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Eldyem

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Posts posted by Eldyem

  1. 5 hours ago, Luminara said:

    and steals Concentrated Strike's crit potential as a balance measure.

     

    I'm going to highlight this - any set that has a mechanic that replaces crits is probably going to feel bad unless that mechanic is just very, very strong. Hitting a crit feels good. This goes double for a "crit" that can potentially do nothing because the associated power isn't recharging to begin with or is very close to being back up.

    It doesn't help that Power Siphon often feels worse than Build Up in practice because you can't really Power Siphon > Burst the way you might want to. Another issue is that Repulsing Torrent has anti-synergy with the only other form of AoE in the set. There's a lot of interesting pieces that don't really work well together.

    • Like 4
  2. Am I missing some context here? Every Control set has multiple forms of AoE lockdown. AoE sleeps aren't even unique to Mind Control. Holds and Stuns completely stop enemies from attacking, Confuses stop them from attacking you, and Fears slow down how often enemies attack considerably. In fact, Sleep is one of the least effective forms of AoE lockdown.

    • Like 1
  3. I don't actually have strong feelings about them; I think trying to do content as efficiently as possible with the tools you have (including random PUG members) is an enjoyable experience, but I'm also not particularly invested in completely skipping content such as running to Clamor in the Yin TF. I personally feel more "super" when I'm smashing through hordes of enemies mindlessly. In particular, TFs like Synapse just stop being fun if they're run at anything less than breakneck speed because its essentially the same content over and over for an hour.

    That being said, I'm more likely to join anything advertised as a "speedy" version just because having one person who decides that 7 other people are "playing wrong" by not fully clearing out an outdoor map, or by starting a mission when they're spending 10 minutes updating their bio, or by using team teleporter (all three things that have happened to groups I'm in) just kills the vibe. I just do not want Synapse to take 3 hours.

    I would personally love if we had more AVs or GMs (or even just EBs with better stats) that could "slow down" regular missions, but, so long as the strongest thing on 90% of given maps is a regular boss who is functionally identical to that other regular boss standing 10 feet away from him, I just don't see a reason to slow down my personal gameplay. I think this is a strength of Drowning in Blood, Mortimar Kal, and Summer Blockbuster content-design wise.

  4. 18 hours ago, SeraphimKensai said:
    • Do you feel that powerset proliferation impacts your AT's identity? Why do you feel that way?

    This might not necessarily be addressing the question as asked, but I think it gets impacted a little when a particular AT gets a "better" version of a formerly AT-exclusive powerset. Scrapper Ninjutsu just feels stronger than Stalker's version (to me), and Mastermind's Poison has the decent, but ultimately sort of unfortunate Noxious Gas that pales in comparison to how good Venomous Gas is. The source getting the worse version of a powerset does feel like it negatively impacts AT identity in a bad way.

  5. On 7/16/2022 at 11:07 PM, Marshal_General said:

    People do want to play support characters. The problem is at the end game they are not needed and this will address only part of the problem.. The other problem is with incarnates, everyone has a pocket nuke and lore pets.

    Is any role really needed at end game? I'm not turning down anyone in the first place, but why would I care that someone is playing a Time Manipulation/Thermal Radiation/Dark Misama/Radiation Emission/Pain Domination/Trick Arrow/Traps/Cold Domination/Poison character if we're at the level where we're just steam rolling? I feel like I'm missing the correlation here.

    • Thumbs Up 1
  6. I'm actually fine with this nerf for Defenders, as I do I feel this set was massively overperforming within its niche of AV melting within groups. I know nerfs are unpopular but there just really isn't another blast set with debuffs as good as this, nor do I think its physically possible to put sets like Fire Blast or Archery on Defenders on par without a complete re-imagining of the sets, so I'm fine with it.

     

    But the T1 and T2 sharing a debuff feels very bad on three out of the four ATs who get this set, and it doesn't feel good on the one that doesn't care as much.

    • Thumbs Up 1
  7. 1 minute ago, TotalThunder said:

    I think there's some disconnect in this discussion between two different types of players.

     

    For people who play the game normally at +0/x0, and build characters for RP or theme, always play on teams, etc, this change doesn't seem that bad or seems like it doesn't change much.

     

    For people who min/max characters, solo +4/x8, and try to push what they really can and can't get away with, this is a real real bad time. If this goes live, squishy ATs are essentially dead and we enter the Energy Aura/Shield meta.

     

    Even resistance based sets will be much, much worse if this goes live. That 90% res cap seems great on paper, but you'll be taking dramatically more damage after this.

     

    I really don't think either of those groups are the ones negatively impacted by this. Most +4/x8 builds can solo much higher than +4/x8 and I doubt they're going to be impacted at all, because +4/x8 was never the cap for what they can do.

     

    It's the players who build character for RP and theme, players who are -ok- at absolute best at building, but who like to push to +2/x5 or whatever who are going to be upset by this, because they're going to have to turn down their difficulty (I would imagine these are the players most resistant to do so, as well) and - and this is the most important part - are the most likely to be impacted by joining a +4/x8 group where they're suddenly doing worse than they did before.

     

    These are the people I largely play with, and I am overwhelmingly aware that these players, for the most part, do not use the forums, and I think these players make up a much larger portion of the userbase than many people realize.

    • Like 1
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  8. 56 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

    These are really good points from an archetype perspective and it makes sense from an Issue 1 legacy standpoint, but looking at the cross-archetype powersets and the availability of IO sets, procs, and Incarnates, it starts to become less driven by those things you've pointed out. There are varying degrees of success in each AT filling each other's roles and none do so as well as the specific AT - but it's less relevant now than in years past. That's just the state of the game. 

    But that doesn't really address why Sentinels seem to be coming up short on every metric. If everyone can step on everyone else's toes, why does it feel like Sents still aren't managing to quite cut it?

  9. 5 hours ago, Mezmera said:

    Plant control came late in the game where it hasn't yet received any balance passes because likely whomever made it wanted the powers that be watching over to see how popular this new toy was that they created to validate their work so they left it OP at the beginning and the game shut down before it would have been given Mind Control's treatment.  Stop using Plant as the bar, it's broken OP, we know, we get it. 

     

    Plant Control was Issue 6. That was 2005. Seven years before the game got shut down.

     

    1 hour ago, TheZag said:

    We have a mind control/psionic assault on torchbearer that has 5k or 6k vet levels and solo'd pretty much everything on max difficulty so that makes me feel that mind control doesnt need anything.

     

    But for controllers,  without a damage dealing secondary,  i can see that some would consider the set as underperforming.  I sleep 1 guy, then hold a guy, then confuse another and kill the last - on my dominator.  On a controller that same combo leaves the controlled enemies alone and loses out on most of the containment damage.  

     

    I don't think that being capable of soloing everything with a secondary that is notably very good at soloing AVs is a fair comparison. I'm sure there are Controller secondaries that can solo the majority of the content Mind/Psi could.

    • Thumbs Up 1
  10. I'm going to agree that there's a huge disparity between Seeds and Mass Confuse, but I honestly don't think making Mass Confuse into Seeds 2 fixes my core issues with Mind Control, which is that it gives up a lot of useful utility and damage by having no immobilizes plus a third-tier hold, and replaces them with powers of questionable utility, but not such questionable utility that anyone is considering throwing them out and starting over (not that we would).

     

    Mesmerize is a clunkier way to apply ST containment. Levitate animates slower than Lift, which makes it substantially worse as a damage-dealing power (I know it doesn't have defense tags, but honestly that's another issue if you mess around in AE). Terrify's fear is just less useful (not useless) without an immob. Telekinises is a cool power with a massive learning curve and almost no situation where it's worth the effort to actually learn. How do we fix these issues?

     

    I would personally address these issues before I touch Mass Confusion, a power that's not bad but compares unfavorably to a power that is honestly incredibly busted. And a part of that is because Mind Control would still compare unfavorably to a lot of other control sets even if MC was 60 seconds.

     

    EDIT because I gave no actual suggestions: A personal pie-in-the-sky approach to fixing Mind Control, in my opinion, might be adding -status resistance to the various powers as a sort of "wearing down" your enemies. One of Mind's niches is having a lot of Holds to throw out to attempt to permahold an AV in specific circumstances; why not lean into that? It would only really help the Holds and solo players, but Mind Control doesn't feel any weaker than any other low-damage control set in 99% of group play anyways.

    • Like 3
  11. 3 hours ago, Blackfeather said:

     

    2 hours ago, Blackfeather said:

     

    As in, as a dedicated role. I do like my Controllers, and not having a dedicated class for it kind of spoils me to WoW. Not interested in mages and the like!

     

    I like this as an idea, I just think there's a more active and less all-or-nothing way to do it. At the risk of making too out there of a reference, the DS RPG series Etrian Odyssey divides "Binds" into Head, Arm, and Leg; attacks are linked to a specific body part, and to stop ALL attacks you have to bind all three body parts (and I believe a small handful of bosses can fight back anyway, but without their best attacks). This is just one way to do it, of course, but I think that the CoH approach ends up creating a situation where big fights have to be relatively uninteractive for a controllers because mezzes are just too strong and too long for big fights; there's more than just "mez" and "no mez" when designing a game.

     

    3 hours ago, biostem said:

    To a degree I agree with your summation, but I also think this falls into the "why don't you just shoot him" trope - We simply don't have the ability, as a super strong character, to flick an enemy in the forehead of knock them out, nor do we have the ability to interrogate or otherwise intimidate enemies, (in any way that would affect the mission flow), unless it was specifically scripted into the mission.

     

    I get what you're saying, but I think there's plenty of ways to make it so that even relatively short mezzes end up providing more value than just shooting something, while also acknowledging that that approach to MMO design literally did not exist when CoH was made.

    I will also say, I've always felt that a fully mezzed enemy - with mezzes as long as CoH currently has - should, logically, just end up arrested since they can't fight back. Obviously that'd make for an overpowered mez class, but I think the rationale is worthwhile to sort of break down what (I feel, at least) is "wrong" with CoH mez. (I also want to be clear I really enjoy CoH's Control classes - I just think they're not something any modern MMO dev would even implement again because they're a nightmare for game balance).

  12. 9 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

    I would argue that control powers don't really translate very well to non-turned base games.   If you don't overlap your controls to perma-lockdown a combatant from the fight, the enemy just hits you the instant they recover, usually with their biggest attack.   Given that NPC attacks have cooldowns and they have large gaps in their attack chains, it's not uncommon that a knockdown that took an enemy out of the fight for 3 seconds did almost nothing at all since the enemy just got up and immediately used all the attacks that came off cooldown while it was down.   If the enemy is missing 75%+ of the time, the odds that any incoming damage was mitigated by a knockdown is even more unlikely.   And if you do have a setup to perma-lockdown enemies from a fight,.. well that's just as broken in the other direction, although most games accept this as being OK to make up for the lack of mitigation when you do not perma-lockdown an opponent.

     

    CoH has implemented many patches and attempts to fine-tune the way controls function with varying degrees of success.  But I still feel that despite the fact that controls are a staples part of the superhero genre and P&P RPGs, they really fail to be a significant part of this game outside of a few highly specialized examples.

     

    I'm going to push back against this a little; quite a few modern MMOs have introduced moments where a player *needs* to stun/silence a boss as part of a mechanical interaction. I think the problem is that CoH's take on controls/combat and team building just doesn't mesh well with MMOs finding a "control" role - which, to be fair, took almost a decade after CoH invested hard in its own take on control. It's also common for other MMO bosses to build up immunities to specific forms of mez as they get used repeatedly.

     

    I think the biggest issue with CoH's approach to control in terms of balancing is that controls are VERY long relative to any other MMO and that there's not really any sort of "building" resistance to mez that makes it less "permahold or nothing" in terms of approach.

     

    8 hours ago, Xenosone said:

    Endurance sapping/exhaustion. It half works and for players only. The ai just has too many zero cost attacks especially mog paragon protectors. 

     

    The other problem is that this is a very "build into" type of mez which just doesn't mesh with the way the rest of the game is designed. The only enemies that aren't dying quickly are the ones with the resistance to the effect. There's a massive disconnect there that makes it work better versus players than enemies almost always.

  13. On 6/26/2021 at 12:50 PM, arcane said:

    Because those are thematic origin related pools and you can only have one such origin theme thing. Be grateful you can even have a choice at all and aren’t locked in to the one actually corresponding to your origin.

     

    My understanding of their original concept was the opposite of this - they were "meant" to add other origins to your existing one (with your existing origin being the source of your primary and secondary).

    • Like 1
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  14. On 6/21/2021 at 5:52 AM, Tyrannical said:

    Hero Patron Pools have been discussed in the past, they were even one of the HC Weekly Discussions back when those were a regular thing, so it's definitely something that's on HC's radar.

     

    I'd love to see some HPPs, but the question is who are the best candidates for the role? Freedom Phalanx? Vindicators? The New Praetorians?

     

    I suppose any could work really, but regardless of what group is picked, they would likely outnumber the villain patrons. Do we stick to just 4 heroes, or do we also expand on the villain side of things to compensate?

     

    I think the Vindicators are some really good picks because some of them are very underdeveloped as in-game characters, but have Praetorian counterparts - and also because there's quite a few ways to develop pools for them that don't step on *any* existing pool's toes. I think the best use of Hero Patrons would be to use them to introduce new sets that are both "lore-friendly" in that they develop the associated characters, and are unique enough that people who don't actually consider their character to be "borrowing" patron powers to be able to explore their themes further with them.

     

    Swan? - Between Kinetic Melee and Kinetics-inspired moves, I think there's a lot of places to go with this. Could get a Smash/Lethal shield via the Energy Aura connection, or Mind Over Body via her Psychic Blast connection; concept-friendly to "energy" or "psychic" heroes.


    Woodsman? - I've wanted a nature epic pool very badly for a long time. Not *too* much to say here; there's enough nature-esque powers to form a coherent pool, especially if Spore Cloud was turned directly into a Darkest Night clone. He even has the obvious Tuatha summons.

     

    And so on.

    • Thumbs Up 2
  15. On 6/17/2021 at 3:08 AM, wjrasmussen said:

    Would you prefer to be held for 60 seconds? 

     

    These kinds of posts are annoying.  Sure, you "don't want changes" and only seek to understand.  It is what it is, work it out in your head or just accept it.

    Why does it need to be 60 seconds? Being honest, a .5 second or so hold back when mez dropped toggles seems very in-theme with a paralysis/jolt/whatever electricity side effect. Annoying and awful to play against, but that's a different discussion. Random clockwork already sleep my low level characters nonstop.

  16. On 6/12/2021 at 1:17 PM, Hardboiled Hero said:

    So just changing the damage type would make the power significantly more damaging.  If the damage type were actually changed I suspect we'd see a reduction in base numbers though.  I'm actually in favor of changing this power to a cold aura.. not only do I feel it would make the powerset more unique, I also don't play ice armor characters specifically because I don't like icicles popping out of my character.

    Would it? The damage is equivalent to the other damage auras, which do more "exotic" damage types.

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  17. I'd love if the signature story arcs (Who Will Die? and Pandora's Box) were added to the WST rotation or given their own WST-esque rotation; it's annoyingly hard to get people together to do the villain ones even with the pretty substantial reward-to-time-investment they give right now.

  18. 3 hours ago, Naraka said:

     

    You're moreso making an argument to nerf Arachnos double leadership toggles or overperformers than you are for buffing Empathy.  But bookmark this quote along with all the others above for later.

     

    Only if you come in with that as a preconceived notion. There's other characters who contribute, passively, as much as a soldier with double toggles, and even moreso with a move set to autofire. The point is to illustrate how low the bar to "contributing" really is when we're fitting that 8th person in.

    • Like 1
  19. 10 hours ago, Madae said:

    Yes, the ATO's synergize well, but that is exactly the point I was making that most of the "help" Stalkers get come from outside sources, more or less a bandaid for the problems inherent in the class, and does nothing for people who don't have those things yet, ie the "level 50 stacked set OP" Stalker. The fact that their old power sets are mostly garbage and only the newer power sets are good really highlights the problem the AT faces, and if the solution to Stalker is "out with the old, in with the new", we're still not really solving the problem, you're just avoiding it and potentially limiting the pool of Stalkers to very few power sets that work instead of changing some questionable things about the AT in general... that seems like more work to me when you can just make all of their older sets viable by increasing base Stalker potential and adjust things as you go along and find out new issues with those changes.

     

    I don't really consider any of this OP territory to be honest. If they were truly OP, I would think I'd be seeing a lot more of them around, and that is simply not the case. Other classes do generally the same things, but "better" or "safer" or "consistently", however you want to put it, and this isn't even getting in to the part where AoE rules the game and AT's that everyone ends up playing because it's just more fun or more efficient or just altogether easier to accomplish and do well with, plus the other toys they generally come with compared to a very specific set of melee options + some defensive clickies and that's it for Stalker.

     

    And one other more important thing to point out I think is that if the method is adjusting their new power sets to include things that they were historically missing, you're basically just making the Stalker a Scrapper to cover it all up, only slightly worse defensively, and doesn't really do any of the unique things that Stalker comes with (see not even bothering to stealth strike since it's a waste of time). I find that an odd choice for a fix instead of trying to play to their strengths.

    I strongly agree with this, but also want to add that I think any sort of buffs to stalkers might want to focus on the early/massively underperforming sets. The sets that are bad on stalkers are bad.

     

    Though the Assassin's Focus change sounds like how it really always should've worked.

  20. 23 hours ago, America's Angel said:

    CoH isn't balanced around the endgame/IOs. It's balanced around 1-50 on SOs.

     

    In that context, empathy is fine.

     

    If you think empathy should be rebalanced based on how it performs at 50 with IOs and incarnates, then that is a much bigger discussion, as every other set in the game will need to be looked at/balanced in the same way.

    I disagree with this - it's incredibly common to have powerset combos, on SOs, that have individuals not dying. If no one is ever actually hitting zero then a healing set is redundant, full stop. And I'm saying this as someone who recently introduced several friends to the game and some of them didn't even update their SOs regularly. Players die from mistakes far more than content being too difficult, and honestly Empathy isn't even the best set for saving people from themselves. That's my issue with set.

     

    1 hour ago, oedipus_tex said:

    The point is Empathy is not very strong with SOs. It is also not very strong with SOs. Empathy has always been popular because of its concept and not because of what it actually does. 

     

    Empathy's key powers have uptime to recharge ratios as such:

    • Regen Aura: 500 down to 90 up
    • Recovery Aura: 500 down to 90 up
    • Adrenalin Boost: 300 down to 90 up

     

    I wouldn't even consider playing the set if IOs weren't part of that picture. The set has nothing else but some heals and Fortitude juggling.

    This can not be stressed enough. Empathy, on SOs, is a massive underperformer outside of Hami raids. It's still an underperformer with IOs.

     

    1 hour ago, America's Angel said:

    Empathy players are hugely useful to teams at +0/8 when playing 1-50 on SOs.

    I think this is an incredibly unfair metric - an Arachnos Soldier with double leadership toggled and fully slotted, set to auto follow someone, is hugely useful to a team at +0/8 when playing 1-50 on SOs. It's also less useful than said Soldier actually fighting mobs. We want Empathy to be on a similar level as other powersets on SOs, and I don't think that's an unfair ask. It's bad that Emapthy's rez is worse than other sets rezzes, it's bad that Empathy's cooldowns are prohibitively long for powers people can accidentally juke if your timing is off, and it's bad that those powers have situations, on SOs, where they're factually just not changing any outcomes.

    That last point is the worst thing a support set can be, and an issue also found in Force Fields (but worse with the right/wrong team); (potentially) irrelevant.

    • Like 1
  21. Going to chime in and say that I am not a fan, at all, of any sort of combo system being add with Fortitude. It just doesn't feel that into the spirit of the set to me, and I'm increasingly tired of combos being the go-to way to "fix" sets.

     

    Personal proposals

     

    Absorb Pain - I think it'd be neat if the Caster got an absorb bubble for the amount they healed. In another world I'd say making this a toggle that works similarly-ish to Spirit Ward + Oppressive Gloom would be neat, but I think that ship has sailed. This power is honestly in a terrible place considering just how much Heal Other can heal, though, and it needs a serious adjustment.

    Clear Mind - Add a lot of status resistance to this, and make it AoE. I think all the Clear Mind clones need to just be AoE at this point. Mez is honestly not an enjoyable mechanic but Clear Minding your team constantly is even less so.

    The Auras - I really do think these should just be bigger AoEs. Gathering for Auras is incredibly unfun and I'm just going to do without 9/10 times. I don't think Empathy will ever be an "impactful" set without these being reliably applied to most of the team most of the time they're cast, and that's not going to happen with the current radii.

    Adrenaline Boost - I've always felt like this would've been a good choice for being made immune to recharge, but with a massively reduced recharge (preferably low enough to be made perma). Right now a big issue with Emp is that it scales very well - too well - with recharge reduction, which means the baseline without that reduction has to be in an absolutely atrocious spot to be "balanced". While there are builds/teams out there that probably get the recharge under 90 seconds, I think a change to no-recharge/90 seconds recharge would be a welcome addition to the set on SOs while changing barely anything for IO'd out characters, significantly smoothing out the difference. Since both Auras will still scale with recharge, I don't think this would be problematic. I imagine this isn't the most popular suggestion, though.
     

    1 hour ago, kikyoku said:
    • Resurrect should be a better rez. Right now all it does is bring them to full health. Boring, it should go higher. Max HP boost, regen /recovery boosts,
      And a backup rez if they die again in under a minute. Maybe multi target? Those things are so in right now.

    I really like the backup rez idea - I think it's very in the flavor of Empathy as a set and is uniquely strong since you often only rez when things are going REALLY bad or when the same person keeps getting themselves in trouble.

    • Like 1
  22. 8 minutes ago, MTeague said:

    I always got the impression it's supposed to be a time-lag thing. 

    Yea, NOW, when we have all content available to us now, and you might be encountering it in any order at all, i agree, it's a bit janky.

     

    But if Mind of a King and Synapse are stories you do very early, where the Clockwork King is still seen as a tragedy/waste of potential but ultimately a menace who needs to be stopped, it makes more sense.  LATER, as you do more arcs where he appears and learn more about him, and see him in a more sympathetic view, attitudes can shift. But I think Synpase TF is supposed to be in the "most people don't know any of that yet" part of the timeline.

    I understand where it is timeline wise, I just feel like the plot is incredibly disjointed. If I haven't done Mind of a King, the idea that they're stealing electricity for an evil plot (or even capable of plotting) is borderline nonsensical. At this point, my character should just think they're annoying wind-up toys that steal scrap to make more.

    I just don't feel compelled by the Synapse TF, so I feel a little bad for the Clockwork King because I can come up with all sorts of hypothetical, non-evil plots, and also because on some level, post-reveal, I have absolutely zero idea what he could possibly want with that electricity. I get that his motivations are supposed to be nonsensical/crazy, because he's nonsensical/crazy, but Synapse expects me to jump to conclusions here and, considering the Clockwork King's actual backstory, that makes me feel a little bad for him (in hindsight).

    Like, I just find this plotline incredibly uncompelling and bland on top of being a slog. If I'm going to sit through an extremely long task force, I want to feel like it's necessary and urgent, and the current plotline fails there. Nothing about it (content, storyline, length) is enjoyable to me outside of the Babbage fight, and any rework needs to address that it's kind of a failure on every point (in my opinion, at least).

  23. Storyline-wise, Synapse's TF has always felt incredibly unsatisfying, and a part of it is because I have no idea what the actual stakes are, plus the Clockwork King's backstory kind of has me rooting for him a little. I'd be fine with the slog if I agreed with the end-goal, but because the TF both drags on and glosses over key points, I kind of feel like a bad person at the end.

    Why does he want the city's power? What is Babbage? Why do we never address what Blue Steel did? The whole arc is built around the twist, but the twist is unsatisfying and answers essentially none of my actual questions and actually just raises a lot more. The Clockwork King gets way better characterization in essentially every mission he shows up in outside of this task force.
     

    3 minutes ago, Techwright said:

     

    Ugh, I feel your pain, several times over.  There's a reason I won't run Posi 1 more than once per character, and you just named it.  You remember it is said some people just want to watch the world burn?  Well, some people just want to let the CoT out.

     

    I would add a sub point to that "pulling everything" line:  charging in all macho-like  to deal with the shadow copies with no game plan, and completely forgetting they have everything in their powers that your team has. 

    In all fairness, the shadow clones are only bosses. The worst situations with them are when several have elec or ice power sets and the debuffs stack heavily; otherwise a group should be able to zerg rush them so long as you all target through the tank. They have barely any health in the grand scheme of things.

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