Player-1

A pleasure to have you back Back Alley Brawler, I hope you're having fun!

Hello Yomo Kimyata, @Koopak has a thread that may assist with this: Ideally, a mission in AE may be the best case scenario to get a truly neutral playing field for such testing.

There are definitely things that are being worked on at this time 🙂

You should try it out!

Hello ZorkNemesis, Between RC3.5 and today there were a handful of tweaks to Storm Blast that can be seen in the patch notes regarding the "Storm Brewing" mechanic, increased proc chances, and a change to the jump distance on Chain Lightning.

Storm Cell casting lightning on itself is fixed internally and will be in the next patch.

This bug went well beyond powerful synergy between a primary and secondary once we dived into it. Again, this allowed lightning to be cast off of all pets you had summoned which unfortunately varies so wildly depending on the character that we could not rely on the feedback from before this fix due to the difference in pets between characters. With the current changes, we are doing much more thorough testing to get this to a place that is both effective and fun.

The key factor is that it granted lightning to any pet you have summoned. This means any temp power that is a pet, any vanity pet, lore pet, pseudo pet like trip mines or really all of the Traps powerset. This leads to a huge imbalance based on powerset combination and beyond.

To clarify, the bug only affected Blasters, Defenders, and Corruptors due to the Fast Snipe version of Direct Strike being able to provide the Storm Cell Lightning to yourself and all viable pets. Sentinels did not experience this particular bug. This alone meant you could possibly get triple the lightning between Storm Cell, Category Five, and yourself. But with every pet or pseudopet created you would get that many more procs which would be problematic for various reasons.

Unfortunately due to a bug introduced in Beta, Direct Strike would have been giving Storm Cell, Category Five, Tornado, Sleet, Lightning Storm, and yourself the Lightning procs and over-saturate the amount of intended strikes. This was caught only recently and thus the re-review of the lightning procs.

This has been fixed and will be part of the next update. Thank you @Monos King!

Will be looking into this issue tonight.

Hello everyone, As always I want to thank you all for the feedback! I also want to reiterate that we ask for test results specifically to give more tangibility to your feedback. Some things are black and white if it pertains to a specific change, a power having a single stat changed and nothing else for example. Others are contextual where multiple parts of a kit are altered and playtesting would be required to see how the changes interact off-paper as it were. While we do read all feedback, if there is evidence that goes behind the feedback it gives us something objective to take back and analyze. Videos, recorded times, DPS analysis, and so on can provide valuable data for us from angles we could not cover alone and will give your input much more weight than analyzing the patch notes alone.

Enemy-facing procs such as Ice Minstrel and Energy Manipulator work as expected, though there may be oddities with Performance Shifter. Are you able to test Energy Manipulator? If you are not able to slot them at all there may be a separate issue.

Was this on a particular Archetype?

Hello @WindDemon21, Please provide actual results between live and beta to back up your claims. Of note, between internal and closed beta testers we saw Storm Blast as a whole, not just Chain Lightning, had on average 20% better results than live. If you are able to show that the same character build in the same content is demonstratedly and repeatedly worse, then I would be happy to take a look at the changes made for Storm Blast as a whole.

Hello WindDemon21, While I do appreciate the feedback, the charged language does less than actual data would. You mention that the changed range alone ruins the power and/or the set, however data from internal and closed beta testing shows that in tandem with the other changes that DPS and Mission Clear speeds both improved by about 20% from the Live version. Have you tried the same encounter with a Storm Blast character back to back between Live and Beta to provide clear data on this impact? If you have any results to show that this specific change does indeed impact the performance as a whole I would be happy to analyze it. The proc chances are relative to the base recharges of the powers. While Gust may have a lower chance than Direct Strike, you can roll the dice far more with the former across all levels. Intensify's effects may have merit, but changes to the power may be out of scope at this time and will need review.

This is fixed internally and will be in the next patch.

This will be fixed in the next build.

Hello again everyone, With the latest build, we request to see if anyone can record tests of knock-back heavy enemies inside of Smoke Cannister attacking one another. Council or 5th Column rocket launcher enemies, Trolls, and so on would be great candidates to see how the patches hold up in such situations! Without going into the weeds as it were, we have a lot of features planned out for 2024 and beyond and in order to devote resources to each we need to stick to a schedule. Like with Storm Blast this page, there can always be tweaks made in a following patch after time has passed to review more data.

Hello LastHumanSoldier, This is something we tested internally and were not able to recreate early on. Can you please confirm that another player is indeed setting off your Temporal Bomb and vice-versa? Also, are you and the other player the same Archetype?

Hello WindDemon21, I ask that you give the changes a try in tandem with the buffs to Storm Cell. The changes to Chain Lightning can be condensed to allowing it to disperse much more quickly through a crowd as it forks much more rapidly, while also receiving a 20% recharge reduction, 15% accuracy boost, and only a 5% reduction in damage with most of it being front-loaded and ending up at the same level of decay as beforehand. The reduction to the chain jump distance is something we had to do for balance as otherwise this version would have been overtuned!

Hello Sai, Can you please provide a screenshot of which icons are broken?

Hello c0, What do you have slotted in remote bomb, and what level enemy were you fighting?

Hello all, I want to reiterate that we do comb through and greatly appreciate the feedback in these threads (and the suggestions forum too!). However, there are certain things we cannot action on either altogether, or in a timely fashion that lines up with the beta cycle at hand. At this time, the powers in Arsenal Control are locked in and we cannot commit to any major swaps such as one type of crowd control to another. That said, if there are suggestions on how the current power framework can be improved we would be happy to look into those!