» Thu May 28, 2009 7:37 am
Yeah thats not "targeting a limb" though. The character would do those exact same swings even if there was nobody infront of you. It might say "down against the head" and "thrust against torso", but that is not actually what happends. Your character will attack in the direction your character is facing, so if there happends to be an enemy in that direction, and close enough, you will hit that enemy. You don't actually aim at a certain body part. There is no difference in hitting the enemys head, torso, arms or legs. The HP system is just like every other level based HP system, a clump sum of HP.
Those different angled strikes, plus the forward thrust, are only a... what to call it... attack combination mechanics, which you can use to attack with. But, the main purpous of them is to use when you perform your characters actual combat skills. Let's say you use a club, and you have a skill called "bludgeon", and lets say the purpous of this skill is to stun your opponent for a short time. So you activate the skill called bludgeon... but nothing much actually happends... your character does not start doing the attack.
That's where those directional attacks come in. Because when you press the skill you want to activate, the game will show you a series of directional attacks you will have to press (and time correctly to if I am not mistaken) for the activated skill to actually happend. If you fail to press the right direction, in the right order, at the right time, the final outcome of the skill will not happend, that being the stun part.
It is a pretty neat mechanic, something different. But there is a downside to it though, and that is that you will have to press a key and/or a mouse button a great deal more often, then you do in most other mmo's with a "normal" skill activation system (like WoW for example). Not to mention that you had to press more key's, more often to begin with, due to that AoC does not have a single automatic attack.