Doc_Scorpion

Spinning off from the Bofuri fan thread... My top prospects for Fall 2022, in no particular order: Encouragement of Climb: Next Summit Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury My Hero Academia 6 Spy X Family: Part II Bocci The Rock! shows promise after one ep, but I'm not ready to call it a contender yet.

Farted around with my lvl 30 bots/FF at +0x2... Definitely hitting endurance issues with all three pet classes. Never actually ran out in any one battle, but there were a couple of times it came close when I tangled with another spawn too quickly. A touch or three of +recovery definitely seems in order.

I do NOT miss Mentor Tetris. Auto-sidekicking to the star holder's level or the TF level was a godsend.

2nd season premiers in January! New Key Art! New Trailer!

It does not effect a "small subset of the game" - it affects every TF, SF, story arc, and radio or newspaper mission from lvl 21 (the lowest you can exemp/Ouro and have a T9) onwards to level 34 (currently the lowest you can have a T9 fully slotted). And that's without considering players that are exemped up [into things like the very popular PI radios]. @ScarySai is correct that it mostly effects the mid 20's, but there are effects above and below that range. And significantly there are effects on one of the most popular TF's in the game. True. Above a certain minimum sample size, it will remain a significant number no matter how large the base number. We also don't have the numbers to support your assertion that there won't be a significant impact.

This is not some we, the volunteer playtesters, can adequately test in Beta. You'd need hundreds of runs with a wide variety of teams to even begin to approach valid numbers. (There's simply too many variables.) And, as has been explained to you before, that's the problem here - we're attempting to examine the cumulative effects of hundreds and potentially thousands of runs of a wide variety of TF's, SF's, story arcs, and radio/newspaper missions. Approached as a Fermi problem, it's fairly straightforward to see that over time decreasing the effort (time) needed to complete a task will result in many more completions of that task. I mean, if it takes me thirty minutes to finish a task, I can complete it 16 times in an eight hour working day. If I can reduce that to a 27 minutes - I can complete it 17 times. A 6% increase in productivity. (And that's rounding down and ignoring the leftover .779 completion each day.) Now multiply that by dozens of people working on the same task and multiply it across time.... That 6% starts to add up to Really Big Numbers of increased completions. And that's where the questions come in. How will it affect the market? What are the long term effects of playing into the existing meta that speed and steamrollering is desirable behavior? Etc... Etc... Because it's absolutely unquestionable that there will be effects.

Did some farting around with my lvl 30 bots/FF and lvl 14 bots/EA last night... At low levels of difficulty, robot endurance wasn't really an issue on either toon. Streetsweeping against orange and red conning mobs, endurance wasn't quite an issue but the Protector Bots and the Assault bots were very low by the end of the fights. I can see how higher difficulties and longer fights could have problems. Maybe a bit of a Regen boost to help offset the increased END usage? Or add something to Supremacy or the Maintenance Drone?

People had lives then too. Your argument is nonsense and will always be nonsense. "Casual" means "can play without complex prerequisites". I.E. you don't need raids, or groups of specific character types, or specific equipment, or specific builds, or max levels/skills, or any of the other crap that infests other games. At it's heart, CoX was built around the PUG - "every archetype can contribute, no archetype is required". It very emphatically does not mean "ever decreasing levels of effort for ever increasing levels of reward".

*nods* That's my Beta pattern. Street sweep around Atlas for a level or two, jump to 6 and run KR radios, then work upwards by steps - generally right at the bottom of a zone's range. (Because in my experience that's where the rude surprises usually lurk.)

Collect the whole set!

A couple of minutes shaved of a single run of a single TF, no. That's not that big a deal any more than one raindrop is that big a deal. When you consider hundreds or thousands of story arcs and task forces over a span of time... That one raindrop becomes a flood. Reward merits are based on the time and effort required - and if those averages drops markedly, then the rewards must perforce follow.

Playing my bots/EA into their mid-teens, and dang am I glad I have a heal [Rejuvenating Circuit] because otherwise these levels are sucking without the support previously provided by the Protector bot. Secondaries w/o a heal and/or builds w/o the Healing pool are going to be at a serious disadvantage in these levels. Proposal - take a leaf out of the Mercs powerset. The first Protector Bot summoned is a CSU (Combat Support Unit) with the ability to cast Force Shield and and to perform minor repairs on other robots. (I.E. it has the current Repair ability, but w/o requiring Equip.)

Please, remember, exemping is a thing. And you also have to consider 'trollers and Masterminds - which, especially the latter, don't need slots do be significantly useful. (And honestly, in my experience, most T9's provide some level of usefulness even with the default single slot.)

I copied over my lvl 29 bots/FF from live, and she pretty much cruised through street sweeping in Bricks and a number of Alignment missions. (Especially when I leveled to 30 and picked up Upgrade.) I'm currently running a low level bots/EA through King's Row on Brainstorm and not noticing any significant problems. Both on default difficulty. The lvl 29 especially felt more lethal. No changes were required to my usual playstyle other than becoming a bit bolder with my bots/FF.

Potentially. Much depends on how, if, NCSoft decides to handle the matter... and we just don't know for certain.

Trust me, I've been on staff for day and weekend events all the way from head honcho on down... It's a *much* bigger [censored] headache job than you realize. I'm not saying it couldn't be done or shouldn't be done - just that you should disabuse yourself of the notion that it "wouldn't take much".

That would be true if CoX was a solo game. CoX is not a solo game.

True. But this issue is about much more than even level characters facing even level content. It's also about characters exempted down from higher levels. For example: Without this change, there's simply no way to get a T9 into Yin - it caps at 25 and T9's are level 32, seven levels above the cap and outside of exemplar range. With this change - T9's are level 26, well inside exemplar range. At some cost, someone as low as lvl 32 could pop into a Yin with their T9 fully slotted. And of course lvl 50's have even less of challenge to facing Clamor and her horde with a fully kitted T9. As I view it, that's the real potential for problems - high level toons exemped down into lower level content with a heavy hitting power previously unavailable in those ranges. And then there's Masterminds. Their T9 doesn't need slots to produce an instant and practically always on increase in power.

Saw you on Brainstorm yesterday, looked pretty sharp!

The Maintenance Drone *poofs* on zoning. Bug or WAI? (If the latter, it's mildly annoying but so far doesn't feel like a deal breaker.)

It's easily testable by those of us who play in the mid levels and don't rush to 50. (Me? I've only got two 50's out of twenty five odd characters - my two signature characters.) It's also easily testable by exemping down into a mid level Task or Strike Force. (Given the number of people who exemp down for the Weekly Strike Targets, this is particularly important to test. There's a reason why previous posts have been excited about Yin.) That being said, I have a lvl 29 bots/ff MM that I've been running heavy on Brainstorm to test those changes. Went ahead and unlocked XP and popped up to 30 to pick up Upgrade Robot (rather than messing about with a respec), and it's a pretty significant power boost. Between that and the upgrades to 'bots she's markedly more lethal. She's got quite a bit of solo work left to do at 29, and I'll definitely be respecing her when this goes Live.

You're still slot bound though... So that offsets getting that nuke early just a little bit. OTOH, it's going to considerably change late 20's play for MM's - because their T9 is useful even without slots.

If you haven't tested it, you're "seeing" anything - you're just guessing. Take your bots out for a spin on Brainstorm and work with facts and knowledge. (I have, at least briefly. So far I haven't found anything that feels like a significant nerf.)

The Maintenance Drone's description is just an alphanumeric string:

Not as complete a test as I would have liked because I'm juggling too many balls at the moment.... - Created a Lvl 1 character the day the '30-day' patch went live. - Mis-entered the dates on my calendar, and didn't check him at the 20 day mark, but on day 29 he was displaying the orange yellow warning flag. - On day 30, was still displaying the orange yellow flag. - Got busy over the weekend and couldn't check, but on day 33 was displaying the red orange flag. Seeing them side-by-side, it's kinda hard to distinguish one color from another. The yellow needs to be more clearly yellow/brighter, and the orange more orange to make it easier to distinguish between them.