It doesn't feel right, it's a turn-based combat, and a fast character getting several turns in succession, sure, but infinite turns?
Perhaps it would help to look at it from different perspectives. One way is that it is the same attack, Feng sacrificed a normal attack opportunity to attempt to land a heavy blow. You can either use Power to stop her and nullify the attack chain, dodge the first stage and lead to her launching a follow-up, or accept the blow and proceed as normal. If you dodge and she follows up, phase two plays out similarly with either stopping her, dodging while she uses the opportunity to set up the biggest strike in the chain, or giving up and letting her finally land a blow. Phase 3's dodge leads to Feng using the momentum from the movement to restart the chain or you can give up and be struck. However, using Power here allows for special counters due to the broad movement leaving Feng wide-open. You can either use it as an opportunity to stun her or use it to launch a reversal counter. Defeating Feng via the reversal is the optimal decision as this rewards 3 relationship points with Feng.
Another way to look at it, Feng used an attack opportunity/turn to launch an attempted guaranteed hit via an infinite combo that continues until she either lands a blow or is countered. She could have attacked normally and likely hit given accuracy and evasion chances. While she keeps swinging and can eventually land a blow if not countered, ultimately you still only receive a single attack as a result of this. Feng keeps up the same series of blows until one lands but the player does have turns between them to either counter, dodge, or wait. It still boils down to 1 successful attack or put another way, the player is able to respond to every one of Feng's actions. It may not be a true attack response but it is a response.
It does stand out, but there are even more egregious combat events that can lead to truly being unable to counter and escape if your fetishes are high enough and you have enough stacks of Trance like in Phase 2 of Sofia's third fight or the instant OHKO that Sofia can launch as well if truly enraged via Holy attacks. It is not a true infinite combo that would continue until you are defeated, just until either a single move lands or she is countered. So in terms of turn economy, it is still ultimately 1 successful attack to 1 turn used.
While you may agree or disagree with this reasoning, I do hope that you find this discussion productive,
Master of Puppets.
Actually, I can kind of understand questioning the "infinite turn" setup. If you can't break out of the chain by dodging, why even include it as an option? It's pretty much pointless, since it doesn't do anything. Now, if you needed to do it 3 times in a row (or just passing multiple checks), I can accept that kind of compromise between "Feng is an incredibly skilled martial artist" and "it's still a viable means of escape if you're skilled enough."
The issue is that the option is rendered completely pointless. There is essentially no reason to insert it or keep it there because it does nothing. You can argue it's there from a story perspective, like "Feng is super fast, okay we can show this by making it impossible for the MC to dodge this specific attack combo" but then that conflicts with her in-game stats as well as any potential future encounters that also run on speed-demon setups. Gimmicks aren't really something you should rely on. Niches? All for it! But gimmicks are usually too much of a crutch. Please note that I'm not saying Feng as a whole is gimmicky, but that having the option to dodge yet making it pointless is.
This isn't to say a character can't be both good and gimmicky (e.g, a sub-boss dream demon with a sleepy demeanor and weak physical form, coded to cast a superpowered sleep spell at the beginning of a fight that you must dodge/be explicitly equipped against or risk an instant loss), but they're rare and typically have to be exploitable in some way in order to be balanced. There's a few exceptions, but I can only really think of one or two at the moment, and even then one of them is mostly only strong because her stats were inflated to fit her role as a boss monster.
Now, I imagine this would be pretty complicated and annoying piece to code for a relatively simple encounter, but the "best of both worlds" between story and gameplay that I can think of is doing a multi-check on stats.
If you really want to keep the "unstoppable onslaught" feature, it should be tied to her superboost towards the final part of the fight; then you can write something like... let's say, after the game notices your attempts to dodge a few times in a row, it'll have the player character realize she's too swift, too flexible to allow you room for a counterattack and that you have to use either a power check or just let her hit you outright.
The entire thing is obviously more of a Quality of Life change rather than a pressing matter that immediately needs to be fixed, but the whole "pointless dangling option" isn't really sensible to keep around. You'd imagine that after the first 100 attempts, a 40 INT PC would realize that he has to try something else.
All in all, though, I'd definitely prefer a Labyrinth release over something as out-of-the-way as this! It's more like something you'd expect to be patched as a refinement, right before the full game is officially released.
Apologies for the wall of text. Hope this helped explain at least part of the thought process behind MoP's complaint.
Dodging is not really pointless and she isn't unstoppable during the combo. She can be stopped at any time by using Power to counter her. Dodging though leads Feng to making bigger movements and this culminates with the 3rd strike of the combo. The key is to dodge twice and then use Power on the third attack when she is wide open as you can either use it as an opportunity to stun her for a free action your next turn or if you are confident in your Power, attempt to finish her then and there with a special reversal attack. Winning via this special counter awards 3 points of progress/affection with Feng and can help with advancing her relationship. So it may appear to be pointless without this knowledge of how the game works, but it truly is not since dodging allows you to bait Feng into making the attack that leaves her open for this counter and special victory. Now this does mean you need to have invested into two stats, Power and Technique, to take advantage of the situation, but it does ultimately serve a purpose.
As for the implications of the ability, it is not that Feng is so fast that she cannot be evaded, the player is able to get out of the way and dodge the attacks after all and can even catch her and counter her mid-swing. A different view is the inertia from the movements, Feng is moving both swiftly and forcefully with full body movements for the attacks of this combo. She's either throwing her herself into you with a hip check, jumping off the walls and flying at your face ready to knock you down and wrap her legs around you, or finally throwing everything to a broad leg sweep. If you stop trying to get out of the way or attempting to counter her and try to attack normally, she'll slam into you full force with nothing to mitigate the impact. You could frame the "wait" options as not adjusting to her attacks and deciding to keep fighting normally, which would lead to being hit and then responding when your turn arrives afterwards. So rather than Feng just attacking without the chance to respond, the player is able to respond but has to adjust accordingly since Feng is changing the nature of the fight to temporarily be more aligned with her martial arts and taking advantage of the fact you're fighting in her room where she trains to utilize the environment given she is literally bouncing off the walls as a part of this combat event. So unlike Mika who will slam into the wall and daze herself if the player moves out of the way of her pounce, Feng will instead react, jump, and push off the wall to keep pressing the attack.
This could perhaps be flawed reasoning, but I do hope that you find this informative,
Kaftein. You may also derive some value from this
Mustang Flex given some of the speed arguments.
As a final word on the combat event and not playing devil's advocate, an eventual off-ramp where Feng will give up the assault if you keep dodging is perfectly sensible and I understand the sentiment and the desire to make the dodging options more effective rather than them just leading up and feeding into an enhanced counter via Power. It probably wouldn't hurt for such a termination of the combat event to award affection/progress as well. Perhaps not as much as the reversal option given that requires a display of both Technique and Power to achieve, but a point or two of progress would not be remiss in that situation for the impressive feat of being able to keep up with and avoid Feng's attacks repeatedly. So just for clarification, I'm not dismissing the arguments being made but am rather offering up potential reasoning for why this combat event currently plays out this way.
Now for the update news, bugfixing is continuing and there have been some modder focused changes as well. Not many specifics but one shared change is that the DefeatMonster function now uses the exact same call as defeating a monster in combat, so all experience and item drop effectors will now apply properly.
I know this isn't the most exciting news nor is it very detailed, but I do hope that everyone interested in this information finds it at least a little useful.
As for modding news, Kaa has updated Loretta the Pale Priestess to v1.5. The changelog is rather brief as the mod has been streamlined, Loretta has new combat moves, and a new loss scene. As always, the Pale Priestess mod can be found on Github
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.
Additionally, Waifupocalypse has received a bugfix update courtesy of epickark. This update also includes Darthsawyer's transparency background edit for Metatron's art. If you prefer the old version, Metatron's image folder contains both pics, just remove the _ from _Metatron. A Direct Link for downloading the most recent build of Waifupocalypse is available on the
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page of MGD's wiki.
I do hope that everyone interested in modding MGD finds this at least a little helpful.
