I've got a surprise for you. The most crucial article since the beginning of the project.

We've finished the first version of the Combat System

Since we were developing it from scratch. I've put the original concept on the workbench and reviewed what was good, what wasn't, and where to improve. We have redesigned everything related to Damage, Weapons, and stats.

Armors, Ammo, and Damage calculations were made more understandable, without stripping depth for possible builds and changes.

The weapons have changed to offer different tactical niches instead of just having different damage/range stats, during the article, we will list some but not all examples.

Keep in mind that all of this is subject to change, we can't see what works and what needs tweaking until we will do some more testing, some things might require a value change, and some need to have the feature reworked.

With that in mind, let's have a rundown of weapon attributes, with them I'll use some weapons as examples of how they work.

The weapons use Attack Lines to define how their attack targetting splits, they also can have a piercing that allows them to hit more than just one target per line. With some weapons, we’re combining those 2 to create different weapon types than the rest.

Through the article you will find small gifs showcasing the mentioned feature or weapons, they will be tested on a rather friendly family of spore plants. 

Attack Lines

Some weapons have an attack cone that decides how the weapon will perform. Bursts will split bullets evenly on each line, leaving the remainder for the main target. Single Shots are hitting targets in the cone with even power.

• Assault Rifle: rifle has a 3-line burst shooting 12 bullets, and every target gets hit with 4 bullets.

• Minigun: has 5 line bursts, 30 rounds split to 6 bullets per target hit.

• Flamer: hits everyone in its area of the fire, spreading damage to 5 lines on a short range and applying a burning debuff.

Target Piercing

Weapons can hit more than 1 target per line depending on their piercing stat.

• Laser Rifle: This single-line weapon goes straight and hits the first 4 targets in the path, upgraded version hits up to 6 targets, allowing for a great tactical damage multiplier on groups.

• Shotgun: Every shotgun has its piercing stat, with most shotguns being able to hit 3 targets per line, and having 5 lines, a shotgun choke mod allows one to extend weapon range but lower the number of lines to 3.

Explosion

Weapons fire a projectile that travels to the target location, upon reaching the target, it explodes.

• Rocket Launcher: It launches a rocket that flies towards the target at a slower pace than the rest of the projectiles, upon reaching the target it explodes, knocking everyone back from the center of the explosion.

• Plasma Rifle: Plasma weapons deal small AoE damage, upon reaching targets small splash damage is applied to everyone near.

• Grenades: grenades explode 1 second after reaching the target.

Pulse Weapons

On top of electrical damage, the attacks will subtract a small amount of target action points.

Melee weapons

The weapons have perks, some can pierce armor, some cause knock-down, and knock-back, and some cut and cause bleeding.

• Super Sledge: The hammer can do a wide swing, hitting multiple targets in front of the attacker, or thrust and knock back a single target.

• Sharpened Spear: Can hit 2 targets in a line, dealing piercing damage, or you can throw it.

They bite hard.

• Wakizashi: Thrust it for piercing damage, or try to cause bleeding with a swing.
• Cattle Prod: Damage enemy while dealing electric damage and lowering enemy Action points.
• Ripper: Cause bleeding with every attack.

Range Bursts

Bursts have been reworked and depending on the weapon, they split the attack between 3 lines of fire or 5 (minigun). They are more of a havoc-wreaking tool than accurate killing weapons.

Aimed Shots

As long as a weapon can aim, the main target hit will be resolved with an aimed body part, if you shoot a laser rifle, aiming for the head and hit 3 enemies including your main target, the main target is hit in the head while the rest count as body shots. There is now also flat aim damage, so even if you don't crit, hitting someone in the head is going to deal additional damage.

Current damage numbers are:

+30% for eyes

+20% for head and groin

+10% for hands and legs

The extra damage is going to close an annoying gap making aiming builds have to crit or gain nothing from aimed shots.

One Hex

One hex still exists, if targets are lined up for one hex and the attack is using more than one bullet, instead of Attack Lines the burst will be soaked into a single target, hitting with a maximum of 50% bullets of the attack.

With changes on Armor DT and bullets, the damage is similar to the Season3 damage dealt, despite only 50% of bullets hitting the target. 

Hex Targetting

Every attack that can hit more than one target, including melee,  can be used with targetting hex instead of critter. You can shoot a laser rifle toward an area outside of your vision, or burst forward when blinded. You can carpet-bomb the area with plasma spam.

Healing Shots

Some weapons and ammo will allow you to do healing instead of damage. A zip gun loaded with syringe needles provides quick health bursts to your target.

Criticals

The crit roll table is hard to read and Crit Roll itself is an unnecessarily complicated additional stat after calculating critical chance.

For initial tests, criticals will deal extra damage based on the targeted part of the body. The additional effects will be caused by crit success using the remaining critical chance points.

In the result, the more critical chance, the bigger chance for additional effect to trigger, without crit roll stat being involved in the calculation. The system will make crits more evened out, making critical results like knockout or breaking limbs a sporadic event, not the core goal of the critical attack.

Weapon Skill Requirement

Every weapon has now a skill requirement and weapon skills are leveled up by use. A skill requirement does NOT stop you from using a weapon, it only makes it harder to hit the target. The weapons have different skill requirements, with a pipe gun requiring nearly no skill will make it easy for new players to score hits with the weapon, but giving Gauss Rifle to a newbie will result in most of the shots being missed.

Ammo

Ammo was reworked, instead of having DR, DT calculations, % lowering weapon damage, or increasing it, it will now simply just have nothing or one of those 4 perks:

• Piercing - Ignores 33% of target resistances.
• Poisonous - Damage is converted into poison damage instead.
• Shredding - Has a chance to cause bleeding effect, lowers total damage.
• Healing - Damage is converted into healing damage.

That does not mean that every weapon type will have its ammo equivalent, there won’t be a healing minigun or shredding flamer ammo. The ammo types will be added to weapons that make sense, and some weapons in the future might be added that specialize in using healing ammo for example.

Armors

Armors have been also changed and damage calculation is different. Most importantly Damage Threshold is a single value applied just once, not per bullet, and armors share DT for every damage element. Having no Weapon Ammo in calculation and simplifying Armor stats makes the system clear for the user. Differences from the DT will be adjusted within resistances that will remain separate per damage element.

Debuffs

There is a variety of debuffs in the game, all of them are new calculations and some of them are new status effects.

• Poisoned

Poison stacks within your body and some of the amount depending on your resistance will damage you every minute, before fading completely. Antidote lets you heal the poison damage. Poison stops passive heal regen.

• Radiated

Similar to poison, it's a damage that stacks up and wounds the player every minute, it is passively gained in irradiated areas so using RadX is important.

• Bleeding

Bleeding can be caused by monsters, weapons, and bullets. Bleeding has 3 levels and every level triggers an equal amount of damage per second.

Level 1 bleeding causes 1dmg/s

Level 2 bleeding causes 2dmg/s

Level 3 bleeding causes 3dmg/s

Bleeding stacks up to Level 3, after reaching this level it causes no additional benefit to the attacker.

Bleeding has a small chance to heal by itself, lowering the bleeding level by 1 up to a fully healed bleeding state.

Bleeding can also be fixed by First Aid skill, reducing the amount of HP healed by the process, more on that below. Other healing sources won't be affected by bleeding.

• Burning

Burning is a strong damage per second caused by fire attacks, it will trigger from 15 to 30 damage per second until it all fades. Most of Flamer's damage is moved into burning stat and off the instant damage of the weapon.

This results in initial damage from the flamer not being strong enough, but repeated attacks build up the number of ticks per second, which, if not managed, will end up badly. 

One Account Approach

What we want is for the player to grow attached to his character, this entails that the player will have multiple classes/builds on the account which he will be able to swap, while character skills will be shared between the builds and be passively gained.

Having Perk presets you’ll be able to change your role in safe locations and experiment to see what hits home for you, without the necessity of creating a new account and leveling it up separately or going through reroll process.

Skills

The skills are now passively gained by use, For example, using first aid will slowly level it up, and scoring kills will increase the skill of a particular weapon. Repairing items will increase repair skill, disarming traps will level up traps, etc.

Currently, all skills are planned to be progressive.

Skill books will multiply the skill gain rate for a given amount of time.

The cap will remain at level 300, although in the early season we might limit it to lower numbers to ease up progression.

First Aid

Doctor and First Aid are merged into a single skill that Heals HP, repairs broken body parts, and removes bleeding stacks.

• Injury Heal

If the player has multiple injured body parts it will try to fix all of them, lowering the chance with every successful heal until it attempted to heal every injury.

• Hp Heal

First Aid heals target hp depending on player skill with a minimum of 30 HP per action.

It will fix the bleeding, subtracting 50 HP points of heal every bleeding level. So using bleeding weapons or bullets might prove useful to deteriorate enemy first aid abilities.

Both Injury heal and HP heal trigger together

Sneaking

It’s worth noting that sneaking will be gained by perks, not skills, forcing you to choose between perk points allocated into sneak instead of other combat/utility perks.

Those changes will be altered/modified by the perks that the attacker and target can have.