Combat / Grouping changes.

Some fairly major enhancements made to how combat works both in groups and when attacking multiple targets. Combat should be much smoother now, unused hits roll over to the next target and assisting is pretty much instant. Full details below.

Regular Combat Change:

There is a fairly large change to combat in how hits are used when you have multiple mobs attacking you or your group. None of this affects fighting one mob at a time.

Under the old system, let’s say you normally get 7 attempted hits per round of combat. If you killed your target in the first 2, the remaining 5 might be wasted until the next time the mud updates all combat (every 3 seconds), or you might get a whole full round against the next mob in the line. This was purely random based on where you happened to be in a linked list.

Under the new system, if you kill the mob in the first two hits the next 5 hits will automatically go to the next mob in line. However, you will only get one round of combat, one full round of combat, for each time the mud does a combat update.

Autoassist/Group Change:

This change also required autoassist to be rewritten. The biggest change is how the next mob to kill is selected. Imagine that Razor, Lasher and Testchar are in a group (in that order) and Razor killed the mob before Lasher and Testchar had a chance to hit.

Under the old system a number of things could happen here. Either Lasher and Testchar miss their round of combat completely for this mud-wide combat update, they hit the next mob in line as expected, or they hit the next mob inline and manage to pull Razor back into combat so Razor gets an extra round of combat. There was also a more obscure case where the group, or just some of the group, could now be out of combat completely.

Under the new system, Lasher and Testchar should automatically move on to the next target in line and get their full round of combat, but again, only their full round of combat. Ideas note #15349 (live port) gives an example of some of this.

One other advantage to come out of this is that autoassist can be made much more effective. To start with, as soon as you ‘kill’ something your groupies will autoassist. They won’t actually _hit_ the mob until the next combat update (up to 3 seconds depending on timing), but will immediately be in combat and able to cast their spells etc.

Another change is when mobs are killed out melee combat by skills or spells – groupies would be out of combat until the next mud combat update, which also meant that skills/spells would not work for a round unless the mob name was actually given. They should now switch the mob they are targeting as soon as the tank does.