Parry Is Too Effective
Our fight shall literally last forever.

Double posting because I forgot to include that I think weapons could have specific parry values as a way to help mitigate the stated issue. Have larger/two handed weapons gain a bigger offensive bonus but suffer defensively, or change it according to skill type. It being uniform doesn't seem to make much sense because why do brute force weapons parry as easily as ones that require finesse? And why do weapons that require finesse have the same parry penetration as weapons which require brute force?

Each weapon has it's own parry percentage.

- Dual wield + guarded stance can make it impossible to land strike through on similar skill levels

- Solution to that is supoosed to either bring more people, a gun, or just… walk away

- But that is indeed not always feasible as getting to some people requires extensive OOC effort, often impossible to extend to 2 people

If I got it right... What is the solution for one player hunting another, without bringing a gangbang or respeccing their character into a gun user?

A character less skilled than you can parry many of your attacks if they're in defensive/guarded. And a character evenly skilled or even slightly more skilled than you can keep you fighting them until you're whittled down from guarded stance counters or you run away.

Weapons that aren't guns could likely just use more offensive modifiers for getting through parry, or to reiterate, the kamikaze stance could be enhanced.

As the system is right now, whoever is defending can basically be a one man army against even several similarly skilled opponents with guarded + dual wield. In my opinion that's upside down, there should be a way for the attacker to have advantage or to equalize without a shooter being there.

Over time the defensive modifiers may have just gotten stacked in ways that made parrying as the defender way too overpowered.

I entered my prior response before I saw yours.

I gotta ask, assuming the situation here is true and not just a weird edge case, if two people are of very similar skill / stat levels are using weapons that parry well… wouldn't it make sense that they end up in a stalemate if one person is attacking all out and one person is doing nothing but defend? Is that actually a bad thing?

To me the problem here is that it's a stalemate where the defender has the advantage. They can stay in guarded and rely on counters to chip away at whoever attacked them, and that sucks because usually the attacker is the one who's staked them out, even taken drugs, and has spend time just being able to ambush them in the first place.

I've been boosted on all kinds of drugs, made my move, and the defensive bonus of parry has ruined my plans because there's no way around it. If for instance, I could go kamikaze and force them to get out of guarded so that we're both taking consistent damage then there's less of an issue.

Kamikaze should, in my opinion, cancel out the guarded stance if we're both similarly skilled.

If counter attacking was kept on guarding it would make the most amount of sense to me that kamikaze stance could also counter attack in addition to a players current attacks, with any weapon, when the opponent attempts to strike.

However then I think the only good postures would be kamikaze and guarded for all weapons, so its probably a lot easier to just ditch counter attacking entirely and give guarded regular attacks at a stat disadvantage.

It'd still keep defensive play a little more advantageous though due to the nature of how certain weapons have higher parry rates and chances, so maybe it makes sense to introduce differing offensive bonuses to weapons like Necronex suggested as well to make up for that – or remove that entirely.

I agree with 0x's take that counters are what make the guarded stance so much more overpowered than any of the other stances. Making it impossible to counter someone who's in kamikaze may also be an option if we're talking actual changes though.

One person is trying to guard, whilst the other is a berserker who has given up all sense of self preservation to kill the other guy. The berserker is at much more risk of death if their target has help show up, because then they have to scramble to defend themselves. That should come with greater reward.

Cowbell's idea is also great for the dual wield dilemma. If in offensive stances dual wield gave you offensive bonuses instead of defensive ones, you'd cancel out the dual wield defensive bonuses of whoever you're fighting.

I wouldn't suggest also making it easier to hit your target because that might be cutting too much into shooter turf. There should just be ways to cancel out defensive bonuses if you're taking risk as the one in an offense heavy posture.

Still, there appears to be a lot of instances of edged weapon combat where players are counter-attacking and bleeding their opponents out. Instances where there was no bleeding (like blunt vs blunt) seem more obviously situations where guarded stance was making the fight much slower but not, at least overtly, making the guarded character seem advantaged. However I don't have too many examples of blunt vs. blunt guarded combat to look at (pretty much just UMC fights) so hard to really draw conclusions.

I'm not exactly great with statistics but if the damage someone is taking from bleeding is not variable based on the opponents attacking power, them parrying attacks and making fewer attacks with stat disadvantages would be less important than just drawing combat out for as many rounds as possible, wouldn't it?

I think that I am mostly following what people have brought up in this thread.

I am going to offer as vague as an anecdote as possible based on my brief experience with dual wielding.

GUARDED ATTACKS / DEFENDING ONESELF

I don't think that GUARDED + DUAL is an insurmountable problem. As my characters and other characters have been going back and forth with each other, on a regular basis, over the last 7 months, turtling hasn't been the "OMG game breaking strat" that I believe some comments here perceive it as.

Keep in mind, that is a sample size of 1. Myself. And about half a dozen other characters who my character has gone head to head with. Take it or leave it.

As for GUARDED > KAMIKAZE , generally speaking , I'm all for that. It pretty accurately reflects "reality". Given two opponents of equal skill, it is much harder to land effective blows on someone who is trying to avoid getting hit, than it is to defend oneself against those attacks.

In fact, from a thematic POV, I kind of like the idea of two opponents who often fight to a stalemate and need to enlist the help of others. It's a good ego check. It creates RP opportunities. It fosters community. There are a lot of pluses there.

WEAPONS TYPES AND PARRYING

@Slither mentioned that various weapons (weapon types?) have varying abilities to parry. If it really is weapon specific, then there should be SOME weapons, like all of the knives except the kukri, that CANNOT parry at all. Unless we're suspending all reality there, there's "NO WAY" that a stiletto or typical spyderco type lock blade is going to parry… anything. Knives are ALL offense.

On the other hand, there are probably some weapon types that should / could have very high parry / guarded bonuses. Like a baton, though I'm iffy on that. Or the bo staff.

MULTIPLE ATTACKERS

This is the one area where I think the game needs a lot of work and is "broken" in the way that combat currently works. If the purpose is to have an anime / action flick like vibe where our characters are "heroes" and after a year or two, they are supposed to be able to wade through hordes of mementos and only be challenged by other "boss like" (to use a video analogy) characters, then the current system is fine.

If the game is supposed to skew more towards reality, then anytime a character is fighting more than one opponent, the negatives should start stacking exponentially.

It is REALLY hard to fight more than one opponent. Especially if they are armed. Especially if they are using different types of weapons. Even specific fighting styles have advantages and disadvantages. For example, the common MMA styles and techniques that we see in UFC make a lot of assumptions about a 1:1 fight. Grappling someone and trying to submit them in the middle of street brawl against multiple opponents is a "bad idea".

ONE WEAPON TO RULE THEM ALL

AFAIK , the staff has been pretty good about avoiding a single weapon / meta that defeats ALL other weapons / armor / skill + UE combinations, ALL the time.

The closest I think we ever got to that is I vaguely remember a few years ago @Slither gave the katanas some sort of special, single hit death strike / decapitation mechanic. My recollection is that the rest of us threw such a fit over it, that he ended up backing out that change. (Correct me if I'm wrong).

A few years ago there was a very well known ganger who cycled through melee weapons with such frequency that it felt like I was never killed by them using the same weapon twice. Bats. Shovels. Pike Axes. The most random stuff. Part of me thinks they kind of enjoyed finding new weapons to kill my character with. =) My point is that there is a lot of weapon variety in the game.

SUMMARY

I do NOT think that parry / guarded + dual wield is too strong. That's based on pretty limited personal experience though.

I do agree that multiple attackers need to be looked at. Unless, the combat system has been intentionally designed for that anime / action flick dynamic.

(Edited by Slither at 9:34 pm on 5/12/2025)

(Edited by Slither at 8:19 pm on 5/14/2025)

Respectfully, handedness is a related component to the parry debate. Whether swords like katanas should be able to be dual wielded has been a debate since about 2019-2020, specifically because of the perception that lighter weapons should have more capability of parry over larger, more cumbersome weapons.

I am fine with the idea that those larger, more cumbersome items have a greater ability to penetrate parries, so long as they cannot be single handed.

The only thing I'm going to look at is the balance between:

1. guarded vs kamikaze

2. how dual wielding a weapon impacts parrying

Our parry system is not super deep. I don't know that it needs to be overly complex to serve its purpose. It sounds like there might be a balance issue w/ guarded based on feedback here, but I need to test to see.

Almost everything else mentioned here is effectively a feature request or an assumption that our parry system does a lot more than it actually does.

If there is a balance issue, it should be fairly straightforward to rectify without changing the entire underlying system.

It doesn't have to be two of the same weapon. This was a major complaint years back when it became the gang meta. You could have a ceramic katana in one hand and a bokken in the other and be unbeatable in melee without having to bother with paying for a good offhand weapon.

I don't have the precise results of the testing I did a while back, but I will give you an idea of them (I doubt anyone would indiscriminately trust my findings anyway).

PC1: Combat Oriented. Max UE

PC2: Balanced/Utility Oriented. Max UE

PC1, stanced kamikaze. Attacking.

PC2, stanced guarded, dual wielding, defending.

Roughly 1/>100 attacks broke guard. Obviously any character in the game would be dead after eating 99+ counter attacks, which land with a 100% success rate on someone in kamikaze stance. Meanwhile, if you are neutral or offensive, there is zero chance you are getting through guarded posture.

Offensive vs Defensive and such had much more favorable results.

Ultimately, this means that if you know someone is going to posture guarded (or turtle), there is no point in even attacking them. They will remain in guarded, shave off your health with counter attacks, and then leave guarded only once you are hurt enough that no matter how many attacks you land, they will still kill you first.