Blackbird71

The range on ENA keeps getting mentioned, but I want to point out that the range on Ice Arrow is equally an issue and should not be neglected.

I know what they were trying to do, but I think it backfired. No power when activated should ever make your abilities worse; rather than flat-out suppressing the strongest effect should take precedence.

All of those are arbitrary restrictions. Changing them has zero impact on the functionality of the game, or the balance between players. All it does is enforce inconvenience for inconvenience's sake. There is no crucial reason to hold to this justification, and there is significant reason to change it.

As I understand it, the enterbasefrompasscode command will only work after you execute the Base Teleporter/Monitor Duty power (unless you're already in range of a portal).

The real frustrating thing in all of this is that it feels like things are so close to a simple workable solution, but then wildly miss the mark and instead we're left with a complicated mess of powers that have to be used in conjunction with each other to get back in the neighborhood of the old functionality. This right here? This is so close to what we need as to be painful. 30s recharge? Fantastic for RPers or anyone else who may need to change locations in a short period of time (or who messed up which location they went to and need to portal again to fix it; happens more often than you'd think!). 2s activation? Very convenient, I hadn't even hoped for something this nice! But where this falls down on its face is that it still uses charges, which can only be recharged at a rate slower than many players' daily use of base portals, and at the expense of being able to progress on any other day jobs. If the need for charges was removed, this would be the perfect drop-in replacement for the enterbasefrompasscode functionality, and most players could take this and ignore the other mess of powers involved in this change unless they wanted some of the additional functionality (dropping a sustained portal on the ground, etc.). Simple, clean, done.

The problem with slotting for range is that it removes the option to slot a full set for bonuses. Depending on the sets used, this can have a significant impact on a /TA blaster's overall defense numbers and strategy. So either way, the reduced range impacts /TA survivability.

What it's missing is the means of acquisition. The Pocket D VIP pass did not require badge hunting, only spending an hour in Pocket D, which many players do through their normal course of play without needing to specifically go after the power. I will say that removing the Auction House day job badge travel powers is the same issue - these could previously be acquired passively and for no Inf, and would have been an inexpensive alternative to the new powers you added. On the changes in general, the problem that remains is the limitation of power use - specifically the charges needed for each use, and the opportunity cost of recharging these in place of working towards other day jobs. The solution to having too many powers needed for travel is NOT making a specific travel power menu, it's making it so that only a handful of powers at most would be needed for effective travel. Give the players options, let them choose which powers they want to acquire and use, but make sure that at most only 2-3 powers are needed to do the job.

OK, starting with the good stuff. Thanks for making this work! Gymnastics now keeps it's flavor and functionality without conflicting with CJ, etc. Given what was said about this before, I'm impressed you were able to pull it off. This part I'm less enthusiastic about. The feedback has been that the range on both ENW and Ice Arrow is too short, especially given the range support nature of the set (no melee powers). I'll be honest, to only slightly boost ENW up to IA's 60ft almost feels like an insult. This decision is especially confusing in light of the following: This indicates that it's perfectly possible and reasonable for a blaster secondary to have an 80ft immobilize, especially when range is a key aspect of the power set. Whether intended or not, I would submit that range has also been a characteristic of the Tactical Arrow set, and should be considered as such.

Just a reminder that these numbers are per character. For some people, that makes a huge difference.

I believe they meant "removed from the teleport power pool."

Here's just a random thought to help improve the travel situation in general: how about if mission contacts in a zone actually gave you missions in that zone? I know it would cut down on a lot of my inter-zone travel needs.

Saying that getting day job badges is "spending time" kind of misses the point. It's usually just a brief moment at the end of a play session before you log out to get to a job location; the "time" is spent while you're offline. Completely different from spending several hours hunting down badges in game during play time.

I completely agree, but we can't beta test stuff that's not actually in this build of the patch. That's what I was responding to, the idea that we couldn't complain about a problem created by this patch because "maybe that will be fixed in the patch before it actually goes live." That's the whole point of complaining about it; so that it does get fixed. For reference, this is what the discussion originally responded to:

And until it does happen, we can only go off of and provide feedback according to what is in the notes. Otherwise we can just assume anything and everything will be in the patch, which is a futile way to go about trying to provide any sort of useful feedback.

Point it out to me.

Here's an idea. I don' t know how possible or difficult it would be, but how about putting the movement buffs back in Gymnastics (so that it actually feels like "gymnastics"), don't make it exclusive from other jump powers, but also don't make the buff stack with other jump powers. So you could activate both Gymnastics and Combat Jumping at the same time, but you wouldn't have any better movement than just turning on one or the other. That would let the power retain it's flavor without conflicting with others.

Then these changes need to be put off until the consolidation happens. Otherwise this update is half-done. Worse even, as they are making consolidation even more difficult by adding even more transport options. If enterbasefrompasscode needs to end now, fine. But I'd rather go a few months back on regular travel options and wait for them to roll out new options complete and whole than to get this mess. Plus, for them to add more travel powers only to reverse that and consolidate them in a future patch later damages their credibility and capability as devs, so if this is really the plan then it would be in their best interests to rethink this approach.

The scarcity is part of the issue, sure, but it's not the whole thing. A big part of it is the glut of powers we have now intended to take the place of one simple command. None of those powers alone will fill the need; they either have limited recharges, too long of a recharge, require too much Inf or badge hunting to get on multiple alts, etc. One command is being replaced with a mess, when the fact is the game already had base teleport powers that could have been adjusted to fill the need, and done so in a way that would only require a single power to get close to (though not exactly the same as) the previous functionality that had become the standard in the game for well over a year.

I cannot give this post enough likes. Well said, and these lessons are vitally important to the wellbeing of a game and its community.

So we're going to gimp travel until they can get around to revisiting the day job charges? No thank you; if we're supposed to rely on these powers as the alternative then they need to be looked at before these changes roll out.

Submitting an average of 1-2 crash reports per week for over a year has not reduced the number of times I crash. But how many powers does it now take to do this? That's the point - you now have to rely on several powers (and take up several slots on your trays) to ensure having something ready. This is a convoluted mess that could be greatly simplified. Which is why we're providing feedback, to help drive those improvements. And you need to stop reducing everything that anyone says against these changes to "change it back how it was." That's not what we're asking for; we're just asking for something simpler and better than having to rely on multiple powers to do what used to be handled by one command.

I said I was done, but there are some new thoughts I wanted to weigh in on. First, a big +1 to Tac Arrow needing its own feedback thread. There is a lot to talk about with this set, and it definitely gets in the way of the other blaster secondary changes. I'd prefer to keep it all hold, if for no other reason than the Lockdown: Chance for +2 Mag Hold enhancement. This is a boon that sometimes makes bad situations a little easier to survive, particularly in light of the Mag changes on ESD. Without it, the power is significantly less useful at higher difficulties. ENA advocates are talking about reducing the strength of a single power; slotting as you suggest reduces set bonuses that affect all of a character's powers. This is not an equivalent tradeoff. Until you account for slotting - unless you Frankenslot, you can only slot for either stun or hold, not both. As I mentioned above, this removes the ability to use Lockdown: Chance for +2 Mag Hold on most targets. Edit: I had to go back and check to be sure, but this is the original i27 note on ESD arrow: Non-robots; that would indicate that ESD arrow does NOT stun all targets equally.

Then something has changed since I last looked into this (granted it was about a year ago), or this is something different than I thought it was. The option I saw then would put all of your macros into the window, making every macro account-wide. Thanks for the info, I'll try it out.

I'll say one more thing on Tac Arrow and then I'm done in this thread. I hope that @Captain Powerhouse and any other devs are paying attention not just to the comments here, but the reactions. Going off of reactions, the opinions here seem to be overwhelmingly on the side of the TA changes going too far. Just as one example, my original analysis on page 6 currently has 11 likes and is climbing every day. Maybe TA isn't what was originally intended, and maybe some of the stats were "mistakes," but please recognize what TA has become, how it is played, and what it means to people. In the end, I would ask what were these changes intended to improve, and what do they actually improve? For many players, it's clear that they are making the play experience significantly worse.

When the functionality of a set is fundamentally changed so as to no longer play the same way, no it is not an unreasonable request.