+1000 on cancelling abilities. Just allow feint to cancel the attack up to a certain point. It should be like normal attack where you can’t just cancel or feint the whole attack animation.

If you plan to keep him with no melee weapon this here is my suggestions to make him playable:

1.) Reduce cool cool down on the RMB push back thing to 1 second after the entire animation finishes.
2.) Allow his primary target to flinch.
3.) Increase the distance of his F teleport ability.
4.) Give him that hop step ability every other class has that helps avoid attacks.

How this will help:

Right now the problem is when you are rushed down you become an insta kill target. If you are able to flinch, then dodge back, flinch and dodge back some more, it would be a way for a skilled player to actually kite an opponent who is unable to block the LMB from the alchemancer. The cool down the current LMB just leaves you a sitting duck and is near useless since you can easily be ran down and killed. The teleport distance is also too short with how large some of the maps are, with the high ground potentially being across a room.

ALTERNATIVE(or addition):
Give him an ability that replaces his F skill with a summoned dagger. This dagger will be usable for 10 seconds and has a cool down of 25. It is an emergency weapon that he can pull out and use to either kill the enemy or defend himself until his team comes. It is a trade off since he won’t be able to teleport and run but will be able to fight for a short duration. Since he is meant to be a back liner anyways, this could be an interesting way to give him a panic button.

ALT 2:
Scrap the design and give him a permanent dagger.

What if we completely change it, have it do no damage as he spins. But instead it pulls enemies towards him like a whirlpool effect. Enemies will be flinched if caught in his suction radius and have enought time to block his follow up attack, much like a chiv light kick. If you see him starting his windup you can block his suction and therefore not be pulled in.

This will be as a distance closer since he is slow as balls and will give him a control ability in teamfights. It can be negated through that shield bubble, normal blocking or by being flinched from ranged attack.

@Reithur said in Melee Combat Fluency - Wi11:

@gregcau Yes, your parries are handled differently in Mirage than in CMW.

In CMW, an attack tracer has to intersect with your hitbox and your parry volume to register as a parry (partly responsible for why butt-parries can happen), while in Mirage, the parry volume is separate from your hitbox, allowing you to somewhat mitigate intentional misses while it eliminates butt-parries.

Wait, is TBS against intentional misses? Those are kind of HUGE in teamfights for baiting out parries.

@Gauntlet said in What's the future for friendly fire:

Just a thought on friendly projectiles: Is it possible to make it like that one build where all melee attacks deflected off of teammates? Make it do no team damage but for example: if a Taurant tosses a boulder and it collides with a teammates mesh, the boulder will deflect from its intended trajectory. This would mean players need proper clearance to throw their ranged abilities and not be able to use friendly bodies to hide them.

Also I believe a lot of your fears of projectile spam will be lessened once you see a proper Vigilist or pair of Vigilist coordinating their Iron Dome abilities.

I’m more concerned about abilities like that two handed mace guy ability where he flies up in the air and comes crashing down. That should do full damage to teammates other wise it’s cancerous charge attack as all over again in teamfights.

@gregcau said in What's the future for friendly fire:

@ChuckingIt Perhaps there are official “clan” servers, one in each region that hosts clan matches which is 100% friendly fire for both melee and ranged. Maybe you get special points for winning on those servers.

Its a big difference if you have 6 people on teamspeak really trying hard to make the team win and will carefully land their AOE skills.

But for 99% of the rest of the games I would just make 0% team damage for melee/ranged. I think the skills noobs learn (or never learn since only a tiny tiny percentage get to rank 50) are hitting and defending their opponents, if they join a clan for a real competitive match they will soon get kicked out if they cant land their fireball in the right spot.

I do think it would be cool if there was a designation of showing how many “competitive” wins you have racked up.

No idea how all that would work, but bottom line as long as the melee/ranged % team damage is adjustable at the server level shouldnt be an issue right?

I thought this game was going to have competitve match making? If this game is really being advertised as a 6v6 competitve Multiplayer game then I think we need to keep the “spam abilities to win” out of this or else it’ll just be another silly game people buy on sale and forget about.

Players will learn to play properly and learn how not to be a noob if the game is worth getting better for. If there are actually ranks that show what tier you are in and skins you can collect and proper match making to keep you playing vs evenly skilled players then the players will practice to get better.

If you want to keep this a casual play for a short while then quit, then by all means dumb the game down. But true competitive games don’t need to hold your hand to keep players even if it’s hard as shit.

Players stay if the game gives you a reason to work hard. IE CS:GO and Mobas.

@Tibberius said in What's the future for friendly fire:

We tried this, it is kind of a nightmare. Just way too many things hitting you that completely overwhelms your ability to react to anything. Was a very negative experience overall.

Wait. So you are ok with teammates not being scared to just spam abilities in a team fight? I can’t imagine people who are serious about competitve balance will like this.

If you have a proper ranking/match making system this will help noobs learn amongst each other then play properly as they get better. It’s like rewarding teammates to just chuck tons of firepots in into teammates who are fighting.

I agree. My solution was similar to yours. It would really help situational awareness.

Torso movement is very much needed. If we were able to control our player’s wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips and back then maybe we wouldn’t need to just raw torso movement. But since we can’t do all those thing, torso movement allows us more freedom in a current generation constraint of controls.

Taking away things that made chiv not “look so realistic” is only lowering skill cap and restricting creativity. Currently I feel like I’m playing skyrim more than chiv in melee.

What kind of damage will magic be doing to friendly units? I think it needs to do significant damage to force players to not just spam abilities into large group of players.

Also it will help players spamming those little fireballs.

I’d hate to see this game devolve into a cluster fawk of eye cancerous spam since you aren’t punished for it.