasion discussion)

As an example; why don't I just run Ghost/Ranger, using a Haunted Soul Weapon?  Let's look at the numbers I get assuming I have a bow and a spear(so no locking guard) and a Spirit on Disengage.  To make things even more simple, we'll use a pretty generic armor like Ninja Armor, and of course, we'll use Miragewalk, the current gold standard for evade.

Let's assume we're a low base cel race.  2, to be exact, though I don't really know what race that'd actually be- it's lower than the cel of pretty much any race you'll be using for dodge.  We won't assume racial buffs to evade.  And we'll assume 3 base luck, another low number.

From the minimum APT needed to make an effective build(due to def/res/vit/will investment being very helpful even on dodgies), we get 8 CEL and 9 LUC.  Let's assume the cat stamp, as well, since most players take the short time it takes to fill that quest.  Black Blood quests also give plenty Legend Inks, so we're going to assume that Cel and Luck are both inked to make up for those low bases on an evasion build  We're also going to invest another 34 into Luck to hit the point right before diminishing returns.

That means we have 44 luck and 9 celerity, which gives us 62 evade.  Pretty low numbers, but we'll get there, don't worry.

Ninja Armor, now.  That's 15 evade.  +9 evade from upgrading at the blacksmith for 24.  +5 evade from Breezecloth material.  +4 evade from Trimming Scissors.  33 evade.

We're at 97 evade now.  We're still not really going to dodge anyone, especially anyone who stacks skill.  But what happens when we use our skills?

Reasonably, if enemies are getting into close range, then you flip shot, activating acrobatics, activating Miragewalk, kiting an opponent, and striking an opponent.  That fear infliction from Haunted Soul gives a -30 hit penalty, so we'll count it as an effective +30 evade.  Acrobatics is +30 evade.  Miragewalk is +25 evade for one attack-  But, in fact, it doesn't decay on autohits, so for the purposes of Evasion, we have no trouble holding onto that.

In one action, we've gained 85 evade.  182 evade, without a single point of directly invested Celerity.  This is already a significant enough range that autohitters begin to struggle-  For simple reasons.  Strength is needed for most weapons to scale and do damage, so strength gouging is important.  To use those skills that deal damage, you need FP, so autohitters invest in Will, and sometimes Faith or San too- though those have become less common over time.  This leaves a lot less room for Skill than what dedicated hitters can run, with weapons that scale mainly off of other stats- like will, or skill, or guile- or builds that can easily sustain FP.  and even if they do invest skill,o get above a 50% chance of not proccing evasion, an autohitter needs to get 232 hit.

But that's not all.

I mentioned Spirited Disengage.  In a ghost/ranger build, Flip shot into another skill into Disengage is a perfectly standard combo.  While it's only for one hit, the miragewalk use I mentioned remains there for disengage.  Disengage gives you a whopping 60 evade, bumping up your evade number to 242.

242 evade.  That's a funny number, to me, since 220 evade is what people say you need to run in order to be able to handle yourself as a dodgy.  At this stage, an autohitter needs 292 hit in order to 50/50 evasion procs.  The solution to this feels like basic attacking, since 'well, I'll get rid of 85 of that evade if I just get close and basic attack!....'  And you know, in a situation where you can afford to dogpile on this no-cel dodgy?  maybe that'd work.  But in any sort of situation where hands can't be spared, you typically have to

>close in with a mobility option
>basic attack, often missing(using 300 hit as a standard) and losing your ability to combo.

Which uses all of your momentum up in a situation....  That the no-cel dodgy just sort of brought about naturally while doing chip damage(flip shot), and sustaining(60 heal from disengage), and using those moves to zone.  What's more, they'll typically also access a third action during that turn, letting them overwhelm that sort of option.

Now.  This specific example is counterable.  Its counters are bows, which have no trouble stacking 300 hit and have a long range, allowing them to use only 3m to drop miragewalk/disengage-  But that pigeons you into Ranger, typically, and then it's down to a mirror match essentially.  Then, sniper rifles- which get bonus hit from Steady(20) and have a decent range, though not as much as bows.  And multishot guns. though the damage output, lack of teamfight utility, and shoddy range have shoved the latter out of the meta more recently, imo.

Even more than that....  This build is bad.  There's so much we're just choosing not to account for, and we're literally sitting at 44 luck.  How often do you see a dodgy- or even a basic hitter- with only 44 luck. We've also chosen not to consider Fortune Wind(27 evade), which can be pulled out in matchups where it feels like your evade might not be enough; or cherry tree, which would provide us another 10 evade from buffing Cel.  We also blatantly avoided using swords, which can give us even more evade up close.  There's also Rising Game, which will buff our evade by 2 with each level.

This isn't an 'only ranger' or 'only duelist' thing, either.  Verglas builds can reach silly amounts of evade, and Rogue's +30 evasion passive is very kind to tanks looking to reduce all damage they take by 30%.  There are lovely setups like this around the class board, some more janky or unreliable than others, regardless of where you look...

...And what's most important to discuss.  This is all done.  Without CEL.  Not a single point was taken away from some other stat in order to boost CEL.  This leaves us perfectly free to beef up our def/res to our heart's desire....

But that's not a squishie anymore.  That's literally just a tank that's just as good at dodging as dodgies are.  That forces the sort of second-guessing and misplays that dodgies do, without sacrificing anything, without building any CEL.  That's what I think is unreasonable, and I hope you understand that much, Spo.

Evasion is great.  Evasion's never been better; for tanks. It requires investing into certain setups, but it works.  Meanwhile, for a dodgy who does build cel- They can go for these setups, but the only benefit they get over a tank is being able to dodge basic attackers more consistently.

Evasion's never been better.  Cel's never been worse.  Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

>"some items and" line
Yeah.  Yet those reworks didn't come out when turn order changes went live.  Those things should already be reworked because they're intimately tied with turn order, yet from what I can tell, they definitely haven't been.  I agree with you though.  It's essential that they are.

>"turn order is more balanced this way" line
The biggest reason that dodgies rushed to go first in the past was for Lantern bearer, so that a player could grant immunity to certain status effects to their team before any rushdown builds got involved.  Rushdown was never really much of a problem, though, since usually what would happen is
-Rushdown player goes in, looking to CC and damage enemy team heavily
-they do so
---Either, they immediately die because the rest of their team wasn't rushdown
---Or, the rest of the team is rushdown, and once everyone on their team acts the opposing team just sort of rolls them since they actually did the smart play of building heavier defensive stats and are going to be perfectly fine if they get rushed for two rounds.
Deployment mode made this disparity become even larger, since if teams coordinated whatsoever, 90% of rushdown builds no longer had a turn 0 play.
So, new turn order does these things:
-prevents rushdown, already falling in the meta, from existing
-doesn't stop lantern bearers from immunizing their whole team before the battle starts- in fact, now no-cel lantern bearers can immunize their whole team before 75% of the enemy team can act, due to turn order.
There's also a common complaint about 'meta-designed teams' that all act on the same initiative order.  But I'm going to call something out about that because it's really silly argument.
-This means they go after at least some members on a team, or all of the teammates build super high CEL.  I don't think I need to elucidate why everyone having wack cel is a negative, but I'll touch on the former part.  The former means that, in some ways, the opposing team can usually still react before the 4-man block acts.
-Second, the opposing team ALSO acts in a four man block???  They might be split up, but if you have two of your team's actions at the end of the round and two at the start,  that means by turn one any sort of advantage from having that 'exact initiative' setup team has faded.

I do understand liking new turn order more than old turn order.  But new turn order hasn't really changed much.  The 'issue' of people double turning or being double turned also still hasn't been fixed, even in 1v1s, as has been established by everyone helping out to show the issues to Dev.  Maybe one day it'll be more balanced, but right now there are too many kinks for me to give a 'fair' evaluation of it like that.


>skip tech
Skip tech is wack.  And it sounds like it's still doing essentially the same thing it has been before, forcing opponents who don't play very safe around it to get bent over.  It's my understanding that the core reason for the turn order changes was to shift that being the case.  That said I think it's cool, I just imagine one day someone will properly document it and talk about it on the forums, leading it to be quashed immediately.

>youkai
Yeah, I agree.  Youkai should be minor units if this turn order is to be reasonable.  Snow Crow and Firefox need to be looked at in wake of those kind of changes, also, as their firefall and snowfall functions fall under 'effects that suddenly suck majorly with new turn order'.

tl;dr I gave my response to spo re: all points, agreeing on about half of them but disagreeing on Cel being strong enough right now; I gave a very detailed example of why evasion can be good when Cel isn't.  Similar examples aren't hard to harvest, and greater examples are certainly out there.

but hey i should probably leave that sort of talk to people who dont build cel since im biased because i build cel right

[Autumn]

Celerity is plenty strong, people just often do not see the strengths of it, I already explained how its good currently and where its shortcomings lie, I think you just refuse to see it the same way I do and that's fine. When it boils down to a discussion of what should win (Hit vs Evade) then it always ends up as a garbled mess and ends up shifting between the two constantly, currently evade wins most cases when proper upkeep of dodge buffs is maintained, a few outlying builds of course beat that when they are hit stacking beyond an actual normal build.

Trust me, like 90% of my characters are all celerity based, the ones I currently play are celerity based, and I think it can be strong. They just need a bit more support with evasion-specific mechanics that give them DPS or DR like with what Verglas offers, the Celerity stat itself is very strong given how effective wind magic is, and how a dodge-tank can persist solely on celerity and no luck.

[SolAndLuna]

Crixius has outlined a few other key issues with the way the current turn order has mixed things up at the moment, so I appreciate that.
From what I read through, it feels like a lot of the more concrete issues that were mentioned throughout this would be fixed by having a more static turn order, as mentioned before.

At the end of the day, my opinion's more or less the same as it was in the previous post.

That being said... it kind of feels like the thread is being taken off the rails slightly? While I don't exactly disagree with either of your statements, this is a thread regarding turn order at the moment, rather than evasion and how effective it is, so it may be good to keep it to the topic of turn order right now.