Galaxy Brain
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Posts posted by Galaxy Brain
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Sniper Rifle animates in something like 1.5~ seconds. However, this is an issue like we saw with Kinetic Melee being "slow" due to the point of the animation it fires.
Other snipes behave as: Aim - fire - recoil / end
Sniper Rifle is: Aiiiiiiiiimmmmmm - Fire/End
Try it for yourself, and you'll see that you can queue up another attack and you IMMEDIATELY act the moment you shoot the sniper rifle shot where other snipes there is a pause after you fire. Ultimately, this does make it "slow" since it takes longer to apply the damage, but if you compare Sniper + Other attack to another 1-2 combo on another set it is likely the same time investment.
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1 hour ago, AerialAssault said:
What if enemies hit by Ignite were hit with a burn DoT? The fire patch itself could inflict the burn on any enemies that wandered into it afterwards.
The DoT would, of course, not stack and would last about as long as the fire patch does.
I would love to see this. Split the damage to be 50/50 = 50% of the damage will be applied by igniting those who touch the burn patch, being set on fire for 1/2 the total damage simply by touching it. The other half would be from the burn patch itself. If you keep somebody in it, it would be effectively the same as now.
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2 minutes ago, macskull said:
This was discussed earlier and IIRC the reason upgrades aren't automatic is because the devs felt the cost of having to reapply them gives more incentive to keeping your pets alive.
That being said, I don't think upgrades should be automatic until some issues with pet AI are addressed - namely, upgrading certain pets with certain upgrades actually makes them perform worse and that's unacceptable.
I do not want to derail this, but this is a specific concern for Robotics.
Testing them out over repeated runs at varied difficulty levels, I uniformly found that robotics performed significantly better if you DO NOT upgrade the Battle Drones (minions) with the Tier 9 upgrade, and DO NOT upgrade the Assault Bot (boss) with the t4 upgrade. The fact that doing upgrade surgery on different tiers of pets got much more effect is troubling, and it is due to the animations mentioned by @Coyote.
I encourage people to try Mercs out now that they have gotten significant speed upgrades for sure!
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19 hours ago, Troo said:
It's not an easy answer.
If a set is not popular and folks who do play it are asking for changes there is more room.
If a set is popular the change tolerance shrinks dramatically.
I agree with the 1st part as often it is unpopular for a reason (look at EM pre/post change)
The second I think has wiggle room depending on *why* something is popular. For example, if a set is popular because it has a bug that causes say... a power to triple-crit 75% of the time, then yeah that should be reigned back as it is broken due to a bug despite it being wildly popular due to the bug.
The only current example of this I can think of is Titan Weapons, which I will always defend as I believe that I personally had a hand in it's arc of destruction. That was a popular choice even with it's downsides due to how powerful it was compared to every other choice with just about every way you could look at it. Objectively, most any AT that had TW would choose that bar-none when looking for raw effectiveness which is detrimental to balancing other sets as they would either always be in it's shadow, or would overshadow all other sets to match it. The learning curve to use it was an argument, but said curve was present and arguably even more potent in other competing sets (like Staff for instance) without them similarly being way above the rest.
Instead of simply being nerfed though, it's "power budget" was distributed into a side-grade where it made it a bit worse but still top-tier, and likewise way more user friendly. With that experience, I am confident that any other changes to popular sets would be handled just as well.
19 hours ago, Troo said:Guidance in my opinion:
- A tweak is adjusting a value related to a power.
- A revamp is removing/replacing powers, impacts to functionality, shuffling the order of powers. (this is where guidance typically is to tread lightly)
- It's always easier to give than take away.
The bit about re-ordering powers is kind of iffy as the vast majority of your powers are all usually attainable within the 1st 3rd / half of your hero's leveling time so I personally feel it doesn't have as *big* an impact, but it very much depends on the swap.
Removing and replacing powers is 100% something not to take lightly! There are of course situations where it should be done no question tho... like Serum or Repair. Impacts to functionality are kind of on the fence depending on what is done. If a mez attack that say, knocked a foe down and did minor damage and now suddenly does MAJOR damage, the function effectively swaps between a "mez" to an "attack", but it's almost like it was a tweak based on the value definition.
I also agree wholeheartedly with the green highlight. Making something "bad" or at least average to start tends to be much harder to do as you need to reign yourself in with your own expectations and knowledge of what is good. However, if it starts out average it can really only go up from there when it comes to further tweaks. I'd say it's easy to make something too good, balanced by how difficult it can be to reign it in once it's out there. The reverse is certainly troo.
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8 minutes ago, Coyote said:
Would it be possible to make the same change for Robots? They have a Full Laser Auto version that takes a whopping 6s. And also a Flamethrower version that also takes a whopping 6s.
It would be in theory, but after some talk about this during the initial testing this was due to how animations are "linked". The change to make the player version of Full Auto a different speed conveniently effected all powers sharing that root animation, spreading to Mercenaries who use the same FA as players animation-wise (despite the 6s timers for them)... as well as some others 😉
I am sure those will be looked at soon, but it is just a matter of hitting one chunk at a time.
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4 minutes ago, TheSpiritFox said:
I actually have two mercs and a ninja's MM sitting at level 1 waiting for them to buff those sets into what I consider useability.
You know, Ninja should actually be tested now that resummoning is a breeze... if you can just spam genin fodder.....
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1 hour ago, TheSpiritFox said:
Latest beta patch says they're looking into MM changes. Bumping this fucker back to the top it's time to start talking about MMs again cause they're actively looking at us.
I will say, the changes they have on the table (current beta) are far more than @Monos King and I expected! For one, it makes half the mercs changes look tame lol
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Hello everyone!
I just want to reach out and say that while there is a lot of information flying around, it can be easy to misread something and come to a conclusion separate from how the change actually functions.
Everyone has access to the open beta and can hop on to try something out that they are on the fence or are confused about both good and bad. I encourage us all to at least give things a go before jumping to any conclusions here on the boards. Even if you end up not liking a change, your conclusion will have far more power behind it if you can back it up with experience!
-Galaxy Brain
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2 hours ago, Troo said:
but in the same post they had an example that did allow full long animation if wanted.
If you want, sure. But actively denying the player options for such a long time (even worse for Mercs) is awful for how the pace of the game plays.This is one of those "protect the player from themselves" things where if a power is really cool but can actually hinder the user it ends up being not so cool.
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21 minutes ago, Keen said:
Thanks for adjusting the animation instead of trimming it. I noticed I can cancel the animation near the end by moving, but that's okay. The animation will play in full if I don't move or attack next so that's a nice compromise.
This is the only instance I dislike the change in cast times. I'd have preferred it stayed long (6s even!) and DPA adjusted instead. Rambo'ing for that long can be appealing to some people. Probably an unpopular opinion tho.No, just no.
A 4s animation would need to start on frame 1 and 100% wipe everything in front of it to be worthwhile with how the game flow works. Being rooted for that long has far more cons than pros beyond just the DPA. Sure, you can do the cool cam spin and have a "rambo" moment, but Rambo didn't have wolverine mop everyone up and move to the next mob while he's still standing there.
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[salt]
Man, I made a mission downright analagous to this that can be things other than arachnos and nobody likes it 😞
[/salt]
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To be fair, there are very little powers that have been "Cottaged" at all. The only one that comes to mind at the moment is Power Crash being something totally different from Stun, but even still it is a Sm/En melee attack that can stun an enemy you target. Same with blaster sustains, they still do the "main thing" they did before but just with added sustain.
You can make a nuke drop to 30% of it's base damage and then make it deal massive debuffs and crowd control, and it would still not be "cottaged" due to the primary function (damage) being intact.
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@oedipus_tex, @Coyote, either way, I feel that the rech and power of Dominator abilities need a look-see specifically due to the slew of click powers they naturally get on short timers, and from the extra-meta sense that nearly all doms chase recharge which makes their already high rech/big effect powers take center stage already.
@Voltak, despite how it sounds, lowering the recharge (increasing?)... making it take longer to recharge would actually be a buff. As Coyote mentioned, in the main game there is a direct correlation for 99% of powers between Recharge and Damage. The longer it takes to recharge, the more output it has and vice versa with faster recharges. This is normally balanced by having fast and slow attacks in a cohesive set where you only have so many clicks to juggle. With Dominators, and Blasters, they have two full sets full of click powers to juggle every encounter. The way Blasters handle this is with their secondary abilities often having a lot more recharge so they are not up as often as primary attacks, with the intention you fill in the gaps with your primary. The more powers you have with similar recharges (usually on the faster end), the more competition they have against each other for their use. The more varied the recharges, the more often they would actually pop up in practice for most players like with Blaster secondary attacks. When those slower cycling moves are on deck, they hit *hard*!
So either by increasing their control by making their control powers come up less often but hit much harder / control much longer, or making their attacks cycle slower but need less cycles per hit, it would strike a balance between all their click abilities and actually be a buff as you build for global recharge as you get to cycle powerful moves more often.
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47 minutes ago, Troo said:
I think we saw quite a few folks unhappy with the last big batch of changes.
I'm definitely proponent for just making a new set when it comes to extensive revamps. Small tweaks are going to happen as well and reigning in something that is overpowered.
Balance is a goal and a journey, not a destination.
Not everything has to be the same.
For this in particular, when pointing to the Cottage Rule, where is the line drawn between small change and revamp?
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34 minutes ago, Replacement said:
(sorry, you know I hate it with as much love for you as possible)
Basis for that tho is that game does have continual rewards forever as long as you keep playing the same character where that one character technically gets better. You gain BETTER (prestige?) rewards from fresh characters though, but your (prestige) also has diminishing returns to prevent just spamming 1000 new characters.
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14 minutes ago, Greycat said:
... flip side of that, nine times out of ten I wish I *only* had the slow version....
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4 hours ago, Apparition said:
I would. I strongly dislike snipes, and play Ice (and Dual Pistols and Water Blast) because they do not have snipes. Not every ranged damage set needs a snipe, nor should have one as snipes do not suit every play style. They certainly do not mine.
Not bashing you, but just curious as with my blasters I rarely if ever treat snipes as "Snipes" given they are used in combat so often. Do you not like them in principle, or just their slow versions?
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To actually toss my hat into the ring, the Borderlands series has a really great way of handling this while ENCOURAGING alts.
In their games, they have a system called "Badass Ranks" where completing certain milestones or challenges unlocks account wide boosts for the player across all their characters. This is unlimited... but the kicker is that you can only attain certain milestones once per character and as you level up it gets harder and harder. For example, there could be 5 different tiers of "defeat an enemy with X thing", with each level being like 100x / 1000x / 10000x, etc. Naturally as you progress it will get harder and harder to achieve. Likewise, the boosts you get also have diminishing returns where the first time you cash in your rank you get 5% Damage. The next time is 4%.... 3%.... 2% ..... 1%.... 0.5%..... etc. Do this across multiple characters enough and you still gain rewards, but it takes longer and the output you get is very small additions to the pile.
I like this as it encourages alts + player longevity and can still offer bonuses to max lvl characters who can complete some challenges far easier than others. There are even some bonuses that only affect high lvl gameplay in the series that have no value to new / alt characters you make.
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6 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:
Big brain take
If we had to take a big step back, it is sort of an issue of what the classes can accomplish.
What do Dominators do? Well, they lock down opponents in order to provide safety to themselves and others, and they deal damage at different ranges. Their "competition" would then be other characters that lock things down to provide safety to themselves and others, other damage dealers, and other damage dealers that have safety.
Controllers lock mobs down like Doms do, and have a chance for critical control what can kinda/sorta allow them to compete with Domination (at least before permadom). However, they also bolster their defenses with support powers to further protect themselves or the team, and control powers often come with secondary effects that are stronger for Controllers. In some niche instances, Containment lets them deal great damage too.
On the offensive, we can compare Dominators to Blasters more than any other AT as they are also a mix of Ranged attacks, Melee attacks, and even control. Blasters though also recently got sustain powers and while they may lack the hard control utility of a Dom, they have much more comprehensive attack chains out of the box and can deal WAY more burst damage.
This leads to the melee AT's. They have more cohesive attack chains from the get-go as their sets are not chopped up like assault sets are. They also have personal defenses which end up being much more reliable on average than control powers for many factors, leading to a much smoother experience with the same result (you survived the fight) with far less interruption between having to choose between using a control and using an attack. Some sets do require extra clicks, but they are almost always an immediate damage or sustain tool in a pinch.
Looking at all these, Dominators offer a mix of all these strengths but the trick is the cohesion, largely due to having so many click powers + the maintenance of Domination. I know a lot of people are actually put off by Doms as they feel they *need* to Permadom. You don't, but when all other AT's have inherents that are core parts of their gameplay that come up all the time every fight, and this one doesn't (until it is perma), it is a bit of a whiplash. With Domination running, you can lock down a whole mob (primary depending) and then run in and go to town, but even at max potential I feel that the action economy ultimately puts a lot of people off.
Approaching a mob, a Dominator will likely start with a powerful control ability (which usually has a less than lightning fast animation), which may or may not cause some damage. Then, they will run in and use their damaging powers. If foes are resistant to their controls / they miss a guy, they will need to re-apply control powers to them before laying the smack down. This is simplified, but you get the gist.
A Controller meanwhile has buffs or debuffs they would apply first, and then spend a lot of their time using Control powers primarily with less contact switching. A Blaster similarly will usually apply a self buff, but then has the raw output to eliminate half the mob in an alpha and focus on the bigger targets thereafter with most of their focus being on damage like how a Controller's focus is mostly on CC. A melee AT can usually just focus on charging into the mob and only have to use "extra" powers on occasion and follow mostly the same plan each mob. What is different between these examples and the Dominator, is that these other AT's likely do not have to contact switch as often between Control / Attack / Buff powers that a Dominator has to juggle constantly.
If anything, they should actually take a note from Blasters. Blaster Charged Brawl has a DPA of 131 unslotted. Scrapper Charged Brawl is likewise 70 DPA, nearly half that. Dom Charged Brawl is 93, which is not a bad middle ground. These 3 versions have recharges of 10s, 3s, and 6s respectively, which makes sense for the Scrapper as they are likely to be tossing out CB much more often as they only have Electrical Melee clicks (usually) to worry about. The Blaster and the Dom on the other hand have full suites of click powers in their primary AND their secondary that compete for attention with every action. This is why Blaster secondary powers often have very long recharges. One, they have plenty of things to do while those powers are on cooldown, and two, when they are available they are GREAT options to use over other powers which encourages you to plan around when the big hitters are up, and usually have the same goal: defeat the bad guy. A Dominator on the other hand has to juggle more between "do I lock down this guy or do I defeat this guy faster?" most of the time, combine that with the STRONG influence to build for recharge due to Domination, and you end up with a messy situation for many players. Having Control primaries largely copy/pasted from an AT that usually has a more set and forget secondary choice (Support powers are often not used as often per click as assault powers), the recharge time / power per control ability seems out of line.
If anything, what if Dominators had much STRONGER click for click control powers than Controllers out of the gate, even before Domination, but in exchange had much longer recharges? Like how a Blaster has a much stronger, but slower Charged Brawl to a Scrapper despite the Scrapper having a better melee mod, the intent is that the Blaster wouldn't need to toss CB out as often. If a Dominator had much stronger but slower control abilities, they could "Dominate" a fight with less activations, and then go to town with their assault sets. Domination would allow them to do this much easier with the ability to have stronger Magnitude for hard targets as well.
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It is a crime that nobody has mentioned
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Can we get lost converts to the Warriors who are Spartans who use sewer caps as shields?
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1 hour ago, Snarky said:
I really consider this a zombie thread, It has been dead for a long time but just keeps wandering around in circles waiting for someone to put it out of it's misery.
Its still been active day to day, and the main points have been met with a big: "Maybe?"
@Luminara had great input, and upon running some tests with Broadsword + isolated uniques it showed some interesting results. This went in circles tho, but the pivot to ATO's is one I have great interest in, as alongside Pet IO's it raises a question of if AT's are sort of where they are due to them?
For example, Brutes vs Scrappers had their dynamic changed as Scrappers had their ATO that is gamechanging. Without the ATO, are they balanced vs Brutes? To a different extent, how do Stalkers compare without theirs? Are powers that get converted to KD and become killers balanced with / without the KD IO's? If pets get buffed but the IO's remain the same, do they become unbalanced?
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7 minutes ago, General Idiot said:
The d&d nerd in me wants seismic sense renamed to tremorsense. That is all.
Avatar tho
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2 hours ago, Safehouse said:
I love this idea. I think it does give a really unique flavor to the set that would differentiate it from the more single-target focused Beam Rifle and the "disintegrate" effect. Make "laser blast" be more aoe-centric, and the idea of straight-line AOE for the lasers enhances that sense of energy so concentrated it can "punch through" defenses.
How would you think the balancing would work for this? I would imagine having the sniper do extreme damage to the target AND everything between you and them would be pretty intense. Or maybe not. I don't know. But maybe something where other enemies than the target take reduced damage compared to the primary target? I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking it. And the buildup to a "chain" effect also sounds really cool.
I'm already getting ideas for a Laser/Energy blaster... 🙂
I think if the powers only hit like 2 additional targets that require precise aim then it should be OK. If else, it could be done as @Tyrannicaldescribed where perhaps the 1st guy takes full damage, then the other guys take like 60-75% damage.
A bouncing laser would be a must too!
One thing to note tho, at least personally, is that I feel new sets should do new stuff even with old assets. Sure we could put together something thematic but if it plays incredibly similar to X other thing then one may fall to the wayside over the other.
On that note, for the Nature defense set I had an idea... what if it had a power that was a reverse Bloom? Say it had an ability that was an ally-targeted buff, but for each use on an ally it gave you a boost as well that could stack?
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Do Dominators Need a Buff?
in General Discussion
Posted
@Mezmera, just curious but what is your Dom build? Luminara does have a point that I agree with in that the synergy of many dom builds is out of whack.
As for the overall design of them, I have been thinking on this more and I feel like they should really play more like a Magneto style character. When you think of an encounter against that type of character, they generally have that moment where they "capture" another character and then W H A L L O P them with something that they need time to prepare and thus would not normally be able to use in a "fair" fight. Likewise, they often have the ability to end fights outright with their control powers.
One thing I am curious on is the performance of their Controls as actual Attacks. There are PLENTY of attacks in the game that double as Mez, and even Mezzes that double as attacks (hell, many Assault sets have these with big hitters that can do anything from Knock Down, Stun, Sleep or even Hold!), so having Dominators treat some of their assault and control powers as "one in the same" could be somethin...
Lets compare Darkness Control between a Controller and Dominator real quick.
All base values, they are actually relatively even all things considered. A controller will actually get more DPA with containment than a Dominator even with their higher base damage, but a Dominator with Domination has roughly the same "bonus" to control duration vs Damage with their powers. For a great example, Dark Grasp with Containment is about 15% more DPA than a Dominator's, while the Domination Duration is about 15% more "CPA" than a Controller's. Neat!
Where things get complex is when we look at their secondaries.
A set like /Cold Dom on a controller has a mix of different power types, both Buffs and Debuffs. Ice Shield takes 1.17s to animate, and recharges in 2 seconds... but with a 240s duration you really do not need to use it often, and when you do it is wicked fast. Infirgidate is "slow" with a 15s base recharge, tho again a 1s animation and strong lingering debuffs to a single target to buy you extra mitigation and even offense with -Def which lasts for 20s, perma out of the box if you keep hitting. Likewise, Snow Storm is much slower at 2.03s cast time and a 10s rech, but it is an AoE toggle power you can open with and keep going theoretically forever as long as you have endurance. All of these powers allow the controller to "Fire and Forget" once per fight or even once per mission at times and then focus on using their control abilities which have decently fast recharges so you can cycle them and add up damage + control. In this particular example, the Controller also has all their powers available as Ranged. All t1/2/3 control powers are ranged, and a quick glance at all Secondaries for controllers have their first 3 abilities also either ranged, or at the least effect yourself. Time's Juncture was the only exception as a toggled PBAoE debuff, but even that has a 25ft radius. They all also tend to be powers that you do not spam *that* often.
Dominator Secondaries on the other hand differ right away by always offering a fast ST ranged attack, and then the T2 is always a stronger melee attack. The ST blast is almost uniformly a 52.83 DPA attack with a 4s recharge time, the t2 differs a bit but it is always a hard hitting ST melee, and the t3 bounces between another stronger Ranged/Melee ST, or an AoE of some sort. Right away though we see an issue. With a hard hitting Melee attack in the mix, you are encouraged to get into Melee Range where immobilizes lose their value. Defensively, an immob keeps a foe away from you and limits their options. Even if they have 2 ranged attacks and 1 melee attack, you are effectively mitigating 1/3rd their damage output (if not more). Going into melee, the immob just means they do not run from you... so it's better used as a damage tool. Looking at the highlight vs the Immob in the table above... yeah you already have a better option. Since the Dominator will be encouraged to use their Secondary more often than a Controller does by the nature of the powers, you spend more time clicking attacks than you do controls given each control buys about ~20s base of control in which to wail on enemies, moreso during Domination (which isn't available every fight until later in the game). However, the Dom needs to contact switch a lot even right from the start with mixed ranges and power types that they need to use more frequently than the smoother experience of a mostly range and control focused Controller.
This is where I feel looking at either the Control /OR/ the Assault set timings are in order for the Dominator. If we want to keep the control sets as-is for each, I feel that the Assault Attacks should be more like the Magneto example where you capture a foe and that allows you the (20s) window to unleash your BIG attacks on them freely. Where a Controller locks them down, then repeatedly locks down for damage and effect, a Dominator only locks down -ONCE-, and then unleashes hell on them for big *DOMINATING* burts. Certain powers in assault sets are already like this, like Seismic Smash, and it feels awesome. On the flip side, another Magneto-esque trope is his control powers just ending the fights outright through sheer power. Just imagine if the ST Immob and hold on a Dominator had double the rech and also double the damage, but all else being the same.
Their DPA would suddenly rival Blaster attacks while also Doubling as a Crowd Control option. In some scenarios, you could ST Immob/Hold a minion to simply rid yourself of them, or at the very least start a fight off very strong with a mez vs a particular target to deal a good load of damage, and then the next 20-30ish seconds can be spent by you wailing on them similar to now but with less overall clicks needed.