When /assist is removed

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noobas
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When /assist is removed

Post by noobas »

In case you're living in a cave:

http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showth ... -Scheming)

Basically a few things are happening that will (perhaps not yet but soon) significantly affect multibox PVP.

First things first: this is on testlive so in no way is it finalized, but I don't know how much testing is occurring right now. It seems generally that stuff goes to live, then people say whatever, and Michi may or may not make a change about it.

/assist will no longer work in the ways it currently works.

From my understanding:

If I attack a mob/tower with my team leader, hit assist on my box, then my box will assist.
If I attack a PLAYER with my team leader, hit assist on my box, then nothing will happen.

If I am a doctor using /assist to heal the aggro target, then it should work in most circumstances:
If the target is a MOB or TOWER and the attacker is a player the doctor should be able to get an assist read to heal the aggro target.
If the target is a PLAYER and the attacker is a PLAYER, the doctor will NOT be able to get an assist read.

A few people have said it won't work, and it will cause a problem.. and all that, but imo it will be quite effective at what Michi intends it to do.

There are a few methods for multiboxers to get an assist read - but it will be more difficult.

Option 1: non-active window mousing enabled.
This requires several positioning challenges, may not be very reliable, and gives a limited result, but it may be the most reliably fast method to acquire the same target rapidly with your box in PVP.

Here's how you do it: first you get all slaves and master using the exact same camera angle and zoom, you also should also arrange your GUI so there is ample room on the top half of the screen to choose targets (I have always had my hotbars on the top of the screen, but I may have to adjust my GUI). next, I would probably make sure all my toons are leeted - but this might not be necessary depending on your zoom.

Next, there are a few ways to acoomplish the next step, this is one way to do it:

http://www.hotkeynet.com/ref/movemouse.html

Lets use this one. Ok so what you do is your set the destination where you want the mouse cursor to be when you click.. the ideal thing here is you want to make it as reliable as possible, so ideally you set it to be the exact middle horizontal position and somewhere about 60%-75% towards the top of the screen (you'll see why in a sec). Now, here is how to make it work.

you get your box on follow, same as always, and you go along pew pewing towers on offence. Now, on OFFENCE... there's only one thing you need to do, you got to kill everything, all towers, all mobs. Ideally you have all ranged toons, and ideally you situate yourself so at any point when you tab, you only tab the current tower and nothing else. WHY? now if anything comes along (i.e. blue dot) it'll be the Only other target other than the tower you're hitting. This is difficult to do, but it really makes it hyper important to plant towers properly in the future from a defensive perspective, and on the offensive perspective, if you want to have a good chance to eliminate defenders rapidly, you want as few targets as possible for your box to tab in order to get a reasonable fraction of your box attacking the same thing.

On defence, this is when things get interesting.

So now, you got a bunch of people attacking your CT. you got your box ready and gas is ticking, you need to find a target so you can open with all your toons and hopefully start the melee with a 1 toon advantage. You quickly run directly at the CT, hit the hotkey for the mouse pointer, the mouse pointer on all screens moves to the position approximately over the head of your master, you click, the CT is selected now on ALL toons.

You press /assist and bingo, the top damage dealer is selected. you open on him and make the first kill and now you can repeat, if you were able to make the kill without moving, you can simply reclick the CT, see who it is attacking, reassist, and go for the next kill.

This method won't work well against high pet damage MB's... which is unfortunate, because that's what is most common on offense right now.

I'm still trying to figure out other ways to utilize this change to my benefit.
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stokken
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Re: When /assist is removed

Post by stokken »

This might be more pvp 1v1 now and not mb wars and i think might get more ppl engaged in tower wars wich is good news incase it happens .

Your missing the other news with new instance ;)
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senare
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Re: When /assist is removed

Post by senare »

I can think of some more tech related ways ro achive this in order of most cool ...

Simply get a image from the screen and 'do some image matching' (there are lib avavible for this sort of things I have a couple friends over at a company called axis here working on that sort of things for survillance cameras this should be much easier since it is renderd from a limited set of graphical resources ) then get the cordinates and click away ... guessing you would have to actually rendar all clients even those off screen ... add
in the image recognition processing ... Idk maybe not realistic ?


More realistic since i know its being done already is to sniff the traffic going over the network and reverse enginer the pkg format ...

Or inject lib into the AO client and intercept mouse /kbd events ...

For me id say that thats way to much (boring) work as it would involve lots of trial and error ... but i am betting there are some people who will try and succed ...
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noobas
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Re: When /assist is removed

Post by noobas »

@ stokkes

Yea I'm not really concerned with the PVM stuff.

The obvious change here with assist is:

Towers will fall rapidly because MB won't be hampered, but PVP will be hampered for any box.

This means we're likely to see agents leading boxes - because agents actually have good killpower and it means that they can reasonably fight and the box doesn't really matter.

If you have a non-diversified box like foob does, with say, 1 agent + 5 crats, you're looking at retaining crat boosters for the duration of the fight which is good, but not a lot else, whereas, if you have a diversified box like mine, and stick a agent on the front to fight you might get a wide array of boosters, which gradually dwindle as each box item is removed.

So, here's what an interesting box might look like at TL5:

agent leader (you intend to fight with this toon once PVP starts)
crat - crat aura
keeper - keeper aura + aura heals
advy - advy aura + team heals + single heals
MA - team heals + single heals
engi - blockers + reflects

MA you could swap with trader, or you could do almost any team here, really.. but ideally you have a team that adds to your survival while you're making kills with your leader.

You could actually use any toon you wanted as your leader, but really you want a toon that can produce a kill more quickly than not and who has solid survival - and here it becomes interesting, because if PVP happens, it really doesn't matter much what happens to your box, you want to survive on your main so you can actually engage in the PVP and get kills.

I think some things are almost a given: tab/kill which means many targets taking small damage from boxes, because why not? Pet classes will be in high demand since they bring 3-4 x as many targets to the fight, which will soak tonnes of MB damage. Area nukes and area roots/snares will be a HUGE boost for both sides, and !!!!! team/area heals.

If /assist is removed, cross healing will be a massive, MASSIVE boost for the side that uses it the most.

Imagine for a moment, an RI full of doc/keeper/agent/advy/MA/trader basically you engage in combat but you can cross heal any time you see a persons HP dropping it doesn't matter if you're rooted, snared, fighting 1 or 2 or 3 people, if there's ample cross healing, eventually you'll wear down all opponents or run out of nano cross healing and eventually succumb.

It just opens up a lot of possibilities, and MB will really be a lot less useful in actual PVP.
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