Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.

Should Drain Fatigue / Sleep be useful as offensive spells against enemies?

Poll ended at Fri Feb 15, 2019 6:34 am

Yes (enemy can become exhausted and vulnerable like player)
14
100%
No (enemy cannot become exhausted, matches classic)
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 14

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Interkarma
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Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by Interkarma »

A recent conversation on reddit highlighted that Drain Fatigue / Sleep are fairly useless when used offensively by player against enemies. While the player will fall to the ground exhausted if their fatigue is drained, and it means instant death if enemies are nearby, the enemies themselves suffer no such penalty. You can blast enemy fatigue to 0 and they keep on fighting as if nothing happened. It's unclear if this is intended or just something not fully implemented in classic.

In Daggerfall Unity, it would be easy to implement an exhausted effect for enemies. For example, output a message like "Knight is exhausted" and freeze their AI. This is the enemy equivalent of player falling to ground exhausted and being easy prey for monsters. This means player could use Sleep effectively in combat, rather than in just that one Mages Guild quest.

I've created a poll for simple feedback and I'm interested in hearing feedback from others around this one. To get the ball rolling, should some creatures then be immune to fatigue-based attacks? For example, Atronachs are supposed to be relentless magical golems - it seems a bit banal if they get sleepy sometimes. :)

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Hazelnut
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by Hazelnut »

My initial reaction was yes, of course those spells should be useful in combat but when I thought about it more, I think that's only true if not unbalancing. In other words, sleep / fatigue needs to not become the most efficient and effective strategy, but just a choice among many. I wonder if this is why the original devs disabled it in combat, because it was unbalanced and they didn't have time to implement properly.

Just my 2p, and why I'm currently a don't know.
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pango
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by pango »

Maybe they dropped the feature to cut down on the number of sprites; Currently there's no "idle" sprites, much less "sleepy" ones :(
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King of Worms
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by King of Worms »

If implemented correctly - so its not over powered - than it sounds great. And yes, some resists should be in place. Skeletons never sleep in my imagination - why should they. They are dead and run on different energy than a living creatures. Same as zombies, maybe vampires etc.

I will vote yes, because I know you guys can do this right.

Btw im quite sure we can squeeze some iddle/sleep animations out from the original sprites

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pango
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by pango »

King of Worms wrote: Fri Feb 01, 2019 1:54 pm Btw im quite sure we can squeeze some iddle/sleep animations out from the original sprites
If that can be done, the idle stance could be used for enemies that haven't noticed the player yet, and more importantly for pacified enemies (so there's some visual clue about who has been pacified).
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MasonFace
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by MasonFace »

pango wrote: Fri Feb 01, 2019 9:51 am Maybe they dropped the feature to cut down on the number of sprites; Currently there's no "idle" sprites, much less "sleepy" ones :(
We can add this sprite frame in easy enough:
download.jpg
download.jpg (8.8 KiB) Viewed 2953 times
But seriously, I like the idea of being able to drain the fatigue of enemies and it actually do something meaningful. And I think KoW is right about being able to make idle/sleep frames. Easiest option might be to just remove the blood from the corpse frame.

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Jay_H
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by Jay_H »

The magicka cost for me remains the biggest question. I don't know that killing a 4-24 health enemy is harder than draining 100+ fatigue from them. AFAIK the magicka cost for Drain Fatigue and Damage Health are equivalent. (That's from very old testing so I could be wrong.)

BansheeXYZ
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by BansheeXYZ »

Do you mean Continuous Damage Fatigue? You can only Drain Endurance and other attributes. Endurance governs Fatigue Points (Stamina) among other things.

There are many questions I have before answering.

-Do enemies actually have a full compliment of stats to drain? If so, what is the point of Drain Luck or Drain Personality on a monster? Were some of these included by mistake?
-Do all enemies have fatigue points? How many on, for example, a rat? Do undead enemies have stamina given that they're dead and wouldn't tire? It's hard for me to imagine a skeleton getting exhausted and needing sleep.
-Why do non-dmg spells like Silence, Charm, Soul Trap, Drain, and Pacify have elemental selection in the spell maker? These should all be magic based. Another oversight in classic? This makes no sense whatsoever, players are gonna be utterly confused by this. If you told me during character creation that if I made myself immune to magic, I'd still be susceptible to fire-based silence, I'd be like "wtf" and start questioning if any of my choices were going to do as I expect. I'd say instant death (Disintegrate) also belongs to this group, and possibly paralyze, or at least fire-based paralyze.

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Jukic
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by Jukic »

-initial thought: yes yes yes, mooar features .....
-afterthought: match classic !

But on the serious discussion note - a mechanic not common and worth exploring (later...)! Another tool a player can wield, (matching a suitable monster profiles - elder vampire: "ahhh these winter nights are too long .... I need a nap ...." ).

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comatosephoenix
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Re: Using Drain Fatigue / Sleep Offensively

Post by comatosephoenix »

I'm not an expert on game balance, but I don't see there being much of an issue with drain fatigue being a way to functionally kill enemies, damage fatigue is basically the same as damage health, weather or not an enemy or class is vulnerable to one form of damage or another is a classic rpg trope. And sleep spells being the low level mage's ace in the hole against groups of low level enemies is another popular theme.

If enemies follow the same fatigue calculation as the player does, attempting to fatigue out some monsters is an incredibly bad idea. especially if they aren't currently using fatigue from walking or in combat like players do. I do agree that it makes sense some monsters not care at all about fatigue, like undead or atronochs. Although vampires probably need to sleep.

It might be interesting to have a property to prevent stealing fatigue from them.

Also while enemy infighting isn't an important feature there are some monsters that primarily deal fatigue damage, and since fatigue doesn't mean anything to other monsters they will almost always get wiped out if they spawn near a hostile monster group.


The other alternative would be to have fatigued enemies have some kind of general debuff, reduced damage/to-hit/armor
I've seen this in other games but I don't think it really fits with daggerfall's fatigue system.

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