General Feedback: Page 5 Build 5

[Not Horus]

18 minutes ago, Inflated Donkey said:

 

Sadly, this is how it comes off looking.  

 

It's exactly how it comes off looking. 

 

These changes can't be pushed out before you also balancing changes for each power affected by them, which is also how it's looking.

[Galaxy Brain]

Is there a general "level" you are aiming at balancing sets to @Captain Powerhouse? A good deal of confusion may be cleared up with that in mind instead of vague "this will be touched" messages. 

[Internaut]

6 hours ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

 

If all values were considered, the controller version of all these powers would receive a true and harsh nerf.

 

As to the "why fix it now?" question: this was fixed long ago, internally, but was never pushed because of crash bugs that were fixed during Page 5 development (the crash bug some might had seen when customizing Faraday Cage earlier in testing.)

I feel like you justify a lot of unpopular and arguably unnecessary changes that you make by saying "it was supposed to be fixed a long time ago/before shut down, but never was" and they frequently end up over/under-tuned, buggy, or outright broken. Like the burn change for example. It often feels arbitrary (or for some reason geared against farming) and I can't help but find myself frequently wondering why you're not focusing on more impactful and desired changes. 

 

I'm sure there's more to it, including my own confirmation bias, but after almost a year thats the impression that myself and many of the people I talk to in-game have.

[Vanden]

It’s nice to see that the anti-nerf rhetoric hasn’t changed at all.

[Action Sloth]

Though I know balance is never easy, especially in a game with so many things to balance, I just want to echo the sentiment that others are expressing, that the changes implemented frequently feel poorly justified as well as wildly personal, untested, and unnecessary. 

[JayboH]

I'm all for proper rebalance.  Depending on the severity of changes, grant freespecs, just like it's always been done before.

 

Make the game better as a whole - which is what it sounds like you are doing.  People don't like nerfs but do it if it is necessary.  Some of us are reasonable and understand.

[Not Horus]

8 minutes ago, JayboH said:

 Some of us are reasonable and understand.

Nice casual dismissal of everyone with concerns as "unreasonable".

[ScarySai]

1 minute ago, Not Horus said:

Nice casual dismissal of everyone with concerns as "unreasonable".

It's incredibly unreasonable to leave a power that was untouched for the entire game's lifespan alone, obviously.

[Inflated Donkey]

11 minutes ago, JayboH said:

Some of us are reasonable and understand.

🙄🙄🙄

[Doc_Scorpion]

Could we move the side discussions and the nerd rage to a different thread?  Some of us are actually trying to follow and participate in the testing - and five pages of "uhn-uh" and "well, you're another" is kinda tiring to get through.

[Vanden]

12 minutes ago, Not Horus said:

Nice casual dismissal of everyone with concerns as "unreasonable".

I would definitely describe people who use powers being made to follow the rules as a soapbox to rail against nerfing in general, say things like "fun detected, fun removed," and assume that a set being targeted for rebalancing is going to be nerfed into the ground as being unreasonable.

[ABlueThingy]

If you want anything new you're going to have to learn to put up with nerfs.  I mean, there's more to it than that but... it's like asking for a surgeon to fix your appendicitis without cutting into you.   The Homecoming team has been pretty clear that they want to make sure they do things right, they comb the spaghetti code out as they go.  So adding new things is easier and lets them do even more creative tricks. 

 

Unless you don't want new powersets or other updates to the game.  In which case... I... Don't know what to tell you. 

 

People who are unhappy that the game is getting updates, changes, nerfs or buffs are not going to be happy with Homecoming.  The point of this server is not to maintain the game as it was.  It is to improve it and push it forward while trying to maintain the core of the game.

 

 

[siolfir]

6 hours ago, Number Six said:

Fulcrum Shift is another power that is a mess of pseudopets and is likely to be replaced by a cleaner implementation without them. I don’t expect stacking behavior on that power to change. It may be affected by AT mods, but it hasn’t been looked at yet so it may be one that they actually created different pets for different ATs anyway.

To address the highlighted part, yes, it already respects the AT modifiers. This makes it extremely easy for a Defender to cap their own damage due to their lower damage cap and higher modifiers.

 

 

Off topic, but to address the line of logic in these posts:

4 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I was under the impression that EM was nerfed due to PvP, but the effects of said nerf also had to be done in PvE since there was little to no separation at the time?

While the animation time couldn't change between PvE and PvP, they most certainly had the ability to make PvP-only effects on powers at the time, as well as have different PvE-only and PvP-only lines (it's why Scourge and Criticals were unresisted in PvP but resisted in PvE, for example). They could have easily reduced Energy Transfer's damage just for PvP if that was the only concern without any changes to PvE damage, even with the engine limitations at the time.

 

[Not Horus]

51 minutes ago, Vanden said:

 and assume that a set being targeted for rebalancing is going to be nerfed into the ground as being unreasonable.

Unless that's the historical behavior of the nerfs that have happen. Which it is.

[Vanden]

23 minutes ago, Not Horus said:

Unless that's the historical behavior of the nerfs that have happen. Which it is.

Really? How many sets has Homecoming team nerfed into the ground?

Edited March 15, 2020 by Vanden

[ROBOKiTTY]

This may be somewhat off-topic, but here it goes.

 

Can people on all three sides not resort to insults and cavalier dismissals of different points of view? Categorizing support of, disagreement with, and indifference towards announced change as 'nerd rage' or 'crying' or otherwise not worth considering is incredibly unproductive. It was one of the most toxic elements of the old forums that I was saddened to see revived here. We all comment here because, I presume, we love the game and feel extremely strongly about it in the aftermath of the loss of it. Change will always upset some and please others, and sometimes you fall on one side and sometimes the other. Most of us waited for the better part of a decade to have another chance at playing CoX again. At this point, this is more than just a game for many of us. I realize this may not be true for some of you, but try to have some empathy. It's time to stop the drama, to be charitable, and to stop assuming that people who disagree with your point of view are stupid or out to start trouble. Take a step back to consider how high the stakes really are in the grand scheme of things, whether it's worth widening the rift in the community over. I sense that some people have carried over old resentments and hard feelings from live and/or the SCoRE years. It's unhealthy and probably hurts you more than the people you're angry at, so try to let it go. People in this community like to brandish the friendliness of the CoX community, so can we try to show it?

 

I recognize I fail at this a lot myself. I'm only feline, but I'm trying. I'd like to ask all of you to try as well. If that's not possible, at least remember that this is not the only place you can play CoX. Thank you for listening. By reading this far, you have agreed to subscribe to my newsletter.

[Draeth Darkstar]

The nerf to Twilight's Grasp is probably justified, it's a very strong heal, but this is a brutal hit to Tar Patch. I don't think it would be out of line to buff the Defender version and leave the others where they are now. It's not like Dark is over-performing on any AT and this is 4 big hits to the Controller version and 3 to the Mastermind and Corruptor versions in one patch when none of those ATs needed to be adjusted downwards on the overall.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Draeth Darkstar

[Inflated Donkey]

How about this.  No nerfs or buffs until we can have skippable cut scenes.

[Vanden]

20 minutes ago, Inflated Donkey said:

How about this.  No nerfs or buffs until we can have skippable cut scenes.

The nerfs will continue until morale improves.

[oedipus_tex]

I don't think the update to Tar Patch is harsh or unfair. The AoE -Resist in Thermal, Time, Sonic Resonance and Radiation has always been -22.5 on Controllers , Corruptors and Masterminds. That's the "correct" value for those archetypes and those sets have always been fine. I always assumed that the bigger values from borrowed psuedo pets were provisional and if the developers ever had reason to revisit those powers they were subject to correction. Given the updates they are making to the overall pet system it makes sense to me that that time is now and it I understand why they wouldn't want to reintroduce what was originally a technical workaround.

[ScarySai]

12 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

That's the "correct" value for those archetypes

There's that word again.

 

I'll quote an unnamed friend of mine here.

 

"What they fundamentally don't get, is it doesn't matter that it follows AT modifiers now, you're changing something that has been well established for the entire lifespan of the game under the guise that it's a bugfix. This is not going to sit well with people. No amount of numbers or coding jargon reasoning you throw out will change the sour taste you've left in peoples mouths, this is why you don't change shit like this. You can bring in more players by revamping older out of date content/powers or inventing new ones but damaging popular non-op powersets is a lose/lose venture."

Edited March 15, 2020 by ScarySai

[Doc_Scorpion]

On 3/13/2020 at 6:22 PM, Number Six said:

Please give it a try and let me know how they behave. Mercs should still prefer to stand still if at all possible and will only move if they have no other target on their aggro list. If you want them to stand absolutely still, you can also put them in "Stay" mode which retains the stay-right-there-no-matter-what behavior.

 

If player feedback indicates it's detrimental in practice, the radius can be reduced for ranged pets separately from melee. Even if it's 1' it needs to be set to something to prevent the issue where pets would ignore Goto commands to reposition near their current location.

I've played with this a little bit and thought about it a lot...  And I can't say I'm fond of it because it kinda undoes what was introduced in the last page (or patch?  I've lost track).  I've grown fond of ranged pets that stay in one place and fight at range.   It makes it a lot easier to keep my boys in range of my bubble.

I can see giving them a short leash (5'-10'?) to fix the issue and give them some freedom to reposition, but 30' strikes me as too much.

[oedipus_tex]

2 minutes ago, ScarySai said:

"What they fundamentally don't get, is it doesn't matter that it follows AT modifiers now, you're changing something that has been well established for the entire lifespan of the game under the guise that it's a bugfix. 

 

 

This seems a touch dramatic. The numbers match other AoE -Resist powers exactly. Anyway I'm of the mind that the developers of a resurrected server can change whatever they want. The source code is out there for the pure preservationists. I'd personally much prefer this updated version of CoX to the literalist version, stuck 8 years in the past. 

[ScarySai]

Sure, they can change whatever they want and ignore us, they own the server, of course.

 

Yet, if your default response to to criticism is "they own the server they can do what they want" or "if you don't like it just leave", you're not really making a strong case.

 

I'd of course rather this server get things right than drive people away, as 90% of the stuff HC has done thus far has been fantastic, it's power balancing where they are really slacking, and that's a very important thing to be slacking on. With large scale changes on the horizon, these concerns need to be voiced now, not later when it's half committed already.

 

 

[Myrmidon]

• The following powers were using Defender modifiers, they have been fixed to use their own AT modifiers
  • Controller > Darkness Affinity > Twilight Grasp
  • Controller > Darkness Affinity > Tar Patch
  • Corruptor > Dark Miasma > Twilight Grasp
  • Corruptor > Dark Miasma > Tar Patch
  • Mastermind  > Dark Miasma > Twilight Grasp
  • Mastermind  > Dark Miasma > Tar Patch
  • Pets > Dark Servant > Twilight Grasp

 

Excellent correction.