Balanced villain powers.

[captainstar]

I was talking to my SG leader if the epic powers of the villains should be more balanced. And he asked me "balanced how?", To which I replied "I think most people just take the powers of Scorpion to have some defense".
And he agreed with me, and said that he thinks 90% of the villains' powers are useless. So I asked him, if it would be a good idea to suggest to balance these powers, here? And he said we didn't have to, since the heroes were better.

But if I want to make a themed character like a ‘Fishman’, I don’t want to have to take other powers than Mako to feel powerful. I want to feel powerful with any epic power.

What do you guys think about this?

[ninja surprise]

I think I accidentally walked in the middle of your conversation with someone else 😬

[Player2]

Play what's fun.  All the powers are powerful.

 

Are some better?  Yes.

Will that hurt your fun?  Probably not.

Will they ever get "fixed" to be brought in line with other powers?  Maybe... but you shouldn't wait until then to have fun.

 

The people who are looking at the "better" options are trying to squeeze as much performance as they can into their builds because fun for some people is being "best" while fun for others is being "what you envision in your character."

 

[aethereal]

For whatever it's worth, Scorpion/Mace Mastery is I think only universally beloved for people who get access to Scorpion Shield.  For armored melee classes, you'll see Soul Mastery for either Gloom or Moonbeam and Shadow Meld, or Mu Mastery for Zzap and Ball Lightning.  Sentinels like Psi Mastery.

 

That isn't to say that we shouldn't address the dominance of Scorpion Shield compared to the other epic armors, but it's certainly not the case that the only villain epic pool that matters is Mace.

[Clave Dark 5]

Kind of the same track as OP.  I've only in the last say six months really started looking at trying to customize builds and had to literally look into every villain Patron Pool to realize that Scorpion's the only one that gives DEF and not "just" RESIST.  Which yes is why you see it as the main choice in so many builds, it makes it easy to soft cap so everyone goes for it.  Not that you couldn't build without it, of course.

 

I'm not sure I'd want to see all the other Patron Pools lined up behind it the same way because I don't want the powers across them to end up just cookie-cutter with a different aura or something.

 

ETA: I suppose some of this falls on us though, always looking for the easiest route to a Min/Max, we'll usually fall into the same ruts.  That's our fault, not the game's design.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Clave Dark 5

[Greycat]

9 hours ago, Player2 said:

Play what's fun.  All the powers are powerful.

 

Are some better?  Yes.

Will that hurt your fun?  Probably not.

Will they ever get "fixed" to be brought in line with other powers?  Maybe... but you shouldn't wait until then to have fun.

 

The people who are looking at the "better" options are trying to squeeze as much performance as they can into their builds because fun for some people is being "best" while fun for others is being "what you envision in your character."

Pretty much this. I have two characters who took Mako specifically for theme (or amusement.) I don't really care what anyone else runs or if they're more or less "powerful." Someone could probably cut/paste my characters and power selections and make something much tougher and more damaging. I don't care. I'm having my fun. 🙂

[JKPhage]

I'm in agreement with OP, and I feel like some of these replies are... a little dismissive to be honest. Considering our most recent patch focused a lot on rebalancing standard power sets so things can play on more equal footing and everything can be more of a viable choice, I think it's a genuinely good idea for the devs to take a look at the patron pools. Especially considering you have to go to extra effort to even have access to them, I feel like they should be looked at and perhaps brought a little more in-line with the other available epics that everyone has access to.

 

I happen to have an ocean-themed character who took Leviathan Mastery for thematic purposes, but it is not lost on me that Spirit Shark has an unnecessarily long animation with markedly low damage for the activation time, nor that Water Spout only sticks around for a stupidly short amount of time. That's just two of the powers from one set. I don't think they necessarily need a *huge* amount of work, but it wouldn't hurt anything at all to bump the damage up on Spirit Shark to match other epic ranged attacks and speed up the cast animation so it doesn't root the player for a stupidly long time and take forever between click to damage. There's no reason not to make that change as it wouldn't make anything else less viable, and only make a fun power seem more like a valid choice and less like a sacrifice made in the name of fun theme powers. Likewise, water spout's duration could be *slightly* extended to give it a bit more oomph as a damage/soft control power.

 

I don't have much experience with Soul Mastery, but when I mentioned I was considering taking it on discord someone pointed out that I might as well just take Dark Mastery as the Dark Consumption from that set was more powerful. Again, there's very little reason for that to be a thing. If I wanna take Soul Mastery to get the super cool Soul Storm power, why do I need to gimp myself out of better versions of the other powers in the pool that are otherwise identical?

 

I think it's a very solid request, and I'd love to see the next "page" address these things. As is most players either take Mu Mastery for Ball Lightning so they have a ranged AOE attack that does good damage or Mace Mastery for the armor toggle because it's very good. I feel like it wouldn't hurt anything at all to tweak Soul and Leviathan to bring them in line with other pools and make their powers more viable so we can enjoy taking the powers we want without worrying that they're going to be wasted picks.

[ninja surprise]

On 12/8/2020 at 9:59 PM, JKPhage said:

I'm in agreement with OP, and I feel like some of these replies are... a little dismissive to be honest.

 

Well, OP didn't make a very clear or argued suggestion, just a snippet of conversation with someone else. Was "I want to feel powerful with any epic power" the suggestion? 

I've never taken Scorpion Shield on any of my characters. I play mostly melee and I don't think it's even an option for any of them, but also never took it on any of my other toons.

 

I feel plenty powerful with the Epic powers I pick. Heck, I usually wind up with so many powers it's hard to fit them all in the trays! And I feel plenty powerful with all of them... well unless I'm trying to defeat anything with my Earth/Time controller. It can lock down tons of foes but takes forever to defeat anything.  But he doesn't have Scorp Shield either.

 

So do that: pick powers, use powers, feel powerful. Good suggestion!

[JKPhage]

On 12/12/2020 at 5:17 PM, ninja surprise said:

Well, OP didn't make a very clear or argued suggestion, just a snippet of conversation with someone else. Was "I want to feel powerful with any epic power" the suggestion? 

I've never taken Scorpion Shield on any of my characters. I play mostly melee and I don't think it's even an option for any of them, but also never took it on any of my other toons.

 

I feel plenty powerful with the Epic powers I pick. Heck, I usually wind up with so many powers it's hard to fit them all in the trays! And I feel plenty powerful with all of them... well unless I'm trying to defeat anything with my Earth/Time controller. It can lock down tons of foes but takes forever to defeat anything.  But he doesn't have Scorp Shield either.

 

So do that: pick powers, use powers, feel powerful. Good suggestion!

Yeah, except you're glossing over the meat of the issue. He even specifically called out Leviathan Mastery, and made a point of saying that he wouldn't want to be forced to take other powers besides the thematic Mako powers just because they'd be less powerful in comparison. He was met with a bunch of people saying "LOL, then just pick other powers!" or "Just take them and don't worry if they suck!" Basically a handful of people telling him to do exactly what he just said he didn't want to, or telling him to just deal with it, when the suggestion of a balance pass on patron powers is not at all an out there request. And for the record, the intent was plenty clear.

 

I'm not going to rehash what I already said, but it really is something that could stand doing. You have to go out of your way to unlock these pools in addition to the existing epic pools and overall a large chunk of the powers are incredibly flavorful and cool, but lack most any punch at all because they exist exactly as they did when COV launched and never got a balance pass. When they were the only option available to redside archetypes it wasn't so glaring, but now everyone has access to standard epic pools that are just handed to you, many of which were retooled/rebalanced for redside archetypes when they debuted to make sure they functioned in the current meta. Patrons, on the other hand mostly got stapled on to the blueside AT's at as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible with Defenders getting the Corruptor version of pools, Tanks getting Brutes, etc. They weren't touched up or anything. As I mentioned, the latest page served up a *huge* chunk of powers passes, with retools, reworks, rebalances and new functionality. I don't think that it would be at all amiss for the next update to feature a pass on the Patron pools to bring them in line with the other choices available, speed up some animations, boost some damage, make sure that they're comparable and on the same playing field as the other pools. Some of us play this game to have fun with it, and if that means we want an ocean-themed character to have the Mako shark blasts, it's decidedly unfun to stand there and fire it off only to see pathetic numbers, if it even gets to the enemy before someone else has already slaughtered them due to the long cast time. We don't *want* to pick another power, and when the ones that are incredibly flavorful and fit our character theme perfectly, it's very disappointing for them to be performing at COV launch levels.

[srmalloy]

15 hours ago, JKPhage said:

overall a large chunk of the powers are incredibly flavorful and cool, but lack most any punch at all because they exist exactly as they did when COV launched and never got a balance pass.

Not to mention that the patron pools were deliberately designed to be functionally equal to each other, the intention being that you would pick a patron pool (and, at the time, you got the pool only for the patron whose arc you ran) based on characterization reasons, not which one gave you the best powers. So they were deliberately designed not to have anything that stood out significantly over the others.

[Coyotedancer]

Sometimes theme trumps building to the meta. It's not dismissive to say that... 

 

Could the villain epics use some attention? Sure.

 

But if you WANT to throw sharks at people in the meantime? Pick Leviathan and have at it... The City just isn't a game that really requires you to have a perfectly tuned and optimal build to be useful or successful. It just isn't. If your shark does a little less damage than Power X, it's not the end of the world. It's still damned cool-looking and perfectly thematic for your Captain Jaws character and that also has value.

 

If it's buffed at some point? Excellent!

In the meantime... You're still getting to THROW SHARKS AT PEOPLE. Which is both ludicrous and glorious, all else aside. 🤣

 

(And yes, I have a character with the Leviathan patron pool myself. I've also done Soul and Mu on a few. Scorpion? Not so much. It falls into the range of what I'd call "Useful but boring".) 

[Greycat]

CD summed things up pretty well. (And personally my shark-throwing, jaws-summoning has not felt particularly "underpowered." )

 

That said, it's not really correct to say they're as they were when COV launched. They have a fifth power. In fact, they were the *first* pools to get a fifth power, because the live devs were going to outright replace "unpopular" powers in them - and they got seriously *roasted* (rightfully so) for trying to do so in the beta. So, they added a fifth power. That got spread to the other pools.

[Doc_Scorpion]

35 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

The City just isn't a game that really requires you to have a perfectly tuned and optimal build to be useful or successful. It just isn't. If your shark does a little less damage than Power X, it's not the end of the world. It's still damned cool-looking and perfectly thematic for your Captain Jaws character and that also has value.

The City is definitely poorer for having drifted into an EVAH MOAH POWA! meta.  Sometimes it seems people forget (or best seriously deemphasize) fun and theme.