MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Picked up playing Minecraft again

After roughly 6-ish months of not playing, this past Sunday I decided to update my server from 1.8 to 1.10 and check out the new features along with a handful of friends.

This evening, the better half provided a phenomenal example of why you should always verify the mechanics of how fire spreads in the game on the wiki before you build a fireplace in a building made of wood:

http://i.imgur.com/CY2A0u0.png

That's the damage that happened in the roughly 30-60 seconds it took me to log onto the server's control panel and kill the stupid thing. I ended up downloading the map onto my local machine, then went into creative mode and did a /gamerule doFireTick false to stop the fire from spreading, then manually cleared out all the fire and reuploaded the map. I figure everyone deserves a mulligan at some point.

The one thing that pisses me off about this update is how they changed the combat mechanics in 1.9. Everything else is great, and I love the idea of shields that you can put a banner on, but the combat modifications seem entirely arbitrary and half-baked.

The main two changes which I can't stand, in no particular order:

- Prior to 1.9, a sword swing was downward, and had a width of roughly 1 block. I could easily target a specific cow or whatever in my animal pens if I wanted to cull some of them. In the 1.9 update, your sword now swings in a horizontal arc, affecting roughly a 4-block-wide swath in front of you. In practice, this means that I can't cull the goddamn adult animals without also taking out a few of the baby animals in the process. And honestly, if you've got 3-4 creepers or other baddies all within striking distance, you're fucked anyway. It just strikes me as a change for the sake of making a change, rather than anything that has any practical benefit outside of PvP.

- Prior to 1.9, you could spam sword swings to some extent and easily take out mobs, but there was still a brief cooldown, and the game more or less enforced a cooldown as well by knocking the mob back a bit. You could do an overpowered swing by hitting the mob with the sword while in midair, and there would be visual feedback by way of a particle effect, and everything was grand. Now in 1.9, they nerfed how much mobs get knocked back, and not only that, there's a longer cooldown period during which your sword does absolutely fuckall in damage. The problem is there's no visual feedback that you have this cooldown debuff apart from a tiny icon on your crosshair which is easy to lose sight of when you're concentrating on the creeper in front of you. I've been surprised several times now because I've been swatting at a creeper 10+ times with an enchanted diamond sword only to have the damn thing still explode.

At any rate, I like all the other changes, but the combat really shits me.