@fvonb:
@DrDiamond6:
First, your change actually decreases the speed of the attack.
Yeah you’re right.
@DrDiamond6:
Second, reducing recovery would increase hit trades, as there are only two situations where your attack is 100% safe: First is when you attack your enemy while he is not aware of you, and second is when you attack during an enemy’s recovery.
That is not correct.
You can attack safely in these situations:
1. Enemy is not aware of you.
2. Enemy missed his attack and is in recovery.
3. You have the faster weapon (windup) and enemy is idle in the moment you start your attack.
4. You parried his attack and start a riposte.
5. You hit an attack (enemy flinches) and start a combo.
Now to:
1. Is obviously working in CMW and CDW. My suggestion wouldn’t change this.
2. Parry in recovery (aka panic parry) in CMW let’s you bypass this. In CDW you can punish misses right now, with my suggestion you still could but it would be harder. Still better than CMW though.
3. Works in both games, my suggestion would not change this but the one with the slower windup has more time to feint-to-parry when he sees that he started his attack too late.
4. Works in both games, my suggestion doesn’t change that.
5. Works in CMW, maybe the Holy Water Sprinkler can stop a delayed combo but not much else. In CDW my combos are often interrupted by the enemy, my suggestion would heavily improve this.
Perhaps I should have made it clear that I was referring to a neutral position, before any attacks have been made. In regards to 3, assuming the enemy is aware of you, he can counter-attack by moving away from your strike and winding up an attack, setting up the hit trade. You see this in CMW with knights using a ducking lookdown overhead on counterattack. In DW, this won’t be as effective due to the damage tracers, but by no means is your attack safe, unless you are at facehug range. Then you are safe. 4 is not an attack; it is a counter attack. Technical detail, maybe, yet a distinction that must be made. 5 is also a continuation of the initial attack, which while safe, implies we’ve gotten a hit in.
But back to your idea that this will reduce hit trades: it will not. Longer attacks increase the chance for hit trades: You can see it in the current build of CMW, with many high level knights, using very slow weapons, abuse drags to hide their windup animations while baiting a quick attack, thus setting up the hit trade. Most hit trades occur due to two players attacking and hitting at close to (but not quite) the same time. The ability to parry from the windup of an attack (like cftp allowed) helps people react to this situation–which bypassed the recovery anyway, removing it from the equation. Assuming that cftp is off the table, there are two realistic options to reduce hit trades. The first is to reduce release time: the less time a weapon is active, the less room for error there is, and the closer two attacks need to be for a hit trade to occur. The second option is to have all hits flinch at any stage of an attack–an option that gives faster weapons a huge advantage once they are in range, but could easily be balanced with a range decrease and/or a damage decrease.
The problem with reduced release time, however, is that the parry timings become smaller, and coupled with lag, it could make attacks practically unblockable.