Alright so I’m using this to try and make a suggestion, so I’ll use this as a way to gauge feedback and see what I can do to improve it.
Okay so after some thinking this is the revised idea:
Make it so that cannonballs deal more damage to entities than they currently do, however make it so that the cannonball needs to directly hit the target in order to deal damage.
Using anything on a ship that forces you in place (using a cannon, taking command of the wheel, sitting in a chair, etc) grants some damage resistance, this is so that you won’t be instantly blasted to death, but using cannons yourself is still a bit risky.
NPCs who are on npc controlled ships either have high damage resistance to cannonball attacks, or they cannot take damage from cannonball attacks until their ship has been sunk, however if NPCs can be hurt and killed before a ship is sunk, then make it so that this doesn’t reduce the loot dropped if you successfully kill enough crew members before sinking the ship, additionally the individual NPCs cannot become aggro’d from cannonball attacks until the ship has been sunk.
Now NPC crewmates on player controlled ships can still be hurt, however they now naturally get resistance to damage from cannons that are fired by NPC controlled ships, in order to prevent crews being decimated by cannons in PvE scenarios.
And by alot more, I mean if you were too close to the side of your boat (sometimes too close was literally being on the wheel) you just died instantly when a volley hit.
the grapeshot point is the strongest part of this. grapeshot having basically no niche right now is a waste of an ammo type and anti-personnel at close range makes actual logical sense for what grapeshot is supposed to be historically. the damage resistance for seated players is also smart, manning a cannon while getting shelled should feel risky but not instant death.
my issue is the explosive cannonball rebalance feels overcomplicated. reduced projectile damage, increased aoe, but aoe deals less to living entities so it barely chips health anyway. at that point why even use explosive cannonballs against players? just make regular cannonballs hit harder on direct hits and leave explosive for strictly heavy ship damage instead of damaging players.
That is what I was trying to do, but maybe my suggestion with altering the damage so that explosive cannonballs dealt the majority of its damage as AoE damage wouldn’t work.
Since the problem with explosive cannonballs currently is that they can hurt your crew for a fairly large amount, but direct hits don’t really do that much on other cannonball types, so I thought that altering the damage would help make explosive cannonballs more of an anti-ship ammo type.
The problem with that is that’s one case of it being too extreme, but the way it is currently makes it so that you deal too little damage which is the other end of the extreme.
if the issue is explosive cannonballs dealing too much damage to crews then just lean into that. make them pure anti-ship with no meaningful player damage rather than trying to balance both.
Yeah but if explosions from cannonballs deal less damage, then making it so that the explosive cannonballs deal mostly explosion damage would prevent them from doing that much damage to players, but still makes it deal high damage to ships.
So a normal cannonball could deal 50% projectile damage, and then 50% explosion damage.
But an explosive cannonball would deal 25% projectile damage and 75% explosion damage.
This is just a concept of how damage could be split into two types of damage.
the split damage concept achieves what you want and the logic is sound.
however, the problem is AO’s balancing is already a mess because of how many niche mechanics interact with each other. adding a second damage type to cannonballs means now you have to account for how defense stats, resistances, armor sets and whatever future mechanics vetex adds interact with both damage types separately.
one simple idea becomes six balance problems. sometimes the cleaner solution is just tuning the existing numbers (in this case taking away living entity damage from explosive ammunition) rather than introducing new damage categories.
Yea I honestly think Grapeshot cannonball should be one of the best option to kill any ship crew or sailors on board during ship battle but deal far lower ship damage in return
and dragonfire carronade should be able set ship crew or sailors on fire and deal burning DOT damage like player do (only when cannon is directly fired next to them)
Dense cannonball shouldn’t be a thing since i think it purpose should’ve been for Heavy cannonball instead
No it’s talking about normal ship fired cannonballs, however the current damage that grapeshot does isn’t that big of an issue, since I can generally ignore a bunch of grapeshot hitting me due to the fairly low damage.
I was thinking about adding something that’d go along the lines of: “cannonballs fired from cannons have knowback that increases with it’s range” but I get the feeling that it’d potentially end up forcing players out of their seats when they get hit by them.
