Arcane Odyssey vs Deepwoken Combat Tags and Kill Credit

While Vetex has vetoed reworking combat tags to give them different behaviors in PvE and PvP, I thought it’d be interesting to share the differences between Deepwoken’s highly fleshed out, complex combat tag system (works really well with much less issues in PvP) compared to AO’s relatively simple combat tag and kill system.

Here’s an excerpt of a QnA form the Balance Team’s balance questions:

  • [MECHANICAL] Is it possible for there to be different combat tag types (PvP, PvE, etc.) based on what you are fighting? How long would it take to do a revamp like this?
    • Balancing different aspects of combat (such as PvE vs PvP) without hurting other activities is a next-to-impossible task, so being able to impose certain restrictions on players through new combat tags based on what situation they’re in (e.g. being hunted, claiming an island) would be extremely helpful for the game. For example, movement buffs such as agility and swim speed cause large issues in PvP, as they allow the enemy to escape whenever they want making open world PvP frustrating and toxic at times. With a PvP hunting combat tag for example, these stats could be nerfed without hurting their PvE usage.
    • Different combat tags would also allow different combat log penalties to be initiated, preventing cases such as losing Renown from accidentally combat logging to a pirate.

Despite Vetex’s disagreement (which still holds to today), I think reworking combat tags to be much more robust would do wonders for both the PvE and PvP communities though, and the controversy with the Swim Speed likely would’ve been less since it wouldn’t have affected PvE at all if it were a change that only affected PvP combat. It’d generally make overworld PvP balancing just way easier for most situations without PvE getting hit in the crossfire, and the balance team would make an effort for those sorts of changes to be as intuitive as possible.

To give you guys a perspective on how different the combat tag systems are between the games, here is a detailed description I wrote for each combat tag system.

Deepwoken Combat Tags

How Deepwoken Combat Tags and Kill Credit Work

Seems to use a priority queue for combat tagging with two combat tag types: PvP, PvE

  • All: Increases slide cooldown, Ether regen scales with Tempo, Freestyler’s Band no longer increases swimming speed, prevents assassinating enemies without Dustlunge talent, reduces health regeneration while sitting at campfires

    • All combat tags are seemingly tied into the kill credit system directly. Essentially, this makes it so that aren’t any cases where an enemy is credited for killing you while you aren’t combat tagged unless you disconnect

    • Application: Applies when parrying/blocking an attack or taking damage.

      • Flexible: Clears INSTANTLY when defeating what put you in danger. Players who applied combat tags to other players can instantly clear them by saying “sorry all” or “mb all”
      • Dodge tag: Dodging any enemy’s attack (including a player) applies a 5s PvE combat tag
    • Reduces damage taken by assassinations by 75%

  • PvP: Lasts 60s, red combat tag color, reduces Conditioned Runner talent health regen, arbitrarily increases the health threshold to void in the Depths L1 without dying (50% → 75%, decreasing by 5% per additional player combat tagged by to a minimum of 55%), Kamui resonance has wind-up (0s → 0.7s), Teleportation resonance has doubled cooldown (15s → 30s)

    • Combat tag tracking: Number of player combat tags is shown on the screen, and the highest damaging player will be shown as your primary cause of death
    • Always takes priority over PvE/Boss combat tags
  • PvE: Lasts 20s, white combat tag color, only combat logs if a player disconnects below 60% health

    • Boss: Identical behavior to PvE combat tags that lasts 3 minutes instead

NPCs can get combat tagged

When players hit NPCs, the NPC receive a player combat tag:

  • Used to calculate kill credit distribution
  • In dungeons, the combat tag that the NPC is afflicted by lasts forever until they are killed
  • Bosses receive 3-minute combat tags

Additional Stuff

  • Health pack distribution: Knocked players/enemies have their health pack distributed amongst damage contributors, proportional to individual damage contribution.
  • Equipment lock: You cannot change equipment that aren’t empty slots in-combat. You can only swap your weapons in-combat with Unmatched Dexterity (Silentheart-exclusive talent)
  • Combat log penalty: The same across all combat tags, resulting in the same consequences as a regular death (i.e. loss of life and loot drop) + spawning with halved food, water, and health bars.
Arcane Odyssey Combat Tags

How Arcane Odyssey Combat Tags and Kill Credit Work

Works simply as a timer that uses a one-size-fits-all combat tag type

  • Duration: 30s

    • Rigid: Can’t be cleared prematurely through any other conditions except dying
  • Application: Applies when dealing damage to any NPC, shark/whale, or player, or when taking at least 5% of your base max health in damage

  • Radial condition: Players with 500k or more Renown get radially combat tagged constantly when within a ~2000 stud radius of a player they are hunting/being hunted by that has at least 25% of their Renown

  • Swim Speed jewel effect is disabled in combat

  • Kill credit: Works independently of combat tags, lasting 60s based on what last hit you

    • Health pack distribution: Whoever hit the player last gets the health pack (only if they’re a player or Grand Navy NPC)
      • This ignores sea life like sharks or whales, but this otherwise doesn’t differentiate between NPCs, players, or even party members
  • Regeneration penalty: Base health regeneration is reduced by 25%, and health regeneration gained by the Regeneration stat is reduced by 50%

  • Loadout lock: You cannot equip a loadout, but you can change your equipment manually still

  • Combat log penalty: Lose 7% of your total Renown, 15% of your Galleons (-350 max), and all items stored inside your ship (even if your ship wasn’t spawned)

Let me know your thoughts on how these combat tag systems differ, your experience with AO’s combat tags, and what could potentially be changed with them.

8 Likes

having a MB all in ao would do wonders

that aside, ill probably respond further to this later if i dont forget. i do have a good few thoughts on this.

1 Like

Honestly I cannot fathom why vetex is so adamantly against this even beyond literally everything else.

This would help shut down atleast some of the friction in the community and I literally can’t think of a single argument against it.

1 Like

what confuses me is that wom somewhat had this already with the MC combat tag, so why the sudden change

I was neutral on having separate combat tags until the swim speed jewel change

The whole point of swim speed is for underwater exploration
But then, sharks apply combat tags, making it useless for an entire 30 seconds

Now I feel like this is needed to have easier balancing overall in the future

personally as odd as it sounds, i dont think sea creatures should apply combat tags at all

i got combat logged one time because some dumbass shark squad bit my ass right as i was leaving, wasnt ideal.

I’ll just state the obvious and say that renown loss, ship containment loss and no secondary stat effect should all be things removed if pve tags become a thing

I think in general, the difference between systems of combat tags between Deepwoken and Arcane Odyssey just highlights a bigger issue of how PvP is treated between both games.

Deepwoken just has better mechanics to properly incorporate the interplay between PvE and PvP while Arcane Odyssey doesn’t seem to have any. While combat tag systems are a major example, there’s other small things in both games that show that Vetex doesn’t really think about PvP in the way that Deepwoken’s Developers do. Which causes many issues that affect PvP to be implemented in a basic, simplified way that then negatively affect other aspects of the game like PvE and QoL in general.

I could go into detail about what these specific things are but I think that would draw away from the topic of this thread.

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I’d like to hear it.