Player-1
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Hello @Shin Magmus,
Knockback into geometry is a global issue not specific to Meteor and Seismic Blast. Its something we are investigating based on maps.
Have you been able to gather more clear times between Seismic Blast and Psychic Blast?
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17 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:
Player-1, I've spent significant time on these builds and this testing to get you data that shows Seismic Blast underperforming... not relative to the best sets in the game, but relative to Psychic Blast. I picked this exact comparison because of the below reasons:
1 - Both Seismic Blast and Psychic Blast have 1 TAoE and 1 Cone, and the TAoEs both knockdown(up) allowing the same sets.
2 - Psychic Blast is explicitly not Fire or Ice Blast, which are the best sets in the game and are apparently viewed as outliers by some of the devs.
3 - This is the most important reason: Psychic Blast was very recently buffed and adjusted. This means that Psychic Blast has been brought up to a higher power level "viewed as acceptable" by the devs. I am comparing these 2 sets in good faith.
I did runs on the test server on GalaxyBrain's Office AE Map, on +3 / x8 (because +4 is kinda hard for most solo Defenders if we're being honest), and did multiple runs on both characters, selecting my personal best for each. The builds are Pain/Psychic and Pain/Seismic, and they are nearly identical to each other on purpose. I do not use attacks outside of the Blast sets in order to keep the comparison fair, although I do buff myself with Spirit Drain and debuff with Anguishing Cry. I also specifically avoid using Judgment or Lore powers, because they add large influxes of flat damage that partially equalizes performance across all ATs and powersets. I don't want to test how well a build is carried by Pyronic Judgment and Banished Pantheon pets; I want to test the merits of these 2 Blast sets against each other. All that said, I do use Red and Purple insps but in equal measure and with the same starting insps and drop rules. I also have all 3 START vendor "Amplifier" buffs active, but no other external buffs. This stuff is mostly so I can function and not die.
I personally think both of these runs are pretty good too, having cut my times down a lot over the course of many attempts on each character.
Psychic Blast: 6:26
Seismic Blast: 7:25 (15.2% slower)
Now that I've done the legwork making these characters, I can produce more tests and more data if you want to see just how much Seismic Blast is underperforming. You just let me know what I need to provide, in order to get this set the buffs it deserves. I stand by my points in my original post, and I've edited it to add these videos up top.
Hello Shin,
This is a great result! However, comparing the best run of A to the best run of B does not paint the whole picture. One thing that stood out between the two videos is that the Psychic Blast run had 4 spawns that did not have any bosses, while Seismic Blast's run had at least 1 boss per spawn. This along with variations on procs going off and so on can lead to variations on the same powerset being ran let alone different powersets being run against each other.
I like the methodology of comparing Seismic Blast to another blast powerset with the same layout. While there doesn't necessarily need to be a video of each run, having a few more run times for both powersets to compare the average clear times would show a more accurate representation of both.
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3 hours ago, Shin Magmus said:
For direct comparisons, do you want something as simple and linear as a Pylon test where ATs can only use their Ranged Attack set? I can go ahead and make some builds on the Beta server and have the strong sets use their Blaze/BiB/TK Thrust 3x as often as Seismic Blast is able to use Enhanced Stalagmite, if video evidence is what you're talking about. In general, my experience is from playing Seismic Blast compared to playing... well Fire and Ice Blast really. But a lot of the experience is technically anecdotal but also multiplied by so many encounters playing with other people using the set. So I've seen time and time again: people casting Meteor without KBtoKD slotted (yeeting enemies directly through cave map ceilings and out of bounds), and even people in the teams asking the Seismic Blast user to "please stop using that power." Or I've been crusing along, queuing up Seismic Force only to realize that I just procced Seismic Shockwaves, then accidentally wasting the buff that I would've much rather spent on Enhanced Stalagmite. I mentioned that in the write-up but I learned the bunnyhop strategy from someone else in-game, who has similar issues with Seismic Blast and who had developed the counterplay to accidentally wasting Seismic Shockwaves.
Some of my points are already direct comparisons though, with numbers cited; I directly compare the effects of Meteor to the effects of several Standard Nukes (i.e. not Full auto, Hail of Bullets, etc), and it just comes out worse than every single directly comparable power. Those powers all share the same bae dmgI don't understand why some of these Seismic Blast powers have the numbers that they do. When you do side-by-side comparisons, it is genuinely confusing that Meteor exists as it does currently. I cannot see the reasoning or theory behind why something that is objectively going to be more difficult to land (and easier to waste) in combat would only deal the same base dmg as an instant hit Psychic Wail that has a 100% chance for a mag3 Stun, and doesn't send enemies flying away.
There are definitely points to consider that do not need hard evidence, such as severe knockback in certain maps having unintended side effects that we may look into in general. However, we generally compare powersets as a whole to one another as opposed to power to power, so while a power may be different compared to others in their powerset category it may contribute to the kit in a meaningful way.
Something like pylon takedowns on a fire/fire, ice/fire, seismic/fire, and say a dual pistol/fire and dark/fire may give a good baseline as to where it may fall for single target. Likewise running a mission with the same builds to show clear speed differences will show AoE potential. These sort of results help us gauge what specifically to change if need be.
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Hello Shin Magmus,
While I appreciate the effort of this write up, the colorful language describing the problems does not give us much to work with. Do you have any direct comparison to other Blast powersets to show exactly why Seismic is underperforming?
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Hello all,
The latest patch seemed to have only carried some changes over for Defenders and will be addressed in the next patch.
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Hello all,
When the powers team revamped Electrical Blast, endurance drain became a hot button issue. The concept of "shocked" came about as a way to address the core issue with the mechanic being that it is incredibly binary: either it does nothing, or it for all intents and purposes locks down the target forever. This is why certain enemy ranks were altered to have a new endurance floor that allows for some power use, but if they are kept drained it would still reduce their attack rate significantly.
"Shocked" allowed for a scaling effect where there was some benefit even if you did not fully drain a target, but it is not applicable for all instances of endurance drain either thematically or mechanically. This is something we are still looking into as it would have game-wide implications.
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A pleasure to have you back Back Alley Brawler, I hope you're having fun!
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4 hours ago, lemming said:
I'm thinking Brine might be not debuffing resist as advertised
Checked the Mino with a Power Analyzer and it looked like it was at -1%, and then started climbing before I got a screenshot
Hello Lemming,
What Archetype was this on, and can you recreate this on a target that isn't the Minotaur?
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That oversight should be fixed in the next patch.
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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.
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3 hours ago, Sovera said:
So, a teaser on what's coming next? 🙂
There are definitely things that are being worked on at this time 🙂
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2 hours ago, WindDemon21 said:
So just getting this straight, storm brewing, means more chances as you attack more, meaning the already CRAZY amount of spamming of storm powers and ignoring your other power sets that storm already was, is now.. even more heavily leaned into to have to storm blast only to make it work and ignore your other primary/secondary set?...
You should try it out!
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2 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:
I skimmed the notes quickly, but i'm curious, are there any changes in the live build that weren't in RC3.5?
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.
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38 minutes ago, csr said:
Based upon some testing with a L33 Storm/Storm Corr and L38 Storm/Tac Blaster I'd say the set hasn't been buffed much at all between Live and RC3. Any improvements seem to be small enough that they are mostly - or wholly - offset by Storm Cell now aggro'ing the target spawn when cast.
Storm Cell casting lightning on itself is fixed internally and will be in the next patch.
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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.
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15 minutes ago, Super Atom said:
This gives us nothing to work with. It wasn't problematic when it was happening, it just felt good. If you could please explain those reasons that would be great, perhaps there is something people didn't take into account?
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.
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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.
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29 minutes ago, ScarySai said:
STORM BLAST FEEDBACK, BASED ON FEB 17 PATCH
I couldn't wait, I decided to test it during lunch.
While an upgrade from live still, every time storm cell bugs out, the thought is the same: Lightning spam is cool, and feels really good. Makes cell actually feel like an impactful power. So to find that the reason cell felt good for the entire beta cycle was not because of the other changes, but because of a bug, is a bit annoying.
On paper, the cell procs getting a different scale might make it more consistent, but in practice, makes it feel useless yet again, especially when you pair it off with the fact they upped the delay again.
Suggestions:
Storm Cell: Find a way to make Cell lightning more spammy, it feels like ass now, it felt great up until this point, apparently due to a bug, yet again.
Bring the cell cooldown on the same target back to 1s.
There shouldn't be a fear of overperformance, if I build the exact same corruptor, but ice or fire, Rain of fire and rain of ice can practically solo entire packs by themselves, Cell can't do that even with godly RNG.
I'd have a more iterative approach in my suggestions usually, like starting off by bringing the delay back to 1s again, but yall sure picked a rather inconvenient time to drop this on us with the patch around the corner, so more stuff needs to be done at once. Storm cell once again feels like the worst power in the set that it's based entirely around, when it felt good up until now from early closed testing of this patch.
Watch this clip of my storm/storm and tell me that lightning spam isn't infinite cooler than what this 'fix' reduced it to.
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.
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This has been fixed and will be part of the next update. Thank you @Monos King!
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Will be looking into this issue tonight.
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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.
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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.
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11 hours ago, Psyonico said:
I hate to be "that guy" but it appears you still cannot slot endmod sets into Temporal Bomb
Was this on a particular Archetype?
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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.
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What I wish Seismic Blast looked like (A diamond in the rough)
in Suggestions & Feedback
Posted
All missions, unless specifically created spawn to spawn, will have a degree of randomness. The best way to counteract it would be to have multiple results aggregated together as an average. @Ston has done this in their testing where they ran three melee archetypes through the Trapdoor mission multiple times to get averaged results. Not only due to enemy placement, but simple misses and proc activations can cause variance even in static encounters such as a Pylon defeat.