macskull

Even when PvP was (almost) mechanically identical to PvE it didn’t have a huge following. People were always doing things like going into PvP with their SO’d flying Archery Blaster and expecting to be competitive, then complaining when they found out the game is very different when there’s someone capable of thinking and breathing fighting against them. The funny thing is it was the complaints from those types of people that got PvP overhauled which really just resulted in driving the existing PvPers away without bringing in new people (who were never going to actually PvP anyways). At the end of the day, this game has never been very difficult which tends to attract a certain type of player, very few of whom are interested in PvP. Hell, go into almost any PvP-related thread outside of the PvP section of the forums and you’ll find people who are outright hostile to even the idea of PvP even though this game’s PvP has always been entirely opt-in.

Just give Sentinels crits and call it a day. Apparently the reason they were supposed to be a “ranged Scrapper” is because their AoEs have melee AT target caps and smaller radii, neither of which are things that immediately come to mind when someone is talking about Scrappers.

Reading all these comments is just making me realize that no one in this thread really knows how PvP works.

The fact there are several posters on these forums who routinely say they avoid getting those temp powers specifically because they're in PvP zones tells me it hasn't.

You wouldn't even need to do that, you'd just need to remove the "is this a Kheldian?" check on the line of code that disables this behavior for everything else.

To be fair, that's less the fault of the Halloween event running and more the fault of whomever is trying to run a Dr Q when it's not the WST.

The entire point of putting temp powers like Shivans and nukes into PvP zones was to add an element of risk to getting them. Creating separate PvE zones with the same content removes that risk. More on point, though: it would be a ton of work to wholesale revert the Issue 13 PvP changes and arguably even more work to only do it in some settings. It would require a dev to want to do it, have the time to do it, and decide that putting in the time would actually be worth it. I know for a fact there are at least two devs on the team who meet the first criterion and one who might occasionally meet the second, but they've both admitted it isn't worth the time.

Fine in theory, completely unworkable in practice. Powers behave differently in PvP than in PvE through one of two mechanics: Some powers check whether their target is a player or a critter to determine their behavior. Most attacks fall into this category. Other powers check what type of map they're on to determine their behavior. The simple version is that every map in the game has an "isPvPmap?" flag which determines behavior for these powers. This flag affects the entire map and requires a restart of that map if it's changed. Most self-affecting powers like armor toggles fall into this category. Obviously, the first one is easy to handle since it's all done dynamically at the time of power activation. The second one is what makes what you're asking for impossible. You have to either have PvP everywhere on the map, or nowhere. There was a pretty active arena and zone PvP population on Homecoming from 2019-2021/2022, and there was at least one major update that had a ton of PvP changes (QoL improvements, PvP-specific accolades, new arena maps, etc.). Unfortunately PvP in any MMO needs pretty continuous development to prevent things from getting stale, and Homecoming's absolutely glacial pace of updates isn't really compatible with that. On top of that, HC does not consider effects on PvP when they're adding or changing things which often ends up having a negative effect on PvP (examples are the psi blast rework and forced rooting implementation, both of which reduced the already-small number of PvP-viable powersets even further).

lol, lmao

The GMs are pretty much entirely relying on reports and their own (ingame) eyes to see if someone is multiboxing, so you don't have anything to worry about.

The problem with “difficulty through tedium” is it ends up with very binary results. If a character or team is able to easily handle an enemy critter adding more hit points just increases the amount of time that fight takes without meaningfully increasing the risk. If a character or group is already struggling with a critter, adding more hit points just means they are less likely to defeat that critter anyways.

Neither of those things are part of damage formulas. You’d have more of a point if changeling somehow also bypassed power recharge but it doesn’t, and most of the Kheldian form powers have animations that are fast enough to have a relatively small impact on cycle time compared to their recharge. At this point I have to think you’re being deliberately obtuse. I don’t know how much clearer I can be - the devs intentionally left this behavior in the game. Your feelings on the matter are irrelevant. Yes, everyone is aware that the behavior will go away when Kheldians get a rework, but we aren’t there yet, are we?

Did you know the increase in damage from a boss to an EB is only about 25% while the increase in damage from a lieutenant to a boss is well over 100%? On the other hand, an EB has more than twice the hit points of a boss. In short, EBs aren't tricky because they deal a lot of damage, they're tricky because they're basically a boss with a much larger HP pool. If a character can easily handle bosses, they can easily handle EBs. Have you tried out the Halloween event this year? The versions of the event EBs at lower levels are significantly weaker than they used to be because people complained.

This game's PvE damage formula does not take animation time into account. This game's PvE damage formula has never taken animation time into account. If you're gonna come at someone it makes it much harder to take you seriously when you're incorrect about things at such a basic level. EDIT: Because I'm sure someone is going to tell me I'm wrong, here is the PvE damage formula: (0.2*(0.8*Recharge+1.8)) / (Standard Area Factor) where "Standard Area Factor" is: Spheres: (1+(Radius*0.15)) Cones: ((1+(Radius*0.15))-(((Radius/6)*0.011)/5)*(360-Arc)) The only place animation time matters in the damage formula is for determining PvP damage, because that formula is entirely different, and we're not talking about that one. EDIT 2: To address some of the other stuff in your post: If the only advantage it provides is to allow you to be on the level of a mediocre Scrapper, maybe that's not actually all that much of an advantage. I never said changeling was the right way to play Kheldians. I never said the devs said changeling was the right way to play Kheldians. I did say leaving it in was an explicit admission on their part that the ATs are in a bad place without it.

I realize there’s only so much I can do as a tester and if the powers team has made up their minds about how they want things to work I’m basically just arguing with a brick wall, especially when many good ideas get completely dismissed out of hand. When you have a lead powers dev whose not-that-uncommon response to constructive criticism is “okay we’ll just revert the entire branch” you kind of just learn to shrug and move on. I’d hope any potential Kheldian buffs significantly bring up the performance floor while not affecting the ceiling, but past experiences with outlier powers show they tend to get nerfed and the rest of the changes don’t do enough to make up for the loss.

It’s not a PvP thing, since there isn’t any travel suppression at all in PvP. If it were a PvP concern they could change how it works in PvP and remove it entirely from PvE but the lead powers dev has said PvE travel suppression isn’t going away.

We’re on the same side here - they’ve already said they’re going to let changeling stick around until they get around to doing a balance pass on the ATs. Where my point of view differs is what the end result is going to be. Based on my observations of how the powers team has handed AT and powerset reworks over the last six years I think whatever Kheldian changes they ultimately end up making will result in peak performance being lower than it is now.

This argument may be technically true (except the bit about standard damage formula since all Kheld powers still follow that), but it holds no merit because the devs: Are aware of the existence of changeling gameplay Explicitly left an exception for Kheldians in the code that fixed similar behavior for every other AT because they acknowledge Kheldians need a buff At the end of the day, if an archetype that is at least somewhat supposed to be focused around dealing damage needs to rely on an exploit to achieve performance comparable to a mediocre Scrapper, there’s a problem with that archetype.

On the other hand, if you're a good musician you know that the instrument a grade school student uses and the instrument a professional uses aren't the same.

Enhancement fungibility is a big part of why the market on Homecoming is even functional. Even HC's player base isn't anywhere near big enough to support a market using the retail rules.

Sprint is not a travel power. Athletic Run is. All toggle travel powers have a 4-second movement suppression period if you activate an attack.

Again, benefit of hindsight.

We have the benefit of hindsight, though. Between inventions and incarnates ED is sort of just a footnote at this point, but for a period of nearly two years it was a pretty substantial nerf which caused a lot of players to simply up and leave.

No. No.

Yes.