rijackson741 wrote:How about this:
Any monster in a spawn area of only one square is a sentinel (probably easier to check this than add a new property to every monster?), and is immune to ranged attacks. The player gets a message such as "your attack has no effect", or "your attack has no effect from this distance"
I like this one.
Even if we decide to make moving sentinels (certain bosses) then it would be easy to override.
Easier than changing properties for most monsters, like you said.
rijackson741 wrote:
If you engage a monster from distance 0 (or 1, depending on how you want to count distance) monsters may flee or follow you if you flee, but only within the bounds of their spawn areas. So safe areas are unaffected for melee combat.
If you engage a monster with a ranged attack, then you just took the gloves off. Then it can flee anywhere, and chase you anywhere.
With the above rules nothing about existing combat would change, and ranged weapons would therefore only add to the game, rather than changing the existing game. If a player decides to shoot a vile plaguestrider from a distance with the new ranged weapons, and it follows them into a safe area and kills them, lesson learned
That would be more coding for sure, but it might be an acceptable solution.
This is a bit perhaps similar to an aspect that I coded but perhaps overlooked mentioning.
With the current system I made, if a player attacks with melee then he'd be followed for a very little number of steps.
The way this works is that each monster has the aforementioned "rage multiplier" that determines how many turns they're "enraged" in terms of the distance between you two. And (here's the new part I forgot to mention) this
starts to deplete only
after you exit combat.
So a melee would be followed for, say, 3 tiles after he flees (3 x 1), but an archer would be followed for 6/9/12/15 --
after he flees combat, which means the monster he attacked is probably already close to him, most likely not greatly harmed because of the bow inaccuracy, and you have accumulated stackable "exposed" conditions with -10% block chance each.
Melee will be followed for a really, really low number of steps, unless someone decides to specifically change the rage value for that monster -- and it become even greater for ranged no matter what you do.
As for fleeing with melee, well, if you really want to flee for good, just move 3 more tiles after combat and you're free.
For ranged, you're pretty much going to be forced to 1v1 with a debuff on your defense if you can't get out of there Asap.
So in effect, people who attack with ranged are most definitely not overpowered. To be honest, anyone who uses ranged weapons will be doing it for fun and I am sure will still be challenged as usual. It's just going to be a different play style, that's all.
As for safe areas, well these will be over-stepped by one or two tiles if you attack with melee, but that's no big deal. Also note that most ranged weapons aren't so far-reaching -- the maximum for any common item is going to be +4 -- so there's a hard limit over how much disturbances the player will be causing in monster movement.
All in all, I advocate that the current testing weapons should be scrapped (specifically the +5) one, and for the next release we should focus on the common +1/2/3 weapons such as whips, throwing daggers, shortbows, and crossbows. Leave the rarer +4/5 for later. I'm not even worrying myself with +6 atm.
Safe areas will be barely changed unless you were already standing on the border, so it's just the issue of sentinels that needs to be addressed. With at least one exception like this, we'll have to do some manual work if we want to make sure everything is balanced.
(Note that I haven't uploaded the apk with the exposed status yet, currently it's a permanent debuff to BC)