Description
Project: War dance is a combat and gameplay mechanic mod that changes the way you fight and adds new mechanics and other systems to support it.
For upcoming milestones or issues, consult GitHub.
Want to join my discord? It's located here.
"Darks Wardance Mega Compatibility Bundle"
Looking for the old out-of-box compat? Data for an ever growing list of mods are available through a datapack by Darkmega located here. It also includes values for "Cloak and Dagger", my stealth mod.
Install the datapack with your favorite datapack handling mod like Openloader or Paxi, or simply insert it into your save games as you would a normal datapack.
Mechanics:
Spotlight videos, in case you don't want to read a giant wall of text. These are outdated, so reading is still recommended:
Posture and Staggering: posture is a separate bar determined by how big the mob is and how much armor it's wearing. When it's full, the mob gets stunned and eventually exposed, taking more damage. It goes up when getting attacked depending on how heavy the attacking item is, and regenerates quickly if you stop getting hit.
Shown as a meter in game. See images tab.
[Imgur](https://imgur.com/8Qi6SLM)[/Imgur]
- Max posture is calculated by (width*height*5), so a player starts with 10 posture.- Being attacked deals posture damage regardless of parry. This makes parrying unequivocally the best option, since you’ll be taking posture damage either way.
- Posture recovers quickly when not attacking, but has a cooldown after being consumed. At full HP, standing still, you regenerate 10 posture per second.
- Armor items may add max posture. Regeneration is a flat number, so it will take you longer to "fully" recover.
- Moving slows posture regen down by 50%, 70% if sprinting.
- Regeneration also is multiplied by your current health percentage.
- If your attack cooldown is less than 100%, you gain an equivalent regeneration penalty
- Dodging resets your posture cooldown.
- This means that while actions play a role, the real deal-breaker is health. Defeating an enemy requires wearing down their health to make staggering easier.
- When the posture bar fills up the entity is knocked back and stunned, gaining 1 fracture, binding both hands and slowing movement. The stagger ends after 1 seconds or taking damage once. During this time posture regenerates rapidly and cannot be depleted until it reaches max again.
- Special case: taking a stunning instance of posture damage that exceeds half of their max posture will additionally knock them down, which lengthens downtime to 3 seconds and disables movement. Skills and certain other attacks may also inflict the "unsteady" debuff, which will do the same.
- The expectation to gain a fracture on a reasonably armored entity (around chain grade) is 8 dagger, 6 sword, 5 claymore, 3 axe, or 2 mace hits. Balance around this.
- Accumulating an attribute-defined quantity of fracture marks instead exposes the entity for 5 seconds. In this state the entity cannot do anything, has all armor negated, and the next hit on it deals an extra 10% of its max health in damage.
- Fracture marks are cleared after exposure. Killing any entity that fractured you will also clear any fractures they inflicted on you, as well as any ownerless fractures.
Parrying: keep your weapon or shield in front of you to guard yourself against melee attacks. Shields also protect you from projectiles and give you some extra posture.
- Vanilla blocking will still mitigate damage, but will also reset the posture cooldown without refreshing the combo cooldown, making it less desirable.
- By holding a “weapon” and orienting yourself towards an attack, you can parry it.- Idle parrying negates damage, but not posture consumption nor attack effects.
- Notably, items have a parry multiplier that is multiplied with the posture damage. This multiplier will additionally multiply the knockback applied to both parties after a parry.
- Shields also parry projectiles
- Projectiles can be configured to consume different amounts of barrier, still trigger their non-damage effects on impact (e.g. a grenade will explode), or be deleted outright (e.g. shulker bullets).
- By popular demand, there is now a config option to restrict parry to a small frame of time after pressing a keybind, because it's more "tactical" or "fun" or something. I don't think it really works in minecraft, but people keep asking for it, so it's there now.
Dual Wielding and Combat Mode: attack with weapons in both hands; shift+R to enter a special state that displays more relevant information.
- Pressing shift+R by default enters combat mode.
- In combat mode, normal key function is overridden with PWD key functions where applicable. (so if middle click was set to use skills, it would use skills instead of pick block or whatever else it's set to!)
- relevant HUDs and your offhand (if it is empty) also only show up in combat mode. The one exception is posture, since it's rather essential to not dying.
Might
- Might is gained at a flat rate every attack, with slower weapons granting dramatically more, charging a bar that can be filled up to twice by default.- After remaining out of combat for 10 seconds, might will relatively quickly drain to 0.
- Might is generally completely consumed in a single cast to augment specific skills.
Spirit
- Spirit is a bar of icons on your HUD that are consumed in discrete quantities to perform certain skills.
- Spirit regenerates at a rate of 1 icon every 2 seconds.
- Consuming spirit or taking damage will pause spirit regen for 2 seconds.
- Spirit will not regenerate when chanting.
Rank
- Rank is gained by a buildup bar that goes up when you gain might, cast skills, kill, or stun/expose a target.- There are seven levels of rank, each rank provides a subtle increase in movement and attack speed that are briefly removed if you take damage.
- S ranks and above also provide a looting bonus to reward fun(tm) farms.
Dual Wielding
- Only "weapons" and "shields" can be swung, and only in combat mode (to prevent accidentally hitting villagers), so buckets and ender pearls will function as normal.
- The exception to the "weapon" rule is fists: they can be swung in the offhand in combat mode.
Two-handing: if you don't want to hold two things, you can also just hold one thing really well.
- You are considered to be two-handing if your offhand is bound, if you are wielding a two-handed item (which also happens to bind your offhand), or if your offhand item is not an item or a shield.
- Two-handing confers many buffs. Maybe too many. Item-specific two-handing bonuses may be checked in the tooltip.
- The price for these buffs is, of course, that you don't have the extra attack or defense from your offhand.
Dodging: double tap movement keys to temporarily avoid damage, sprint+sneak to slide forward. Compatibility with Elenai Dodge 2.
- Double tapping any movement key except forward has you dodge in that direction.
- You can also sidestep by key+sprint. Both are only available in combat mode.
- The player performs a small jump with large horizontal velocity, ending about 5 blocks from where they begin. The cooldown is configurable, but defaults to 0.75 seconds (15 ticks).
- It is intended as a quick way to adjust one’s position around a target or dodge a hit.
- While dodging you are immune to all melee and projectile attacks for 10 ticks.
- Pressing both sprint and sneak will perform a slide forward with the same effect as dodge, but compresses your model down to swimming size. Useful for getting through crawl-holes and whatnot.
- I-frame times can be adjusted in the configs.
- Dodges are suppressed with Elenai Dodge 2 installed, though slides are not.
- Might bonus from rank will also apply to Elenai feather regeneration, but regeneration will be halted by posture cooldown. These features can be individually disabled.
Armor Stats: armor items have more unique ways shape your gameplay.
- I highly recommend installing my other mod, Armor Curve, to nerf vanilla damage reduction. These stats don't really add onto your ability to not die per se, but I think armor curve is neat.
- Armor can have different attributes that slightly modify the aforementioned mechanics. The overall change on feel in gameplay will be outlined below:
- light armor increases posture regeneration speed, so you must manage your own fracture and run away frequently, but can easily come back to continue harassing your enemies. They also have better stealth ratings and often conduct spirit well.
- medium armor increases max posture, which encourages using in-combat recovery and certain reckless tactics like suplex. They also have a deflection rating to facilitate taking a few hits, but low magical conductivity.
- heavy armor greatly increases fracture marks, which allows you to tank. Though you have a higher initial pool of not dying, your relative ability to recover it is poor, so you must seek to overpower your opponents before the "fatigue" kicks in.
- To slightly counteract mixing and matching, armor will grant continuous quantities of discrete attributes. This means that you might not hit a breakpoint for max fracture if you swap out your helmet for a lighter one for the regeneration rate. Your armor choices should be considered carefully.
Stealth: manipulate light and vision to remain undetected in light armor, and deal debilitating backstabs.
Completely moved to Cloak and Dagger!
Sweeping Edge rework: full damage and aim assist.
- Sweep attacks will hit everything in an area for full damage and all enchantment or on-hit effects.
- Aiming is not necessary. Sweep attacks hit a predetermined area in front of you regardless.
- Different weapons have different types of sweep under different circumstances:
"none" attacks... don't sweep at all.
"cone" attacks sweep in a fan with a narrow angle. The angle can be increased with sweeping edge.
"impact" attacks deal splash damage to enemies in a small radius around the hit point.
"circle" attacks deal splash damage to enemies in a small radius around yourself.
"line" attacks deal damage in a straight line, with sweeping edge influencing the width of said line.
"cleave" attacks deal damage in a vertical chop in front of you, with angle determined by sweeping edge.
- Item attacks can be configured to perform extra effects, such as forced crit, damage multipliers, and running commands on the attacker or target.
Skills: special actions that may be performed in combat mode to gain an edge in the fight.
- Manuals and scrolls may be used to learn new skills. Scrolls are found in random dungeon chests and are also given out as rewards for particularly impressive feats while using certain skills. Manuals will automatically overwrite your skill loadout with the loadout stored in the manual, ignoring ones you have not yet learned (unless the manual is set to autolearn).
- Manuals can be generated with the command /wardance manualize [true/false] for autolearning. You can also enter the meditation screen with a valid written book in your hand to convert said written book into a manual. Scrolls can be NBT'd to give a random skill or a fixed skill.
- When you first spawn into the world you are given a random hand-crafted manual. The manual is intentionally incomplete so you may fill it up with other skills you find around the world, and each is crafted to demonstrate some basic skill synergies. You don't have to use the manual if you don't want to, of course.
- Skills must be first set in the skill screen, then brought up in combat mode with the R key as a radial menu. You have 5 active slots, 5 passive slots, and 1 "style" slot.
- When you first enter you are greeted with a screen with a single slot dead center for your stance/art/style. The center info screen gives a welcome message and basic instructions on how to pick a style, and the styles are listed on the left.
- After you pick a style, the slot moves into the bottom right corner and the skill screen appears for you to select your skills. You can pick another style by clicking that slot, but picking another style will clear currently selected skills.
- Each skill has a color, and each style only supports up to a certain number of colors.
- Above the skill selection scroll bar is a list of filter options. You may filter by color or revert to default, which shows all equippable skills. The colors that you currently have are tinted instead of white.
- Each color tab has extra tooltips on mousing over that show their names and short descriptions:
red: dominance. You are mighty. Crush your foes.
green: resolution. Never give, never fall. Be as steady as a wall.
gray: subterfuge. The deadliest strike is the one unseen.
azure: fervor. Implacable, unstoppable. Death rains down in a thousand cuts.
cyan: perception. See all, reach all. None can escape your grasp.
violet: decay. What order has built, entropy shall destroy.
gold: evergetism. A somewhat conflicted category that is built around both group buffs and personal greed.
- All skill icons are taken from Lorc's site game-icons.net.
Configuration: nearly everything can be turned off, datapacking help in spoilers.
- This mod uses datapacks to determine the combat stats of weapons. Place your data under <namespace>/war_stats. For an example, see this json for the vanilla stats. Two-handing bonuses should be placed under <namespace>/war_twohanding, and follow the Attributizer format. It is possible to create stats for an item tag in this manner by prefixing the key with "#", in which case the stats will be applied to any items with the tag that have not been already explicitly defined.
- Different sweeps can be datapacked to occur under different circumstances. Available circumstances are standing (default), falling, sprinting, sneaking, and riding. Only defining one sweep is still acceptable; if you define it under the main object and nothing else, it will be applied to all circumstances. One exception to this is that cone sweeps will automatically be changed to a cleave while falling.
- Armor stats and shield attack speed reduction are provided by Attributizer. For an example, see this json for the vanilla stats provided.
- Special cases of mob parrying (e.g. iron golem having an innate shield against projectiles) can be defined with a json datapack. See this github file for an example that gives the spider a harder shell.
- Use /wardance toggle to turn off specific features (such as parrying or sweep attacks) for specific players.
Miscellaneous Changes/Bonus Features: useful luck stat, manuals and scrolls.
- When attacking, a number is rolled between 0 and (attacker luck-target luck), with damage increased or decreased accordingly. The luck bonus can be adjusted or disabled in the config.