I love the body part damage system of the other IREs. 4 attacks to break a limb, you can keep track of how many hits you've landed and taken in your head and shift your defense accordingly. But in Lusternia, it takes Jelaludin 23-50 swings to break a limb, modified by enough things that trying to calculate when my opponent's limbs will reach a certain point of damage just makes me laugh. No knight in the game even tries as far as I can tell, they either rend as much as possible, or go bonecrusher with lightning runes.

Lusternia really needs to backtrack a bit and have a simpler wounding system that we can work with mentally. So, here's a suggestion.

Every knight does 2-4 points of wounding damage per attack, based on their own stats. The weak and fast ones do 2, middle of the road 3 and slow and buff 4.

If you use a focused strike instead of an unfocused attack like slash or smite, the amount of wound damage goes down to 1-3 as a drawback of having such precision.

Every 10 points of damage, a limb goes up to the next stage of being wounded and the affliction of that stage of wounds goes off.

So, this becomes something to easily calculate. Hack away with your moves that do 2-4 and see how long it takes you to get a limb within the strike range for a wound, then you can strike and get the 'ol double leg break etc. If you want the more sever wounds, you use the untargetted attacks for longer.

Thoughts?

Read Roark's old (that is, 10 days old) thread. Basically, it will be like that:
- accuracy ratio of a weapon will change to a set value
- damage stat will improve the damage the weapon deals
- to-hit stat will improve the chance a weapon has to deal deepwounds/break limbs


EDIT: here

I love Roark's idea!!

I keep hearing about upgrades for us. Maybe we'll get some good ones.

Like when I do 112 damage to Sierus with 194 and 150 damage maces!

But yes. Something needs to be done with wounding. It's a neat system, but sadly not as effective as it could be.

If I were Roark, I'd do make the weapon stats not dependant on the knighthood skill, but rather upgrade them a constant amount (like if you were Virtuoso) if you possess the skill at all. Or make them as skill-dependant as elementalism blast. Newbies would start dealing more damage while some other non-newbies would stop killing everybody in 2 hits.

Good thing you're not Roark then.

Whatever. It would be best if everyone had only the following abilities:

BASH
syntax: BASH
You deal 500 damage to your target.

HEAL
syntax: HEAL
You heal 500 damage to your target, for the cost of 200 mana.

LASH
syntax: LASH
You deal 300 mana damage to your target, for the cost of 50 mana.

KILL
syntax: KILL
If the target has less then half of their mana, they die.

Everyone starts with 500 health + 20/level. Same with mana.

Ah, I forgot the artifact.

UBER SWORD
cost: 1000 credits
When wielding, cuts the mana cost of all (2) of your spells by 50%, and increases the damage you do with all (2) of your attacks by 25%.

But then you'd run out of mana, and where would you be? I demand you either upgrade Lash to return 100 mana, or you add a new skill called: MEDITATE to return 50 mana a second, while you take 10% more damage. Mhmm

You'd have to die to recover it. Tough luck, but more people would like to buy the artifact then (more $$$ for Lusternia).

That doesn't make much sense. If I'm striking with greater precision, why would I be doing less damage to that limb? If I'm randomly swinging my sword at you as opposed to aiming at your leg and putting all my force behind it, would your leg be hurt more or less from the strike?

Terenas- that argument can go both ways. More precision often comes with less strength.

I'm aware of Roark's post, but increasing wounding damage isn't the same as standardizing it. It'll still take you a different number of swings to wound almost everyone in the game and could quite likely remain impossible to calculate on the fly even after they change what causes wounding.