I am really getting sick and tired of overpowered spray attacks that some enemies have, and how they can hit you 2, 3, 4 times per second and their damage is balanced around ONE hit, not multiple. Okay, if something can charge you for, say, 20 damage, that might be fair. What is NOT fair, is some mob that unleashes a ridiculously long-range spray attack and suddenly you get hit 5-6 times in a split second for 20 damage each hit and...... you're dead full stop before you even know what hit you. Sometimes, if it's the first time you've seen this attack, the game will even pause for a split second and you're dead before you even see the animation. Most games give you something called "Invincibility Frames" or "I-Frames" for short, where when your character takes damage, there's about half a second to a full second of invincibility to prevent cheap stuff like this from happening in the first place. From what I can tell in Starbound, the ONLY I-Frames you get is from mobs' touch attacks and it's about a quarter to a third of a second. There is zero, from what I can tell, I-Frames having to do with projectiles. You can get hit with 10 projectiles in the same frame and you will take damage from all 10. It'd be different if that mob that pukes blood on you would do, I don't know, instead of 20 damage, maybe each projectile does 3-4 damage that would be more reasonable. But nooo, each projectile does FULL DAMAGE and I'm tired of having to run away and heal every time something cheap like this happens. This is probably the chief reason why Combat in Starbound just does not feel "good" (that, and contact damage in a game with lower-than-usual I-frames is also lol). It is just entirely unforgiving and how nearly every stupid mob in the game is aggressive, it just gets old when you run into Spray Mob #39484839 and you end up using your 5000th bandaid to a cheap spray attack you had no room to dodge, it just gets old. I hate having to carry a shield constantly and even then, only modded shields are actually any good against this (vanilla shields block a whole, what, 50 damage? wooo).
Been? I don't understand, since it seems to be something about Nightly if I'm not wrong (And I'll likely be).
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about anymore, if the normal mob attacks and what you call "special" attacks are the same thing, then they're the normal attacks and all mobs have different attacks.
Actually, it seems the game doesn't give you iframes for low damage in relation to your max HP. Someone mentioned how the first mission boss gets much harder with endgame armors because suddenly, the lasers don't trigger iframes anymore and kill you nearly instantly.
Yeah, this is a much needed modification. Also, agreed that lack of i-frames + contact damage are the two biggest impediments to enjoying this game's combat. Heck, I'd say it's worth suggesting that contact damage be removed as well...
I think with proper I-frames, CD wouldn't be anywhere near as bad and it'd be done in such a way that it'd make more sense.
This is one of the reasons why I like using a broadsword with blink explosion. Blink explosion seems to iframe from the moment you activate it to the point when you reappear after teleporting. I guess this behavior is unique to blink explosion, since I also tested blink slash and it doesn't seem to have any such iframes.
They added Shovel Knight mechanics to the game, so Contact Damage isn't as much of a problem anymore. As for getting killed by spray attacks, the only one that gave me any trouble was the blood spray the Erchius mutants in the Erchius mission can do. They have a pretty good cooldown before they can use it again, and a nice long tell when they do it. But there are places where there are many of them in a group so they can kinda spam it at you if they take turns. I like the idea of spray attacks, but the execution needs work. Honestly, the only thing I'd do is tone down the damage each individual hit does. No single attack should take you out in a single blast (note: if both attacker and defender are on equal tiers). Our shotguns can't do that, why can theirs?
There are ways to make Spray attacks work with iframes without compromising those. For example, spray attacks ignore their own iframes for a short moment. Say the attack fires every 4 ticks so if the player has been in a "short" iframe for 5 ticks or less (some tolerance needed) then the attack deals damage anywayt and restarts the iframe from 0. Megaman Zero games (maybe not the first, not sure) also use the notion of combos. Each attack has a combo score and will completely ignore iframes from a lower score. Like the three hit combo of Zero does a level 1, 2 then 3 attack. If you break the combo, you start back from level 1 and cannot hit the mob while his iframe lasts.
IMO, Spray attacks shouldn't be immune to i-frames. IMO, Spray Attacks are supposed to be attacks that are difficult to dodge, but if you get hit once, then you get hit. That's why I support the first hit triggering enough I-frame that you should only get hit once, maybe twice if you get hit with the entire spray. It makes the attack difficult to dodge (because spray attacks have an area that they cover), but yet not so cheap that you get stunlocked or killed from 100% to 0% in a second or two. That, and in many other games that have these "spray" sort of attacks, they are usually used as debuffs for that reason. For example, you get hit with a fire attack, take very minor damage but get set on fire. Or an acid spray that causes you to take acid DoT, or a poison spray that applies the poison debuff, or perhaps an acid spray that lowers your defense or something. Or how about the ice spray that reduces movement speed but does no damage? Not every single attack needs to deal direct damage.
Sure you can do that too. But this will basically make the machine gun weapons kinda useless without retuning.
But both player and NPC enemies use those weapon types ! I was more thinking about those machine gun NPCs in fact
