Please get rid of the Fear effect on Assault Rifle>Ignite

[Solarverse]

51 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Honestly I think the best way to improve Ignite isn't to remove the fear effect, but to cause it to light the target on fire. That way they take damage, catch on fire, get afraid and run away, but they continue to take the same amount of Fire DoT they would have taken had they stayed in the Ignite patch.

 

Bonus points if the devs are able to add an emote where the target waves his arms around and screams like people do when they're on fire. Perhaps the could use the sound file that Carnies use when they are defeated.

 

I think the main issue with a lot of powers, is that they no longer do what they were originally intended to do. AoEs were not designed to make mobs scatter, but some of them do now. I can't remember if Ignite was one of them or not, but back in those days it was not a huge issue since AoE Holds recharged rather quick in those days. IIRC, fear was added to Fire AoEs after one of the many attempts to nerf power leveling. I think some powers need to be changed to reflect the current times.

Having said all that nonsensical crap, I do agree with you, but I would rather see the fear removed. Most people who catch on fire in real life collapse to the ground, they do not have the air to run around since the fire takes all the air before it can reach their lungs, so they collapse and burn that way. Even though real life simply cannot be applied to this game in any logical way, it still makes sense. Perhaps a stun effect in place of the fear effect? They would still walk around aimlessly, but they wouldn't walk far in that case.

[PeregrineFalcon]

2 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

Most people who catch on fire in real life collapse to the ground, they do not have the air to run around since the fire takes all the air before it can reach their lungs, so they collapse and burn that way.

While true, I was going more for the cinematic movie/comic book effect rather than the rather gruesome real life effect.

[Solarverse]

1 minute ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

While true, I was going more for the cinematic movie/comic book effect rather than the rather gruesome real life effect.

 

Well, since you put it that way, heh.  😄

[dragonhawk777]

2 hours ago, Incursion said:

well said, and that's exactly what happened with Burn.  There were two very popular burn tankers, fire/fire and fire/ice. The ice patch mitigated some of the nerfs as mobs would just keep slipping as burn would do the dirty deed. AR was very popular at launch. Ignite and full auto were considered OP pre-ED days and they started hitting it with the nerf bat. I didn't have one at the time as i was running around with an energy/electric blaster (my god that character had his debt badges quick).   Before burn tankers was the Invulnerability tanks, and i believe invincibility took a hit at some point.   Most of the balance changes at the time all had to do with thwarting Power Leveling.  Fear was a very very broken mechanic for team play.  Was probably the only thing more annoying than KB.  

Yeah the pre ED days were interesting.  I had made my fire/energy blaster the ultimate sniper in pvp.  I used HOs and stacked up accuracy and range to my snipe.  It had so much range it could reach across most of the arena maps.  I would use a tanker or scrapper as a spotter, target off of him, hit Aim and BU, then one shot controllers, defenders and scrappers from beyond visual range.  The only thing they would see is a red beam then dead.

[Solarverse]

5 minutes ago, dragonhawk777 said:

Yeah the pre ED days were interesting.  I had made my fire/energy blaster the ultimate sniper in pvp.  I used HOs and stacked up accuracy and range to my snipe.  It had so much range it could reach across most of the arena maps.  I would use a tanker or scrapper as a spotter, target off of him, hit Aim and BU, then one shot controllers, defenders and scrappers from beyond visual range.  The only thing they would see is a red beam then dead.

 

I'm sure you got my Stalker a few times. He was a nightmare for heroes in those days, but I was killed by those mystery snipes more times than I care to admit. His name was Wraiven if that rings a bell, heh...I'm sure (if you played on Freedom) you killed him more than once.

[AerialAssault]

6 hours ago, kelika2 said:

The way you are typing it, it has a wide enough area to make Ion judgement flinch.  even if targets do not run it hits 2-4 targets max, if that

 

I have never mentioned the radius of Ignite. Kindly don't put words in my mouth.

 

Let me say it again: Burn does not have an Afraid effect because it is used by Melee ATs (Brute, Tanker, Scrapper). It would be counterintuitive for enemies to run out of the Burn patch, forcing these ATs to continually chase the enemies running away from them.

 

Ignite, by contrast, is used by Ranged ATs, who (mostly) want enemies to stay away from them. You even say yourself that it's radius is small enough that it won't affect many enemies, so it's not like you're scattering whole swathes of enemies.

 

I'm acutely aware of how Ignite functions. My namesake is an AR/Dev Blaster whom I played from the early days of Live, so I've come to see Ignite as an area denial tool, even if that area is quite small.

 

My suggestion of making Ignite apply a DoT to any enemy that is hit by the patch gives the best of both worlds. Unless, of course, you hate that enemies run around at all, in which case we'll disagree on a fundamental level, and it's just not worth getting into that.

[Incursion]

3 hours ago, AerialAssault said:

 

I have never mentioned the radius of Ignite. Kindly don't put words in my mouth.

 

Let me say it again: Burn does not have an Afraid effect because it is used by Melee ATs (Brute, Tanker, Scrapper). It would be counterintuitive for enemies to run out of the Burn patch, forcing these ATs to continually chase the enemies running away from them.

 

Ignite, by contrast, is used by Ranged ATs, who (mostly) want enemies to stay away from them. You even say yourself that it's radius is small enough that it won't affect many enemies, so it's not like you're scattering whole swathes of enemies.

 

I'm acutely aware of how Ignite functions. My namesake is an AR/Dev Blaster whom I played from the early days of Live, so I've come to see Ignite as an area denial tool, even if that area is quite small.

 

My suggestion of making Ignite apply a DoT to any enemy that is hit by the patch gives the best of both worlds. Unless, of course, you hate that enemies run around at all, in which case we'll disagree on a fundamental level, and it's just not worth getting into that.

burn had one added as a nerf that has been since removed.....did ignite originally/always have fear effect? Either way, dot powers for ranged at’s in general don’t make a whole lot of sense to me as they don’t have the damage mitigation ability of melee. 
 

the set is underpowered, the stats are shown in the blaster forums with actual data. It needs higher numbers, not more ticks. Full auto is already tick tick tick.

[AerialAssault]

46 minutes ago, Incursion said:

burn had one added as a nerf that has been since removed.....did ignite originally/always have fear effect? Either way, dot powers for ranged at’s in general don’t make a whole lot of sense to me as they don’t have the damage mitigation ability of melee. 
 

the set is underpowered, the stats are shown in the blaster forums with actual data. It needs higher numbers, not more ticks. Full auto is already tick tick tick.

 

Ignite has, as far as I'm aware, always made enemies run out of the fire. I haven't played it from its earliest days, but I have played it a lot since I started playing all those years ago 

 

While I tend to agree that long duration DoTs are of limited utility, Ignite and Full Auto tick over very quickly over its short duration. I've never struggled to wipe a mob of enemies with Full Auto.

[Incursion]

15 minutes ago, AerialAssault said:

 

Ignite has, as far as I'm aware, always made enemies run out of the fire. I haven't played it from its earliest days, but I have played it a lot since I started playing all those years ago 

 

While I tend to agree that long duration DoTs are of limited utility, Ignite and Full Auto tick over very quickly over its short duration. I've never struggled to wipe a mob of enemies with Full Auto.

Truthfully I wasn’t sure myself, it’s been a very long time. Maybe the answer lies with changing more than one power eek

[Solarverse]

10 minutes ago, Incursion said:

Truthfully I wasn’t sure myself, it’s been a very long time. Maybe the answer lies with changing more than one power eek

I honestly can't remember for sure either. In my old aged brain though, I seem to recall it did not start off that way, but the fear affect was added later on. If memory serves, it had a knock back (or was it knock down?) affect instead. That's my old age memory of its earliest incarnation.

[Incursion]

12 minutes ago, Solarverse said:

I honestly can't remember for sure either. In my old aged brain though, I seem to recall it did not start off that way, but the fear affect was added later on. If memory serves, it had a knock back (or was it knock down?) affect instead. That's my old age memory of its earliest incarnation.

I wonder if all of the old patch notes from live archived. I would imagine so, this community in general was so good about holding onto everything. I would love to find a log of all of the changes over the years. AR changes caused quite a stir from what I vaguely remember.

[AerialAssault]

Rather than think about what Ignite was, we should look at what it is today.

 

Now, my information here comes from City of Data and Mids. I'm at work at the moment so I can't load up the game, so this data is probably somewhat inaccurate.

 

According to Mids, Ignite, unbuffed and unenhanced will deal 50 ticks of 5.5 fire damage every 0.5 seconds to enemies caught in the fire, for a total of 278 damage over the ten seconds the fire patch lasts for. Now, while 278 damage isn't a lot for the duration Ignite lasts for, when you start enhancing the power it escalates quickly. If you were, for example, to slot five Ragnaroks and a Bombardment: Chance for Fire into it, that goes up to 603 total damage. Again, for over 10 seconds that's not really a great deal.

 

But what you have to remember is that Ignite is an auto-hit power. Enemies in the fire will take the damage regardless of any defence they may have. It means, even under an accuracy debuff, Ignite will always hit it's target. At least, that is what I have observed on my own Assault Rifle characters.

 

This ignores the fact that, when enhanced even a small amount, you can keep an Ignite patch up constantly, slightly compounded by it's long animation time.

 

Of course, we rarely ever see this full damage because enemies are compelled to leave the fire patch, which isn't exactly large. In fact, I think the effective radius is actually smaller than the visual fx of the Ignite patch.

 

Taking the above into account, if the Afraid effect were to be removed from Ignite, it's damage would have to be reduced accordingly. By how much? I don't know, I got a low C in maths.

[UberGuy]

1 hour ago, Incursion said:

I wonder if all of the old patch notes from live archived. I would imagine so, this community in general was so good about holding onto everything. I would love to find a log of all of the changes over the years. AR changes caused quite a stir from what I vaguely remember.

 

They have been preserved on the Wikis, but Cryptic/Paragon didn't publish everything that actually changed in those patch notes, so a lot of relatively small but individually important changes have no public indication of when (or sometimes that) they happened.

Edited March 15, 2021 by UberGuy

[Incursion]

6 minutes ago, UberGuy said:

 

They have been preserved on the Wikis, but Cryptic/Paragon didn't publish everything that actually changed in those patch notes, so a lot of relatively small but individually important changes have no public indication of when (or sometimes that) they happened.

i found the patch notes (that you just mentioned) for each issue, but other than the constant regen changes and power buffs across everything else, a lot of the nerfs weren't documented as you pointed out.   It would be like searching a needle in a haystack but i wonder if wayback machine has any of the old posts to find out what happened back then.  I did see a nice snippet about FEAR change - saying that most powers (didn't specify which) had them change the running away to standing their terrified). Issue 3 or 4 or something i think it was. 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Incursion

[Incursion]

1 hour ago, AerialAssault said:

Rather than think about what Ignite was, we should look at what it is today.

 

Now, my information here comes from City of Data and Mids. I'm at work at the moment so I can't load up the game, so this data is probably somewhat inaccurate.

 

According to Mids, Ignite, unbuffed and unenhanced will deal 50 ticks of 5.5 fire damage every 0.5 seconds to enemies caught in the fire, for a total of 278 damage over the ten seconds the fire patch lasts for. Now, while 278 damage isn't a lot for the duration Ignite lasts for, when you start enhancing the power it escalates quickly. If you were, for example, to slot five Ragnaroks and a Bombardment: Chance for Fire into it, that goes up to 603 total damage. Again, for over 10 seconds that's not really a great deal.

 

But what you have to remember is that Ignite is an auto-hit power. Enemies in the fire will take the damage regardless of any defence they may have. It means, even under an accuracy debuff, Ignite will always hit it's target. At least, that is what I have observed on my own Assault Rifle characters.

 

This ignores the fact that, when enhanced even a small amount, you can keep an Ignite patch up constantly, slightly compounded by it's long animation time.

 

Of course, we rarely ever see this full damage because enemies are compelled to leave the fire patch, which isn't exactly large. In fact, I think the effective radius is actually smaller than the visual fx of the Ignite patch.

 

Taking the above into account, if the Afraid effect were to be removed from Ignite, it's damage would have to be reduced accordingly. By how much? I don't know, I got a low C in maths.

Isn't the idea/purpose of removing the fear to allow the current dmg numbers to work better so it's an overall improvement to the set?  I get what you are saying by taking a measured/balance approach, but why not see how it plays out first before adjusting dmg numbers.  The set needs a buff, it's underpowered according to the data. 

[arcane]

17 minutes ago, Incursion said:

Isn't the idea/purpose of removing the fear to allow the current dmg numbers to work better so it's an overall improvement to the set?  I get what you are saying by taking a measured/balance approach, but why not see how it plays out first before adjusting dmg numbers.  The set needs a buff, it's underpowered according to the data. 

The damage number on Ignite is balanced around it being so regularly escaped. You change the dynamic, you have to change the damage.

[Galaxy Brain]

Just want to check something...

 

Scrapper Burn = 133.5 dam

 

Blaster Ignite = 278.1 dam

 

could be part of it

[Black Zot]

31 minutes ago, arcane said:

The damage number on Ignite is balanced around it being so regularly escaped. You change the dynamic, you have to change the damage.

 

Balanced my foot, you're talking about a contender for "weakest blast set".  Ignite could do its full damage on the initial tick and the set as a whole would still be weak.

[Incursion]

44 minutes ago, arcane said:

The damage number on Ignite is balanced around it being so regularly escaped. You change the dynamic, you have to change the damage.

 

Not necessarily, not when the set as a whole is underperforming.  We are all chatting with with hypotheticals here, but the goal is to improve the power, thus improving the set, not every change needs to be give and take.  I could be wrong and maybe some sort of dmg change is needed to "feel right' but it's a pretty rough set. 

[arcane]

10 minutes ago, Black Zot said:

 

Balanced my foot, you're talking about a contender for "weakest blast set".  Ignite could do its full damage on the initial tick and the set as a whole would still be weak.

Powers should be balanced as powers and as parts of sets, not just one or the other. 

[Incursion]

19 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Just want to check something...

 

Scrapper Burn = 133.5 dam

 

Blaster Ignite = 278.1 dam

 

could be part of it

yeah but the comparison isn't good. Melee characters are standing in the middle of the burn patch, some are using another damage aura on top of it, and they are using primarily AOE attacks from within to melt away mobs,  single target dmg isn't needed at all, except to help mow down a stingy boss level.   Two completely different playstyles i think. 

[Incursion]

1 minute ago, arcane said:

Powers should be balanced as powers and as parts of sets, not just one or the other. 

sure but if said power is crap, and said set is crap, why would you not consider just buffing the power? If it's too much, that's what beta is for and scale it back a bit.  The answer could be changing other powers in the set as well.  either way it should start somewhere. 

Edited March 15, 2021 by Incursion

[arcane]

Just now, Incursion said:

sure but if said power is crap, and said set is crap, why would you not consider just buffing the power? If it's too much, that's what beta is for and scale it back a bit. 

I would absolutely consider buffing both the power and the set. But only in a sensible and measured way.

[Incursion]

Just now, arcane said:

I would absolutely consider buffing both the power and the set. But only in a sensible and measured way.

of course, there's no need to create the new FOTM build, I just don't like pre-nerfing things before an imaginary change even takes place (if that makes any sense at all lol). 

[AerialAssault]

1 hour ago, Incursion said:

yeah but the comparison isn't good. Melee characters are standing in the middle of the burn patch, some are using another damage aura on top of it, and they are using primarily AOE attacks from within to melt away mobs,  single target dmg isn't needed at all, except to help mow down a stingy boss level.   Two completely different playstyles i think. 

 

The point is, if an enemy were to remain within the Ignite patch for the full duration, it would deal significantly more damage than Burn. If you remove the Afraid element, then Ignite effectively becomes a mini-nuke, since the damage can't be avoided by the enemies stood within it. For reference, Ignite deals the second most damage in AR, behind Sniper Rifle and ahead of Full Auto (the actual nuke of the set). That high damage is mitigated by the fact that most enemies don't want to stand in it. But then we as players can mitigate that by forcing enemies to stand in one place, either through Holds or Immobilization (or a lot of Slow). 

 

My full suggestion is as follows:

• Leave the Afraid element in Ignite. Give it a weak and short-lived unenhanceable slow so that enemies which enter it are unlikely to run very far once they're out of it.
• Have Ignite deal half of it's damage upfront to enemies with the initial attack, which requires a hit check.
• The Ignite patch then places a DoT on those enemies and any other enemies that step into the Ignite patch dealing the other half of the damage, which is auto-hit. Non-stacking.
• Increase the radius of Ignite slightly, at least so that it encompasses the size of the actual visual fx.

 

I feel this is the best of all worlds. People like myself, who can appreciate the comedy factor/immersion of enemies not wanting to stand inside a fire still get that, and people who want Ignite to deal it's full damage more reliably get that too. I guess the people who don't want the enemies to move at all won't be happy, but me and them disagree on that on such a fundamental level it's not worth going into in this thread.