The elephant in the room - running attacks

So lets talk about it already. I remember when the whole slot system was working subpar (read: ‘was totally busted’) some people got together and investigated how it worked and why it did not perform its purpose. Has anyone done anything like this for the current version of the game?

I’ve been playing a more squishy career lately equipping a significantly shorter reach weapon, and the problem kinda moved into the front row of reasons I took some stupid damage for. I mean at this point it might be the issue with this game for me. I lack the specific expertise for doing the research myself, but I’ll gladly participate in any effort to do anything about it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the issue boils down to two main components:

  1. Enemies initiating running attacks (those rubber-banding glued-to-your-butt attacks that are hard to escape trivially) when they shouldn’t. For example when they are like 3ft away from you. It even looks comical - sometimes rats and other chaff just start running on the spot as if they decided to lose some weight on a treadmill.
  2. The ‘running’ movement itself. It just doesn’t work when there is even a single obstacle around - enemies start running backwards, running with ridiculous speeds (both fast and almost zero), they start skating around, strafing, phasing through obstacles if you’re not a host, they start dancing around you like freaking fairies and whatnot.

Sometimes it gets completely nuts - I was the last xenos standing on a FoW run yesterday only to get slapped around my masked face to death by an ordinary chaos chaff guy - he just raised his arm with a knife, started make-belief running and then slid sideways so fast that I actually missed a push. Of course his attack connected and I went down. I mean, I’m not pretending to be a top player, but sometimes I feel that I’ve reached a point at which the game just doesn’t want me to get better at it and just throws some truly random crаp like that in.

So yeah, having sunk this many hours into the game and seeing how the developers are not willing to do sh|t about their game, the only real hope for us more dedicated folk is maybe attempting to mod the game ourselves. However, I’d like some real input on this one - I don’t even know the extent to which the game is moddable at this point.

Thanks.

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And people on this forum were telling me it was me being silly when i wrote that they were lucky that they didnt have this happen <.<

Its been a thing for so long and especially visible with the beastmen so i honestly could not understand how so many didnt seem to know about it. But it´s also really clearly visible with both maulers and CW´s or even stormvermin also initiating random charging attacks while you are in melee range.

You dont have to running or dodging away at all, they can just straight up decide they´ve walked far enough and feel like charging.

.-…

Somewhat related i am sure, a thing that makes playing handmaiden a massive pain. For me it often occurs that i see a mauler initiate a running attack. I let him walk up to melee range and i dash through him, turn around and…he´s somehow tagged along, done a 180 to follow and is a millisecond or two away from delivering that overhead charge.

Now i would not disagree with someone saying that just spamming dodges while attacking should not be allowed to be the ultimate “stay alive” strategy. But enemy tracking is a bit too ridiculous at times.

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I posted a clip recently where you see an enemy initiate a running attack while I’m moving TOWARDS it and then glitching sideways between different slots
Whatever decides that it’s time to do a running attack clearly is broken in some way - not sure if it’s a client thing or a general bug but it doesn’t feel right at all.

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Well yeah, but I remember a time when you had to actually know how to kite a horde. And by that I mean you had to control your distance precisely because you didn’t want to get overwhelmed with running attacks, so you had to be in their face and carefully deal with normal attacks that you could then break up with a push or a hit or something of the sort. Now dealing with a horde actually feels more like dodging on cooldown and whoever has the most dodges is automatically good at it by natural selection. I’d like to get some of that skill ceiling back.

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I remember that time as well, back in Verm1 lul. It was a rare occurrence back then for a rat to suddenly decide to skid in place and stab via a running attack. In Verm2 I recall three phases, all of them rather on the extreme end. There was the phase prior to Version 1.4 I believe, where everyone used to run Parry because dodging was completely unreliable due to gross levels of tracking, enemies having the habit of randomly doing 180 flips mid-overhead and so on. Then there was the phase leading up to WoM, where most enemies were stationary during their attacks and you practically never got hit. It was also the time during which the game was most boring imo, as there was very little challenge or real skill play involved with the official realm.

In regard to the WoM phase, most of the changes amount to making the game more interesting and cooperative. However, there are a bunch of issues that have remained ever present and I don’t actually know if they are long-standing bugs or features at this point. Tracking is absurd and mostly evident on maulers due to the wind-up of their attacks. I’ve once seen a mauler chill by the exterior of the barn at the start of grain, only to slide along the edges of the wall, follow through the corridor, turn a corner and destroy a player who has grabbing the healing draught that is frequently found there. I’d also point out that he was winding his axe for the overhead throughout the entirety of the sliding. Most enemies tend to engage in this kind of behavior sometimes, but probably due to shorter attack animations it doesn’t look that extreme. Attack speed also seems to be inconsistent, as sometimes they just swing at superluminal velocities from nowhere, even though you are playing at the same difficulty where attack speed should be consistent.

I only recall an ancient jsat video where he had a tool to visualize the slot system and spawned chaos enemies in. What was happening was mostly due to the size of the enemies and the proximity of the slots to the player. In their attempt to get behind and occupy their slots, marauders would wander too close to him and default to attacking whilst forming a dense clump. I think that problem has been long fixed, but I also think there’s still an issue that props up mostly due to the increased number of enemies in the game. This is just speculation, but I believe that when there’s too many of them, the guys in the back decide they want some action as well and instead of waiting their turn decide to dive in with sliding/running attacks, even though you are backed into a corner or doing a minimal amount of wall scooting. This isn’t an issue so much with fanatics, but comes up during mixed hordes or large numbers of marauders. The rats of verm1 were much better behaved, but their density was a lot smaller as well.

That’s likely because handmaiden’s dash doesn’t count as a dodge unless you are running invisibility. All enemies will track your dodge, including hookrats, gunners, assassins lol and even the horde you just dashed through a moment ago, and now half of it is midway through sliding/running attacks.

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Gunners and firerats tracking isnt so bad and it feels pretty fair, but assassins curving their jumps midair or getting grabbed mid-dash by a hookrat just feels plain bad.

But one can dodge the hook by letting him walk up and start his grab animation before using dash though…but this still means silent ones in a horde = instant death while dashing.

And honestly its not so bad that enemies start doing running attacks after i dashed, what is bad is when running attacks that have already started can have such ridiculous sticky-ness as if i had just been walking and didnt just dash a fair distance. Seeing a mauler do that 180 in the middle of an attack isnt just strange, it makes em look like undead who dont really give a dang about skeletal alignment.

“oh my spine is crooked and neck is twisted like a rope? Gimme a sec i´ll align them after i split this fool in two”.

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That’s actually a very good way to put it. A lot of the time it feels like if an enemy has committed to an attack, then it will connect pretty much no matter what you do.

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Yes, I believe you’re correct on all accounts including the sad truth about a lot of players actually perceiving all this as a feature already.

However, is it my latest career choices, or has anything been changed with some of the latest updates - not sure which ones though, but definitely post WoM.

Definitely started when WoM released. What I don’t understand is why enemies sometimes do a running attack when you aren’t evading their range. I walked up to an SV yesterday who hadn’t aggro’d onto me yet and he insta-180 running attacks me when I was in melee range starting my attack against him. Other times like when enemies climb up to you (in mass) they’ll just instantly running attack because they want a slot behind you but will attack you to get there or something, or the amount of times in twins where enemies try to flank you with a running attack as soon as one enemy dies and splits.
I never understood why horde enemies have much better tracking than elites do, elites only become a problem in large groups but 1 mauler starts his long running overhead attack and you can dodge at the very start and then just stand still and he will miss.

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It’s happened to me many times. I call shenanigan. Definitely needs to be looked at. Makes no sense. Aesthetically and otherwise.

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My only advice is to try Deathwish if you haven’t already. It’s not perfect but hordes are more consistent and readable when they aren’t flying everywhere.

Iirc you said this about my run when I was moving away from enemies by running in the opposite of direction of them while not facing them (which is faster than backpedaling). I had 5% movement speed on trinket and a weapon with one of the highest movement curves in the game. I was also using the fact that at high levels of enemy densities the AI pathing gets messed up,

So you want enemies to do running attacks more often if the player is not within a given distance?

I’m not a massive fan of some of the excessive tracking either, but it can definitely be worked against in a reasonable way. Wouldn’t mind some changes though.

There were mainly two occasions i referred to in your case, the biggest one perhaps is when you stood still for a good second or two to shoot a blightstomer. Not a single attack was sent.

The second case being when you were nearly surrounded and not really moving fast and yet only 2 attacks were actually delivered, one which was midair that you blocked.

But there was another guy who told me that enemies absolutely never initiated charging attacks unless you were running away(evidently false) and that i was ignorant for not knowing : (

The worst part is that enemies only really have 3 animations, which is either:

  • Walk forward
  • Walk sideways
  • Run forward

So whenever they decide to do their running attacks at point blank range (which is all the time), they just slide in circles with their massive speed burst.

Define no attack. I get hit after shooting that arrow at the Blightstormer. Enemies do not always do running attacks even if the player is out of reach of a normal attack. A lot of the time they just walk up to the player. Getting hit there wasn’t going to end the run if multiple enemies were targeting me because damage is reduced when multiple enemies are targeting the player.

I get surrounded a lot, so I’m not exactly sure when you’re referring to.

Afaik they have a very small distance for doing it. Basically if they aren’t in a slot in front of, next to or behind the player, it’s running attack territory. Massed CWs are a good example of this as they’ll spam the running overhead unless the player stands completely still at the perfect distance while also avoiding getting pushed and triggering a running attack. Not running away won’t prevent running attacks, just as standing completely still won’t either.

The minimum distance where running attacks starts could probably be a decent spot to start messing about.
Currently it just feels way too lax and enemies can start the animations on 2nd row if they have the reach, totally disregarding whatever the player is doing at that moment.

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That system might be bugging out too, just yesterday i was dealing with a norscan horde when i missed a marauder coming in from my left and he fellow did a solid 50-60 in a single hit, despite a lot of others in fairly close proximity.

This does sound about right for what i experience, however i do suspect the system to be fraying a bit because i´ve had stormvermin/maulers/beastigors intitiate running attacks while directly infront of me.

Now those end very quickly because they start in melee normally but they quickly become very noticeable if i try to move,dash or dodge away as depending on timing the enemy will just stick right to me like glue…especially painful when playing handmaiden T_T

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I wonder if it’s a latency issue causing the unit to mismeasure where they are relative to the player. Enemies doing weird stuff accounts for an unfortunately high proportion of times I see players going down.

No it´s definitely not that, i´ve been paying more attention since a little while back and i´ve noted that enemies nowadays just randomly decide to do running attacks even in melee range.

Just yesterday i was standing still and bashing up a chaos warrior with a shield and the bugger responds by starting up a running overhead slam. So lag is not the problem.

The reason why i think more people havent noted this is because these running attacks end very quickly if they start in melee range. That and only elites are difficult to stagger out of them so you can kite&fight a horde without them and not really notice it.

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