As you wander the plains of Ravenna, you hear a prompt unsheathing of a blade before narrowly being missed by a flash strike. Your adrenaline spikes. Your rival’s been lying in wait here, just past Rasna of all places? Not even a second goes by before flying slash barrels toward your direction.
Befuddled by what happened a dozen minutes ago, you check the bounty board. Your rival’s at Shell Island… “Perfect, I could use some extra renown and maybe a treasure chart.” you think to yourself. As you arrive, you ready a beam to fire at your rival… only to be met with a flash of yellow light as its promptly parried from the air. “Predictable as always.”
The concept.
Rivals more often than not feel like they want to be left alone more than anything, they don’t learn anything from any of the encounters, don’t anticipate anything… they feel like they’re not even trying. And the only one actively seeking out trouble is usually you, with the occasional accidental bump into them.
Ambushes
[Will require a bit of a change to rival spawning.] There’s a 1/20 chance that when a rival spawns, they’ll be prepared to ambush you. With the addition of invisibility potions in the brewing update, it’s not out of the ordinary for them to lie in wait while mostly invisible. They’ll still spawn where they usually can, just with this extra trick up their sleeves now.
Only one rival can be waiting for an ambush in a server, though regular rival spawns are unaffected.
( Which means… yes, there’s technically 2 rivals per server now. don’t worry about it.)
Instead of giving any warning, they’ll just attack to make this the first strike, already putting you at a decent disadvantage.
After 2 or an arbitrary amount of rivals are defeated, they’ll get impatient and stop their ambush.
Making them visible on the bounty board again. ( Instead of the chat saying that rumours have started circling, it’ll say something along the lines of “Notorious criminal (x) has emerged from hiding.” this is to make a clear distinction. )
Or scrap that last part and have them be able to be waiting to ambush you indefinitely.
( Which is obviously stupid. The player shouldn’t have to search for their rival if they don’t even know where they are, and there should be a timeout on how long they can wait.)
Predictability
If you always open an encounter with the same attack, your rival will start to take notice.
Predictability will happen in stages. This is to add a bit more depth to rivals and make it seem like they’re trying to understand how you engage them. If they see a pattern, they’ll jump on it.
0 - Unpredictable
This is for new openings, or anything that your rival considers new. They won’t have counterplay against it or anything and it’ll be like usual.
1 - Aware
After a couple times of seeing the same trick pulled by you, they’ll block in anticipation.
2 - Predictable
Your rival will parry your opening every time.
3 - Counterplay
Your rival will parry and immediately follow up with an attack of their own as punishment.
ending note
I POSTED THIS TOO SOON SO I HAD TO EDIT SORRY
I DIDNT HAVE 3 DONE AAA
predictability could be followed up on, like if you do any combination of attacks too often your rival could have a similar learning process for that. Shouldn’t have them be able to remember everything though, so like 3 things that are predictable or so. so yeah thats like the last thing i’m adding to this
don’t consider this part of the suggestion, just me thinking of further ideas to add onto this
