Blackbird71

@Jimmy You were saying? The Sorcery Pool revamp has now had exactly one iteration before going into a release candidate. This is exactly the sort of rushing I was afraid of.

Please no more pop-up tray powers!

This is one thing I dislike about the Sorcery pool, and the changes don't seem to improve on it. The powers seem to be geared towards shoring up the weak areas or otherwise augmenting a few specific ATs. This is an origin pool; there should be something in it that can be appealing or useful to any character of a magic origin, regardless of their AT. I realize that's much easier said than done, but I think the proposed changes only serve to further pigeonhole the set as the "pet AT" pool. And I should clarify I'm not saying that every power in an origin pool should be useful for every AT, but there should be at least one power that could be a reasonable pick for each AT. Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't really see that in Sorcery.

I'd argue that the unpredictability of the boost effect makes it significantly less powerful than you're giving it credit for. If it's being used in an attack chain, and the effect doesn't go off, now you're stuck either 1) effectively using it as another T1 attack, or 2) pausing your attack until another power comes off cooldown to jump start the chain and try to get AB's effect to trigger again. "Surprising" isn't fun; it's annoying. I like my powers to be reliable. This iteration of Arcane Bolt is not, and as such, I'll be passing it over. Honestly, there's nothing about the Sorcery pool revamps that make me excited for the pool. I solo too much for Spirit Ward, Enflame seems like a pain with the terror effect, taking Fly over Mystic Flight at least puts me in the same pool as Hover for some combat defense, and RoP, well, I hardly found it worth it before the nerf. It's a shame because thematically I have characters that I'd like to use the pool on, but the set still offers too little benefit over other options.

The problem with this thinking is that Arcane Bolt seems to be most often taken in builds that lack sufficient primary/secondary powers to build a reliable attack chain, and so use AB to fill a gap in that chain, not displace an existing power. And this mentality concerns me: why should pool power attacks, especially in origin pools, not be on a par with primary/secondary powerset attacks, even if only on a T1/T2 level? Putting them at a similar power level increases build diversity options; arbitrarily making them inherently weaker decreases those options and ensures these pools will remain an oddity among builds.

I think this was part of the problem and why the Discord poll got such a negative reaction here. It was outside the norm, and no one expected or knew to look for any such poll on that platform, and so it gives the appearance of trying to go around the official feedback discussions to "shop" for a more dev-preferred response. I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying that's how some here may have interpreted the move. In the future, I'd suggest that such polls be linked or referenced here before the results are compiled and considered; that would avoid making people here feel like their voices are being ignored. Like it or not, the HC team isn't just developers; you're all in a PR position, and a big part of that is managing the appearance of what goes on just as much as the reality of what goes on.

Then please tell Powerhouse to stop skipping meals to get things out the door. If there's no release deadline, there's no need to endanger one's health over it. ☺️

I'll back up the HC team on this one; the stuff getting hidden is a lot of useless back and forth between players arguing rather than any sort of productive feedback or conversation. Frankly, I'm surprised a good portion of pages 4-8 of this thread weren't nuked for just that. I'm guessing they did as I did and just tuned out that whole mess.

Just going to lay down some general thoughts on the changes to the Sorcery Pool at this stage in the review process. First, I appreciate the efforts to look over the entire pool and attempt to improve the balance of powers. This is very much a better approach than just nerfing RoP without considering the context of the powers required before being able to take it. However, I question the wisdom of changing an entire pool this late in the beta process. Granted, I don't know what the dev's timeline is for releasing Page 2, but this appears to be a rushed change that likely will not get the amount of testing and productive feedback that it deserves. Going off of past experience, when Build 3 of Page 1 went out, the first Release Candidate was imminent, and much of the Build 3 feedback seemed to get cut off prematurely. I can only speculate that Page 2 is rapidly moving toward its first Release Candidate, and the dev posts here highlighting the need for quickly evaluating these changes would seem to support that. I fully expect that these changes to the Sorcery pool may only get this one iteration before going into release mode, and I really don't think that's giving something as big as changing an entire pool enough time and opportunity for proper testing and feedback, especially given the volunteer nature of both devs and players doing the testing. I'd much rather see all the Sorcery pool (including RoP) rolled back to the live version for Page 2, and the changes pushed off to Page 3 when they can be given the full development cycle for vetting, instead of having this crammed in at the end and likely pushed out without the opportunity for sufficient development iterations.

Wow. OK, that's very telling of the Devs' mentality, and frankly rather worrisome. What's wrong with having a travel boost power (note: AB was not a travel power in itself) that gave extra defense at the cost of OAS to be used as a panic/get out button?

You misunderstand. I get why it exists. I'm just saying that I would prefer if it didn't, and if an alternative could be found, even if that alternative is less powerful/dramatic than the proposed Afterburner. These secondary powers on pop-up trays are an annoyance, no matter how you deal with them. I would gladly take a reduced benefit over having to deal with that annoyance. So far as marginalizing Mystic Flight, MF still has the teleport component. And yes, that operates on a secondary power, which is one reason I've rarely used it. One advantage of Fly has always been the simplicity of the power; in fact, that simplicity has been used here countless times to justify the significant difference in speeds between Fly and other travel powers. Please keep that simplicity intact. "Different but equal" does not need to mean "equally annoying."

I'm trying to understand what any of that has to do with my post that you quoted. My comment had nothing to do with the speed values, only an objection to the need for a secondary power on a pop-up tray as a needless hassle and QoL problem. A minor one, yes, but still an unnecessary annoyance.

I'd much rather see the death of the "fiddly bits" that are pop-up power trays. Just bake 1/3 of the new Afterburner bonus into the base Fly power and be done with it. I'd much rather have that lesser increase constantly if it means avoiding pop-up trays, or the need to disable such trays at Null the Gull and adding Yet Another Click Power to my existing trays, which are already packed full on any high level character.

That doesn't change the fact that your testing is not accurate for common "real world" conditions.

We'll have to disagree on the reason behind the slotting priority then. I will continue to maintain that in-mission performance is a much greater slotting priority than speed outside of missions. As noted by others, for players who use travel powers inside of missions, additional speed can even be problematic. No, I don't think we're going to see any significant swing in slots being moved from combat powers to travel powers.

You're missing the point. The conventional wisdom on the AT forums isn't to even put 1 SO in the travel power, but instead to slot for -KB or -Slowness, etc. And when every single slot being in the right place is critical to getting the right set bonuses, a little less time between missions is not going to incentivise any serious builders into devoting any additional slots to these powers; not when the tradeoff is performance in the missions. Any builds that do will be laughed at as "sub-optimal," and with good reason. But the real point is this: Wavicle's analysis does not mimic "real world" conditions, as it does not reflect either the current popular slotting, or the likely slotting that will be devoted to travel powers even after these changes.

But how many players are going to max out the travel powers? Build slotting is often tight, and I think it much more likely that these will continue to be slotted as they often are now. Basing this on researching dozens of player-made builds across all ATs, most commonly it seems that no additional slots are given to travel powers, or sometimes one at the most. For SO builds or (non-set) IOs, there might be a single travel speed enhancement slotted (if not an endurance reduction). At the "higher end" builds, (i.e., IO set builds), these are most typically dedicated to IOs with bonuses other than travel speed, and any speed boosts come from set bonuses. So I submit that basing any analysis off of maxed out travel powers does not satisfy the premise of "real world" conditions.

So far as I'm aware, SS and SJ benefit from the same travel speed set bonuses as Fly. If you're going to consider that the enhancement slots in Fly may be reduced because of these bonuses, then you should consider that the same is true for the other powers as well. I.e., SS and SJ would still require fewer slots than Fly in order to be maxed out.

Please explain "actual testing" of "real world use cases." The disconnect right now seems to be that players feel like the increased proportional disparity between travel power speeds is unjustified, primarily due to "real world use cases." If you can describe the methodology used for your testing, these players can attempt to replicate it and determine 1) whether these tests are an accurate representation of real worlds use cases, and if so, 2) whether dev conclusions regarding speeds are valid and warranted. If players can discover for themselves that the answers to both of those are "yes," it would go a long way toward convincing people that these changes are in fact balanced.

A bit of both. I'd consider it feedback on the grounds that it informs the devs what sort of numbers I'd expect to see if RoP were performing well or "overtuned." That then gives the devs something to work with, even if that work is just correcting my expectations with some other justification. Managing customer expectations is a huge part of any project, and understanding customers' existing expectations is an important part of that. So far, it feels like the HC devs have done a poor job of 1) understanding what the players' expectations are for RoP (and other powers addressed in this page), and 2) effectively communicating what expectations they think the players should have, and providing sufficient reasoning to convince them why those expectations should be considered the standard by which to measure this update.

Well, at least the belt looks about the same...

So, this brings up a thought I've been having: what level of usage should we be expecting from RoP? Fair warning, to give my opinion, I'm going to have to delve heavily into the realms of assumptions, speculation, and hypotheses. First, let's consider that this is an Origin Pool, meaning it's specifically themed to the magic origin. While HC has made it possible for any origin to take it, let's just assume the intent is for it to be used primarily by magic origin characters. So, next assumption: all HC characters are divided equally among the five origins. I'm sure the devs could provide numbers on this, but without those, I'll just have to go with the idea that magic-themed characters account for ~20% of all those on HC. Of course, not every magic origin character will make use of the magic origin pool. By a rough opinion, I would propose that if the origin pool is performing well, and is a solid but not overpowered choice, it would be used by roughly half of the characters with that origin. So, taken with the previous assumptions, that would be ~10% of the total character population. For a more numerical analysis, we can consider that there are 9 base power pools, and add the one corresponding origin pool for a total of 10 pools, of which a character may choose four. These numbers would suggest that, all powers being equally effective, the Sorcery pool would be selected on two out of every five magic-origin characters. This would work out to 8% of the total character population. So, I'll make an assumption of 8%-10% as a (very) rough statistical window to indicate that Sorcery is performing well, but not overperforming. If all these assumptions are remotely correct, then the number of 5% shared by Faultline would indicate that RoP or the Sorcery pool as a whole is underperforming by as much as half of what it should be. Now, if we break this down further, Corruptors taking RoP at 11% hits close to this target range, indicating that the power and pool are considered a decent option, and perhaps only slightly better than alternatives. Conversely though, with a 5% usage across all ATs, Corruptors being at 11% would indicate that some other ATs fall well below this 5%. This would mean that for magic-origin characters of some ATs, the magic-origin pool is severely underperforming and is significantly less desirable than the available alternatives. Are all of these assumptions accurate? Probably not. Are there flaws to this reasoning? Plenty, I'm sure. Does it provide any sort of baseline guideline for expectations? Maybe; I think it at least sets something of a ballpark. At the very least, it was an interesting thought experiment for me. Maybe it's useful, maybe it's not. If the numbers are completely wrong, at least it might give the devs an idea of what player expectations for power performance could be. If they have some other ideas on what we should expect, then maybe they can use this to learn how to manage player expectations. If these numbers and assumptions actually make some kind of sense, then maybe it can help guide them towards where the powers and pools need to be.

There is some confusion on the start time for the faire. From the post here: And from the CoR Discord Server: https://discordapp.com/channels/569909890819293245/796839970244657162/827580526931345418 @Shadeknight, can you please clarify? Thanks!

Personally I hope not; I'd rather they get rid of the pop-up secondaries in favor of some of the other suggestions players have made. The pop-up power tray has always felt like a kludgy sort of fix; just something tacked on rather inelegantly, and one more thing to have to fix or workaround with macros and keybinds after disabling the annoying tray.

I don't think it's fair to say that every character should be able to perform at this level, as that implies that builds, power picks, enhancements, etc., all don't matter. However I think it's at least reasonable to say that every archetype should have the possibility of making builds that can keep up at the upper tiers of gameplay, and perform comparably well as each other. Nerfing a power often used to shore up the disparity between ATs seems counterproductive.