What if T9 armors....were T2s?

[Leo_G]

15 minutes ago, Replacement said:

You "can" win fights with just brawl, too. No one is enjoying doing so, though.

And your obtuse comparison really just goes to show how out of control some builds and build directions have taken this game.

 

The only thing I (and the OP) are trying to portray is that some powers are situational.  The way some portray these situational powers and then turn up their noses like they are just too good to ever waste their voluminous mental capacities (more like ego) on something so niche and situational is very similar to how bourgie people feel about regular food.

 

And moreso how the "solution" used to countered is making the power even more accessible than having it at level 4.  "Get rid of the crash and make the cooldown half of what it is and diversify the mitigations so it's not all just def or just res blah blah".  Sometimes I wonder if you people ever listen to yourselves lol.

 

FYI, I'm not advocating for having the tier 9s shifted down to tier 2s because that has a lot of various issues such as some tier 9s being more useful or advantageous to have earlier on while some other power in the set will have to take its place at tier 9 (delaying when you can get it).  It's not a completely baffling idea considering on another server, they moved Controller pets up to around that level too. 

Edited March 13, 2020 by Leo_G

[Replacement]

1 hour ago, Leo_G said:

And your obtuse comparison really just goes to show how out of control some builds and build directions have taken this game.

 

The only thing I (and the OP) are trying to portray is that some powers are situational.  The way some portray these situational powers and then turn up their noses like they are just too good to ever waste their voluminous mental capacities (more like ego) on something so niche and situational is very similar to how bourgie people feel about regular food.

 

And moreso how the "solution" used to countered is making the power even more accessible than having it at level 4.  "Get rid of the crash and make the cooldown half of what it is and diversify the mitigations so it's not all just def or just res blah blah".  Sometimes I wonder if you people ever listen to yourselves lol.

 

FYI, I'm not advocating for having the tier 9s shifted down to tier 2s because that has a lot of various issues such as some tier 9s being more useful or advantageous to have earlier on while some other power in the set will have to take its place at tier 9 (delaying when you can get it).  It's not a completely baffling idea considering on another server, they moved Controller pets up to around that level too. 

Like I said in Post #2 of this thread, I think this idea is actually awesome, but it's incompatible with the game as it stands now.  But that's not really our beef.

 

I am using an "obtuse" comparison to try to show you how extreme your perspective is.  If "brawl for winning" is obtuse, then you have to admit that there exists something on the other end of the spectrum that is equally, insanely unreasonable.  "Using powers responsibly" can be achieved without a 5% up-time.

 

If a 10 HP heal on a 20 minute cooldown is stupid, then what tuning can you make for it to be better?  10 HP per 10 minutes?  100 HP per 10 minutes?  200 HP per 10 minutes?  This is the reality of balance: it's never perfect, but there are extremes that don't make sense.  

 

Short version: You can definitely live through a crash.  At what point is it not worth the effort and power selection?

 

Bonus game! I underlined all the parts in your post that attempt to project flawed thinking onto anyone who disagrees with you.

 

Here's a really great example I encourage anyone to read that shows a great job of breaking down spotting when someone is telling you how to think through framing instead of content:

https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-effort-one-video-is-worth-a-trillion-dollars

 

 

Quote

The segment starts by telling you that the previous news story you were supposed to fear is over, but fear not, there is more fear to fear:

“So we survived the fiscal cliff after all. The next dire circumstance you’re gunna hear us talking about around here is the debt ceiling which, make no mistake, has the capacity to crash the US economy.”

(Emphasis added)

‘Wow. Sounds pretty serious,’ you might think to yourself. ‘I better watch the rest of this segment’.

Onward:

“So wouldn’t it be just like the current thinking in Washington, and the cast of characters there, if they could mint a coin they could spend that could solve the problem.”

(Emphasis added)

The anchorman has already conveyed, by implication:

1. Washington is doing things wrong because
2. The people working there are fools who
3. Want a magic coin to fix all their problems

Edited March 13, 2020 by Replacement

[Replacement]

@Leo_G to go to our mutual interest of FFXI, you are aware that they eventually changed Last Resort's duration from 30 seconds to 3 minutes?  It still has the crippling defense penalty, but at some point they faced the facts that a move that is a full-strength provoke, a huge penalty to your survival, and has a 5-minute cooldown... all of that was just not worth the meager benefits.  This is a good example of what I mean: I'm all for drawbacks, I'm all for good tactical decisions.  But that needs to at least be reflective of the benefits.  I don't think that's asking too much.

[Leo_G]

8 minutes ago, Replacement said:

Like I said in Post #2 of this thread, I think this idea is actually awesome, but it's incompatible with the game as it stands now.  But that's not really our beef.

 

I am using an "obtuse" comparison to try to show you how extreme your perspective is.  If "brawl for winning" is obtuse, then you have to admit that there exists something on the other end of the spectrum that is equally, insanely unreasonable.  "Using powers responsibly" can be achieved without a 5% up-time.

 

If a 10 HP heal on a 20 minute cooldown is stupid, then what tuning can you make for it to be better?  10 HP per 10 minutes?  100 HP per 10 minutes?  200 HP per 10 minutes?  This is the reality of balance: it's never perfect, but there are extremes that don't make sense.  

 

The reason I say it's obtuse is because this isn't a circumstance where these particular opposites correlate on a spectrum to be relevant.  On one hand, you have a power that has no cost and provides the minimum and is available to everyone and on the other hand, you have a power that grants you all of an attribute (or attributes) that the game allows you but through succinct conditions.  The only spectrum that is relevant here is their level of effects applied.  They don't apply the same effect, they aren't used for the same purpose, they aren't available to the same characters and they aren't balanced by the same limits.

 

Why would you compare only using brawl to defeat an AV to using a tier 9 to survive a sticky situation?  I can only assume it's because you're attempting to make a point but alas, it's as pointless to argue against as me arguing for some substantial change that will likely not align with the goals of another vocal subset of the community.

 

If you wanted to make a *better* compariosn, why not make an example of a 10HP heal on a 1sec cooldown?  Over 1000 seconds, it can heal for 10,000HP.  Compared to a heal that can heal for 10,000HP but on a 1000sec cooldown.  Of course, you didn't make that example because you'd be demonstrating the difference of a heal and sustain in this game.

[Leo_G]

13 minutes ago, Replacement said:

@Leo_G to go to our mutual interest of FFXI, you are aware that they eventually changed Last Resort's duration from 30 seconds to 3 minutes?  It still has the crippling defense penalty, but at some point they faced the facts that a move that is a full-strength provoke, a huge penalty to your survival, and has a 5-minute cooldown... all of that was just not worth the meager benefits.  This is a good example of what I mean: I'm all for drawbacks, I'm all for good tactical decisions.  But that needs to at least be reflective of the benefits.  I don't think that's asking too much.

Frankly, they made a lot of changes that didn't make a lot of sense primarily because their feedback mostly consisted of japanese players (who have different mentalities when playing MMOs).  Not saying your Last Resort example doesn't make sense, but I wouldn't be using changes from launch to current in FFXI as a talking point.  Not to mention, over time, the game was made to be more solo friendly.  To try to use various balancing points from that game to reflect here, we'd have to go down an entirely different rabbit hole since this game and FFXI are *VEERY* different and the goals each game has is also different and has changed over time.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Leo_G

[CaptainSalerno]

Regarding T9 armor power my idea would be to replace them with some kind of damage buff based on the element of the armor set. For example, if you have fiery aura, you may get some kind of fire damage.

This damage may be an auto bonus on all the attacks of your melee set or a PBAoE attack or a damaging aura, depending on what the set already has.

Another idea that I already read on this forum, would be a power (auto?) damaging the enemies every time they land a hit on you

[Menelruin]

1 hour ago, CaptainSalerno said:

Regarding T9 armor power my idea would be to replace them with some kind of damage buff based on the element of the armor set. For example, if you have fiery aura, you may get some kind of fire damage.

This damage may be an auto bonus on all the attacks of your melee set or a PBAoE attack or a damaging aura, depending on what the set already has.

Another idea that I already read on this forum, would be a power (auto?) damaging the enemies every time they land a hit on you

While cool ideas, they go against what's called the "Cottage Rule," which the dev team tries to adhere to.  They prefer to maintain the core concept/function of powers, rather than completely replacing/reimagining them.  The idea behind most T9s seems to be, as someone said, an "emergency button".....something to take your defenses/resists above and beyond what's normally achievable.   The problem is it's not MUCH higher than what a level 50 player can have on ALL THE TIME......

[CaptainSalerno]

16 minutes ago, Menelruin said:

While cool ideas, they go against what's called the "Cottage Rule," which the dev team tries to adhere to.  They prefer to maintain the core concept/function of powers, rather than completely replacing/reimagining them.  The idea behind most T9s seems to be, as someone said, an "emergency button".....something to take your defenses/resists above and beyond what's normally achievable.   The problem is it's not MUCH higher than what a level 50 player can have on ALL THE TIME......

If T9 has to be an”emergency button” , I was thinking some kind of “super hand clap” power, stunning every enemy around you while replenishing both health and stamina (maybe recharging all you powers also?) with a very long cooldown, of course.

[Replacement]

2 hours ago, Leo_G said:

I can only assume it's because you're attempting to make a point

I'll try to make the point without any examples at all.  It's clear they're just getting in the way.

 

Statement #1:

Given any power, you can tune it with disadvantages such as crashes and long cooldowns.

 

Statement #2:

Assuming #1 is true, I submit that no matter how extreme the power is, you can attach enough disadvantages to make it a bad idea.  You can always escalate the drawbacks until it's just not even worth it anymore.

 

Statement #3:

I submit this is what you are seeing in page 1 of this thread.  Having poor uptime is ok... until it hits the level where it is not.  Having a crash is ok... until it outweighs the benefits to too large a degree. 

 

What's really interesting about this thread is it's forcing us to view T9s as an opportunity cost against T1 and 2 armor powers.  Unstoppable looks fine when you assume it's layered onto all your other goodies.  When you stop and look at it in a vacuum, compared to Temp Invulnerability or even Resist Physical Damage... Unstoppable just doesn't look like it's worth the price of the buy-in.

Edited March 13, 2020 by Replacement

[Leo_G]

2 minutes ago, Replacement said:

I'll try to make the point without any examples at all.  It's clear they're just getting in the way.

 

Statement #1:

Given any power, you can tune it with disadvantages such as crashes and long cooldowns.

 

Statement #2:

Assuming #1 is true, I submit that no matter how extreme the power is, you can attach enough disadvantages to make it a bad idea.  You can always escalate the drawbacks until it's just not even worth it anymore.

 

Statement #3:

I submit this is what you are seeing in page 1 of this thread.  Having poor uptime is ok... until it hits the level where it is not.  Having a crash is ok... until it outweighs the benefits to too large a degree. 

 

What's really interesting about this thread is it's forcing us to view T9s as an opportunity cost against T1 and 2 armor powers.  Unstoppable looks fine when you assume it's layered onto all your other goodies.  When you stop and look at it in a vacuum, compared to Temp Invulnerability or even Resist Physical Damage... Unstoppable just doesn't look like it's worth the price of the buy-in.

Well it took you long enough to distill your point down to worth which is mostly a subjective perspective.

 

Whether tier 9s' effects are "stupid" or how fun they are or aren't is a subjective argument too.

 

I like to hear solutions but yours sounds like it's solving an issue of preference but masked in objective reasoning.  What argument could you make for improving the tier 9s beyond the fact that you don't want to take them and completely changing them would alleviate that tick in the back of your head about having a power you don't want go untaken?

 

But then perhaps I'm also viewing things through a scope a bit further back and asking not only why some disadvantages attached are bad ideas but what changes have occurred to give players that perspective in the first place.  Perhaps it wasn't a good idea to give every player nukes and high bonus recharge and access to capped defense at all times.  Perhaps trying to buff everything up to a higher level just so the gap between the over performing and under performing ATs and sets wasn't the most well thought out solution.  Maybe giving everyone access to even more of everything without any kind of catch by revoking the cottage rule and alter armor tier 9s to do different things isn't necessary besides checking off a box for people with OCD.

 

All the way up until this point, I haven't made the argument about crashes or how bad they are, merely that they aren't a death sentence.  It's funny because, back on live in some of the earlier issues, people posted about means of neutralizing crashes all together with their use of powers...I'm not saying that being able to do that suddenly makes the power's opportunity cost greater but it's a funny side-by-side to see the direction the game has shifted from trying to emulate super heroic feats with danger and price to mostly a parody of anything resembling danger or price and with the term "hero" thrown about like an empty title.  Now, nothing has a cost and if it does, it can be mitigated and if it can't, it's not worth using (even if that price is just a longer cast time).  I wouldn't ask to have the old game back but lament the goals and mentalities being used going forward will just make the game all the more cheaper and not worth playing outside of building a character and putting them on a shelf.

[Call Me Awesome]

If I were redesigning Unstoppable to be a useful power in today's game I'd go about it something like this:

 

1. Drop the +Res from 70% down to around 20-30%.  (Hmm, looking at CMA's current build it would only need to provide 20% when fully enhanced in order to hard cap all resistances but Psi.  Ok, drop the +Res down in the 10-20% range.)  As it stands now the 70% +res is drastically overkill; it's utterly trivial to hard cap S/L with no IO bonuses and it's pretty easy to get E/N/F/C to 50% or above without extreme IO building.

 

2. Either leave the +Recovery as is or perhaps slightly reduce it.  With all the +recovery IO's currently in the game this aspect isn't a huge deal.

 

3. Cut the HP and End crash down to 25%-50% range.

 

4. Leave the uptime and recharge as is, OR give it the One with the Shield treatment and make the recharge unenhanceable and set to double the uptime.

 

That way you get a truly useful emergency button that doesn't drastically over cap you and doesn't automatically kill you when it drops.

[Sarrate]

On 3/12/2020 at 3:14 PM, Leo_G said:

I think you're missing the point though.

 

Uptime wouldn't be the reason to pick them.  Emergency Button is why you pick it up, even if you needed an emergency button every 10min but are limited to 10+ here, that at least takes care of 1 instance of needing that button vs just going to the hospital.  And if encounters are challenging enough to get your team hospital visits, that just aids in the opportunity costs of long recharge powers since travel time will be used to regroup.  And just because the power is off cooldown doesn't mean press it which further eats into uptime (uptime is really irrelevant...) 

 

Overall, the slower a team moves, the more likely you are statistically going to need an emergency button.  If your team is moving fast, likely the encounters are breezed through.  

Sorry to dredge up something from last page, but I wanted to make a comment on this.

 

The way I look at it is this, if you're in danger of dying, then yes, a T9 would help / prevent that... but it also means that you'd be weaker in the times when it's not up (missing a core power you normally could have taken). This isn't just at lower levels, but higher levels too (why I was pointing out pushing Invincibility from 28 to 35, that's a looong time to wait for a core and defining survivability power).

 

The way I'm reading your post makes it sound like you're assuming people will be on teams, which is not the case. Most of my /played on Homecoming has been solo. So I very much value the base level performance of a set, as it means I can tick the difficulty to spawn more enemies sooner. A T9 wouldn't help me do that because of the gaps. 

 

 

I'm not saying that god-modes are absolutely garbage or that they should be removed from the game. No, I understand their uses, they can be fun, and they can save the day. I'd just argue very strongly against moving them to the front of sets - especially globally. The opportunity cost is too high, imo.

[Sarrate]

3 hours ago, Call Me Awesome said:

If I were redesigning Unstoppable to be a useful power in today's game I'd go about it something like this:

 

1. Drop the +Res from 70% down to around 20-30%.  (Hmm, looking at CMA's current build it would only need to provide 20% when fully enhanced in order to hard cap all resistances but Psi.  Ok, drop the +Res down in the 10-20% range.)  As it stands now the 70% +res is drastically overkill; it's utterly trivial to hard cap S/L with no IO bonuses and it's pretty easy to get E/N/F/C to 50% or above without extreme IO building.

 

2. Either leave the +Recovery as is or perhaps slightly reduce it.  With all the +recovery IO's currently in the game this aspect isn't a huge deal.

 

3. Cut the HP and End crash down to 25%-50% range.

 

4. Leave the uptime and recharge as is, OR give it the One with the Shield treatment and make the recharge unenhanceable and set to double the uptime.

 

That way you get a truly useful emergency button that doesn't drastically over cap you and doesn't automatically kill you when it drops.

Two other possibilities:

 

5) Instead of instantly dropping your health and endurance, they could have a timed -10% hp & -10% end / sec for X seconds so long as your health & end are above Y. Basically, Unstoppable would leave you exhausted, and constantly drain hp/end from you, potentially more than the current 90%, but it would be over time so that you could react to it.

 

6) Slap on a large -MaxHP & -MaxEnd. This wouldn't move your health or end bars at all, but they'd be much smaller, reducing your effective health and end pools. This might be a bit weird, though, as after it wears off, you could end up staying at full health (since your current health percent scales as MaxHP changes). So the crash would be much subtler and easier to notice... which is probably a bad thing.

[Haijinx]

I agree with Replacement.  This is the kind of idea that would have been awesome during the closed Beta or something.  

 

T9s would have had to be toned way down, but still .. 

 

As a suggestion for those underwhelmed by low level armors .. buy the Kinetic Damper temp power at the P2W.  It is extremely strong at low level.  Especially once paired with the two +3% def IOs 

 

 

[kelika2]

17 hours ago, Leo_G said:

The only thing I (and the OP) are trying to portray is that some powers are situational.

With the advancement of IOs (those things from like issue 9) two things happened:

They phase out tier9s even for emergencies

And builds are always so tight there is sometimes not even room for them.  because if I have the option for having an emergency button, or a LOTG mule.. im ganna go with LOTG and make sure my insp tray is good to go.

 

oh my god i forgot about insps, they too phase out most tier9s

 

Situational powers have no place in todays CoX

[Call Me Awesome]

18 hours ago, Sarrate said:

Two other possibilities:

 

5) Instead of instantly dropping your health and endurance, they could have a timed -10% hp & -10% end / sec for X seconds so long as your health & end are above Y. Basically, Unstoppable would leave you exhausted, and constantly drain hp/end from you, potentially more than the current 90%, but it would be over time so that you could react to it.

 

6) Slap on a large -MaxHP & -MaxEnd. This wouldn't move your health or end bars at all, but they'd be much smaller, reducing your effective health and end pools. This might be a bit weird, though, as after it wears off, you could end up staying at full health (since your current health percent scales as MaxHP changes). So the crash would be much subtler and easier to notice... which is probably a bad thing.

I don't think either of these is the solution, the -% per minute just gives something you'd have to manage constantly for the next while instead of doing your job and absent inspirations or the proper teammates it's even more of a guaranteed faceplant than the current system.  The second one is just adding an unneeded complication and greatly reducing your effectiveness.

 

I vote to keep it simple without needing to introduce complex and potentially bug inducing new systems.  Adjusting the values of the buff and the crash should be the easiest way to make it useful without that.  The exact amount of those adjustments would need some testing but I think having the buffs in the 15-20% range and the crash in the 25-50% range would be in the ballpark of having a useful emergency button when you get in trouble without the crash making it worthless.

 

We already have the example of One with the Shield for how a useful emergency button can work; on it's own Shield is competitive with Invuln in terms of durability AND it has a +damage buff as well as a T9 emergency power that's worth having for those situations when things go pear shaped.  My Shield Stalker currently has OwtS but I seldom need it.  My Shield/Fire tanker on Live also had it and occasionally used it for difficult encounters.  It's crash is enough that you need to pay attention to it, but not severe enough to kill you outright if it happens in combat.

 

As of right now Invuln is up to any task without even considering the T9, and most Invuln characters I know don't consider taking it.  I think that the T9 needs to be useful and not an automatic skippable power in the build.  We don't need every T9 to be a Granite Armor level choice, but they all should have a valid reason for choosing them in any build.  (Actually Granite is a whole other can of worms entirely in that it's a complete replacement for the entire rest of the set.) In my opinion every power in a set should have a valid reason to choose it; having worthless powers seems like poor design.  That goes for the T1-T8 just as much as the T9.  Currently Inuvln only has one highly skippable power and it's Unstoppable.

[AgentForest]

On 3/12/2020 at 7:58 AM, Black Zot said:

Crashes are bad game design regardless of when they become available.  You want to make T9s worth the code space they take up?  Ditch the crash.

BOOM!  This plz.

Honestly, they got rid of the crash for Blasters because they were so boring to just one shot a whole group of enemies, then be useless for 30 seconds, only to repeat.  So they made those moves weaker, but have no crash so they can just be a strong nuke during one's regular rotation.

So they should do this for defensive T9s.  Go the Moment of Glory route.  Make it maybe 10 seconds, but really good, no crash, and then a minute or two cooldown.  There really is no need for a crash.  It just breaks enjoyment and the flow of combat.