McNinja said:
Azrael the Cat said:
McNinja said:
I nearly broke my controller because I "missed" a f**king huge Dragon in DA: O. I hate the "miss" calculations because the animation doesn't "miss," but the game does. And in real life, you NEVER miss your target with a sword, unless they parry/dodge/block the strike.
Any swordsman who completely misses their target when it is being attacked by 2 other people is a freaking retard.
What??????
Seriously, where on earth do you get this idea from? Who on earth have you been fencing against that they hit >50% of the time?
Even at a minor club level, you miss more often than you hit (and that's across all styles: sabre, foil, epee - even cane fighting), and the % of times you hit goes down as the standard of tournament increases.
I'm just flattened by your claim - I'm seriously struggling to see how anyone with any experience at sword work could possibly see that as plausible.
BLOCKING is exagerrated in games, as that hardly ever happens in real swordwork - mainly because it's just too inefficient compared to dodging and hitting your opponent with a timed hit, but also because anyone with a decent amount of experience will anticipate the block and use it to set up their next attack. Personally, my 'standard' opening when fencing with sabre or epee is the old-fashioned tap to the outside of the blade (in a 3 block position) and thrust/cut over, or tap outside then tap inside (in a 4 block position) then rotate the hand over for a swipe at their head/mask. That's a VERY old and VERY standard combination that you'll see in every sword style in the world. Anyone who reacts to the taps with even a half-hearted block will struggle. Even in the large 2-handed sword styles (like your Japanese styles), which traditionally emphasise that overhead block, these days it's all about timed-hitting, with those traditional blocking positions only being used in tournaments insofar as they provide part of the 'arming' position for the next blow - i.e. rather than being the standard defensive response (which is just taking a step back or to the side, so you're out of range), they're used when you manage to anticipate the opponent's attack and clear it as part of the swing for your own attack.
And who on earth just stands toe to toe and lets their opponent wail on them, hitting them every time? Every bout I've ever fought has had me and the opponent a good double sword-length away from each other. Most swings are feints or misses as you're both moving in and out of range - you're not just standing there swinging at each other like fixed objects. Would be a pretty short sword fight if the blades were sharpened, too.
I'm actually curious - what on earth were you basing that 'you never miss in sword fighting' on? It sounds more like something you'd take from godawful Hollywood films than real sabre-work.
I'm not talking fencing. I'm talking in real sword combat in war. Like Romans v. Goths war, or actually any war involving melee weapons.. In war two sides charged at each other, and it usually devolved into one on one encounters, where you had no room for error and missing your opponent usually meant your death. If a Spartan was fighting someone in close combat and he just flat out swung in the wrong direction, he might kill himself out of shame. There's a huge difference between missing because you're too far away or you swing in the wrong direction and missing because your opponent dodged or blocked. One makes you look like a retard, the other is a legitimate excuse. When you're in someones face trying to stab them to death, and they're in your face trying to do the same, misses don't happen. blocks and dodges do. How often do you think the Spartans missed their enemies in battle? Never.
That's what I'm trying to say. In DA: O, your character would run up to somebody, stand not more than 2 feet away from them, and swing. You had a chance of "missing" even though there was no animation depicting such. It was even more infuriating when your target was also being hit by other people, whether an archer or rogue or mage or w/e, because they shouldn't be able to dodge, and a guy who has trained with weapons all his life shouldn't be able to miss a guy being attacked by three other people while his back is turned, from two feet away no less. And it was even
worse when fighting a massive dragon that took up half of the screen. "Missing" it would indicate you just swung your sword in the completely wrong direction, and missed the huge dragon not one foot in front of you. It's just stupid.
I see what you're saying, but i odn't think you understood what I was saying.
And your extensive experience of sword warfare comes from where?
Other than your imagination, that is.
Do you seriously think that when your life is at risk (even putting aside that in reality, one swipe/stab is going to kill you (medical attention being a fair way off, and infection being a serious risk), you're going to be so suicidal as to not dodge or control your range? We're talking about trained, professional fighters - fencing is as close a comparison as you can get. If the formation is so broken that you've got guys facing 3-4 opponents, the battle is well and truly over - isn't exactly representative of sword-fighting.
If you want to make the Greek comparison, let's base it on what the Spartans actually did for tactics, rather than what you made up after watching 300. Firstly, Spartans used spears as their preferred military weapon, not swords (good one-on-one or small-group weapons aren't the same as good military formation weapons). Secondly, they used a series of lines, which were subdivided into pairs of soldiers. The pairs would consist of an older soldier and his ward, who he was responsible for training - the prevalence of homosexuality in ancient Sparta and their views on women (at the time, 'romantic love' was thought to apply only between men, with heterosexual relations only there to increase the Spartan population) meant that these soldier/ward pairings were often also lovers, making them very strongly bound. Their war tactics leveraged that emotional bond, as the ward was responsible for 'covering' the soldier. Basically, their attack pattern was to thrust, then parry diagonally down. They'd stagger it so that whenever one soldier was thrusting, the ward to the right would be clearing the weapon aimed at that soldier (i.e. instead of parrying weapons aimed at themselves, they'd be parrying to protect the guy to the left of them). Similarly, the ward would be protected from the soldier to the right of him, who would be clearing diagonally down at the same time that the ward was thrusting.
You can see that the whole tactic is arranged around defence - with the wards responsible for protecting the soldiers that they are most strongly emotionally bound to, and the more experienced soldiers responsible for protecting whichever ward was to their left.
Now I'm not sure what you've got in your head, but that kind of standard military tactic for the time was always going to lead to (1) many many more blocks than successful hits, and (2) an absence of scenarios where one guy is fighting 3.
I don't know where you've got this idea of trained soldiers charging into each other like some bad action flick. Military formations are designed to prevent that, and have been for as long as organised warfare have existed. Why do you think battles could last all day, when there's only a few hundred participants? Given that one decent thrust is fatal (armour during that period was far inferior to the weaponry), don't you think they'd all run out of soldiers pretty quickly if they hadn't developed tactics to stop that?
So: if you're taking your queues from small-group combat, you're going to get a lot of dodging in and out of range, because getting cut will kill you and it's amazing how people don't like that happening to them. If you're taking your notions from military combat - like the Spartans - then you're going to get WAY less hits than misses.
Are you sure you didn't get your idea from a movie?