My many misgivings about Knockback, and a list O'Shenanigans

[Lujo]

Right, so me and Darvin kinda agree that the Bear Mace would still be a kickass item with just +10% damage. I think it even used to be +10% but it got buffed to be more attractive. This now puts it in a spot where it's the item which adds the most +% damage, more than the elite Dwarven Gauntlets but can be prepped on any run on top of your inventory item. This is completely unnecessary.

The problem with knockback being unatractive or scary for newbies is that it's horribly unclear. To this day I don't know about how exactly it's damage formula works, whether for items, boons or Pissorff. This is what's keeping it obscure. Most other things, especially damage adding things are clear, knocback isn't. It's even hard to calculate because you have to hover over your damage to see you base and then see your total knockback and then do math, and for Pissorf it used to be 60% if you hit a monster into a wall and something if you hit a monster into a monster and it's a horrible mess in terms of presentation.

That's the only thing keeping people who aren't running around abusing it from running around abusing it. Everyone else who isn't running around abusing it isn't because it got boring after years of doing it. I don't even know the formulas, but here's what I do know about knocback, and why you could be cheezing it like mad as it kinda slipped testing because other stuff was just presented in a more straightforward manner (and was less complicated):

Regular knocback AFAIK:

- It pushes whatever you hit one square forward.
- If the target hits a wall, the wall is destroyed.
- If the target hits another target both targets are damaged, either for full knockback damage or some percentage of it, but that doesn't matter.
- God alone knows how it interacts with corrosion or resistances.
- If the target has blink it's kinda screwy:
- If the target hits a wall: no blink
- If the target doesn't hit anything (pushed into an empty square): no blink
- If the target hits another target: blink
- If the target hits an undistructable square, map edge, or another monster the target doesn't move

In short: You hit something, it tries to move forward, if it hits a wall or another monster they both get damaged.

Knockback damage & what it means:

- It adds a percentage of your base damage to your attack if you slam the target into something
- It lets you hit two guys with the same attack. Not for same damage, but that doesn't matter.
- You can slam monsters into each other. You don't have to slam them into walls.
- You can slam 2 bossess into one another.
- Every hit causes knockback damage, so if you use a reflex potion, the target is pushed twice so you deal it twice. This can get very stupid in terms of damage output.
- Knocking monsters into one another won't kill the other monster. So if you put a monster behind a boss, and just slam the boss into it, the other monster will be a permanent wall for pemanent guaranteed knockback on the boss.

- Knockback doesn't care about total damage, only base damage. So -% damage (like Mage Plate) doesn't reduce knockback damage or Pissorff DMG. It sure as hell confuses people.

Sources:

- The sources are Bear Mace, Binlor and Dragonkin CP.
- Most you can have on a non-dragon is 90% if you find another Bear Mace in the secret subdungeon. This means 1/4 of runs on any map with secret subdungeons.
- By prepping Binlor and the Mace you can have 65% Knockback on any run.
- The mace can be prepped on any run, as it's a blacksmith item so you can prep something else from the locker on top of it.
- The mace knockback damage is the biggest % based damage increase on an item in the entire game.

Racial Sinergy & Problem w Humans:

- Obvious sinergy with Orcs
- Prepping Binlor and a Bear mace is kinda like starting a run with a 650 CP Human ON TOP of whatever you get from your race and any other benefit you get from other Binlor boons and the general wall destruction and declogging utility. And the actual locker item.
- What's more, if you know what you're doing Binlor also adds another 300 Human CP worth of %based damage increase which also removes resists on every hit.
- This means that it would (maybe?) take a Human blowing all his Glyphs and then some to match just prepping the Mace and Binlor even if you go for a race which doesn't add any damage. I resent this a lot.
- With most classess giving +%dmg instead of +base dmg, Human becomes essentially a really niche guy. Outside of Transmuters (and maybe Monks or whatever), if you'd prep a Human, you're probably better off just prepping the Mace and Binlor for that run and play anything else, doesn't even have to be an Orc.
- The only exception is in VGT where Knockback doesn't work on the boss due to the final level layout, but I still fondly remember when the layout was different. I killed him with a Gorgon by knocking him into walls I made with Imawal repeatedly.


Thing to keep in mind:

Even if you would kill the monster with your knockback damage, it WILL hit you between your regular attack and the knockback even if you have first strike. The order is your hit - their hit unless first strike kills them - knockback.


Shennanigans:

- You hit both bossess with the same attack, doooh. If you can position them next to one another (Wonnafyt, Wheytwut, Pissorff, Melle Knockback), melle the one that does less damage to you, damage them both.

- This often turns one boss into completely effortless popcorn

- This also takes care of many bossess which would otherwise take effort to melee, as you don't even fight them

- Stack with reflex potions, slamming the boss into walls with a string of DP's or TT potions is the cornerstone of many lvl1 bosskills

- Pissorff is a glyph which does the same thing with a penalty to your damage. Still, you're damaging two bossess at the same time with a cheap, spammable glyph which scales with base damage instead of levels. Orc bloodmages are huge clowns who can efforlessly farm VT gold.


Utility shennanigans:


- A Knockback declogs passageways for no mana. Just try to not knock stuff down corridors, but diagonally into walls of said corridors if possible.

- You can destroy statues you make with Imawal for no mana and get gold.

- You can farm Binlor piety for no mana. Strong enough to get wormonger Gorgons through Grimms Grotto (if not even VT runs).

- Also keeps the 30% Might buff from Binlor's Stone Something boon up effortlessly if you keep slamming something into walls.

- Keep blinkers from blinking by slamming them into walls (even position them by pissorffing/knockbacking them into empty spaces towards a wall)

- Remove death protections 2X as fast from guys who have them.

- Slam monsters into a boss. Position a few of them next to a boss with knockback, heal up, and just start slaming them into it.

- Position a monster behind a boss, and just slam it into the monster. Perma knockback on boss.

- Slam an easy to melle guy (Say Meat Man) into a difficult to melle guy (Say a Naga) then First Strike/Firaball/Pissorff the other guy.

- God knows what else



"Crazy stuff":


- Lvl 1 bosskills. Just Dodgestep + a lot of knockback and base damage.

- JJ piety farming, apparently. If you knockback a monster right in front of you in the fog, you'll get piety for revealing it again. Exploity as hell.

- If you reduce your damage via Mage Plate or whatever other %based way (say Mage Plate + very early JJ desecration and several Taurog punishments however that works), this doesn't affect Knockback damage. Then just put a platemail on a Dragonkin and slam a low damage Meatman into a boss. Not sure to what extent this works, but people have been slapping plants into bossess to kill them.

- Abuse Pissorff spellcasters. Prep binlor as he gives a free Pissorff. Crystal ball effectively reduces your pissorff cost by one, and if you're slamming into walls so does Rock Heart (or at least it used to).

- Orc Bloodmages. Gety our health up at a very low level so that you can get a lot of B2P out of a full pool (not necessary, but why not, it's good). Line up bossess so you slam one into another, or a boss so that you slam him into a monster. Go nuts, convert anything that doesn't give more base damage unless you convert it or possibly upps your mana and keep a getindare around if you see one, just keep going. Ding on popcorn if necessary, once one boss croaks (getindare helps), finish off the other one easily. Farm any VT where you can reach bossess untill you have your entire kingdom upgraded.

- Orc Wizards, same thing pretty much, just takes a bit more effort.

(the list goes on, I'm just tired).






Bear mace ought to be 10%. you can find that thing in 1/4 of all secret subdungeons and prep it on any run, and knockback has both utility and power, it doesn't have to encroach on the human as much, or make the mace such a monster prep.

Knockback is complicated and worded in silly ways. There HAS to be something that can be done about it.


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IMPORTANT TIP for people complaining about bossess spawning in or near corners - this can occasionally happen. If you're relying on knockback, don't convert WONNAFYT, WHEYTWUT or PISSORF and see if you can position another monster so that you can slap the boss into it. It's worse than slapping two bossess into one another but you still get more damage on the boss that you would otherwise. One of these kinda always spawns.

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ALSO IMPORTANT - see how complicated it looks if you write it all (not even all) down? Looks lke it takes a lot of game knowledge to get use out of it? WRONG. You just hit sh**t and it dies faster than it would otherwise.

It works regardless of whether you have a clue about how well it's working. THATS why it's not been complained about, it's easy to not pay attention to or even calculate how much it's doing for you, or even realize that Binlor is in fact a god of huge damage, but you don't have to have a clue about half of this to kill stuff dead with it. People were picking the damned Binolr Boons up because they raise magic resists or remove walls (and because why not), and bringing the mace in because it helps farming binlor. It just takes you a while to realize where all the bigass damage is coming from.

I was overprepping Binlor just as a maphack. I actually wondered many times about why he was even in the western, fighter themed direction when he "doesn't add any damage", all the while having about a 1000 Human CP stapled onto whatever in a way which made it difficult to know what's going on. I'm not even kidding.

[Tinker]

Wow, lots of stuff, lots of passion.
1. I agree that knockback isn't very clear. Especially since half the time the battle predictor doesn't predict it correctly, especially with the kinky interactions with Corrosion/Strength/Resists/etc.. I kind of get the feeling, that it was also not entirely clear to the devs...
2. From a strictly bonus damage point of view, I think the devs used a rough 2:1 rule of thumb ratio when assessing balance (at least, human/half-dragon conversion, and item bonuses, seem to follow roughly this). Which is, I think, fine, because yes you can line up things perfectly to bring this closer to a 1:1 ratio, but then you spent resources doing that (i.e. over-exploring behind a monster, or using teleportation glyphs, or spamming PISORF just to move stuff). Which is hardly worth going out of your way for, if all you have is a single Bear Mace.
3. The maphack aspect is something that doesn't bother me because the reason it's important at all to begin with is how some maps can make you lose without even playing the game, which is arguably the least amount of fun you can have anyway. That said, I'd pick Titan Guitar if I wanted to be certain and really get it off the table.

[Lujo]

1. All I know is that I don't know (possibly there's legit reasons I just don't know them) what's with the whole 60% into walls 50% into monsters (and whether that's 25% to each) on Pissorff, but it makes it look like something that needs a tech manual. I know the devs gave it a shot at clearing it up, and I did post about it ages ago (and not just me), it's just that the whole thing adding another calculation which includes the sorta hidden base damage on top of the regular +% damage + interactions with corrosion and resists make it look unapealing to do maths on experiment with. Or keep track of.

And the whole thing is really, really simple, all it needs is a number of how much damage you do shown. "Pissorf: Push monster forward. If it hits a wall or another monster Pissorf does *current damage number* physical damage to it. This number is X% of your base damage." That assuming the damage for walls and monsters is made the same. Otherwise: "Pissorf: Pushes monster forward. If the monster hits a wall it recieves *number* physical damage. If it hits another monster they both recieve *number* physical damage. These numbers are X% and Y% of your base damage."

Would do wonders. Way things are now, i know I don't know the exact formula, but am farming the VT with it, which is just silly.

2. Idk, I never saw lining things up as very complicated, not even when I was a newbie. You need 2 monsters one next to the other, how complicated is that? People do way more complicated things all the time, why is this seen as complicated?

3. The maphack aspect isn't the problem anymore, it's just that the mace serves the purpose kinda well enough that it doesn't really need that much damage, and because actual knockback damage is so hard to keep track off that Binlor was historically seen as something you prep for wall / resistance removal. Even though he actually gives you huge damage.

You could see this in the complaints about Binlors resistance removal boon being nerfed seen as "crippling to Binlor". Binlor gives you +70% damage! That's more than any other god, it's huge! Especially with Bear Mace, which sinergizes for easy piety and currently turns is into 95%. So people would prep him and just pick all that damage up nonchalantly and complain about the nerfs to the damage resistance removal boon, and not really attribute the sucess of their runs to all that damage because it didn't show up on the interface.

You had crazy situations where at the same time someone would be posting about Binlor being underpowered in one thread, and in another thread a newbie repeatedly failing VGT, but doing it on the first try after being told to "just go Binlor Paladin" (due to suddenly having more damage than any other single source in the game gives you, by a wide margin, I think). That's the thing with knockback, you can make it arbitrarily huge, and people can not notice it even while using it, and that's all about presentation.

If you prep a mace with Binlor right now - it's kinda too much. And I suppose people prep it every time they prep Binlor, because it would have sinergy with him even if it did no damage. If you prep it just for the utility, you don't need the damage at all. If you find two maces - hey, 20 or 30 % extra damage you didn't pay anything for would still be perfectly legit. And if you prepped it for the damage - why is there a damage item that gives more damage than anythign you can put in your locker, but preps on top of whatever's in the locker?

[dislekcia]

This is literally trying to create an issue where one doesn't exist, presumably for drama purposes. This is the last I will post in this topic, if it gets out of hand it will get locked.

1. Blink is simple: If a monster is next to you after a combat, it blinks away. Monsters are not next to you after you hit them away from you with knockback. If you hit a monster into another monster, it can't move and thus is next to you, so it'll blink. ROCKET SCIENCE!

2. Of the last 856741 recorded runs (easily accessible in our DB right now):
188900 used blacksmith preps
64246 used badge of courage
58706 used sword
35234 used shield
13925 used slayer wand
13256 used bearmace
3533 used really big sword

That is totally how we expect people to be playing the game. What's the concern here, that something is good? Yeah. It is. Cool

[Lujo]

I don't know what to say.

The concern here is that the Knockback tooltips/mechanics are unclear compared to most other stuff, and if they weren't the statistics would've been looking different. Now I remember you explaining the blink bussiness before, but I never remember it any time I start the game up again, and I use knockback all the time. I assume since many other people don't use it they don't even get far enough with it to be confused by that. I personally don't even know how the Pissorf formula works exactly.

What I do know is that if you could see the pissorf damage as a number, or your current knockback damage as a number somewhere statistic related to it would be different. So would the attitudes towards related features.

No drama, plain fact. Whether you care or not - that's something I can't influence.

[Tinker]

[Blovski]

I'm not really agreeing here - Knockback is a reasonably high-skill tool (compared with the plain bonus damage items) requiring secondary glyphs (Pisorf, Weytwut) to get the most you can out of it. I mean, it might be above the power level of other Blacksmith items for an advanced user but then again, compared with Perseverance Badge it's a full slot (big deal with some gods/loadouts) and it's got a little less early-game whack than the sword or board into Transmutation Seal trick.

Personally I think it's really cool that stuff like Peekaboo exists, and I think having a Warmonger utility item is completely essential for a lot of dungeons. Knockback + blink has never puzzled me (compared with the slow+blink interaction which I never realised until people told me off for doing Wizard Silver (I think?) wrong. It's kind of disingenuous to act like using Bear Mace + Binlor's boon (which, emphatically, takes some time and a lot of your precious walls to get), even if you do it properly, is identical to having 65% Attack Bonus, given it necessarily involves some preparation and thought about it.

Yeah, everything you've listed is true but they're a range of approaches, a lot of which are exclusive of each other (hence, stopping blinkers and Stone Form farming and best-practice declogging and JJ piety farming and so on all clash with each other in some way or other).

[Lujo]

How is using Wheytwut to put someone next to someone else "reasonably high-skilled"? It's a starting glyph that lets you move somebody somewhere. If you've got knockback, and knocback is worded to do what it does, and you decide you want to apply this ability, then you want to move someone where you can knock him back into someone. You'd have to not understand what knockback or wheytwut do at the language level for this to be complicated. What is "low skilled" then?

As for the Bear Mace having less wack than the sword early, later it has more damage than anything else. It's 1 damage per level, past lvl 4 it's better than the fine sword, at lvl 7 it's better (and more stable) than the trisword. I don't even remember when was the last time I've prepped the Blacksmith sword (I know about the seal trick, there's just better uses for the seal). If, for sake of argument, it actually said +1 damage per level, it'd say it's reasonable to assume noone'd ever prep the sword over it. Or consider it a waste of a big item slot - because if you wanted damage, what exactly would you put in that slot?

I didn't say that the utility of the Bear Mace is the problem at all. Only in the case of peekaboo where prepping the mace is a nobrainer choice considering what you get for it. In theory it might look ok, in practice you're getting slotless benefits which outweight items before you actually need any items. When you have what you want, you can just ditch the mace. Once you know about it, prepping it or not prepping it isn't really a meaningful choice, unless you decide you want to have less JJ piety. The only real question is whether it's a (edit) doubledoom type map, otherwise you lose out on a blacksmith item, but I don't think any other one can compare to what you get this way for just exploring.

Disingeniuos? I'm prepping Binlor for the explicit purpose of having +65% to +95% damage by taking 2 of his boons everywhere but VGT. I use the glyph he gives me and the mace I prep, to get 5 piety per every wall I destroy, and take those two boons, and as a reward I have the highest and the most effortless damage buff that I'm aware of in the entire game. I'm not somehow lying to myself about that, am I? Because if I am, what is doing my base damage worth of damage to the monsters on top of my melle attacks every time prep Binlor?

How is it disengenious to say that having 65% of your base damage in knockback if you prep a knockback item and a god that enables knockback and rewards you for knockback, different than having 65% attack bonus? What preparation does it take? You're worshiping a guy who rewards you for destroying walls, for which he can reward you with +40% damage. If you took his +30% damage boon, he also rewards you for destroying walls by upping your damage further. This is the most obvious reason to prep Binlor, everything else is way more convoluted and advanced - you prep him with Bear Mace, you get 65% knockback and 30% more whenever you either destroy a wall through either knockback, any of the 2 glyphs he gives you, or taking his stoneskin boon (using the piety you get by using the previous two methods).

You get ~ double damage. That's what's Binlor is about, everything else is advanced, this is about as subtle as Taurog. You run out of walls in one spot, you move a guy next to more walls or to another guy, whatever's closer. It's impossible that this is complicated, I've seen with my own eyes free mobile app games for kids with more complex and fiddly mechanics than this basic Binlor gameplay. And I don't prep him for anything more complex, I prep him when I want really simple, quick, huge melle damage, which I would otherwise maybe prep humans for except this takes less effort and gives more in return and declogs the map.

And if I'm prepping the mace for utility, and I've got something in my locker for damage, why does the mace have to outperform all my locker options on it's own?

What I'm saying about the Bear Mace is that it's widely applicable in many situations and many different approaches, why does it have to stack with the god it allready has so much sinergy with in a way which pushes his allready large damage increase all the way to almost 95%, or even just a stable 65%. If you take all of Taurogs stuff you get +20%, 5 damage and no utlity.

[Darvin]

[Lujo]

^ And that's the whole of it. It adds too much damage to the allready high damage boost Binlor gives you, and it adds too much power for too little effort to JJ. I'm not even saying good shouldn't be allowed to be good, just that it's a tad too sinergistic with those two.

And I strongly disagree that knockback is a complicated mechanic, it's just that the exact number of how much damage you do is not listed anywhere in game. If the player could actually see it, they'd find ways to get it to trigger in no time.

As for Slayer Wand - it's better than it looks, especially for Vicious spellcaster runs. You get level up without expending anything by zapping a big guy you wouldn't kill anyway.