Best posts made by Gauntlet

Apologies for the rough draft outline. These are some notes I took while playing, and not a lot of it could be condensed into sections as the issues I’ve run into are small but all over the spectrum from mild nuisances to gameplay inconsistencies. This is from the perspective of someone with 3k hours of Chivalry, and about 300 hours of Mirage from Alpha.

General Gameplay

• Dying after the Victory screen appears counts towards your total deaths.
• Idle kick should not be active during “pre-game”. I launch a server and alt-tab to try and kickstart a player population but will be booted for inactivity. Idle kick should ONLY occur when that player is taking a slot on a team / the server is full.
• Getting hit by non-flinch projectiles during release prevents you from combo parrying or combo feint to parrying. Getting hit during release does not put you back to idle to allow a parry if there was more than one attack thrown at you during this time.
  • If you are hit during release you should be able to parry again immediately.
• Players can enter the spawn area where the enemy team gets a countdown warning w/ the flag on CTF, making it extremely difficult to retrieve.
• Low health red glowing outline // sound muffling // heartbeat are all really intrusive. Getting to that point is almost guaranteed death because of the amount of visuoaudio clutter.
• Too many maps have the camera spectator start outside the map boundaries, and be unable to move. This is very unpolished and feels bad for the player.
• End of round takes far too long. By stopping the action (freezing players) you’re forcing everyone to look at a scoreboard screen which for many players heralds an exit from the match. So if it has to be this way, speed the process up! 30 seconds is too long.
• Projectiles tend to react far too immediately to environmental objects. Ex: I fire a tinker hookshot at a player, and try to curve it around a corner. The projectile itself is not very close to the corner as I’m curving it, but then it kind of skips to the corner as if it connected.

Tinker

• Obelisk
  • Players flinched by obelisk can still attack, despite taking damage. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re parrying it and riposting and it’s showing a flinch animation first, but something is going on here.
  • Obelisk if activated at the time in which it expires, will expire despite being activated. It would make more sense that if activated it would complete the explosion instead of disappating mid-animation.
  • Spawning obelisks off the edge of the map in courtyard works like it does in Spire. I like this a lot! However if you fall a certain distance below the map and try it, the obelisk will spawn in the kill zone. In order to save myself, I’d rather have it spawn in the air below my feet, when I am in the process of falling.

Alchemancer

• Alchemancer melee needs a rework.
  • He can hit trade w/ his attacks which goes against FHF.
  • His sword spawning and particle animations can be very blinding for the attacker, including his parry animation.
  • The parry animation hides ripostes because the borders of the glow mask the windup animation of the stab attack.
  • Having a weapon spawn (instead of a physical weapon) makes it hard to determine his reach for both the user and defender, because there is no visual reference.
  • The sword looks lame! Would love a nice steel shortsword in place of the current plastic looking sword.
  • His attacks are far too slow, even w/ the melee variant.

Taurant

• Ability interactions.
  • Taurant whirlwind creates gamble situations. Often the first part of the swing will miss, but the follow up will be in range to hit. The whirlwind should only have one twirl, and the player camera should spin w/ it. Creates a sense of immersion and is more predictable than the current double spin model.
  • Attempting a leap slam out of a stasis will cause you to fall to the ground w/o lifting you into the air. Considering that you can wall jump into a leap slam, this seems incongruent from how the ability normally operates.

Team Damage

• Attacks that intersect friendly teammates player meshes should stop the weapon release. A team hit should NEVER continue through a friendly player.
  • Creates blendering play styles when in team fights, with teammates swinging through each other to hit enemies.
  • Hitting through friendly players is very effective (only 25% team damage for the potential 100% damage on enemy hit). Please reconsider stopping the release tracers from continuing when friendly players are struck. A team-hit should act as a minor deflect, like hitting a world object.

• • ○ De-incentivizes team hitting (no potential reward).
    ○ Provides more opportunities for survival in 1vX (using enemy players for strategic positioning).

Mirage brings new features to the melee combat genre with the integration of magic and special abilities activated by the player at any moment. Some of these abilities can force a loss of control on the players in the game, and I think it’s important to reduce the amount of loss of control some of the abilities can force.

Player using an ability:

• Once an ability key has been pressed, the player is committed to the attack. The battle changes so quickly that players use other abilities to counter or punish a keystroke where previously they may have been in an optimal situation to begin using said ability.

This is a loss of control for the player initiating an ability, such as a Taurant boulder, or a leap slam, vigilist disperse, tinker mines, etc. When they activated the ability, it may have made sense to do so, but much like committing to an attack the game can change so rapidly that you are forced to feint to parry out of it, or to cftp after successfully performing a strike. In the same way the melee changes so suddenly, using abilities comes into the same problem.

Proposed solution - Enable ability canceling. This would put the ability on its full cooldown, stop the ability effect from occurring, and allow for players to maintain control even after initiating an ability. Would also allow for new interactions for some abilities such as Vigilist disperse and Taurant leap slam to be used as a vertical mobility ability (use ability, get the vertical leap, cancel the ability before the slam down to grab onto a ledge). This would reduce instances where players using an ability lose control, and still be a strong punishing factor for those who cancel to defend themselves (ability is now on cooldown without the effect going through).

Edit: I should also mention that the cancel should have a temporary attack lockout, so that offensive ability feinting does not become a thing. This should be PURELY defensive.

Player is hit by an AOE ability

• There are instances in this game where you are forced to parry large aoe attacks, such as disperse, leap slam, iron dome (unreactable), big blast, whirlwind, etc.

For the most part these aoe abilities are not avoidable, especially when engaging the opponent in melee range. If I strike at a Taurant and he uses leap slam, I will miss my swing and he will land the aoe hit on me, which for the most part isn’t parryable when up close because the slam goes behind your parry box and hits your back unless you gamble a 180° parry hoping the actual tracer lines won’t hit you instead. If successfully parried then you are now thrown around by the impact, the same way you get thrown away by whirlwind, big blast, disperse, iron dome, etc. There are so many abilities that force a loss of control over your positioning that you can easily be forced into corners by ability spam. I think it’s very important to reduce the amount of abilities knocking you out of position. Just two players can toss others around like a ragdoll currently, and force their stamina / parry juice down to nothing before they even swing at their opponent. A common engagement tactic for Taurant currently is to unload his entire arsenal of abilities on one player to reduce their parry juice to nothing before the actual melee fight begins, essentially securing an automatic victory should all abilities be parried.

Proposed solution - Reduce the amount of aoe on abilities, and reduce the amount of stamina lost from parrying abilities. Iron Dome does not need to be doing damage and knocking players away, it already has the benefit of being near instant and being an anti-projectile shield. As an interrupt it is far too powerful, and winds up being “free damage”, which is a very poor decision for competitive titles. There should never be instant unavoidable damage with forced stamina loss (see: Chivalry kicks). Leap Slam has tracer lines for direct hit damage, but almost no one uses the tracers for damage on this ability, they all aim for the ground behind their opponent for the aoe splash hit. The player on the receiving end of this attack cannot see where the slam will land, and therefore have to guess where to parry. If up close, I will turn 180° and side step to parry the incoming aoe. This will feel counter intuitive to new players who think “I parried, why did that hit me?” as the Taurant appears to launch through them on their screen.

On a final note, Disperse currently hits way farther than the animation distance played, which feels wrong.

Regards,
Gauntlet

The most dire game mechanic that needs attention this build are parries as currently they are barely functional yet they are a core combat mechanic. Stabs coming straight at the user were extremely hard to parry, and attackers could guarantee hits behind the parry volume by turning to the side, and leaning back into their opponent in facehug range. This was particularly unpreventable when a player parried an enemy attack and lmb riposted in this way. Clocktower has video of this in action but I’ve been told TBS devs are aware of the problem so it may be redundant.

Walljumping: Currently feels clunky to use as it requires the user to be looking in the direction that they want to move when wall jumping. Great to use for scaling a wall, but for pushing off of a wall as one would imagine when they hear “wall jump” it does not serve this purpose appropriately.

• Keep the current press spacebar to scale wall, but implement a secondary wall jump with more horizontal distance and less vertical, activated by double tapping a movement key in the direction the user wants to move away from the wall.
  This kind of wall jump is featured in Unreal Tournament. Similarly, a user should be able to wall jump as many times as they can before they touch the ground. The courtyard pillars are asking for this kind of double wall jumping movement.
  An example of what this looks like can be viewed here:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlGlVVFi4ok

• It is also important to separate the walljump key from the ledge key (both currently use spacebar), as sometimes you want to perform a wall jump but wind up performing the ledging animation to climb over small walls.

• Finally the current wall jump could use some animation. The floatiness is very apparent, and there is no sound of impact when performing a wall jump (provides no indication anything was done). Some changes that might be worth looking into would be leg animations that kick off the wall (see Unreal Tournament example video), and the sound of the boots colliding with the wall or a very short player grunt.

Falling Damage occurs from relatively low falls in this game. Feels inconsistent with the design of the game (high ledges, movement abilities that grant players great height).

Regarding camera: The camera should be in the head. Camera in the neck feels weird, like I’m a very tiny person. The sense of attachment is not there. Vypress camera in the current build is the only camera that feels okay to use. Tinker camera in a 6v6 made me toggle third person to see what was happening because I was so low to the ground.

Map out of bounds kill zones are too close to the fall point.

• This game, much like Super Smash Brothers, has abilities that enable some classes to safely fall out of the map and return, such as Vypress pounce + dash attack, so if she were knocked out of bounds she may be able to climb back in. At the moment, in Falcon Ridge specifically, out of bounds kill barrier is so close to the fall point that using the abilities needs to occur near instantly otherwise you die.
• Dying when falling out of bounds / into water is visually underwhelming. The ragdoll is jarring and doesn’t seamlessly transition from your previous character state. When falling into water having some kind of impact with the water would help add to the immersion of the situation.

Combat music engages when damage taken, including fall damage. To maintain the atmosphere of the game, perhaps consider excluding fall damage as a trigger for combat music.

Parry: Major issues with parry at the moment.

• Parry volume is too easy to bypass. Facehug accelerated lmbs while crouching and looking up go behind the parry volume.

• Intentional misses feels as awful as it does in Chivalry. The parry volume forcing close attacks away is sorely missed.

• Parry recovery is too short, leaving little room to punish mistimed parries. This issue might be rectified if feints didn’t have a delay between attacks as it currently does (addressed below).

• Combo parry is gimmicky as it was in Chivalry. If you want to make something like combo parry exist, make it so that on successful hit that the player can parry at any time (without queuing) much like a player in neutral stance could do.

Feints: There exists a delay on feint to attack that feels really bad for any class not featuring fast weapons like Taurant. Feint to attack should have minimal delay to keep a sense of fluidity and control in combat.

Friendly Fire: Currently friendly fire operates as it does in Chivalry. I think this is a huge mistake. In a melee based game being able to see what is happening is extremely important. In chaotic melees, sometimes players will swing through their own team to hit an enemy, who could not have predicted or reacted to it because the hit came through a character model, effectively masking the attack from view.

From my perspective earlier Mirage builds handled this appropriately by stopping all attacks that intersect with a friendly hitbox. In this way a player cannot use their teammate as a sacrifice to hit an enemy who has no ability to understand what is happening behind the player they’re engaged with. You can even keep some team damage from these swings to further solidify the importance of being careful with your swings.

Queuing errors: Currently queuing is far too generous, and remembers inputs from before you were flinched. If I queued a swing and became flinched, the swing would begin playing after my flinch time was over, requiring me to double tap the parry button to feint to parry.

General review of melee gameplay this build without being able to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong, everything feels desynchronized.

• Occasionally melee attacks where my weapon intersected player models would not register (might have something to do with character mini-dodge movements).
• Sometimes when I’m pressing ability keys I become so desynchronized from my own inputs that I can sit perfectly still and watch my character try to “catch up” with my most recent input. This usually occurs when I’m being flinched and queueing abilities. This is a rare bug that I’ve encountered only a few times and is hard to replicate.
• There are also some abilities that you can perform after being flinched to interrupt a players combo. Taurant whirlwind comes to mind as one of those abilities because he is uninterruptible when the ability enters the swing stage of that attack.
• Playing in a 7v7 environment, there are so many abilities being used with minimal strategy employed. Abilities have no limiting factor other than cooldown, which causes players to use all abilities when they are off cooldown. In 1v1 scenarios ability use is not such a large issue, but the moment there exists at least 5v5 the ability spam becomes overwhelming. Dialing back the amount of AOE on abilities would be one useful step. AOE is largely anti-skill, it requires very little aim and should be used very sparingly because everyone has to cluster together to fight in a melee focused game like this.

To finalize my ideas on the current state of gameplay in a 6v6 environment, I would urge that abilities have some limiting factor in place other than cooldown. Tying abilities to stamina might be one avenue worth pursuing, as it takes stamina to parry ability attacks that are largely unavoidable in many situations. Players unloading their entire arsenal of abilities becomes far too chaotic in team fights.

Alpha Build #07
General:
This is finally a build where I can enjoy the melee combat for what it is. Previously the issues with lag and desync were so intense that my enjoyment of the melee was minimal. Whatever you did for Alpha #07, continue doing so for every build. These changes have been felt more strongly than anything that’s been done to date. Stability of gameplay is too important. Night and day between this and every single build since March.

• Feint lockout after three feints I have mixed feelings on. After playing around for a bit, if I read two feints in a row it feels nice knowing the third will have to be an attack. It helps cut down on the sense of gambling a bit. However it has some bad gameplay implications in the event that you double feint into an attack but then need to feint to parry due to changing circumstances, but cannot. Perhaps consider making the FTP bind ignore the feint lockout, or simply creating an attack lockout after the third feint so you can only use it defensively if need be.

• Currently there exists a portion of all melee attacks that does no damage to prevent reverses. These tracers that deal no damage should be parryable. Especially when a player tries to accelerate an attack and winds up overturning into it, their attack will just ghost through dealing no damage nor being detected by the parry volume. This feels clunky for both the attacker and defender. Similarly the parameters that dictate “reverse” attacks seems to be too tight on lmb swings, as targets at the tip of my 120° fov remain unaffected by the swing which feels very odd as it’s still relatively in front of my player model. This may also help with some situations where player lookdown overhead tracers aren’t parryable until release, despite their weapon model basically starting inside the parry volume but going undetected because it’s during the non-damaging portion of the swing.
  Player windups - the 450 ms minimum windup feels too slow for one-handed weapons. For the user their attacks can feel sluggish. Makes feint punishing hard combining generally long windups with FHF, as longer windups dictate longer feint windows that a player has to read first before committing to their attempted punish.

• Ducking does not bend the torso low enough for many swings, however it is important not to effect other parts of the game by changing torso rotation (ex: stronger look down attacks). Matrixing has roughly the same height of ducking, but with the added benefit of moving the head back away from the swing so they’re more likely to strike the torso than the head.
  Images to illustrate
  
  

• Late feinting during windup causes character to grunt. Becomes very confusing when feint reading to hear attack grunts on feinted strikes.

• Motion blur works nicely however when entering crouch the effect is far too pronounced. Rag dolls can also fall victim to over blurring (specifically when the ragdoll goes flying or if the torso is cut off from the waist).

Regarding the effectiveness of drags:
Parry duration and release windows - parry duration seems excessively long, or release seems excessively short for all weapons.
Drags are so ineffective that feints are the only tool utilized currently for tripping up parry timing. Do not be afraid of drags, be afraid that feints will become the only tool in a veteran player’s arsenal.

• Potentially tighten the parameters that dictate when the parry volume will detect a swing, as sometimes player parry catches attacks that don’t feel very close to the target player especially in close range where it appears that tracers closer to the attacking player’s hand seem to get caught by the parry volume instead of the tip/body of the weapon.

Also had a thought regarding drags; what if there were a way to offload some of the drag in an attack from the release into the windup? Basically if you held a key down while in early windup for an attack, it would slow the windup time by some specified amount and this would be reflected in the windup animation. It would offload the the responsibility of mouse dragging from the release into the windup, so that you wouldn’t have to worry about the release tracers being caught by the parry volume or having weapons with absurdly long release windows. In this way you can have slowed attacks that don’t actually slow the release animation (which was often complained about being “immersion breaking” in Chivalry because of attacks appeared to “stop” midswing) but instead play with timings during windup. Could be bound to feint key but instead of tap to feint, it’s hold key to delay windup.

Example: Taurant overhead windup time is 500ms (made up value), holding the feint key during early windup (within 100ms of initiating) increases that windup to 600ms with a slight augment to the wind up animation so that it was apparent that this had happened.

Probably not worth doing though because complicated.

Classes:

Entropist
Healing should be a targeted heal over time stream that effects one player and goes on cooldown. AoE instant heal winds up having far too much team potential.

• In team fights, an aoe instant heal like healing gas grenade when landed on multiple players has effects far too potent on the outcome of that team fight, by increasing the effective health pool of the team by each player touched by 30.
• Duel scenarios the Entropist who default has 90 hp, may as well have 120 hp because of the self heal. Similarly if the fight goes on for a while, the cooldown might finish giving him yet another 30 hp boost. Self healing is far too potent in both team and duel situations.
• Harms ability diversity of individual Entropists. Who would take anything but healing gas grenade? It’s too good, and all other available choices will seem silly by comparison. Unless they were equally powerful, to which I’d question the logic behind making such overpowering abilities on a class.
• This harms team build diversity by making Entropist a requirement for every team, or even two Entropists who are coordinating their heals.

Taurant

• Overhead still seems to be extremely sudden when combined with looking down and crouching, though less so than last build. Stab riposte animation seems to suffer this issue as well.

• Alt overhead makes very little sense for a weapon in the context of the game. An upper cutting strike winds up feeling like a wasted swing type for this character because a swing starting from below is counter intuitive to hitting the head or torso (the intended target zone). Alternating from over the right to over the left shoulder variants of overheads may be a better choice in attack types. This also goes for Vigilist, Entropist, and Tinker.

Tinker

• Landmines will despawn if they accidentally overlap. This is unnecessarily punishing to a player who may accidentally throw them too close together. Instead of destroying the mine, make the second mine bounce or deflect off the first mine until the meshes no longer intersect, to avoid mines overlapping.

Vigilist

• Iron dome does not protect from aoe damage on some abilities. Entropist grenade damages anyone inside the iron dome.

Alchemancer

• Piercing shot: should it pierce terrain? Would this be too overpowered? Piercing shot feels too much like phoenix with the added bonus of piercing enemies if it connects, but often players are not lined up properly for the pierce portion to matter. I think it might be interesting if it could pierce geometry and was instead a short range projectile instead of a long range one.

Additional thoughts:

Now that spawn rock is locked, I found a new favorite ability. Entropist shove = belly bounce. Should be renamed to belly bounce as well. Amazing ability.

Cando brought up a hysterical idea: Entropist having the ability to belly bomb from above. Essentially when up high he can jump and perform a downward smash style ability by landing directly on his belly. Might be good to add more focus on belly based combat mechanics tbh.

Regards,
Gauntlet

Alpha #08

I want to open this feedback up on the importance of movement in Mirage. In this build wall jump arc and distance was changed again, and much to the detriment of the game in my opinion. What stands out particularly for Mirage in terms of the melee gameplay is how players express themselves with movement. Back and side dodging, wall jumping, abilities that have mobility properties attached to them. These all add many exciting new options to engaging in the melee combat of the game. By reducing the efficacy of some movement properties (the recent wall jump change) you are also harming what makes this game unique to the melee genre. I feel it is very important to focus on movement and how players express themselves with movement.

I would argue high mobility is imperative for this game to stand out amongst melee titles. It’s what feels so incredibly different from other upcoming melee games like Mordhau, Of Kings and Men, and Bannerlord. The two most defining characteristics of Mirage combat are movement and abilities. By lessening the impact that these factors have on the gameplay, inadvertently the game feels more muted and less unique. Without these powerful influencing characteristics, Mirage melee is not very distinct from Chivalry, which will become stale quite quickly.

Movement

Wall jump - Please consider reverting to long horizontal wall bounces. The jump distance made the movement feel so fluid and quick, like a hybrid melee / arena style game.

• Arguably the side / back dodges have a greater effect on the melee than the occasional wall jump.
• At the moment wall jump feels weak enough where I ask “why would I bother doing this?” As all it does is slow you down significantly without providing any significant advantage or opportunities.
• Having multiple wall jumps before you hit the ground may also be something fun for the wall jumping enthusiast.

Suggestion: Sliding - Ducking in Mirage is pretty rough considering different classes have differing heights. Maybe there could be an alternative sprint style duck in the form of a slide. The animation for vypress slide kick could be repurposed so all classes have access to a low slide performed by hitting crouch when the player has enough momentum (ex: off of a wall jump or when sprinting for some time). This way taller characters can get roughly as low as some of the smaller characters by sliding. May look silly though. Insurgency features this powerslide here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wg0V00sqzw

General:

Main menu - The art in the background looks phenomenal, but the green warping overlay is ugly. I would rather see the artwork unobstructed (potentially an option to toggle off the warping green overlay effect?)

Spawn walls look kind of ugly, doesn’t give the vibe of a mirage or something ethereal, but is rather artificial. Perhaps because the effects of the spawn block volumes at their edges are too well defined; it should be more like smoke diffusing into the atmosphere than an obvious rectangular shape.

Water - The water in Mirage is quite pretty, but has some weird issues.

• Player weapon model directly effects the water on your screen, the water will warp and distort with your weapon. To replicate, stand by the waters edge and look at your weapon, and feint some attacks. Notice how the water is interacting with the weapon? More noticeable when in motion. Screenshot for reference.
  

• Another issue is viewing angles. When looking straight down into the water vs looking straight ahead, the water loses many of the beautiful reflections of the environment.

Melee combat:

Melee combat continues to improve, the level of accuracy and minimizing of desync is noticeable.

• Taurant lookdown overheads are largely parryable now, though your reaction has to be spot on otherwise you’ll be hit with incredible speed.
• Vigilist spiral spear has some very strange speed related issues. Feels far too quick for a weapon with that kind of length. Imo weapons with great speed should only be smaller, with larger weapons generally being slower. Speed + reach is a lethal combination for online multiplayer games when factoring the effects of latency.

Parry duration feels too long. Is it 400ms or 500ms? Drags feel functionally useless with long parry window.

Feints - Can offensively feint when out of stamina. Not a good thing. It would make sense if feints were available for defensive purposes when out of stamina (things like FTP are huge quality of life), but having offensive feints available at 0 stamina does not bode well for gameplay.

Late feints still produce a grunting attack sound.

Audio:

• Character death screams do not follow ragdoll location. Particularly noticeable when the body goes flying but the scream is heard from the location that the death strike occurred.
• The new voice menu makes no sense coming from Chiv. Why wouldn’t the voice menu just cycle the voice commands around instead when I press X or Z twice? This binding to multiple number inputs thing and the noticeable delay afterwards is rather weak compared to the efficiency of XX5 for you’re welcome (instead of Z44 in Mirage). Unless the delay is coming from the server fetching these sound files so everyone hears the same voice command (which is important), this mode of input is inferior.

Maps:

TO_Bazaar is great! Beautiful map with fun objectives, good layout and design, and simple easy to follow goals. Could easily be the Dark Forest of Mirage. Kudos on optimizing the Azar spawn on the docks, the framerate on my GTX 780 i7-4770k setup is roughly 80 fps on average this build (previously this was about 50 fps). Much improved!

• Regarding spawns, all attacking spawns need to be overhauled in Bazaar. Single entrance with severe chokepoints is bad for attacking team. Consider separating spawns and alternate routes out.

Sunken city is a really well designed open layout map, but could use something defining or unique such as a setpiece item in the form of a monument / statue, strange weather, or lore relevant banners / signs that show faction loyalty. Something to ground this location in the world of Mirage.

Classes:

Tinker

• Hookshot and Mine graphics look amazing. Great work.

• Saber now has a red colored center rather than torquoise, looks alright. Would prefer a purely steel material throughout as a weapon skin choice - similar to the Vypress saber. The Vypress saber post texture changes to make the weapon look more grounded in reality is far more visually stimulating.
  This suggestion also applies to Taurant weapon texture, with the indentations being a less than impressive torquoise texture of unknown material. Kind of looks like lava with a hue shift towards blue.
  Not very impressive imo. Screenshot for reference.
  

Vypress

• Her pauldrons look like plastic due to the way light plays off the material. Reminds me of the shoulder pads from Power Rangers. They need some attention from the art team.

• Still cannot use pounce off of a wall jump or ledging attempt.

• Pounce: Currently it offers a unique ability: You can lurch forward suddenly while attacking, much like a dash attack but one you control. However it’s very obvious what is happening when the Vypress suddenly lurches forward. The graphic that appears is cool; I think it’d also be of benefit to the ability that a smoke screen appear slightly behind the graphic, masking the Vypress who is flying forward towards your position.

• This is me being nitpicky: The high heels look stupid and offer very little positive to the character design. It also brings questions like “who would go into battle in heels?”

Taurant

• Rage: I see this ability is one of the locked abilities. I believe this is a very bad thing, as it’s an ability that adds nothing interesting to the game, isn’t particularly fun to use or to have it used against you. It’s a boring stat change with really bad balance implications.

• Leap slam canceling feels so cool!!! Love it. Perhaps disperse could have the same treatment?

• Charge feels underwhelming at the moment. Could an additional effect be added? Something like if you hit a player into an object you do extra damage? Ex: Charge a player (who didn’t parry the attack) into a pillar or a wall.

Alchemancer

• Needs a dagger so he can stop being such a bad class. I understand the desire to want to have a purely ranged class, but when you have 6 classes and one of them is purely locked from melee, melee players like myself will not want to play him at all. This means to me, the game only has 5 potential classes to play, because the 6th isn’t actually a melee class. I’d give up my levitate / teleport slot and the ability to spam those annoying fireballs just to be able to wield a dagger with him.

• Loads of desync issues with Alchemancer fireball atm. When pressing and holding LMB I will often perform a cast animation without the fireball spawning. If I don’t release the LMB when this happens, and keep combo’ing it, I will perform no attacks but will continue animating as if I am.

Feedback Build 54909

Combat and Movement
The following is very subjective as I don’t have concrete numbers to justify my position. These are all how it “feels” to play the combat in this game.

• Wind up times feel too long and combo times feel too short. Results in players who can accidentally misjudge range and follow up much quicker than you can punish it, even if you didn’t parry at their miss and began to punish as soon as you interpreted the miss.
• The sense of reach when evading attacks is normalized, I no longer feel like I’m being hit by out of range attacks. Though it still sometimes happens, but I’m not quite sure if this is related to character models during idle stance (legs sticking forward?), desync with the server (there’s lots of that currently!)
• Movement can be jittery when using Entropist magic carpet and ledging / wall jumps.
• Dodge/jump movement feels amazing, great work. Would love to have a standing jump return as currently jump while standing still causes a forward movement.
• Gameplay is starting to come together in a very cohesive way, I’m excited to see more.
• Knockback is excessive, making ripostes feel like a gamble whether you’re in reach or not when playing characters with shorter reach.
• Player movement speed feels a tad bit high atm. Issue compounded with really tight turn radius which feels bad for the attacker and makes hitting moving targets very difficult.
• Queuing issues still exist, I can still accidentally queue parries from time to time. Post flinch melee queues still happen, which can be very confusing for the user. Might be related to the player queuing during flinch and the game accepting that input?

Classes

Vigilist - In facehug range she has a bit of a dead zone if the opponent moves to the Vigilist’s left side to evade a stab. The stab tracers start from the far right and only begin to center towards the end of the stab animation. Issue compounded with excessively oppressive turn cap.

Taurant - Can intentionally miss with the first swing on the whirlwind attack in face hug (or within reach of the attack) and drag the second part of the attack onto his opponent, forcing a gamble situation similar to reverse overheads in Chivalry (Do I parry instantly in case the first part of the hit connects or wait and see if the ROH hits at the tail end of the attack?)

The changes to Taurant leap slam are excellent and I no longer feel punished when Taurant begins this attack. In my experience Leap Slam doesn’t properly animate where the Taurant is looking, so you will sometimes see him aiming one way, but instantaneously change direction when the slam comes.

Questions
General Questions:

What’s your favourite character class?

• Tinker: most fun abilities (spawn rock, hook shot, back flip). Currently her melee feels bad to play due to oppressive turn caps.

What’s your least favourite character class?

• Vigilist: The abilities can be fun to use, but I simply hate the character design. She’s very plain and uninteresting both visually and from a gameplay perspective.

What’s your favourite ability?

• SPAWN. ROCK. I will miss space flight when it is fixed.

What’s your least favourite ability?

• Entropist healing abilities. Messes with your sense of hits to kill significantly. Would be alright if it flashed the players health when they were healed.

Open Questions:

What’s fun and what’s not?

• Fun: Melee so long that it receives the attention it currently needs
  Not fun: Alchemancer - A class with a lot of potential that is being squandered by forcing a non-melee class in a melee focused game.

Thoughts on the game balance?

• Chaos orb far too potent. Taurant is a juggernaut this build because of the universal turn caps, effectively neutering the light classes.
• Vigilist is in a good spot now that held block is gone (there is no counter to hold block like heavy kick in chiv, so it should probably stay removed unless a heavy kick style ability is introduced to ALL classes to counter turtle strats).

If you could change only one thing in Mirage, what that would be?

Two things

• Introduce a dedicated feint button that is separate from the parry button, so I don’t have to worry about accidental parries when I’m trying to feint.
• Remove all artificial lockouts that might exist (cftp and ftp feel like there is a delay). The delay that is felt on cftp and ftp actions I believe is related to the changes made to packet loss and desync, as I noticed with a small hiccup in my internet my windup time became excessively long. Introduced a lot of inconsistency to the gameplay from the user perspective.

Bazaar!
TO_Bazaar - This map is quite good, with one technical caveat. The Azar cabal spawn has a fairly intense frame dip when looking at the Bazaar from the docks. Optimization definitely required for lower end pc’s (framerate ~50 on GTX 780 running “high” preset with no players present).

Screenshots to illustrate some map escapes and other things that probably shouldn’t exist.

Stuck spot replicated by taking any class and jumping up to the bridge during the prep-phase of TO_Bazaar, and standing on the bridge. When the prep timer ends the player if standing on the bridge section closest to the first objective will be caught by the rising bridge and will have to f10 to escape being pinned. Can also stand on the middle of the bridge and wind up at the top when combined with class abilities.

Section of the roof above B site where the glass doesn’t force your character off. Can be used to gain a tactical advantage.

The building overlooking B site has no invis walls to prevent players from scaling to the top of it. Can be used for a tactical advantage.

Another section where the glass isn’t present.

Stage 2 of Bazaar classes can sit on this cloth without being bounced off. Gains a tactical advantage while being unreachable for certain classes.

Before considering a closed beta with a wider player base, queuing issues and common desync issues must be resolved. That is my opinion but I’ll firmly stand by it because your first impression to more public spaces is often the lasting impression, and a flimsy foundation is not the way you want players to first experience the game.

In Mirage my most common experience is I have no idea what my character is doing, especially in the heat of combat when I’m giving the game many inputs. Sometimes it feels like the game can’t even keep up with those inputs. What comes next is often a surprise to me, and if it’s a surprise to a veteran of this type of melee gameplay what would it be like for someone who hasn’t a clue?

I think TBS is focusing on PAX West, which means lots of polishing will be coming in the next couple of months leading up to PAX. After this event I have a feeling they’ll be looking towards launching a beta. With all the coming focus on playability hopefully the game will be in a better state for devs to consider beta.

Last night we managed to get quite a few testers on for another large scale battle (roughly 8v8). We focused on to_Bazaar, and switched sides after each round.

What I noticed was this:
We played a total of three matches in to_Bazaar. Every defending team was able to DNF the other on first objective. Here are some bullet pointed problems with the first objective being too difficult.

• Bashran spawn is too close to the objective
• The capture points take too long before control switches
• Capture points are too close together

If one of these is changed, it will likely resolve the issue. A faster capture means that you can successfully sneak one objective while the enemy team is busy at the other. Currently because of the close distance between capture points, long time to capture, and mobility of players, you’ll be swarmed in moments before you can capture the point. A player who is respawning and sees the objective being captured has enough time to get to A or B site before the full capture is done.

This will be a short feedback post regarding gaps in the attack tracers.
I often feel that attacks which appear to be within range of my target, and with near facehug contact, will still sometimes miss / ghost through that player. There are a few possible reasons why, including player movement speed / dodges, desync or packet loss dropping the attack. General things that can be attributed to online play.

However the final issue I believe there might be some more control over, which is the frequency at which tracers draw. Here is an example of the kind of gaps can be found in the tracers when dragged to their maximum potential while covering large distances.

Below is a more realistic example

I do not know to what extent these gaps might have on the combat, they do seem rather small. At the same time however, small gaps could distinguish between a hit and a complete miss. One need only look at the flail from Chivalry to remember the facehug swings in which the tracers would barely miss in only some specific circumstances, but enough to where the whole feeling of the weapon was that it was broken.

My query is this: Is it possible to increase the frequency at which tracers draw? Will this have adverse effects for player computer / server performance?

I figured I’d start a ‘thoughts about’ thread to discuss the current state of two characters who are, in my opinion, the two weakest classes of the game. So you might be thinking how are these two the weakest, when I can get kills with them? It’s not their lack of ability to kill others, but rather they lack the ability to defend themselves in most situations and become insanely dependent on teammates to help them survive.
During our playtest some testers noticed I had 40+ kills on defense during TO-Gov, and I attribute that to class picks. I was playing Vigilist, who is easily the strongest class at this point in time due to her high survivability, versatile abilities, block mechanic, and strong stabbing melee attacks. The enemy team had three Vypress players, one alchemancer, and one Taurant. How I managed to kill so much was honestly like shooting fish in a barrel, I’d encounter one of the Vypress or Alchemancer players, and simply spam melee at them until they ran out of phases, dodges, flights, etc. These classes had no way to stop me from killing them, and that does not read like a competitive, skill based game when there exists such strong asymmetry in class balance. Deep into the match, the enemy team suddenly swapped to three Taurants instead of three Vypresses. This stunted the rate of killing, as this class has the ability to defend themselves, and with the current block volume, there is almost no way to direct attacks around their sides as one would do in Chivalry, leading into long slog festing melees that ended with players draining their “parry juice”.

Vypress: I have the most fun using Vypress’s abilities, they chain well together and allow for unique combat engagements. At the moment with Vypress having only a dodge ability to avoid damage, phase seems like a no-brainer pick over pounce. However in practice pounce allows you more distance after a short delay, enabling safer escapes than just dodge and phase. In my experience if you’re close enough to an enemy to use phase offensively, you’ve just blown your only escape for when your opponent inevitably parries your attack and ripostes into you for free damage.

• Shuriken and Extended melee: I feel these two abilities are much too similar and extended melee is just the smarter pick of the two. Extended melee allows you much more control over the projectile, which (I think) hits harder, and is a more controlled, non-arcing, long range projectile than shuriken. The only notable difference is the windup time, in which the shuriken fires quicker than extended melee.

Alchemancer: Has two defensive abilities at any one time: one can act as a mini-dodge / projectile blow back, and flight / teleport. Flight and teleport are in my opinion, too similar to be sharing the same slot for this class. Teleport doesn’t provide the range or safety of flight, while having a similar cooldown period. Teleport is redundant at best, and would make more sense if it shared a class slot with another ability, enabling alchemancer to choose to be more offense oriented (two attack abilities and one defense), or more defense / harassment oriented (two defense abilities, and one offense). Considering that you can only cast one ability at a time, and Alchemancers abilities largely don’t synchronize well together, I’m sure most players would opt to have more defense abilities than offensive.

• Draggable projectile: This ability, while a great idea, suffers the same issue as Entropists currently unnamed projectile that is functionally the same. The projectile launches, and is then directed to a spot by the users mouse. Currently, if your mouse is anywhere close to the ground, both draggable projectile and Entropists variant will fire the projectile straight into the ground, no where close to the users mouse. To replicate this, fire draggable projectile, aim your mouse towards the map horizon slightly above the ground, and press shift. The projectile won’t fire off into the distance as you’d think, but rather straight into the ground in front of you. Unless you are guiding the projectile into a wall, the ability will most times fire somewhere you didn’t intend for it to. This is not good for the user, as their expectation of what should happen is completely different than what actually happens with the projectile.

Finally I would like to end my post with some thoughts on these classes engaging in melee. I am of the opinion that both Alchemancer and Vypress should have access to block. It would enable Vypress to engage in melee fights and not just hiding behind their teammates and praying one of the enemies doesn’t pick them out of the fight, and for Alchemancer to survive when one opponent decides he’s had enough with this floating mans crap. Alchemancer’s block would be some form of arcane shield he produces, and Vypresses crossing her dual weapons together. You could even share the animation between these two classes, as the Alchemancer would cross his wrists to generate an arcane shield.

In regards to Alchemancer, I think all classes should have some melee ability. Currently Alchemancer has no attacks bound to middle mouse button. I could see him having two melee attacks, a palm strike forward mouse wheel “stab” attack that is quick and used for flinching, and a scroll wheel down karate chop for more damage. This would allow Alchemancer to be a hybrid melee / ranged class, that while weaker in melee than he is at ranged, isn’t completely useless when singled out. Edit: Giving Alchemancer melee ability would also synergize with Alchemancers LMB projectile fire attack, which appears to have random deviation after a certain travel distance. Enabling Alchemancer to be closer to the fight will allow him to make these accurate shots instead of sitting far back and hoping random projectile deviation doesn’t just send his attack into the wall/ground. Balancing classes around the idea of forcing a player to position themselves in the back just doesn’t work in a skill based melee game, where all players need to be involved in close ranged combat, and it also severely limits the effectiveness of some classes when a map is designed to be close quarters (Second objective TO-Gov_p). This is especially true when considering the mobility of some of these classes, enabling the enemy to simply bypass the melee classes who are supposed to protect their back lines. Similarly I’d like to see someone stop me from taking a Tinker and hook shotting their ranged players out of position and into the melee.

Feedback Build 49694

Voice Dialogue -
I would like to preface this section by saying most of the feedback here is negative, but for every negative point I make and example used, there are other voice lines which are done exceptionally well. In general I like the voices and characters, but I hope to bring to your attention a possible problem with voice lines that are overly long and fail to get the message across succinctly.

• Voice dialogue can be too long. Players spamming voices in Chiv can be annoying, but would be far more annoying if it were like in Mirage where characters can go into a couple of sentences of dialogue. In my opinion: if the voice line consists of multiple breaks / pauses via commas or periods, it probably isn’t a very good line.
  Ex: Tinker panic: “This is useless! We’re all gonna die.” This is a good line if it were separated into two voice commands instead of one. Especially because the first sentence can exist without the second following it.

• Voice dialogue can be outright bad. Tinker panic: “Do something! Alchemancer, Taurant, Vigilist, somebody! Do something!” This entire line sounds… odd. There are three words that aren’t repeated and three words naming character classes (maybe your team doesn’t have a Taurant? Everybody likes Vypress and Tinker after all ;-)).

• Voice dialogue doesn’t always explicitly say what it needs to. “Behind you!” dialogue can be long and convoluted.
  Ex: Tinker “Somebody tell the Vigilist that she failed to notice the Cabal flanking us.” Waaaaay too long to say Behind you! No sense of urgency.
  Ex: Vigilist “Look out! Your Alchemancer marked(?) you for piss.” This is supposed to be a warning that enemies approach, but the message doesn’t really convey “incoming enemies”.

General:

• Jumps can be mildly broken still by spamming the jump key. Not sure if this has to do with some form of jump cooldown that exists to prevent dodge spamming.

• Players can interact with the turquoise health globe of fallen friends. This probably should not be the case, as it is exploitable / rewards enemy team for losing comrades.

Feints:
Most of these points are already known by TBS. Feel free to skip.

• Feinted attacks still make the grunt sound, but do so with a delay.
• Feints will not work if you hit the feint button too soon after initiating an attack. You should be able to perform feints at any time during the initial stage of a windup without delay.
• CFTP and FTP still have a noticeable delay. This needs urgent fixing as player inputs are quicker than the game can handle (feels limiting).

Classes:

Tinker:

• Performing the “Dervish” attack with an intentional miss comboing into another attack will hit during the players recovery period if they parried at the missed Dervish attack.
• Can bypass the set up time when planting a mine by executing the ability mid-air. Will instantly place the mine on landing.

Taurant

• Lacking in mobility moves to get to certain vertical elements in the map. While we currently do not have access to a full array of abilities to select from, I would like to suggest separating the leap slam to an on-activate style move as it was before, so the Taurant can use the leap to get up to high places and climb, instead of always using it to slam the ground.

Vigilist

• Currently suffering from the same issue as Taurant, cannot access vertical elements of a map with the current ability set. This might not be an issue when the other abilities are implemented. Perhaps her disperse attack could function the same as the proposed Taurant leap slam change, where the leap section can instead be used to climb or slam the ground per user input.

Gameplay continues to improve, I don’t notice the tap / held modifiers as much as before but with one caveat: When I tap alt and release and it toggles, it stays toggled for a short period of time after I have released the alt key during my attack. This causes my next attack in the combo to sometimes become an alt swing, despite my finger no longer being actively pressed on the alt key. I would still prefer to have the ability to disable this behavior entirely because I’m a very tap happy player and I dislike toggling.

Regards,
Gauntlet

I like one off achievements that aren’t easily set up. The second part of this is unrealistic as players will always find a way to set things up to cheese the achievement. Unless you create a parameter where achievements do not unlock until the server has at least 4v4 or something.

• Kill a player mid-air with Alchemancer’s draggable projectile (phoenix).
• Deny a Vypress phase by interrupting the cast.
• Kill four players with one Taurant boulder.
• Use Tinker’s hook shot to force a player out of map bounds (essentially taking someone with you as you’re falling to your death).
• Kill a player with a riposte strike off of a parried projectile.
• Decapitate two players with Taurant’s whirlwind attack.
• Use Alchemancer’s RMB after falling X meters to prevent fall damage. Make X a pretty extreme height so it’s risky to pull off. This assumes that the RMB will have the force push properties that enable a safe fall mechanic. If not, then swap the RMB safe fall for teleport.
• (Vypress) Parting Gift. Perform a phase and exit by throwing a shuriken into a player for a killing blow.
• With at least three enemies alive, win a LTS round as the last man standing for your team.
• Ravine second objective, successfully complete the flag planting event without taking damage.
• DNF the enemy team on the first objective of every TO map.

These are just a few ideas that I would find fun for achievements. Achievements should require a situation that doesn’t always happen, and can be extremely difficult to pull off. Players should be trying their hardest to complete these challenges, and they should not be something that can occur idly (Kill X amount of players with projectiles… would be a boring achievement).

Parry frames during riposte used to exist slightly in Chivalry, and it definitely afforded the 1 in 1vX more options in surviving the encounter. This was later removed as it was incidental (the parry frames existed for the full duration of the parry, even if a riposte was activated). Overall would be a good addition to the combat.

It was a ton of fun going way over the player limit. Technical issues aside like lag, desync, and framerate; the gameplay holds up pretty well and there are some very exciting moments to be had (like a 3 or 4 person multihit with taurant boulder).

However in any format greater than just a few players, and even with just a few players, there exists a huge issue with Alchemancer who is just too difficult to deal with while trying to focus on a melee fight.
I find Alchemancer even more frustrating than a Chiv archer, at least the chiv archer had some down time between shots where after he missed I knew I had breathing room.

• Alchemancer has no down time, his reload isn’t very long and he gets to fire 5 fireballs which he can control their trajectory. They deal enough damage to be significant, very consistently will hit (they’re not hard to aim with dragging which means headshots abound), and often in the melee fight you have no idea where you’re being hit from.
• His damaging abilities are actually the least of the issue, it’s really just the constant stream of fireballs that makes him hard to deal with. Should you manage to locate the alchemancer, he’s often very close to his friends and will easily flee with one of his escape maneuvers, forcing you to retreat (while taking more fireballs to the back for daring to go after the alchemancer).
• He can’t be one shot killed by anything, making punishing an alchemancer brutally difficult if not impossible

Imo if this character class is to be a fun addition for everyone and not just the person playing Alchemancer, the fireball default attacks need to go, and he needs to be given a small dagger as his primary. Offload more of his ranged damage into his abilities, even give him access to some kind of avatar form where he can start spamming those fireballs, but it shouldn’t be all the time. This way he has a preference towards ranged attacks, but there exists times where it’s on cooldown and he needs to engage in a melee fight with a less than optimal weapon.

These are all great ideas that I hope TBS addresses. Atm I believe it’s too early to determine what the competitive format for Mirage will be. What would you suggest TBS add for LTS modes if that winds up being the competitive format?

I bring this up because some of your suggestions operate under the assumption that TO will be the competitive mode. However, when Chivalry originally launched, competitive format was centered around LTS. This swapped to TO in mid 2013 because players realized how flawed an objectiveless LTS mode was.

For Mirage in earlier tests there was an LTS mode with an objective, a kind of point capture where only one player could initiate the point capture (bomb plant essentially). This mode was much more exciting and fun than Chivalry LTS ever was. If fleshed out further with more maps, I could easily see Mirage LTS being the competitive mode over TO, because TO is a horrible format for competitive matches.
In my opinion: TO isn’t fun to watch, the excitement and drama of one life per round isn’t there. The time per round is excruciatingly long in TO, where LTS is compacted to a 3-5 minute segment. There is also an immediate and clear winner, where in TO admins need to compare times or make other determinations based on the objective type in that particular map.

Alpha Build #09

General

Water

• Some strange reflections of first person model are still present.
• Love the water visuals in this game, it’s very phantasmagorical.

UI

Main Menu - UI is shaping up nicely. Feels incredibly user friendly and coming from Chivalry, everything works as you would expect it to. Awesome!

• Exit application - The icon to exit game doesn’t bring up a prompt asking “Are you sure you want to quit?” with a Y/N prompt. Unforgiving for accidental misclicks.
• Getting into the application you are forced to watch the UE4 / TBS logo. Possibility to skip these without removing files? I always hated intro videos.
• When in-game and with either the loadout menu or team select screen open, I’d like to be able to press the hotkey N or M to switch fluidly between the screens instead of having to mouse click the UI icon to swap between them. Character select and team select swap icons are on opposite sides of the UI, makes changing between them back and forth a bit of a chore if you accidentally misclick.

Server Browser - Needs to be centered, obviously still work in progress.

Sound

• VO Blocked to prevent voice spamming is too restrictive. I can’t laugh a few times, then try to tell someone “behind you!” without it silencing me. Remember, voices provide valuable intel as well as comedic effect. Preventing voice spam winds up being more obnoxious than hearing a voice spammer.

Gameplay

• In a 6v6 setting, the gameplay is fantastic. Nothing really beats the rush of fighting multiple opponents, dashing under / over attacks, phasing through players, etc. In a team fight, Vigilist really shines with her Iron Dome ability. It becomes necessary to every group fight, really.
• CTF needs a few tweaks to the design.
  • Players need to be able to see if they’re carrying the flag. A flashing indicator which reads “YOU HAVE THE ARTIFACT” would be hugely important, preferably where a player can see it.
  • An indication which team currently holds the flag also needs to be available on screen at all times. Often a player could capture without me knowing which team controlled the flag.
  • Why would we deliver an artifact to the enemy base? Why not make it a bomb so we’re suiciding into the enemy fort.

Combat specifics

• Many facehug ripostes seem to ignore parry volume. Some issues remaining with general reactiveness of parry in Mirage.
• Parry volume does not follow torso rotation. Attacks from odd angles (attacks from above mainly) will often bypass parry volume.

• Feints are largely unreadable still. Might be due to a lot of weapons early hitting / bad animations (Taurant feint into attack animations blend poorly and appear as if the attack never stopped).

• Players desyncing from their attack animations (like in Chivalry) can occur. The animation will either play really late (you’ve already been hit but then the attack animation plays), or no animation will play at all.

Stamina
Is too intrusive on the gameplay. Parry a few abilities (which you largely cannot avoid doing), parry an attack or two here and there, maybe wall jump / side step, and you’re out of stamina. It’s very sudden and extremely limiting

• Consider increasing the stamina pool or reducing the amount of stamina lost across the board. This game is incredibly fast, parry into parry, feint into parry, cftp, side steps and other jump dodges. Stamina winds up dictating too many 1vX encounters, with the 1 running out and having no chance to recover. In its current incarnation it’s a huge skill limiter as I cannot perform all the necessary functions in a fight for my own survival without running out of stamina.

Movement

Wall jumping

• Much improved over last build. I didn’t think I’d like the class differences in wall jump distance but I find it a good balance for heavier characters like Taurant to be unable to wall jump the same distance as a Tinker or Vypress. Visually it didn’t make sense either. Great work.

Classes

Vypress

• Shuriken should have a few more bounces before disappating imo

Entropist

• Lacking a cool ability at this time, nothing particularly defining about him other than access to heals.
• Belly bounce is underwhelming when sharing the same ability slot with magic carpet
• Kind of wish Entropist grenades were physical instead of magic. Having what appears to be grenades strapped to his belt which are where he’d pull them from to toss would be neat. The graphic of the grenade itself could look like a small pot with a team colored trail that flows out of it.
• Weapon damage is underwhelming, and ability selection is underwhelming. Abilities should have more variety and facilitate different playstyles. Currently only one set of abilities is worth picking, making him very one dimensional.

Tinker

• Changes to tinker are godly, back flip being used to jump high is fun, and grapple hook behaving like a self pull when mid flight is really neat too. Would it be possible to make it so grapple shot works on environment to pull her? Ex: Mid air tinker uses grapple shot against a wall and pulls herself towards it.
• I’m tinker biased. Tinker is bae.

Vigilist

• Can hold ward strike, animation shows her throw but then holds the projectile. The animation is visually confusing in this way.

Maps

TO_Bazaar

• This section of the map appears to be large enough to walk on, but an invisible barrier prevents player movement. Feels incongruent with what is visually present.
  

It’s definitely a problem imo, and it extends further than just spamming voices.

Character voices are often used to provide intel as well as provide comedic effect. With the current restriction to using the voice commands, I can’t laugh a few times and then yell “BEHIND YOU!” if I see someone coming up from our rear, due to voice spam restriction. Parameters are far too tight, and honestly probably don’t need to exist at all.