If you could radically overhaul 1 thing....

[Galaxy Brain]

Figured this could be a fun, "pie in the sky" topic for folks to kind of toss ideas out that would probably way too drastic to actually do, but would be fun to muse about!

 

For me, I would revamp Endurance. 

 

This has honestly bugged me for a while, but we see seeds of it's problems all the way back from Issue 0 until... whichever issue made Stamina inherent. Characters seem to either have major End Issues, or 0 end issues with the in-between being incredibly rare. It also seems that starting out, Endurance is the number one issue for many characters to the point of being unfun / punishing just trying to play the character especially where toggles are concerned, slowing things down or making things much more dangerous and frustrating. Once you build past that point though its like you never had issues at all and End may as well not exist.

 

There are many ways to take it, but personally I would be cool with a switch from Strategic Endurance (where your build/plans dictate performance) to Tactical Endurance (where your decisions in the moment dictate performance). As an example, lets say end costs were Doubled but recovery was Quintupled. You could rip through your end quickly, but the downtime between would be incredibly small. Or you could pace yourself and essentially never run out of end but play slower but steadier. That would allow for a much "smoother curve" to leveling and different kinds of builds and playstyles in my opinion.

 

 

What would you all take a swing at?

[Luminara]

6 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

What would you all take a swing at?

 

I'd standardize damage output in respect to animation time.  X damage per Y animation time, with all other aspects of powers balanced around those stats.  That would bring a lot of under-performing powers up to par, and normalize other things, like endurance costs and recharge times.

 

Barring that, I'd standardize mez.  I'd restrict Holds (single-target and AoE) and all AoE control to controllers and dominators (total lockdown), and single-target Stuns to defenders, corruptors and masterminds (partial lockdown).  Single-target Sleeps and Immobilizes would be available in place of other status effects in other archetypes.  Giving every archetype access to every status effect and every vector was terrible design from the start.

 

And barring either of those, I'd add damage to collision physics so Knockback could be more than soft control.  Knocking an enemy into a wall should hurt, not merely provide a brief pause in incoming damage.

[RageusQuitus2]

Id get rid of crafting and SOs and lower.  Id also like to see drop rate/inf rate increased.  I want IOs on all my toons and I wanna make ALOT of builds.  Ill never have the time to manage that, unless i played on test...  Which i guess is kinda like street sweeping in pvp zones (empty).  

[FoulVileTerror]

My laundry list of ideas is a bit too long to get in to, though if I had to choose just one . . . 

 

It would be to implement an alternative or three to the damage-as-only-means-of-progress meta.  

The key one being a Resolve mechanic.  Essentially a different form of "HP" that is decreased with Controls and Debuffs, which would cause enemies to surrender when depleted.  It would be slower than DPS'ing things, but would offer rewards in the form of granting Reputation with factions and various NPCs, in addition to the usual Experience and Inf.  It would also provide significantly more roleplay potential.

All the tech's already here, honestly.  By the time the Legacy Devs implemented the "NPC drops to a knee and becomes non-hostile, clickable, and chattable" code, this dream could become a reality.

 

Of course . . . it would just take an amount of work that would require a whole professional team and months, or maybe even years of time.

Part of why I'd like to see the development changes I keep harping on and on about regarding work delegation and clearly established design documents.  If not for my dream, then for any of the other ambitious projects which are technically possible, but just need the oversight to become feasible.

[Kinestron]

Is a dev system something that could be on the list? I would like whatever system that is used to create new animations be overhauled so it is easier to use. My one main complaint even when the game was live was new powersets always included rehashed animations. They would even reuse sound effects which is really surprising. Considering how many times I've heard 'spaghetti code' that is definitely a pipe dream.

Edited September 11, 2020 by Kinestron

[FoulVileTerror]

Radically overhaul the 3D asset and animation devtools for ease-of-use?

Yeah.  That's a good idea, @Kinestron!

[Vanden]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

I'd standardize damage output in respect to animation time.  X damage per Y animation time, with all other aspects of powers balanced around those stats.  That would bring a lot of under-performing powers up to par, and normalize other things, like endurance costs and recharge times.

Isn't that what they did to PvP in i13? And everyone says ruined PvP?

[Darkneblade]

I get rid of Paragon City so that everyone can became automatically villain.

Good thing I'm not programmer huh?

Edited September 11, 2020 by Darkneblade

[FoulVileTerror]

Ah, but Paragon City is where all the most villainous villains live, @Darkneblade!  Would you become an even more villainous villain yourself if you took their home away from them, or would that make you a hero?

[Bill Z Bubba]

10 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Isn't that what they did to PvP in i13? And everyone says ruined PvP?

Maybe? Sure didn't ruin claws for PvE.

[Darkneblade]

1 minute ago, FoulVileTerror said:

Ah, but Paragon City is where all the most villainous villains live, @Darkneblade!  Would you become an even more villainous villain yourself if you took their home away from them, or would that make you a hero?

Probably ''Anti-Hero''.

[Tsuko]

the whole WW interface

[Luminara]

5 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Isn't that what they did to PvP in i13?

 

Yes.

 

9 minutes ago, Vanden said:

And everyone says ruined PvP?

 

No, that would be movement suppression, buff/debuff restrictions and limitations, gutting mez across the board so no control lasted longer than 4 seconds (while simultaneously replacing all status protection with status resistance, and adding a scaling reduction to mez time based on prior mez status (any one of which would have been effective, and any one of which obviates the other two)), reduced caps for the ATs with the lowest caps already, etc.  Essentially, everything else they did to further shoehorn PvP into the game.

 

Especially the movement suppression.  That alone raised enough ruckus to rival ED.

[Vanden]

Movement suppression doesn't even exist in PvP any more.

[Bill Z Bubba]

8 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Movement suppression doesn't even exist in PvP any more.

Had to go test this and it's true. Movement suppression only exists in PvE now. For some reason.

[BZRKR]

*puts on the D&D wish-writing hat*

The one thing that I'd radically overhaul is "The Back End Spaghetti Code That Makes Improvements Difficult And/ Or Impossible". The end result of the overhaul would be a clean, scalable, modular code that the Devs could easily work with (Whatever that really means).

[Twisted Toon]

Personally. I would revamp Character creation.

Instead of having 14 separate Base Templates that power sets are added to based on AT choice, I would have a single Baseline template, and was then modified by AT choice, then Power set choices.

That would allow for easier balancing between the power sets, and ATs themselves.

 

And example of the baseline template and an AT modification could be as follows.

Baseline template:

 

HP: 100

DEF: 0

RES: 0

 

etc...

 

The Tank Modification would be (numbers would most likely be different)

HP: x1.3

DEF: 0

RES: 20

 

etc...

 

Then the power-sets would offer their normal effects

Tanks would have more RES

Scrappers would have more DEF

Blasters would do more damage

 

etc...

 

This would free up all the Power-sets for all the ATs. (if the Devs so desired)(Also making the Sentinal AT superfluous)

That way, a Blaster could choose an armor set, a Scrapper (or Tank, Brute, Stalker) could choose a ranged attack set.

The AT choice would determine the base stats, so to speak, of the character, and not the entirety of what the character would be.

Tanks would still get punchvoke, scrappers would still get crits, Controllers would get better mez mag, Defenders would get better buff/debuff numbers and so on.

But, you could have a Blaster and a Dominator with the same power-sets, and they would play totally differently because of the AT stat modifications to the baseline template.

 

[Luminara]

12 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Movement suppression doesn't even exist in PvP any more.

 

It never existed for me.  Just one of the benefits of using Hurdle as a travel power.

[Omega-202]

44 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Isn't that what they did to PvP in i13? And everyone says ruined PvP?

It sort of is what they did in PVP, and as someone who, at the time, played a Sonic/Energy Blaster in zone PVP, I loved it. 

 

The people that hated it were the Ice and Fire Blasters who got an effective nerf due to their quick animations.  But Shout got turned into a freight train because it took forever to fire.

[Biff Pow]

Not that radical but I'd freshen up all the old low-res costume options.

[Sakura Tenshi]

Too many things, and honestly I don't know what would actually be useful. I'd kind of like to overhaul control sets and powers with two changes:

 

1. Control powers no longer require line of sight.
2. Minions and Lieutenants locked in a sleep, hold, stun, or fear that will have a total duration longer than 30 seconds are instantly defeated.

The former is meant to let Doms and Controllers feel like masters of the environment, controller-like powers in media give their wielders a feeling of omnipresence by not even needing to be in the same room as their targets. The instant defeat conditions for low-rank enemies is similarly because in media, while major enemies are rarely held down for long, if you use a sleep spell on a mook, they're down for the count, game playwise it's meant to make controllers and dominators have a bit of an easier time, though I fear this could make things too easy.

[Huron]

Supergroups. Literally from the ground up, beginning with making it account based, rather than character based.

[FoulVileTerror]

@Sakura Tenshi, your idea for the instant-defeat of lower Rank enemies is pretty close to what I'd do with the Resolve mechanic, but I would include an aspect to it where extremely high Magnitude (from stacks of Controllers on a single target) would also eventually achieve the same result.

[Greycat]

1 hour ago, Vanden said:

Isn't that what they did to PvP in i13? And everyone says ruined PvP?

I13 did a lot of things, one of the big ones being changing how powers worked. You went from being able to play a character in PVE and haul it over to PVP where, it might not be *optimal* ("Bring a team!") but you know how it works, to having holds that don't, mez protection that doesn't, and heals might but won't after a while, among many other things.

 

 

 

As for what I'd do... hmmm.

Unpopularly - drop the rule of 5 to a rule of 3 for set bonuses. (And fold LOTG into regular recharge percentages.)

[FoulVileTerror]

Would you have some kind of diminishing return, @Greycat?  Or just straight-up "no limits on IO Set Bonus repeats?"