ViridianDev

Wish I could have stumbled on this thread sooner, but I suppose it's really not that old and better late than never. Hi everyone; in case you don't know me, I'm Viridian, a developer on the Homecoming Team, and the one that helmed, designed and developed the Council revamp. To put to rest guesses of intent posed in this thread, and help clarify some mechanics, here's an impromptu dev diary. The goals of the Council revamp were twofold: Adjust the higher-level units in the faction to an appropriate difficulty comparable to other endgame factions As a commonly run radio mission faction, crank up the rewards to provide a solid alternative for players that don't want to farm Pre-revamp, the Council were easily the weakest of the core factions encountered in the 40-50 range (which I'll be referring to as endgame for brevity); Galaxy minions had the lowest DPS of any mob that could be encountered in endgame, for example. Steps taken to crank up the difficulty were to bring up mobs encountered at lower levels (lycanthropes, dark vampyr archons), add exotic damage types (nyctwolves, galaxies), and tweak powers (Vortex CL Archons would sit and spam their Missile Launcher all day and completely ignore their other attacks until interrupted with a knockdown or mez, soldier minions had high cooldowns on their weapons so they'd attack once and then get stuck in a Brawl loop). On the second goal, we were coming off some recent AE farming nerfs from a previous page, so I wanted to encourage an environment where players could gain additional rewards provided in the base game with some level of interactive gameplay. Steps taken here were to increase the reward scales of some enemies (galaxies were increased by 20%-40% depending on rank, lycanthropes increased by 50%), compounded with resurrecting enemies (galaxies) to further increase reward-per-spawn rates. Now that the goals have been outlined, and it's been a decent amount of time since the changes have gone out and been played/experienced, it's time for some critical self-evaluation. Based on forum/discord discussions, and sentiments expressed while running in teams, the Galaxies were the ones that missed the mark the hardest. Their power suites were modeled as Warshade-flavored counterparts to the PPD Awakened Peacebringers (a faction in the same level range bracket), with the self-resurrections adjusted from being chance-based to player input; dodge the radius, guaranteed no rez, closer in behavior to a Super Stunner, which players are familiar with. Despite the fact that a boss slot in a spawn yielded an additional +180% in xp and inf, the additional effort needed to take down one of these enemies (especially when they appear en masse), winds up being too tedious, and creates this feeling of sponginess that outweighs the rewards returned. Today, I believe the Council revamp was mostly successful but flawed; created in time where I had less knowledge of the engine than I do now, still learning to navigate feedback. It's not perfect, but as a first-ever feature, holding myself to an expectation of perfection would have been simply unrealistic. I can't guarantee that they'll get a second evaluation in the near future, but if they were to, there would be several things I'd like to do to adjust to player feedback; increasing the delay before resurrection for Galaxies to give players more reaction time, reducing both the rate at which they rez as well as the amount of self-healing they get, and reducing the amount of mobs with access to the critical knockback. On the topic of lycanthropic transformations, allow me to clarify a few of the rules: A mob that naturally spawns as a lieutenant will never be able to transform into a boss (ie, player has bosses turned on, mob encountered is a lt, transforms into a lt) A mob that naturally spawns as a boss downgraded to lieutenant due to bosses turned off will transform into a boss (I don't know about the mechanics for live, but this has always been the case on Homecoming to my knowledge. It was certainly not something accidentally changed during the Council update, as mob ranks are controlled by a completely different set of code) Without segueing into a design discussion of whether or not this SHOULD be the case, it is not something obvious and readily fixable, so I wouldn't expect the behavior to change anytime soon.

Looked into the flying animation oddity; unfortunately the problem stems from the fact that there is no aerial version of the animation, so it's going to default to the typical flying laser beam eyes animation.

This is the intention; old Warrior Clobber was based on the ancient version of the power that did almost no damage, but with a long duration guaranteed disorient. Bringing it in line with the modern player version served dual purposes; 1) It keeps numbers consistent, so players generally know what to expect from a War Mace power named Clobber, and 2) slashing the disorient duration in half generally allows players without mez protection more follow-up counterplay.

Can you provide specific examples of weapons powersets that are able to be selected as primary/secondary when they shouldn't? Are you achieving this state creating the critter in AE normally or going into the critter file and manually adding powers using the inline feature?

Right now, it's only implemented for the Council because it has to be implemented on a per-power basis. In the future as Homecoming continues to evaluate enemy factions, we should see more of this being included.

At this time, there won't be more alt fx themes added to Arachnos Soldier powers; it would have to be considered for a future page. There's an internal limitation I was not originally aware of that prevents further proliferation.

Council Empire have their own separate powers defined and are treated as a separate faction, so they're not a part of these changes. Axis America did get costume updates to separate their identity from Council Empire, but likewise have had zero powers changes.

Addressing multiple recent concerns brought up around reward; PI powerleveling radio teams and lowbies were absolutely considered during these updates. Resurrections grant full xp for each defeat, netting additional xp per spawn, and transformed Nightwolves and Nyctwolves have increased reward scale, to account that the pre-transformation Vortex soldier or Vampyr does not grant xp.

Stepping in to clarify here; Masters of Ruin have had a spawnlimit of 1 set since the beginning, so that's why there hasn't been a changelog called out for them. If you're encountering more than one at a time, that would have to be a result of multi-aggroing spawns. Masters of Death do not have a spawnlimit, and aren't expected to get one, as the mage class that should exist most commonly at high level.

Incarnate Circle of Thorns were left out of this update, as incarnate mobs have some separate balancing design rules. Feel free to test them though to make sure stuff didn't unintentionally bleed over. The all-ghosts spawn is Working As Designed; it's an upshifted version of the all-ghosts spawn you'll find in the 15-30 range.

Galaxy suites' were mostly left untouched in the 20-40 level range to keep the difficulty at endgame, but the Galaxy minions did get Shadow Blast added to their suite at the lower ranges; you probably won't see it cast as often because they're minions and Bolt is a lot more spammy, but it's there The Galaxy costumes will not be changed further; the purpose was to delineate the minion/lt/boss rankings more easily in the high level range since they get much nastier, preserving legacy looks was prioritized here. As to the Martial Arts/Energy Punch confusion; the Power Punch is fx directly lifted from the Praetorian Resistance, as a lore nod to the Council continuing to subsume Resistance following events in President Marchand's and John Houston's arcs. The Martial Arts adjustments were for the lieutenants/bosses.

This is a working as design change; the Council have a new mechanic for chance for critical knockback, the popup text chosen was FREEM.

The prerequisite for a set existing in AE, due to how the backend spaghetti code works, is that it must be available as a player set first. The goal was to add all the missing (non-epic-archetype) sets to Architect Entertainment; if you are finding some missing, please report it as a bug and we'll look into it. To your specific callout, Symphony Control should already be available in AE.

What you're probably seeing here is if you're queueing Channelgun/alt anim Burst/Longfang while another is already animating; this is a known legacy animation bug that happens when you activate a power while currently animating a power using the same animation. Since the bug is not exclusive to VEATs, it will require a wider fix that won't make page 7.

The character customization preview for that feature is not accurate to how it looks ingame; an unfortunate limitation that couldn't be overcome. I highly recommend testing ingame to get an idea for how the feature plays out. These powers were intentionally omitted from the Bane Mace alt animation by design, as the Bane Mace does not fire bullets or physical ordnance; it's an energy weapon with some support grenades.