Re: HeroineRumble - 3D ACT Fighting/Battlefuck/H-Wrestling-new ctrls and balance, Oct
I noticed there's a bug where orgasms don't seem to occur when you win the match with an H-move as long as Amber is involved - you just drop them as if you won with a submission move. It doesn't matter if Amber is the one using an H-move, or having one used upon her - orgasm seems to not trigger.
Also noticed something that -might- not be intentional - I noticed you made sure that grabbing without two Q's beforehand is enabled while an opponent is down, and disabled the instant they use either a roll or wake-up attack. This disabling is not, however, extended to when they stand up naturally after time - meaning you can start a grab while they're standing up and they have to roll or get grabbed. I don't think it's all that big a deal, but seeing as how you disabled this ability upon wakeup and roll I figured it might be against what you wanted.
Finally, it seems you significantly nerfed H-moves damage, yet buffed the per-tick damage of submissions? I know the submission/H balance is a difficult topic, but now it's at the point where you can have a pretty major advantage over AI simply because they occasionally 'waste' their time with H-moves whereas you don't have to if you want to win. I know addressing this issue is likely to be low on your to-do list and grapple reworks are still in the planning stage and all that though, so I'm just going to throw out my ideas on what I think would work based on the current state of the game.
I think you're right when you said H-moves are likely to be used over submissions as long as they fulfill the same purpose and are differentiated only by numbers - which means the core problem is that they do the exact same thing. Solving that is difficult though, as currently health and stamina are the only two resources they can interact with, and H-moves reducing stamina wouldn't really make sense. I know I've brought it up before, but personally I think the best approach is going back to the idea of a third resource, such as a super bar.
As for my ideas on meter now that I've thought on it more and followed this game's progress for a bit - I think the idea of using it for a reversal is unnecessary, as snowball is kind of in the past at this point. I think keeping it simple would be fine - meter is built during all holds to a degree. Submissions do more damage and wear out the opponent faster, H-moves do a lot less damage but build meter slightly faster. As far as what meter is used for, I actually think keeping it minimalistic would be best and only having one super per character. This plays to what you said in how players will generally choose h-moves if submissions/h are equally useful - which means if players have a bar of meter and both the h-move and submission do damage, players will tend towards just using the h-move, in which case you might as well save yourself the animation work. Regular h-moves/submissions will still have their balance however, in that submissions are more number-efficient in terms of doing lots of damage AND building meter, but h-moves will have their benefits in terms of say 20-30% faster meter gain. As for how strong the supers are, I don't think they should be match-winners or anything, but still significant. The simple route would be making them simply more difficult to escape - say perhaps 50% or so, which means a submission super would get 6 or so ticks of damage on a moderately tired opponent as opposed to 3-4. A more flashy/impactful option, for h-supers at least, would be to make them the exact same as normal h-moves, however replace the 'release' command during them with 'bring to orgasm', which does a chunk of damage similar to a throw. In Amber's case she could have a super throw, which is either a stronger throw, or more interesting would be a throw that transitions into an h-move or submission - for example, imagine if after her powerbomb she held them down in that position for an h-move similar to sapphire's grounded up-W, something like that.
Again, I don't expect to see this issue tackled anytime soon, and I'm sure the state of the game will change a lot in the future which could make this idea null and void, so please take it with a pinch of salt. I just mean this to be an example of a realistic possible solution to the h/submission balance issue which wouldn't have a strong effect on the current flow of the game.
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