Scaling enemy buffs

[nihilii]

16 hours ago, ivanhedgehog said:

To be fair, the 50+1 is because of the level shift that is part of the incarnate system.

I was being confusing: I meant you only need to be alphaslotted for Apex or Tin Mage, yet people specifically ask for characters that are at least levelshifted.

[Parabola]

On 1/5/2020 at 10:56 AM, nihilii said:

If you set out to build tough factions in AE, making something challenging to anyone but the most minmaxed teams is trivial. Ever fought a mob group of cold, rad and FF mobs in a bank map on +4/x8? (If you're confused by FF, think: force bubble pushing you against the walls)

The game has difficulty, the rewards for seeking that difficulty just need to be higher - starting at the malta/carnie level, as mentioned. Mechanics are in place to give greater rewards on a per mob basis, Paragon Protectors give +40% XP for example.

Adding new enemies with harder powers - yes yes yes.
Giving incentive to fight more diverse stuff - yep!

I'm not so fond of blanket stat scaling, on the other hand.

1) it penalizes adding more players to a team unless you're confident they'll contribute. This is a dynamic CoH purposefully avoided from inception, with XP bonuses for teaming. It's easy to make a MMO team friendly, it's harder to make it social friendly.
2) it's never fun (IMHO) from an immersion perspective to have mobs artificially become stronger or weaker. Levels are an acceptable stretch because they're clearly indicated with color coding, but various extra buffs, meh. I much prefer the "mob as a constant unit" school of thought CoH follows, which dictates you add difficulty by adding foes or by designing harder foes. Once you start tweaking mob stats on the fly, you make reference points muddier and it starts to be a little too minmax-y as you peer behind the curtain of what's going on.

 

On 1/5/2020 at 11:03 AM, nihilii said:

I think this is wishful thinking. The rise of challenge necessary for the maxxed brute to *need* the SO defender would likely be so drastic it would obliterate the SO defender. In practice, I feel it would just push certain people to only look for fellow maxxed characters. You already see people being picky about who they take on Master STF/RSF runs, asking for 50+1 on Apex/TinM, even demanding certain requirements for ITFs.

 

On 1/5/2020 at 10:21 PM, ivanhedgehog said:

underperforming sets just wont get invited.  What you will find are teams of 8 kitted out brutes still running just as fast as they can, now for even higher rewards. they need to fix the broken sets before even thinking about this sort of thing. Look at energy melee for tanks/brutes. when was the last time you saw one played?

 

All fair points. I would say on the subject on people being picky about who they take on teams; as mentioned it already happens and in all likelihood the people who play like that would probably continue to do so even if the difficulty was lowered overall. Some people are just that way inclined.

 

All of this is a thought experiment into what else could we do to address what I am convinced is a real problem with game balance without wielding the dreaded nerf bat. At the end of the day the most direct way to address the problem would be to reign in the high end performance of IO's and incarnates but I worry that will never happen due to how it would go down. The point about needing to bring under-performing sets up to par is absolutely true but I think it needs to be done in the context of the overall game balance - we can't just aim to make everything perform like titan weapons and not degrade the game experience further (as I see it).

 

On the subject of the disparity between SO and IO performance and the implications that might have for SO only characters if the game difficulty was raised in some way. Approaching the problem from the other side we could think about simply making SO's better. If we close the gap between SO's and IO's by buffing SO's then there would be more room to make the game more difficult and so bringing the relative performance of IO's down without direct nerfs and without affecting the 'game is balanced around SO's' idea (which these days I don't fully subscribe to but I know many do). Now I have no idea how exactly to go about buffing SO's with ED in place but anyway it's a thought!

[Galaxy Brain]

3 hours ago, parabola said:

I am convinced is a real problem with game balance without wielding the dreaded nerf bat.

Unfortunately, you can't just buff everything without also nerfing for balance reasons, else it gets goofy and not-fun in the long term.

 

Edit:

3 hours ago, parabola said:

we can't just aim to make everything perform like titan weapons and not degrade the game experience further (as I see it).

Spoke too soon lol. But yeah, honestly boosting up all the sets to that lvl-ish of base power and the reigning back the high end incarnate / IO stuff would be nice

 

 

As for the SO boost,t hat is a very interesting angle.... honestly, all the talk about SO balance vs IOs, I dont think anyone has brought up just making SO's competitive! 

Edited January 7, 2020 by Galaxy Brain