Heccin' mechanic changes

Thoughts and suggestions for some of the core gameplay mechanics that HG has to offer.

1. The Feast:

• Needs some tweaking. As of now you have a choice - spend a lot of time at the Feast (after you've cleared the area out) and lengthen the game significantly (what I mean by this is sticking around to get good enchants on the strongest armour you have, grabbing anything useful (which is another point that needs discussing), and making sure nobody else can get anything from the Feast by burning everything/blowing everything up (which is also a problem :v)) or quickly grabbing a bit of gear and high-tailing it out of there, avoiding any fights but risking dealing with a full Protection II (or even more - there's enough iron in many Feasts to make 6 or 7 anvils) and Sharp II+ player.
• So what can be done? Well, as you may have seen in my main update thread here, which I suggest you check out first, there's a few new Feast designs in the air (literally), and personally, thinking back to the many Feasts I've witnessed, the current Feast make-up is a massive pain. My reasoning for this is that, as mentioned, there is a lot of useful and a lot of semi-useful gear in the Feast - the inner 4 chests are downright overpowered, whereas the second ring contains no armour whatsoever, and the third ring is personally the most useful. For those of you that are unaware of what the Feast contains in each ring, here's a recap:
  
• Inner chests: diamond armour (fully randomized, can be anything from 3 pairs of boots to several sets), diamond swords (practically guaranteed), Poison II (16 seconds), Slowness 1 (60 seconds), Weakness 1 (90 seconds), Instant Damage 1, Strength 1 (20 seconds) (all mentioned potions are Splash potions), bows with the Power 1 enchantment, unenchanted bows, and experience bottles, ranging from 10 to 32 per stack, with up to 3 stacks per chests, arrows (much more common in tier II chests)
  
• Middle ring chests ("tier II's"): mushrooms (both kinds - not necessarily equal), bowls, bows with the Punch 1 enchant, flint-and-steels, lava and water buckets, ender pearls in stacks up to 6, cobwebs, arrows in reasonable quantities (almost always a stack in total)
  
• Outer chests: Iron ingots in randomized stack sizes (often at least 6-10, more or less are quite common due to the intense number of chests), large amounts of wooden planks, large amounts of cobblestone, iron armour (lots of it, you'll find quite a few sets), iron swords, and ender pearls in small amounts, empty buckets, cooked porkchops, cooked steaks

Now, why is the outer ring of chests the most useful (in my view)?
Due to the massive amount of iron you can gather, it's often more worth it to get all of this iron and armour and some of the other gear in the chests than going for the centre chests. These chests are highly contested and you'll find yourself in the thick of things, which can be extremely risky, especially if you have a team or a player is lucky enough to have a Strength pot. If you get all the iron and armour from the outer chests you'll be able to continously craft yourself back-up armour pieces to replace your broken ones - an extremely strong strategy in any long and drawn-out fight, even against a full diamond. You'll also be grabbing ender pearls and blocks on top of buckets - blocks are some of the best tools in your arsenal when it comes to HG, just due to the incredible amount of different uses you can get out of them.

So what can be done?

1. The first step is to change the centre enchanter. This should no longer be a GUI enchanter but give you a completely random enchantment when right-clicked with an enchantable item, with the maximum possible enchant being a Level 1 enchantment in anything. The only enabled enchants for swords are Sharpness (1), Fire Aspect (1), and Unbreaking (1), for armour of any sort only Protection (1) and Projectile Protection (1) as well as Unbreaking (1) are available.
   
2. Next, the enormous amounts of uncrafted iron in the outer chests should be nerfed, with the maximum iron per stack being 8. The chance of iron swords spawn should be increased by around 10%, since this way, unarmoured players can safely get at least a bit of gear. Iron armour spawn rates should remain untouched, but there should be a chance for mushrooms of both kinds and bowls to spawn inside them.
   
3. The tier II chests should no longer contain mushrooms of any sort, but cocoa beans in stacks ranging from 15 to 35, since these are, after all, better chests.
4. The centre chests should have a far lower spawnrate for Weakness pots, but instead a higher spawn rate for Poison pots. The spawn percentage for Strength needs to be decreased dramatically, since they're just too strong. Reduce the spawn rate of EXP bottles as well, since they're also much too powerful with the current kit line-up. The diamond armour spawn rate is also acceptable, however I think there should never be more than 5 of one particular piece of armour in the Feast.
5. Going on from that...tier II chests need to contain something more useful. Sure, to the veterans that still play HG or are popping in from other servers stuff such as water and lava or cobwebs are useful, but the average Raid player (hehe @CARN0) won't know what to do with them and will just ignore the tier II chests. So, the incentive is some special chain armour. This armour will be enchanted, but never with Protection, always with one of the other protection enchants. Additionally, there will always be an Unbreaking II enchant on all of the armour pieces found in the Tier II chests. This makes these chests viable if you want some strong durability back-up armour, especially in a game with few diamond swords involved.
6. And while we're on diamond swords - reduce the spawn rate of diamond swords in the centre chests by a hefty amount. Instead, add pre-enchanted Sharpness 1 iron swords that additionally have Unbreaking II applied to them.

Finally, there's some new special items that need addressing, and then we're through with the items! Rejoice!

• The aforementioned re-applied kit abilities would spawn in the tier II chests, ideally at a low spawn rate, since they're quite strong. Additionally (wow I keep forgetting so much) you're not able to use any given kit ability more than once every 10 seconds - this also counts for using a different ability entirely during these 10 seconds.

And onto some mechanics.

• First off, the bonus Feast spawning in viewing distance of the first Feast, with coords being announced - argh. This has caused me so much irritation in the past, and I'm sure I'm not the only one here. In my view this was a good idea back when the forcefield began to creep into the centre of the map in order to force fights wayy back in the HG beta, but this isn't the case anymore. The bonus Feast needs to spawn a good 250 blocks away from the normal Feast in my view just to stop the normal Feast winner from being unstoppable there as well and let other players have a chance at getting the bonus Feast, especially with the amount of time it can take to loot a Feast.
• Second, the Feast needs to have some more flexibility when it comes to how it spawns in. I already showed a few ideas on the idea thread mentioned several times above, but some completely different and completely new Feast platforms would really spice up the game, and I'm all for crazy and nutty Feasts that differentiate from the "OG" Feast where everything spawns in the middle, or the current Feast (or as I like to call it, "The Ring of improvement"). Feasts where certain kits don't work well or where certain kits that aren't normally viable have a strong advantage, you get the picture. Think big, but think different, because this is where you come in.
• Thirdly, minifeasts need some serious (and I mean serious) reworking. As of right now they are extremely broken and a minifeast is half the game won. Here's just an example of what a normal minifeast looks like the way they spawn today: (this is from a few months ago but the minifeasts are still the same) And yes, those are all Strength pots. That's 80 seconds of Strength with full iron, iron for spare armour, and a lava bucket (granted, as Thor, but still), without any of the flint-and-steels or other lava buckets. This is nuts.

So here's what I propose:

1. Limit the amount of iron that you can get from a single minifeast down to a maximum of 10 (chestplate + sword, basically). Maximum amount of buckets in a bonus Feast down to 2, and a removal of the TNT and the flint-and-steels from them. Removal of the Strength pots, instead, re-add the Poison and Slowness pots you could often find in them.
2. Add the Salvager's Anvil, a special anvil that, when right-clicked with any non-kit item, crafted tool, armour piece, or sword, will return the core ingredient of said item to you - the material used to craft the item, so no sticks or anything. This will decrease down if the item is damaged.
3. Minifeasts currently contain an enchanting table that is useless without lapis lazuli - pointless, in a way, especially since they contain EXP bottles. Therefore, the table needs to be fixed to a normal, infinite lapis table.
   
4. Minifeasts that spawn after the Feast/bonus Feast have, in the past, been ignored completely - why go for something like this when it's pretty much always going to be much more worth your time just scraping up the rest of the Feast/bonus Feast? Therefore, minifeasts that spawn after the Feast has started will start containing double the enchantment bottles and additional de-buffs - Weakness and special 10 second splash Blindness pots. Minifeasts that spawn after the bonus Feast has spawned (and therefore started (lol)) will contain powerful tools such as unbreakable iron pickaxes and fishing rods, additional recrafts, and kit items (see below).
5. Finally, in the past minifeasts were the main (and in some cases the only) way to get your kit items back after you respawned as a player with a rank or if you used them. Minifeasts from before the Feast will contain a gold block that will give you your kit's item(s) and a compass back and drop them onto the ground at your feet if your inventory is full. Minifeasts that spawn after the bonus Feast will contain double these, allowing for kits such as Kangaroo to use their ability all game.

And finally, finally, we get to the most important part of this thread:

The PIT!​

The Pit was, for those of you that don't remember or didn't play then, a huge arena that spawned after 45 minutes, and was essentially a large hollow cylinder that went from ground level in whatever biome it spawned in to y=10. It had some of the biome still up as the top of the cylinder, but was not infinite (it was walled off by a force field). It ended after 60 minutes with the player with the most kills automatically winning the game at this point, and I'd love to see a return, but on a different scale altogether.

1. It will spawn at 50 minutes.
   
2. It will be larger, and there will be less "border room" at the top.
   
3. The Pit would end after 70 minutes, giving you 20 minutes to duke it out (or run away, if you're a Kangaroo).
4. In events, this Pit would spawn at 60 minutes and end at 90.

I haven't worked out the rest yet, but I'm open to suggestions and opinions.

-Sam, always in your hearts (if you support HG, that is )

 

I warned you

But yes, in today‘s meta brute-forcing is much more favorable to big brain plays because strategy is so easy to counter with said knuckleheadedness, I‘ll write a longer response later though.

Alright, so on this:

• Nerfing soup health given or the amount of soup you can carry is not the way to go in this kind of scenario. Soup is such an integral part of HG that, as we saw both on MCPvP and on here, NoSoupHG wasn't popular for a reason - if you want the ultimate nosoup experience, just play UHC or UHCF or whatever. HG's gameplay is just so much more soup-based that you have to buff strategic play, which has the upside of keeping vets happy (xd).
  
• For instance, you could improve tutorials for HG (media team) and make sure that new players pay attention to them by having a reward system in place for completing tasks in a tutorial as well as completing achievements (another idea thread for another day).
  
• You can also just take the reins of strategy-based play and make those reins better, for instance giving certain items less or making their retrieval much more risky.

 

Haha

 

I'm working on it