I've been playing sea of thieves for a while now and really have enjoyed the game. But recently Rare made some changes to pirate combat the I'm not really into, for example, sword gameplay. Now when you use swords you can swing a walk a lot faster than you previously could making it very frustrating when boarding other peoples ships cause you just get hit locked by 2 or more people aimlessly swinging their swords on deck. Which is really overpowered in my opinion and doesn't require much skill on the part of the defender And to make the matter even worse sword blocking doesn't help at all and is one of the least used mechanics in the game (in my opinion), its to easy to bypass the sword block by jumping and other maneuvering techniques. If the sword is to be balanced I think they should let you walk at normal speed while blocking to balance out how easy it is to start to combo someone. The changes they're making to the combat makes it look like they're focusing on the casual players who don't like PVP and only play quest types and grind, not the players like me who enjoy PVP and want to have epic ship battles and Feel amazing when we come out victorious. Instead, when I board a ship I get stuck in place by two guys swinging their swords at me until I die because I can't move.
My second frustration with the combat in Sea of thieves is the Eye of Reach which is sort of useless now that Rare nerfed it. It doesn't really work for up close ship combat since you can't no scope with it. It's also not great for long-range combat since the pistol can do everything a sniper can just without having to take a whole half a second to aim down a scope. and it does only 70% damage instead of 80% now too. At the moment long range combat isn't really a thing in Sea of Thieves because every time you fight someone it's almost always on a ship and when you fight skeletons they spawn so close to you and never stop chasing you that you don't need to use anything longer range than a pistol to kill them. I wish they would find a way to make the Eye of reach relevant in modern Sea of thieves so that when the arena comes out it won't be as useless as it is now.
If you guys have any ideas on how to improve the Eye of Reach im all ears. If you guys don't agree with me or have other ideas lets discuss them in the forum I'd love to hear about any criticisms or ideas you guys might have.
My most important and last complaint with combat is about sprinting and how it relates to PvP in Sea of Thieves
It has been a problem for a while now in my opinion but some of you might not relate with it as much as I do. What I mean when I say how sprinting relating to PvP is the transition from running to firing a gun or reacting with a part of the ship like dropping an anchor and such. For a long time, I have gotten frustrated when I'm on a enemies ship trying to dodge pistol bullets and sword swings by sprinting then when I see an opening to shoot someone I stop sprinting quickly try to aim my gun down sights and shoot.... but even though I'm clicking my mouse it won't shoot until a second or two has gone by. By that time the person has moved or my other opponents have caught up to me have started to combo me with their sword swings which I'm completely unable to get out of so I inevitably die (I also have this problem when I'm trying to quickly lower someone's anchor but I can't do it in time because it won't let me interact until 2 seconds after sprinting). It's very frustrating cause I can't do anything about it and it makes it immensely harder to use my gun on other people ships while sprinting. I really hope they remove the feature in the future for arena so that I'm able to get my shot off quicker. I feel like I get penalized for sprinting when I shouldn't. The only reason it seems like their doing this is because of young Xbox players who cannot move around as quick as some of us so because of that they force us to be unable to interact or shoot while sprinting and a little after..... All I wish is that everything would be more fluent and didn't have as much delay time.
Thanks for reading to the end I know this is a long article so if you have any thoughts on the matter please tell me and ill definitely listen to what you have to say
