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OK, So I have been wanting to write one of these for a while and I finally got the chance to do so. I think one of the core mechanical problems with this game can be boiled down to accels being too fast. In an ideal melee slasher there would be a few different tools you could use against your opponent in order to get past their defense in terms of swing manipulation. These tools would each serve their own purpose and ideally would be used at the same rates. Right now the meta for dueling is acceling your opponent 10 times to your 3 drags and the reason for this is simple. Accels are objectively better than drags. Accels atm are so fast that you can strike at a speed near the minimum reaction time of a human. Particular weapons such as the long sword or the pole axe can strike so fast that ping becomes the defining characteristic on whether you are able to parry an attack.

From my perspective this game has been balanced around someone running 20 ping when the average player (especially in a large region like NA) has a ping anywhere from 50-70. This leads to the infamous red parry, or to those unfamiliar a red parry is a term used to refer to a parry that arrives at the server too late to count, due to the player not being able to parry early enough to compensate for the server latency. Sadly this problem leaves players who have a mere 20-30 ping advantage over their opponent a huge step up as they are simply not able to compete at the same high tier level. With a good accel you are able to punish your opponent despite the fact that they were able to read your attack and react to it through red parries. On top of this the current meta in duels is very stam focused with each side acceling a ton and doing massive casino drags in attempts to get around the other players defense. Chamber feint to parry has neutered alot of swing manipulation, especially in regards to drags, adding another facet to why accels are more useful than drags. Another problem I have recently noticed is that double parries have become abundant to the point where if you dont hard accel your opponent after successfully baiting a parry you are guaranteed to have your opponent parry your second attack.

The effects of accels being too fast are larger than merely red parries and a dumbing down of swing manipulation, other mechanics such as feinting quickly become very strong when played correctly. Weapons such as the short spear, arming sword, or bastard sword are all deemed "unreadable" relying on morph feints in order to force your opponent into parrying out of fear of an accel or stab. These morph feints are particularly effective leaving you unable to chamber them as morphs counter chambers and the accels for each of these weapons are so fast that you are expected to early parry in order to block. The constant gamble of having to read these lightning fast morph feints and maintaining and maintaining this gamble on whether your opponent is going to commit to their attack or not is simply not fun nor engaging when dueling. Your best hope is to outstam them but more often than not you wind up dead after unsuccessfully reading 4-5 feinted accels/morph feints. These weapons require extremely little swing manipulation that require any skill outside of learning the most basic of accels. When some attacks come so fast that you are expected to "early parry" or gamble that your opponent is going to commit to an attack in hopes that your parry will go off early enough for you to block their attack, there is something fundamentally wrong with the game. Most successful fighting games try to avoid these gambles as much as possible as rng, though fun in small healthy doses, can lead to the player feeling like they lose by chance rather than a player feeling that they won/lost definitively by skill.

Strangely enough Kicks can even be tied into the current problems with accels aswell. Players, especially at the high tier, have noticed that kick are very over powered; with the ability to force 50/50s and steal initiative from your opponent kicking effectivly has become a staple of high tier play. In regards to accels, kicks force the player whose attacking to have to worry about kicks while they still have initiative. For instance if I decide to drag, ideally, it should be on my opponent to react to that drag and block it in order to regain initiative before attacking again, instead the opponent is able to easily gamble a kick during your attack and interrupt your drag hard punishing you for using swing manipulation. This leads to a disincentive to drag as they now are forced to be on attack and defense while dragging, as opposed to acceling where you are able to punish any kick attempt instantly.

This meta of acceling is further reinforced by the mere practice time it takes to execute these attacks successfully. Having personally trained many new mordhau players I quickly realized the time and dedication that is required to accel at the highest level is a mere fraction of the time it takes to learn how to drag at a high level. Its hard to blame a newer player (who only uses weapons such as long-sword, alt baxe, poleaxe or similar super fast weapons) as they find huge amounts of success simply by staring at the floor and riposte acceling. It seems ridiculous to me that I can teach a player to accel well at near top tier level in an hour but in order for them to drag effectively it requires literally hundreds of hours of practice. The skill ceiling for this game gets significantly hampered by this style of combat and its frustrating seeing these duelers top fragging on a duel server while barely using any swing manipulation at all outside of top tier duel servers like cashmates where massive drags are required in order to get around chamber feint to parry. Dueling casually has become annoying as these players do well while only using a fraction of the tools available to them. But how can we blame them when it simply works.

Tying other frustrating mechanics such as third person or true comboing 1 handed weapons and you are able to get near frame perfect accels that require reaction times faster than any person not wired on caffeine or adrenaline could parry. I understand that finding a balance for accel speeds can be difficult as it can easily render the balance of swing manipulation uneven in the other direction, but my goal for this post would be to see the devs move towards a meta closer to 50% accels and 50% drags rewarding those who execute and use mind games (such as conditioning and well practiced swing manipulation) rather than the uneven balance of staring at the ground with every weapon praying your attack will be faster than they are able to react with the occasional casino drag as a mix-up. We shouldn't reward those who have a higher hertz monitor or better ping unfairly and for those who are stuck at with pings around 50-60+ ping and a 60 hertz monitor the game can feel unplayable at times. (I know this is predominantly focused more towards duels but the effects do bleed into more casual play like insta maul head shots which I know so many players complain about)

Finally I hate to be that guy who points out a problem and neglects to provide solutions so here are some ideas I had in mind in order to remedy this problem. The first and probably most obvious would be a global release time reduction that would result in a slowing down and increase in "readability" of all weapons. A second suggestion and probably the hardest would be a fundamental rework of many of the animations used by weapons that involve more of the body possibly or some other visual indicator on whether an attack is about to begin. And lastly, my personal favorite, a possible adjustment to hit boxes preventing players from starting an attack within another players hitbox. This would hopefully punish those who love to face hug as hard as they can while reposting acceling overheads within the model of their opponent (otherwise known as an insider.) Much akin to the underhand wessex removal change with the introduction of hitstop on over drags I would hope to see a similar hitstop mechanic on those who over accel in this manner. This would force players to use proper footwork along with good swing manipulation in order to pull off the ridiculous accels we've become accustomed to today. Sadly I'm no game dev but figuring out collision within the windup of a swing would be undoubtly extremely difficult so I doubt a change in this form will ever take place.

I want to end this by reminding everyone this is just my opinion as well as those around me and from my experience this is a pretty big problem in the game. If there are any questions about what I wrote I would be happy to help I know some of the terminology can get confusing at times but I'll try my best to explain. I do love this game dearly and hope to see some fixes to these problems soon. :)

PS: Though dated and specifically describing mordhau in a much earlier state I think this video also provides a good partial explanation of the problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLoxheVshFQ

PPS: Since this post is starting to catch some steam I wanted to also point out the fact that all hitstop weapons currently have a broken hitbox making them even more difficult to read. The biggest offender would be the pole axe with evening star being a close second. The hit box of the weapon is infront of the accual animation and this can be seen especially well when you are acceled in the head. This just further adds to the problem of accels being too fast as those particular weapons get some weird buff to their accels as timing a parry on these kind of attacks become even more annoying.

PPPS: I also want to mention how ranked dueling has kind of become a joke among high tier players because the servers that are used are something like 60tic rate, half of the standard for most duel servers a quarter of the 240 tic rate I run on the servers I play on privately. On top of not being able to get a consistantly even ping between yourself and your opponent it makes ranked close to unplayable as you are farmed by some guy with a longsword staring at your feet the whole time.

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almost 4 years ago - /u/Jaaxxxxon - Direct link

I think a big part of this isn't accels from neutral, but riposte accels. Crush is working on some riposte changes that will make things more readable, and may help a lot in this department. There are a lot of little things that if improved will make the game play a lot better, and we're working on them!