General Feedback: Page 5 Build 4

[Wavicle]

On 3/9/2020 at 10:00 AM, Vanden said:

I have to echo this, this seems poorly-thought out. AVs are getting nearly doubled damage at 50? I remember a dev saying when the AE was new that the goal was for the custom critters' powers to be as close to player powers as possible, and back then it seemed myopic, too. One of my big concerns, for example, was that using a custom critter with any sort of electric power would be incredibly unfun for the majority of build because of how much more effective end drain is on players than on NPCs. This change seems like another big blow to anyone trying to use the MA to make good, stories instead of just farms.

 

The patch note says the following:

Generally all enemies were dealing less damage than they should apart from ranged minions, this has now been corrected

Doesn't that seem to indicate that AE enemies are having their damage BUFFED? If so, how does that appeal to farming?

Edited March 11, 2020 by Wavicle

[Vanden]

14 minutes ago, Wavicle said:

The patch note says the following:

Generally all enemies were dealing less damage than they should apart from ranged minions, this has now been corrected

Doesn't that seem to indicate that AE enemies are having their damage BUFFED? If so, how does that appeal to farming?

I never said it does anything to farming.

[Wavicle]

6 minutes ago, Vanden said:

I never said it does anything to farming.

You said "This change seems like another big blow to anyone trying to use the MA to make good, stories instead of just farms."

I don't understand that.

[Wavicle]

The following Leadership powers have had their activation time reduced from 3.63 seconds to 1.5 seconds:

• Pools > Leadership > Maneuvers
• Pools > Leadership >Assault
• Pools > Leadership >Tactics
  
  What about maybe doing something similar for Tough?

 

Edited March 11, 2020 by Wavicle

[Vanden]

1 hour ago, Wavicle said:

You said "This change seems like another big blow to anyone trying to use the MA to make good, stories instead of just farms."

I don't understand that.

People trying to make actual content will have another hurdle in that the difficulty of their custom enemies will have to be even higher than it already is so the mobs are worth full xp.

[Titomancer]

Not sure if this is the right spot, but I didn't see any feedback/focus/suggestion threads with regards to the dark melee overhaul.  Considering the entire set does -tohit, could there be a replacement for Touch of Fear?  A single target -tohit fear power that does no damage on top of an entire set that does -tohit (and on a stalker has a decent chance for fear anyway)  seems super redundant.  Some suggestions might be:

 

A single target hold.

A single target confused (Dark Control leans heavily on Possess, why not Possessing Touch/Grasp/Tickle/Whatever)

Something unique that no set has, and I don't even know is possible, a knock TO.  A pull.  A yoink.  Get Over Here! Whatever you want to call it.

 

Alternatively, an AOE, since as stated it seriously underperforms in the AOE department.  Maybe the PBAOE Burst from dark assault (cant recall the name)

 

Thank you for all that you do!

[siolfir]

3 hours ago, Moka said:

Not to be blind as a bat, but where is it stated we're getting a change to AE critter damage? Did I miss the point of something somewhere? Though I personally think AVs needed to do more damage. A full team of 8 versus an AV is just a health sponge endurance test, not an actual fight.

From the patch notes:

Quote

AE Damage Fix

• Fixed several issues that caused custom critters in Architect Entertainment to deal damage that's inconsistent with their non-custom counterparts
• Generally all enemies were dealing less damage than they should apart from ranged minions, this has now been corrected
• See the tables below for the impact of enemies at level 20, 50, and 54

Level 20	Melee Damage Change	Ranged Damage Change
Minion	+12%	-4%
Lieutenant	+12%	+1%
Boss	-10%	-32%
Elite Boss	No Change	No Change
AV	No Change	No Change

 

Level 50	Melee Damage Change	Ranged Damage Change
Minion	+12%	-4%
Lieutenant	+12%	+1%
Boss	+44%	+8%
Elite Boss	+29%	+8%
AV	+82%	+47%

 

Level 54	Melee Damage Change	Ranged Damage Change
Minion	+12%	-4%
Lieutenant	+12%	+1%
Boss	+51%	+13%
Elite Boss	+29%	+8%
AV	+95%	+58%

 

 

 

 

55 minutes ago, Titomancer said:

Not sure if this is the right spot, but I didn't see any feedback/focus/suggestion threads with regards to the dark melee overhaul.  Considering the entire set does -tohit, could there be a replacement for Touch of Fear?  A single target -tohit fear power that does no damage on top of an entire set that does -tohit (and on a stalker has a decent chance for fear anyway)  seems super redundant.  Some suggestions might be:

 

A single target hold.

A single target confused (Dark Control leans heavily on Possess, why not Possessing Touch/Grasp/Tickle/Whatever)

Something unique that no set has, and I don't even know is possible, a knock TO.  A pull.  A yoink.  Get Over Here! Whatever you want to call it.

 

Alternatively, an AOE, since as stated it seriously underperforms in the AOE department.  Maybe the PBAOE Burst from dark assault (cant recall the name)

 

Thank you for all that you do!

Dark Assault's PBAoE is called Engulfing Darkness. It was suggested already and I personally would like it, but they've already said that the changes for Dark Melee are done for this planned release and will be put back on the table for a future release - it was picked because it was thought to be low-hanging fruit, but the branch was a little higher than they expected it to be so they're going to see how it does with just the Shadow Maul change.

 

[ROBOKiTTY]

17 hours ago, Moka said:

Though I personally think AVs needed to do more damage. A full team of 8 versus an AV is just a health sponge endurance test, not an actual fight.

 AVs aren't just fought by full teams of 8. Low-level characters with weak builds also face AVs. Buffing AVs will just make tanks and perhaps healers required to take on AVs, which is counter to what CoH is about.

  

17 hours ago, Wavicle said:

Doesn't that seem to indicate that AE enemies are having their damage BUFFED? If so, how does that appeal to farming?

Farms don't use AVs. Only story and challenge arcs use AVs. Buffing AV damage by almost a hundred percent hurts those very disproportionately.

 

Farmers will also get hit, but not in a good way. This will turn AE farming into even more of a monoculture than it already is, because optimized builds will be able to take the increased damage, but not builds that were already marginal to begin with.

 

Farming gets a bad rep, but it is a legitimate part of the game. One thing that is not often acknowledged is that farmers, both on live and on HC now, are a backbone of the in-game economy, as they generate a significant proportion of the drops that go on the market. Less farming means a scarcer market. It's almost certainly even more pronounced on HC than on live because of the lower player population.

 

And as has been pointed out above, the lower damage scale is not an error but working as the Paragon devs explicitly intended.

[Captain Powerhouse]

Quick note on the AE thing: that particular change is being pushed to next issue.

 

Right now, with some outliers like KoB, many powers actually do less damage when creating a custom critter than they do on equivalent AVs in the game. The change is being pushed back to attempt give all these outlier avoidance mechanics where an AV will warn before using extreme attacks like KoB, or maybe a Ranged Nuke, so players can move away or take some other safety measures. This will take some time and wont make it into Page 5.

[Sovera]

*stares at DM changes*

 

*quietly withers*

[Ariamaki]

The cast time reduction for Leadership auras is well-appreciated, and should probably be propagated to every single toggle with a long cast time: Tough, certain Armors, etc.

[Sovera]

36 minutes ago, Ariamaki said:

The cast time reduction for Leadership auras is well-appreciated, and should probably be propagated to every single toggle with a long cast time: Tough, certain Armors, etc.

Agreed. What is exactly the balance meaning of making activating toggles such a long affair? I have no idea what the original devs were thinking when they made it so. A toggle is something thrown once at the start of the session and then ignored until the next death or the next session.

[Wavicle]

1 hour ago, Sovera said:

Agreed. What is exactly the balance meaning of making activating toggles such a long affair? I have no idea what the original devs were thinking when they made it so. A toggle is something thrown once at the start of the session and then ignored until the next death or the next session.

That’s exactly what they were thinking. You only hit it once in a while, so it doesn’t matter how long it is, within reason.

[General Idiot]

If you get rezzed in combat I suppose how long it takes to turn your toggles back on could be a balancing factor of some kind. 

[ROBOKiTTY]

4 hours ago, General Idiot said:

If you get rezzed in combat I suppose how long it takes to turn your toggles back on could be a balancing factor of some kind. 

Being mezzed also used to detoggle everything. If the animation time was ever meant to be a balancing factor, it was long obsolete, as leadership faced devastating nerfs over the years, most notably GDN. I think of it as an artifact like how Superior Invisibility cost 1.04/s endurance on live despite its defence (the tooltip still calls it "extremely high") being a paltry 2.25% in combat.

Edited March 13, 2020 by ROBOKiTTY

[ROBOKiTTY]

On 3/12/2020 at 9:23 AM, Captain Powerhouse said:

Quick note on the AE thing: that particular change is being pushed to next issue.

 

Right now, with some outliers like KoB, many powers actually do less damage when creating a custom critter than they do on equivalent AVs in the game. The change is being pushed back to attempt give all these outlier avoidance mechanics where an AV will warn before using extreme attacks like KoB, or maybe a Ranged Nuke, so players can move away or take some other safety measures. This will take some time and wont make it into Page 5.

 Unfortunately, this doesn't really address most of the concerns brought up.

 

Custom mobs doing less damage was by design, because stock NPCs have always followed a very different set of rules than custom NPCs in AE. Most stock NPC in the game have much smaller pools of powers than a PC, and most of them are attacks with few defensive powers (most of which don't work like player defensive powers). Instead, purple patch, rank scaling, and NPC passive defences make up for that lack of defensive powers. Most stock NPCs have gaps in their attack rotation, and most AVs don't have enough attacks to have a full attack chain.

 

This is not the case for custom mobs in AE. Custom mobs inherit the benefit of purple patch, rank scaling, and passive protection that all mobs of equivalent ranks have by default. On top of that, they also have access to two full powersets, which usually grant them a much more seamless attack rotation even with just one damage set. If a defensive powerset is chosen, then they get access to defensive powers designed for player characters, meaning they are generalized against a wide spectrum of damage types, unlike stock NPCs which tend to have more specialized defences. It's not even possible to give custom mobs in AE weaknesses that many stock NPCs have (e.g. robots have negative smashing resistance, and Clockwork have negative psi resistance; almost a fifth of stock mobs have some kind of negative resistance).

 

DPS from custom mobs is already higher than just about anything the game is able to dish out. Not much in the base game deals as much damage as an aggro-capped AE farm, despite the fact that they're designed to do minimum damage to optimally-built characters. The ITF is a good comparison, as the ambushes and scripted spawns are easily aggro capped, and they are far more survivable to a greater variety of builds than an S/L AE farm, even with the additional benefits of the massive -def and mez protection Cimeroran mobs have.

 

Then there's the fact that this blanket change will alter the balance of every arc out there -- not just farms -- that uses custom mobs. The EB and AV change in particular will disproportionately affect non-farm arcs. A lot of the Hall of Fame/Dev's Choice arcs were made by players who are no longer active, so they're not going to be adjusted, potentially making them unplayable to a significant portion of their intended audience.

 

Finally, I question the idea of making the telegraphing-attack-and-twitch-reaction mechanic a part of AE. It was always one of the more controversial additions to the game, as it made the game less accessible to players with disabilities or slow reaction times. Adding the mechanic as an additional toy to the arc writer's toolbox might be interesting for variety, but adding it to every AV with a nuke or extreme-damage attack seems rather drastic.

 

So I don't understand what the purpose of this change is. It's likely to exacerbate the death spiral of AE. The one-two punch of 1/3 XP and significantly harder mobs will discourage people from trying out arcs containing custom mobs. It will hurt roleplayers who rely on custom NPCs for storytelling. The effect on farming will be relatively low, because worst comes to worst, farmers could just switch to stock mobs.

Edited March 13, 2020 by ROBOKiTTY