Solinarius

I won't get too into the "good old days", but they did happen, and the hay-day of the DF2 community was very special. That whole era of early online gaming was special (and it will never happen again!). I attribute this to the fact that PCs were rarer and too difficult to understand (due to being less mainstream) for the common, unwise, and hateful people that are so visible today. As a result, there was a higher ratio of reasonable individuals, intellectuals, and cheerful folk to go around. Here's to us!

Eeeeh... I made a big reply to most of your post, but I accidentally closed Chrome (/doh!). To summarize: It's not just the sabers that need work, for their own sake, they need to be better balanced against the Force itself. That's one thing I felt OJP did well. Not that I would like to see a replication of its combat. It's a bit awkward for me to say what "needs" to be done, though, when I have very little frame-of-reference on the Jedi Knight: Enhanced agenda for sabers and the Force.

By the way, when I mentioned "prequels", I meant the Episode 1 movie. Heheh, the saber in DF2 is a joke, without mods (specifically SBX!).

Red spam is more prevelant in JA simply because your arm swing animations lock out when they hit the mid point in any of the main swings.  Where as JO just does the full/complete swing.  It's a matter of debate whether it is better.  But that is the core reason for pokes in JA.  You can still do it in JO but without the animation lock up it does mean you have to time your swings a little bit more than just spam the red stance all the time.

 

This is more of the reason why yellow is used more in JO vs. JA regardless of code changes and what have you.  Yellow is the middle or the core saber stance.  It's in all saber styles for that very reason.  If you remove the locking out of the swing animation you more or less revert back to JO with people relying more on the speedy swings/stances and less on reds arms locking up at the swing mid point. 

 

Is that better from a gameplay stand point?  Eh, considering how many people NOW in JA are used to that animation lock up, I consider more might complain despite the fact going back to JO it didn't do that.

 

Want a more over the top kinda sabering system you can try OJP Enhanced.  Lot more based on the movie stuff but I'm sure if people played at it long enough you'd probably run into the same kinda people using same moves over and over with fights even in that mod.  It's just what happens.  People find/pick out what gets the fastest kills or can boost there e-peen fastest and everyone else either has to do it or kinda be left in the dust cause crowd mentalities can have a major effect on socialization for folks.

I never played JO/JA online, myself. Still, it's easy to understand why the strong stance would be the most popular. It is cheesy, not only for the reasons you mentioned, but because it effectively ignores saber defense (medium does this as well, to an extent). This is why the best of the saber combat needs to be consolidated, while the rest be restrained, so that abuse is minimal and so the playing-field provides a straight-forward, fair, and rewarding challenge. I also strongly disagree that OJP is over-the-top. It attempts to bring some sanity to the chaos that is the vanilla saber combat. It's vanilla JK that is over-the-top. Even more so than the prequels because Episode I had at least -some- values of real melee discipline and theory mixed in with the "sword clashing".

Hello everyone! I'm Sol, for short. Avid gamer, modding generalist, and a fan of DF and JK since the beginning. Please pardon my current and future enthusiasm, as I really do love these games and I'm Glad to be here .

On topic, I'm going to be brutally honest. I initially loved JO's & JA's saber combat, but over the years, I started nit-picking because it can be so unwieldy and cheesy, depending entirely on how you play. I started a project that, on the surface, is not too dissimilar from other single-player saber improvement mods. However, I focused my mod on making the sabers practical, fluent, and dangerous, without sacrificing speed. My experience and knowledge have taught me that practicality is among the most important foundations for combat (in games and for real). Jedi Knight is no different. While styles have added a measure of strategy to the game, they are poorly balanced and are hardly logical. This is especially true for the dual saber and staff styles, which are highly exaggerated. I'll have to agree that JK is better off without most of the special attacks.

There are still plenty of rough edges with my saber animation edits but overall the combat is very consistent. Aside from the occasional wild graze, you have to exploit openings in an opponent's defense in order to make successful blows. Here's a demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P26egPGxlGw